Krisenmanagement – Herausforderung und Chance! Risk Management and Mitigation!

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.