A
Acquiescent Silence: When the crew stops reporting problems because they believe the office doesn’t care or won’t change anything. “Why tell them the pump is broken? They’ll just tell us to plan a repair we can’t afford.”
B
C
Cognitive Decoupling: When the office separates a commercial demand (e.g., “No delays”) from the physical requirement (e.g., “Rest hours”). They pretend the two aren’t connected, leaving the Master to solve the paradox.
Construal Level Theory (CLT):
- High-Level Construal: The office’s “big picture” view (e.g., “Maintain Schedule”).
- Low-Level Construal: The Master’s “concrete” view (e.g., “The crew hasn’t slept in 18 hours”).
D
Deference to Expertise: A hallmark of High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) where authority shifts to the person with the most immediate knowledge of the situation, regardless of their rank or location.
Double-Bind: A “no-win” situation. For example: Being told to never violate rest hours, but also being told that a delay for rest is “unacceptable performance.”
E
Epistemiology: the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge. It asks the fundamental questions: What is knowledge? How is it acquired? How do we know what we know?
Epistemic: the adjective used to describe anything relating to knowledge or the degree of its validation. If something is “epistemic,” it concerns the state of knowing.
Epistemic Niche: a concept from cognitive science and evolutionary biology that refers to the way organisms (and humans) alter their environment to make information processing easier, more reliable, or more efficient. Instead of just reacting to the world, we “build” a niche that offloads mental effort onto physical objects or spatial arrangements. In simple terms: we change our surroundings so we don’t have to think as hard to stay safe. See Epistemic Niche
F
G
Goal Conflict: The inevitable clash between “Safety,” “Efficiency,” and “Throughput.” Management often claims Safety is #1, but their KPIs only measure Efficiency.
H
I
J
K
L
Latent Failures: Decisions made by “distal” actors (designers, managers, accountants) that lie dormant in the system until an “active” trigger on the ship causes an accident.
Local Rationality: The principle that people do what makes sense to them at the time, given their goals, knowledge, and limited resources. If a mate “fakes” a log, it’s usually because the system made it the most “rational” way to keep the ship moving.
The Long Screwdriver: The phenomenon where shore-side management uses real-time data and satellite comms to micromanage tactical shipboard decisions they are poorly positioned to make.
M
N
Newtonian : Newtonian thinking is a mindset rooted in Isaac Newton’s physics, viewing the world as a predictable, clockwork machine with clear cause-and-effect relationships, linearity, and reductionism, where complex systems can be understood by breaking them into smaller parts. It’s a structured, deterministic approach focusing on measurable inputs and outputs, assuming that if you know the starting conditions, you can forecast the outcome. This thinking shaped much of modern science, government, and organizational structures, emphasizing control, hierarchy, and straightforward processes, though it struggles with complex, unpredictable human systems and quantum-level realities.
O
P
Psychological Distance: The mental gap created by physical or social separation. The further the office is from the deck, the more abstract (and unrealistic) their demands become.
Q
R
S
Safety Bureaucracy: The accumulation of paperwork, checklists, and rules that exist to protect the organization’s legal standing rather than actually making the work safer.
Safety-II: A shift from focusing on why things go wrong (accidents) to why things go right (the 99% of the time your expertise saves the day).
Socio-Technical:
T
Tension: In socio-technical systems (STS) research, tension refers to the state of friction, conflict, or misalignment that occurs when different elements of a complex system—specifically the social (people, culture, habits) and the technical (software, infrastructure, tools)—interact. Unlike a “problem” that can be solved and dismissed, a tension is often an inherent, ongoing condition that researchers must identify and navigate.
U
V
W
Work-as-Done (WAD): How you actually get the ship into the berth at 0300 with a failing thruster and an exhausted crew. It involves “finagling,” shortcuts, and expert adaptations to messy reality.
Work-as-Imagined (WAI): How the office, regulators, and manual-writers believe work happens. It is linear, predictable, and follows every rule perfectly.