Why the Crew lies and why SIRE exposes it.
(Article available on Linkedin.)
Let’s be honest.
Every Captain has “adjusted” a logbook entry at some point.
Every Chief has “prepared” the engine room for an inspection so well that an hour earlier they wouldn’t have recognized their own machinery space.
Every officer — since the days of the first steamships — has played the same game.
Officially, we call it inspection readiness.
Unofficially — it’s a survival mechanism.
And as long as inspections were based on paper, lying was cheap, easy, and widely accepted.
The problem is: SIRE 2.0 sees what paper never could.
Why it no longer works
Vetting used to be simple:
If the paperwork looked good → the ship was considered “safe.”
The engine room could be hotter than a furnace, the bridge team barely standing after exhausting maneuvers, alarms muted everywhere — but as long as the VIQ showed clean “Yes” marks, everyone was satisfied.
SIRE 2.0 turns this theatre upside down.
- The inspector’s tablet forces real-time evaluation.
- Questions are generated algorithmically — you can’t “memorize the checklist.”
- The inspector must assess the human, not just the equipment.
- Every hesitation, every micro-gesture of stress, every logical gap in the process → becomes a Human Factors observation.
You can fill out the logbook as beautifully as Rembrandt painted.
But you can’t paint over analytical PIF scoring and the Real-Time Human Response Tool.
Paper can be forged. People cannot.
Why the crew lies (Psychological Safety)
The crew doesn’t lie because they’re “bad.”
They lie because the system demands lying if they want to survive.
The report clearly shows that lying grows in the space between:
WAI – Work as Imagined
Corporate fantasies of perfect procedures,
and
WAD – Work as Done
The dirty, chaotic, real work at sea.
The reasons are always the same:
- Fear of the office: “Tell the truth → get punished.”
- Zero-deficiencies KPIs: as if “no remarks = safe vessel.”
- A culture of punishment instead of learning: mistakes seen as sins, not signals.
- Lack of psychological safety: no sense that you can tell the truth without retaliation.
If you punish people for speaking the truth, you teach them…
…how to lie perfectly.
And they do it extremely well — until SIRE 2.0 arrives, and suddenly everything that worked for years starts to break.
What SIRE 2.0 actually changes
SIRE 2.0 doesn’t ask: “Does the ship look good?”
It asks: “Do you understand what you’re doing — and is this how you do it every day?”
That’s where the theatre ends.
Because:
- A crew member can recite a procedure, but if they don’t understand why, the inspector will see it.
- You can perform a “perfect deck round,” but if your real practice includes shortcuts, the inspector will notice.
- You can show “100% Hours of Rest compliance,” but if the officer can barely stand — it will surface in Human Factors.
SIRE 2.0 isn’t hunting for mistakes. It’s hunting for the gap between WAI and WAD.
And that gap can’t be covered with fresh paint.
What actually fixes lying
This is where the real revolution begins.
Not in procedures. Not in a new SMS. Not in more checklists.
If we want to eliminate lying, we must remove the reason people lie.
And the reason is simple:
lack of psychological safety.
That’s why, when I work with crews:
- I don’t teach them “what to answer,”
- I don’t train them “what to say to the inspector,”
- I don’t choreograph inspections.
I teach them how to feel safe when they tell the truth.
How to show the inspector real work — without fear of the consequences.
How to say:
“We do it differently because the procedure is outdated — and I can show you why.”
How to understand their own WAD rather than be ashamed of it.
This is the new core competence in the era of SIRE 2.0.
A call to action
If you truly want to prepare a ship for SIRE 2.0, here is the brutal truth:
Stop auditing paper. Start auditing trust.
If the crew tells the truth → the inspection is easy. If the crew is afraid → the paper will look beautiful, right up until the day it becomes a tragedy.
SIRE 2.0 is not looking for defects. SIRE 2.0 is looking for truth.
And the truth will only appear when people stop fearing that they will be punished for speaking it.
