SOTE 2026 Conference Topics
Leadership, Culture and Organizational Development/ESG
The fields of leadership, culture and organizational development in safety integrates leadership, a positive safety culture, and organizational sustainability. It emphasizes leadership, commitment, effective communication, trust, and employee engagement. Key aspects include training, ensuring safety is a core value embedded in all organizational operations, and a focus on mental wellness and psychological safety and psychosocial risks.
New Safety Paradigms
The field of New View safety, or Safety-II, emphasizes adaptability, resilience, and positive outcomes in complex systems. It focuses on resilience engineering, human factors, and learning from success, viewing safety as an emergent property of interconnected elements. This approach prioritizes proactive safety management, understanding specific contexts, and enabling systems to function successfully under varying conditions.
Behavioral/Cognitive
The behavioral field in safety focuses on understanding and influencing human behaviors to improve safety outcomes in various environments, such as workplaces, homes, public spaces, and transportation systems. This field integrates principles from psychology, sociology, human factors, and organizational behavior to design interventions that promote safe practices and reduce the risk of accidents and injuries.
Risk management
Risk management in safety involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks to protect individuals and assets. Key components include hazard recognition, risk evaluation, and implementing risk reduction strategies. This includes developing safety protocols, emergency plans, and regulatory compliance. Continuous improvement, crisis management, safety culture, and technology integration for real-time monitoring and predictive modeling are essential. It’s a dynamic, collaborative process requiring ongoing commitment. This aspect includes high risk, catastrophic yet low probability as well as serious injury and fatality (SIF) prevention management.
Safety/Process Engineering
Safety/Process Engineering ensures safe, efficient operations across industries by identifying hazards, assessing risks, and implementing safety measures primarily through safety by design or design for safety. Key aspects include risk assessments, integrating safety features, complying with standards, hazard analyses, designing safety systems, emergency preparedness, considering human factors, enhancing reliability, process safety, accident investigations, and communication.
Safety Technology – Next Generation Tools
Safety technology leverages advanced tools to enhance safety, mitigate risks, and prevent accidents across industries. It may use real-time monitoring, sensors, IoT devices, predictive analytics, machine learning to detect hazards as well as the numerous applications of Artificial Intelligence. Key aspects include Safety Instrumented Systems, drones, robotics, wearable tech, AR/VR training, automation, biometric access, communication systems, virtual assessments, blockchain for safety records, and autonomous vehicles, all promoting safer work environments.
High Reliability Organizations
High Reliability Organizations (HROs) thrive in complex, high-risk environments by ensuring exceptional reliability and safety management. Key traits include constant vigilance, avoiding oversimplification, operational sensitivity, resilience, continuous learning, deference to expertise, mindfulness, decentralized decisionmaking, redundancy, crisis preparedness, open communication, and strong leadership. HROs empower frontline workers, value expertise, and foster a culture of openness and continuous improvement, benefiting industries like aviation and healthcare.
Systems Engineering
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field focusing on the design, integration, and management of complex systems. It involves requirements engineering, system design, integration/testing, and lifecycle management. Key aspects include risk mitigation, decision analysis, modeling, simulation, configuration management, and verification/validation. Interdisciplinary collaboration and quality assurance are essential. Applied across industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, healthcare, and IT, it ensures efficient and effective outcomes through integrated systems methodologies.
Resilience engineering
Resilience engineering, emerging from high-risk industries like aviation and healthcare, enhances complex systems’ ability to handle unexpected challenges whilst managing their impact. It focuses on system complexity, adaptation to changes, and learning from successes and failures. Emphasizing human factors and proactive preparation, it fosters a safety culture beyond rule compliance. Applied in IT and finance, it aims to fortify systems against uncertainties through the promotion of flexibility and adaptability.
SOTE 2026
Discover Baltimore, Maryland USA
From iconic landmarks and historical monuments through to wilderness adventures and cultural experiences, Maryland has it all. Come for SOTE 2026, immerse yourself on the stunning east coast of USA!
- Oriole Park at Camden Gardens
- Fort McHenry
- Fells Point
- Inner Harbor
- Brookside Nature Centre
- Local Wineries
- Maryland Zoo
- Smithsonian Museums
- Deep Creek Lake
- National Aquarium
- Sagamore Distillery
- The Walters Art Museum
- Scenic Harbor Cruises
Pricing for SOTE In-person Conference during May 2026 in Baltimore, Maryland.
Join us at the wonderful Baltimore Convention Centre. Register now, pay later!
We have already locked in a host of exciting Keynote Speakers, with more to come!
SOTE 2026 In-Person Workshops
Register now for our sought after in-person Workshops 7 May, 2026
WORKSHOP 1: Todd Conklin & Corrie Pitzer
Embedding HOP – for Real and for Good
Too often, Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) is introduced as a short-term campaign or rebranded training initiative, an exciting philosophy that fades when the novelty wears off. This powerful workshop, led by two of the world’s most provocative safety thinkers – Todd Conklin and Corrie Pitzer – dives deep into how organizations can move beyond surface-level adoption and truly integrate and sustain HOP principles.
Through a dynamic mix of case studies, live dialogue, and critical challenges to conventional wisdom, Todd and Corrie will confront the barriers that cause HOP to stall: entrenched compliance mindsets, shallow leadership engagement, lack of operational translation, and failure to measure what matters. Participants will explore how to rewire culture, rethink accountability, and redesign and create new systems for an environment where learning, trust, and risk resilience thrive.
This workshop is not for spectators. It is an immersive session for those ready to wrestle with complexity, question sacred cows, and build a roadmap for embedding HOP into the DNA of their organization – from the boardroom to the front line.
If you’re serious about moving HOP from posters to practice, and from events to ecosystems, this is the workshop that will challenge, equip, and inspire you to make it real – and make it last.
WORKSHOP 2: Kathy A Seabrook & Andresa Hernandes
The Power of People: Leveraging the business value of Health and Safety for Corporate Success
‘People are at the core of every thriving business and their ability to contribute is influenced by their health, safety and well-being.’ People, a company’s human capital are foundational and essential to business success.
What are the challenges and barriers you experience when managing workplace safety and health in your company? Typically, it is around finance, company culture, value, contribution and compliance. When the value of workplace safety and health is integrated into the business: financially, culturally and operationally, the value of safety and health of a company’s people are understood and leveraged in the context of the business and better business decisions are made, proactively. Leveraging your company’s culture, stakeholders collaboration opportunities, human capital, balance sheet and profit and loss statement, this workshop will introduce you to impact valuation and value accounting methodologies and principles to influence decision-making to collaboratively identify the true value of safety and health to your company and its stakeholders.
Join Andresa Hernandes, Vice President of Safety for Siemens AG and Kathy Seabrook, CEO Global Solutions Inc as we introduce you to an innovative impact valuation methodology for workplace health and safety and decision making. Business integration is key. Many organizations manage workplace safety and health separately from business. This workshop provides tools, resources and real world, hands-on, interactive opportunities to conduct health and safety impact valuations, ultimately monetizing the true value of safety and health on a balance sheet and in a profit and loss statement with the ultimate goal of influencing decision-making in your company.
WORKSHOP 3: Jean-Christophe Le Coze & James Pomeroy
Optical Illusions: Safety in Words and Pictures
Since the earliest development of occupational safety, we have used models and images to represent safety ideas and theories. From Heinrich’s pyramid, Reason’s Swiss Cheese through to the visualization of contemporary safety ideas, drawings and visual models are central to how we understand safety and explain accidents. But in enabling our understanding and helping us manage safety, do models and metaphors also constrain our thinking and limit us?
During this highly participative and enjoyable workshop, Jean-Christophe Le Coze and James Pomeroy will engage the attendees in exploring the role of visual models in safety theory and practice. The session will help attendees to reflect upon their use of models, explore what makes some more popular than others, and consider their use and meaning changes over time.
The workshop will also explore the words and language that we use in safety and to describe accidents and errors, often attributing blame without even thinking about it. Attendees will gain a different perspective of the role of language and leave with greater awareness.
The workshop will be immersive, and participants will learn by doing. It is also practical, and attendees will leave with richer knowledge and be enabled to consider how the images and words we use construct safety. The words and images we use are the tools by which we construct safety. Join this workshop to learn how to better use your tools.
WORKSHOP 4: Speaker details coming soon!
Speaker TBC
Speaker TBC