Quotes from Sidney Dekker

A just culture accepts nobody's account as "true" or "right" and others wrong.

Creating a climate in which disclosure is possible and acceptable is the organization's responsibility.

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?

But errors are consequences: the leakage that occurs around the edges when you put pressure on a system without taking other factors into account.

The question is not how pilots can be so silly to rely on this, but how they have been led to believe (built up a mental model) that this is actually effective.

Indeed, automation does not fail often, which limits people's ability to practice the kinds of breakdown scenarios that still justifies their marginal presence in the system. Here, the human is painted as a passive monitor, whose greatest safety risks would lie in deskilling, complacency, vigilance decrements and the inability to intervene in deteriorating circumstances.

People have long been willing to trade freedoms for economic prosperity, which is where a compelling link to the promises (though not generally delivered realities) of neoliberalism becomes visible.

Safety and risk are made and broken the whole time, throughout your organization. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings.

A whole complex system cannot be inspected, only parts or sub-systems can be inspected.

Saying what people failed to do has no role in understanding 'human error.

We are amazed at how little organizations recognize and value the opinion of their workforce about operational and production issues.

What is the cause of the accident? This question is just as bizarre as asking what the cause is of not having an accident.

In complex systems, after all, it is very hard to foresee or predict the consequences of presumed causes. So it is not the consequences that we should be afraid of (we might not even foresee them or believe them if we could). Rather, we should be weary of renaming things that negotiate their perceived risk down from what it was before.

Our technologies have got ahead of our theories. Our theories are still fundamentally reductionist, componential and linear. Our technologies, however, are increasingly complex, emergent and non-linear.

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?