Safety / Published book
Modern Event Investigation Techniques
A field guide for developing a supported account, testing controls, and following through on what is learned.
About the book
Move from an event to a useful account.
Modern Event Investigation Techniques is Todd Jerome Jenkins’s practical guide to building a supported account of an event, testing the controls involved, and following through on what is learned. It connects the initial response with evidence gathering, explanation, and learning rather than treating the first plausible answer as the end of the investigation.
The focus is work as it happened: the information available, the conditions people faced, and what the controls actually did. That makes the book a starting point for readers who want to move beyond a person’s last visible action and examine the circumstances around it.
Watch · Modern Event Investigation Techniques
A close call. Now what?
Explore a practical approach to event investigation: build a reliable account, test explanations, and verify that improvements work.
Who this book is for
The guide is intended for safety professionals, investigators, and operational leaders. It also gives people who support an investigation a shared way to think about evidence, unanswered questions, and the work of checking a proposed change.
If you are preparing for an investigation, reviewing an account, or helping an action owner close the loop, start with the question you need to answer. What is established? What remains uncertain? What would demonstrate that a control works under the conditions of the task?
Use the guide to organize the work
- Establish the account. Build a timeline from observations, interviews and available records. Keep a reported fact separate from an interpretation, and mark gaps rather than filling them with assumptions.
- Test competing explanations. Ask what evidence each explanation would predict. Look for information that could weaken your preferred account as well as information that supports it.
- Examine the controls. Identify what was meant to prevent the event, what people actually relied on, and how those arrangements performed under the conditions of the task.
- Verify the change. Give an improvement an owner, a review point and a way to check it in use. Completing an action is different from showing that it works.
A question to practice before the next event
Fictional learning example, not a book excerpt. A pallet enters a pedestrian route during a busy delivery. The first account says that the driver missed a sign. A later photograph shows the sign behind a staged load, while the delivery plan describes a different entry point.
Keep the observed route, sign visibility, staging conditions and plan version as separate evidence items. The useful question is how deliveries and pedestrian movement were coordinated at that time. Interview the people involved and compare their information with the records before choosing an explanation.
A proposal to add another sign is a starting hypothesis. A follow-up would check visibility and route separation during an actual busy delivery, including what happens when staging changes. The absence of another event alone does not demonstrate that the control improved.
An investigation and a Learning Team serve related purposes. The investigation establishes an account of a particular event and tests relevant controls. When a wider question about everyday work remains, a Learning Team can explore it with the people who know the task. Learning Teams can also begin proactively, without an incident.
Practice with companion resources
The MEIT companion investigation workbook and DEMO-001 evidence pack provide a reusable workbook and a fictional case for practice. Use the case to work through an account, identify gaps, and discuss what evidence would support a conclusion before applying the approach to your own work.
Related reading
Begin with how to conduct a workplace incident investigation. Compare approaches in root cause analysis versus learning from events, explore alternatives to the 5 Whys, and prepare with interviewing employees after an incident.
Read the published book
Choose the paperback for a physical reference or Kindle for digital reading using the purchase options alongside this overview. The retailer provides the edition details, current availability, and checkout.
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