What is Just Culture?
Just Culture plays a central role in any area where reliability and safety are an integral part of everyday work - such as aviation. At the Platform's member organisations we create and maintain an atmosphere of trust that allows us to learn from failures as well as successes and thus continuously improve safety.
Why Just Culture plays such a central role here is illustrated in the following video, using the example of SWISS:
Just Culture is defined as
A culture in which operational staff or others are not held accountable for actions, acts, omissions or decisions commensurate with their experience and training, but gross negligence, intentional violations and destructive actions are not tolerated.
EC 376/2014 Art. 2 Para. 12
System complexity demands new approaches - in Swiss law, too
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The systems have become so complex in our 21st-Century world that an incident can no longer be attributed to a single action or an individual. Even if everyone does everything right, a system failure can still occur. So we have to admit that the old concept (also known as “Safety One”) is outdated. It suffers from two false assumptions:
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That we humans are capable of building 100% safe systems.
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That if everyone follows the rules, nothing can go wrong.
In the light of this, Just Culture should be understood as a conceptual approach that overcomes old and outdated thinking and addresses the challenges of today. Legislation that is almost 80 years old is not made for today's highly complex world. Just Culture is a step towards developing a modern civilisation - a step that must be taken if we are to ensure the future safety of our systems. This is where the reporting system plays a central role, because it provides valuable information on the system's performance.