What is the ethic of risk management in the maritime industry?
Pretending to be in control of risk through excess focus on paperwork.
How is this achieved in practice?
Prescriptive regulations are simplified and transferred to binary audit templates (Yes / No / ranking / grading). This simplistic design is convenient for the auditors to follow. It also provides a (false) sense of measurement and control.
Who benefits from this?
Traditionally, auditing has been a high-skilled / high-waged model of work. But this simplified approach is slowly turning auditing into a low skilled-low waged service industry thus benefiting a limited few.
Who is made powerful by the design philosophy of audits?
This simplified and binary checklist design allows the auditor to pick and choose between areas they consider important and comfortable to focus. What appears like a highly formalised process from the outside is, in essence, political, subjective and biased.
Who is made powerless?
Rules are not objective. Rules are interpreted and targeted more towards the behaviour of the seafarers and administrative controls. This is mirrored in the quality and nature of corrective actions and recommendations issued as part of the audit reporting. Coupled with KPI culture, negative reporting and goal Zero, all this leads to a culture of fear, shaming and blaming of the seafarers.
How does this influence the safety of maritime transport?
There is some evidence to show that audits are improving personal safety but, by and large, audits are resulting in serious accidents at sea. Excessive and unwanted paperwork generated by audits take away the focus of the mariners from critical tasks such as navigation. All this leads to groundings and collisions at sea.
Where is the evidence for this?
First, start with your company audit reports. Next, talk to your seafarers. And finally, read ‘Bureaucracy overload: calling for audit implosion’ by Kristine Vedal Storkensen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Storkensen warns that the trend is far widespread both within and outside of the maritime industry.
What can we do?
✅ Look for auditors bias in the audit reports: Check out the experience and educational background of the auditors. Find out if there is a correlation between the auditors past experience and education and the audit findings. Sometimes, audit reports say more about the auditors than the risk profile of your company.
✅ Critical risk controls: Map audit findings against the hierarchy of controls. Notice how far the audit findings verify the effectiveness of critical risk controls.
✅ Connect authority with expertise: At the end of the audit, engage in a constructive dialogue with the auditors. Ask them what they have learned about you (your business risks and your cultural context) through the audit process. Doing so creates humility, and opportunities for learning and improvement both for the auditors and the company.
