Just Culture Quotes

“Not being able to find a cause is profoundly distressing; it creates anxiety because it implies a loss of control. The desire to find a cause is driven by fear.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“If professionals consider one thing “unjust,” it is often this: Split-second operational decisions that get evaluated, turned over, examined, picked apart, and analyzed for months—by people who were not there when the decision was taken, and whose daily work does not even involve such decisions.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“Accidents are no longer accidents at all. They are failures of risk management.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“Unjust responses to failure are almost never the result of bad performance. They are the result of bad relationships.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“The main question for a just culture is not about matching consequences with outcome. It is this: Did the assessments and actions of the professionals at the time make sense, given their knowledge, their goals, their attentional demands, their organizational context?”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight. It is essential that the critic should keep himself constantly aware of that fact.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“Creating a climate in which disclosure is possible and acceptable is the organization’s responsibility.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“A just culture accepts nobody’s account as “true” or “right” and others wrong.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“The question that drives safety work in a just culture is not who is responsible for failure, rather, it asks what is responsible for things going wrong. What is the set of engineered and organized circumstances that is responsible for putting people in a position where they end up doing things that go wrong?”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“It has to do with being open, with a willingness to share information about safety problems without the fear of being nailed for them.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“forward-looking accountability.”2 Accountability that is backward-looking (often the kind in trials or lawsuits) tries to find a scapegoat, to blame and shame an individual for messing up. But accountability is about looking ahead. Not only should accountability acknowledge the mistake and the harm resulting from it, it should lay out the opportunities (and responsibilities!) for making changes so that the probability of such harm happening again goes down.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability