 As someone said to me a little earlier today, I'm going to rattle a cage a bit. So I guess that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk to you about the use and abuse of culture. And I'm going to be fairly critical of the way these terms are used. The terms culture and particularly safety culture are very widely used by safety professionals and in business circles. And I'm very familiar with that term being a sociologist because culture is our bread and butter in sociology and in anthropology. It's been sort of the core concept in those disciplines for 100 years or more. But safety culture is very much a Johnny Come Lately. It's a new concept, really appeared on the scene late last century. It is very much a Johnny Come Lately and it's one of the most misused and abused of all these terms. Now I'm not the first to make that point. I think in the year 2000 there was a safety journal editorial that made the point that it was called culture's confusions and the author made the point that there is no agreement, confusion reigns about the meaning of these terms in safety and business circles. And nothing has changed. There continues to be nearly 20 years later. I like to use the term fog. I think that safety culture is a bit like a fog that comes down and eyes glares over and meaning disappears from the conversation when we start to use these terms. Okay, so I'm going to advance five propositions. The first one will be about six propositions. The first five will be about culture. Only the last will be about safety culture because most of the focus needs to be on the concept of culture itself. So the first question I want to raise is this. Is culture a characteristic of individuals or a characteristic of groups? When management seeks to change culture, what are they trying to do? They're actually trying to change the terms you hear are things like mindset. They're trying to change the mindsets of individuals. They're trying to change core personal values. This is the language that we hear about. So core personal values, mindset, clearly in the minds of these managers who are advocating cultural change, they see culture as a matter of individual values, individual characteristics. So here's the safety manager of one large company. He says safety performance has been achieved through our unwavering commitment and dedication from all levels in the organization to create a safety culture which is genuinely accepted by employees and contractors as one of their primary core personal values. We went on the aim is to create a mindset that no level of injury is acceptable. If that is the approach you have to culture, how do you achieve it via education clearly? If you're trying to change people's values and attitudes, some kind of educational process is what is required. And the implicit assumption here is that culture is the characteristic of individuals. That stands in stark contrast with the views of social scientists for whom culture is a characteristic of a group. And if it's a characteristic of a group, we must always specify which group we are talking about. When people talk about culture, you must ask, well, what the culture of whom? The culture of what group you're talking about here? Is it the work group? Is it the organization? Is it the corporation? The point is that each of these has its own culture. They may overlap, but they're not necessarily the same. And we need to understand that fact because that helps us to understand a lot of the complexity we see in subcultures within organizations. So let me draw out the implication of this notion or the implication of this distinction I'm making because there are some significant implications of the distinction. If culture is a characteristic of individuals, it means that individuals can take it from one group to another. If it's a characteristic of it like personality, a relatively invariant characteristic of an individual, then we can take it from one group to another. So here is another spokesman saying this. Real commitment is trying to inculcate a safety culture in his people. Real commitment to safety can't be turned on at the entrance gate at the start of the day and left behind at the gate on the way home. Safety and well-being of fellow employees is extended beyond the workplace in this company. A true commitment to safe behavior is developed by promoting safety. It's a full-time 24-hour attitude both on and off the job. And that whole focus depends upon the assumption that culture and safety culture is the characteristic of individuals. But if culture is the characteristic of a group, it's a group property, then the attitudes to safety may indeed change when we pass through the factory gate. One thing on one side of the gate, because we're in one group on one side of the gate, we may be in quite a different group on the other side of the gate. When we pass through the gate, the next thing we may do is go and join our friends in the Motorcycle Club or the Hang Gliding Club in which the attitudes to risk will be totally different from the attitudes to risk which are encouraged within the workplace. And in that external peer group, the culture there is quite different from the culture in the workplace. And the individual can move perfectly happy without even realizing what they're doing from one set of attitudes towards safety which are appropriate in the workplace to another set of attitudes which are appropriate in the Hang Gliding Club or the Motorcycle Club, where the aim of many people is to go as close to the edge as you can because that way you are demonstrating your skill. And for people who fall over the edge, the usual view is they were careless or they were silly, but it won't happen to me because I go as close to the edge as I can and I'm skillful so I stay on the right side of that edge. So the attitude to risk in that kind of context may well be absolutely different from the attitude in the workplace. So that's the proposition. The first proposition I want to recommend to you. The culture is the characteristic of a group, not an individual. And talk of culture must always specify the relevant group. If it doesn't, it's incomplete. You really haven't said very much until you specify which group it is you're talking about. The second proposition concerns the influence of national cultures. A nation is the group here, the relevant group is the nation, so we can talk about a national culture. There will be certain attitudes and values and behaviours which are characteristics of nations. Companies often complain, I hear them complaining quite bitterly, that they're fighting with a national culture which is overriding their own attempt to create a culture of safety within their organisation. That the national culture is more powerful than the organisational culture that they are trying to promote. So I hear for example big companies working in both Australia and P&G talking about Australian workers have a certain attitude to culture to rules and procedures which is one of resistance and they're not willing to comply with things unless they see the point. Whereas the workers in P&G will do whatever they are told and this they see as a demonstration of difference in national culture. Now I'm a bit sceptical of that analysis because I suspect there's another issue here and that is the extent to which those workers are vulnerable in their jobs and I think that a worker in P&G working for a big company is probably a lot more vulnerable than a worker in Australia is and so that may well account for those differences. But nevertheless let's assume there are these national differences. Now what I want to say to you is that there are some careful studies, good studies done by psychologists which demonstrate that organisational cultures can override national cultures if the organisation so wishes, if they put the energy into it. The conclusion of one of these studies was that perceived management commitment to safety exerts more of an impact on workforce behaviour and subsequent accident rates than do fundamental national values. I reiterate that was a careful study which over a lot of people looking at variations between national cultures and also variations between organisational cultures and it came to that conclusion that the organisational culture perceived commitment to safety is more important than national culture in determining their behaviours of individuals. And when you think about it, there are some examples which demonstrate the point fairly convincingly. Talking to a big multinational oil company some years ago they were about to build a very large vessel in a Korean shipyard and they were concerned that the fatality rate in Korean shipyards was very high and from their point of view quite unacceptably high and they tended to see this as a feature of Korean culture, national culture as opposed to the European, this was Shell actually, Shell's culture in the national context in which other European contexts in which Shell operates would not have accepted that high rates, high fatality rates which were apparently accepted in the Korean shipyards. And the question was how are we going to deal with this presumed national culture in Korea? Well to their credit they didn't accept that this was somehow or other something that was inevitable, inevitable. They said we are not going to accept that, we are going to demand that, and this was part of the contract that if anybody is killed in the shipyard that the senior manager in that area will be sacked immediately and the first time this happened that first manager was sacked immediately and the safety behaviour in that shipyard just changed like that, just like that. Because Shell had put in place a really powerful mechanism to ensure that it got the safe behaviour that it wanted. It was not intimidated by the notion of national culture. I don't believe in national, I mean I don't think, in fact this is an aspect of national culture, it's more an aspect of the level of economic development of countries because that same behaviour was very prevalent in the UK in the 19th century. So it's about where you are in terms of your economic development. But organisations, corporations can if they wish and if they put the energy into it and make the commitment they can create the cultures they want. So this is the next proposition then that organisations have it within their power to ensure that organisational cultures override national cultures. There's an interesting corollary here where sometimes the question is asked how long does it take to change a culture? And I was at a conference a little while ago where a very eminent speaker said oh it's hard to change the culture of a big organisation, it takes five to seven years. And I thought that's just nonsense. The fact of the matter is as soon as the behaviour of a top manager changes and there are consequences the culture begins to change. It's very quick, it's actually very quick if the people at the top mean it. They have to mean it. So I mean you don't get, you don't change the whole culture of the organisation overnight but there's a process that starts which is a rapid process. It takes place quickly. Okay, now the next one I want to talk about is the definition of culture. And of course there are numerous meanings of culture. In anthropology the term refers to the meanings which people attach to artefacts. That's a standard kind of definition in anthropology and often in sociology. Now within organisational context that's not as relevant. There are other kinds of meanings which we use. They divide roughly into two main approaches. Those which emphasise values and norms of groups. We're always talking about groups. The ideational elements if you like and on the other hand the practices, the things that people do, the organisational practices. And most definitions will emphasise one or the other. These are not contradictory definitions but there is a question about which of these definitions is useful to emphasise. And my view is that the most useful to emphasise is the way we do things around here. Now I realise that's a simplistic, well some might think it's simplistic definition but I actually think it's a very sophisticated definition which does incorporate most of what we need to think about when we're talking about cultures. So it's the practices. Now why do I say it's sophisticated? Well first of all around here, that's a reference to a group. Around here means it's vague but it's saying we need to think about well what is around here mean, is it the work group, the peer group, and what is, it could even be the nation. So there is a reference to the group involved or implied in that definition. That's the first point of sophistication about that definition. The second thing is it's collective, it's what we do. This is not about individual practices, it's the practices of the group. There's a collectivity involved here. And the third interesting thing is that there is a value element to that expression. Now I don't know what you think about this but when someone says this is the way we do things around here, can you hear a kind of normative statement this is the way we ought to do things? That's implied in that isn't it? If anyone says this is the way we do things, what you're hearing is not only do we do it this way but we ought to do it. So that's the normative element coming in there, the value element, the psychological element if you like. So that definition incorporates all its importance in my view in culture and it's a very helpful definition to think about partly because it helps us get away from the waffle, it helps us say alright what is culture, it's what we're doing around here, it's the practices, the collective practices. I've seen people say put up models and fancy models saying here is organizational practices here and that leads to a culture and I say no no no, the organizational practices are the culture. At the moment you say they lead to a culture you're asking well what is this culture and what is this thing? It becomes very nebulous. No the culture is the organizational practices, what we collectively do around here. So the normative element, this is the right way, this is the accepted way that we do things around here. How do we know that there is that normative component by the reaction? If there is because it's the reaction which demonstrates that this is a required behavior. I remember going to walk in being in a large headquarters of a large organization a few years ago and I was walking down a staircase and I had a bag in each hand and I certainly therefore wasn't holding the handrail and one of the managers who I was with said oh look would you like me to hold one of your bags as we go down here so you can hold the handrail? So I said thanks. So that was a reaction to my non-compliance with that company rule as you know most big companies stick rigidly to that rule and other similar sometimes trivial rules when they should be focused on more serious things. But it was rigidly adhering to that rule. I knew this was a rule because there had been a reaction to my non-compliance. It wasn't a punitive reaction but it was a reaction that made me realize that I better do the right thing around here. This is the way they do things around here. On the other hand on my campus the ANU there are signs saying in the pedestrianized areas cyclists must dismount. Well cyclists never dismount. And there are never any consequences. So what we say then is despite the university rules and the university's belief about what ought to be the case is not part of the culture because it's not part of the way things are done around my campus. I think there's another reason for preferring a definition which focuses on practices rather than trying to talk about mindset or values or those ideational components. And that is this. If you're really going to focus on practices they can be seen, observed and changed for. Management can seek to change those practices whereas values are much harder to change. Harder to see, identify, harder to change. Let me read to you the words of an organizational anthropologist who says this. Changing collective values of adult people in an intended direction is extremely difficult if not impossible. Values do change but not according to someone's master plan. Collective practices however depend on organizational characteristics like structures and systems and can be influenced in more or less predictable ways by changing those structures and systems. So this is a reason, a practical reason for focusing on practices rather than values. And I need to make the point that these two things are complementary that it's not about focusing on practices and ignoring values they go inextricably hand in hand and let me tell you why it is because there's a fundamental human characteristic that we don't like our behavior to be out of alignment with our values. We'll tolerate it to varying degrees but on the whole we like our behavior to be in alignment with our beliefs and our values. Psychologists call that cognitive dissonance. We don't like things to be inconsistent, our values to be inconsistent with our behavior. So the interesting thing then is that if you change the behavior and it's no longer consistent with the previous values of that person, those values will shift over time and come into alignment with the new behavior. So I'll give you a specific example that always strikes me as a powerful one. Many years ago now when seat belts were introduced people simply didn't wear them and so it was not necessary. From their point of view, safety didn't really require the wearing of a seat belt. That was their mindset, their attitudes, their values. However, then the seat belts make compulsory and people you started to get fine for not wearing your seat belt so of course you buckle up and then after a while that becomes the habit and becomes the way we do things around here is we buckle up the ultimate reason we do this is because if we don't we might get fined but now we're now faced with a situation we're routinely buckling up but we previously thought this was not necessary so now our values start to change our beliefs start to change this is probably a good idea that really it's going to save lives if we buckle up in this way. So that's an example of the way you change the behavior and then the values change, the thought processes will change and it's interesting this routine behavior so accepted that if you take off without your seat belt not only will your car beep at you but if you get over that fact you're likely to feel a little unsafe there's a strange feeling there's something not quite right here and you're likely psychologists have done some interesting work on that for a short period you're going to drive more safely and more carefully because your seat belt is up and therefore you're at greater risk. That doesn't last for very long but it's a demonstration of how this attitude now that wearing the seat belt is appropriate safe behavior that idea is now ingrained in our thinking. Okay so let's move on to the next proposition I want to talk about description versus explanation versus culture as explanation I think it's really important to think a bit conceptually about culture if we consider an idea that the idea of a culture of casual compliance I've often come across this phrase or something like when people are explaining an accident they say oh this organization had a culture of casual compliance now that's the best way to think of that is as a descriptive statement not an explanatory statement it's a descriptive statement and it's a statement that people feel no particular need to comply around here they comply with rules when they find it convenient to do so and not otherwise so that's I think a useful way in which we can talk about think of culture as a description now we can also treat it as an explanation what? an explanation for individual level behavior if if culture around here is that when we do work at heights we don't actually wear the appropriate safety harness then if I as a new worker say oh shouldn't we be wearing a harness when I go up there and I get poo pooed by my fellows then I will feel constrained not to wear that safety harness in the appropriate way so in that case the culture of that workplace does become an explanation for why I as a new worker adopt that behavior because cultures have this coercive, this normative effect on individuals it becomes an explanation then for my behavior so it's useful if you're trying to explain the behavior of an individual but if we want to go back a step and think about culture as a description of the collective behavior of the group it is a useful a useful description because it collects together into one category a set of behaviors which then you can start to say why is it that people are not complying in the other circumstance and so that in itself invites a higher level of understanding it invites a quest to explain why it is that we have this culture of casual compliance and as soon as you ask that why question you get into very useful kinds of explanatory factors like lack of supervision or incentive systems that are encouraging people to take shortcuts or the fact that the procedures themselves are very difficult to comply with their poor procedures and these are really useful explanations we can do something about it we can really do something about that on the other hand if we treat it as an explanation of individual behavior I'm saying this person didn't wear their seat belt because there's a culture in this group of not wearing their seat belt that then works against explanation this becomes a strategy for blaming all the people involved as soon as you start to blame people interestingly the quest to understand and explain goes out the window I'm not sure why that is it seems to be a fundamental psychological fact that if we can pin blame on somebody our quest to understand disappears so it's not very useful it's not a very useful strategy to say okay we're going to use culture as an explanation for this individual behavior because we identify a failure of the culture at the level of culture at the end of story it must not be the end of the story that's the point where we begin where we begin our explanation I think the proposition I want to leave you with at this point is this one that in the organizational context it's usually better to treat culture as a description of group behavior because that invites the why question why are they behaving in this way rather than as an explanation for individual behavior because that stifles the why question it terminates the the five why process which we should be adopting okay now the next thing I want to talk about is the sources of organizational culture then if we accept that we want to understand why this culture exists as it does what are some of the sources factors that give rise to the culture that we observe and the first one is structure the structure of the organization now I'm going to give you an example of how organizational structure creates culture in a different context not safety, not immediately about safety anyway and it's the culture of railways that one of the very powerful elements of the culture of railways is a powerful commitment to on time running to ensure equality trains are supposed to hit their targets within within three minutes so this is a very powerful culture that operates in most railway environments and what that often means is that trains are traveling faster than they should be they're traveling undangerously fast and in order to comply with that culture of on time running and the reason I'm interested in this is to go to New South Wales identify this culture of punctuality of on time running as one of the causal factors leading to that accident because the driver was speeding in order to catch up time so the question is how is that culture of on time running created now it's not just a mindset I've made this point so it's a set of practices it's a detailed monitoring there are sanctions against drivers who fail to meet schedules one driver at the inquiry described how when he, if he arrived late he was subject to quite intimidating questioning questions he would get from his supervisor were something like this you lost time son where, speak up, speak clearly in other words he'd done the wrong thing and he was being criticised for this and possibly punished for it and if his reason was not satisfactory he would have had to go to the factory a more senior manager spoke to the driver and extreme cases there would be a fine or suspension for the day all of that involves a massive organisational apparatus large numbers of people whose job it is to ensure that the trains run on time the figures are assembled twice a day and presented to the top management of the train company twice a day in relation to the morning peak hour and the afternoon peak hour so that's the first point it's your sense of how closely they are scrutinising the data the systems that they have to ensure that their trains run on time a massive organisational apparatus so that's a very clear example in the way a structure, an organisational structure will create a culture the culture of on time running okay so that's the first point the structure of an organisation will create the culture within the organisation culture and structure are somehow independent factors that have to be dealt with have to be balanced in some way what I'm putting to Israel a different proposition that the culture is actually created by the structure you get the structure right you resource it right and you'll get the culture you want so how you resolve that divergence of opinion maybe is up to you but there are different perspectives on these things okay so this but now the second interesting approach to how you create the culture is leadership leadership is often suggested as the way we approach create the culture we want and at the shine an organisational psychologist makes this point leaders create cultures and administrators live within this particular quote as a provocative sarcastic quote if you're happy to be a manager fine you live within the culture but if you're a leader you'll recognise you have the capacity to change it and how do leaders change cultures they create and change cultures by what they systematically pay attention to this means anything from what they notice and comment on to what they measure control reward and what they do with think about on time running how did those managers create that culture of on time running by measuring controlling and rewarding the behaviour they wanted so in other words these two approaches I'm talking about structure and leadership are actually consistent with each other what we have is the leaders if they want to create a certain culture of rewards and measurement and control and so on which will generate the culture that they want and once we understand if we see that as a causal connection a structure that corrects the organisational culture we can then go a step further and ask where does that organisational structure come from why are the leaders setting up that kind of structure and we'll often find that we need to go outside the organisation to understand why it has the structure and that it has in the case of railways why are they so concerned about punctuality there are enormous pressure exerted on them from outside the organisation there are various political and public channels to run on time and indeed there are regulators who may even penalise them for failure to run on time so the proposition I want to suggest to you and I'm going to read it slowly so that we can really think about it organisational cultures depend on the structures that organisations put in place to achieve important outcomes these structures reflect the priorities of top leaders the priorities of leaders in turn may depend on factors outside the organisation such as regulatory pressure and public opinion or shareholder pressure market pressure these are the best known examples of external pressure which will dictate the kind of structures that many organisations put in place now finally a few words about safety culture let me start with the definition which is widely quoted when anyone starts to think about safety culture this is probably the most widely quoted definition which then is immediately ignored let me explain what I mean here is the definition from the I think I have it here the International Atomic Energy Agency this was created after the Chernobyl nuclear accident where safety culture became quite a significant concept and idea and the agency produced this definition safety culture is that assembly of characteristics and attitudes which establishes that as an overriding priority nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance and obviously it is in the context of the nuclear accident but it is where safety is as an overriding priority is given an overriding priority then we can speak of a safety culture it is only when the organisation gives that as an overriding priority that we can speak of a safety culture now for most organisations safety is not an overriding priority many people will make the point that it cannot be otherwise the organisation would be out of business but for most organisations which are not strictly in business like aspects of the military and some other activities where their primary goal is not business that they can make a commitment to safety as an overriding priority at least in peacetime so for most organisations safety is not an overriding priority it follows that most organisations do not have a safety culture I hope you understand that as a matter of logic most organisations do not have a safety culture I remember hearing Judith Hackett making this very point at a previous conference that I went to that very few organisations can really claim that they have a safety culture in the sense that it is a culture where safety is the overriding priority yet people will give you that definition and immediately ignore it because they are talking about all organisations having a safety culture it may be a good safety culture or a bad safety culture or an indeterminate safety culture but when you listen to people talking they are assuming that all organisations have a safety culture now I don't know, as an academic I just can't stand that kind of inconsistency it just blows me away I just get really irritated by it but that's my particular cross to bear I guess one of many problems associated with the concept of safety culture here is how one review of the concept described the situation there is no agreed definition on the term safety culture and no definitive model of safety culture the literature is large, diverse, fragmented confusing and ambiguous there is little evidence supporting a relationship between safety culture and safety performance in a practical sense it is fruitless to continue to attempt to define safety culture rather than trying to change something as nebulous as safety culture the focus should shift to changing the organisational and management practices that have an immediate and direct impact on workplace safety now to which I say wow if I were a safety practitioner I would breathe a sigh of relief I can ditch this concept of safety culture and get on with what's important it's the practices in this organisation I don't need to worry about whether I call this culture or safety culture or I don't need any other language to deal with this I can get straight on to the issue of focusing on the organisational practices and getting them getting them right let me give you a practical example of what all this means I was studying BP, Texas City a big accident that BP had had a culture change program just a few months before the accident they were trying to change their safety culture in a particular way for those of you who know this language they were trying to encourage BP to be a high reliability organisation don't worry about that if you don't know what that's referenced to but what they were trying to do is to get people to be sensitive to warning signs and weak signals of the danger might lie ahead those words are in quotation marks because this is what they were actually trying the language they were using and people they went through workshops and people got pretty good at identifying warning signs and weak signals of danger lying ahead and started to report these things as they were supposed to but the problem was the organisation did nothing with the reports because it had not allocated any additional resources to respond to those reports and so people became rapidly very disillusioned with that whole approach the problem was there were no practices to match what they were trying to teach their workforce so that's what we need to get right, we need to focus on those practices in this case what do we do how do we respond to reports which our workforce provides to us think about these terms safety culture, organisational culture workplace culture, peer group culture aviation culture which is the odd one out I'm going to suggest to you well any suggestions as to which is the odd one out aviation aviation, any other suggestions well for me the I mean I can see why you say aviation but for me the one that's the odd one out is safety culture why because all the others are a reference to the group aviation is a reference to the aviation industries in that sense it's a group but safety culture is the only one that doesn't give a reference to a group, safety is an adjective and so immediately begin to see there's something funny about this concept but I've got to the point where I I've really abandoned the term all together when I wrote a book some years ago called safety culture and risk with a comma after safety as you can see on the screen even then that was 10 years ago I was disturbed about the concept but now I think if I had my way I would ban it from the English language so I'll just say that doesn't mean to say we need to I mean you can replace it very often you can just replace it with safety why don't we just say safety or the concept I like is operational excellence we can advocate a culture of operational excellence that's a much more powerful concept for me than a culture of safety so I'm not abandoning I think it's good to have language that we can use we need to get the right language so thank you very much