About the Guest

Lewis Eisen, JD, CIP has been called “the man who makes policies fun”—and after 40 years as a lawyer, federal policy writer for the Government of Canada, and business consultant, he’s proven that strict rules don’t have to read like punishment. As a two-time Britt Literary Award winner (2020 and 2025), IQ Article of the Year recipient (2024), and creator of the Perfect Policies™ approach, Lewis has revolutionized how organizations worldwide communicate expectations, replacing the command-and-control language that triggers resistance with respectful wording that earns cooperation.

Lewis Eisen’s Philosophy

Employees and customers don't resist rules because they're strict; they resist rules that feel disrespectful or demeaning.

The language you choose when setting administrative policies provides insight into the amount of respect you have for your employees—and unintentional negative messages conveyed by your wording can undermine your goals without you even realizing it.

Episode Highlights

📜 From Lawyer to Policy Revolutionary

Lewis traces his journey from practicing law in Toronto to founding the Perfect Policies™ approach, sharing the pivotal moment that made him realize traditional policy language was fundamentally flawed in encouraging compliance. His experiences working across multiple federal departments revealed common problems with traditional policy writing that inspired him to develop an entirely new methodology starting in 2015.​

🎯 The Perfect Policies™ Approach

Lewis explains the core principles of the Perfect Policies™ approach and how it differs from conventional rule-making frameworks that have dominated organizational policy for decades. He addresses the critical challenge: how do you balance being respectful while maintaining the authority and enforceability of corporate rules?​

⚠️ Common Policy Mistakes That Undermine Compliance

Organizations routinely make mistakes when drafting policies that inadvertently undermine compliance—and most don’t even realize they’re doing it. Lewis identifies the most common errors and reveals the hidden, unintended, or negative messages embedded in traditional rule-making that trigger resistance rather than cooperation.​

📖 The International Bestseller: RULES (4th Edition, 2024)

Lewis discusses what revisions in the latest edition of RULES: Powerful Policy Wording to Maximize Engagement reflect evolving workplace dynamics and the changing relationship between employers and employees. With competition for corporate talent fiercer than ever, organizations can’t afford to ignore the damage caused by negative language and a disrespectful tone of voice.​

🌍 Respectful Language Across Cultures

Lewis explores whether what constitutes “respectful language” is influenced by differences in geography or industry—comparing Canadian government agencies, UK organizations, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. His Perfect Policies™ approach has been adopted around the world, demonstrating universal principles while adapting to local contexts.

🤖 AI and the Future of Policy Drafting

Lewis addresses how AI tools like ChatGPT are affecting policy drafting and whether they can be trained to write in the Perfect Policies™ style. This emerging technology presents both opportunities and challenges for maintaining respectful, effective policy language.​

🎤 Tailoring the Message

As a speaker who has presented at conferences ranging from NAGARA to FWD50, Lewis explains how he tailors his “Setting Standards for Excellence” keynote for different professional audiences.​​​

📚 Resources & Contact:

* RULES: Powerful Policy Wording to Maximize Engagement (4th edition, 2024); Available on Amazon

* Website: lewiseisen.com

* LinkedIn

* YouTube Channel: Lewis S Eisen Perfect Policies​

* TEC Canada Speaker Profile

About the Guest

Rob Fisher—founder of Fisher Improvement Technologies and a pioneer with over 30 years of experience deploying Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) across 40 countries. He has conducted over 100 successful HOP integration strategies across heavy industry. Also, the author of Understanding Mental Models, a speaker, and a mentor.

Rob Fisher’s Philosophy

Error is normal—but it's not a mantra, it's a principle. If you're not giving workers tools to recognize and respond to vulnerability, you're not doing HOP.

Episode Highlights

🔧 From Theory to Tools

Fisher challenges organizations that treat HOP as a rebranded safety slogan, explaining that real HOP implementation means embedding error-reduction tools into how jobs are planned, how procedures are written, and how incidents are analyzed.

He also explains how to integrate HOP with existing Safety Management Systems (SMS) by shifting focus from blaming individuals to understanding and improving the systems they work within.

👔 Leadership Is the Missing Link

Most leaders haven’t been taught how to engage in ways that actually prevent errors.​You will find out three things leaders must actively develop to create the inputs producing safety outcomes.

⚙️ Task-Based Systems Beat Campaigns

Rather than treating safety as a side project or campaign, Fisher provides task-based systems that examine how fatigue, distraction, procedures, personal stress, and environment shape daily decisions. His AERO system helps individuals become aware of and better manage their personal tendencies, enabling more effective workplace interactions.

📊 Performance Modes and Mental Models

How small adaptations accumulate into systemic risk? You will understand performance modes, mental models, error traps and triggers, and the impact of managing controls on error reduction.

🔍 Real Learning Changes Systems

Fisher challenges the common practice of distributing incident summaries and calling them "learnings," arguing that real learning is active, applied, and shifts how people work. Learning must prevent the next incident, not just review the last one.

📚 Contact & Resources:

* LinkedIn: Rob Fisher​

* Book: Understanding Mental Models

* Website: www.improvewithfit.com​

* HOP Services: Human and Organizational Performance​

* Insights & Articles: FIT Insights

⚠️ Content Warning

This episode contains discussions of suicide and mental health crises. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out for help:

* National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (U.S.): Call or text 988 (available 24/7)

* Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

* International Association for Suicide Prevention: www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres

You are not alone. Help is available.

About the Guest

Dr. Vince Hafeli is the President of Ajax Paving Industries and a mental health advocate. 🎤 His TEDx talk "A Discussion on Mental Health and Suicide in the Construction Industry" has received millions of views worldwide and earned the #5 highest spot for number of views. He authored the book Mental Health and Suicide, which shares his story alongside 12 other extremely personal stories of loss, along with practical advice for industry leaders. 🏃 Vince is an 11-time Ironman (140.6) and 4-time 70.3 triathlon finisher—a testament to how endurance sports and physical fitness have contributed to his own mental health journey.​

Vince’s Philosophy

It should be OK to say that I am not OK in the workplace.

Episode Highlights

Mental health isn’t separate from safety—it is safety, and when organizations ignore mental health challenges, they’re ignoring a critical risk factor that affects everything else they’re trying to manage.

📚 An Unexpected Journey From Field Technician to President

Dr. Hafeli traces his path from entry-level laboratory and field engineering technician in 1985 through quality control management, asphalt plants and materials general manager, to ultimately becoming President of Ajax Paving in 2019.

🔬 Doctoral Research: Revealing the Hidden Crisis

Dr. Hafeli shares key findings from his dissertation research on mental health and suicide in the construction industry, revealing why depression is one of the top three workplace problems in construction and what makes this industry particularly vulnerable to mental health challenges.

💔 Breaking 17 Years of Silence

After keeping his suicide attempt hidden for nearly two decades, Dr. Hafeli discusses what finally gave him the courage to speak publicly about his experience. Growing up and throughout his career, he faced numerous personal challenges including the loss of his father, brother, two children, and mother within a few years, along with the immense pressure of climbing the professional ladder in a demanding industry that valued strength and stoicism.

🚨 Misconceptions About Suicide

In his keynote "Why Suicide Occurs: The Misconceptions We Need to Address," Dr. Hafeli tackles the most common misconceptions about suicide that prevent people from getting help and organizations from responding effectively.

🛡️ Building a Mentally Healthy Workplace

You will find practical guidance on what signs managers and coworkers should look for when someone might be struggling, and how to help employers overcome the fear that employees have about seeking help—concerns about losing jobs, missing promotions, or being judged by coworkers.

📚 Contact & Resources:

* Personal website: vincehafeli.com​

* Book: Mental Health and Suicide​​

* TEDx Talk: A Discussion on Mental Health and Suicide in the Construction Industry

* Ajax Paving Industries of Florida: www.ajaxpavingfl.com

🆘 Suicide in Construction Awareness:

* American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) Suicide Awareness: www.artba.org/suicide-awareness​

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