Just Culture

I am not getting all technical here, I just believe this is a cool thing that we all should embrace and not only as it relates to Aviation Safety, but to other aspects of our personal or professional life. It is a good means of opening communication channels within the organisation.

Just Culture is an aviation safety culture that fosters openness and encourages people to report safety concerns as a part of a continuous improvement process. It promotes a non-punitive culture whereas people come forward and report their errors or safety concerns. However non punitive does not mean getting off free. It also assumes that the organization and management may have created situations that lead to unsafe practices and problems.

Just Culture looks at four (4) types of behaviours: Human Error; Negligent Conduct, Reckless Conduct and Wilful Violations. Once an error is reported an investigation to determine the root cause by looking at all probable causes whether they are personal, procedural or organisational.

If the violation was other than human error, then management has to look at some form of personal coaching or even taking punitive action.

The above is a very quick overview of Just Culture and probably a shallow one.

Just Culture is part of the Safety Management System (SMS) that is currently being mandated as a civil aviation regulation across the globe.

Be safe and enjoy

Double Standards

Double Standards, who among us have not voiced these accusations against parents, spouses and or bosses. We all had damn good reasons, didn't we. I never gave it a second thought, until I started giving Quality Awareness courses and found out that we wallow in Double Standards.
How so, in Aviation just as in other critical industries; Quality, Safety and Security are not nice things to have, they are core values, they are culture and should be second nature. We should breathe, think and live these values. (This is the party line)
Back to reality, in Quality there is a need for continuous improvement and we have that nice Plan, Do, Check, ACT (PDCA for short) process. In our personal life PDCA is intuitive, we plan to go some place, we start the journey (do) we find a problem we change our route (act) and then check again to see if there is another problem until we reach our destination. And we do that for every thing we do.
The other intuitive aspect is Risk Assessment, in our personal lives (unless we are distracted or doped) we run a quick risk assessment and mitigate the risk for every thing we do, be it crossing the street, driving, playing or cooking you name it.

So why don't we use it in our professional life, the standard answer is we are too busy with work, duh. Really, too busy to improve or be safe. Why is it when it comes to our personal issues we perform certain things and when it comes to work we don't even think of these things; Simple DOUBLE STANDARDS.

So please before you start accusing people of double standards, have an inward look at yourself.