An organization that listens to and learns from its people is constantly improving and understands that mistakes, errors in judgment, and the need to adapt are normal. Organizations should listen to and support their personnel by promoting a culture that:
- Encourages them to report mistakes and safety occurrences and
- Investigate them where appropriate.
When an organization is listening and learning in relation to safety, the following are true:
- Leaders support fairness, openness, and learning by encouraging personnel to speak up when things go wrong rather than fearing blame.
- Actions and decisions are understood before they are judged, and people are supported to learn from their actions.
- People are asked for their advice on designing systems that could improve things.
- Those responsible for managing incidents draw on human factors (things that influence people’s actions and decisions), investigations, skills, and expertise to fully understand how an incident happened, the lessons that can be learned, and how to adapt in the future.
A lesson is something learned by study or experience. The benefits of learning from experience (LfE) are anticipating and preventing other potentially more severe outcomes.
Lesson(s) learned from safety occurrence investigations and formal inquiries should be shared with stakeholders where relevant within the organization and across the wider safety community where appropriate.
Organizations should identify lessons from safety occurrences to predict better and prevent future safety occurrences and adopt good practice(s) in order to develop and drive continual improvement of their safe systems of work. This demonstrates a good learning culture within the organization.
Organizations may also learn lessons and adopt good practices from other organizations. These lessons and/or good practices should be adopted appropriately by the organization
to enable them to identify new methods and maintain currency with the most up-to-date industry safety standards and practices.
Source: UK’s Ministry of Defense
