The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.

Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.

Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective) recognise that people are an important part of the process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous results.

People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!

Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".

It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.

You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.

See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.

Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic controllers were not empowered to assess the situation and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more accidents.

Your meetings have an agenda? We just debate something and are stuck on some minor unimportant point that doesn't matter and the meeting goes into overtime and then we schedule 2-3 follow-up meetings where everything we said is now completely irrelevant because our assumptions were incorrect from the start. And then you finally get to work and you can't implement it like it was specified since everyone forgot that you can't really do X so you have to it some other way making everything that was discussed completely moot.

Sorry, the zoom meeting link has changed so now the meeting will take 4 hours and you must get the agenda by FAX.

(this is what happened to OP)

As a German I envy your meetings with Germans

Don’t worry. You can drag them on the street! Safety first and all that.

"I was just following orders." --Any German soldier after 1945

That's not the main reason though. The reason the denazification was mostly a sham is because a lot of federal positions required good contacts and experience in that field and you couldn't find anyone qualified who wasn't in the party. Based not just on first hand accounts on the family side but also lots of research. A lot of higher ups also were well connected so they got an already short conviction halved to released early in order to get a position in the government.

"I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but it's also true, and even more so in the context of Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more murky for the civilians who theoretically could have walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that they were just doing their jobs. And you have to keep in mind that all of the Nazi's racial ideology had been codified into law at the time. So you were once again just implementing the rules, even if those rules were actually harmful.

But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of this in the form of the American approach that is much more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary. Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw away the key, they recruited them.

They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis.

At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the USSR was more important than punishing some middle manager and the quickest way to get the West German state together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.