Stop Blaming Bob

A Practical Guide to Investigations That Actually Reduce Risk

Move beyond human error, retraining and procedural rewrites. Learn how to turn workplace events into meaningful learning and genuine risk reduction.

Mark Alston draws on safety science, human factors, Human and Organisational Performance, Safety Differently, and systems thinking to provide a practical framework designed to shift your process from prosecution to genuine learning and risk reduction.

Inside Stop Blaming Bob, discover:

• how to decide what deserves investigation, how deeply to investigate, and where limited learning resources will have the greatest value

• a visual method to map “Work as Intended,” “Work as Normal,” and “Work as Happened” to reveal operational realities

• practical conversational tools to engage workers as solution experts, not targets of blame

• how to examine scheduling pressures, resource constraints, and flawed workflows, instead of attributing workplace issues to human fallibility

• how to verify whether actions have actually reduced risk, rather than simply closing them out

• how to move beyond default actions such as retraining and procedure changes, and develop stronger controls that reduce reliance on flawless human performance