DOSSIER

 

Pradeep Chawla – how seafarers can be motivated to learn


Pradeep Chawla, former head of QHSE and training with Anglo Eastern Ship Management, and now founder of digital learning company MarinePALs, explained how to create an organisational culture which supports learning


If you want an environment where people are motivated and supported to learn, you need the right organisational culture, where seafarers feel they can trust office staff and are trusted in return, believes Pradeep Chawla, founder of digital learning company MarinePALs.

Mr Chawla formerly held the role of head of QHSE and training with Anglo Eastern Ship Management for 31 years. The company currently has over 650 vessels under technical management and employs 32,000 seafarers.

We need to focus on people’s motivation to continually learn, because we have probably reached the limit of how much it is possible to improve by writing more procedures. “We have beaten ‘procedures’ to death. There is a checklist for everything you do,” he said. Yet accidents continue to happen.

To have a trusting relationship between seafarers and office staff, seafarers must not feel that they might be blamed for anything which goes wrong on ship, when they were doing their best to prevent it from going wrong.

This means a working environment where it is understood that people may fail at their work, and learning from this is better than blaming people, he said.

During the years of 1998 to 2018, it was common for accident investigations to conclude that the reason for the accident was a failure made by a person.

“The right approach is to say, ‘we understand you failed but what was the ecosystem around the seafarer which create this environment which allowed the person to fail..’ That brings in processes, commercial pressures, various sets of other factors.”

Near misses are very important for learning, because several near misses often come before an actual incident. But we can only learn from near misses if people feel safe reporting them. “Why do people not report near misses? Because half the time, the reaction from the office or charterer is, ‘how could you do this, this is so stupid.’”

Shipping companies which do not have a close relationship between ship and the office are also “very unlikely to have a learning environment,” he said.


Jetty collision example


In one example, a tanker had a collision with a jetty causing a hole in a tank and a spill, due to a tow line from a tug breaking (or ‘parting,’ to use the technical term).

The tug was supposed to connect to the tanker one mile from the berth, but the tugboat was late. The tanker continued towards the berth under its own power, being connected to the tugboat about 0.8 miles from the berth.

The tow line parted very soon after it took the force of the tug pulling the vessel. But 0.8 miles from the berth was not enough distance for the tanker to slow itself down. The reason tugs normally connect to tankers a mile from a berth is that if there is a parting of the tow line, which would normally happen immediately after the tug starts pulling the vessel, it provides more distance to recover.

A point on the map is agreed on by the pilot and bridge team, of the last allowable ‘abort point.’ “Once you cross this point you are at a point of no return without a risk to the ship,” he said.

So, it was a mistake by the crew, but an understandable one, given that they did not expect the tug line to part, and were probably under time pressure. The crew had been highly experienced and ‘top class’, Mr Chawla said. The decision to continue had also been supported by the pilot.

Similar accidents may have been caused by mooring gangs not being in the right place as a vessel arrived, high currents, or delays.

So, the correct response from the company would be not to blame anyone, but to help seafarers in the company to understand what went wrong, so that the same mistake is not made again.

In this example, the tanker operator took the 25-page investigation report and created a 7-minute video showing what happened which could be shared. It did not blame anybody.

 

Not intending to fail


It is important that senior management recognise that seafarers are trying to do the right thing in nearly all cases.

“It rarely happens that they intentionally did something which was unacceptable. Circumstances happen [such as] someone getting distracted at a crucial moment.”

A ’just culture’ means starting an investigation with the premise the person did not intend to fail, he said.

If you find that the act was intentional, or grossly negligent, such as a captain under the influence of alcohol, then you can fairly blame them, but not otherwise.

“In my 31 years I may have come across two cases where I could get angry and say, ‘this was gross negligence.’ In all the others the human did not want to fail, was trying his best, may have been limited by lack of skill or experience, or external factors,” Mr Chawla said.

In one case there was a pilot who was a “very angry man” and shouting at people. The ship ran aground because people were too afraid to tell the pilot he had mis-identified a buoy.


Creating useful learning

 

The next question is how useful learning can be achieved. Useful learning can be broken down into a number of elements, Mr Chawla said.

The student needs to be engaged; the learning needs to transfer useful skills, not just theory; and there needs to be reflection on why the learning is happening, he said. In training about how to handle ballast water, for example, there is usually very little discussion on why the regulations exist. “We teach them, ‘this is what you can’t do, this is what you should do,’” he said.

A further ingredient is that the teaching should itself be motivational or inspirational, encouraging people to learn more. And it is helpful if it is collaborative, between student and instructor, and between different students.

Good training also needs to cover both human factors and technology factors, since accidents are often caused where these come together, he said.


MarinePALS


Mr Chawla left Anglo Eastern in July 2023 because he reached the company’s mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. But rather than retire, he set up MarinePALS, a digital learning company.


MarinePALS also acquired an IT company, which builds the software. Today, there are 45 staff on the engineering team, and 15 developing content.

Anglo Eastern was the company’s first client, and its learning systems are provided on all Anglo Eastern vessels.
Since then, there have been further orders from a ‘medium sized company’ with seventy ships, and three smaller companies.

It offers to build custom videos for its clients. There have been specialist videos on bulk carrier hatches and tanker moorings.

The learning management system and it’s contents are licenced to a shipping company which makes it available for crew, not bought directly by crewmembers.

Companies pay a single per ship fee for the entire package, with games being an optional extra. “So far everybody wants the games,” he said.

The software is provided via a cloud server to an app on seafarers’ mobile devices or laptops. For ships which do not provide crew with fast internet, the files can be downloaded from an onboard server.

The content is in English with subtitles or dubbing in other languages. Most shipping companies prefer English since English skills are part of the STCW requirements, Mr Chawla said.


Warning


The system is designed to ‘facilitate’ learning, encouraging people to learn, and making it easier, rather than telling people what they should know.

In a world where any information is a few clicks away, the challenge is making people want to absorb new understanding, and making it easy to absorb, not just providing them with information, he said.

MarinePALS has pioneered short training videos of upto 7 minutes in length. Even that may be too long - 5 minutes may be the ideal length for people’s attention spans today, Mr Chawla said.

Many studies show that people’s attention spans are reducing, and this trend is unlikely to reverse.

So, provide a simple message such as what the consequences may be if something is not done. “On YouTube, if you don’t engage the viewer in 20 seconds, you’ve lost him,” he said. The only exception is if seeing the video is a mandatory safety requirement, in which case “the 20 second rule doesn’t apply,” he said.

“Our parents would read a newspaper from page one to the last page. Now everybody can choose what information they want,” he said. “They usually absorb the information in short bursts.”
The videos have a link to the relevant page of the company competency management system, so you can see where the company asks that its crew understand what the video is saying.

To encourage peer to peer learning, seafarers are given scores as they progress through the materials. You can see how your progress compares with other people in the company at the same rank.

The training is ‘gamified’ in other ways. For example, there is a port state control game, where you are asked to find defects in photographs of ship equipment as fast as possible, such as a chair which is missing a leg.

“Gaming of learning is an amazing thing,” he said. “People don’t realise that they are learning.”

“It is not taking a ‘port state control course.’ It is an activity you can do sitting with your friends on the ship,” he said. As you play, “the system is assessing your capability to apply your knowledge of regulations,” he said.

MarinePALS is also exploring virtual reality learning, for example so someone can ‘walk’ around the inside of a forepeak tank.

The system can be used for assessment, where someone is asked to find the structural faults in a tank.

In a classroom you can be taught about ways that cracks can occur, in virtual reality you can see the cracks and how they occurred.

MarinePALs is exploring the use of AI to generate video imagery to potentially reduce development costs. But so far Captain Chawla finds it is not so useful, because the AI has not had much maritime video to train on.

“If you ask AI model to make a video for two cars chasing each other, you will get a perfect one. If you ask for a video about a mooring winch, it cannot do it.” If you ask for a ship captain, the AI might give you “something out of Pirates of the Caribbean,” he said.

 

 

 

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