Nippin Anand 0:00
Hi, I am Nippin Anand, hello and welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand, in this episode, we will talk about enclosed space risks, and we will ask the question, are we learning from enclosed space accidents that seem to be on a consistent increase within the industry? I, for one, have a special relationship with enclosed spaces. Even the image of an enclosed space makes me very phobic. As a young deck boy, I would avoid going into enclosed spaces and make all kind of excuses, manipulate paperwork and even beg my senior Cadet or the Boson to swap roles while taking on a supervisory duty standing by outside the tank as I moved ranks, I discovered that there were more people who shared my fears. Claustrophobia remains a taboo that no one speaks about in this male dominated industry. After all, with a handful of people who wants to be seen as the panicked chicken on the ship. After my sailing career, I joined a classification society as a safety inspector. There was no way I could avoid entering in closed spaces in this role, but there again, I found innovative ways to avoid facing my fears. At time, I would just dip in and out of the tank, and on other occasions, I would request a seafarer to inspect on my behalf, I just couldn’t get into these dark, slippery and creepy spaces. They freak me out, even in my dreams. For many years now, I have studied enclosed space related risks, accidents and near misses. I even wrote a chapter about enclosed spaces in my book. Are we learning from accidents? My biggest concern all these years has been that the way we frame enclosed space risks as an industry has taken us so far away from the reality of the risk in fewer words, our language is our single biggest problem. We blame the Seafarer after every accident, but we don’t take the time to reflect on our own selves, our models and our assumptions about the risks. The increasing number of enclosed space accidents over the years is a testimony to our ILL founded framing of the risks and our stubbornness to face the mirror as an industry without reframing our thoughts, we stand little chance to bring the desired change. In this article, I present some thoughts about where we are as an industry and what is missing in our approach towards managing enclosed space risks. I don’t have the answers, but I do have some questions that I would like you to ponder upon. Let’s begin with the first one, unknown risks. Every ship is unique, and every operation presents its own challenges, often even in a few cubic meters of space, you will find an adjacent bulkhead, a coffer dam, a cargo hold, or another tank that silently injects toxic gasses or depletes the oxygen that takes the seafarers by surprise. The seafarers acknowledge the unknown nature of the risk and hidden surprises, and yet they are seduced into the language of control. How do you control that which you don’t even know? But we are not supposed to talk in this way. Instead, we are taught that we should continuously monitor the atmosphere and be careful of the hazards, whatever that means. Question, how can we talk about measuring and controlling those risks that we do not even understand? Number two byproducts and trade offs of risks. Notice a typical checklist or a risk assessment template. It always goes from left to right or from top to the bottom. That is how checklists, Method Statements and Permit to Work systems are also designed. Worse still, the end result, whether at the bottom end or the right hand side of the form, has to be the same. Risk is controlled. We never ask the question, what new risks are created by those controls? What are the byproducts of our decisions? What are the consequences of our decisions, we never dare to leave the risk in red, as is, why not? We can address the problem of continuous monitoring by deploying more deckhands, but there are only so many people on the ship, and we may end up creating problems elsewhere. We can publish lessons learned, alerts, flashes and bulletins, but we never ask, what are the repercussions of burdening people with information overload? Here’s a question, what new risks are we creating when we have controlled the risk? Where and how do we discuss those emerging risks in our forms, checklists? And rituals. Number three, risk perception. Just last week, I facilitated an enclosed space workshop with a group of seafarers, regulators and ship managers, whilst the manager was clear that they would never allow bunkering crew change surveys and tank inspections. At the same time, a seafarer responded by saying that if he had followed the advice of the ship manager while the ship was in Singapore or Rotterdam during demanding operations, he would be fired by the company. What excites the ship manager is so normal in a seafarer’s world. Clearly, the reality on board does not match with what the ship managers think and expect. Question, where in our checklists and procedures do we make space for individual and group risk perception? How do we get the ship managers to think from the seafarers perspective and vice versa? Number four enclosed space fatalities. A review of industry reports and incidents shows that there is a significantly higher percentage of seafarers in high rank positions who succumb in enclosed spaces, up to 65% senior officers, as against 6% young people. This is a clear indication that spending more resources on designing better processes and retraining of the seafarers are not only ineffective, but also counterproductive. There is nothing more demeaning to a seafarer than being sent on a training course for a skill that he has learned through years of practice. Question, how can we address cultural influences and psychological biases such as overconfidence, under confidence, habits, heuristics, group thinking, peer pressure, through education and training programs? Are we using the right tools to resolve the risks at hand? The time pressure or commercial pressure, much of high risk activity is performed under intense commercial pressure. Yet a typical response to the problem from the shore side is that the Seafarer should get better at planning. Planning cannot be detached from perception. Perception is the basis for planning. If I don’t see the risk, how am I supposed to account for it? If I am regularly calling five ports every week, crew are consistently fatigued. Last minute changes to the ship’s itinerary have become a norm. It is fair to say that the risk cannot be seen anymore. It has become normalized. What is there to account for in planning once the risk has been accepted and normalized? Question, How can risk assessments and Toolbox discussions account for the risks that have been tacitly and unconsciously embedded in a culture? Are auditors and investigators even equipped with cultural and psychological competencies to engage with the Seafarer number six, the instinct to save the others. For many years now, the industry has been grappling with admonishing people who instinctively fall for saving their mates during rescue operations and succumb to death, and it is often the senior officers with significant rank experience who fall into this trap. Apparently, this is not a problem of incompetence. Such instinctive reactions make us for who we are as human persons. But instead of acknowledging and addressing these issues through emotive storytelling and experiential learning, we opt to go for more training and process interventions question human beings are non rational, and more than 95% of our decisions are made in a non rational mode. How does it even make sense to address those non rational decision making using Rational methods? Number seven, hierarchical culture. The maritime industry has a long standing reputation for hierarchy and power distance. It is not uncommon to have growing patterns that exhibit an even reinforce hierarchy and power, distance, and yet we seem to have an unquestioned belief in stop work, authority, stop the job, speak up and similar safety interventions. Safety interventions are based on the myth of individualism, bravery, autonomy, liberty and the courage to speak up in the face of an adverse situation. But none of this holds true in the existing demographics of the maritime world. I have written an article on this, which I will include with this blog.
Nippin Anand 9:56
Question, how can we expect a Filipino Bose? On a nine months temporary contract employed by a third party managing agency to refuse tank entry in the middle of a critical operation. Why do we put so much faith in safety intervention tools? Number eight, phobia and trauma. It surprises me every time I read an article or an accident report involving enclosed spaces, we are so silent about the recurring theme of panic, distress, trauma, anxiety and a phobia associated with enclosed spaces, apparently by ignoring the non material and emotive aspects of what makes us humans, we give even more space to hedonic and material language of risk management. Despite years of unsuccess, we remain convinced that more paperwork, digital apps, real time, information system performance, greener, KPIs, behavioral training and lessons learned mounted on the bulkheads will save people from dying. Question, how can we measure phobia, distress and trauma? Why do we not consider sharing the raw stories of the seafarers and bringing them to the surface to create the desired impact for learning and change. I have included one such story of a young Seafarer who survived a near fatal injury at sea with this blog number nine, measurement and control, much of risk management is anchored to the myth of bureaucracy. The world is stable. The future is predictable, and if we try harder to foresee what lies ahead, we can control the risk. Is that so we are living in the most uncertain times of our living history. By now, we should realize that the more we attempt to measure and control the risk with our predictive armor, the more uncertainty we are inducing in our lives, we need to measure what is sensibly measurable, but we also need to become aware of those risks that we simply cannot control. Only tackle question, what language do we have to talk about the risks that we cannot control? Does that even matter for how long will we continue to blame the seafarers for enclosed space fatalities? I invite you to pick up an accident report and read just the conclusive pages only if you do not have the time to read the whole report. Most reports read as if the seafarers get up in the morning and choose to end their lives by entering into enclosed spaces. This is as far as our imagination takes us with our existing methods of risk assessment. I find it so interesting that the stubbornness of the industry to learn from the accident is framed as the ignorance of the seafarer. So what do we do about all this? Well, we have designed several methods and tools based on the social psychology of risk that would help us to create a language to talk about risks that we cannot control, but to also bring the unconscious nature of decision making to the surface using verbal and visual methods. These methods are highly influential and successful in drawing out and addressing the risks that we do not understand using our existing methods. Several people from around the world have benefited from this, and as we speak, we are doing a range of exercises and setting up a lot of workshops in order to address these issues, some online and others in person. If you are interested, please get in touch with us at novellus.solution/slash events. You can also email us at support@novellus.solutions. Here is a summary of everything that we discussed in one slide. I will include the entire presentation as part of this blog. I hope you found it interesting. It made you think, reflect, and you will act upon it, because reflection alone does not bring the change. We have to do something with it. On that note, I hope you have a good day. Thank you for listening. You.
