Speaking Truth at the Edge: Leadership Lessons from the Columbia Disaster

Myth-Busting AI: Governance, Risk, and the Future of Safety

In this episode of the Safety on the Edge podcast, we sit down with Anthony Aarons, an expert whose career journey has transitioned from high-risk environments like mining, oil, and gas directly into the world of artificial intelligence. With the rapid and sometimes terrifying pace of AI development, this conversation dives into the realities, emerging risks, and undeniable opportunities of integrating AI into safety management. Anthony introduces the critical concept of "cognitive offloading," exploring what happens to our visceral safety instincts and critical thinking when we hand our processes and decision-making over to machines. Through powerful analogies and real-world stories from the deep mines of South Africa to modern hospital wards, we discuss why human intuition and physical presence are irreplaceable assets in high-risk environments. In this episode, we cover: * The hazard of cognitive offloading and how offloading our thinking to AI may diminish our visceral sense of behavioral risk. * Why artificial intelligence should be treated as a copilot rather than the pilot when it comes to organizational decision-making. * The built-in sycophancy of Large Language Models and how their design to be pleasing prevents them from properly challenging our assumptions. * The fundamental governance steps and building blocks organizations must have in place to deploy AI safely and effectively. * The enduring necessity of human judgment and why the ultimate legal and moral liability for decisions will always rest with people. Join us as we explore what we don't know about AI and discuss how to preserve what makes us uniquely human in an automated world. Catch Anthony live at the Safety on the Edge Conference in Baltimore! He will be delivering a 45-minute presentation and leading a deep-dive 2-hour workshop on March 7th. Secure your spot today at https://safetyontheedge.com

The Metrics Mirage: How Metrics Shape Behaviour

There is much within safety discussion on the limitations of lagging metrics and the need to establish better ways of measuring safety. But what if the issue was not the type of metric, but measurement and the behavioural consequences of measurement? And what if performance indicators that we use to measure safety meant different things to people? The presentation will explore the behavioural effect of performance metrics. Based on empirical research with 20 safety leaders overseeing large and global organisations, the discussion will consider how the interpretation of performance metrics is fundamental in shaping how individuals respond to metrics. Using TRIFR as an example, the presentation will challenge the focus on finding the perfect indicator to measure safety and encourage attendees to consider the context and consequences of measurement. Drawing from his research, James will demonstrate how a safety metric can be interpreted in many different ways simultaneously. Whilst TRIFR can be interpreted as a measure of the safety within an organisation, it can also be interpreted as a sign of management control, a means of motivation, a sign of self-promotion, a measure of risk and an indicator of trust in leadership. In our pursuit of the perfect metric for safety, we are overlooking meaning and human behaviour. Key Take-outs: 🔹 Safety metrics should be viewed not as scientific instruments but behavioural triggers. 🔹 The meaning and use of safety metrics is not singular but multiple and therefore contestable and conflictual. 🔹 An individual's response to safety metrics is shaped by the context of use and consequences for them. 🔹 In our pursuit of the perfect tool, we need to consider how it is used and the consequences of measurement on individuals. 🔹 We also need to consider the ethics of safety metrics.

Bridging Safety Science & Injury Prevention: Systems Thinking and Real-World Application

In this episode of Safety On The Edge Talks, host Corrie Pitzer, CEO of SafeMap and co-founder of Safety on the EDGE, sits down with Shannon Frattaroli. Shannon is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and leads the Center for Injury Research and Policy. Together, they dive into the critical intersection of academic research and practical industry application. Shannon shares her expertise on taking a public health approach to injury prevention, aiming to systematically reduce the burden of injuries across populations. The conversation challenges traditional compliance-based industry metrics, exploring how organizations can move beyond lagging indicators to embrace prospective risk analysis and stop injuries before they happen. Key Topics Discussed: * The Public Health Lens: How viewing workplace safety through a broader public health perspective offers new frameworks, data sources, and approaches to problem-solving. * Bridging the Gap: The powerful potential of partnering academia with industry to continuously evolve safety models and adapt to new workplace threats. * Frontline Engagement: Why successful safety protocols must involve and explain changes to the frontline workers who are arguably the most invested in safety. * Prospective Risk Measurement: Shifting the ultimate metric of success from simply counting injured workers to proactively identifying and mitigating high-risk situations. * The Power of Champions: The crucial role that individual leaders and internal spokespersons play in advocating for risk attention and driving cultural change. * The Future of Safety: How emerging tools like Artificial Intelligence will create tremendous efficiencies in cleaning and analyzing data to speed up safety research and interventions. Join Us Live: Hear more from Shannon Frattaroli and other industry pioneers at the upcoming Safety on the Edge conference in Baltimore, May 4 to 7. Shannon will be a keynote speaker on Day 1, which will also be broadcast virtually to audiences across Latin America.

The Worker Is Not the Problem. They’re the Solution.

In this episode of Safety on the EDGE, EDGETalks, Corrie Pitzer sits down with Todd Conklin for a candid conversation about how safety thinking is evolving and where it still falls short. They dig into a shift that sounds simple but changes everything: the worker is not the problem. The worker is the solution. From there, the discussion goes deeper. Why do organizations still default to controlling people instead of learning from them? Why does safety continue to focus on eliminating risk when risk can’t actually be removed? And what happens when leaders realize the problem sits closer to their desk than the front line? They also take on some of the friction in the industry today, including the tension between engineering-driven risk control and human performance thinking, the debate around whether HOP “reduces injuries,” and whether injury rates are even the right way to measure safety performance. 🔹 Why asking workers what they need is more effective than telling them to be safe 🔹 The difference between preventing failure and building capacity to handle it 🔹 How systems degrade long before something goes wrong 🔹 Why some regions are leapfrogging straight into newer safety thinking 🔹 What the “next thing” in safety might look like This is not a conversation about compliance or programs. It’s about how work actually gets done and what it takes to make it more reliable in a world where risk is always present. If you’ve ever questioned whether traditional safety approaches are solving the right problem, this one will land.

Speaking Truth at the Edge: Leadership Lessons from the Columbia Disaster

What really causes catastrophic failure? It’s rarely a lack of intelligence, data, or expertise. More often, it’s silence, filtered truths, and decisions made at the edge of uncertainty. In this episode of EDGE Talks, we speak with Rodney Rocha, former Chief Engineer at NASA and a central voice in uncovering the systemic failures behind the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. This is not a retrospective. It’s a conversation about leadership under pressure, risk at the edge, and why organizations repeatedly fail to hear what they most need to know. If you work in complex, high-risk systems—mining, energy, healthcare, aviation, infrastructure—this conversation is for you.