49 Essential Workplace Safety Thought Leaders

Introduction

Workplace safety has never been more contested, or more consequential. Around the world, the question of how to keep people safe at work has moved well beyond hard hats and incident registers. It now cuts through organisational psychology, systems engineering, legal compliance, psychosocial health, human performance science, and culture transformation. The people shaping this conversation matter enormously, and knowing who they are gives safety professionals, executives, HR leaders, and board directors a genuine advantage.

The scale of the challenge demands it. According to the International Labour Organization, nearly three million workers die every year from work-related accidents and diseases, an increase of more than five per cent compared to 2015. A further 395 million workers globally sustain non-fatal work injuries each year. In the United States alone, the 2025 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index found that workplace injuries cost employers US$58.78 billion annually. In the United Kingdom, the Health and Safety Executive reported that 40.1 million working days were lost to work-related illness and injury in 2024 and 2025. The ILO estimates that work-related harm imposes economic losses of approximately five per cent of global GDP each year.

What the data tells us is that despite decades of safety regulation, the problem persists. What the best safety thinkers are now arguing is that compliance frameworks alone do not prevent harm. The shift happening across the profession is one from rule enforcement to genuine culture, from blame to learning, from safety as a bureaucratic obligation to safety as an expression of how much an organisation actually values its people. That shift has champions, and this list is built to help you find them.

I put together this list to surface voices working at the cutting edge of workplace safety globally, with a deliberate focus on practitioners, researchers, and advocates who are actively contributing to the conversation in 2025 and 2026. The list moves past the most prominent household names in favour of thinkers whose work is directly changing how organisations approach hazard management, psychosocial risk, human performance, safety culture, and WHS law and governance. Whether you are building a reading list, planning a conference programme, or trying to find your next thought-provoking podcast, this is your starting point.

If your organisation needs support not with safety regulation but with the leadership conversations that determine whether a safety culture actually takes hold, that is where Jonno White comes in. Jonno is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, keynote speaker, and Certified Working Genius Facilitator who works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Workplace Safety Matters: The Stakes

The argument for taking workplace safety seriously goes beyond compliance. Work-related diseases account for the vast majority of fatalities globally, with circulatory diseases, malignant neoplasms, and respiratory conditions ranking as the top three causes. Agriculture, construction, forestry, fishing, and manufacturing together account for 63 per cent of all fatal occupational injuries worldwide, according to the ILO.

The landscape is also shifting in a significant and legally consequential direction. Psychosocial risks are now formally recognised as occupational health and safety hazards under frameworks such as ISO 45003, and under model WHS laws across Australia that came into force in 2023 and 2024. In the United Kingdom, mental health conditions, specifically stress, depression, and anxiety, are now the primary driver of work-related ill health, accounting for 964,000 workers in the HSE's 2024 and 2025 statistics. The profession is being asked to manage both physical and psychological harm simultaneously, which requires genuinely different expertise.

This is precisely why the thought leaders on this list matter. They are working at the intersection of science, law, practice, and culture, reshaping what it means to keep people safe at work.

If you are looking for someone to facilitate the leadership conversations and team dynamics that underpin a genuine safety culture, Jonno White works with leadership teams across industries delivering keynotes, Working Genius facilitation, and executive offsites. His approach to psychological safety, team trust, and accountability complements the technical safety work your specialists are doing. Email jonno@consultclarity.org or visit consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, they have made a documented and substantive contribution to workplace safety, occupational health, or WHS-related disciplines through published work, ongoing research, professional practice, or active public advocacy. Second, they are currently engaged with the conversation, publishing, speaking, or contributing to the profession in 2025 and 2026. Third, the list was deliberately built to move past the most prominent household names in the field in favour of voices who may not yet be on every safety professional's radar. Geographic and disciplinary diversity was a priority, drawing in voices from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Europe across safety science, human and organisational performance, psychosocial safety, WHS law, safety culture, and safety technology.

Category One: Foundations of Safety Science

The safety science tradition has foundational thinkers whose frameworks underpin how the entire profession understands human error, system failure, and organisational resilience. These voices established the conceptual architecture that practitioners around the world draw on every day.

1. Sidney Dekker

Sidney Dekker may be the most widely cited living thinker in the field of safety science. As Professor and Director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and Professor in the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University in the Netherlands, he has built a career that spans aviation, healthcare, emergency services, and high-hazard industries. Stanford has ranked him among the world's top one per cent most influential scientists.

Dekker coined the term "Safety Differently" in 2012, which has since become a global movement. In Safety Differently: Human Factors for a New Era, published by CRC Press, he argues that the old safety model, focused on compliance, procedures, and incident counting, actively undermines genuine safety by treating workers as problems to be controlled rather than assets to be supported. His speaking engagements in 2025 spanned the Health Services Innovation Conference and the Veterinary Human Factors Conference across six continents.

2. Erik Hollnagel

Erik Hollnagel is the architect of some of the most foundational frameworks in modern safety science, including the Safety-I and Safety-II distinction, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM), and the Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off (ETTO) principle. He currently serves as Scientific Director at the Institute of Resilient Systems in Seoul, South Korea, and as a Visiting Professorial Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney. He holds professor emeritus positions at the University of Linkoping and was a founding scientist behind the Resilience Engineering field.

In Safety-II in Practice: Developing the Resilience Potentials, published by Routledge, Hollnagel's central insight is that safety management has historically focused on preventing things from going wrong rather than understanding why things go right most of the time. He argues that organisations need to build capacity to succeed under varying conditions, not simply to avoid failure. This reframing has influenced national safety strategies and regulatory approaches across Europe, Asia, and Australasia.

3. Andrew Hopkins

Andrew Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra, and one of the world's most respected analysts of the organisational causes of major industrial disasters. He was an expert witness at the Royal Commission into the 1998 Exxon gas plant explosion near Melbourne, a consultant to the US Chemical Safety Board during its investigation of the BP Texas City refinery disaster of 2005, and a consultant on the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill inquiry. Over 100,000 copies of his books have been sold globally.

His 2022 book Sacrificing Safety: Lessons for Chief Executives, published by CCH Sydney, draws on his analysis of Boeing's 737 MAX failures to argue that chief executives who outsource safety decisions and prioritise commercial outcomes over engineering integrity create the conditions for catastrophe. Hopkins uses a sociological lens to show how organisational structures, accountability systems, and leadership behaviour determine whether frontline workers are genuinely protected.

4. Todd Conklin

Todd Conklin spent 25 years as a Senior Advisor at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, developing the Human Performance program in one of the world's most demanding high-hazard environments before retiring to become a full-time speaker, author, and podcast host. His twice-weekly Pre-Accident Investigation podcast has run for over 700 episodes, with his 2026 output confirming his continued activity and global following among safety practitioners.

Conklin's book Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organisational Safety, published by Routledge, reframes the purpose of safety management entirely. His central argument, shared in his co-authored book Do Safety Differently with Sidney Dekker, is that workers do not cause failures but rather trigger weaknesses that already exist in the system and the organisation's processes. His defining challenge to the profession: "You can either blame and punish, or you can learn and improve, but you cannot do both."

5. Rhona Flin

Rhona Flin is Professor of Industrial Psychology at Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University, and Emeritus Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. She is a Chartered Psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her research examines human performance in high-risk settings, including the energy sector, healthcare, aviation, and emergency services, with a sustained focus on non-technical skills such as decision-making, situation awareness, and team communication.

The second edition of Safety at the Sharp End: A Guide to Non-Technical Skills, co-authored by Flin with Tom Reader and Paul O'Connor and published by Routledge in 2025, has become a standard reference text in oil and gas, aviation, and healthcare safety. Her decades of research designing non-technical skills training systems for offshore platform crews, pilots, surgeons, anaesthetists, and nuclear power plant operators represents one of the most applied and evidence-based bodies of work in the safety field.

6. Rob Long

Rob Long is the Executive Director of Human Dymensions in Canberra, Australia, and the founder of the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) discipline, which he established in 2003. He holds a PhD in learning and development and has published 13 books on SPoR, which have been downloaded more than 600,000 times globally. His organisation has trained more than 20,000 practitioners across 30 countries, and Safe Work Australia has featured his work in its resources on humanising WHS management.

Long's contribution is in the application of semiotics, depth psychology, and social science to safety, offering a framework that treats risk as a social and cultural phenomenon rather than simply a technical one. His ongoing workshops, active through spor.com.au with March 2026 sessions confirmed, provide safety professionals with tools for understanding how unconscious assumptions, cultural norms, and social dynamics shape safety behaviour far more powerfully than any policy document.

Category Two: Human and Organisational Performance

The Human and Organisational Performance movement has become one of the most significant developments in workplace safety in the past decade. HOP practitioners argue that human error is normal and predictable, that systems must accommodate human variability rather than demand perfection, and that learning from normal work is more valuable than investigating accidents alone. These are the practitioners and educators bringing HOP principles to organisations worldwide.

7. Sam Goodman

Sam Goodman is the founder of The HOP Nerd LLC in the United States and one of the most active practitioners and educators in the Human and Organisational Performance space. He was ranked second globally on the Thinkers360 Health and Safety leaderboard in 2025, reflecting his sustained output of content reaching safety practitioners across manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and transportation. His LinkedIn presence draws consistent professional engagement from safety practitioners worldwide.

Goodman's contribution is in making HOP accessible at the frontline. His workshops break down the five principles of human performance into practical frameworks that supervisors and safety officers can deploy without advanced academic training. His emphasis on learning teams, psychological safety, and the normalisation of human error has helped organisations move from a "find and fix" incident culture to a "learn and improve" operational one.

8. Kym Bancroft

Kym Bancroft is the Director of New View Safety in Australia, a consultancy dedicated to helping organisations operationalise Human and Organisational Performance and Safety Differently principles in real operational settings. She is delivering an international keynote at the 2026 Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference in New Zealand, where her session covers moving beyond HOP principles and language into practical actions that influence how work is actually done. Her work spans learning from normal work, shifting from retributive to restorative culture, and aligning HOP with due diligence and legislative obligations.

Bancroft's particular value is in bridging the persistent gap between HOP theory and practice in high-hazard operational environments. Many organisations understand the concepts but struggle to embed them alongside legacy compliance obligations. Her session structures and practical tools give safety teams concrete ways to declutter low-value safety activity, use metrics that enable learning rather than compliance tracking, and create the frontline conversations that actually change how work is done.

9. Brent Sutton

Brent Sutton is the Founder of Learning Teams Inc and a leading practitioner in the facilitation of learning teams as a safety improvement methodology. He is delivering a pre-conference workshop at the 2026 Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference in New Zealand titled "The Illusion of Control: Improving Critical Risks and Controls with Human-Centred Thinking." He also appeared as a guest on Todd Conklin's Pre-Accident Investigation podcast in 2025, where the two discussed the commodification of safety thinking and the conditions needed for genuine innovation.

Sutton's practice centres on involving the workers closest to the work in the investigation and improvement of their own work systems. He argues that the people at the sharp end possess knowledge about why things go wrong and what would actually make work safer that is systematically invisible from above. His pre-conference workshop format gives safety practitioners facilitation skills they can immediately apply in their own organisations.

10. Dave Rebbitt

Dave Rebbitt is the Principal Consultant at Rarebit Consulting in Canada, holding both an MBA and the Canadian Registered Safety Professional (CRSP) credential. He works with organisations in energy, manufacturing, and construction on safety culture transformation and human performance improvement. He was ranked sixth on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025, one of only a small number of Canadian voices consistently represented in global safety leadership rankings.

Rebbitt is one of the more intellectually rigorous voices in HOP practice, consistently testing orthodoxies and calling for evidence-based approaches to culture change. His writing, published through Thinkers360 and LinkedIn, addresses the persistent gap between what safety science recommends and what most organisations actually implement, and he advocates for safety metrics that go beyond lagging indicators to measure the conditions that produce future harm.

11. Ron Gantt

Ron Gantt is the Director of Innovation and Operations at the Reflect Consulting Group in the United States, and the acting editor of SafetyDifferently.com, the online platform associated with Sidney Dekker's Safety Differently movement. His speaker profile at safetyontheedge.com, current as of March 2026, confirms his active role as a practitioner and educator in resilience engineering, human factors, and Safety-II applications. He has contributed content to ISHN magazine and appeared in multiple podcast interviews on the new view of safety.

Gantt's contribution is in translating the Safety Differently and Safety-II frameworks into practice for organisations navigating the real-world gap between work as imagined and work as done. His writing consistently challenges the assumption that following procedures equates to managing safety, and he is one of the clearest voices in the field on why traditional safety programmes produce diminishing returns and what a genuine learning orientation requires instead.

Category Three: Psychosocial Safety and Wellbeing

Psychosocial safety is among the fastest-growing areas in the WHS profession globally. In Australia, psychosocial hazard provisions now carry the same legal weight as physical risks under model WHS laws. In the UK, mental health conditions are the leading cause of work-related ill health. These are the researchers and practitioners reshaping how organisations identify, manage, and reduce psychological harm at work.

12. Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and the scholar most responsible for establishing psychological safety as a concept with serious scientific standing. Her research on team learning and psychological safety spans three decades and has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, and the Harvard Business Review. She was ranked second on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2025, and her HBS faculty page shows new research publications in April and May 2026.

Her 2018 book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, published by Wiley, has been translated into 15 languages and is one of the most widely assigned texts in leadership development programmes worldwide. Her 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, which won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, extends her framework to the conditions that allow organisations to learn productively from failure. Her definition of psychological safety as the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking is now foundational to how the WHS profession understands psychosocial safety.

13. Graeme Cowan

Graeme Cowan is one of Australia's most respected speakers on team resilience, psychosocial safety, and mental health at work. He is a Founding Board Director of R U OK?, the national suicide prevention charity, and co-founder of WeCARE365, a platform that has trained more than 100,000 managers in burnout prevention conversations. He is a recognised LinkedIn Top Voice. His book Great Leaders Care: Building Safe, Resilient and Successful Teams was published by Wiley in April 2026.

Cowan's research into the Australian Workplace Psychological Safety Survey, conducted in partnership with R U OK? and Professor Edmondson, was the first study of its kind in Australia and established a baseline for measuring psychological safety across industries. With Australia's model WHS laws now treating psychosocial hazards as legal obligations, his frameworks for caring leadership and team resilience have shifted from best practice to legal necessity for organisations serious about their compliance obligations.

14. Michelle Tuckey

Michelle Tuckey is a Professor of Work Psychology at the University of Adelaide, where her research focuses on the prevention and management of psychosocial risks in the workplace, including workplace bullying, harassment, and work-related stress. She is a speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide, where her participation signals the integration of academic work psychology into the mainstream WHS profession.

Tuckey's research is notable for its rigour and practical implications. Her work on job demands and resources and the organisational antecedents of workplace bullying has been published in peer-reviewed journals and has influenced how WorkSafe Victoria and other Australian regulators approach psychosocial risk guidance. She bridges the gap between the academic evidence base and the practical frameworks organisations need to actually implement psychosocial safety.

15. Deanne Boules

Deanne Boules is the Founder of the Centre for Human-Centred Leadership and a Director at Insync Workplace Solutions in Australia. She was ranked fourteenth on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025, reflecting her sustained content output on psychosocial safety, leadership, and workplace culture. Her approach draws on human-centred design principles to create conditions in which workers feel psychologically safe enough to raise concerns, admit mistakes, and engage fully with safety improvement.

Her approach to safety leadership development is distinctive in its emphasis on listening as a safety tool. Boules argues that many safety incidents trace not to technical failures or absent procedures but to interpersonal dynamics that discourage frontline workers from speaking up. Her workshops develop the specific conversational and relational skills that safety leaders need to create genuinely open safety cultures rather than compliance-driven ones.

16. Marie-Claire Ross

Marie-Claire Ross is the Founder of Trustologie in Australia, a consultancy specialising in helping leadership teams build trust as the foundational precondition for genuine safety culture. She was ranked fifteenth on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025, and she maintains an active LinkedIn presence with regular content on trust, safety leadership, and culture. Her premise is that trust is not a soft outcome but a specific, measurable precondition that determines whether workers will report near misses, raise hazards, and follow safety procedures without direct supervision.

Ross's book Trusted to Thrive: How Leaders Create Connected and Accountable Teams provides a practical trust-building framework for safety leaders. She argues that the fastest lever available to any organisation trying to improve safety outcomes is increasing the trust that frontline workers have in their direct supervisors, because it is this trust that determines whether safety-relevant information flows upward before incidents occur. Her consulting work spans resources, construction, healthcare, and government sectors.

17. Danny Wareham

Danny Wareham is the Director of Firgun Ltd in the United Kingdom and one of the most consistently active voices in the global safety conversation on LinkedIn. He was ranked fortieth on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025, and his content addresses psychological safety, just culture, and the human dimensions of safety leadership from a UK perspective drawing on experience across European organisations.

Wareham advocates for a safety culture built on genuine respect for workers, where recognition and care matter as much as rules and enforcement. His LinkedIn content regularly draws engagement from safety professionals across Europe and addresses the interpersonal dynamics of safety leadership: how managers communicate about risk, how organisations respond to near misses, and how the daily interactions between supervisors and workers either build or undermine psychological safety.

Category Four: WHS Law, Governance, and Regulatory Leadership

Workplace safety is inseparable from law and governance. The legal framework determines what organisations are obligated to do, how they demonstrate compliance, and what consequences flow from failure. These voices are shaping the legal, regulatory, and governance landscape of WHS across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and globally.

18. Michael Tooma

Michael Tooma is a Partner at Hamilton Locke in Sydney and widely considered Australia's pre-eminent occupational health and safety lawyer. He has specialised in WHS law for more than 20 years and is consistently recognised in legal directories including Chambers Asia-Pacific Band 1 and the Asia Pacific Legal 500 Hall of Fame for Labour and Employment. He received the Australian Institute of Health and Safety Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide.

Tooma's contribution extends well beyond legal practice. He was a member of the Taskforce that developed the world-first Industrial Safety Manifesto in partnership with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and he has written several books on WHS law that serve as standard references for safety professionals and corporate counsel across Australia. His practice advises organisations on psychosocial risk, officer due diligence, regulatory investigations, and crisis response in some of the most consequential WHS matters in the country.

19. Marie Boland

Marie Boland is one of Australia's leading experts on WHS law reform and regulatory policy. She was the principal author of the review of the model WHS laws delivered to Safe Work Australia in 2018, which produced 34 recommendations for strengthening the framework. That review directly shaped the amendments to model WHS laws that followed, including the psychosocial hazard provisions now in force. She is a speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide.

Boland's contribution is foundational to the current regulatory landscape. Her review identified significant gaps in how the original framework addressed psychological harm, fatigue, violence and aggression, and remote and isolated work. Her recommendations for strengthening officer duties, improving regulator coordination, and introducing clearer obligations on psychosocial hazard management have directly influenced the laws now governing how millions of Australian workers are protected.

20. Duncan Spencer

Duncan Spencer is Head of Advice and Practice at the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) in the United Kingdom, where he holds the Chartered Fellow designation. His role encompasses managing IOSH's academic research function and content development team, responsible for delivering thought leadership that advances the knowledge of OSH professionals and informs policy globally. He delivered a keynote at the Health and Safety Event 2026 at the NEC Birmingham in April 2026, one of the UK's largest annual health and safety gatherings.

Spencer is a published author on OSH subjects and a regular conference speaker across the UK and internationally. His work on psychosocial risk, the evidence base for safety and health management, and the evolving role of OSH professionals in organisational governance represents one of the most institutionally influential voices in the UK and European profession. Through IOSH's global membership of more than 49,000 professionals, his output shapes standards and practice in over 130 countries.

21. Sharon Thompson

Sharon Thompson is the Chief Executive of WorkSafe New Zealand, the country's primary workplace health and safety regulator, and a speaker at the 2026 Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference. As the head of WorkSafe, she leads the agency responsible for enforcing the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 across New Zealand's most hazardous industries, including construction, agriculture, forestry, and manufacturing, which together account for the majority of workplace fatalities in New Zealand.

Thompson's regulatory philosophy goes beyond enforcement to culture change. Under her leadership, WorkSafe New Zealand has invested significantly in dialogue with industry and in building a shared understanding of the duty of care framework that underpins the 2015 Act. Her presence at the Safeguard conference, attended by practitioners from across the public and private sectors, signals the importance WorkSafe places on engaging the profession as a complement to regulatory action.

22. Julia Whitford

Julia Whitford is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Institute of Health and Safety, the peak professional body for the WHS profession in Australia, with more than 5,000 members. She is active on LinkedIn, regularly engaging with the profession on issues including psychosocial safety, ESG governance, and the professionalisation of the WHS role. Her leadership of AIHS shapes the professional development standards, advocacy positions, and community of the Australian WHS profession.

Whitford's LinkedIn content in 2025 and 2026 has engaged directly with the ILO's finding that workplace psychosocial risk factors are linked to more than 840,000 deaths globally each year, and with the expanding role of WHS professionals in ESG governance frameworks. As CEO of AIHS, she sets the agenda for the 2026 National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide, which brings together the most significant voices in Australian WHS practice and policy.

23. Glyn Jones

Glyn Jones is a Senior Partner at EHS Partnerships Ltd in Calgary, Alberta, and one of the most respected occupational health and safety consultants in Western Canada. He holds a Master's degree in Occupational Health and Safety, and the credentials of Professional Engineer (P.Eng.), Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH), Registered Occupational Hygienist (ROH), and Canadian Registered Safety Professional (CRSP). He is a speaker at the Western Conference on Safety 2026 in Vancouver, has lectured at the University of Alberta, the University of Calgary, the University of New Brunswick, and Lakeland College, and writes a regular column for Canadian Occupational Safety magazine. His LinkedIn shows activity as recently as January 2026.

Jones brings more than four decades of consulting experience across heavy industry, manufacturing, commercial buildings, and government in Canada and internationally. His particular expertise in hazardous materials assessment, incident investigation and causal analysis, and occupational exposure risk has shaped safety programmes across the Canadian resources sector. His academic and column-writing output makes him one of the most consistent thought leadership voices in Canadian OHS.

Category Five: Safety Culture and Organisational Change

Building a genuine safety culture is one of the most persistently difficult challenges in the profession. Research consistently shows that most safety failures are cultural failures rather than technical ones. These are the practitioners and researchers who understand culture change deeply enough to actually deliver it.

24. Clive Lloyd

Clive Lloyd is Director and Principal Consultant at GYST Consulting in Australia, creator of the Care Factor Program, and the author of the Amazon number-one bestseller Next Generation Safety Leadership: From Compliance to Care. He was named among the top five global thought leaders on health and safety by Thinkers360, and he was identified as a Chartered Fellow-level practitioner trusted by global mining, oil and gas, construction, and utilities organisations. His LinkedIn activity in 2025 shows regular engagement on psychological safety and organisational culture.

Lloyd's contribution to the field lies in his argument that safety leadership requires fundamentally different psychology from compliance management. In Next Generation Safety Leadership, he makes the case that intrinsic motivation, trust, and genuine care are the prerequisites for safety excellence, and that organisations relying on rules and metrics alone will always plateau. His Care Factor Program gives executives and supervisors practical tools to shift from a compliance mindset to a caring one, with demonstrated results in high-hazard industries worldwide.

25. Tim D'Ath

Tim D'Ath is the Head of Safety at Yarra Valley Water in Melbourne and the author of Humanising Safety: A Four-Step Approach, published by Routledge in 2024 and achieving number-one bestseller status. He is an international keynote at the 2026 Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference in New Zealand, where his session is titled "Humanising Safety: Time to Bring the Pickle Back." Before moving into safety management, D'Ath spent ten years as a construction worker, offshore oil rig roustabout, and trade assistant, giving him a frontline credibility that is rare among safety authors.

In Humanising Safety, D'Ath argues that the safety profession has created a false dichotomy between traditional and contemporary approaches, when what organisations actually need is a synthesis that draws the best from both. His four-step approach covering the psychology of safety, the human condition, frontline knowledge, and practical human-centric systems gives safety professionals a framework that holds up in real organisations with real operational pressures and competing priorities.

26. Nippin Anand

Nippin Anand is the Founder and CEO of Novellus Solutions in London and an Associate Research Fellow at Cardiff University. He holds a PhD in social sciences and anthropology and has published three books, including Are We Learning from Accidents? and 51 Stories in Culture. He hosts the podcast Embracing Differences, one of the earliest and most established podcasts focused on risk, culture, and learning in safety-critical industries. His LinkedIn profile shows active posting as recently as March 2026, including a pilot course delivered to Warsash Maritime School under the updated STCW PSSR standard effective January 2026.

Anand's contribution is in applying semiotics, social anthropology, and the Social Psychology of Risk to safety, bringing a genuinely different disciplinary lens from the dominant human factors tradition. His work on the Costa Concordia disaster, which drew on his expertise in maritime safety and cultural intelligence, has been cited by the Danish Maritime Accident Investigation Board as an important contribution to understanding how cultural assumptions shape accident investigation. His practice focuses on helping organisations learn from events rather than simply attribute blame.

27. Mark Alston

Mark Alston is an independent practitioner in Australia specialising in investigations and risk assessments, working under the banner "Investigations Differently." He was a speaker at the 2026 NSC National Safety Conference in Sydney, where his session was titled "Stop Colouring, Start Controlling: Making Risk Assessments Deliver." His LinkedIn profile in January 2025 shows him actively promoting his upcoming conference session and engaging with the Australian WHS community.

Alston's critique of colour-coded risk matrix culture is both well-evidenced and practically useful. He argues that most risk assessment processes create administrative theatre rather than genuine risk reduction, because the tools being used are designed to produce paperwork rather than insight. His workshops build the analytical and conversational skills needed to move from compliant documentation to controls that actually reduce exposure, and his session title alone speaks to a frustration that resonates with safety practitioners across every Australian industry.

28. Sarah Lou Harmer

Sarah Lou Harmer is the Principal Consultant at The Humanity Project in New Zealand, a consultancy specialising in psychosocial risk management and workplace culture. She is a speaker at the 2026 Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference, where her session addresses why psychosocial risk cannot be managed through frameworks and functions alone. Her argument is that psychosocial risk is a feature of social systems rather than a failure, and that managing it requires understanding the social architecture of the workplace itself.

Harmer's approach draws on critical risk thinking to analyse how the fragmentation of HR, health and safety, wellbeing functions, leaders, and boards weakens the organisation's capacity to identify and address psychosocial hazards. Her work is particularly relevant for New Zealand organisations navigating the psychosocial obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, where the challenge is translating legal requirements into genuine cultural practice.

29. Craig Marriott

Craig Marriott is the Principal of Craig Marriott Consulting in New Zealand and a speaker at the 2026 Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference, delivering a pre-conference workshop titled "Influencing Up: Being Heard at the Top Table." His work focuses on the practical challenge that safety professionals consistently face in getting their concerns and recommendations genuinely heard by boards and executive teams.

Marriott's expertise in safety influence and stakeholder engagement addresses one of the most underserved skill gaps in the profession. Safety practitioners with strong technical knowledge often struggle to communicate risk in terms that resonate with financial and governance decision-makers. His pre-conference workshop gives participants practical influence skills grounded in the specific dynamics of the New Zealand regulatory and governance environment.

30. Sharron O'Neill

Sharron O'Neill is a WHS researcher and speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. Her work examines the systemic and structural factors that determine safety outcomes in Australian workplaces, with particular attention to how accountability is distributed across organisations and how regulatory strategies influence organisational behaviour over time.

O'Neill's perspective is distinctive in its focus on structural conditions rather than individual leadership behaviour. She argues that understanding why organisations produce harm requires examining industry structures, supply chain dynamics, labour market conditions, and procurement practices, not just frontline supervision or safety management systems. This broader systemic lens is increasingly important as organisations grapple with multi-employer worksites and complex contractor arrangements.

Category Six: Safety Technology, Data, and the Future of Work

The digitisation of safety management is transforming how hazards are identified, how incidents are investigated, and how performance is measured. AI, wearable sensors, predictive analytics, and digital management platforms are creating new possibilities for proactive safety management alongside new risks if implemented without adequate attention to human factors. These voices are working at the intersection of technology and safety.

31. Cam Stevens

Cam Stevens is the Founder and CEO of PKG in Australia, a Chartered Fellow of the Australian Institute of Health and Safety, and a physiotherapist and human factors specialist by training. He was identified as a LinkedIn Top Voice on workplace safety in 2025 with a profile describing his work at the intersection of WHS, AI, digital transformation, critical risk management, and human factors in high-risk industries including mining, oil and gas, construction, energy, utilities, and chemicals.

Stevens's contribution is in helping high-hazard organisations modernise their safety systems by integrating AI and digital transformation in a genuinely human-centred and problem-led way. His LinkedIn content in 2025 addresses AI-powered safety systems, computer vision for hazard detection, natural language processing for real-time risk capture, and the worker experience design principles that determine whether new safety technologies are actually adopted at the frontline rather than resisted as additional administrative burden.

32. Shawn Galloway

Shawn Galloway is the CEO of ProAct Safety, a global safety consultancy based in Houston, Texas. He has more than 25 years of experience in safety strategy, culture, leadership, and employee engagement, and has published several bestselling books including Bridge to Excellence: Building Capacity for Sustainable Performance (2023). He hosted over 800 podcast episodes of Safety Culture Excellence, contributed more than 400 articles to leading industry publications including EHS Today and Professional Safety in 2025, and delivered the opening keynote at the Safety in Ammonia Plants and Related Facilities Symposium in September 2025.

Galloway's framework of five core capacities for safety excellence, covering system, leadership, cultural, engagement, and strategic capacity, provides organisations with a structured model for building sustainable performance rather than chasing compliance. His perspective challenges the tendency to treat safety as a cost of doing business and consistently reframes it as a strategic differentiator with measurable commercial value. His scheduled appearance at the National Safety Council Congress in 2025 reflects his standing as one of the most prominent voices in US safety culture consulting.

33. Alex Collie

Alex Collie is a Professor at Monash University in Melbourne and a speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. His research focuses on occupational rehabilitation, return to work, workers' compensation, and the economic and social determinants of recovery from work-related injury and illness. He brings an evidence-based epidemiological perspective to workplace safety that complements the culture and leadership focus of much contemporary safety thinking.

Collie's research has demonstrated that the way organisations and workers' compensation systems respond to workplace injury significantly affects worker outcomes, with early intervention, quality of case management, employer attitude, and GP involvement all playing decisive roles. His work challenges the assumption that injury outcomes are determined primarily by the severity of physical harm, and his findings on the psychological and systemic context of recovery have important implications for how organisations design their injury management processes.

34. Matthew Thorne

Matthew Thorne is the Founder of Risk Diversity in Australia and was ranked twelfth on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025. His work focuses on diversity and inclusion as a safety lever, examining how homogeneous teams, biased risk assessment processes, and exclusionary safety cultures create hazards that conventional safety management systems fail to identify and control.

Thorne's contribution is in bringing a genuine diversity lens to safety science. He argues that risk assessments designed primarily by and for male workers in physical industries systematically underestimate the hazards faced by women, workers from non-English-speaking backgrounds, workers with disability, and other groups whose experiences are not centred in conventional safety thinking. His work has practical implications for organisations seeking to build safety systems that genuinely protect all workers.

Category Seven: Safety Science and History in Practice

The richness of the safety profession depends in part on its willingness to critically examine its own assumptions and the history of its ideas. These practitioners bring historical analysis, philosophical rigour, and cultural intelligence to a field that can too easily become reflexively self-reinforcing.

35. Steven Shorrock

Steven Shorrock is Senior Team Leader Human Factors in the EUROCONTROL Network Manager Safety Unit, where he leads the European Safety Culture Programme. He is also Editor-in-Chief of HindSight, the highly regarded aviation safety and human factors magazine published by EUROCONTROL. He holds a PhD in human factors in air traffic control, is a Chartered Psychologist and Chartered Ergonomist, and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast's Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems. His blog humanisticsystems.com was active as recently as December 2025.

His 2025 speaking engagements included a keynote at the PACDEFF and AAvPA Combined Conference in Sydney in September 2025, an invited talk on psychological safety and just culture for the UK Government Office for Science, and presentations at the Air Navigation Convention in Bucharest and the Veterinary Human Factors Conference. In Spring 2026, his article on designing for human fallibility was the featured piece in FOCUS, the official journal of the UK Flight Safety Committee. Shorrock co-edited the book Human Factors and Ergonomics in Practice: Improving System Performance and Human Well-Being in the Real World, published by CRC Press, and his European Safety Culture Programme, now in its seventh year and working with multiple countries across Europe, represents one of the most sustained applied safety culture programmes at institutional scale in the world.

36. Carsten Busch

Carsten Busch is the founder of Mind The Risk in Oslo, Norway, a self-described Safety Mythologist and Historian, and a tutor in the Lund University Human Factors and System Safety programme. He holds qualifications in Mechanical Engineering, Safety, and Human Factors and has more than 30 years of HSEQ management experience across railway, oil and gas, and policing in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Norway. His book Preventing Industrial Accidents: Reappraising H. W. Heinrich, published by Routledge in 2021, won best safety-related thesis awards. A January 2026 profile on grokipedia.com confirms his current roles and activities.

Busch's unique contribution is in the intellectual history of safety. His research into the primary sources behind H. W. Heinrich's original work has challenged the simplified version of Heinrich's ideas that has driven safety practice for decades, and his books Safety Myth 101 and The First Rule of Safety Culture bring critical thinking to assumptions that the profession rarely questions. With more than 10,000 LinkedIn followers and active participation in the Dutch Society for Safety Science, he is a genuinely influential contrarian voice in the European and global safety conversation.

37. Rosa Antonia Carrillo

Rosa Antonia Carrillo is the President of Carrillo and Associates in the United States, an internationally recognised leader in creating transformational change through relationship-centred approaches to safety, environment, and health. Her 2020 book The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership: Achieving Success through Employee Engagement, published by Routledge, was described as required reading for understanding the foundations of safety culture by the late Edgar Schein, one of the most respected organisational development scholars of the twentieth century.

Carrillo's central insight is that safety outcomes depend not primarily on systems and procedures but on the quality of relationships inside an organisation. In The Relationship Factor, she identifies eight beliefs about human nature that are common to leaders who successfully demonstrate that safety matters while also delivering business results. Her 2023 book Health and Safety Leadership Strategy: How Authentically Inclusive Leaders Transform Safety Culture extends this framework to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a safety lever. She has consulted globally for over 25 years and was the Wigglesworth Memorial Lecturer at the Safety Institute of Australia.

38. Tiffany Desmond

Tiffany Desmond is a safety leader at HazTek Safety Management in the United States and was ranked thirty-ninth on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025. Her work focuses on construction safety, safety management systems, and the practical implementation of safety leadership development for supervisors and frontline workers in high-hazard environments.

Desmond brings a practitioner's perspective to the intersection of construction safety and leadership development, having worked extensively on the challenge of closing the gap between formal safety management systems and how safety actually operates at the frontline of construction sites. Her LinkedIn content in 2025 addresses leading indicators, frontline engagement, and supervisor capability, and she is one of the most active female practitioners in the US safety thought leadership space.

39. Moni Hogg

Moni Hogg is a New Zealand-based safety professional with more than 20 years of experience in health and safety, including roles with Rocket Lab and Fletcher Building. She specialises in the Safety-II approach and has spent a decade pioneering its practical application in the New Zealand context. She was a speaker at the 2026 Safeguard Women in Safety Conference and is recognised for her leadership in Safety-II through partnerships with experts in Australia and regular appearances in industry events, publications, and awards.

Hogg's particular contribution is in making Safety-II accessible to operational teams in New Zealand's most complex industries, including construction, healthcare, manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, and forestry. Her model centres on human-centred controls that focus on real people's decisions, capabilities, and performance rather than rigid rules and transactional systems. Her work challenges traditional critical risk management and presents evidence-based alternatives that empower teams rather than constrain them.

Category Eight: Wellbeing, Occupational Health, and Emerging Voices

This final category brings together researchers and practitioners working on the frontiers of the field, from occupational wellbeing and First Nations safety to the integration of ESG and climate risk with workplace health obligations.

40. Diana Sarraj

Diana Sarraj is a psychosocial safety specialist and speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. Her work focuses on the practical management of psychosocial risks in Australian workplaces, including the identification and control of hazards such as high job demands, poor role clarity, workplace bullying, and inadequate support. Her presence at AIHS 2026 reflects the mainstreaming of psychosocial risk into the core of the WHS profession.

Sarraj's contribution is in helping organisations move beyond superficial wellbeing programmes to genuine psychosocial risk management that identifies and controls hazards at their source. With Australia's model WHS laws now placing psychosocial hazard management on par with physical hazard management, her expertise is directly responsive to the compliance challenge that safety professionals across every industry are grappling with.

41. Julie Wills

Julie Wills is a mental health and WHS leader and speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. Her work addresses the intersection of workplace mental health, safety management, and organisational culture, with a particular focus on building structural conditions that prevent psychological harm rather than simply responding to it after it occurs.

Wills's perspective is grounded in the operational level of safety management, where the challenge is not understanding what good practice looks like in theory but implementing it in real organisations with competing priorities, limited resources, and resistant cultures. Her contribution to the AIHS 2026 programme reflects the growing recognition that mental health and physical safety are not separate streams but deeply interconnected dimensions of the same obligation to protect workers.

42. Naomi Kemp

Naomi Kemp is a WHS wellbeing and systems leader and speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. Her work focuses on the integration of health, wellbeing, and safety management in complex organisations, and on designing systems that support worker wellbeing proactively rather than reactively.

Kemp argues that the most significant opportunities for improving worker wellbeing lie not in individual interventions but in redesigning the work itself, including job demands, autonomy, social support, and role clarity, in ways that reduce the load on workers rather than simply equipping them to cope with a load that should not exist in the first place. Her systems-level perspective is an important corrective to the individualistic bias in many workplace wellbeing programmes.

43. Wade Needham

Wade Needham is a practitioner and speaker at the OHS Leaders Australia Summit 2026, where his work addresses HOP and safety leadership in the agriculture sector. Agriculture is one of the most hazardous industries globally, with the ILO estimating that one in three fatal occupational injuries worldwide occur among agricultural workers, yet it is also one of the sectors where contemporary safety frameworks have made the least headway.

Needham's work in applying HOP principles to agricultural workplaces addresses a genuine and relatively rare challenge. The conditions of seasonal labour, family business structures, geographic isolation, and highly variable work make agricultural safety a distinct discipline that generic safety approaches consistently fail to serve. His presence at OHS Leaders Australia 2026 reflects the profession's growing recognition that the resources, construction, and urban-focused safety conversation needs to make more room for rural and agricultural voices.

44. Kudzi Moyo

Kudzi Moyo is a safety innovation leader and speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. Her presence at Australia's leading WHS conference reflects the growing diversity of the Australian WHS profession and the increasing contribution of practitioners from diverse cultural backgrounds. Her work addresses safety innovation and the practical challenge of building inclusive safety cultures in organisations where workers come from diverse backgrounds.

Moyo's perspective is particularly valuable for organisations in industries with diverse workforces, including construction, healthcare, aged care, and food manufacturing, where effective safety communication and culture must operate across significant cultural, linguistic, and experiential variation. Her work represents a strand of the safety conversation that the profession needs urgently to amplify.

45. Skye Buatava

Skye Buatava is a First Nations WHS advocate and speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. Her work addresses the specific WHS challenges and priorities of First Nations workers in Australia, an area that is systematically underrepresented in mainstream WHS discourse despite the disproportionate representation of First Nations workers in high-hazard industries and their distinctive occupational health risk profile.

Buatava's contribution is in bringing First Nations perspectives and voices into the WHS profession, challenging the assumption that workplace safety frameworks designed by and for the majority culture are adequate for all workers. Her presence at AIHS 2026 signals the profession's growing recognition that genuine inclusivity in WHS requires not just diverse participation but substantive engagement with the specific safety challenges, cultural values, and historical context of First Nations communities.

46. Rita Zhang

Rita Zhang is the Deputy Director of Construction Work Health and Safety Research at RMIT University in Melbourne and a speaker at the 2026 Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference in New Zealand. Her research focuses on the influence of organisational culture and leadership on WHS outcomes in the construction industry, the development of integrated supply chain approaches to WHS, and the management of WHS in subcontractor arrangements.

Zhang brings the rigorous empirical methods of construction management research to WHS questions that are often addressed primarily through practitioner experience. Her work on how organisational culture and procurement practices shape safety outcomes in construction supply chains has practical implications for principal contractors, developers, and regulators grappling with the challenge of safety governance in complex multi-party project environments.

47. David Cant

David Cant is a Chartered Fellow of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (CFIOSH) and the Director of Veritas Consulting in the United Kingdom. He was ranked eighteenth on the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders on Health and Safety in 2025. His work spans occupational safety management, safety culture development, and the practical implementation of health and safety management systems in UK and European organisations.

As a Chartered Fellow of IOSH, the leading professional body for the health and safety profession globally, Cant brings both credibility and practical experience to questions about what good safety leadership looks like in UK and European regulatory environments. His LinkedIn content in 2025 engages with questions of safety culture, just culture, and human performance applied to the specific context of UK organisations navigating the Health and Safety at Work Act and its associated regulations.

48. Sharanjit Paddam

Sharanjit Paddam is an actuary and climate risk expert and a speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. His work sits at the intersection of climate change, physical risk, and the future of occupational health and safety obligations, bringing a quantitative risk modelling perspective to questions that the WHS profession is only beginning to grapple with.

As climate-related physical risks become increasingly embedded in corporate governance frameworks and ESG reporting obligations, the question of how worker health and safety obligations interact with climate risk is urgent. Paddam's expertise in quantifying and communicating physical climate risk provides safety professionals and boards with an analytical framework that bridges the gap between the WHS and ESG conversations.

49. Melissa Doran

Melissa Doran is a safety culture practitioner and speaker at the 2026 AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Adelaide. Her work focuses on the practical development of safety culture in organisations navigating the transition from compliance-based to genuinely values-based approaches to worker protection.

Doran's contribution is in the detailed practice of culture change: the specific interventions, conversations, and structural changes that actually shift how workers and leaders think and behave around safety. Her presence at AIHS 2026 reflects the growing recognition that safety culture change requires dedicated expertise and sustained effort rather than being treated as a byproduct of compliance improvements or training programmes.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices were seriously considered but did not make the final fifty. James Reason, whose Swiss cheese model of accident causation remains foundational to how the field understands system failure, is perhaps the most important theorist behind much of the work on this list. He is semi-retired but his ideas underpin the field in ways that cannot be overstated. Charles Perrow, whose Normal Accidents theory argues that accidents in complex tightly-coupled systems are inevitable, has profoundly shaped how the profession thinks about systemic risk. Both figures are either retired or working at a reduced pace compared to the actively publishing voices that populate this list.

Diane Vaughan, whose concept of the normalisation of deviance was applied to the Challenger and Columbia disasters, was also seriously considered. Within the current active professional community, Deanna Kemp of the University of Queensland, whose research on the organisational causes of harm in mining and extractive industries is exceptional, came very close. Nippin Anand, already on the list, had colleagues in the social psychology of risk space who are doing strong work. The deliberate editorial choice was made to move past the most prominent household names in favour of voices the reader may not yet have encountered.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

One of the most persistent mistakes organisations make is conflating safety compliance with safety culture. A robust WHS management system, a stack of completed risk assessments, and a clean audit record are necessary but not sufficient for genuine worker protection. Research consistently shows that most serious incidents occur in organisations that were technically compliant at the time. The organisations with the best long-term safety records have invested not just in systems but in the relationships, conversations, and leadership behaviours that determine how workers actually experience safety in their daily work.

A related mistake is treating psychosocial safety as separate from physical safety. The research base is now clear: psychological harm at work is prevalent, serious, caused by identifiable and manageable workplace hazards, and addressable through the same risk management framework that applies to physical hazards. Organisations that maintain this separation are failing their workers and, increasingly, failing to meet their legal obligations under model WHS laws in Australia and equivalent frameworks in other jurisdictions.

A third common mistake is underestimating the importance of frontline worker knowledge in safety improvement. The people closest to the work understand the gap between the formal safety system and how work actually happens in ways that are entirely invisible from above. Organisations that engage this knowledge through genuine consultation, learning teams, and safety conversations consistently identify hazards and improvement opportunities that formal safety audits miss entirely. This is the core insight of HOP, and it is reshaping the profession at every level.

Over-reliance on lagging indicators is a fourth persistent problem. Measuring safety performance primarily through injury rates and lost-time figures gives organisations a picture of what has already gone wrong rather than insight into the conditions producing future harm. The voices on this list are unanimous in advocating for safety performance indicators that measure system health, worker engagement, quality of safety conversations, and actual control implementation rather than simply whether incidents have occurred.

Finally, many organisations separate safety leadership development from general leadership development. The most effective safety cultures are built by leaders who genuinely care about their workers as human beings. The conversational and relational skills that make someone a great leader are the same skills that make someone a great safety leader. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, delivers keynotes, workshops, and executive offsites that build exactly this capability. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Safety Learning System

Building an ongoing engagement with the best safety thinking does not require a large budget or a formal learning programme. It requires a few deliberate habits and a commitment to staying connected with the people pushing the field forward.

Start with podcasts. Todd Conklin's Pre-Accident Investigation podcast, publishing twice weekly, is the most accessible entry point into the HOP and Safety Differently conversation for practitioners at any level. Nippin Anand's Embracing Differences brings a genuinely different cultural and philosophical lens. Shawn Galloway's Safety Culture Excellence podcast covers practical implementation across every major industry.

Build a LinkedIn reading list by following at least ten of the fifty people on this list. The posts from voices like Clive Lloyd, Rosa Antonia Carrillo, Dave Rebbitt, Marie-Claire Ross, Danny Wareham, and Carsten Busch are among the most consistently thoughtful safety content on the platform, and the comment conversations they generate are a genuine education in how the field is developing.

Attend at least one safety conference annually. The AIHS National Health and Safety Conference in Australia, the Safeguard National Health and Safety Conference in New Zealand, the Western Conference on Safety in Canada, and the NSC conferences in the United States bring together the voices most active in developing the field. Conference attendance provides access to speakers, networks, and conversations that cannot be replicated through reading alone.

Create a shared reading practice within your safety team. The books referenced on this list, from Hopkins's Sacrificing Safety to D'Ath's Humanising Safety to Carrillo's The Relationship Factor, are most valuable when discussed rather than simply read. A monthly safety book discussion, even an informal one, builds shared language and commitment to the kind of learning culture the best safety thinkers are advocating.

Finally, invest in your capacity to have difficult conversations. The most common reason that safety information fails to travel up the chain of command is that workers and supervisors do not feel psychologically safe enough to raise concerns. Building that psychological safety requires leaders skilled at creating conditions for honest conversation. Jonno White, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes across 150+ countries and founder of The 7 Questions Movement, delivers keynotes, workshops, and executive offsites that build exactly this capability. Whether virtual or face to face, email jonno@consultclarity.org or visit consultclarity.org. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs far less than engaging high-profile local providers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between WHS, OHS, and EHS?

These terms are largely interchangeable, reflecting regional naming conventions. WHS stands for Work Health and Safety and is the terminology used in Australia following the harmonisation of occupational health and safety laws from 2011 onwards. OHS stands for Occupational Health and Safety, the previous Australian terminology still used in Victoria, Western Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. EHS stands for Environmental Health and Safety and is the preferred terminology in the United States and in multinational corporations where environmental compliance is managed alongside occupational safety. All three refer to the same fundamental discipline of identifying, assessing, and controlling risks to the health, safety, and wellbeing of workers.

What is Human and Organisational Performance (HOP)?

Human and Organisational Performance is a contemporary approach to workplace safety that starts from the premise that human error is normal, predictable, and inevitable. HOP practitioners argue that because humans will always make mistakes, the most effective safety improvement strategy is to design systems tolerant of human variability and able to learn from it, rather than attempting to eliminate error through training and discipline. The five core principles of HOP, articulated most clearly by Todd Conklin, are: error is normal, blame fixes nothing, context drives behaviour, learning and improving is the goal, and how leaders respond to failure matters. The approach draws on theoretical work by Sidney Dekker, Erik Hollnagel, and James Reason.

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected on the basis of a documented and substantive contribution to the workplace safety profession through published books, peer-reviewed research, active professional practice, or public advocacy. Active engagement with the conversation in 2025 and 2026 was a requirement. The list was built to represent geographic diversity across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Europe, and beyond, as well as disciplinary diversity across safety science, HOP, psychosocial safety, WHS law, safety culture, occupational health, and safety technology.

What is the difference between Safety-I and Safety-II?

Safety-I and Safety-II are concepts developed by Erik Hollnagel to distinguish between two fundamentally different approaches to safety management. Safety-I is the traditional approach, which defines safety as the absence of accidents and focuses management effort on preventing things from going wrong. Safety-II is the contemporary approach, which defines safety as the ability of a system to succeed under varying conditions and focuses management effort on understanding and supporting the normal performance variability that allows things to go right most of the time. Safety-II does not replace Safety-I but extends it, arguing that organisations learn more from studying everyday successful performance than from the small number of accidents that occur.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership workshops or team sessions for my organisation?

Yes. While the workplace safety experts on this list are the people to engage for technical safety management, WHS law, and human performance frameworks, organisations that want to develop the leadership conversations, team dynamics, and psychological safety that underpin a genuine safety culture can engage Jonno White. Jonno is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, keynote speaker, and Certified Working Genius Facilitator who works with leadership teams in schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. He delivers Working Genius facilitation, DISC workshops, and executive offsites that help leadership teams develop the relational and conversational skills that safety culture requires. International travel is often far more affordable than expected. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How do I get started if I am new to contemporary safety thinking?

The most accessible entry point is Todd Conklin's Pre-Accident Investigation podcast, which is free and publishes twice weekly. For books, Sidney Dekker's The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error is the most widely recommended starting point. Erik Hollnagel's Safety-II in Practice provides the clearest framework for understanding the Safety-I to Safety-II shift. Clive Lloyd's Next Generation Safety Leadership: From Compliance to Care is the most accessible treatment of the psychology of safety leadership. Amy Edmondson's The Fearless Organization is the essential foundation for understanding psychosocial safety. LinkedIn is also a rich and free resource: following the mid-tier practitioners on this list will give you a real-time education in how the field is evolving.

Final Thoughts

The workplace safety conversation is in a genuinely exciting and contested moment. The theoretical foundations laid by Dekker, Hollnagel, Hopkins, and Conklin are now being translated into practice by a new generation of consultants, practitioners, and organisational leaders. Psychosocial safety has moved from a fringe concern to a legal obligation. The integration of technology is creating new possibilities and new risks simultaneously. And the question of what a genuinely humane approach to keeping people safe actually looks like in a real organisation with real pressures is being debated with more rigour and honesty than at any previous point in the profession's history.

The fifty people on this list are not in agreement on everything. Safety Differently and traditional safety management still exist in tension in many organisations. The question of how much weight to give compliance versus culture is genuinely contested. This intellectual tension is a sign of a mature and developing profession, not a problem to be resolved.

What the best voices on this list share is a commitment to genuine learning, a respect for frontline workers as the most important source of safety knowledge in any organisation, and a recognition that keeping people safe at work is fundamentally a human challenge as much as a technical or regulatory one.

The leadership skills that underpin great safety culture, including the ability to have honest conversations, listen to uncomfortable information, build trust across hierarchical boundaries, and hold people accountable without blame, are skills every leader needs. If your team needs support developing those skills, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally) and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes across 150+ countries, delivers keynotes, workshops, and executive offsites that build exactly this capability. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on building psychologically safe leadership teams, check out my blog post on the best HR thought leaders globally at consultclarity.org/post/hr-thought-leaders.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

The human resources profession is evolving faster than ever. Whether you are a people operations professional, a CEO building company culture, or a safety leader trying to understand the full landscape of workplace wellbeing expertise, the HR thought leaders guide at consultclarity.org surfaces the voices most worth following in 2026.

Keep reading: consultclarity.org/post/hr-thought-leaders