Just Culture and the Role of Accountability Continued from page 43 Benjamin Goodheart is an aviation professional with nearly 20 years of experience in the field. His diverse career began in aviation line service and has expanded to roles in aviation safety and loss control, training, and professional flying. He has worked in and with a variety of aviation organizations, including flight training organizations, business and general aviation operators, and major airlines, and his varied experience affords him a wide variety of opportunities to practice within his passion. Benjamin is an active author and researcher focused on novel applications within aviation safety management and organizational climate and culture. He holds an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical work to build a sound and sustained reporting culture, where staff know firstly what to report, and aren’t afraid to report the things that almost happened. Reported data is used to create opportunities for organizational improvement, and a learning culture develops when leadership and front-line employees dynamically seek occasions to extract lessons from normal operations. Once satisfied that the culture has embraced reporting and learning, leaders can focus on supporting a just culture by modeling restorative accountability, that is, the forward- facing accountability that assigns responsibility for addressing harm, rather than blame. As Grimshaw, et al. note, “One reason why so many leadership conversations about accountability problems produce little action is that during the conversation the leaders find a way to rationalize why they are not really accountable for solving the problem” (2006, p. 12). For leaders, creating a culture of accountability in balance often means a frank admission that orga- nizations tend to function exactly as they are designed, which is to say that cultural change can rarely overcome entrenched, misaligned corporate structures. In organizations that suc- cessfully balance the tension inherent to a just culture, leaders are not only clear about expectations, they are also open to evaluating their own contri- bution to systems that inadvertently bias toward blame. To borrow from Keith Hatter, symbolism without structural change is a con perpetu- ated by people too afraid to change or who can’t be bothered to put in Benjamin J. Goodheart, Ph.D. the effort. Finally, accountability is not only organization-facing. Some space for individual agency nearly always exists, even in tightly-coupled systems with layers of organiza- tional control (Aveling, et al., 2016). Here, successful leaders focus not on balancing personal and organiza- tional accountability, but instead on understanding that the relationship between the two is not exclusive, but cyclical. Systems have to be designed in light of their ability to support—or hinder—individual competence. The problem, as Todd Conklin is fond of saying, is: “the thing about being wrong is that just before you know you are wrong, it feels exactly like you are right.” A just culture acknowledges this and, rather than focusing on blame, unpacks context to understand not only why, but how events could have happened. It wraps this shift in thinking in an organiza- tional commitment to transparency and learning, so that we can more readily access the tools people need to create safety as a capacity for resilience in the face of uncertainty. Just culture shifts our perspective to understanding from the bottom up, and to paving a restorative path forward, assigning accountability not as blame, but as the responsibil- ity for addressing harm. To do this, leaders must take a transformative approach and work not only to build systemic support for individual agency, but also to dismantle those trappings of the old ways of “blame and shame” if they are to reap the benefits of moving toward just culture. Now, let’s get to work. Aveling, E. L., Parker, M., & Dixon- Woods, M. (2016). What is the role of individual accountability in patient safety? A multi-site ethnographic study. Sociology of health & illness, 38(2), 216-232. Berlinger, N. (2005). After harm: medical error and the ethics of for- giveness (Vol. 18). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dekker, S. (2016). Just cul- ture: Balancing safety and accountability. CRC Press. Grimshaw, J., Baron, G., Mike, B., & Edwards, N. (2006). How to combat a culture of excuses and promote accountability. Strategy & Leadership, 34(5), 11-18. Mayer, C. M., & Cronin, D. (2008). Organizational accountabil- ity in a just culture. Urologic Nursing, 28(6), 427. Sharpe, V. A. (Ed.). (2004). Accountability: patient safety and policy reform. Georgetown University Press. Dr. Benjamin Goodheart is the Managing Director of Versant, an interna- tional safety and risk management firm based in Colorado. Benjamin has exten- sive experience in aviation safety management, planning and accident investigation. He is an ATP-rated pilot and flight instructor, and he holds a Ph.D. with a research focus on gen- eral aviation safety and organizational performance. To learn more about how Versant can help you manage risk, call 833-VERSANT or visit Versant on the web at versantrisk.com. Aviation Business Journal | 3rd Quarter 2018 45 REFERENCES
