Conklin: Next step change in safety management requires fundamental shift, acceptance of failure

According to Todd Conklin, retired Senior Advisor for Organizational and Safety Culture at Los Alamos National Laboratory, safety is the “ability for workers to be able to work in a varying and unpredictable world.” Industries must accept that not all accidents are preventable, and they must focus on managing the capacity for systems to fail in order to create the most effective safety culture. In this interview with DC from the 2023 IADC Health, Safety, Environment and Training (HSET) Conference in Houston, Texas, on 19 April, Dr Conklin speaks about how managing that capacity represents a “new view” in safety leadership, and how it differs from the “perfection model” of incident prevention that represented the traditional view of safety in the industry. He also discusses where the oil and gas industry is in its safety journey – particularly, how the industry’s focus on dropped objects represents the shift from the traditional view of safety to the new view.