In this episode, I speak with Nippin Anand, a master mariner and safety expert. He is the founder and CEO of Novellus Solutions, a consulting firm that helps organizations build cultures of safety and learn from accidents. Nippin and I talk about how cultures of safety are created (and destroyed), the importance of cultivating psychological safety among employees working in high-risk industries, and why managers are often not-so-great listeners.

In the episode, we talked about:

• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
• Innovation in knowledge-based companies vs. high-risk industries
• How unsafe conditions are worsened by managers’ inability to listen to line workers
• The role of psychological safety in high-risk organizations
• Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick
• How managers’ urge to seek consensus and solve problems can cause more problems in the long run
• How the urge to blame managers (instead of line workers) springs from the same place as the urge to blame blame line workers (instead of a managers)
• Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster by Lee Clarke
• Faster, better, cheaper, safer—is it possible?