I'm reminded of the time Tony Blair visited Silicon Valley to figure out how to replicate it back home. He was at a round table with tech royalty (Gates, The Sun guy, Schmidt etc etc). Steve Jobs was there too.
Everyone was chipping in with their theories about why the U.S and Silicon Valley were so good at what they do when Jobs lost his patience and butted in in true Jobsian fashion.
"Listen! Take a look around this table. Everyone here has a massive failure in their past. Big, epic failures. In the US, we think thats a good thing. In the UK you think it's a bad thing. Thats it."
Or soemthing like that, you get the idea.
Anyway, i've always liked that outlook regardless of wether it's true or not.
More generally it is very difficult to build highly reliable systems of any kind without having a very open culture where you focus on exposing problems and fixing them rather than blaming the message.