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9 WMU J. Maritime Aff. 1 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/wnujlmti9 and id is 1 raw text is: WMU JOURNAL OF MARITIME AFFAIRS, VOL. 9 (2010), NO.1, 1-3 Human and Organizational Factors in the Maritime World - Are We Keeping up to Speed? Editorial Everybody is familiar with the famous 80% figure with regard to Human Error or Human Failure when discussing safety in maritime operations. Standard accident examples in the maritime sector are close to hand and often referred to. Despite this commonly quoted paradigm, it is noticeable that human factor-related discussions have recently not been so high up on the international maritime agenda. It seems that ballast water management, goal-based standards, climate change and other more technical issues have more successfully competed with the once-dominating issue of human factors. Does this mean, however, that we know enough about human factors and are now able to limit their negative safety implications to a generally accepted level? This, certainly, is the objective of all the human factor-focused discussions - to shed some light on how well our own individual limitations are dealt with by organizational arrangements and how these subsequently interact, for good or ill, in safety-critical operations. Human and organizational factors have been addressed in instruments agreed at IMO. The International Safety Management (ISM) Code is just one example brought in as a reaction to identified safety-limiting, shore-based organizational arrangements in the wake of a ferry accident that caused lives to be lost at sea un- necessarily. The ISM Code is a major achievement. However, does it mean that issues arising from organizational arrangements have now been solved? At least parts of the maritime industry do not seem to be convinced about this, as the example of the Tanker Management and Self-Assessment (TMSA) shows, where compliance with the ISM Code is considered to be only the minimum level for the safety arrangements of an organization. Shipping companies in the tanker segment of the world fleet are required to develop their safety measures further, in line with a suggested scale of four safety levels. This leads us to the conclusion that this part of the industry does not seem to be satisfied by the introduction of ISM and its effect on operational safety in maritime operations. How can one arrive at a conclusion looking at these two disparate points of view? One way to form an opinion is usually a review of accident developments. Reduced numbers of accidents are often seen as an indicator of the successful effect of a new regulation on safety levels. However, a number of studies point out that specifically organizational factors are not always investigated according to the models suggested by IMO. In addition, accident investigation reports are usually not very rich in orga- nizational context for various reasons. This hampers serious attempts to assess the safety gains due to the ISM implementation. There is no doubt that the ISM Code ©World Maritime University. All rights reserved. ISSN: 1651-436X print/1654-1642 online