First Video-Blog: Root Cause Analysis for Culture Change

Welcome to my FIRST Video-Blog (VBLOG)!

I will be doing my best to produce one of these VBLOGS per week.  I'll do my best to keep each one about 3 to 4 minutes in duration.  You can either look at the video, or simply read the text in this blog article.

Please let me know what you think!

Some say that culture has nothing to do with things that go wrong.  We say that is has everything to do with it.  The way we are is the cause of all that goes right and all that goes wrong.

Hello this is Bob Nelms and I’d like to talk a minute or two about culture.

Culture:  a way of life of a group of people – the attitudes, beliefs, values, and assumptions that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed on by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

I wonder if we can trace the causes of any and even all of our problems back to culture?

That’s the same thing as wondering if we can trace the causes of any and all of our problems back to our attitudes, beliefs and assumptions.

Let me ask you this. 

What if part of the causes of the image you’re seeing was a faulty high level alarm on vessel?  What if people know about that faulty high-level alarm, but didn’t do anything about it? 

I wonder why they didn’t do anything about it?  Do you think we could trace the reasons why back to their attitudes, beliefs, values, and assumptions?

If so, that’s culture.

As a person who’s been dealing with things that go wrong since 1974, I can categorically tell you that CULTURE is responsible for all that goes right and all that goes wrong. 

But I wouldn’t want to leave this discussion without pointing out something else.

Culture is people!

You can’t talk about culture without talking about people.

Everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong can be traced back to people – their attitudes, beliefs and assumptions.

Use yourself as a test-bed and you’ll see what I mean!

When something goes wrong in your life, ask yourself “what is it about my attitudes, beliefs, or assumptions” that contributed to this event? 

I don’t know about you, but I can ALWAYS find something about myself that contributes to my problems – ALWAYS.  Even more, I can ALWAYS seem to acknowledge that it’s something about the WAY I AM that is a bit problematic. 

The point is that together with everyone else around me, the way we ARE is CULTURE.

We are in the Root Cause Analysis business, which means we are in the Culture-Change business, because if CULTURE doesn’t change, nothing else will change.

See you next week.