This episode focusses on risk management aspects and the importance of non-technical skills of operators in safety critical operations. Operators need a special skill set and need to be able to work in a safety culture, where the safety of the vessel and human life onboard has the utmost priority. However, the shipping business involves risks. A vessel in motion can never be operated at Zero risk. Even when safely alongside at a berth in a port there is a remaining risk, e.g. that another vessel maneuvering in the vicinity of a docked vessel gets out of control due to wind or technical failures and collides with the docked vessel. The risks are multifold, however with deep knowledge and understanding of technical, procedural and human factors of the operation we have the tools to control and to mitigate the prevalent risks.

Scientists of the modern psychology and world wide safety experts from all industries have done a phenomenal job to analyse incidents, accidents and so called near misses in order to get to the root causes of these accidents and to identify contributing factors which led to the final tragic event, which we call an accident. The required qualifications of operators, managing safety critical processes was extended beyond their technical skills being necessary to manage these processes to the so called non-technical skills.

Today we talk about the following key non-technical skills of persons being necessary to manage safety critical processes:

-teamwork and leadership

-effective communication

-situational awareness and decision making

-assertiveness

Every single of these non-technical skills of operators can be trained and are essential to prevent accidents. These elements are the filaments we use to plait the safety network around the decision maker to prevent that a single human error of this decision maker remains undetected and hence cannot be corrected and leads to an accident.