About the Guest

Giovanni Peri is the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Professor of Economics at UC Davis and Director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, an interdisciplinary research hub focused on international migration and refugees. His research examines how immigration affects labor markets and productivity, and it has been published in top journals and widely discussed in major media outlets.

Giovanni Peri’s Philosophy

Immigration is an economic engine that boosts productivity and job creation through complementarity in the labor market.

Episode Highlights

Immigration policy rarely appears on enterprise risk registers, yet it can directly shape workforce continuity, productivity, and even the pace of technological adoption across U.S. industry.

* Immigration as a workforce continuity risk

How policy shifts can create labor shortages that cascade into missed maintenance, delayed capital projects, and production constraints.

* Mass deportation scenarios

What Peri’s research implies about impacts on GDP, employment, and industrial production when large groups of workers are removed from the labor force.

* Construction and infrastructure exposure

Why construction is particularly dependent on immigrant labor, and what disruption means for facility maintenance and long-cycle investments.

* Supply chain cascades

How workforce disruption in hubs (e.g., ports, refineries, manufacturing corridors) can ripple through broader supply chains.

* Historical lessons

What case studies like the 1930s Mexican repatriation and WWII-era exclusion policies suggest about unintended economic and labor-market consequences.​

📚 Contact & Resources:

* UC Davis Global Migration Center director page ​​

* Paperwork: Do immigrant workers depress the wages of native workers?​

* CEPR profile

About the Guest:

Dr. Ivan Pupulidy is an internationally recognized expert on safety and risk in complex adaptive systems who has transformed how federal agencies and organizations worldwide approach accident investigation. As former Director of Human Performance, Innovation, and Organizational Learning at the U.S. Forest Service, he developed the Learning Review process in 2013—a methodology that replaced the agency's Serious Accident Investigation Guide and has since been adopted across industries from chemical safety to aviation.

Ivan Pupulidy’s Philosophy:

We can blame and punish, or learn and improve—but we can't do both.

Episode Highlights:

🔥 From Fire Lines to Faculty

Ivan traces his extraordinary career journey from mine geologist and exploration geophysicist to Coast Guard pilot, combat aviator, and ultimately to academic and safety thought leader. His experience flying MAFFS tanker missions over wildfires and investigating accidents as both pilot and investigator fundamentally shaped his understanding that traditional accountability models miss the mark in complex, dynamic environments.

🔄 Simple vs. Complex: Why Traditional Safety Fails

Most safety approaches were designed for simple systems but are routinely applied to complex adaptive systems like wildfire fighting, aviation, and industrial operations—and this mismatch explains why the same incidents keep happening. Ivan explains the crucial distinctions between simple, complicated, and complex systems, and why understanding these differences is foundational to effective safety management.

💡 The Learning Review Revolution

The Learning Review fundamentally replaced traditional serious accident investigation in the Forest Service and is now spreading globally across industries. Rather than fact-finding to assign blame, the Learning Review focuses on sensemaking and dialogue—understanding the systemic conditions that influenced actions and mapping why decisions made sense to people at the time.​

📚 Resources

* University of Alabama at Birmingham - Advanced Safety and Engineering Management Program​

* The Learning Review: Adding to the accident investigation toolbox(Pupulidy, 2015)

* U.S. Chemical Safety Board Learning Review on dust hazards (co-authored with Crista Vesel)

Organizations:

* HOP Hub​

* The Taos Institute

Connect:

* LinkedIn: Ivan Pupulidy, PhD​

About the Guest:

Dr. Rainer Hoff is a pioneer in process safety management applications for the chemical, oil and gas, energy, and life sciences sectors, and a leading authority on electronic document management systems (EDMS).

Dr. Rainer Hoff’s Philosophy

Configurability isn't about letting everyone do whatever they want—it's about respecting that different facilities, different processes, and different organizational cultures require different approaches to managing change effectively.

Episode Highlights:

📜 The Early Days: From Paper to Pixels

Dr. Hoff recounts what MOC looked like in the early days of OSHA PSM regulations, when organizations were first required to formally manage change. Despite everyone having to comply with the same regulations, companies approached MOC very differently—and these early implementations revealed problems that needed correction as the discipline matured.

💻 The Present: Not All MOC Systems Are Created Equal

Today’s electronic MOC systems may look equally impressive in vendor literature, but Dr. Hoff reveals they’re far from the same. He identifies red flags that signal an organization’s MOC system won’t actually prevent incidents and explains why organizations often implement expensive software that nobody uses—and how to prevent that costly mistake.

🔧 The Configurability Imperative

Unlike paper-based MOC systems, modern electronic platforms offer configurability—and Dr. Hoff explains why this capability has become critically important. He addresses the counterargument that standardization is safer than customization and tackles the crucial question of who should do the configuration: software experts or end users. The most common mistake organizations make when configuring MOC systems can undermine the entire implementation.

🤖 AI in MOC: Separating Value from Hype

Is AI safe to use for MOC? Drawing from his management of the AI-PSM LinkedIn group and peer-reviewed research, Dr. Hoff distinguishes where AI adds genuine value versus where it’s marketing hype, and identifies safeguards needed before AI can be trusted with MOC decisions.

📚 Contact & Resources:

* Company: Gateway Consulting Group

* Management of Change Best Practices Newsletter

* AI-PSM research papers and presentations

* LinkedIn: Rainer Hoff

About the Guest:

Brent Sutton—Managing Director of Learning Teams Inc. and author of foundational texts in the "New View" safety movement—joins to revolutionize how we think about incident investigation and organizational learning. For decades, organizations have followed the same playbook after something goes wrong: investigations, root cause analysis, corrective actions, and often, blame. Brent offers a fundamentally different path—one that replaces punitive investigations with collaborative Learning Teams that genuinely improve safety, quality, and operational excellence.

Rob’s philosophy:

Learning Teams obtain and consider different perspectives and angles of functional diversity to define problems in a group context.

Episode Highlights:

🔄 From Root Cause to Real Learning

Brent unpacks what a Learning Team actually is and does, contrasting it sharply with traditional root cause analysis and corrective action reports. For leaders who've spent careers in the old paradigm, he explains the fundamental shift: moving from "who failed?" to "what can we learn?" and from blame to understanding the context that shaped decisions and actions.

💡 The 'Aha Moment' That Changed Everything

After years developing and implementing Learning Teams methodology, Brent shares the pivotal realization that organizations needed a completely different framework. His books systematize what was once an intuitive practice into a replicable methodology that any organization can adopt.

🛡️ The 4Ds Framework: Making Complexity Transparent

The 4Ds framework—identifying work that is Dumb, Different, Difficult, or Dangerous—provides practical structure for proactive learning from everyday successful work.

📋 Compliance Meets Learning🔍 Work-As-Done vs. Work-As-Imagined

Organizations often have regulatory requirements for investigations that seem to conflict with a learning-first approach. Brent demonstrates how Learning Teams can satisfy compliance requirements while still prioritizing genuine organizational learning over box-checking exercises.

🔍 Work-As-Done vs. Work-As-Imagined

One of the most powerful shifts Brent facilitates is helping investigators move from analyzing work as they imagine it should be done to understanding how it's actually performed in the messy reality of operational environments.

📩 Contact & Resources:

🎧 Podcasts:

🌐 Website:Learning Teams Community

📚 Books

* The Practice of Learning Teams: Learning and improving safety, quality and operational excellence (2020)

* HOP Beginners Guide To Doing Safety Differently

* 4Ds for HOP and Learning Teams: A practical how-to guide (2023)

About the Guest:

Trish Kerin is the former Director of the IChemE Safety Centre and a globally recognized process safety leader whose career spans Mobil Oil, Australian Vinyls, and Wesfarmers Kleenheat Gas, where she served as National Health and Safety Manager. She has represented industry on government committees, served on the board of Australia’s National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, and received top honors, including the Trevor Kletz Merit Award and the Women in Safety Leader of the Year award.

Through the award-winning podcast Process Safety with Trish and Traci (a Jesse H. Neal Award winner), she breaks down incidents such as Flixborough, Texas City, and Buncefield to extract patterns that help prevent future catastrophes.

Episode Highlights:

🦆 The Platypus Philosophy®

Trish’s Platypus Philosophy® is a framework for identifying, collating, and analyzing weak signals of potential hazardous events before they escalate into incidents. Using the memorable PLATYPUS acronym, it trains practitioners to spot anomalies—the “platypuses” that don’t fit expected patterns and are often dismissed because they challenge existing mental models. This philosophy tackles cognitive biases that cause people to overlook early warning signs, helping organizations shift from reactive fixes to proactive risk control.​

🧠 People, Stories, and Safety

Trish champions the mindset shift from “people as the problem” to “people as the solution,” coaching leaders to harness frontline insight instead of defaulting to blame. She is also known for The Four Cs of Effective Process Safety Storytelling, a framework that helps organizations communicate complex safety concepts in ways that stick and change behavior. Through powerful stories and case studies, she shows how the right narrative can prevent “incident amnesia” and keep critical lessons alive over time.

🌍 Automation, AI, and New Weak Signals

As industries adopt more automation and AI, Trish highlights emerging weak signals leaders must learn to recognize—from algorithmic anomalies to changes in operator engagement and overconfidence in “smart” systems. She also explores how sustainability goals intersect with process safety, including where green ambitions can unintentionally introduce new risks if not thoughtfully managed.​

📩 Contact & Resources:

* 🎧 Podcast: Process Safety with Trish and Traci

* ​IChemE Safety Centre

* The Platypus Philosophy: How to identify and manage weak signals

About the Guest:

Rob Galbraith is the Founder and CEO of Forestview Insights and author of the international bestseller The End of Insurance As We Know It (2019). With nearly 20 years at USAA pioneering advanced analytics before "data science" was even a term, Rob has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. He holds a Master's of Science in Insurance Management from Boston University and earned his CPCU, CLU, and ChFC designations. Rob helps century-old insurance companies build innovation capabilities and move beyond FOMO-driven change to strategic transformation.

Rob’s philosophy:

Innovation is a discipline no different than claims or underwriting.

Episode Highlights:

🔧 The USAA Innovation Culture

How did serving military families—often in remote locations with limited connectivity—force USAA to think differently about customer experience? Rob shares early insights from advanced analytics work that challenged conventional insurance wisdom.

📖 Five Years After “The End of Insurance”

Looking back at predictions made in 2019, Rob discusses what came true and what surprised him about how the industry evolved—including AI's transformational role now amplified by ChatGPT and generative AI.

💻 Technical Debt: The Innovation Tax

Insurers were early technology adopters—1970s mainframes, 1980s desktop computers—but this created technical debt. Rob explores the role of platforms and ecosystems in overcoming this legacy burden

🚀 The Future: Risk Prevention Over Risk Transfer

The shift from reactive risk transfer to proactive risk prevention, including embedded insurance and parametric coverages, represents the coming transformation.​

📩 Contact & Resources:

* LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rob-galbraith​

* Website: endofinsurance.com

* Book: The End of Insurance As We Know It: How Millennials, Insurtech, and Venture Capital Will Disrupt the Ecosystem (2019)

About the Guest:

Dr. Todd Conklin spent 25 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where failure was simply unacceptable, developing the Human Performance program in one of the world’s most secure, high-stakes environments. He is a global pioneer in Human and Organizational Performance, creator of the influential Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast with thousands of episodes and a worldwide following, and author of several books—including Pre-Accident Investigations—that have transformed how organizations approach error, learning, and the future of safety.

Todd’s philosophy:

Safety means enabling workers to tackle any challenge in a world full of surprises.

Episode Highlights:

🧠 Human Error Is Normal

Todd unpacks one of his most radical statements for traditional safety leaders: human error is normal and predictable, not a moral failing. Working at Los Alamos—where “zero tolerance” for mistakes carries real weight—paradoxically shaped his understanding that error cannot be eliminated, only anticipated and managed through better system design.

🚫 Blame Fixes Nothing

Why is blame so toxic to organizational learning? Todd explains how the instinct to find “who failed” actually prevents organizations from understanding what really happened and blocks the systemic improvements that could prevent recurrence. The choice after every incident is binary: blame or learning—you can’t have both.

📚 Learning Is Vital (But Different from Data Collection)

There’s a crucial difference between genuine learning and simply collecting information after an incident. Todd breaks down what real organizational learning looks like—and why most post-incident processes fail to produce it.​

🔮 Pre-Accident Investigations: Investigating Before Disaster Strikes

Todd’s book Pre-Accident Investigations argues that organizations should investigate accidents before they happen—a concept that sounds like science fiction but works in practice. He walks through what a pre-accident investigation actually looks like, what you’re investigating when nothing has gone wrong yet, and how to convince organizations to invest in preventing events that haven’t happened.

📩 Contact & Resources:

* PreAccident Investigation Podcast

* Books: Pre-Accident Investigations, Simple Revolutionary Acts, The 5 Principles of Human Performance

* Todd Conklin on LinkedIn

About the Guest:

Daniel Allen Butler is a maritime and aviation historian who has spent decades reconstructing some of the 20th century’s most infamous disasters. His books on the Titanic, Lusitania, and Hindenburg read like forensic investigations into how systems fail, blending archival research with a sharp focus on organizational decisions, governance, and culture.​

Daniel’s philosophy:

History’s worst disasters are rarely caused by a single bad decision; they emerge from cultures that normalize warning signs, drift toward danger, and then forget the lessons once the crisis passes. Butler’s work challenges comfortable myths and insists that leaders confront evidence, ambiguity, and shared accountability if they want to avoid becoming “the next Titanic.”

Episode Highlights:

🚢 Titanic: More Than an Iceberg Story

Butler dissects the organizational decisions that made Titanic vulnerable long before it entered the ice field: policies about maintaining speed through known ice, sailing with only 20 lifeboats for over 2,200 people despite davits for 64, and commercial pressure to showcase speed, luxury, and schedule adherence. He contrasts the British Board of Trade inquiry, which largely exonerated the system, with the U.S. Senate investigation that focused on lifeboats and wireless protocols, drawing lessons about how inquiry design shapes what risks leaders are even able to see.​

🚢 Lusitania: Fatal Ambiguity in Command and Risk Ownership

On Lusitania, Butler highlights how conflicting mandates—keeping civilian commerce flowing while operating in a live submarine war zone—created dangerous ambiguity over who truly owned threat assessment and protective decision-making. Incomplete intelligence, weak signaling, and flawed assumptions about U‑boat behavior combined with missing governance structures between Cunard and the Admiralty, offering a blueprint for the guardrails he would mandate for any modern board.​

🛩️ Hindenburg: When Material Choices Trap You

For Hindenburg, Butler explores whether the disaster was primarily about hydrogen as a material hazard, the flammability of the airship’s skin and dope, or deeper systems-integration failures—and which evidence most convincingly points to an ignition mechanism. He unpacks how public spectacle and global media coverage both illuminated and distorted root-cause analysis, and what this teaches about the limits of mitigation when your fundamental design choice may be “unacceptable regardless of controls.”​

📡 Seeing the Drift: Patterns Across Disasters

Across all three cases, Butler identifies signals that were visible before the disasters yet discounted or normalized at the time, embodying Sidney Dekker’s idea of “drift into failure” where each local decision appears rational even as the system migrates toward catastrophe. He outlines concrete routines and disciplines—clearer accountability, more honest threat assessment, and structured challenge to commercial pressures—that could have altered the trajectory in each story.​

📩 Contact & Resources:

* Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic

* Daniel’s LinkedIn​

* Daniel’s website

In this episode, we explore the intricate world of counterterrorism and crisis management with Richard A. Marquise, a 31-year veteran of the FBI.

About the Guest:

Richard A. Marquise is a renowned counterterrorism expert. As the head of the American task force investigating the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, he led the U.S. side of the inquiry that spanned the globe. For his work, he received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service. He is also the author of “Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation,” an inside account of the case.

Richard’s philosophy:

Effective counterterrorism is not only about reacting to events. It combines meticulous investigation, international cooperation, and a deep understanding of the adversary.

Episode Highlights:

✈️ An Unprecedented Attack

Marquise recounts the initial moments of the investigation, a time when a terrorist attack of this scale against a civilian airliner was almost unimaginable. He describes the enormous challenge of coordinating a multinational investigation with a debris field covering over 800 square miles.​

🧩 The Evidence Trail

A key focus of the episode is the painstaking process of evidence collection and analysis. Marquise explains how a tiny fragment of a circuit board, found on a piece of clothing, became a critical piece of the puzzle that ultimately led investigators to the bomb’s origin.​

🌍 Global Cooperation and a New Era of Terror

The Lockerbie bombing marked a turning point in how the world understood terrorism. Marquise discusses the unprecedented level of cooperation between American and Scottish authorities and how the investigation shaped the future of counterterrorism, from intelligence sharing to aviation security protocols.​

⚖️ The Pursuit of Justice

The episode concludes with a reflection on the long and arduous path to bringing the perpetrators to justice. Marquise shares his perspective on the trial and the enduring impact of the Lockerbie bombing on the victims’ families and the world.​

📩 Contact & Resources:

* Mr. Marquise’s papers related to the Pan Am Flight 103 investigation are archived at Syracuse University Libraries.

* LinkedIn​

About the Guest:

Philippa Girling—a former Chief Risk Officer who left the corporate world to create spaces where women can thrive authentically. In 2022, she made a bold transition from corporate finance to found Camp Château—a summer camp for women in southwest France focused on creating authentic, inclusive, and restorative experiences.

Philippa’s philosophy:

Diversity and inclusion aren’t simply HR initiatives—they’re how we build powerful teams. People need to be not just asked into the room, but asked to lead the dance.

Episode Highlights:

🏦 From Wall Street to the French Countryside

After three decades navigating the patriarchal world of global finance, Philippa made a courageous decision to step away from the traditional career path.

💡 Risk Management as a Life Skill

Philippa reveals how operational risk management skills—assessing threats, building frameworks, and creating psychological safety—translate powerfully into her new venture. From traditional banks to fintech startups, her experience taught her that effective risk identification depends on hearing diverse perspectives.

🏰 Camp Château: A Laboratory for Inclusive Leadership

Camp Château isn’t just a vacation destination—it’s a deliberate experiment in collaborative, inclusive leadership that challenges traditional corporate hierarchies. The camp is 100% owned by 140 women and gender-diverse founding members, embodying Philippa’s commitment to equity and shared ownership.

🌍 The Future of Risk: Human Elements in an AI World

As AI and automation reshape risk management, Philippa emphasizes the irreplaceable value of empathy, authenticity, and inclusion in understanding and responding to complex risks.

📩 Contact:

* LinkedIn​

* Camp Château