For more than two decades, the safety literature has treated Just Culture as a precondition for an organisation’s ability to learn. In the lived practice of many organisations, it remains retributive: it decides more carefully, but it still decides, who gets punished for an incident. In 2018, with Restorative Just Culture in Practice, Sidney Dekker put forward the sharpest formulation of the alternative. The book demands a frame shift that sounds simple in the reading and, in implementation, cuts across most organisational defaults.
What the book does
Dekker translates the distinction between retributive and restorative justice from criminal law into incident inquiry. Retributive logic asks: who broke which rule, and what sanction is proportionate? Restorative logic asks: what harm has been done, who is affected, and what is needed so that all those involved can keep working? The first examines guilt. The second restores the relationships the incident has damaged. Dekker shows that the second question is, in most safety reviews, simply not asked, even where Just Culture programmes formally exist.
From “who is at fault?” to “who is hurt?”
The first key point is the shift in the guiding question. Retributive Just Culture, even in its differentiated form with Reason’s culpability decision tree, stays centred on the acting person and their responsibility. Restorative Just Culture shifts the focus to those affected: not only the operator, but also those harmed, their families, the team that has to keep working after the incident, and the organisation whose trust has been shaken. This shift is not a waiver of accountability. It moves the question of to whom accountability is owed.
The three questions that take the place of the question of blame
From the restorative justice tradition, Dekker takes three guiding questions to structure any inquiry. Who is hurt: physically, psychologically, professionally, in trust? What do those who were hurt need in order to keep working? Whose obligation is it to meet those needs? This triad is the operational centre of the book. It does not replace the question of what happened and why. It adds a dimension that retributive reviews typically leave out, because its answers do not come in the form a sanction decision requires.
What changes in practice
On the implementation side, the restorative approach calls for different formats than the classic incident investigation. Just Culture boards that decide on guilt and sanction become inquiry panels that ask questions rather than render judgement. The acting person is not the subject of a disciplinary review. They are the person who tells what happened and which conditions made the events plausible. Those harmed enter the proceedings as participants whose needs are part of the resolution, not only as legal claimants. The organisation takes responsibility for the conditions under which the incident became possible, rather than pushing them onto the acting person.
Restorative Just Culture does not soften rigour. It shifts the question. Who is hurt, what do they need, whose obligation is that?
What this means in practice
The environment in which an organisation operates in Switzerland is structurally oriented toward retributive logic. Insurance proceedings, supervisory-authority reports, and criminal investigations work in categories of fault and sanction. Restorative inquiry runs alongside, or not at all. It competes with procedures that are faster, more documentable, and more readily connected to the legal framework. Reading the book alone does not change this structural situation.
What it can do is open a second track. In organisations that face the question of how all those involved are to continue working after a serious event anyway, Dekker’s approach offers concrete vocabulary for work that otherwise happens informally and without system. Where Just Culture committees today work with Reason’s culpability decision tree, the book shifts the understanding of what such a committee is meant to do in the first place. It does not replace the retributive function. It positions that function as one of two, to be handled separately. The legal and insurance inquiry has to take place. The restorative inquiry alongside it as well, with its own setting, its own facilitation, and its own output. Combining both functions into a single procedure is the most common implementation mistake.
The tension with criminal law
A structural limit accompanies the restorative procedure: the organisation operates within a criminal-law framework that it cannot set aside. In Switzerland, serious incidents in healthcare, in air or road transport, or in industry fall under the Criminal Code’s provisions on negligent bodily harm (Art. 125 SCC) and negligent homicide (Art. 117 SCC). Criminal prosecution operates with individual attribution of fault; restorative logic does precisely not. An organisation can run a restorative procedure and at the same time be drawn into a criminal investigation whose procedural logic runs counter to its own. That requires a deliberate separation of the two tracks. What is said in the restorative procedure must not automatically end up in the prosecutor’s file. Some sectors have developed protective arrangements: confidential reporting channels, statutory exclusionary rules for certain investigative material, separated Just Culture procedures with their own confidentiality regime. Others have not. Building a restorative procedure without taking this protective situation into account turns the acting person’s open account into their own criminal-law exposure.
What the book leaves open
Dekker shows the what and the why convincingly. The how remains more open. Anyone wanting to introduce a restorative procedure into an organisation in which retributive procedures have been in place for years gets the vocabulary from the book, but not the transition path. The question of how the two logics can be coordinated in practice, without the restorative variant becoming an optional add-on, stays unanswered. This is the gap at which most implementations fail.
Who this book is for
The book is worth the time for safety officers, Just Culture committees, and senior leaders in healthcare, in air and road transport, in industry, and in the public sector. Also for internal investigation functions facing the question, after an event, of how to move forward. Anyone using Reason’s culpability decision tree as a tool should have Restorative Just Culture in Practice at hand before the next sanction decision comes up.
Sources
- Sidney Dekker – Restorative Just Culture in Practice, Routledge 2018 (main source)
- Sidney Dekker – Just Culture: Restoring Trust and Accountability in Your Organization, 3rd ed., CRC Press 2017
- James Reason – Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents, Ashgate 1997