Safety is about people, but not scapegoats

On becoming Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), one could immediately sense that Koji Sekimizu was determined to put his own stamp on the law-making body in a way that would mark a departure from his predecessor’s tenure.
One of the results of that new approach bore fruit in London last week when Sekimizu hosted a Symposium on the Future of Ship Safety as a prelude to the 92nd Maritime Safety Committee. The master plan was to discover whether or not there was sufficient support to write a new version of the SOLAS convention, thereby addressing safety concerns post-Costa Concordia and moving the IMO’s agenda on from the seemingly intractable CO2 debate.
Of course the safety/environmental nexus could not be avoided entirely. The fact that technology has appeared to lead regulation in recent years, resulting in the unworkable Ballast Water Management Convention and the impractical and expensive air emissions rules to mention two, inevitably seeped into the debate.
How could the same mistakes be avoided when the topic was safety? Sekimizu opened proceedings with the suggestion that to have the kind of ships it wants by 2050, the industry must act now. Safety culture must be encouraged beyond mere compliance, he added.
This would inevitably mean the use of new technology, but it would also require much better gathering of structured data, which could be used to help formulate regulations that replaced a prescriptive regime with a risk-based approach.
The first contributor, RCCL’s Harri Kulovarra, provided plenty of evidence that cruise operators were doing precisely that, building to probabilistic, risk-based standards based on advanced simulation and modelling. Even so, he said there was a “strong opportunity” for better safety and environmental performance if companies adopted an innovative mind-set towards vessel lifecycle and compliance.
And Kulovarra set the tone for the entire event by drawing attention to the role of the human element, arguing for better standardisation of training and the use of advanced techniques such as psychometric and psychological analysis.
The industry is good at designing systems and equipment, he said, but it often fails in transferring it to end users. The theme of technology fit for purpose was taken up by Maersk Technology’s Bo Cerup-Simonsen who pointed out that though it represented a great opportunity in safety, the industry too rarely asked whether it was safe or practical.
He agreed the man-machine interface was in need of revisiting, a sentiment echoed by BP’s Christopher Bailey, who said future safety standards would depend on improving conditions for crew as well as a better understanding of the impact technology has on people.
Innovative technology doesn’t always translate well into the marine environment and the need is greater than ever to assess and understand the impact of technology before it is deployed on board.
There seemed to be a consensus emerging; that the new SOLAS would have to use technology in an increasingly straightforward way and put the human factor in the centre of the equation, based on much better data gathering.
These are points that classification societies among others, have been promoting strongly in recent years. The welter of environmental regulation has served to prove how the tendency to make equipment and systems more complex has resulted in the human factor being overlooked in rule formulation and in practice.
That might not matter if the equipment performs as specified but when it does not, it is not always (or only) the equipment that gets the blame. Part of the problem – and perhaps what Sekimizu hopes to solve with SOLAS II – is that some of the data needed to make better decisions is considered proprietary and thus not for sharing.
Data that can be assembled is collected on the basis of anonymity and can still make a useful contribution, but much greater transparency will be needed if the industry is to add the human element to the safety jigsaw.
More than once we heard speakers declare that safety is about people, that “safety is what happens when you are not looking” and that solutions need to be scalable. And these are all partially true. Some risk management professionals though, reject the idea of the human factor as a primary focus. The tendency, particularly post-casualty, to zoom in on the individuals concerned will often miss the point that it is the organisation that has failed, not just in training but in designing systems and procedures that people can work with.
That tends to overlook some of the other points made on the first day (the second dealt more with practical responses) that safety culture should not be a function of organisation size and that the focus on people must be strengthened without increasing the administrative burden.
A surprising perspective came from an always reliable source. Clarksons’ Martin Stopford is the go-to brain on maritime economics and suggested to delegates that despite the tendency to put the cart and horse in the wrong order, the industry was at present suffering from technological weakness, with little depth of technical knowledge in many shipping companies.
Owners had, he said, passed technical responsibility for their ships to the market and whatever number one used to gauge the fleet, they are nearly all different, massively multiplying the technology/safety challenge. Asked whether he thought safety concerns could fall victim to tight budgets, Stopford conceded it was possible.
Inevitably the most disruptive presentation of the afternoon came from the youngest person, Birgit Liodden, founder of Norway’s YoungShip and campaigner for next generation involvement in an industry she fears is falling desperately behind in the race to secure the talent it needs.
I don’t think Liodden was being deliberately provocative when she called shipping “an industry of grey men”. IMO, after all, is one of the more balanced forums in terms of gender and diversity.
I think her point was that to improve safety and environmental performance as well as to improve the perception of the importance of shipping would need not just new role models but corporate structures capable of identifying, nurturing and delivering those role models too.
In that sense Liodden brought the two sides of this debate together. Shipping must pay much greater attention to the human factor but that does not just mean seafarers. It also means shore staff and company officers adopting a top to bottom safety and performance culture. The potential of such an approach might not be that we throw away hundreds of years of commercial practice but that we understand that achieving safety beyond compliance will require a degree of that transparency that will be new to shipping.
More than this, it means that, as the men and women in suits understand more about their counterparts in boiler-suits, there will be less temptation or tendency to scapegoat mariners for non-compliance and a better chance to recognise them for what they are: the strongest link in the chain.
Source: BIMCO