SOTE 2027 PROGRAM
In partnership with the National Safety Council and Johns Hopkins University.
One day of plenary provocation. One day of concurrent depth across four streams. Built on the five Edges and the nine fields of the Call for Abstracts.
MAY 11-12 | SAVANNAH, GEORGIA, USA
Benchmarking
Compare real data. Peer to peer.
Plenary Speakers
One stage. Every delegate, same room.
Concurrent Speaker Sessions
Choose your track. Go deep.
Professional Development Seminars
Small groups. Practical skill-building.
Program Architecture
TUESDAY
Tuesday afternoon is Component 1, the capped Benchmarking Forum with the 2027 benchmarking eight, followed by the Welcome Reception.
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday is the Plenary Speakers day — one room, no parallel programming, structured as a journey along the five Edges of the Forum’s identity: Leading, Cutting, Front, Razor and Cliff.
THURSDAY
Thursday is the Concurrent Speakers day — four streams built from the nine Call-for-Papers (CFP) fields, three sessions and a closing hot-topic debate hour each.
FRIDAY
Friday morning is Component 4: four half-day, CEU-credited Professional Development Seminars, releasing delegates by 13:00.
How the CFP feeds the program. Every concurrent session pairs one invited anchor with two competitively selected CFP slots, honoring the three doors of the call — pioneering concepts, best-in-class case studies, and the unproven. Anchor names below are invitation targets, to be confirmed; CFP slots are described by the kind of paper the committee should select into them, with example titles to guide curation.
Nine Fields across 4 Streams
STREAM A
Leadership & Culture
Leadership, Culture & Organizational Development + Sustainability/ESG.
STREAM B
Human Performance & Behavioral Sciences
HOP/Safety II/Human Factors /Cognitive Psychology.
STREAM C
Risk & Process Engineering & Technology
SIF + Safety/Process Engineering + Organizational Design + Systems Thinking and Design + Technology/Next-Gen Tools.
STREAM D
National Safety Council Sessions
Programmed and managed by the NSC summit committee.
This mapping follows the brochure’s published stream names exactly, including its placement of high-reliability organizing within the Risk & Process stream, and reserves Stream D for the NSC per the joint-staging agreement.
SOTE 2027 PROGRAM
Discover the speakers and sessions in store for SOTE 2027
DAY ONE
May 11, 2027
The Benchmarking Program
The rules of the rooms: dialogue, not presentation; comparison, not performance.
Session One, Round 1
Companies A, B, C, D host. Four rotational rounds with the benchmarking eight, with breaks and structured networking between rounds
Delegate rotate
Session One, Round 2
Session Two, Round 1
Companies E, F, G H host. Four rotational rounds with the benchmarking eight, with breaks and structured networking between rounds
Delegate rotate
Session Two, Round 2
DAY TWO
May 12, 2027
The Plenary Day
Where the profession stands in 2027: the Safety Asymptote revisited with three more years of global data, and the case for the five Edges.
The profession's institutions confront the plateau: what the injury data cannot show, and where the NSC is taking the fight on serious injury and fatality.
Café & Networking
The view from the top: a major-corporation chief executive on what safety looks like from the CEO chair - and what it costs to lead it honestly.
Three first-time presenters, twelve minutes each, selected from the CFP's 'unproven' door — the Forum's bet on the discipline's next pioneers.
The 45-minute fireside on hypergrowth, measurement integrity, the automation paradox and humanoid robotics — per the prepared moderator's guide.
Industry 4.0/5.0, AI, autonomy and automation: the operator, the supervisor and the safety function twenty years out.
Engineering, HR, sustainability, operations and data-science leaders — none of them safety professionals — on what safety looks like from the other side of every silo it touches.
Café
Psychological safety where consequence is highest, in conversation with the Forum's academic partners.
Audience vote for Award winners
Company Excellence, Safety Practitioners and Lifetime Achievement Awards; Savannah historic district
DAY THREE
May 13, 2027
Leadership - Culture - Organizational
“Courageous Leadership: What 360 Data from High-Risk Industries Reveals About the Leaders Crews Trust”
“The Trust Ledger: Rebuilding Credibility After an Organization Breaks Its Safety Promises”
“Psychosocial Risk as a Line Responsibility: Moving Mental Wellness Out of the HR Silo”
Cross-industry panel drawing directly on Tuesday's benchmarking eight.
“What the Eight Rooms Revealed: Patterns Across Best-in-Class Safety Cultures”
“Measuring Culture Without Fooling Yourself: Survey Integrity in the Age of Gaming”
“The Middle-Management Squeeze: Where Culture Programs Go to Die — and What Fixed It”
Lunch
“What Boards Actually Govern: Safety Disclosure, Materiality and Reputation”
“Human Rights at the Sharp End: Safety Performance Across a Global Supply Chain”
“Climate Risk Is Operational Risk: Heat, Water and the New Hazard Profile of Existing Assets”
Three debates, twenty minutes each: one motion, one proposer, one opposer, then the floor — with a house vote before and after.
“This House believes zero-harm targets do more harm than good.”
“This House would dissolve the safety department and hand safety to the line.”
“This House believes safety is won or lost in the boardroom.”
DAY THREE
May 13, 2027
Human Performance & Behavioural Sciences
“From Guru Circuit to Standard Work: Institutionalizing HOP After the Consultants Leave”
“Learning Teams at Scale: What Changed — and What Didn't — After 500 Events”
“Work-as-Done in the Control Room: An Ethnography of Night-Shift Adaptations”
“Deciding Under Pressure: Cognitive Load, Fatigue and the Myth of the Careless Worker”
“Risk Perception in the Crew: Why Experienced Operators See Different Hazards Than Their Procedures”
“Designing With the Grain: Interventions That Work With How the Brain Actually Operates”
Lunch
The Forum's honest BBS session: one defender, one critic, one synthesis — chaired for evidence.
“The Case for Behavior: What Four Decades of BBS Data Actually Show”
“Observation Without Theatre: Rescuing Behavioral Science from the Card-Count Era”
“After the Argument: A Unified Model of Behavior, Conditions and Culture”
Three Oxford-style debates, twenty minutes each: one motion, one proposer, one opposer, then the floor — with a house vote before and after.
“This House would ban the term ‘human error’ from investigation reports.”
“This House believes psychological safety has been oversold.”
“This House believes discipline has no place in a just culture.”
DAY THREE
May 13, 2027
Risk & Process Engineering & Technology
“Black Swans: The Catastrophes Organizations Don’t See — the 2027 Evidence Update”
“Preoccupied with the Wrong Failures: HRO Principles Audited Against Ten Years of Disasters”
“When the Curve Lied: A Company's Honest Account of Record Injury Rates and a Multiple Fatality”
“In-Field Verification That Verifies: Separating Control Assurance from Compliance Theatre”
“Energy-Based Safety – is it the right time for it?”
“Learning from High-Potential Events: What over 2,000 HiPo Investigations Reveal About Prevention Blind Spots”
Lunch
“Human vs. Machine in Risk Discovery: What 100,000 Frontline Observations Taught Us About Both”
“Safety Instrumented Systems Meet Human Factors: When the Trip Point and the Operator Disagree”
“The Hallucinated Root Cause: Stress-Testing Large Language Models as Incident Investigators”
Three Oxford-style debates, twenty minutes each: one motion, one proposer, one opposer, then the floor — with a house vote before and after.
“This House resolves that EBS premises and promises are valid.”
“This House believes critical control verification has become the new compliance theatre.”
“This House would trust an AI algorithm over an auditor.”
DAY THREE
May 13, 2027
National Safety Council Sessions
“Intervention Studies, Replication and the Evaluation Gap: A Sober Audit of the Field’s Evidence Base”
“Resilience Engineering at Twenty: What Has Been Operationalized, What Remains Metaphor”
“Beyond Root Cause: Causation Models, Counterfactual Reasoning and Hindsight Bias in Investigation”
Serious psychometric discussion, explicitly not vendor claims — the chair will enforce it.
“Safety Culture and Construct Validity: What Are We Actually Measuring?”
“Fifty Years of Safety Climate: Meta-Analytic Findings and the Climate–Behavior–Outcome Causal Chain”
“Perception Under the Clock: The Psychometrics of Bias-Resistant Culture Measurement”
Lunch
Chaired discussion extends to the PhD pipeline and what safety should steal from other fields.
“Cumulative Knowledge or Fashion Cycles? Safety Science’s Theory Problem, from Heinrich to HOP”
“Vaughan, Perrow and Turner in the 2020s: The Disaster Canon Re-Examined Against Recent Catastrophes”
“Why Research Doesn’t Reach the Frontline: The Divide, the Grey Literature, and the Edge Papers Answer”
Closing Plenary
The Synthesis: Four Rooms, One Profession. Stream emcees report the sharpest finding and the sharpest disagreement from their rooms; the founders and the NSC respond; the Forum's year-ahead commitments are announced — including the future of the SOTE platform in Latin America.
DAY FOUR
May 14, 2027
Professional Development Seminars
What actually predicts performance beyond injury frequency: the Safety Asymptote evidence base, leading indicators that survived statistical scrutiny, and building a measurement architecture your board can trust.
Hands-on: what to deploy, what to refuse, and how to govern it — risk-discovery tools, computer vision, LLM investigators, and an AI assurance framework delegates take home.
The BBS–HOP argument run as a working seminar: delegates test both toolkits against live cases and leave with a defensible synthesis for their own organization.
Drift, weak signals and the metabolization problem: a war-game in which delegate teams stress-test a live operation's catastrophe blindness using the Coefficient of Chronic Unease.
One idea each delegate will act on within 90 days, captured and circulated; farewell from the founders. Forum closes 13:00.