Host Todd introduces his new book, The Stability Trap, and shares a sneak peek episode created with an AI-generated interview. The episode explores why organizations that appear safe can still experience accidents and how success itself can erode safety capacity.

The discussion outlines the core ideas: safety as the presence of capacity, the three R's (redefine safety, reframe the worker, relearn investigation), and a five-stage practical blueprint for leaders, safety professionals, frontline workers, supervisors, and system integration.

Short and practical, the episode is a teaser for the book and invites listeners to reflect on whether their organizations maintain the resilience, confidence, and systems needed to recover when things go wrong.

Jay Allen interviews Todd Conklin about his new book, The Stability Trap, exploring why even safe, stable organizations can fail. They discuss the "drive to zero," complacency, pressures on middle management, wearables and data, and lessons from aviation and the pandemic.

The episode also covers how AI was used to reorganize the book’s ideas and help craft its ending, and offers practical reframes: treat safety as a capacity, see workers as system monitors, and retool systems to match capacity with risk. The book is available now.

In this episode Todd Conklin joins Jowanza Joseph to explore modern safety thinking: why human error is normal, how context shapes behavior, and why leadership response and system recoverability matter more than blame.

They draw on examples from Los Alamos, AWS outages, SpaceX and everyday technology to show how organizations can design systems that tolerate failure and learn from it.

Listeners will get practical insights into the five principles of human performance and how to build resilient systems that fail safely and recover quickly.