Building Reliable Teams: Scan & Focus, Psychological Safety, and After-Action Reviews with Jake Mazulewicz

What do paratroopers, dumpster fires, and Navy destroyers have to do with building reliable safety culture?
According to keynote speaker and human reliability expert Jake Mazulewicz, everything.

In this episode of Safety Spotlight, Jake walks through his winding path from volunteer firefighter and EMT, to Army paratrooper, to PhD, to leading human performance specialist for high risk utilities and technical teams across North America. Along the way, he challenges safety leaders to rethink how work is really done compared to how it is written on paper, and why the best insights live with the people turning wrenches, throwing breakers, and sweating the pipe.

“Trust is earned in droplets and lost in buckets.”

We unpack Jake’s scan and focus model for situational awareness, why you cannot be a floodlight and a spotlight at the same time, and how high reliability teams deliberately pair scanners and focusers on critical tasks. Jake also explains how to turn after action reviews into non punitive learning sessions, why you should debrief mostly on jobs that go well, and how to build psychological safety using practical questions leaders can start asking on Monday.

He shares how effective safety leadership is less about enforcement, and more about trust, curiosity, and learning from everyday work, not just incidents. We also explore ideas from his book Seven Practical Steps: How to Build Reliability, Safety, and Trust in Technical Teams and the real business impact when organizations treat safety culture as culture, period, instead of a separate program.