02/06/2017
Maritime disasters keep reoccurring every year. There are three deaths and at least 30 recorded accidents every day in shipping, and every other day a ship is lost.
It also has massive implications on business and reputation, directly and indirectly.
This is a major concern and the whole industry needs to change its focus when it comes to improving maritime safety. But how?
Fairplay News interviewed Propel experts during Nor-Shipping to learn their views on what is key to improving maritime safety.
Read more here http://maritime.ihs.com/
If you do not subscribe to Fairplay, here is the article in full:
The cover up culture within some shipping lines is causing errors and unsafe practices that are repeated causing avoidable accidents according to safety consultants Propel.
Based in Oslo, Norway, the company has amassed a large database of information regarding accidents through analysing accident reports and through an anonymous survey that had 30,000 responses set against IHS Markit data from its Seaweb database that showed a strong correlation, 92% between a shipping company’s management commitment to safety and accidents.
Torkel Soma, a partner at Propel, told Fairplay: “We didn’t believe that the correlation would be that strong when we started.”
Propel’s view was that management commitment was key to creating a safety culture within a company and that in shipping many companies were too focused on processes rather than a preventative strategy.
Propel believe that there are three strategies for safety; do everything right; manage failures when they occur and handle a crisis, that is to be prepared with an emergency response.
“Shipping companies had a lot of focus on the first and third strategies, but the second strategy, how to manage failures, does not go so well, so our insight is based on that second strategy,” explained Soma, “but most accidents could have been prevented”.
According to Soma there are three deaths in shipping and at least 30 recorded accidents every day on ships, including offshore vessels and floating rigs. People make mistakes, but they are afraid to own up to their errors which means no-one ever learns from the failures, “people are afraid of failures” said Soma and so most companies focus on strategy one, doing everything right.
In an echo of Koji Sekimizu’s proactive regulation policy when he was secretary general of the IMO Propel believes that management must be proactive about managing failures and should seek to abolish the ‘cover up culture’ that is so damaging.
“Disasters don’t happen when you are being inspected so there is a need to create an environment where crew are permanently ready for a disaster, so the cover up culture comes to the worst performers, but we mustn’t just focus on shipping companies it is the whole industry that needs to change,” said Soma.
Change will come if companies follow Propel’s strategy where crew learn of a problem, they then speak up rather than covering up, but this also means that senior staff must be open to the feedback they are getting from more subordinate crew, which will promote teamwork and an acceptance that the group needs to manage dilemmas.
Such a strategy builds trust and creates an attitude where staff and crew care. Such a strategy must be applied company wide, onboard vessels and in offices ashore and be reinforced constantly by the crew themselves.
“When we work with these behaviours we have seen massive improvements in company safety cultures,” claimed Soma. However, the process is long, it does not happen overnight as K Line’s UK MD Yuzuru Goto can testify.
Diagnosis and identification of key areas for improvement preceded the implementation phase which Goto said the company is in now and after 18 months K Line UK is around half way through the programme.
“There has been some push back from the crews, because they feel there will be a negative side effect when admitting errors, said Goto, adding, “Through a project we call “K” ARE we want to redefine failure, failure seems so negative that people don’t want to be open about it, but if you can change the culture so that failure is seen as an opportunity to learn then failure can be seen as a positive.”
K Line is trialling the system with its UK business with a view to rolling out the process company-wide if it is successful and Goto believes that there has already been a change in the company’s culture.
Goto emphasises, however, that “industry support is needed, because the benefits are the same for everyone if we avoid disasters.”
Disaster prevention is the key and both Propel and K Line recognise that the process is too long and so a game learning company was contracted by Propel to develop an online learning tool for crew called SAYFR.
Bjarne Johnson, partner and director of Attensi, the game producer, told Fairplay: “Games need to feel realistic, but at the same time they must be enjoyable so that people will want to play them over and over again. Repetition is key to the learning.”
SAYFR has several levels and allows trainee to communicate with characters in the game and to then make choices about what they will do following their interaction. The different choices they make have different consequences.
“Friendly competition, between ships and between companies helps because it drives repetition as the crew compete for the highest scores. One man was seen to log on to the system mostly between 9pm and 11pm at night, he was playing the game to get the highest score,” said Johnson.
The game reinforces the idea that individuals can learn from past failures and that openness and communication is the key to that learning.
According to Propel the company has a number of different types of customers, including a major cruise company that it said it had noticed a difference in following the development of the new safety culture as the crew started to collaborate better the passengers noticed the difference.
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