‘‘Be thankful for whistleblowers everywhere: not seduced by a flawed culture, not cowed by the perils of speaking up.’’
ANDREA VANCE, LETTERS, CARTOON & DAVID SLACK
In today’s media, one of the worst things you can have written about you is ‘‘not a good look’’. So step forward and take a gulp medical students outed for falsely claiming to have acquired overseas experience providing medical support to communities in Belize, Bosnia and Italy when in fact they were drinking mojitos and/or chilling in Dubrovnik.
‘‘Not a good look,’’ said various people. A number of interviews followed this revelation. We heard from people who’d been there, done that, and partied to dawn in Lisbon. They suggested this was not something all that new or unusual.
Whether or not that’s correct, university authorities in the glare of news bulletins took a firm line. There were Consequences; a package of consequences in fact, largely in the nature of a chiding.
But this is not the first story of its kind, and doubtless it won’t be the last. This was presented as a question of individual students breaking the rules, but from a distance it looked something more like a prevailing culture finding itself exposed to the glare of uncomfortable sunlight.
A culture can flourish in your group, your organisation, your society, your Facebook page, right up until the day it’s no longer convenient. On that day, you can collectively own it, or you can decide to put the blame on particular individuals who happened to be the ones transgressing at the moment the world caught sight of it.
The captivating podcast series White Silence marks the 40th anniversary of the Erebus tragedy.
Among the investigations and thousands of hours of evidence lies the truth that although the
airline had a policy not to descend below 16,000 feet on its Antarctic sightseeing flights, pilots were routinely taking the plane much lower to give their passengers a better look.
It was clearly the farthest thing from a secret. Newspaper and magazine stories of the time enthused about the magical experience of travelling south over this otherworldly land, describing everything they saw as their pilot brought them down for a better look, 1500 feet above the Antarctic ice.
But when it came to the giving of evidence, the airline declared itself to be unaware of this common knowledge, leaving the pilots to wear the consequences.
Why? Possibly for reasons of insurance, possibly for other reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. Those possible reasons are explored at length in the podcast and it’s absolutely worth six hours of your time.
What I’m interested in here is the notion of a culture that is at ease with what you’re doing up until the day things go wrong, at which point you’re cut loose and left to face the consequences.
A good organisation will listen when it’s told that something is wrong with its culture. It will own the problem, and fix it. It won’t go looking for scapegoats.
Not all organisations are necessarily good enough to do this. It took a Cartwright Inquiry to bring the medical establishment around to the understanding that a culture that acted in a paternal fashion could be deadly.
An old favourite is to acknowledge terrible things have happened, then describe it as systemic failure, like some sort of ghost in the machine, and change nothing. Your culture expresses a collective understanding: what you tolerate, what you consider important. You can be clear-eyed about it, you can also be deluded.
Are the police listening sufficiently to whistleblowers presently calling them to account for a culture of bullying? Does the Defence Force have something in its culture that needs attention, and will the Operation Burnham hearing help them find the way towards an answer? Has our parliament sorted out the problems in its workplace yet?
And how many million light years do you reckon we might still have to travel to deal with rape culture?
Be thankful for whistleblowers everywhere: not seduced by a flawed culture, not cowed by the perils of speaking up.
If you’re smart, when they speak up you listen.
A good organisation will listen when it’s told that something is wrong with its culture. It won’t go looking for scapegoats.