Safety Unpacked - Learning or Blaming? with Amy Morris

In this episode of the Women in Safety Podcast, Alanna Ball and Amy Morris take a closer look at incident investigations and the bigger system issues that often sit behind safety events. Rather than defaulting to worker blame or behaviour-based explanations, they explore what happens when controls are poorly designed, hard to apply, or simply do not hold up in real working conditions.

The conversation highlights why incident investigations need to go beyond surface-level findings and ask better questions about how work is actually done. Alanna and Amy discuss the importance of classifying incidents properly, understanding the difference between workable and unworkable controls, and looking at the wider organisational conditions that shape risk and decision-making.

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Episode Highlights

• Why correct incident classification matters when deciding where effort and resources should go

• How many incidents involve controls that are difficult or unrealistic to apply in real-world conditions

• The difference between easy, difficult, and unworkable controls, and why that matters in prevention

• Common examples of control failure, including broken equipment, impractical PPE, and the workarounds people create to get the job done

• How poor system design and organisational culture can weaken even well-intended controls

• Why investigation methods need to ask better questions, not just produce quick conclusions

• How strict rule enforcement can sometimes drive unsafe workarounds instead of safer work

• The role of wider system weaknesses, beyond individual behaviour, in shaping incident outcomes

• Practical ways to build more resilient controls through stronger design and organisational learning

• Why storytelling matters in incident reporting and helps reveal the full picture behind an event

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This episode is a strong reminder that incidents rarely make sense when viewed through blame alone. Alanna and Amy encourage safety professionals to look more closely at the systems, controls, and organisational conditions surrounding an event, rather than stopping at what the worker did or did not do. When investigations focus on the full story, including the pressures, design flaws, and control gaps involved, they become far more useful for learning and prevention. For anyone working in health and safety, this conversation is a call to strengthen investigations, improve control design, and build systems that work in practice, not just on paper.

Connect with Amy:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyleahmorris  

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