A just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. It is particularly important when an incident has occurred or when something has gone wrong. How do you respond to the people involved? What do you do to minimize the negative impact and maximize learning?

This third edition of Sidney Dekker's extremely successful Just Culture offers new material on restorative justice and ideas about why your people may be breaking rules. Supported by extensive case material, you will learn about safety reporting and honest disclosure, retributive just culture, and the criminalization of human error.

Some suspect a just culture means letting people off the hook. Yet they believe they need to remain able to hold people accountable for undesirable performance. In this new edition, Dekker asks you to look at accountability in different ways. One is by asking which rule was broken, who did it, whether that behavior crossed some line, and what the appropriate consequences should be. In this retributive sense, an account is something you get people to pay or settle. But who will draw that line? And is the process fair? Other ways to approach accountability after an incident is to ask who was hurt; to ask what their needs are; and to explore whose obligation it is to meet those needs. People involved in causing the incident may well want to participate in meeting those needs. In this restorative sense, an account is something you get people to tell and others to listen to.

If you learn to look at accountability in different ways, your impact on restoring trust, learning, and a sense of humanity in your organization could be enormous.