After screenings of The Inventor, people kept pulling the filmmaker aside to talk about the film through the lens of their own workplace.
A lineman would start describing a near-miss his crew never wrote up. A plant manager would start talking about a fix that had been sitting in a budget request for two years.
It happened enough times, with individuals across construction and utilities, but also in tech, education, and finance, that a real pattern started to emerge. A story about a fix that existed but never reached the people who needed it was giving people language for something they'd been carrying, but without a language to say it out loud.
To find out whether that pattern held up outside a screening room, we went to the source regulators actually use.
We parsed every NRC Integrated Inspection Report for U.S. commercial power reactors from January 2014 through Q3 2026, 2,800 reports. When inspectors document a finding, they can tag it with one of 23 defined cross-cutting aspects, the performance traits behind what went wrong.
We counted which aspects showed up in which reports, then independently re-checked every count against a second, separate pass. The 8 attributes this diagnostic measures are drawn from that same 23-aspect framework, the subset that's actually present as real beats in The Inventor itself.
Every respondent answers based on the same fixed scenario, the film itself, so the film is the control. Differences in how people describe what led to the tunnel disaster surfaces up differences in the vocabulary an organization has actually given them to describe risk.
Each response is read for which of the 8 attributes it names. Aggregated across a room or a cohort, that mapping shows where a team's shared language for danger is strong and where it's thin or missing entirely.
The readout is a clearer direction to point safety culture efforts organizations already run.
Deliberately independent: not affiliated with, reviewed by, or endorsed by the CSB, NRC, or NTSB. Curious about the research behind this? See the FAQ →