t’s Friday afternoon and a ship is leaving the harbour. As the ship departs the ports, the ship side makes contact with the jetty leaving a dent on the hull. Someone from the port terminal sees this and reports the matter to the shipping company.
On Saturday afternoon, the vessel manager emails the captain stating that an incident was reported by a third party while the ship was leaving the port. ‘According to the company SMS section 9, you are obliged to bring all non-conformances and defects to the company’s attention. Why was this incident not reported to us, captain?’
The captain responds by saying, ‘I’m aware of the damage, I have inspected the tanks from inside, there’s no damage to the ship. I didn’t think it was that serious to report it on a weekend.’
And what follows is an ugly back and forth of emails for the rest of the week.
Call it a problem of non-compliance, an absence of a reporting culture or ‘communication issue’. It is all of that and much more.
This is about using rules and processes to get others to do what we want. It can be quite unreasonable to expect others to do the things we want simply because we want them to, and it raises all kinds of issues of using force to get our way. In contrast, it is not unreasonable to expect others to ‘respect’ rules and processes and get them to do what we want.
Imagine this. ‘Captain, we came to know that whilst departing from the port, the ship made contact with the jetty. Are you aware of this issue? Is there anything we need to know?
I sometimes wonder why is it so difficult to begin with a question such as this one.
What ancient wisdom can teach us about managing talent
While Brahma creates the Cosmos and Shiva destroys it, Vishnu
