Keynote

From the Field to the Boardroom

Why behavioural drift happens, how bias accelerates it, and what leaders can do differently.

Audience Conference delegates and executive leadership

Duration 45 to 60 minutes

Formats Keynote, conference plenary, panel

Takeaway A shared vocabulary for describing frontline behaviour in board-level risk language.

This is the talk delivered at the IRMSA Annual Conference, and it is the one that most often gets booked after someone has read an incident report that concluded with the words human error.

The argument

Behavioural drift is not a failure of character. It is the predictable output of a consequence environment that quietly rewards the shortcut. Twenty years across seventeen countries produced the same finding in every one of them: the gap between the documented system and the observed one opens slowly, in small increments that each look reasonable, and it opens long before anyone gets hurt.

What the room leaves with

How drift starts, why it accelerates under schedule pressure, and the specific biases that make it invisible to the people closest to it.
Why reissuing a procedure changes the antecedent and leaves the consequence untouched, and what to do instead.
How to describe frontline behaviour in a way that survives the trip into the board pack without losing what mattered about it.

Who it is built for

Conference audiences in high consequence industries, and executive teams who have noticed that their leading indicators keep leading them somewhere they did not expect.

The rest of the programme.

01 Why Risk Systems Fail When It Matters Most The gap between documented procedure and actual behaviour, and why it widens exactly when the system is needed. Risk, assurance and operations leadership 45 to 90 minutes 02 The ABC of Organisational Risk Applied Behaviour Analysis in practice: how antecedents, behaviours and consequences build the culture you actually have. Risk professionals and operational leadership 60 minutes, or half day as a workshop 03 Leadership Sets the Thermostat What you accept today becomes tomorrow standard. The behavioural role of leadership in high consequence work. Executive teams, senior operational leadership 40 to 60 minutes

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