I used to fly a lot. I don’t miss it. And when I boarded* an aircraft, especially from local operators in, say, Africa, I would sit in meditation hoping that they were maintained by a team that worked in a blame free culture.
It sounds contrary: surely something like aircraft maintenance needs accountability? Yes, but of the system, not the individual.
You’re working on a landing strut. You over-torque a fastener. Your eyes are tired and the index marks are small. You’re driving home and you think “was that a 6 or an 8?”. The aircraft is perhaps on the taxiway by now.
In a blame culture, you may be tempted to dismiss it. It probably won’t make any difference. There’s a tolerance built in. But in a systems culture you call someone who hits the big red button and the aircraft stops.
That’s not the important part. There are plenty of fail-safes built in so it’s vanishingly likely that an issue would have arisen.
There’s a diagnostic. You are interviewed by a team. Together you work through the whole process. They get a torque wrench with a digital display. Rosters are altered. A triple check is put in place. The checklists are updated. And so on.
And at the end you get complimented on identifying a system problem, not criticised for making a human mistake.
Learning takes time and requires investment. The most important problems are complex and don’t have simple solutions. Beware any leader who says they have “the answer”.
The blame mob stirred by a number of politicians and media outlets is harming our Covid response, but this obsession with half-arsed simplistic solutions could also be at the root of our perceived** productivity problem.
Infrastructure is a mess in many developed nations. Water systems are crumbling, power grids are failing. We are reaping the rewards of people focussed more on “lazy balance sheets” than understanding how things actually work – including people.
That’s the productivity crisis we need to fix, and that’s a problem of governance.
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* See what I did there? Not planed or deplaned or whatever invented word some illiterate with a marketing degree made up yesterday…
** Productivity tends to be measured by GDP, a metric so useless that even its creator said it should not be used to assess national progress.