In January 2012, the Costa Concordia went aground and capsized off the coast of Italy. One of the most disturbing aspects of this accident was that a group of competent officers and an experienced captain on the bridge were not able to detect that the ship was heading straight into the rocks.

In this podcast, I will present the power of framing using the story of the Costa Concordia accident. I interviewed the captain before he was sentenced to prison, and I was surprised by how the captain responded to my open-ended questions during the course of our interview and how it led me to a completely different view of the accident and learning than the one presented in the public domain. I have also recently written a book on this accident – Are We Learning from Accidents?

We will focus on the following questions: 1. Why was the Costa Concordia accident framed as a problem of ‘speaking up’ and the failure of ‘bridge resource management’? 2. What are the parallels between concepts such as ‘psychological safety’, ‘crew resource management’, ‘non-technical skills’ and ‘soft skills’? 3. Why do these concepts appeal so much to the risk and safety industry? 4. What are the alternative frameworks to think about ‘speaking up’? 5. And importantly, why we should never underestimate the power of framing?

This is the first in a series of videos based on my recent book, ‘Are We Learning from Accidents?’. In the next few weeks, I will post more videos on a range of topics including 1) normalisation of risk, 2) collective sensemaking in a crisis, 3) understanding safety culture, 4) the power of scapegoating (blame), 5) what is learning, and 6) how do human beings learn, unlearn, relearn and make decisions.

You can read a sample of my book and it is available for purchase at: https://nippinanand.com/

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