PAPod 489 - A Deep-diving Conversation with Sidney Decker

Do you know that the title actually sucks? And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you more about why I wrote it and the way I did it. But it says, don't blame. And which is fine, right? It has a subtitle. And the photo's cool. Yeah, which isn't me. The pointing finger thing. So the credit for that goes to Evie, my daughter, who found it and created the cover. I was going to say, she's creative. Oh, she's super creative.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. And so, but don't blame is telling people what not to do, right? Which is stupid because, I mean, in some sense, it should be an encouragement for them to do something constructive, right? But we could still make the argument that telling people not to blame is a constructive exhortation, right? Music.

But hey everybody and welcome to the pre-accident investigation podcast i'm todd conklin how are you, you got to be excited i mean you have to because you know i try to start the podcast a little little different every time, which sometimes freaks people out. It's very weird. I sometimes get these emails and say, yeah, the podcast, something screwed up because it started in the middle. No, I just, that's art, you guys. I'm trying to make creative expression here happen in real life.

But you have to be excited about this because I'm not sure I've ever done a podcast, nor may I add, do I think I ever thought I would do a podcast that would start with Sidney Decker are saying the title sucks. That, my friends, is progress. That's what it looks like. That's what it smells like. That's what it tastes like. Now, today's fun. Today's going to be a conversation with Sidney Decker, Griffith University professor. He runs the Safety Learning Lab program.

He wrote many books, a bazillion books. I bet over, I bet he's got, I don't even, I should have looked this, a better person would have looked it up. I bet he's got like 14. I bet you I'm right too. So somewhere in that area. But the book he wrote that I love the most, and you'll hear me gush about a little.

This is an interesting podcast because it got a little gushy. I think part of it was the room we were in. We were in this really weird bride's waiting room. Yeah, that's what it's called, bride's waiting room. So it was a white room with roses and white furniture. And I don't know how you feel, but white furniture scares me and has since I was a child. I'm always certain something's going to fly out and stain it.

And so it was kind of this weird vibe, but we had an excellent, well, you'll hear, it's an excellent conversation.

Conversation and it's it we both get to talk about things that we're super interested in under the guise of the the don't blame book which is it's it's really a it's it was a one of my favorite conversations i've had in a long time so that's saying something i mean that's kind of right where it is how are you everybody recovering everybody doing good things happening getting into to the groove, as it were, because we're a quarter through the year. So you know what that means.

It's just time is zooming by, baby. And so as it zooms by, let's make sure we're entering the world in the spirit of gratitude because that's always valuable. Let's try to keep the same bike all year long. That's important to me, at least. And let's use this year to help forward our fellow human beings, our peers in the great struggle, so that everybody gets better. Wouldn't that be kind of a cool way to spend the year? I think so.

I think that would be pretty powerful. So the pod today, we recorded it in Wollongong on the GSIS, the Global Safety... Initiative Summit Intervention. Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's the name of it. And we got a chance to sit and record the pod. There is a little interruption in this pause. You'll hear it. And if you get it, you get extra credit. I mean, you can move your grade from a C to a C plus if you catch on to it. There's going to be a couple of these actually coming up.

But I left it in because I thought the magic of this pod was kind of how things went and how the conversation happened. So that's what you have to look forward to and listen carefully as we progress through. It's always interesting, at least in my mind, to talk to an author about their book, just because you can always hear a certain amount of promotion, and they should do that. I mean, that's kind of the point. And if you've not read this Blaine book, it's definitely worthwhile reading.

Reading i also in my head hear a little bit of not regret but a little bit of i would have i would have done some things differently had i been writing the book now which is at least in the books i've written perfectly normal you write the book you finally get to a place where you can stop that's the hard part of writing a book is figuring out that you have to stop because you can fix it it forever. And then you publish it. And almost immediately you find stuff that you're like,

crap, that's not what I didn't mean to say that. That is not what I wanted to say. Right. And so you have to kind of live with that. And that's, I always kind of hear that. Now that may be me projecting, but I don't know for sure or not. Listen and see if you hear it as well, but this is, it's a great conversation. Sydney and I've been friends for many, many, many, many years. And so there's a certain amount of comfort and trust, I guess, that we have with with one another.

And I think it kind of shows up in the conversation. I think you'll like, you'll like this conversation because again, we move into topics that both of us are incredibly interested in and that always kind of makes it valuable. So sit back and relax. This is going to be kind of a head scratcher. You're definitely going to have to think about some things, but listen to the conversation.

In fact, you're invited to be the third person in the room. Sit and enjoy the conversation between myself and Sidney Decker on Blame.

What would you call a book like that? Well, if I knew, I would have called it that. So I don't know. Yeah, okay, fair enough. That's 100% fair. If there was a better title, I would have given it that. I didn't realize how stupid that question was. It's a rather stupid question. Yeah, true. Although, I mean, it's a very, very obvious one. And one that perhaps encourages us to always think better, deeper, further and go, yeah, no, you can do better than that, right? Right.

But I think it's – so two things. One is why is it a crappy title?

Because, well, as I said, it tells people what not to do. but also because you know this whole idea about safety one versus safety two safety differently is the idea that you know it's not about the absence of negatives it's about the presence of positive capacities trying things to capacities and make things go well by saying don't blame, i don't know somewhere in the book i do talk about the capacity to forgive and to me i think that is When we get right down into the depths of the book,

perhaps that's one of the missing capacities from the Brazilians' repertoire. So I've become fixated on forgiveness. Partially because I started thinking about forgiveness. And forgiveness is something you can't do halfway. No. That it's a commitment in forgiving. I mean, that's the most obvious thing I've ever said. But it also speaks so much about moving forward, getting beyond, improving, getting through. Jacques Derrida said, an inscrutable French philosopher, like many French philosophers,

but Jacques Derrida said, you can only forgive the unforgivable. Yeah. And that's deep. There's something beautiful in that. I mean, but that's the point. That's true, right? That's absolutely the point I would make is that the hardest things you can't partially forgive and the hardest things, the things I most need to forgive for, those are the hardest things because they're the most unforgivable things. But there is no halfway. If I'm going to forgive, I have to forgive the unforgivable.

If I'm not going to, if I'm going halfway, then I'm not forgiven. So, so you and I know about our, our, our mutual love for banquets, right? For different reasons. This is why, well, we both detest them. Yes. Yeah, basically. They're loud, hideous, and boring. They're hideous and boring, which is why many listeners will not see as I want. I think, and I have started this, Todd, I think you're going to like this.

I have started asking this as a banquet question to people to whom you're introduced. The question being, so whom can you not forgive? Yeah. That's juicy. Wow. And that's a smack. Yeah, no, that's amazing. So tell me, whom can you not forgive? Oh, that's great. It's nice, eh? It's, yeah, yeah. So that's worth thinking about. But it's also beautifully tied into the notion of blame.

I mean, but it's such a more interesting, at least in my opinion, way to think about blame than seeing blame as a tool you turn on and off. That's an interesting way to put it. And if we use blame through, say, a policy or one of these just culture frameworks or flow charts, that is something that you turn on and off. And in some sense, you delegate sort of the moral responsibility for placing that blame onto the tool, right? Well, it isn't me. To the algorithm.

I wouldn't do this, but my hands are tied. Which is, as we well know and have demonstrated multiple times, BS because it is very much a human production, the way you walk through these algorithms, right? Because there's a lot of choices to make as you're going through it, right? So, and a lot of things to take positions on. Now, of course, none of this is easy, which is the beauty about trying to write a book about it that is as accessible as possible. And we'll talk about that in a second.

So we were talking about Kant in a different conversation that's not on this podcast, which is fine because you can talk about Kant a lot. I mean, Kant talks in some of his writings about the, which is pretty much an open door, I suppose, but the time irreversibility. I mean, which of course is a very Newtonian commitment also. Sorry, an anti-Newtonian commitment. A complexity commitment, right? If something has happened, you cannot have it unhappen because the world will never be the same.

Right. And so Hannah Arendt, a later German philosopher, journalist, who documented the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, she wrote about forgiveness, das Predikament der Unwiderruflichkeit, the predicament of irreversibility.

And however the next thing she says and Kant seems to agree is that absolutely you can't turn back the clock but the relational consequences do not have to be irreversible and I think that's beautiful sometimes and I have said this on occasion to people involved in these very difficult discussions and deliberations with themselves and others others, I say, don't worry about fixing the event. Don't worry about fixing the story about this. Worry about fixing the relationship.

Because you know what? You'll have to work together in the future, right? And so, I mean, yeah, unless you run them through a just culture card chart and get rid of them, but yeah, but that's not a constructive response, as we know, in most cases, right? So, and has lots of counterproductive consequences. But forgiving is hard. And forgiving doesn't necessarily mean that you do continue together, right?

There is plenty of – not plenty, but there's some writing in the literature on forgiveness that says that even if you decide to part ways, you can still forgive. In fact, the parting of ways can be an act of forgiveness, right? And say, okay, you go your way. I go mine. I forgive you. And so – and it's in a sense unburdens the forgiver.

Yeah. In fact, I think that freedom that it offers, what it really allows, at least in an organizational setting, it really allows the ability for you to become more open to learning. The notion that blame stops learning is really more of a notion about forgiveness. Yes, and perhaps even there, Todd, we're sending the wrong message, right?

Blame stops learning. learning undoubtedly true and a good soundbite however what matters more is what accelerates learning and what what one-liner can we throw at that right perhaps forgiving accelerates that's exactly there it is i mean that's exactly where i was the one-liner that's where you took me, is because i'm thinking about it i like it yeah i was thinking about it in in relational terms The moment I forgive the transgressor,

then I've opened up the dialogue to that relationship becoming different, better, larger, deeper, nicer, farther apart, whatever the outcome is at the end. That's actually a really important discovery. And I've been thinking about it a bunch. Is there a problem, Jay? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, kick them, yeah. Oh, no, it's fine. Yeah, no, it's fine. You know my podcast is not the Academy Awards, right? It's really, it doesn't bother me at all, actually. So that's good.

Okay, okay. But that notion of forgiveness, God, who would have thought this conversation would go here? Well, I think in some sense the book is pregnant with it, right? Yeah, it is. What is it that you do do? Well, forgive. Think about this. Find it in your heart. Find it. And there's very pragmatic reasons for wanting to forgive, right? Or for being invited to. You can never force people to forgive. That's impossible, right? Because then it would not be genuine.

It would not, you know, that's nonsense. And so even the people who are the putative transgressors cannot be, they can ask to be forgiven, but they cannot force somebody to forgive them because then it means nothing, right? So it has to be, as you said, no, well, actually you said in different contexts, but it has to be a voluntary free, well, or process for that matter. And so, nor, the literature is interesting on this. I mean, sometimes we think that it is sort of conditional, right?

Forgiveness is conditional on three things that precede it. So confession, repentance, and atonement, and then you forgive. But if we make forgiving conditional, it's not forgiven. Yeah. And it becomes partial. And it becomes conditional. You know, you have to meet these conditions and then we might see if we want to forgive you. Then it's not forgiving.

Then it's something else. You know, we will reintegrate you or we will reinstate you or give you another six-month contract or whatever it might be. Right. But it's not forgiving. Forgiving is literally undeserved. Remember Derrida, right? You can only forgive the unforgivable. If you only can forgive the unforgivable, it is per definition undeserved.

And will never be deserved. So if you try to deserve it by confessing, repenting, and atoning, and we'll talk about those in a second, because those actually have meaning within organizational context. And I think parts of it are already going on in various industries. I would agree. Right? So let's take confession first. Confession is literally truth-telling, right? And so I'm not Catholic, right? They do this for a living, right? And so I don't know how much confession is truth-telling.

But again, I'm not Catholic, so I wouldn't know. But truth-telling. Now, this is a primary component in open disclosure policies in healthcare organizations, in the sort of the no-blame laws that certain healthcare organizations or have been adopted by certain states, also in the US, particularly to protect doctors from disclosing mistakes. And work wonders, right? They accelerate learning.

They prevent lawsuits and all kinds of things. And they don't end, but they mediate some of the suffering that occurs, right, in the wake of medical error. And so confession. What then is repentance? Repentance is saying how bad you feel about that. So first I tell you the truth, and then I'll tell you that I feel that I've swallowed a brick. Right.

Or whatever it is that you want. And so that creates the emotive connection with the victim or whoever is on the receiving end of whatever you did or whatever you were involved in. You repent. Then you atone. How do you atone? Well, you fix what's broken. You fix the harm that has been caused. You could do this as a doc by saying, let's do this if they trust you or I'll get my colleague to fix you up or whatever it is, right, if you're still alive.

And so I can imagine atonement in organizations can be all kinds of things, right? I can atone by standing up and talking at the next toolbox meeting or shift start. Yeah, or safety meeting or whatever ritual of atonement can happen. And so fascinating, right, that Jewish people have a very simple solution. They're super pragmatic. Neither am I Jewish, by the way. So very pragmatic. They have the day of atonement, Yom Kippur. poor. So we just, we just collect it all for one day.

And then we say, oh boy, did we screw up last year, right? And you're supposed to reach out to everyone whom you couldn't forgive. And who couldn't forgive you? And that Day of Atonement sort of is a massive release. And it's very pragmatically organized. Perhaps – I'm just making this up as I sit here. This is not in the book. But perhaps organizations could organize their own Day of Atonement. It's not a bad idea, right? Don't we have always been in the forefront? Forefront, forefront.

But try to push out ideas in wacky directions and see where they end up in practice. So I'm not expecting this to happen tomorrow. But just a little seed in the head. But, I mean, you think about the sort of free data days. I mean, there are places where you could go in and say, today's the day you can tell us anything. Whatever rule is broken, we'll talk about it. Well, that case would be a day of confession, repentance. Right.

And that's kind of the tenets of apologia, you know, of apologies. I know. Yeah. But, I mean, I love how— It's a day of confession. Yeah. Yeah. We could start there. Well, because, not to sound too woolly, but it's got a cleansing property. It does. But what it really does is sort of start a dialogue from a much different place. Well, and serves, I think, relational affirmation. Yeah, it tees that up for sure.

If you have to trust other people that you work with to do their job so that you can do yours safely, then I think a day of confession, day of atonement could make eminent sense. Yeah. Absolutely. It's a really great idea. It's an interesting idea. None of this is in the book. We should write another book. So it's always, always more ideas. I was going to say, there's always another book.

Hey, so about this book. So I decided on your advice, my dear friend, to publish this through Amazon, which was a mixed, mixed bag. Easily, quickly available, Kindle. Is it audio? I have no idea. Audio. Yeah. Okay. I forget. It's the big audio thing, whatever it is. Yeah, okay. The quality of the production is from some of the reviews that I have. I try not to read reviews because good reviews never make you feel as good. Bad reviews make you feel bad. Yeah, that's true.

So it's not really worth it. But I did catch one which expressed some disappointment about the presentation and the final delivery of the book as opposed to the previous ones. So, and of course, my university has KPIs, right? And you need to be with a reputable academic publisher for the book to be counted towards whatever outputs I need to generate. I've refused to measure this, but I think I'm sufficiently productive as it is. Yeah, I think so. And those KPIs are changing.

This is actually true. That's a good point. Can't keep up, right? We're no longer in the 1970s, people. Well, and it's just a lot of publishing houses that are not publishing houses anymore. True. It must be a hard time to be an academic house right now. Or a publishing house. Yeah. This is true. But the book is called Stop Blaming, Create a Restorative Just Culture. It's available via Amazon, my website, Amazon, various other places.

Any bookseller, I think you can probably get it through. But it's slim. I don't even know how many pages it is. Don't know. But not many. 100 something? 110 or something. That's it? That's super breezy for me, man. Yeah. I think that's about right, too. That's just how I wrote it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it tells you, all right, so an incident has happened. Boom. All right. Now what do you do? What don't you do? Right? And my first recommendation is first.

Nothing. Sit on your hands. Unless there's, of course, something big ablaze and you need to fix that immediately. Stabilize the system. But do not pee in your pants trying to respond to, I need to show how important safety is. I'm going to do this, that, and the other thing. Don't do anything. Do nothing. And then I run through stress tests, what you can do in response to the incident.

And I talk about the various kinds of justice and the difficulty of just separating restorative from retributive, which is a popular thing to do. But there's always some retributive elements in restorative justice. I mean, even if you ask somebody to do a toolbox talk, right, to atone, and that's not their initiative, that can be experienced as retributive, right, as sort of punishment. And the thing about, I mean, the thing about punishment is punishment's in the eye of the beholder.

Totally. You have no intent to punish at all. My kids have made that very clear to me. Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely. yeah yeah particularly when there was differential punishment yes between them yeah yeah between the lot of them so that was one thing I need a short break sorry Jay because I'm trying to think what there is an important thing I need to say bye, we're over time anyway no we're good yeah yeah but I do need to say goodness I bet you're jet lagged between Brisbane and it's a whole hour, it's a whole hour it's huge huge oh it's an hour and it's like eight years and an hour.

I like brisbane brisbane's fun brisbane is fine it's it's laid back it's a very good lifestyle like santa fe it's kind of the hipster town oh absolutely yeah yeah without the winter, confession of fantasy there was something else really important about the book that i, ask me some questions if you have any, Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah. Then it cannot be important. Yeah, pull the mic back up. So what did this book lead you to thinking?

I guess what I want to ask is why did you write this book? But I'm more interested in what was the outcome in your mind after you wrote this book? Did you leave with new ideas? Did it reinforce old ideas?

Is i mean i always learn something new when i write a book it's always yeah you know absolutely and it generates more questions yeah i need answers that might lead to the next book yeah absolutely and in this case it certainly did i have been wondering i've been wondering as you know right i um i i became a chaplain last year on the very day my mom yeah the minister in our the preacher woman yeah died and

there's something perhaps there's something poetic in it perhaps Perhaps it's just numerology. Or perhaps people would say, you know, this is divinely led. I wouldn't subscribe to that. There are many ways you can put meaning on that, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. And I respect all of them. Yeah, yeah. And I respect my mom. But I did that. I did that in order to learn a language and a skill set that allowed me better emotional connection and access in the wake of a terrible event.

Because nothing of the stuff that we have learned so far prepares us for that, right? Yeah, I agree. Yeah, you can be sort of an emergency responder. Sure, there's a little bit of that. But the spiritual needs, I'm not necessarily in any belief tradition, but the simple spiritual need of meaning, why, existential questions, right? Survivor guilt, questions like that, right? They are not answerable within any of the frameworks or theories that we have. that we have.

It was an entire relational component to tragedy. Completely relational. Yeah. Why did this hit me in the head and not the other guy or why would the other guy dead? And I'm looking at him. Right. And so why didn't hit me? I mean, questions like that are, are pressing and, and, and huge in the wake of these sorts of incidents. And so what this did, this book, was it kindled in me.

Best ring ever. That's ridiculous. Um. So what this book kindled in me in terms of what to do next is I think if we have started talking about the capacity to forgive as one of the resilience capacities in order to accelerate learning. Yeah, yeah. Forgive to accelerate your learning. I think the next step is obviously to talk about compassion, kindness.

Very much so. The kinds of things that have been edited out of the conversation about capitalism and getting stuff done and making money and making your shareholders richer, right? I mean, these things disappear, yet we're not on this earth for long. I 100% agree. I have a friend who's a professor of social justice. Yeah. Very like you, too.

Amazing thinker, contemporary person. He talked to me about the relationship that the thinking that these new safety differently ideas have brought into the workplace that we're moving what was traditionally cleanly and neatly in a box that said the worker screwed up. It's an industrial accident. There are no moral or spiritual implications to this. Don't hold a nail gun to your head. Right. And he talked about the implications that widening the discussion has.

It actually, I can totally see why we both are playing around in this area because what's happened is it's no longer a workplace accident. No. It's actually much more. It's a moral. And there are moral and, in his terms, social justice issues. And spiritual implications, right? About meaning and existence. He didn't mean social justice in the just way. Workplace term, he meant spiritual. It was really an interesting conversation.

I would love to be in on that next time. Oh, you can, because he will gladly do it. But that's where, I mean, the very discussion you're having of that there's an act of confession, there's an act of forgiveness. But forgiveness is not something that is begged for. It is something that is given completely. Completely free. Yeah, it can't be partial. It has to be, you can't forgive, love the sin and hate the sinner, that kind of, right? Right.

And that's something, I mean, I've thought about this a lot, is that, not to get too freaky, but we treat error, or we traditionally have treated error as if it were sin. Oh, but even people themselves in certain professions, particularly professions that assert a very large degree of control over outcomes, right? Pilots, doctors, they can't forgive themselves. Yeah, high consequences. And that's, I mean, that's a whole different book.

And I talk about that a little bit, but self-forgiveness. Now, if there ever were a condition for forgiveness to work, it may well be that self-forgiveness needs to happen first. Otherwise, how can you accept somebody else's forgiveness? So I think I agree with you. I'm not intellectually – I don't know how to process that. That's really hard. That's deep.

It's really hard because the transgressions that we carry or believe we carry, we don't have that external – So the one thing if I forgive you and I offer it completely, you didn't ask for it, I offered it to you, is that the benefit I get is that I feel better. I'm not sure I can make that same case for self-forgiveness. I don't know why, but it feels different to me. There's another research question in there. But there may well be some literature

on it. I think it's an enormously important question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think people, I think you see leaders in organizations who struggle really with meaningfulness after a horrific event happens and honestly don't know how to feel. I mean, they don't know that forgiveness is a word they probably should think about. And that at some point until that happens, probably the organization itself will have a really difficult time moving on. At least in my experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a tremendous amount of guilt and shame and pressure that's put them in a position where they honestly don't know how to respond to that. And self-forgiveness is certain. Yeah, it's got to be vital. I just don't know how to do it. I haven't figured it out. That's all right. Next book. Yeah, exactly. I'll figure it out. This book's exciting. I'm pleased to, I mean, I think it's a great treat. it's it's a very very nice book and i think it's the timing's really right on it too tell me how.

Well, so I think one thing that the discussions that are happening really across industry, not just in safety, but across industry about how people identify in the workplace, how we manage people, the expectations we have, mental health, which comes in the dialogue a lot, work-life balance. All those questions are much more spiritual in nature. or relational in nature. I don't mean to scare people by saying spiritual, but it's much more relational in nature.

And that means we need a new set of tools to sort of understand. Remember Sully? Yeah. Of course we remember Sully. But I mean, at some point, I think he may... No, yeah. So he got the book Just Culture from the mayor of New York, right? Well, because he lost the book Just Culture from the Berkeley Library. Yeah, so no, the Fresno State Library. Oh, even better. Yeah, not as fancy.

I suppose, well, I shouldn't be saying that, but who am I? I was going to say, I would think they're very different libraries. They're different libraries, yeah. Just speaking entirely as someone who's been to both. Okay, so, which he had borrowed, which got wet in his landing in the Hudson, correct. And so Bloomberg gave him a new copy of Just Culture.

But then in that same presentation, Bloomberg, and I was aware of this only after it happened, But Bloomberg said that Sully's acts and the whole crew was sort of a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. And it is in that sense that I speak of spiritual. Yeah. I mean, it's not spiritual nonsense. Yeah. You know, let's light candles and things like that. No, no, no. The resilience of the human spirit. And that resilience is challenged when something

really bad happens. And it's that resilience that needs beefing up by answering or answer at least approaching these really difficult questions, right? Why me, not the other guy or – right? So –, That capacity, I think, yeah, we have a lot of work to do. And you're starting the discussion. Thank you, my friend. As usual. Thank you.

And there, my friends, you have it. The conversation between myself and Sidney Decker. I told you I found this to be stunningly interesting. But I'm 100% serious when I tell you I've become fixated on the notion of forgiveness. And it's a long story with lots of context, as every story is, in my case, involving one of my dearest friends and a rental house and an eviction. It's someday, if you want to hear it, I'll tell it to you. It's a long one, but it's an important one.

And I think that conversation was one of my favorites. So I hope you enjoyed it. It went a little long, so I owe you five minutes. Sorry. I suck. You're great. I'm terrible. Until then, learn something new every single day. Have as much fun as you possibly can. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. And for goodness sakes, you guys, be safe. Music.