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

Explore the topics of software safety — from Chain-of-Events to System-Theoretic Accident Models.

About the Guest:

Dr. Nancy Leveson is a professor at MIT and one of the world’s leading voices in system and software safety. Since founding the field of software safety in 1980, she has developed the STAMP, CAST, and STPA frameworks that have reshaped how regulators, companies, and investigators understand accidents in complex socio-technical systems.​

Nancy Leveson’s philosophy:

Software doesn’t fail—requirements do.

Episode Highlights:

🔧 From Hardware Thinking to System Thinking

Leveson explains that traditional safety engineering was built for a world of hardware components and random failures, not today’s software-driven, tightly coupled systems.

🎯 Reliability vs. Safety: Two Different Worlds

One of the most powerful distinctions Leveson draws is between reliability and safety. She uses a powerful analogy to distinguish these often-confused concepts. A gun fired alone in the desert 100 miles from anyone is both reliable (fires when triggered) and safe (harms no one). That same reliable gun fired in a crowded mall remains equally reliable but becomes catastrophically unsafe.

🧠 From Blame to Explanation: How Software Really Contributes to Accidents

Rather than thinking in terms of “software failure,” we can focus on how software participates in unsafe system behavior. Traditional accident investigations rush to identify “who failed”—usually the pilot, operator, or front-line worker—then stop. Nancy’s CAST (Causal Analysis based on System Theory) asks different questions:​

* Why did it make sense for them to do what they did at the time?​

* What mental model were they operating with?​

* What feedback were they receiving (or missing)?​

* What context shaped their decisions?

🚀 STPA: Designing Safety In, Not Inspecting It In

While CAST analyzes accidents after they happen, STPA (System-Theoretic Process Analysis) model prevents them before they occur. Instead of cataloging every possible system behavior—impossible with millions of lines of code—STPA focuses on what must not happen:​

* Model the system as control loops and feedback paths​

* Identify unsafe control actions that could lead to hazards​

* Design the system to eliminate, reduce, or mitigate those actions​

📩 Contact:

* LinkedIn

* aeroastro.mit.edu

Books:

About the Guest:

Jordan Barab ran AFSCME’s safety program in the 1980s before becoming OSHA’s Deputy Assistant Secretary under President Obama for nearly eight years. He now channels that experience into his hard-hitting blog Confined Space, chronicling weekly tolls of workplace fatalities and the politics that shape them.​

Jordan’s philosophy:

I didn’t insert politics into health and safety—I just try to explain it.

Episode Highlights:

⚖️ The Labor-Management Battle

Barab explains why occupational safety remains deeply political despite seemingly universal support for workers coming home alive.

📉 The 185-Year Inspection Crisis

Discover OSHA’s staggering resource gap: with current staffing, it would take 185 years to inspect every U.S. workplace just once.

💸 Penalties That Don’t Deter

Learn why OSHA fines are “peanuts” for large employers.

🔬 NIOSH: The Research Pipeline Under Threat

Explore how the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) provides the scientific foundation for workplace safety—and how the Trump administration is dismantling it.

🌡️ Climate Change and Unfinished Standards

Discover why critical protections remain incomplete despite urgent need.

🕳️ Coverage Gaps and Forgotten Workers

Learn about the millions of workers OSHA doesn’t protect.

📩 Contact & Resources​

* LinkedIn

* https://jordanbarab.com/confinedspace/

About the Guest:

Vera Cherepanova is Executive Director of Boards of the Future and one of the few individuals to receive the “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” designation from the US government for her contributions to compliance and ethics. She authored the first-ever compliance book in Russian and serves on corporate boards globally. For decades, she worked across ethics, compliance, internal audit, and risk—giving her a comprehensive view of the “second and third lines of defense”.​

Vera’s philosophy:

Everything counts. It’s a long game—take it as such. Everything you do, every introduction, every piece of work, counts toward the bigger goal.​

Episode Highlights:

🎯 From Rule-Follower to Change Agent

Vera traces her journey from collecting compliance data to questioning what happened next. After years of submitting reports to boards, she realized she didn’t understand whether the information made any difference—and in many cases, she was certain it didn’t. This shared perception among compliance peers channeled her energy into the question of impact: How much difference do independent control functions actually make?

The answer led her to found Boards of the Future, advocating for ethics and compliance professionals to have a seat at the boardroom table where decisions about value creation and preservation happen.​

🥦 The Broccoli vs. Chocolate Dilemma

Discover Vera’s powerful analogy: ethics and compliance are like broccoli. Everyone knows it’s healthy and important. They teach kids to eat it. But somehow we want chocolate—the fast results, the instant sugar kick, the forward-looking revenue generation. We focus on chocolate until there’s a crisis: we’ve had too much, stepped on the scale, and realize something’s wrong. That’s when compliance gets invited to the boardroom and everyone listens carefully.

Vera’s call to action: Don’t overdo on chocolate. Don’t run into crisis again. Think about balance, because healthy eating isn’t only broccoli or only chocolate—it’s about taking care of both at the same time.​

📊 Value Preservation AND Value Creation

Explore how boards are tasked with two high-level responsibilities: preserving accumulated value and multiplying it through strategy and growth. Compliance has always been seen as belonging only to the first part—ticking boxes, cost center thinking. But when you don’t take the ethics part out of the equation and look at culture (how things are done when nobody’s watching), you realize ethics has everything to do with value creation. Culture and strategy reinforce each other. A strategy fails when the culture doesn’t live up to expectations. Risk isn’t the other side of the coin from strategy—it sits on the same side, inherent to every strategic choice. Both were wrongly outsourced to independent directors and control functions.​

🔍 The 95/5 Problem

Learn about Vera’s research into board oversight guides for ethics and compliance. She found roughly 10 guides—all titled “Ethics and Compliance Oversight”—and did the statistical calculation: 95% of the wording focused on compliance (Caremark case, laws, reporting structures, audit committees) while only 5% addressed ethics (values, purpose, culture). Yet every guide stated that ethics is the foundation. Vera calls this trend unfair and wrong. If ethics is truly the foundation, it deserves at least 50/50 treatment. This imbalance reflects how ethics has been instrumentalized over time as merely a “softener” for compliance rather than something with profound value on its own.​

🏢 The Silo Problem: Why Compliance Doesn’t Know the Business

Discover the mutual ignorance problem: boards have a strange concept of what ethics and compliance can do, while ethics and compliance have a strange idea of what the organization and board are actually doing. If you ask the average board member who does cultural work, 95% will answer “HR.” Meanwhile, compliance professionals may know the 2050 global target but little else about strategy.

The solution: desperate need for business acumen, strategic thinking, and curiosity. Compliance needs to participate in rotation programs, sit in marketing, learn what other departments do. Organizations become more siloed as they grow—Vera recalls engagement surveys consistently showing the poorest scores on “how much do you know about the department next door?” Communication is everything.​

⏳ The Horizon Problem: Short-Termism vs. Stewardship

Explore how Boards of the Future speak only to “enlightened investors” who understand stewardship principles. If you’re a VC or PE fund looking to exit in two years and squeeze out as much as possible, you won’t listen—because you have a short-term horizon. But boards and founders can choose their investors. They can define success beyond the Silicon Valley model that tells brilliant minds their ultimate achievement is getting any funding. When boards choose the right investors with the right horizon, they have discretion to frame decision-making for the long term—which is always the more ethical choice. With impatient investor bases, boards lose that discretion. Ethics and compliance investments make sense on longer horizons; on short horizons, you do the minimum so nothing blows up during your two-year exit window.​

📜 The 2004 Turning Point

Get the inside story of why “ethics” was added to “compliance.” In 1991, the US adopted Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (FSGO), featuring compliance programs prominently—companies with effective programs got penalty discounts. By 2004, regulators had data showing a missing piece: during investigations of corporate misconduct, employees consistently said “it was a common thing to do,” “that was the expectation here,” “everybody else was doing it.” Issues weren’t standalone—they were systemic and cultural. Regulators realized they needed a component addressing behavioral aspects and social norms. So in 2004, FSGO was revised to require an effective compliance and ethics program. Yet over the years, ethics has been instrumentalized to mean almost the same as compliance, just softer—which Vera argues is completely wrong.

📚 Featured Resources & Further Reading

Learn more from my Guest:

* Website: www.veracherepanova.com

* Books, guides, and articles

* Ask an Ethicist ColumnVera writes a monthly advice column for Corporate Compliance Insights, where she tackles ethical dilemmas in the workplace with thoughtful, practical guidance.

* Boards of the Future (Non-Profit):

Learn about their mission to advocate for ethics and compliance professionals on corporate boards​

📩 Contact

Connect with Vera via:​

* Studio Etica (Consultancy): www.studioetica.com​

* LinkedIn: Follow Vera Cherepanova

About the Guest:

Ahmed Salim is a Director at PwC, where he specializes in Compliance within Healthcare and Pharma Life Sciences, with a particular focus on AI and AI Governance. He is also the author of Mastering Compliance Through Change Management. His career has taken him from congressional field representation to chief compliance officer roles across multiple organizations, giving him unique insight into the political and human dynamics that drive compliance effectiveness. Ahmed holds a law degree and a master’s degree in communication, and he regularly contributes to Compliance Today and CEP Magazine.

Ahmed’s Philosophy:

Compliance professionals need to stop being viewed as the siloed team that no one wants to talk to. We need to speak the language of business and become true partners. It’s not about being the person who says no—it’s about being the person who helps find a way to yes while protecting the organization from reputational damage.

Episode Highlights:

🤖 AI Governance Without a RoadmapExplore why the absence of federal AI regulations in the U.S. creates both challenges and opportunities—and how organizations can leverage frameworks like the EU AI Act to build effective programs.

🔄 The 8-Step Change Management FrameworkDiscover Ahmed’s proven methodology for transforming compliance from checkbox enforcement to strategic partnership, including vision development, leadership sponsorship, and continuous improvement.

⚖️ The Chatbot DilemmaLearn why AI-powered compliance tools present unique governance challenges—and why getting an incorrect answer from a chatbot may actually be less problematic than getting one from a human.

🤝 From Enforcer to Business PartnerUncover the practical strategies Ahmed used to rebuild trust with skeptical sales teams and operations departments, including showing up at their meetings uninvited and speaking their language.

📊 Tech-Enabled ComplianceUnderstand how AI can revolutionize training, policy management, and auditing—while navigating the ethical and practical challenges of implementation in regulated industries.

🎯 Quick Wins and Strategic PatienceFind out why celebrating compliance victories matters and how to build momentum through achievable milestones while playing the long game on organizational transformation.

Sources:

* Mastering Compliance Through Change Management

* https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/cybersecurity-risk-regulatory.html

* Ahmed Salim’s LinkedIn

About the Guest:

Howard Berkes spent 38 years at NPR exposing hidden industrial dangers, from the Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster that killed 29 miners to the black lung disease epidemic. His groundbreaking investigations have earned him more than 40 national journalism awards, including the IRE Medal—the highest honor in investigative reporting.

Howard’s philosophy:

Workers deserve to go home every day safe, healthy, and alive. If I see something that interferes with that and it’s not being addressed properly, I feel like I should do something about it.

Episode Highlights:

⛏️ Upper Big Branch: Production Over Safety

Get the inside story of how 29 miners died in a preventable methane gas explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine.

🫁 The Black Lung EpidemicDiscover why young miners in their 30s and 40s are dying from advanced black lung disease after just 10 years of work—a disease that used to take 30+ years to develop.

🛡️ The PPE ParadoxLearn why dust masks aren’t the answer to coal dust exposure—and why relying on them creates false security.

⚖️ The Political Nature of RegulationExplore how the White House determines whether workers live or die.

🎤 Building Trust in TragedyDiscover the investigative techniques that earned Berkes access to dozens of sick and dying miners in Appalachia—a region historically skeptical of outside reporters.

Connect with Howard: howardberkes.com

About the Guest:

Paul Gruhn developed the world’s first commercial safety system modeling software in 1994, served as ISA president in 2019, and co-chaired the ISA 84 Standard Committee for years.

Paul’s philosophy:

Doing the modeling doesn’t make your plant any safer. People don’t have accidents because you got your model wrong.

Episode Highlights:

🎯 From Forensics to Functional Safety

Gruhn shares how a chance encounter at an ISA show launched his 40-year career in safety engineering. Working alongside a 70-year-old English reliability consultant who later passed away, Paul unexpectedly inherited his role and dove deep into ISA standards work, presenting at DuPont, where he caught the attention of the 84 Committee chairman. His journey reflects how expertise develops through seizing opportunities and committing to lifelong learning.

📋 The Battle for ISA 84

Get an inside look at the heated debates behind safety standards development. When the 84 Committee started, 50 people would show up to three-day meetings where raised voices could be heard through hotel partition walls. Markov modeling advocates clashed with algebraic equation supporters and fault tree proponents, yet none could agree on the “best” method. The solution: publish all three approaches with examples and let practitioners choose what works for them.

🏗️ The Jenga Tower of Management of Change

Discover why management of change failures—not calculation errors—cause real-world disasters. Gruhn uses a powerful Jenga tower analogy: at design, all pieces are in place, but poor change management slowly removes blocks without replacement. The tower still stands, so management assumes safety, but one small push causes total collapse. This pattern explains Bhopal (five years old when disaster struck), Texas City (distillation column overflowed eight times before the fatal accident), and countless other tragedies.

🤖 The AI Dilemma

Learn why Paul is “terrified” of AI’s role in process safety. Junior engineers will trust AI outputs without understanding the gaps, while downsizing eliminates senior experts who can spot missing elements. Unlike hand calculations that can verify models, AI gives different answers to the same question twice—dangerous when lives depend on consistency. Currently, AI may help populate HAZOPs or safety reviews, but relying on it completely risks creating engineers who don’t know what they don’t know.

💰 Bean Counters vs. Engineers

Explore how financial managers replaced technical leaders in plant operations over 50 years. These “bean counters” don’t understand plant operations and slash budgets for things they can’t comprehend on spreadsheets. The result: increased reliance on contractors who lack process knowledge, maintenance outsourcing to service companies, and owner-operators reduced to managing contractors rather than doing work themselves. Paul describes walking into facilities where he immediately wanted to leave after 30 minutes of questioning.

🔒 Cyber Security Reality Check

Discover how cyber security failures mirror functional safety failures—they’re not product problems, they’re human problems. Gruhn shares a real case where a DCS vendor’s virus-infected laptop shut down an entire oil processing facility because the DCS, safety system, and office network all shared the same infrastructure. The safety system did exactly what it was designed to do when communication failed, yet the end user blamed the vendor rather than their own poor network segregation.

Joe Flood isn’t just any journalist—he’s the Harvard-educated author who spent seven years uncovering one of America’s most devastating algorithmic failures. His book The Fires reveals how a computer model literally burned down entire NYC neighborhoods in the 1970s, and the lessons couldn’t be more relevant today.

🚨 Beyond the Algorithm: Universal Risk Lessons

This conversation reveals how NYC’s devastating fire crisis applies across industries facing similar model-over-reality challenges. Whether in AI deployment, urban planning, or healthcare resource allocation, the lessons about data quality, institutional blind spots, and the danger of algorithmic overconfidence transcend city planning.

Joe’s philosophy:

When you first use data in an anecdotal, intuitive field, there’s enormous gains to be made. Where it goes wrong is when you start using models as an excuse to not think hard about complicated systems.

💡 The Universal Lessons

The Michael Lewis Principle: “Models work when used as another way to think about complex problems. They fail when used as an excuse to NOT think about complex systems”.

The Technocratic Trap: Following the post-WWII tech victories and economic boom, the 1960s represented a peak in confidence in data-driven decisions. When fire unions challenged closures with ground experience, RAND countered with “stochastic modeling” that judges couldn’t question.

Human Cost: Entire census tracts lost 80-90% of housing and population. In neighborhoods with shared “cockloft” building designs, a one-minute delay meant the difference between one building burning versus an entire block.

🎯 Why This Matters Now

We’re in another “data automation revolution” with AI. Joe draws direct parallels between 1960s algorithmic overconfidence and today’s AI hype cycles. The same quotes about computer-driven governance from the Goddard Rocket Institute could be recycled for AI companies today.

Core Takeaway: Good intentions + elegant algorithms + institutional blind spots = catastrophic real-world consequences when we let the map replace the territory.

📩 Contact the Guest

Joe’s currently releasing The Fires as an interactive video podcast with charts and original commentary.

Follow Joe’s Work:

* Substack: The Fires Video Podcast

✉️ Connect with Joe on LinkedIn to explore speaking opportunities or learn more about his upcoming video podcast audiobook release.