Todd interviews Professor David Woods about recent NASA mishaps and a growing cultural shift toward "cheaper, faster" decision-making that sacrifices safety. They explore how past safety gains have lost vitality, highlight cascading modern risks (the "messy nine"), and argue for mutual assistance and revitalized resilience practices.

Wood's most recent writing on this is available in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists called: Cheaper, Faster, and Who Gives a Damn about Anything Else.

The episode connects space, aviation, cloud outages, and AI-driven engineering to show why coordinated foresight and cross-disciplinary cooperation are essential to prevent far-reaching harm in today’s complex systems.

In this episode, Todd Conklin joins Amir Shahzad to discuss human and organizational performance, resilience, and how to design systems that allow failures to be caught and recovered before they become disasters. They explore the gap between work as imagined and work as done, the value of learning from everyday work, and practical steps leaders can take to create safer, more resilient workplaces.

They also cover cultural change, the role of procedures, adaptive behavior, and the potential—and risks—of AI in safety, all delivered with a mix of practical advice and light-hearted rapid-fire questions.

Hosts Todd and Brent discuss an upcoming restorative workshop centered on RaDonda Vought's account of the Emory Hospital event. The episode highlights how normal performance variability can combine into serious failures, the value of storytelling, and the importance of learning and building resilience across complex systems.

The workshop in Santa Fe (March 31–April 1) invites healthcare and high‑risk industry professionals to move from “what” happened to “how” to apply lessons in practice. For more information or to register, contact officetoddconklin@gmail.com.