Challenging the obvious

It’s almost the end of the weekend and time for some reflection. I’m reading a book “International Seafarers and Transnationalism at sea” by Professor Helen Sampson – a study in ethnography and culture. Sampson takes us through lived experiences of seafarers and to me she makes a compelling case to question the obvious. By questioning the obvious I mean that challenging unquestioned beliefs and assumptions that we usually take for granted.

Sampson shows us how officers onboard merchant ships are freely moving about into crew spaces (crew mess rooms and TV rooms) while crew members in lower ranks are ‘denied’ entry into officers’ spaces. On one of the ships she visited, Sampson brings to surface “how Filipino junior officers had no access to computers (denying them use of emails) or to onboard training in the use of computers” which had an impact on their career progression. Sampson intrigues me more when she writes how officers and crew are addressed differently on ships. While the officers are addressed by their ranks (captain, chief etc.), the crew members are addressed by their first names. The ‘lowly’ status of the crew, she argues, is almost hidden in being addressed by their names because addressing them by ranks (for example calling them steward, messman, oiler, seaman) would demean their status. Eleven years as a seafarer and I never recognise any of this.

As safety professionals I invite you to develop a sense of questioning the obvious. It makes sense to think, reflect and approach safety issues from fresh perspectives and especially those that do not resonate with us. Karl Jung teaches us that “the extent to which the ego becomes too one-sided is a reflection of how much we are denying the depth, breadth and multiplicity of the Self.” By listening to alternate views, we confront this one-sided ego, enrich our experiences and learning. A word of caution though - listening to others does not mean agreeing with their views; it simply means being critical and reflective of our own assumptions.

I find this book meaningful for safety professionals at many levels especially at the time when we are trying so hard to impose theories on reality, creating divides (safety I & II, new view and old view, HOP and HRO) and raging a war against compliance with rules and regulations. It is for academics to advance knowledge and make theoretical contributions, our job as professionals is to pay closer attention to the problems we face, without becoming too blinded by theories. Sampson’s work also serves as a reminder that accidents are often a manifestation of deeper problems that may have little to do with procedures, barriers and safeguards. We tend to look into familiar places when the answer to many of our problems may lie elsewhere. For instance, onboard the Cosco Busan, a container ship that collided with the Delta tower of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in November 2007 in poor visibility, a lone voice of a Chinese crew member was recorded on the Blackbox in Mandarin saying, “. . . American ships under such conditions, they would not be under way.” In one of the companies I visited some time ago, the management was starting to realize that the problems they were seeing in control rooms were not the problems with the control rooms – they often came from elsewhere.

One could see this as an issue of competence and the inability to exercise judgment and authority but one may also view this as an insight into understanding the limitations of risk management models and frameworks that have always treated human beings as a rational being who can make a distinction between good and bad decisions or decide between ‘risk and opportunities’. The former gives us an opportunity to think differently and create possibilities for dialogue, discussions and collaborative solutions; the latter takes us back into hiring and firing, training and re-training, and more generally repeatedly asking the same questions.

If we want better solutions, we may want to consider spending some time thinking about our questions. Sampson offers us one way to achieve this.

I am currently writing a detailed paper on this topic, and would welcome your thoughts and experiences.