When Experience Becomes a Blind Spot

Experience is one of the most valuable assets on a ship. It helps a master recognize a developing situation before it becomes obvious, allows an experienced officer to distinguish between what is unusual and what is genuinely dangerous, and reduces hesitation when time is limited.

But experience has another side. Sometimes the same experience that makes a seafarer faster at recognizing a situation can make them slower to question it. The dangerous thought is rarely "I don't care." It is more often: "I've seen this before."

A vessel approaches a berth. The wind is stronger than expected, but not unusually strong, and the master has handled similar conditions many times. A cargo operation develops a small deviation from the expected pattern; nothing is outside the immediate limits, and the officer has seen the same thing on previous voyages. A navigation situation requires a little more attention than usual, but the bridge team knows the area and the route is familiar. Nothing is obviously wrong. And that is precisely where experience can become a blind spot.

Familiarity changes the meaning of information

An inexperienced officer may treat an unexpected indication as a reason to stop and investigate. An experienced officer may recognize it immediately, and that recognition can produce confidence before verification has taken place. The difference is subtle. Experience says: "I know what this looks like." Good operational discipline adds: "But let me verify that this is actually what I think it is."

The problem is not experience itself. The problem is when previous successful outcomes become evidence that the current situation is safe. They are not. A situation can resemble ten previous situations and still contain one important difference. That difference may be the wind direction, the vessel's loading condition, visibility, traffic, or equipment condition. It may be the fatigue level of the team, or simply that the operation is developing faster than expected. The experienced person sees the familiar pattern; the risk may be hiding in the part that is not familiar.

Successful history can create false confidence

There is another trap. If an operation has been performed repeatedly without an incident, people naturally become more comfortable with it. That comfort is understandable. But operational success does not necessarily prove that the operation was well controlled. A vessel can complete the same maneuver twenty times with a narrow margin and never experience an adverse outcome. On the twenty-first attempt, a small change may remove that margin. Nothing suddenly became "unsafe" at that moment. The margin was simply no longer sufficient.

This is one reason why experienced teams can sometimes normalize small deviations more easily than inexperienced ones. They have a large library of previous outcomes, and they know that many things which initially look uncomfortable eventually work out. The danger is allowing that experience to answer a question that still requires verification. "It worked before" is evidence of history; it is not evidence of control.

The most experienced person in the room can also be the strongest influence

Experience becomes particularly important when there is a hierarchy on the bridge. A junior officer may notice something that does not feel right, while the master may have seen the same situation many times. A short exchange can determine what happens next: "Looks fine." "OK." And the issue disappears. No one has done anything obviously wrong, but something important may have happened. The junior officer's uncertainty has been closed by the senior officer's confidence rather than resolved by evidence.

This is where Bridge Resource Management becomes more than communication training. A strong bridge team does not require the least experienced person to be correct. It requires that person's concern to remain visible long enough to be assessed. The purpose of challenge is not to defeat authority; it is to protect the operation from assumptions, including the assumptions of experienced people.

Experience should increase verification, not reduce it

There is a useful distinction between recognition and verification. Recognition is fast; verification takes discipline. An experienced master may recognize a developing situation almost instantly, and that is a genuine advantage. But the next question should remain: what has changed?

That question is powerful because it interrupts automatic thinking. What is different from the last time? What information am I relying on? What assumption am I making? What would make my current assessment wrong? What is the consequence if I am wrong? These are not questions for inexperienced officers alone. In fact, they may be more important for the most experienced person on board, because the more familiar the operation becomes, the easier it is to stop seeing the details.

The uncomfortable value of being challenged

A mature safety culture does not measure its strength by how rarely the master is challenged. It measures its strength by whether the master can be challenged without the bridge team becoming uncomfortable. That does not mean encouraging unnecessary debate. It means preserving a mechanism through which a concern can survive long enough to be tested. Sometimes the junior officer will be wrong. Sometimes the master will be wrong. Sometimes both will be partially right. The important thing is that the operation should not depend on who speaks with the greatest confidence; it should depend on which assessment survives verification.

That is particularly relevant during pilotage, restricted-water navigation, mooring, and other periods where small changes can quickly reduce available margins. Experience should make the team faster at recognizing risk. It should not make the team faster at dismissing it.

The paradox of experience

There is an uncomfortable paradox in maritime operations: the more successful someone has been, the more convincing their assumptions can become. A master with thousands of maneuvers behind him has earned confidence. But confidence is not the same thing as certainty. The best use of experience may therefore be not to say "I have seen this before," but "I have seen this before, so I know what I need to verify."

That is a very different form of experience. It does not reject intuition; it disciplines intuition. It does not distrust expertise; it prevents expertise from becoming automatic. Because the greatest value of experience is not knowing that something worked yesterday. It is recognizing what has changed today. And sometimes the most experienced person on the bridge is the one who knows that the situation looks familiar, and still asks one more question.

Capt. Volodymyr Smirnov is a Master Mariner with over 25 years of experience on large ocean-going vessels, including more than 18 years in command with senior operational accountability. His professional focus includes operational risk management, bridge team decision-making, and confined-water navigation strategy.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.