In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Doug Parker, former US Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, whose illustrious career has spanned labor law, federal and state oversight, worker advocacy, policy leadership and consultancy.

Doug explains why regulators are often seen only through the lens of enforcement and what that view misses. Drawing on his time leading OSHA, he describes the broader role of guidance, dialogue and worker voice in improving safety outcomes.

The conversation explores how trust shapes the relationship between regulators and organizations, why engagement matters and how fear of enforcement can limit learning and transparency. Doug also reflects on the constraints regulators operate under and what that means in practice.

This episode gives EHS professionals a rare regulatory perspective on how to engage more constructively with oversight bodies and use regulation as a lever to support meaningful, lasting safety improvement.

Find out more about OSHA: Home | Occupational Safety and Health Administration

California State OSHA resources and templates: Cal/OSHA - Division of Occupational Safety and Health - Home Page

Worker-focused global resources Doug recommends: Hesperian Health Guides | Knowledge for Action - Action for Health

Doug Parker on LinkedIn: Doug Parker | LinkedIn

Contact Doug directly: [email protected]

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Shawn Connick, a safety consultant with decades of experience across construction and energy.

Shawn reflects on why safety professionals are surrounded by ideas yet often struggle to turn them into practice. Drawing on his own experience, he shares his success operationalizing new workplace safety approaches with (all too familiar) resource constraints.

Discover how to effectively implement learning teams, ensuring safety is aligned with production and quality, insights emerge before workers get hurt, and your organization improves in all these areas together.

Shawn emphasizes the importance of building ‘safety fluency’, helping leaders understand that organizational change is the key to creating safer workplaces. This episode gives EHS professionals invaluable guidance on making new safety approaches work in practice - and on a limited budget.

Find out more about Shawn’s consultancy work: Shawn Connick Construct Strategies

Books recommended by Shawn:
- Sidney Dekker’s: The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'

- Todd Conklin’s: The 5 Principles of Human Performance

- Bob Edwards and Andrea Baker’s: Bob's Guide to Operational Learning

- Edgar Shein’s: Humble Inquiry

Podcasts recommended by Shawn:

PreAccident Investigation Podcast | Todd Conklin

A HOP Podcast (With No Name)

Podcasts - Freakonomics

Shawn Connick on LinkedIn: Shawn Connick, CSP | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dr. Todd Loushine, an Associate Professor, EHS professional, scientist and Data Analytics enthusiast who has extensively researched how we track safety.

Todd challenges the profession’s reliance on familiar aspirations and indicators, questioning whether established goals and metrics actually enhance workplace safety.

In this stimulating interview, he explores the current balance between compliance and people, and shares his extensive critical analysis of the data we rely on to measure performance. Other big-picture questions, such as safety’s role and alignment within an organization, also come under the spotlight.

Todd pushes EHS professionals to raise ambitions for safety. He urges you to think more deeply and critically about metrics, while broadening your perspective beyond hazards to a more empathetic approach.

Resources recommended by Todd:

Home - Safety On The Edge Conference

SafetyInsights.org – Home of safety & risk research summaries

Dr. Todd Loushine on LinkedIn:

Todd William Loushine, PhD, PE, CSP, CIH | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Lori Guasta, a safety leader whose career spans frontline practice, academia and consultancy.

Lori reflects on the profession’s obsession with the next shiny object, even though the fundamentals that support safe work have been understood for decades. She explains that chasing the latest silver bullet will actually distract organizations from doing safety well.

Leadership development and cultural change are key themes throughout this inspiring conversation; however, Lori’s experience allows her to cover many important areas, including generational change and women’s role in workplace safety.

Lori encourages EHS professionals to step back from the noise, reconnect with proven principles and focus on what genuinely supports people to work safely. This episode offers practical guidance to get back to basics and ignore the temptation to search for safety shortcuts.

Explore the life’s work of Edgar Schein: Edgar H. Schein: books, biography

Lori Guasta on LinkedIn: Lori Guasta, Ph.D. | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Crista Vesel, an academic, author and safety communication specialist whose work focuses on how language influences learning and decision-making in safety-critical environments.

Crista explores why safety professionals often rely on familiar approaches even though they fail to produce meaningful learning. She explains how language used around incidents can steer inquiry in particular directions, narrowing what is explored and what gets left out.

Drawing on her pioneering work on learning reviews, Crista explains how certain language patterns can unintentionally shut down inquiry, reinforce blame and limit understanding. She contrasts this with approaches that support open and collaborative dialogue to give organizations deeper understanding of workplace safety.

This conversation offers EHS professionals practical insight into using language more deliberately, strengthening insights after events and creating cultures where workers share and organisations learn.

The Masters of Engineering program where Crista teaches: Graduate | Advanced Safety Engineering and Management

Her (open access) thesis on agentive language: Language Bias in Accident Investigation

Crista and Ivan’s book: Human & Organization Potential

Find out more about their work: Dynamic Inquiry | All change starts with a question

Kenneth Gergen’s book recommended by Crista: An Invitation to Social Construction

Crista Vesel on LinkedIn: Crista Vesel, MSc | LinkedIn

Ivan Pupulidy on LinkedIn: Ivan Pupulidy, PhD | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Dr. Simon Goncharenko, a respected thought leader and author on a mission to make safety management theory more accessible. 

He examines why many organizations continue to rely on specific philosophies, frameworks and metrics to manage safety, even as serious injuries and fatalities remain stubbornly high. He questions what established measures, such as TRIR, tell us and where they can distract attention from more meaningful risk.

Known for challenging narrow thinking in safety management, Simon revisits key concepts, including behavior-based safety and safety culture, highlighting the crucial gaps between theory and practice. 

Throughout the interview, Simon returns to a central theme: safety is not a single-solution challenge. He encourages EHS professionals to broaden their approach, push boundaries and resist over-reliance on specific ideas. Safety is a journey, not a destination.

Simon’s safety management books:

Save Lives: Pushing Boundaries in Human Factors

Operationalizing Twenty-First Century Safety

Find out more about Simon’s work: Save Lives Global – Safety Consulting

Dr. Simon Goncharenko on LinkedIn: Dr. Simon G. | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Diane Chadwick-Jones, a former BP safety leader and long-time researcher whose work has shaped how organizations think about safety incentives.

Diane explains why linking pay and bonuses to injury rates often creates unintended consequences, including suppressed reporting and reduced learning. Drawing on years of internal and external research, she shows how incentives can reinforce belief systems that feel right but undermine safety in practice.

She shares how BP and other high-hazard organizations have moved away from injury-based bonuses, what replaced them and why peer recognition, transparency and supportive leadership matter more than annual rewards.

This conversation offers EHS professionals practical insight into influencing senior leaders, changing belief systems over time and building conditions where people feel safe to speak up about problems before they escalate.

Diane’s published research on safety incentives: Rewarding safety performance: Improving safety or maintaining beliefs?

Find out more about Diane’s work: Diane Chadwick-Jones / Safety Leadership / Human Performance

Energy Institute videos Diane recommends:

The modern view of incident causation

Human performance - what does it mean?

Walk through a task to prevent incidents

Safety leadership in the field

Diane Chadwick-Jones on LinkedIn: Diane Chadwick-Jones | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Leslie Rex Stockel, Associate Professor of Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology at Oklahoma State University and a long-time leader in safety education.

Drawing on decades of experience and teaching, Leslie reflects on how safety ideas evolved from Taylor and Heinrich to behavior-based safety and human performance. And assesses the impact of approaches like safety third.

She questions whether leaders are patient enough to give new approaches a chance and warns against the profession’s tendency to chase silver bullets rather than focusing on sustained incremental improvement.

Leslie explores the growing imbalance between cultural and technical safety, warning that strong people skills cannot compensate for weak technical foundations.

Throughout the conversation, she offers candid, practical advice for EHS professionals to assess their own gaps, strengthen both sides of their practice and focus on what truly keeps people safe at work.

Find out more about Leslie’s work: Leslie Stockel | About | Oklahoma State University

OSHA’s website: Home | Occupational Safety and Health Administration

ASSP website: ASSP - American Society of Safety Professionals

Leslie Rex Stockel on LinkedIn: Leslie Rex Stockel, PhD, CSP, SMP, FASSP | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Martijn Flinterman, a sociologist, researcher and author, specializing in how organizations deal with safety. Drawing on the work of Niklas Luhmann, Martijn challenges many assumptions that underpin traditional safety management.

He explores why focusing primarily on accidents can obscure crucial safety insights, and why categories such as “safe” and “unsafe” often create blind spots. Martijn explains how systems manage risk through distinctions, narratives and routines, and how these can unintentionally suppress reflection, dissent and learning.

The conversation also covers interesting ideas including harmony bias, constructive distrust and humble confidence. Martijn argues that too much trust can become negligent, silence can itself be a risk, and safety professionals must learn to act decisively while acknowledging that their understanding is always partial.

This wide-ranging discussion offers EHS professionals a sociological lens to better understand complexity, challenge comfortable assumptions and create space for critical reflection in safety systems.

Learn more about Martijn’s work: Unter Soziologen / Among Sociologists

Martijn’s book featured in this interview: Managing Safety in Complexity

Luhmann’s most accessible writing: Introduction to systems theory : Luhmann, Niklas, 1927-1998

Martijn also recommends the sociologist Stefan Kuhl: Stefan Kühl – Uklitag

Martijn Flinterman on LinkedIn: Martijn Flinterman | LinkedIn

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Ben Goodheart, a human-centred safety consultant and podcast host who advocates a design thinking mindset to improve safety outcomes.

Ben introduces EHS professionals to the concept of design thinking and its practical application in workplace safety. He explores the importance of workers’ experiences, small-scale experiments and incremental change - and how these alternative approaches can positively impact your organization.

He shares cool real-world examples of how design thinking has driven greater safety success and provides actionable guidance to replicate this in your workplace.

You’ll also discover what Ben wants you to focus on instead of technical knowledge, how “safety improv” can help and why it’s good to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Learn more about Ben’s work: Magpie Human Systems

Listen to Ben’s safety podcast: Punk Rock Safety

The Empathy Map Ben suggested: Empathy Map - XPLANE

Ben recommends this website: IDEO - A Global Design & Innovation Company

Ben Goodheart on LinkedIn: Ben Goodheart, Ph.D. | LinkedIn

Contact Ben: [email protected]

Safety Labs is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Find us at www.safetyproducts.global

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]