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Post-incident reviews often focus on timelines and technology, limiting learning. This talk shows how applying the Social Psychology of Risk helps leaders surface hidden psychological and cultural factors, improving understanding, trust, and organisational resilience.
New York • September 15-16, 2026
Full LDX3 lineup is here 🙌
Post-incident reviews often converge on familiar outputs: a timeline, contributing technical factors, insights into system behaviour, and a set of follow-up actions – frequently centred on monitoring, alerts, or process changes. While valuable, these outcomes rarely deliver the deeper learning needed to improve long-term individual and organisational resilience. They focus on what happened in the system, rather than how people experienced the incident while operating in its inception, moment of impact and recovery.
To learn more effectively from incidents, engineering leaders must extend their practice beyond the physical language of systems, events, and actions, and intentionally explore the psychological and cultural dimensions that shape technical and non-technical decision-making and attitudes to risk. This talk demonstrates how the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) can be applied to post-incident reviews to achieve deeper, kinder, and more meaningful learning.
Using the lenses of Workspace, Headspace, and Groupspace, the session shows how leaders can build stronger connections with review participants and surface often-hidden contributing factors. Most incident discussions remain in Workspace: tools, constraints, signals, and procedures. By also exploring Headspace (what people noticed, believed, felt, and prioritised) and Groupspace (relationships, hierarchy, norms, and power dynamics), leaders gain insight into how risk was perceived, decisions were made, and why actions made sense at the time.
Through real incident examples, attendees will see how subtle influences – such as confidence, doubt, incident history, and organisational pressure – shape decisions long before any “root cause” appears on a timeline. The talk demonstrates practical techniques for asking better questions, listening more effectively, and creating the psychological safety required for people to articulate these factors without fear or blame.
Attendees will leave with concrete approaches for facilitating post-incident reviews that go beyond technical analysis, strengthen leadership effectiveness, improve decision-making, and build teams and systems that are more resilient because they are better understood.
Key takeaways
- What the Social Psychology of Risk is and why it matters in post-incident reviews.
- How to use Workspace, Headspace, and Groupspace to analyse incidents more deeply.
- Practical questioning and listening techniques that surface psychological and cultural influences without blame.
- How these insights improve leadership effectiveness, decision-making, and organisational resilience.
