Keynote Presentations

Seven Steps to Improve Safety & Human Reliability in Your Team
45-90 minutes​

• Unwanted errors and surprises in high-hazard industries can change lives, ruin careers, and capsize reputations overnight.

• Some teams manage these risks far better than others. What works? What doesn’t?

• Join us to learn seven key steps taken by: pilots, nurses, firefighters, paramedics, lineworkers, paratroopers, and other high-reliability operators across the globe.

• You’ll walk away with practical techniques to apply to your job immediately, plus eye-opening insights to help you improve human reliability and safety for years to come.

• The seven steps are: (1) Take a Learning-Based approach. (2) Build Psychological Safety. (3) Lead After Action Reviews. (4) Apply classic defenses. (5) Improve systems. (6) Build Resilience. (7) Tell stories that change minds.

• Includes one-page summary handout.

How to Build Trust and Expertise with After Action Reviews (AARs)
45-90 minutes

• For over 40 years, safety-focused teams in the military, emergency fire & rescue services and other high-hazard industries have used After Action Reviews to save lives, build trust, and share priceless, unwritten expertise.

• AARs work well for both front-line field teams and office / knowledge workers.

• Join us to learn the four key questions to ask in an AAR, plus eight "field expedient" tips from 20 years of experience.

• Participants will actually DO a brief real-world AAR too.

• One-page summary handout included.

Three Ways to Build Psychological Safety in Your Team
45-90 minutes

• Many leaders believe that holding employees “accountable” for errors will reduce errors.

• In reality, punishing people for errors strangles communication, erodes trust, and often creates more errors. What’s the alternative?

• Increase engagement, communication, and learning by building Psychological Safety.

• Join us in this fast-paced seminar to see the evidence, and discover three practical ways to build Psychological Safety in your team immediately.

• Includes detailed handout.

Why We Can't Proceduralize Everything: And Three Real-World Alternatives
45-90 minutes

Unwanted errors & surprises are serious threats to reliability in any high-hazard industry. To address them, many leaders apply a mechanistic approach. They write detailed procedures and enforce strict compliance. But these mechanistic strategies often backfire in adaptive, human-based systems. Join us in this presentation to:

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1. Learn the difference between Mechanistic and Adaptive Systems

2. See why we can't "Proceduralize Everything” in Adaptive Systems

3. Get three practical, real-world strategies for increasing safety & human reliability in complex, adaptive systems.

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Summary handout included.

Scan & Focus: a Practical Way to Improve Situational Awareness
45-90 minutes

• Why didn't we see it?

• How could we have missed it?

• It was right in front of us!

Situational Awareness is essential to smooth, safe, reliable operations in high-hazard workplaces like yours. But what is it? How does it work? How can we improve it?

In this workshop, you'll learn how to use a unique and practical approach called "Scan & Focus" to improve your team's Situational Awareness.

To learn more check out this article.

Some speakers tell good stories, but give you no real evidence or practical take-aways.

Other speakers give you a sales pitch or an infomercial instead of real content.

And some speakers offer theories so abstract and complex that your audience winds up scratching their heads in confusion.

Useful Content
Your people are busy. So, I summarize hundreds of pages of research saving you years of time. Your people get practical content they can apply immediately.

Real-World Examples
Stories stick. So I share brief success stories and cautionary tales about pilots, surgeons, wildlands firefighters, soldiers, scientists, electric system operators, engineers, and their leaders.

No Marketing
I briefly describe my company when I take questions at the end. That's it.