Last month, at the EHS Congress, Berlin, Sidney Dekker unpacked restorative just culture, a new theory that goes beyond safety differently, while still keeping people at its heart. SHP editor, Mark Glover, was there.
Sidney Dekker, was given the following introduction before his presentation at the 2022 EHS Congress in Berlin:
“For the last two decades, or even longer, he’s given us ideas around just culture, around safety culture, around human error and recently he’s started to try and get us to think about safety differently,” said Andrew Sharman, Chair at the event. “In this session he is going to share what he believes is the new view and what he calls restorative just culture.
The stage was set then. To see Dekker share a new theory is special, and the audience knew it. One delegate told me over coffee that Dekker was the only reason she came to the two-day conference.
But to look ahead, let’s look back to 2012 and to the Safety Differently movement developed by Sidney Dekker et al who streamlined current thinking into Safety 1 and Safety 2. Here, Safety 1 was seen as the old, archaic and restricted linear approach, measuring failure (accidents, fatalities) and trying to prevent repetition by establishing rules and procedures. I’m summarising but it focused on things that go wrong, where people are seen as the cause of the problem.
Safety Differently
“In 2012, Safety 2 or Safety differently was born or rather constructed,” Dekker explained, while walking among the front tables, avoiding the stage and with no slides or presentation behind him – this was all vocal. “To Eric Hollnagel (one of the academics behind Safety Differently) the idea that safety equals the absence of negatives was always anathema, it was a really bad way to think about safety.”
“Erik had a crusade against human error – he said to me, ‘Stop writing books about human error. It’s a label, it’s nothing, it’s an attribution it doesn’t mean anything, but I kept thinking the public wants books on human error my publisher wants books on human error and so I kept doing it but I’m done now…I’m done.’”
“Stop doing it.” Dekker at the EHS Congress, shares his views on LTIs.
Dekker rallied against the trend of statistics, particularly around the false dawn of measuring lost time injuries (LTIs) “Stop doing it,” he urged, “It’s an exceedingly bad idea. Stop that nonsense. It creates a culture of secrecy, it creates a culture where people shut up, it creates a pathological culture.”
Strong stuff – but the new way was to put the emphasis on the human. He pointed at the audience. “The impetus was you guys,” he explained. “You came to us and said, ‘We’re stuck – We have rules coming out of our ears, we have so many rules that there is no hope that people are actually going to read this stuff before they do the work.’”
“Safety differently was driven by this quest that we were no longer improving – so what are we going to do differently? Well, the first thing we’re going to do differently is to see safety differently.”
In it the mantra, ‘People are not the problem, people are the solution’ at its core, yet Dekker the meaning was no longer hitting home, that we remain fixated in figures. “We need to move away from the assumption that safety is a bureaucratic accountability. We’ve all been sucked into this that safety is about showing numbers up the line, pushing data up the line, and showing good numbers to the point and all in the LTIs.
Away from charts, graphs and numbers he encouraged further understanding of what it is to be human, that we need to understand why failures are happening and be brave enough to look at ourselves as the reason.
“Nobody comes to work to do a bad job. If they do a bad job, it’s not because of them necessarily it’s because of the conditions that we have created that don’t set them up for success. Guess who’s responsible for that – we are!”
Stress test
He set up a scenario – an incident has just occurred in the workplace which he said should be viewed as a “stress test” of that organisation, which is stressed in three ways. The first is to react to the incident in a different way. Could it have gone worse?
“I meet very few incident analytic teams that ask if it could have gone worse and if so, why wasn’t it?” he said. “If you get good answers to that question in terms of buffers, capacity [it means] we have resilience in our people we have ability to mobilise resources in a way that makes this thing go away, then ‘yes’ you pass that stress test. Because it means that the capacity to not make the incident get worse is inherent in how you felt your organisation set up and the teams and processes that are in it.”
But what about those who think it didn’t get any worse because of luck? “Then you’ve failed because you can’t rely on luck…because it will run out at some point…and [it means] there is some interesting work for you and your employees to do.”
A second “miserable” failing of the test is the assumption that the incident can be dealt with by a poster or “another rule”, where he explains the incident is probably more a sign of a larger, systemic issue. “An incident is something that represents a pattern of behaviour that goes on all the time. Do you think this stuff is happening when there is no incident – think again.
Stress test number three, and perhaps the nub of restorative just culture – how are you treating people? “This is where you show your humanity,” he said. “This is where you show your understanding of where these things (incidents) actually come from. This is where you show your heart – or the lack of. This is where you show if you actually trust your people, or whether you can be trusted.
Organisations operate and ultimately thrive with social capital which is made up of strong, trusting relationships, that can quickly crumble when fingers are pointed. “Safety-critical businesses are strung up in these relationships,” he explained, “If you respond retributively to someone about an incident guess what happens to that trust? Guess what happens to that capital? You are destroying social capital. It is capital destruction.”
Restorative just culture
Too often, retributive questions follow an incident – who’s responsible? What should happen to the individual? Who’s to blame? “Instead,” Dekker says, “Ask who is impacted by the incident, not just the person involved but colleagues, customers, contractors, bystanders and ask this: what do they need. Because impact creates needs and then whose obligation is it to meet those needs?”
And here, is the crux of Dekker’s theory – asking questions around impact, need and obligations builds back the currency of social capital.
He concluded: “Those are the questions that can make restorative just.”
Click here to read coverage from this year’s EHS Congress in Berlin
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And as usual he’s absolutely right. Bur I’d argue that even more important than safety (In the UK 31 working age suicides to 1 workplace accident fatality) is the (positive) impact all of that has on mind-set, culture and mental health).