Chapter 2 

What we can see is not enough for the challenges we faced?

It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone…

Heart of Darkness (1902) by  Joseph Conrad.

The world we see seems so diversity and vast are actually composed mostly from our imagination. For lots thing are untouchable by our sensation, like the sun, moon, star, distant mountain or tall tree. Also it is hard to say, we have been any sensation memories of those. Most of the time we just take it as granted as we see it almost every day after the first curiosity faded away while we are still very young. This is where the long term memory started. After that, we just accept it as part of reality. Period. The reality could be a puzzle to us in our life time for something is unreachable. This is not because we are lazy, it is because we human had very limited capacity in our ability to recognize the truth by our own sensation and something just has to take it in this way. Like the Sun is actually untouchable to anyone. Even something is touchable; we will not feel it all by our own. If we want to buy a pair of paint but not sure about its texture, we will only pick up one corner of the clothes to feel rather than feel it all by our own hand to make sure. This is not only because we might dirt the clothes but because our sight judgment together with little sensation of touch had constructed whole clothes texture for us. The Worlds we see are more or less constructed in the same way to us by our working memories to pick up something in long term memories and others in short term memories. We have to understand our mental picture of the world to know what process we should be through to proper increase our knowledge and experience to cope with the ever changing era. 

Mental picture of the world: conscious and subconscious 

To construct the world of our own is a complicated process which consists of many aspects:  

Our conscious of the world is very limited by 7 items only and all our mental ability is alternatively using these limited capacities. We just get so used to it we did not even notice our limitation for we are helping with our working memories. If we cannot adopt in a new environment with the help of our LT memories, we will just have a very strange feeling to slow us down. Try to tell what the differences of these two pictures below you will see what means of this.   

How we explore the world by ourself?  By magical 7, to memorize.

To compare difference of these two pictures, we will have to use our memory to remember part of the picture and compare the same part in other picture. It is no doubt we can only use the limitation of the magical 7 items to do the comparing job for us. Our Iconic memory could also help in identifying the differences but have to set up some reference if it is not as obvious as the high heel shoes she wore. In her skirt length comparison in these two pictures, we have to compare the end of the skirt on her left hand position to know the skirt was shorter in right side picture (as the skirt end in same position seeing from the chair). Then we will wonder does the apparent difference length of skirt is an illusion of her hand position which is just a little bit forward of her skirt than left side picture. By comparing her left hand finger rest position, now we are sure of her shirt is really shorter in right side picture. Maybe you already notice something missing on the wall behind her head. But, what is that? You have to go back to take a second look to make sure. And what exactly it is? By looking back and forth many times, you finally get the picture and the idea of what it is all about.

If the task we take is to remember what items in one picture by one look like a good intelligent agency did, we could speak out about 7 more or less items as predicted by psychologist like shores, hand bag, chair, lamp and her long hair. For these items has its name and those name are coming from our long term memory. 

Once the task changed to compare two pictures, we soon limited to lesser items to be work with. This is because the competition of the awareness (or conscious).

How we notice the world by ourself?  By magical 7, Pay Attention.

Like the example above, change task will change our attention immediately. For an unfamiliar environment around us, most people will lost the ability to react due to our brain need some time to settle down new memories. Some parts are easy, like the sky is bluer, the tree are fewer, some tree are taller and grass cover are lesser. Some things are more bizarre like the giraffe which take all OUR attention. The height, long neck, slender leg compare to the body, what the bulge behind her neck, does it look at me now, any signs of danger to me or not, what I should do ? etc…. we don’t know whether we should observe or just take off from the scene? Both action are competing our attentional capacity. 

The world we could noticed is limited by our attention. Attentional items cannot over Magical 7 either. We can have so vast information just by one look depend on our long term memory in the environment familiar to us. If we did not have enough long term memory to support our movement, we will have to be cautious of very step we take. Like a student first transfer to a new school, he cannot run in the hallway but to look cautiously of new building surrounding him.  

How we understand the world by ourself?  By magical 7, to appraise.

When the light is out in a darkroom, although everything in the room are very familiar to us we still have to feel the way out by our hand because we lost the eyesight which eventually cause the loss of our spatial judgment of safety . Whenever we touch the wall by the same materials we know before immediately our mind create the whole picture of the wall in this room’s layout instead of to feel all the parts of wall. We can then almost be assured that there will be a chair against it in next corner. The process is slow as “touching is believing”, no other way out. But if we touch something we never noticed before and no idea at all, it will cause a shock to us like some TV show ask honorable guest to touch something he don’t know inside the black box. It is the same while somebody hiding outside our vision and come to tape on our shoulder from behind. These illustrate exactly what we are doing in our daily life. We want everything in order, not just come out of blue( from nowhere), otherwise we will end up in shock state. Some radical reaction may be taken without our rationale consideration and most probably accident happen with our regret afterward.

We cannot test the thing with our first encounter and cannot test it all by ourself afterward. We need it to be in same place of our mind in some time beforehand i.e. that is in our long term memory already. You won’t test over three points of clothes to understand what material is made of. The real examinations are few and yet we think we understand the world at all. This is the complacency our brain provides to us to make us feel comfortable about our life and actually living in the dream we had. 

How we familiarize the world by ourself?  By magical 7,  to Rationalize.

Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. - Alfred North Whitehead (1861 –1947 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead) So, the civilization is part of our subconscious for something we can doing without thinking twice. Human aviation history reveal one hundred year before, people were just happy about he can back alive after each flight. Who can image man will be able to fly over the space without atmosphere. Does this because man’s brain evolved tremendous over one hundred years’ time? No, impossible, no way. Man still has the limitation our brain inherited only now we can exclude the doubts by other means either by the help of computer or systematic knowledge established.  The memory, attention or the doubts in our mind still competing the precious Magical 7 space. We rule out the strange part of life and get used to the fact of science by items number of magical 7, each time. 

How we decide the world by ourself?  By magical 7,  to decide.

Human are making decisions more or less in every day’s life. What time to leave the bed, what breakfast to eat, which hand to open the door, who I should go to see first,….etc. All these come up to our conscious from time to time. These won’t cause our mental burden if it is our daily routine which we can do it in our subconscious level. If the situation is new and the stake is high so the decision might become tough for us? We will try to forget about something (or leave behind) and use our concentration at some points and observe its change in the hope that we can find the key elements in each situation if we are not familiar with the situation. We cannot tell what sign is supposed to mean about something in its position? We just hope the time will be in our side so as we can take care of very small piece of it in time to decide what we should do to solve problem. 

Sometimes the answer is not on the table. Even we observe it all very carefully; our attempt will be as foolish as we haven’t doing at all. We can call this is an unfair game. But we can do nothing to improve the situation, the solution have to come around from other prospect or in other dimension. We can follow the path which we knew is safe to do so. We all knew the nuclear power is enormous but no safe scheme is big enough to set up a plant for global use. So human have to set up thousands small nuclear power plants to harness the power of it within the acceptable risk we can taking.   

How we construct the world by ourself?  By magical 7,  to learn.

Our personal learning experience is the same as the civilization progress of the mankind. We notice the world and memorize, familiarize, judge, decide, construct our mantle structure, add new element to see, change our plan and finally satisfy by the world we lived. These mental activities are all carry out inside our conscious level and compete for the precious space of 7 items in our short term memory; either we use it to memory, attention, observation or recalling. For most of the time, we did not know our mental limitations. In our conscious level, only 7 perceivable items were noticed and we are happy about this too until something happened beyond our expectation. If some situation will surely require our extra attention to accomplish it, we will simple give it up with a sigh ( “or comma, give me a break”). This is not our laziness caused the problem. It is the protect mechanism of our brain to avoid mantle fatigue which might cause even more complicated mistake or disaster. We have to respect and overcome the drawbacks of our brain. Eventually, no human brain can do the God’s work. God only permit us with the Magical 7 to handle our earthy world. 

From the paragraph above we know, all human mental activities are competing our short term memory capacity of Magical 7. How can we survive in this very limited resource we inherited? The answer is coming from our long term memory. Long term memory is something explicit to us and ready for use in anytime but we may never know it correctness by ourself, like the sun, moon, star, earth, the pond and the forest. We may never discover what the true constitution of the Sun, but we can take the Sun bath every day and accept it pure existence as part of our life. It is just there like the background of our life without our conscious. For some kind of long term memory is movement based procedural memory to compare with the knowledge based context memory. Without the long term procedural memory, if we were sick at bed for some months we even cannot get off the bed by ourself for our muscle forgot how to coordinate the movement to balance our body out of the bed. The process to transfer our short term memory into long term memory is our learning process.

Our learning process

All people have to go through some educational process before he is capable of any work assigned to him. As human brain working structure is consisted from four kinds of memories, we have to do the learning process to comply with it. For instant, people do forget what they have just heard or saw. So we have to motivate their attention on the subjects we want to teach to them. People have the problem to remember what they learnt last week or month; we have to check their learning after two months period. Most important is our limited short term memories space and total blank storage of long term memories in the beginning stage. Without our Long term context memories we cannot understand what world we are in and grasp the key points of work. Without our long term procedural memories we cannot execute an operation need consequential movements in a limited time frame, like doing golf swing or martial art defense moves.    

Learning process is no exception which has to comply with the magical 7 limitation. We cannot rationalize everything before we do it. But, we receive no warning for the things we want to do. We get so used to the assumption made by our brain we accept it according to our feeling not our thought. So there is always having the possibilities we will do something we are not knew without feel anything wrong. This is so called macho, it is part of human nature and depend on how dare we are in our personality. This kind of mistake is unavoidable unless we are closely monitored by our superior.

For the limitations we had, the learning could take place only by 7 plus 7 process. No easy way out, even the most brilliant student has to learn his knowledge from the very beginning stage to accumulate his long term memories from nothing inside. His brilliant is because he learns anything only once then he got it. For ordinary people, we have to reinforce many many times before it became part of our long term memories. The way the knowledge or long term memories accumulated will take about 20 years for us and may be 10 years for a genius. The reason for the genius take so long to acquire necessary knowledge is due to his physical limitations like sleep, eat and exercise needed, not his mental ability. We are suffering both mental and physical limitations at same time for our memories are largely depend on the emotional feeling at it. The emotional reaction actually is our physical body condition reflects on our feeling.

Learning process affected by culture

The learning processes are also affected by our culture difference. In western world, people seem to prefer a learning style that allows them to take small logical steps, once at a time. The learning is not necessary by reason been given but by the process we are doing to make sense. They are not worried about the whole picture; they want to make sure everything is logical and right before doing. In eastern world, people use analogy to explore similarities and differences between things to learn. They are more likely to know the reason why we have to do it then actual actions are taken. The whole picture must be presented before anything could be done. If your patched picture is not beautiful enough then they probably lost the interest to it, in another words, not motivated. Both kind of learning culture are suitable for their teaching methods and social norms. Once these processes become a pattern, we just get used to it and get impatient while the process is different. This is the new challenge our management level faced in today’s maritime environment. Sometimes we just need to ask what will be more appropriated for their learning purpose to avoid the bad feeling about the learning or working instructions been given.

Learning cycle of special task

For a special task newly assigned to an apprentice, the learning cycle are employed to demonstrate the necessary steps and strategies needed to achieve our goal. There will be many different learning phase, we will need different learning attitude and skill to attend their learning. For an easy job, the learning process is easy. Just do it and you will get it. For a complicated job the learning process must be taken through proper steps. 

1. 1.     Beginning: from a naïve who need everything to be taught but limited by his attention capability of 7.
2. 2.     Studying: he who everything seems reasonable to him but remembered only 7 by his context to LT memory each time.
3. 3.     Practicing: he who thought he can handle the things with his limited 7 key points structure.
4. 4.     wondering: he who is in doubt as some element are now diverse at some point more than his 7 ST memories capacity. 
5. 5.     Mentoring : he who frustrated by his failure in identifying the priority of 7 key elements of every decision
6. 6.     contexting : he who have many success experiences in the things he did can now stipulating the process in his LT memories.

In different stage needs different mental ability. 

1. 1.     In the beginning, he needs to concentrate his attention to the things he should know.
2. 2.     While studying, he needs to remember the things he thought is reasonable.
3. 3.     In Practicing, he needs to decide which step to take in sequence.
4. 4.     In doubting, he needs to evaluate the situation he is in.
5. 5.     In failing, he needs to identify the key elements in his job.
6. 6.     In finishing, he needs to stipulate the context in his achievement.      

For a mentor, he need to direct his energy in different way to guide this young man. 

1. 1.     In the beginning, he needs to motivate his pupil to the things he should know.
2. 2.     While studying, he needs to teach his pupil the things he thought is reasonable.
3. 3.     In Practicing, he needs to manage his pupil to follow steps in sequence.
4. 4.     In doubting, he needs to share his pupil his priority of events.
5. 5.     In failing, he needs to help in identifying the key elements in his job.
6. 6.     In finishing, he needs to ask the context in his process.   

Learning is important to knowledge base error. 

Not enough knowledge or wrong knowledge applied is usually deems as the main reason of human error of young man. However, this kind of mistake is very hard to avoid due to the knowledge type is short term memory which is subject to forget after two months period at most. Literally we can forget about it in a blink of eyes or distracted immediately by something just passing by. Unless his short term memory can be added to long term memory by the context in his mind (by the flash back memories in his deepest stage of sleep at night, quick eye movement period). The reliability of LT memories is so solid even we have been electrified it won’t fade away. This is no joke for psychologist did do the experiment on human body and found this is true. The most recent LT memory we can retreat is two months ago after electric shock. Any memory within two months are gone with the shock which we called it ST memory. However our memories are neutral to right or wrong. It is not something we can remember is always right.  

Formal and informal learning

We can verify the correctness of our memories through practicing or mentoring. The things we can do without think it over again is called skill. The skill is important to carry out our daily routine to save the time needed for evaluation. The men with proper skill will always working smoothly. The confidence of his working attitude will serve us an expression of his capability in the work. If we are not sure of what we are doing we will hesitate in the action we are going to take and the bystander will notice the reluctant of your movement. For a team to success, team members must have to notice other member’s action confidence. 

If the formal learning by education or mentoring is not available, the learner who has learned how to learn, and so can choose their strategy to suit their circumstances is most needed. This is called versatile learner.  Informal learning can happen anytime and anyplace even without our conscious awareness. In our daily life, lots of things happened around us. Only the things that give us some emotional feeling or we are rational looking for will leave the marks on our subconscious. If we are willingly to bring up our subconscious structure to our conscious level, we are looking for inspiration of the work. Anyway one thing is important for our informal learning is to be around the scene. If we are not at the scene, nothing will happen. In the ancient time, the apprentice is not paid for his time. He only had the privilege to be around and do some errands seem unrelated to the true skill he needed. However act around the scene will do the magic of learning. Over a prolong time frame even the routine job could be evolved by the inspiration we had to reach its perfection. The inspiration is the least solution for something we are not familiar and have to solve by ourselves. In an emergency, it is not recommended but as a last resolve.  

Learning from mistakes need our guts

- Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one the second time. – H. W. Shaw

It’s never easy to admit we’ve made a mistake, but it’s a crucial step in learning, growing, and improving ourself. Why it is so hard for us to avoid the same mistake twice? We all make mistakes, but only the extremely self-esteemed among us can admit them. It is the consistency in human psychic which has it great influence over our actions over mistake. We tend to underestimate the mistake we took to make us feel good to go on our normal life like nothing had happened. This is our basic survival requirement inherited from our ancients. But people around you know when you make a mistake; still you want that you can constantly cover it up. To admit the mistake make us feel bad about ourself. To avoid the mistake twice need our most positive attitude in the life we are living. This positive attitude can only be got by proper motivation or determination in our mind. However, let’s take this energy to go through this journey. The key is not to see the mistake as the end product. It is actually a beginning. 

If you consistently make mistakes and do not learn from it and correct it, you must take action to change your attitude to be accountable, for it is probably obvious – so admit it. If we do not accept responsibility for our mistake, there can be no learning from the situation. It becomes another setback with its opportunity lost. Aggressively investigate the opportunity every mistake brings with it. Always ask yourself these questions: -       How much cleverer or smarter am I after this experience? -       What will I do differently next time to avoid this mistake?

Some people are resilient and willing to keep trying in order to be successful, even when they do not see immediate progress. However, others are not that determined. 

Some people collapse at the first sign of trouble, and if you are one of them, you should push and inspire yourself. You must show confidence even if you made a mistake or have done poorly. 

Success is a journey, a process, not a destination. You should realize that successful people have also failed and yet, still managed to succeed that is why it is okay to fail. Never let the fear of striking out get in the way of your success. 

Realize that while mistakes may cause pain, they also provide an excellent opportunity for growth. Out of every disaster comes the chance to be reborn. 

Rational Investigate your own mistakes

Work to understand why it happened and what the factors were.

What was the probable sequence of events?

What information could have avoided the mistake? 

Are there alternatives you should have considered but did not? 

Were their multiple small mistakes that led to a larger one?

Were there any erroneous assumptions made?

Were we trying to solve the right problem?

How can we avoid getting into situations like this? (What was the kind of situation we wanted to be in?)

Was this simply unavoidable given all of the circumstances? A failure isn't a mistake if you were attempting the impossible.

Has enough time saved for us to know if this is a mistake or not? 

Overcome your negative emotion of mistake? 

Accepting responsibility makes learning possible.

Don't equate making mistakes with being a mistake.

You can't change mistakes, but you can choose how to respond to them.

Growth starts when you can see room for improvement.

What kinds of changes are required to avoid making this mistake again? 

What kinds of change are difficult for you? 

How do you think your behavior should/would change in you were in a similar situation again?

Work to understand the mistake until you can make fun of it (or not want to kill others that make fun). 

Don't over-compensate: the next situation won't be the same as the last.

Human tend the learning by scenarios, by multi sensory memories. If the scenario is critical in our mistake the emotional impact become more vivid in our memories. The emotional reaction could be trigged by the slightest sign of the scenario before our own awareness. So it is important that we have to check by ourself the emotional impact of mistake had faded away to avoid the urge to do something once we been pull into the same scenario again willingly or not, like the trauma suffered. We have to prepare ourself rational and emotional readiness to face the challenges of works. 

Ｗhat is Continuous Professional Development

Continuous Professional Development(CPD) may be defined as a systematic approach for improvement and broadening of knowledge and skill, this is important in the era of ever-changing.

Why we need Continuous Professional Development? 

- Individual development, Develop personal qualities, at different entrance levels, as a professional seafarer,
- Lifelong learning concept, Improve standards of competence and professionalism and Provide professional recognition
- Knowledge transfer from generation to generation, An immediate positive impact on your workplace performance

-       Maintained leadership in your professional area

Benefits to business are seen to include

- The ability to remain innovative and competitive

- The fulfilment of skills gaps and development a high performing workplace

- Increased staff retention and a highly motivated workplace

- Access to an effective knowledge base able to embrace new technologies/ techniques / processes

- leading to improved business performance

- The ability to attract the best candidates for vacancies within the business

Shipboard training, coaching, mentoring 

Employees are our greatest asset. Their competence management system is vital for employee retention, customer confidence, developing leaders and industry leadership. Most OOW onboard are work bound, not so much time for training, coaching, mentoring. Thanks to the MLC 2006 enforcement, now extra OOW are assigned to traditional 3 OOW shift on board. This practice leaves some extra time for his learning with OOW salary and release the workload of paper brought about since the International Management Code for the Safe Operation of Ships and for Pollution Prevention (the ISM Code) is enforced in 1998. It is in great extent of these two parties; OOW and Master have to appreciate each other before any meaningful interaction can be begin. These interactions include the training, coaching mentoring and communication. 

For an OOW, the impression of him to the Master will decide how much Master is willing to teach. We all know Master is not a superman; He needs some help from the bridge team in the very instance of an emergency. But his decision making ability still invariant comes from his sole responsibility or his sole judgment as we should said. If the OOW is good the Master is lucky to get some extra help. If he don’t like this OOW, the help from this OOW is irrelevant to him anyway. Even the sincere help of OOW is offered, Master will doubt about his intention. This is just human nature, not any exaggeration of Marine life on bridge. This goes without problem in last century in one national one ship, now become a problem for multinational seafarer in these days and even in faster personal rotation. For a master‘mentoring’ and ‘leadership’ were essential cousins – because mentoring can reduce the probability of leadership failures ( Doctor Marina Papaioannou). Any meaningful training, coaching, mentoring and communication are based on whether they had good relationship or not. Training, coaching, mentoring also set a great stage for these two parties relationship. 

The personal relationship on board before

Historical teaching of knowledge at sea is conducted by apprenticing and mentoring for marine educational system is not so popular. The maritime related knowledge is almost exclusive to ordinary seaman which needs some advanced mathematic knowledge of spherical triangle theory. For those cadets have the privilege to receive the nautical knowledge mostly from some kind of connections, the learning process usually begins at very young age. There is no problem of the learning cycle as mentioned above to be completed as the learning usually accompanying with the practicing. Any question raised the assistance are handy as the mentor also on board at the same time and he has the willingness to teach. 

The learning environment is different from ancient centuries now. Most nautical cadet are graduated from maritime university or collages. No man will be posted as third mate without knowledge base certificate issued in the following; Personal Survival Techniques, Fire Prevention and Firefighting, Elementary First Aid, Personal Safety & Social Responsibilities, Proficiency in Medical First Aid Aboard Ship, Proficiency in Survival Craft & Rescue Boats, Advanced Firefighting, GMDSS General Operator's Certificate and Navigation Radar & ARPA Simulation, ECDIS and HELM Training. 

The handicaps of depend on training course now

Some training course had some kind of on hand experience as the simulator or physical equipment are used to evaluate whether learning objectives are reached. The training requirements are diverse and complicate. The training sessions are usually last 2-5 days. If the training course is within 40 hours, it still way to long to be memorized by the trainer for two months required in LT memory. No matter how hard the written test or how often the simulator exercise, the learning experience fall into ST memory category which subject to be forgot in any time unless the training intensity reached the trauma level. How cruel the world is. However, the training on simulator is totally harmless. No matter how hard the exercise can be, it will only be good for the trainer to get best of it. So the simulator exercise should not be aimed to smoothly accomplish by the trainers. It should be designed to create correct personal response, teamwork and attitude in the difficulties they are facing. If every exercise is easy, the training is wasted.

Most jobs in the world for the young man are basically routine base as the skill is accumulated from long time experience and no trust are entrusted on young man. Merchant marine is different story. Real skill of certified OOW can only be certain at actual happening and no guarantee for no mistake in second time even he had done it right in the first time. OOW need so diversity trainings as mentioned before. Those training course he had received need 10 years practice on board to become part of his skill in this industrial. Before OOW had valid skill for his work, the situation is buzzard. For an OOW, he has no faith in the job he is entrusted. For a Master, he has no faith of the OOW assigned to him. The connections seem quite nature in old century is lost. Also the question was raised to shore base management - to what extent can vessels are remotely managed in place of good leadership and management on board? In this century, maritime industrials are invested by developed economic power and manned by developing countries, not one national but multi-nationals. We need new moral at sea to overcome these handicaps we had in management and forge proper learning culture on board.

End of Chapter two

! An analysis of merchant marine officers responses asking them to rate various non-technical skills showed an interesting difference between deck and engineer officers. For example, engineer officers rated teamwork above leadership and decision making while deck officers rated leadership as the highest priority. It was interesting to note that neither group rated communication as highly importance!

Marina then went on to look at mentoring – the stages of mentoring from initiation and cultivation to separation and redefinition. The positive benefits of mentoring for both the mentor (career advancement, passing the torch and learning from the mentee) and the mentee (career advancement, salary improvements, organization and professional identification) were discussed. Finally Marina developed the idea that ‘mentoring’ and ‘leadership’ were essential cousins – because mentoring can reduce the probability of leadership failures.

Our third speaker was Stella Kazamias, Human Resources Manager of Interorient Marine Services Ltd. Stella’s task was to develop how we can achieve leadership and mentoring training within our companies. Her ideas included development of annual officers leadership and skill development workshops where both sea and shore staff attend and work on various projects together to find solutions. Stella was keen that companies design a leadership framework which clearly defines leader’s behaviours and expectations thus ensuring that everyone in the company understands what is needed for good leaders and mentors to develop. Frequent ‘one-to-one’ coaching/mentoring meetings were needed both ashore and on board ship to provide continuous feedback. The office also needs to be very much involved with the process giving it support and encouragement. Cultural awareness training, project-leadership opportunities, performance assessment and promoting a climate of ‘trust’ were other important ideas.

Our final speaker was Mike McCabe from Seagull. Mike’s presentation was entitled ‘Knowledge and Experience – do they have what it takes??’ Mike presented us with a scenario where there was a serious problem on board and the Managers were faced with a series of dilemmas – do they actually know the competence of the decision makers on board and was all the information available from the ship to make the correct decision? This very much depends on how accurate are the appraisals, Superintendent assessments and

evaluations of the seastaff. Mike reflected on how this process used to be done – onboard training and mentoring from seniors to juniors with almost hourly instruction, advice and guidance on ‘how to do the job’. Nowadays this element is missing and new systems of onboard learning have to be offered.

Typical Seagull training system

Mike then spoke about competence management, summarised below.

Finally Mike explained some of the other training programmes and tools that could be offered by his group to assist with mentoring and leadership on board.

After our speakers , there was a very active Q&A session discussing the many issues of ship-shore communication, methods to motivate, management of ships from ashore.

Then all participants were asked to complete a questionnaire. The key points and findings of the questionnaire are published below and give valuable insight into the development of mentoring and leadership training.

Results of the Questionnaire given to attendees. Persons attending 72.

Grading from Very Good (1) to Poor (5)

Your Views on Leadership and Mentoring

Before joining this seminar, did you consider that there are any leadership /mentoring issues for the industry to deal with?

Yes

No

After the seminar, what are your views on the need for leadership/mentoring?

Leadership training needed

Leadership/mentoring is not needed currently.

STCW on Leadership Training

Leadership and Mentoring training in practice.

Does the current STCW Convention including recent amendments adequately address leadership and mentoring training on board?

Yes

No

Does your company currently carry out Mentoring and Leadership Training?

Yes

No

If No, do you expect to do so in the future?

Yes

No

If you think the STCW including the recent amendments does not adequately address leadership and mentoring training, what do you think needs to be done?

This is a ‘home grown’ problem for Companies to address through their training processes.

There must be less ‘committee-based’ decision making on STCW standards and less compromise on standards.

Motivation of crew is needed.

If your company carries out Mentoring and Leadrship training, what type of training is done?

Fleet officer meetings.

On-board training by internal auditors during voyages.

Yearly seminars for senior officers.

Any other comments made

We need industry wide cultural change.

We need to re-open the two-way loyalty with core personnel for this to work.

We need a more practical approach.

Key points included

97% of participants considered that there were leadership and mentoring issues for the industry to deal with after attending the seminar.

85% of participants felt that the STCW and the recent Manila Amendments would NOT adequately address mentoring and leadership training

58% of participants did carry out some form of mentoring and leadership training.

The positive response from this feedback showed that this is a very important subject.