Exploring the Core of Crew Resource Management Course: Speak Up or Stay Silent
Argues that speaking up is not one crew resource management topic among many but the precondition for all of them, then reports what happened when a course built on that premise was put in front of working bridge officers. The argument is made plainly: if nobody communicates, then mutual monitoring, supporting behaviour and shared mental models never come into play at all, so a team unwilling to speak has no use for the rest of the syllabus. Espevik and colleagues also supply, without naming the construct and without citing Edmondson anywhere, a serviceable statement of what speaking up requires: team members must not only be willing to speak up but also trust that what they say or do will not be held against them, which they call the core CRM object. That is the bridge to psychological safety, and it is worth noticing that it is reached from inside the safety training tradition rather than imported from organisational behaviour. The setting is the Norwegian Coastal Express, which runs around the clock along what the authors call one of the most dangerous littoral areas of the world, with a watch leader and an assistant standing each bridge watch. Crews came ashore during a scheduled eight hour stop in Bergen and took a four hour course in fours: an opening plenary hour on the importance of and the barriers to speaking up, then a blindfolded team problem solving task in which the youngest assistant is secretly handed the information the team needs, then forty minutes in a simulator working a difficult stretch of coast in their normal pairs, then forty minutes of reflection facilitated by a subject matter expert. What is measured is thinner than the framing suggests. Forty three navigators attended and thirty nine evaluated the course, by three questions on a visual analogue scale administered once, afterwards, with no pre-training measure, no comparison group and no observation of what anyone subsequently did on a bridge. Sex was not recorded, deliberately, to protect anonymity in a small sample. Scores were binned into low, medium and high: 89.74% rated the course high for increased awareness of team processes, 64.10% high for perceived learning, 89.74% high overall, and nobody rated anything low. Two cautions attach to those numbers. The abstract reports 69% where the results section and the discussion both give 64, an inconsistency the reader has to catch unaided. And the figure the abstract presents as relevance comes from a question that actually asks how far the training increased awareness of team processes, with the authors arguing that the one can stand in for the other. They place the evidence at the first two levels of Kirkpatrick's hierarchy, reactions and learning, say so themselves, and close by stating that future work must address behaviour change on board. The most interesting result is a null. The paper predicted that watch leaders would value the training less than their assistants, on the strength of findings that surgeons and cockpit captains rate communication training less positively than nurses and second pilots, and found no group difference at all. The authors read this, explicitly as speculation, as a sign that power distance aboard these ships is lower than they had assumed. It reads at least as well as an artefact: a null from thirty nine people split into two groups is weak evidence of no difference, and the paper reports distributions skewed towards the top of the scoring range, which is where a difference would be hardest to see. Take the argument for why speaking up is the core of CRM, which is well made and matters. Treat the evaluation as evidence that professional seafarers welcomed the training, which is what it can carry, and not as evidence that anything changed afterwards. One further reason for restraint: the course was developed, certified and delivered by the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, to which all three authors belong, and evaluated by them. The journal itself files the paper as a case report.
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