Prof. James Reason, in his book from 1997, talks about five dimensions of safety culture.
One of them is “Learning Culture”.
He makes a long list of what needs to be in place: “observing, noticing, attending, heeding, tracking, reflecting, analysing, interpreting, diagnosing, creating, imagining, designing, planning, acting, implementing, doing, and testing (p.218)”.
But he doesn’t say how to do it.
As part of my Ph.D. I’ve reviewed over 30 different safety culture assessment tools.
Between them, they focused on over 80 different dimensions of culture, but only two touched on learning and listening to the workforce (Zohar&Luria, 2005; Mohamed, 2003).
Learning is too often seen as investigating failure and then sharing information hoping that the increased awareness will lead workers’ new behaviors and management actions.
Learning focused on listening is rare.
