PreAccident Investigation Podcast PAPod 589 - Failing Safely: Todd Conklin on Resilience, Recovery, and Real Work
Mar 14, 2026
Todd Conklin, HOP and safety systems expert who champions resilience and learning from everyday work. He explains failing safely and designing recoverable systems. He contrasts adaptive frontline work with rigid procedures. He highlights learning from normal work, adding rescueability, and how leadership can change safety culture. He also touches on AI risks to safety.
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Design Systems For Recovery Not Just Prevention
- Prevention alone is necessary but not sufficient for safety; systems must also include recovery so failures can be caught before catastrophic consequence.
- Todd Conklin compares this to the bow-tie model and says the best systems are explicitly built with recovery and rescue capacity to fail gracefully.
Procedures Are Ideal Maps Not Reality
- Procedures describe ideal work but cannot capture all real-world variation, so workers constantly adapt procedures to get work done safely and productively.
- Conklin notes adaptations become 'good ideas' when successful and 'at-risk behaviors' only when they fail, highlighting normal adaptive behavior.
Write Procedures As Operating Envelopes
- Write procedures as operating envelopes with upper and lower thresholds instead of rigid step lists so normal variation is anticipated.
- Ask why procedures exist: if for liability rather than work improvement, rewrite them to support workers' adaptive problem solving.
