DRIFT

The decision looked sudden. The drift was not.

Good people do not suddenly become careless, disengaged, or unwilling to speak up. Long before something goes wrong, the workplace has been shaping the moment.

Pressure. Workload. Hierarchy. Incentives. Familiar shortcuts. Silence. Physical design. What leaders reward, tolerate, overlook, and repeatedly ask people to work around.

Over time, those conditions can consume the mental margin people need to notice, remember, question, speak honestly, and change course.

In DRIFT: How Even Good Workplaces Lose the Space to Think, Joe Caracci draws on more than two decades of work with organizations and more than 10,000 conversations with employees following workplace injuries. Through real stories from healthcare, manufacturing, construction, and other workplaces, he shows why problems that appear to be individual failures are often the predictable result of conditions that have been developing for years.

DRIFT explores the forces that shape decisions before the critical moment arrives-and what leaders can do about them.

You'll discover how:

• workplaces quietly teach people what really matters;
• pressure narrows attention and changes the choices people can access;
• repeated workarounds gradually become normal;
• trust, dignity, and permission to pause affect whether people speak up;
• small changes in leadership, systems, and the physical environment can create more room to think.

DRIFT is about more than preventing injuries. It's about designing workplaces where people have enough space to think, enough trust to speak, and enough dignity to know their judgment matters.