No Blame Culture is promoted in the nuclear community in which the possibility of a misdeed is acknowledged and its reporting is encouraged, and the staff in question will not be sanctioned for the misdeed except that it is wilfully committed and in bad faith. Timely reporting will facilitate identifying the cause and the consequence, implementing immediate mitigative measures, identifying weakness in personal capability and in management control so that the relevant training and corrective actions can be taken, and allowing the lessons to be disseminated both in-house and within the community so that similar misdeeds can be reduced. The culture is also promoted in professions that seek high performance reliability such as aviation and health care.

An organisation that adopts No Blame Culture often tends to emphasise honesty and professional integrity, share understanding of human behaviours and recognition of business challenges, show respect to expertise and be solution-oriented, while showing team spirit, trust, respect and a sense of purpose among its staff.

As an example, an unplanned shutdown of an operating nuclear power plant will occur after triggering one of a number of automatic safety protection criteria, that is in turn caused by plant equipment failure or improper operator action. It is essential that the cause of the shutdown is properly identified and resolved before the plant resumes operation. With this culture that promotes openness, there will be little hindrance if at all for the staff involved to come forward and facilitate situation diagnostics, to support a proper system check before plant restart, to identify if the situation is caused by, for example, inherent plant system fault, improper maintenance or insufficient training, and to develop a corrective action plan so that remedial actions can be completed within a reasonable time frame.

In recognition of the inherent presence of misdeeds in human activity and the need to control their consequence to an acceptable level, the nuclear community also apply measures to reduce their possible effects, by having operational risk assessment, work preview and qualification, quality assurance, and duplicate and diversified multiple engineering safeguards for critical plant systems.

This article is contributed by Ir Richard Fung with the coordination of the Nuclear Division.