Put bluntly, experience is just bias with a good track record. “Master with 24 years of experience.” “Chief Engineer with 18 years on similar engines.” It sounds reassuring, and it appears on every CV and in most investigation reports. But experience is not simply accumulated wisdom. Sometimes it is accumulated assumptions, and the awkward question is: experience of what, exactly?
The pattern-recognition trap
Human brains are exceptional at recognising patterns, and it is how we cope with complex environments like ships. A radar echo looks familiar. A vibration feels normal. The weather window “should hold”. The cargo “usually behaves”. So we interpret the present using the past, and most of the time this works well.
Researchers who study expert decision-making, notably Gary Klein, describe this as recognition-primed decision-making: experts rarely compare options, they recognise a situation and act on the first workable answer. It is fast and usually right. But patterns are blunt instruments. When a situation resembles an earlier one, the brain fills in the rest of the story, often before anything has been verified. That is not negligence. It is how cognition works.
Experience builds confidence, and confidence reduces curiosity
The more experienced someone becomes, the more efficient their decisions become. Efficiency is good, but it has a side effect: it reduces the number of questions we ask. The junior officer double-checks everything. The senior officer thinks, “I’ve seen this before.” Sometimes that is exactly the right call. Sometimes it is the moment a wrong interpretation quietly locks in.
Investigation reports routinely record the experience of the people involved, and the line is usually there to show how surprising the mistake was. In practice it tells us very little. Experience does not prevent error. It shapes how we read a situation, and those readings can become so automatic that we stop challenging them. The Master who has entered the same port 40 times may miss the one variable that changed. The Chief Engineer who knows an engine intimately may dismiss the sound that actually matters. Not because they are careless, but because experience trained them to expect a pattern.
The normalisation of “slightly wrong”
Experience also teaches us to tolerate minor irregularities. Every ship has them: a gauge that reads slightly high, a pump that runs a little warm, a radar echo that occasionally ghosts. Experienced crews know these quirks and learn to live with them, until the quirks become normal.
Sociologist Diane Vaughan called this the normalisation of deviance, from her study of the Challenger launch decision. Seafarers have their own version: “She’s always done that.” Most of the time they are right. But every now and then the system decides it has had enough, and the “normal” thing is no longer normal.
Experience needs friction
The answer is not less experience, which would be counterproductive. The answer is friction: not bureaucratic friction, but intellectual friction, the kind created when people feel comfortable challenging assumptions.
- The junior officer asking, “Are we sure that’s rain clutter?”
- The superintendent asking, “What makes us confident this cargo will behave?”
- The Master saying, “Let’s take a second look.”
These questions cost seconds, and they only work when the person asking is not made to feel foolish for it. That is a question of culture more than procedure.
Experience without challenge slowly turns into institutional overconfidence.
The quiet truth: experience is just bias
Shipping respects experience, and rightly so. It is what keeps ships moving safely across oceans. But experience is not the absence of bias. It is bias that has worked repeatedly in the past. Occasionally it points us in the wrong direction with great confidence, and confidence, as every investigator eventually learns, can be a very persuasive accomplice.
Hittesh Gupta is Head of Casualty Investigation (APAC) and a Principal Surveyor with BMT, specialising in marine casualty investigations, cargo claims, technical disputes, and loss assessment. Based in Singapore, he provides independent expert support to insurers, P&I Clubs, shipowners, and legal counsel on high-profile maritime incidents across Asia and globally, with experience spanning container, bulk, tanker, and offshore operations.
Views expressed are the author's own and do not represent those of their employer.
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