Jake Mazulewicz
In high-hazard operating environments, errors are inevitable. The question for senior leaders is not how to eliminate them, it is how to build teams that catch errors early, recover quickly, and learn fast enough that the next incident does not look like the last one. Most organisations chase zero-incident targets and then punish the people closest to the work when those targets slip, which is precisely how reliable teams stop reporting near misses.
Jake Mazulewicz is a Human and Organizational Performance specialist who helps leaders in high-hazard industries build teams that prevent, absorb, and learn from operational errors.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jake Mazulewicz
- He has run the work, not just studied it. As HPI Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he applied the same frameworks he now teaches to lineworkers, system operators, and executives.
- His Near Miss Library generated more than 150 voluntary reports inside one utility, the kind of disclosure rate most safety programmes never achieve, and it carries endorsements from both executives and union leadership.
- His Scan & Focus model and Four Levels of Decision Making are tools field foremen and substation crews actually use, not concepts that work only in a classroom.
- He speaks the language of pilots, paratroopers, firefighters, and lineworkers because he has worked alongside them. Audiences in technical industries treat him as one of their own, which is rare for a keynote speaker on safety.
- His book, Seven Practical Steps, gives senior leaders a defensible operating playbook for human reliability that can be cited inside the business after the keynote ends.
Biography highlights
- Ph.D. in Education, University of Virginia
- Former Human Performance Improvement Lead, Dominion Virginia Power, 3,500+ person unit
- Founder and Director, JMA Human Reliability Strategies
- Author, Seven Practical Steps: How to Build Reliability, Safety, and Trust in Technical Teams
- Has worked with 250+ teams across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and government sectors
- Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, Energy Safety Canada
Biography
The instinct in most safety cultures is to chase zero. Zero incidents, zero errors, zero near misses. The most reliable industries figured out long ago that this target produces the opposite of safety. It produces silence. People stop reporting what they see, the organisation stops learning, and the next failure looks exactly like the last one.
Jake Mazulewicz has spent more than two decades inside that contradiction. As Human Performance Improvement Lead for a 3,500-person business unit at Dominion Virginia Power, he led the work of analysing more than 300 incidents, ran root cause analyses on transmission-level switching errors, and built a Near Miss Library that drew more than 150 voluntary reports from a workforce that had every reason not to volunteer them. His Ph.D. in Education from the University of Virginia underpins the teaching method, but the credibility is operational. Lineworkers, system operators, and executives all recognised the same person in the room.
In 2015 he founded JMA Human Reliability Strategies and has since worked with more than 250 teams across utilities, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and government. Named clients include the US Department of Energy, Fermilab, NERC, Chevron, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and Energy Safety Canada. His book, Seven Practical Steps, codifies the approach he has used inside those organisations: a learning-based posture, psychological safety as a working condition rather than a slogan, and After Action Reviews treated as a craft.
What separates him from other safety speakers is biography. He has served as a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, a wilderness search and rescue field team leader, and a military paratrooper. When he tells a technical audience that errors are signals, not character flaws, the room hears it from someone who has had to act on that belief in conditions where being wrong has consequences.
Key speaking topics
- Human and Organizational Performance (HOP)
- High-reliability team practice in high-hazard industries
- Psychological safety in technical teams
- After Action Reviews and event learning
- Situational awareness and decision-making under pressure
- Safety culture and human error reduction
- Just culture and incident investigation
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs, and operations leaders in utilities, energy, manufacturing, and other high-hazard sectors
- Heads of HSE, safety directors, and chief safety officers responsible for organisational reliability
- HR and people leaders responsible for psychological safety and frontline team culture
- Field operations leadership: plant managers, station managers, fleet leaders, frontline supervisors
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of psychological safety that survives contact with a unionised, technical workforce
- The Scan & Focus model as a usable situational awareness tool, applied to their own operating context
- A practical method for running After Action Reviews that produce learning rather than blame
- The Four Levels of Decision Making framework, mapped from novice to expert in their environment
- A reframing of error as a system signal, with the operating implications for how leaders respond to incidents
Talks
A practitioner-built sequence drawn from pilots, firefighters, paratroopers, nurses, and electric power lineworkers, showing how the world’s most reliable teams operate so that errors do not disable them.
Key takeaways:
- The seven operating practices that distinguish high-reliability teams from compliance-focused ones
- Why a learning-based posture outperforms a punishment-based one, with operating evidence
- A starting sequence senior leaders can apply inside their own organisation within 90 days
After Action Reviews treated as a leadership discipline rather than a paperwork exercise, drawing on military and emergency response practice.
Key takeaways:
- The structural difference between an AAR that produces learning and one that produces defensiveness
- How to debrief everyday work, not just incidents, so the muscle is built before it is needed
- The leader behaviours that determine whether a team will surface what actually happened
Psychological safety presented as an operating condition for technical teams, not as an HR concept, with specific behavioural anchors leaders can model.
Key takeaways:
- Why psychological safety is a precondition for error reporting, not a soft outcome
- Four leader behaviours that signal it is safe to surface mistakes early
- The difference between psychological safety and the absence of accountability
A decision-making framework that maps how technical experts actually develop, useful for both operational training and leadership development.
Key takeaways:
- The four levels of decision making and how to recognise where each team member is operating
- Why expert intuition cannot be taught directly, but the conditions for developing it can be designed
- How to match decision authority to demonstrated capability, especially in safety-critical work
A method for investigating human-error incidents that holds people accountable without punishing the act of disclosure.
Key takeaways:
- Why root cause analysis of human error fails when it stops at the individual
- A learning-based event review process that satisfies regulators without silencing the workforce
- How to integrate event review findings into operating practice, not just incident reports