Apo Belokas, Managing Editor, SAFETY4SEA, delves into the evolving landscape of the shipping industry, emphasizing the imperative of addressing human factors in relation to decarbonization and digitalization as new industry realities.

Drill Performance onboard ships is the most vital element of a successful emergency response. Drills are required either by legislation or as part of the Company SMS and the time and energy spent across the industry to comply with legislation and ensure a proper response when necessary is huge.

Getting closer to 2020, our industry is under pressure to innovate sustainably and show its change-ready profile to the strict climate-alerting regulations. While remarkable progress has been made, it is of much interest to look where the inefficiencies lie as well as how close we are to properly manage CO2, SOx & NOx challenges and meet the goals and aspirations set by IMO.

Being the most recent event in a string of fire tragedies within the last year, 'Grande America' was the wake-up call to ship operators, industry insurers and regulators who, have been paying more and more attention to reasons that cause or feed such incidents at sea lately.

Millennials have begun filling leadership roles in workplaces but faced with some common challenges like situations that test their skills, mindset but also their patience and consistency. Many of them strive to deliver performance, while others just enjoy the director’s position and sadly destroy their team’s performance. But what separates the first from the latter? Certainly, the way they handle daily challenges at workplace!

We are currently navigating the 4th industrial revolution, the so called Shipping 4.0 which focuses on digitization, environmental leadership and safety excellence. During the course of 2018 we have ween IMO announcing an ambitious strategy toward 2050 emissions reduction by 50%, discussions over the forthcoming 2020 Sulphur Cap implementation and also a heated debate on whether to scrub or not to scrub.

We have all perceived colleagues being more difficult to work with than others. But, have you ever wondered to what extend the super-competitive,  grumpy and miserable colleagues or the intrusive leaders impact negatively the quality of your own work? Luckily, there are techniques for dealing with a variety of different behaviors - like negativity, aggression or selfishness.

“I can’t do much”, “This always happens to me”, “My whole day is ruined”. Do you hear similar “ANTs” buzzing around in your ears, sabotaging your best self? The wide field of ANT (Automatic Negative Thinking) is gaining more and more popularity lately. Having already discussed the “Cognitive Behavior Theory” in previous SAFETY4SEA Issues, it is high time we address where negative thoughts come from.

There have been flare-ups in the maritime cyber security era over the last two years, when major cyber incidents begun striking industry’s operations. Theft of credentials is said to have increased significantly, with phishing and malware being the most popular cyber threats.

Lately, there have been many signs that leadership development is being flawed; an assumption rising from the fact that although people search what behaviors to change in order to become a better leader, they do not search how to change those behaviors. It is of essence therefore, to generate a discussion on leadership development focusing on the self-awareness part, the foundation to ensure good leadership.