Giovanna with large port list due to overboard valve perhaps not working?
No blame culture; a concept.
17 crew on the ship, and one of them pulls the handle off the overboard valve so that it can’t be used. Nothing is said the broken handle is placed beside neatly in three bits and nothing is reported. No malicious damage or sabotage here, just pure stupidity. No excuse, someone somewhere accepted that a basic level of knowledge was required to be employed, and documents issued by “reputable” sources attested to the fact that yes this man has in fact a brain and is capable of using it. Documents, certificates, references the whole nine yards all to prove worthiness of employment.
Some time later during an inspection of the overboard ballast system, I note that one of the valve handles is broken, imagine if you will walking into the kitchen and noticing that the hot tap on the kitchen sink has no handle. Hard to miss. Very hard to miss. I turn to the engineer and ask, ” How long has it been like this?” the reply ” very long time…it wasn’t me” and I say “but less than a fortnight as that was when the last inspection was held, no?”
Blank face. No response.
I ask the Chief engineer later, he looks at me pale faced and shrugs his shoulders “What to do?” he says, “new crew, new problems”, I ask “when were you planning on telling me?” he replied well you know now.
The idea is that you report the incident so something can be done about it, like fixing or repairing or educating. But mostly the crew say nothing at all. Worrying really.
No blame culture is right, nobody admits to the problem so there is nobody to blame.
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Me no, wife no, baby come, how come?
When will it ever change?
Wow! Want to work with me on using this story for my leadership column in the July issue of MarineNews magazine?
Which is why the hallmark of a great organization, great crew, great working group, great shift – is not their ability to create innovative new plans or ideas, but to consistently do the simple things correctly.
If you have “briliance in the basics” you are hard to beat. If you combine that brilliance with innovation, you become impossible to beat.
Good post.
Scott, well put, reminds me of Clausewitz:
Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
Change “in war” to “at sea”
Things are very difficult if you have high crew turnover.
Would it happen to be a Swedish crew..? In my experience the Swedes always bend over backwards to avoid conflicts and blame. If not, then please slap my wrists for my Swedism.
We have an in-joke at work where we say it’s great to work for a CFO. Our organisation incidentally includes a Chief Fire Officer who normally is called the CFO. However, the joke is explained as a consequnce-free organisation. If you screw up, there are never any consequences.
Nuts
when i was a young lad plying the seas inside one of Uncle Sam’s submarines, we had a culture of reporting ALL problems, big or small. if you got in trouble, well, that was what happened. you took your lumps and carried on.
the ramifications of not reporting a problem could be sudden and quite lethal.
different culture, different mindset.
Thanks for all the great response folks.
@N-E, you know better than me!
@paddy, no Swedes! a few “rotfrukt” for brains but!
@Nuts, Lucky for me there were no consequences this time and we have a redundancy system, in fact we have triple redundancy in some systems just to avoid disasters.
@Bothenook, thanks for the insight from your perspective, the consequences for a problem on a Nuclear sub, are larger than on a surface civilian ship and you have the added benefit of USN discipline and all crew from one country. I have between 4 or 5 nationalities and sometimes questionable education standards, so I have to be vigilant.
@Scott thanks.very true.
@Kennebec, high crew turnover is one of the biggest headaches, teaching the same routines over and over.
@Peter, cheers, will be in touch.