Pre-Accident Investigations

by Todd Conklin

Pre-Accident Better Questions - An Applied Approach to Operational Learning challenges safety and reliability professionals to get better answers by asking better questions. A provocative examination of human performance and safety management, the book delivers a thought-provoking discourse about how we work, and defines a new approach to operational learning. This is not a book about traditional safety. This is a book about creating "real" safety in your organization. In order to predict incidents before they happen, an organization should first understand how their processes can result in failure. Instead of managing the outcomes, they must learn to manage and understand the processes used to create them. Ideal for use in safety, human performance, psychology, cognitive and decision making, systems engineering, and risk assessment areas, this book equips the safety professional with the tools, steps, and models of success needed to create long-term value and change from safety programs.

138 pages, Paperback

Published June 21, 2016

Reviews

[Alyssa W · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book - it has big ideas that could change the world of safety - but I can't give it more than one star because of the myriad of grammatical and spelling errors in the book. They made it unreadable. Between those, the misquotes, the refusal to use any contractions, and the author's tautological writing style I just gave up.

Some examples:

"He told them that punishing [the employee] for doing something that he did not intend to do in order to make him come to work tomorrow, and not do what he did not mean to do today has not fixing anything."

"It is hard to not know what you do not know, and yet you still do not know what you do not know."

"As is the conversation itself new, ideas become increasingly understandable."

And my personal favorite:
"The only way to talk about the complex relationships that exist between the worker and the worker Todd I am not too sure what you are expressing here is to use a process that allows the discussions about these complexities in operations."

So I would highly NOT recommend this book, unless it was re-published with the many errors fixed. And maybe with more detail on specific things - like, how do you create a Learning Team, how do you sell this to management (because I'm sure not going to tell them to read the book). I understand that things should be fluid, micro-experimentation, etc, but having concrete steps as a starting point would add so much more value to the book.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good ideas and practical advice.

Only criticism is the editing... lots of typos which was annoying. Good material that causes the reader to look at safety differently and in many ways, more practically. A core philosophy is the workers doing the work usually know more about how things happen than managers or consultants.

[Katrina · Rating 1 out of 5]

While the ideas of this book are new and useful, there are two very large items from a book standpoint I cannot ignore when rating: this was written like text to speech on wordpad with no spelling or grammar checking and it could have been distilled into one or two chapters, the rest was fluff or repeating the same generic statement multiple ways.

[Nick Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful ideas for any leader, manager, and/or safety professional.