The Learning Journey: IAEA Safety Culture Continuous Improvement

Stanley Deetz, Ph. D. University of Colorado at Boulder Boulder, Colorado, USA

Learning In Organizations

Individuals, groups, organizations and communities learn following a similar process. How learning occurs and doesn’t occur are both important.

Most learning for each is incremental where information and understandings confirm and embellish accepted paradigms.

Accepted paradigms serve as a type of pre-understanding or recipe directing observations and ways of talking, thinking, and acting.

The Significance Of the Pre-Understanding

All creatures have antennas attuned to their routine environment.

Like antenna, pre-understandings direct attention to the world extended in instruments, provide a vocabulary directing ways of thinking and talking, and are institutionalize in policies, checklists, and routine responses, etc.

Culture as Pre-Understanding

“Culture” as a shared pre-understanding, directs a group toward a particular way of attending to and talking about people and events.

In this sense, “culture” can be considered as shared “lens.” As a lens it helps groups see and pay attention to some things rather than others.

The shared nature of these allow common understanding, ease and efficiency.

Transformative Learning

The very things that make the pre-understanding functional in normal situations makes it disastrous in abnormal ones. Think of a bug with a new predator for which it has no sense equipment to detect.

Transformative learning occurs when a “difference” or anomalous event is detected that puts into question the complex pre-understanding in place.

Non-Learning Loops

The “difference” or anomalous event is ignored

or not brought to attention.

The “difference” or anomalous event is

rationalized, exceptualized, or minimized.

The “difference” or anomalous event is not used

to transform the integrated system

The Cost of Being Incremental When Transformation is Needed

When a “difference” or anomalous event does not lead to a transformation a rapid negative spiral usually occurs.

The response is most often more of the same harder and faster accelerating the spiral.

Can each of you think of any instance of non-learning?

Learning Conversations and Learning Culture

When is transformation learning needed?

What is needed for transformational conversations?

Designing Transformational Learning Conversations

Shared space is a practice and needs practice, not a concept or teaching. If not trained it will not happen when most needed.

Emotional readiness requires reduced states of physical and identity threat.

“Difference” has to be included, prized, and utilized.

Cultural Change and Herding Cats

Like cats, people are not sheep nor cows and resist when treated as such.

Like string, people are better pulled to the future than pushed. Culture that pulls is a co-constructed enablement rather than a given constraint.