Trust in Action, From Blame to Restorative Justice
Our guest for episode 97 is Sidney Dekker, Professor and Director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He explores the negative effects of a blame culture in organizations and advocates for a restorative justice approach. He explains how blaming leads to a lack of honesty and authenticity, negatively impacting organizational learning, performance, and safety. He explains that a blame culture causes individuals to hide mistakes rather than address underlying systemic issues. He emphasizes that restorative justice focuses on impacts, needs, and obligations rather than rule violations and consequences. He also touches on the concept of human error, arguing that it should be seen as a consequence of deeper organizational troubles rather than the cause. The focus should be on understanding why people made certain decisions based on their goals and knowledge at the time, rather than blaming them for errors.
Throughout the interview, Sidney provides practical examples to illustrate his points. He cites the Apollo 13 mission as an example of successful crisis management through trust in frontline operators and focusing on what is working rather than what is broken. He discusses the importance of including multiple stakeholder perspectives to learn and improve organizational practices. When addressing severe cases like a dam breaking due to government negligence, Dekker argues for a restorative approach to accountability. This involves truth-telling, repentance, and actions to repair harm and address the needs of affected individuals.
He also connects his views to Kant’s philosophy, suggesting that while past actions cannot be undone, the relational consequences can be addressed through restorative practices. He reflects on recent incidents of inappropriate behavior in organizations, stressing the need to address broader sociological issues rather than just individual behaviors. Trust, built on compassion and empathy, is fundamental to fostering a just and safe organizational culture. Sidney concludes by emphasizing the importance of trust in both professional and personal contexts, highlighting its role in collective success and his commitment to promoting restorative justice in organizational safety practices.
Why blaming after a mistake is not what should happen
What happens in a blaming approach obviously, is, well, many things, but one is that people will start ducking the debris, the fall out of a particular incident and not want to contribute to the conversation, which means that you shrink the number of stories that you get dramatically. In fact, you’re often not really interested. One story is enough, if that is enough for you to blame or put the blame on a particular person, you can say, well, this person sucked, they screwed up, they should have done this, they should have zigged instead of zagged and that explains the whole thing that carries the explanatory load of our incident. A restorative approach actually is much more active in inviting multiple stories and voices into the conversation. As you do that, you get a much broader picture and often a much deeper picture of how long standing conditions give rise to particular circumstances that set people up for failure, and that these things existed for a long time prior to the particular incident with which they showed up.
Surviving a crisis through teamwork and problem-solving is NASA’s Apollo 13 mission.
Let me lift up, I think, two key things that are consistent with the ideas that we’ve been discussing. The first is the trust that you give to the front line operators, which is in some ways really cute to suggest that that was sort of an active and deliberate choice in that case, which it wasn’t, because nobody else could help. They out there in space had to solve the problem. The front line guys had to figure this out. But it’s an instructive example that once you do that, you actually can get really interesting bottom up results rather than top down saying, oh, here’s what you should do, here are the rules, here are the protocols, follow the crisis protocols and you will be fine. Of course, complexity theory would predict that none of that is going to work, because crises throw all kinds of novelty and unanticipated and unpredictable things at you. So that’s the first thing, trust the front line operators. I think the second thing in that particular example is very consistent with safety two or safety differently thinking, which is focusing on that which works. What is the key question that Gene Kranz down in Houston asks the boys up in the module? He says, tell me what is still working in the module? And I don’t think those are the exact words, but that’s basically what he wants to know. Tell me whatever system is still working, that’s what he wants to know. And from there you built your solution. This is vastly different from what we typically do in organizations, which is, well, what is broken, what has been screwed up, what’s not working well, that’s not the focus. The focus is on what is working, which is consistent with safety two thinking, which is safety is about the capacities and the things present that make outcomes go well. That’s, I think, very instructive in Apollo 13 as well.
Books and Publications above Blaming and Restorative Justice
Sidney Dekker has published a great number of books on the subject. He also published a vast number of articles. Here is a full overview of the books published. Here is an overview of the articles and papers he wrote.
