ALERT 16 — ROGUE BEHAVIOUR

It appears that today complacency is there among the most serous issues and it is yet to be fully addressed. And this is because the complacency could easily result in creation of the culture of non-compliance and non-professional behavior, sometimes referred to as rogue behavior. The term rogue behavior can be defined as willingly or unnecessarily failing to comply with existing guidelines, or taking unwanted risks.

It can manifest itself in a variety of ways, and some of the rogue behavior inducing conditions are quite easily recognizable - such as boredom, complacency, familiarity, ignorance, risk taking... Others may not be so easy to recognize - apathy, assumptions, dumping down, invulnerability, predictability... Complacency if certainly considered a major factor in marine accidents. When we do something for the very first time, we concentrate, we are aware of the hazards. But when we have done the same thing thousands times without anything going wrong, we lose that stimulation. Seafarers work in a hard and unforgiving environment.

Things still do go wrong, and people do make mistakes, equipment does fail. It is therefore critically sensitive to put the required safety barriers in place so that these failures do not result in a catastrophe... This short but interesting and very useful video film was prepared to supplement the Human Element bulletin issue No. 16.