Nippin Anand 0:00
Evening, I was struggling with the title of this talk today, and I was taking a shower for the last three days, I’ve been struggling with this, and I just popped out to say, how about this? How accident narratives

Nippin Anand 0:11
impede learning, and what that really means is that how our narratives come in the way of how we understand accidents, incidents, you name it, mistakes and and so on. And I think there’s something deeply religious about us as human beings. We think that we are scientific, but we’re actually very religious. We are deeply religious. I’m going to talk to you about that, and hopefully we’ll have some great conversations after that. Let’s see how this goes. I’m going to talk about a ship called the Costa Concordia. And this is a ship that capsized off the coast of this is dancing, yeah. So this is the ship that capsized off the coast of jeleu islands in Italy in 2012 and it was, it resulted in the death of 32 people, and allegedly the captain of the ship, commonly referred to as Captain coward, was the main cause of the accident in the official accident report, I’ve never seen anything like this, where in an official report, somebody would be seen As the main cause of the accident. And I actually had a fascinating experience talking to the captain. I traveled to Italy to spend four days with him, and I recorded a lot of footage with him. And he was going to the prison, and he had nothing to lose, so he offered a lot of insights. Video recordings, voice data recorder, which is the equivalent of a black box on a plane. And so it took me four days and then another seven years to write a book to make sense of all of that. And it was interesting that today, when I was Russell, asked me, What is he going to talk about, I said the Costa Concordia accident. And his first response was, Oh, is that the ship where the captain ran away with that, that dancer lady? And I thought, wow, that’s exactly the kind of responses I get all the time. So this, you know, we want to sleep at night. We need a we need a story, and we have to tell ourselves a story. And so I want to talk about the mythical nature of of the the stories that we create, which are deeply religious and we think they’re scientific. That’s the fascinating break. So let’s get started. So, so here’s Captain Francisco scoutino. That’s me and as the head of the Danish maritime Accident Investigation Board, and we spent, this was our four days in Sorrento, in his hometown in Italy. And this was our first day of interviewing him in 2017 and guess what he said? He said that you’re the first person who came to speak with me at a professional level, first person in five years after the accident. This accident happened in 2012 and 2017 the man says that you’re the first person who came to speak with me in a professional level. How much we hate people involved in accidents, right? Think about it. We don’t like failures in my country, where I come from, which is India, every 14 minutes, a child commits suicide because they could not fulfill the expectations of their parents. This is how much we hate people who fail in their lives, right? Because they remind us of infallibility. And I find it fascinating, absolutely fascinating, that nobody in five years spoke to him, listened to him. Everyone accused him, and we created all kind of stories, and we created a 300 page document that we call accident investigation report, which is totally mythical, absolutely mythical. But it’s not new. We have always done it that way, and we’re sitting here at library of mistakes and thinking, why don’t we learn? Well, the answer is there because we don’t. We think we are scientific, but we are actually religious. We want to tell ourselves a simple story. This was a this was a classic example of that. So you can see, everyone wants to interrogate him, investigate him, throw him into trauma, but nobody wants to listen to him. And we did 12 hours of video footage with him just by asking one question, what would you like to share? And he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop. Can you imagine?

Nippin Anand 4:46
We have to think about these things. We do that to our children, by the way, forget about professionals. So this is a book that I wrote, which I call an inner journey of unlearning. I thought I it was my own personal. Experience at sea in 2005 I was involved in an accident, and it threw me into a trauma for about 10 years. But I saw similar patterns with him at a much, of course, at a much more disproportionate level, my mind was nothing as compared to him. He’s 16 years in the prison now. I got away with it just by being sacked from the company. But this book that I wrote is not an objective story of this accident. It is a deeply biased and subjective view of this accident. So I don’t cloak myself in science. I very, very openly claim that it was a subjective story. It was a biased story, and it helped me to unlearn a lot of things in life. So in a way, it’s his story, but woven into my story. So that’s that’s how I see it, and I presented it in this book. But the interesting thing is that one of the things that I wanted to talk to you, just one thing about in this book is I wanted to give you a flavor of how mythical our accident reports are, that we call official accident narratives. So there’s two accident cases here, the US Airways, 1549, and the Costa Concordia. And let’s just look at the two of them and see how far away we go from reality to create or to console ourselves that we are in control of our situation, how mythical we are, and we claim ourselves to be science and objective focused. So the US Airways, 1549, on one side and the cost of Concordia. So let’s go to the USA airways, 1549, this is a fascinating example of how we create narrative accidents and invest and incidents and mistakes and so on. So this is 2009 the I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this accident. This was the, the miracle of the Hudson, and it’s, it’s a fascinating word, actually, miracle that you use in an accident report how religious it is. And then we look for a root cause. I mean, how can you explain a miracle? But through a root cause, it’s absolutely absurd. Yeah. So anyway, so 2009 we have the this accident. 155 people on board, 140 passengers, 15 crew members. And what’s unique about this accident is this American company. It’s American pilot, and the American airspace doesn’t happen very often. Doesn’t happen very often, right? Yeah. And then we have the picture of Sully that appears on the media a few, few few years later. And I find this picture mesmerizing. I see this picture so powerful. It just chimes with your unconscious. And it says, Chesley Sullenberger, this is the Guardian article. Actually, you should read this article. It says, old fashioned kind of a hero, wow, yeah. And it says, this is a statement that really, really is worth thinking about. I knew people would be debating whether what I did was right or wrong, perhaps for decades. Do you know why he said that? Are you familiar with his accident, the miracle of the Hudson? Yeah. Do you know why he said that is it? Because certain people thought that he could have landed at an airport, yeah, yeah, yeah. Could be. Could be. Could be one of those things. I think the he was surprised by the outcome. He was himself surprised by the outcome. He didn’t expect nobody would die. He just didn’t expect that to happen. It was a miracle. Sorry, it not. It has not. You’re right, yes, yes. So in a way, the man is surprised by it, and how interesting that we make him a superhero, right? We like simple stories. Look at this accident investigation report. It’s absolutely amazing. The religious nature of this report, the professionalism of the flight crew members and the excellent Crew Resource Management during the accident sequence, contributed their ability to maintain control over the plane configured it to the extent possible, to control under circumstance and fly an approach that increase the survivability of the impact, really. I mean, there is so much randomness in this accident that we have not even touched upon by creating a superhero, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m against Sully. He’s did some really good things, but there was a lot of randomness in this accident. I’ll come back to you in a minute. There was a lot of randomness in this accident that worked in his favor. The temperature in the river was minus 15 degrees centigrade on that day, which means there was no marine traffic whatsoever. Had it been the case, it would have been a catastrophe. There was a very experienced co pilot sitting next to him, which doesn’t happen very often. Yeah, the plane was had an in water landing gear. And the odds of having a plane with in water landing gear flying inland, inland is one. Is to 20. In Airbus fleet at that time. So there was only one in 20 planes that would fly inland and still have landing gear for landing passengers in the water. It was so there’s a lot of other things. And the funny thing is, you know what? The funny thing is that all that is captured in the official accident investigation report, and yet we don’t consider any of that in making sense of this accident, because we want to create a superhero. We want to see somebody has saved us. We love that bit. Somebody has brought us the salvation, and this person should become the super superhero. Yes, you had a question. Yes, I will. I will expand on that. Yes, yes. Please bear with me. I know it’s a difficult thing to digest. Yes, if you don’t like that, that’s fine. I’m quite happy with that. Yes, use something else mythical, not religious or dogmatic or whatever. So, yeah, this is, this is how the accident investigation report reads. And then, you know, we created this superhero out of it. And we even, even produce a Hollywood movie out of it, yeah, and we ignore all the randomness that we document in the report, because we love heroes. Isn’t that interesting? Yeah, let me tell you another story. Now. This is 2012 This is the Costa Concordia. This is 4229 people on board. 32 people died. In the other case, nobody died. In this case, 32 people died. So there was no salvation here, right? So what do we do now? We do just the opposite. So this is Captain Francesco scatino within 48 hours. Within 48 hours, there was a press statement and a scapegoat was found without any accident investigation. So this is an Italian ship, an Italian captain, Italian company and Italian waters. Yeah. Can you see that American and Italian? Very coincident doesn’t happen in my world. I’m an ex seafarer. It never aligns like this so neatly. So here we are with another statement as they roll their eyes. Italians dismiss Captain Francesco sketino’s erratic behavior as a shame in Italy, some are convinced that he must have been drunk. Ever so Italian distracted by a woman, there you go. A blonde Moldovan dancer was reportedly dining with the captain shortly before the disaster. Some former colleagues described him as a well trained professional and defended him. Others said he was a hot dog boat driver, right? So look at the narrative. One wouldn’t be surprised what follows in the official accident investigation report is this that it is needless to put an evidence that the case of the cost of Concordia is considered by this investigation body, and we believe by everyone in the maritime field, and on what basis, and we believe by Everyone in the maritime field. Have you done a survey? Have you done a study? Yeah, a unique example for the lessons which may be learned despite the human tragedy in the master’s unconventional behavior, which represents the main cause of the shipwreck. Wow. There we have it. Official report. I have never seen an official report which categorically states that the captain of a ship is the main cause of the accident. I’ve never seen anything like that. So that is my suspicion a lot. So this is skitino on the day he surrendered to the police just three months after we left him in his hometown, and he got 16 years in the prison. But the question is, 16 years for what? Because it was claimed that he left the ship and he ran away from the ship. But in actual fact, he was on the ship all the while, and is some of the work that he did. For example, he jumped on top of a lifeboat that was just about to come under the davits. This lifeboat was full of 300 people, at least. We don’t know the exact number it, and if it had yet allowed that, that that boat, that those damage, to plunge into this boat, we would have had about 300 deaths, apart from the 32 people who died, right? But that story was not important. That story was of no interest to anyone,

Nippin Anand 14:46
because we were looking for an anti hero, not a hero, and we were so busy gathering data around that. And this is not just my book, but there’s lots and lots of research done to show. At under what circumstances he evacuated the ship and what did he actually do? But none of that was any interest to press all the official accident investigation. Yeah, so we did exactly what we did to Jesus Christ, 1000s of years ago. We found a scapegoat that would carry the sins of the society. I it so the mythical pattern keeps repeating itself. I hope you have an answer now. Yeah, we are very mythical. We are very religious, and we cloak ourselves in science, and we think that we are modern. We are advanced, we are civilized. And those uncivilized people who live somewhere, you know, in in the Pacific Islands, or the aboriginals and the in the Maoris, they know nothing at all. We have a lot of data, and we can prove a lot of things. Really, we can’t handle failures exactly like they couldn’t. Let me tell you the story. So yeah, right. See the Greek myth, from chaos to order. If you can bring the bird strike, engine failure, everything gone wrong. Now you need a superhero who can save us all. That’s the Greek myth. That’s exactly the Greek myth right in front of you and at the bottom you could not save us, so you’re the anti hero. Yeah. Can you see how religious we are? Yeah. So this is just to bring it all together. How we create stories of accidents and disasters, how these stories give us meaning and comfort, how these stories reveal our unconscious beliefs, and how these stories Preserve Social and political order. So why are we not learning from accidents and mistakes? Because it’s not about learning, it’s about preserving social and political order. On that particular night, if scatino was not the scapegoat, the entire cruise industry would have wiped out because of systemic failures of the industry. But we found a scapegoat, and we preserved social and political order so we could all go back to sleep and say, Oh no, we can go back to cruising again. It’s summertime. We need, we need to. We need a holiday. So we create this, what we call a moral monster, right? So my question is, how scientific are we? And just look at how much we have really progressed over the years. Is by comparing between the people of South Sudan, which we call the azan days. This is there’s something fascinating about anthropologists, and I’m one, but that you actually sometimes have to travel so far from your own culture that your language falls flat to explain anything at all, and that’s when you realize that they that whom we call primitive and uncivilized and savages and barbarians, they are no different. Actually, they’re no different at all. So this is the azandes, and this is the ritual of witchcraft. So what we asand is have is that, you know, in within their community, if a child becomes sick, they treat it. They treat it like all of us do, but the way they explain it is that they look for somebody within the community whom they don’t like, and they just drag this person across the fields because they believe that this is the person who actually brought this this situation. So you can see, everyone wants to give meaning to misfortune. And the question is, how are we any different? So the how is explained very well in all the books that you think about that you’re surrounded by, the mechanistic is explained extremely beautifully well with all the evidence, all the data, whether it’s the usaways, 1549, or the Costa Concordia. But when it comes to the why, why did it happen? We fall back on our familiar myth, the Greek myth, or the Roman myth or the Christian myth, you name it. So the azan days would call it witchcraft and accusation, and we call it causation and blame. But it’s no different. The question is, are we any different when it comes to giving meaning to misfortune, whether it’s accidents, incidents, disasters, crisis, whatever, and I think not so. What can we learn about ourselves? I think what we can learn is we love simplified stories. We like stories of heroes and anti heroes when things go wrong. We love absolute control. Helps us sleep very well at night. And this faith in science that we call Scientology, this is actually a building in Edinburgh. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s, it’s just fascinates me. Yeah, so, so, yeah, it’s, um, it’s, the point is that how these religious narrative. Actually come in the way of learning and and we, we take them on face value and call them objective and scientific research output. I think it’s not. We should probably question these narratives. That’s all. Thank you. Yes.