How Do You Steer The World's Longest Cruise Ship?

Submitted by wendii on Fri, 07/23/2010 - 19:30.
in

An article in this month's Wired magazine shows pictures of cockpits of various high speed, high performance vehicles. It's fascinating to see all the knobs and dials in the fast jet and a submersible. What interested me most though, was the the captain's station of the Oasis of the Seas - the world's longest cruise ship. The picture looks as I would imagine it, with lots of displays and things to twiddle and turn. In the article which accompanies the picture, the captain says "The port and starboard command chairs have built-in joysticks for controlling the ship" The article goes on to say: Those are typically operated by other officers.

It turns out the captain's job is not to steer the ship at all. How many times are managers and leaders compared to 'captains steering the ship'? How many times are new CEOs of companies in trouble described as needing to "turn the ship around"? How many times are articles written about staff "going overboard after their captain"?. And now it turns out, that captains don't steer ships at all. So what are they doing?

The captain's job, according to the captain of the Oasis of the Seas says is "mentoring and teaching". In Manager Tools terms he's delegated the steering of the ship and now coaches his staff to do it well. He manages the ship - he doesn't actually do the work himself. That's how you steer the longest cruise ship in the world - not by doing it yourself, but by delegation. Does that make you reconsider a job you didn't delegate, now you know how big the jobs are that are delegated?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_cockpits/

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Submitted by mobile724 on Sat, 07/24/2010 - 01:15.

Another interesting cockpit

 Another interesting cockpit is that of the Boing dreamliner. The article says:

"[...] the Dreamliner’s 100 systems produce and process several terabytes of data during a single transcontinental flight. That’s why it took two dozen designers, pilots, and engineers—plus more than a decade of “format management” research—to figure out what data to present and how to present it. “We’re able to do more computing and image processing now,” says Mike Sinnett, a Boeing VP and chief project engineer for the Dreamliner. “But if you’re not disciplined, you can provide too much information.” "

I was amazed to read how many people (and how much time!) it needed to figure out what information is useful for the pilots in their particular situation during a flight and also how to present it. On the other hand, it is probably not surprising, considering how we are struggling in our jobs to achieve the same... to focus on the key information, to boil it down to what matters most, and present it in the right form for the recipient, the supervisor, the customer, etc... and that even without having terabytes of data to swim (or drown?) in....

wendii's picture
Submitted by wendii on Mon, 07/26/2010 - 19:10.

Thanks Mobile274!

I was going to write about that today, but you literally took the words right out of my mouth (or off the page)! I would have said almost exactly the same thing. Thank you for sharing.

Wendii

TrevorS's picture
Submitted by TrevorS on Sat, 07/31/2010 - 11:24.

Ship

Well, if all it takes is delegation then I want that job. Just kidding. This is great and actually worthwhile to teach children who might thing that being a Captain of a large ship would be hard to do.

When we wager at an casino en ligne we find that we fall in love with the casino games as well as the casino cash and service offered.

wendii's picture
Submitted by wendii on Mon, 08/02/2010 - 20:41.

Great comment!

Thanks Trevor, you made me smile :-)

Wendii