Dr Todd Conklin, senior adviser for organisational and safety culture at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, gave presentations and a workshop at the Clyde Dam on Tuesday promoting a ''new philosophy'' on workplace safety.
He is in New Zealand for nine days, giving more than 20 talks across Contact Energy sites.
Contact first brought Dr Conklin to New Zealand more than 18 months ago to advise on improving its health and safety systems.
There was a 55% decrease in accidents in the past year due to implementing his recommendations, communications adviser Shaun Jones said.
Dr Conklin said instead of looking for bad workers, industry leaders needed to address conditions prone to failure.
''It's about assuming something bad will happen, and managing the consequences. If someone is doing work on top of the dam, you should be less worried about them falling and more worried about the landing.''
Workplaces also needed to remove a culture of blame.
''Blame is not only a gigantic waste of time, it misdirects resources. It takes time away when you could be doing a much better job of understanding how you got into trouble.''
Dr Conklin sought to move health and safety away from the ''old way'' where management would ask workers to not fail and punish them when something went wrong.
Workplaces needed to empower workers to report problems before accidents happen.
There were ''huge'' improvements since he came to the site last year, although there were no glaring problems at the time, he said.
''The leadership is much more enlightened than they were then. Much less likely to punish.''
Contact's general manager of health, safety and environment, Tania Palmer, said workers were now more likely to call management if something went wrong.
Contact implemented a regular safety culture survey where workers would report on how safe they felt while working.
Contact Energy CEO Dennis Barnes said it was moving from a culture dominated by compliance and rules to one where it was constantly learning and improving by engaging with workers.
by Jono Edwards
