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Accidents happen in non-capitalist contexts as well. Reaching for that as a cause without any evidence is weak. Profit motive is like gravity - it's always the

by csours 4y ago

Accidents happen in non-capitalist contexts as well. Reaching for that as a cause without any evidence is weak. Profit motive is like gravity - it's always there, in every society. It may have other names, like making your superior happy, but it's there. You have to guard against profit motive weakening your core values - you have to put up guard rails. If those guard rails are missing, that's very bad. If those guard rails are there, and people avoiding them is normalized, that's very bad. If those guard rails are there, and people get in trouble for avoiding them, that's very bad. If those guard rails are there, and you have a comprehensive process for reviewing incidents and updating rules and processes based on real world factors, then you're part of the way towards good safety culture. Safety culture is the decisions that individual team members and teams make. Safety culture is also the corporate process for evaluating incidents. And also the way that resources are or are not assigned when concerns are raised. And so many other things.

ff317 4y ago
This is exactly where those lofty Mission + Values statements come into play and why they're important when they're both written and lived well (as opposed to just some bland generic screed made from corporate buzzword bingo terms that everyone ignores). The Mission is what you're trying to achieve (the profit motive, in some form), and the Values are the guardrails. They say explicitly what things you won't sacrifice (like human rights and lives) in service of the mission. Having this stuff laid out clearly from the top down helps a lot with getting efforts to create and enforce those lower level processes taken seriously.
- csours 4y ago
  And when teams ask for resources to fix issues, they have to get those resources. Its all very well for an executive to say those lofty things, it also has to be funded. Unfortunately, sometimes people in the middle just assume that saving money is more important; the CEO might have told them to allocate resources, but the request just got squashed along the way.

by csours 4y ago

ff317 4y ago

This is exactly where those lofty Mission + Values statements come into play and why they're important when they're both written and lived well (as opposed to just some bland generic screed made from corporate buzzword bingo terms that everyone ignores). The Mission is what you're trying to achieve (the profit motive, in some form), and the Values are the guardrails. They say explicitly what things you won't sacrifice (like human rights and lives) in service of the mission. Having this stuff laid out clearly from the top down helps a lot with getting efforts to create and enforce those lower level processes taken seriously.

csours 4y ago
And when teams ask for resources to fix issues, they have to get those resources. Its all very well for an executive to say those lofty things, it also has to be funded. Unfortunately, sometimes people in the middle just assume that saving money is more important; the CEO might have told them to allocate resources, but the request just got squashed along the way.