Maximum Safety
When a new entry first arrived at HMS Ganges, the most immediate challenge was not learning seamanship, drill or naval routine.
It was trying to understand what was expected.
The difficulty was not a lack of willingness. Those who arrived at the New Entry Division had volunteered for the Royal Navy. They had already made the decision to leave ordinary civilian life behind and accept a demanding form of training.
The problem was that they had entered a system whose rules were unfamiliar, whose language was new and whose standards were often not yet understood.
In those first days, recruits developed their own method of coping.
It was not an official training principle. It was simply the way inexperienced boys attempted to survive while they worked out the environment around them.
The method was based on what might be called maximum safety.
Keep your head down.
Keep your eyes open.
Watch what happens to somebody else before making the same mistake yourself.
If another recruit got something wrong and received correction, everyone else learned from the experience without having to endure it personally.
It was not an unreasonable approach. In an unfamiliar organisation where mistakes were very visible, caution seemed sensible.
The difficulty was that it encouraged recruits to think of training as something to endure rather than something to understand.
At first, many of us viewed the instructors simply as people whose job was to identify mistakes. They appeared to be waiting for someone to fail, and avoiding that attention became a priority.
That perception was understandable. The early days at HMS Ganges were designed to create a sharp distinction between the civilian life recruits had left behind and the naval environment they had entered.
The standards were different. The routines were different. The expectations were different.
For a new entry, the safest option appeared to be following the crowd and avoiding unnecessary risks.
Then came the realisation that changed everything.
The discovery that information was available in manuals, displays and instruction altered the recruits' understanding of the process. The Navy was not simply setting traps and waiting for mistakes. The requirements were there to be found.
This did not mean recruits stopped making errors.
They did not.
The difference was that mistakes became easier to understand. A recruit could be wrong without necessarily being regarded as a failure, provided that he was genuinely trying to learn.
That was a significant distinction.
The training environment remained demanding, but it became less threatening because the recruits began to understand what was actually being assessed. Effort mattered. Improvement mattered. Asking questions mattered.
The atmosphere changed because the process started to make sense.
The change was visible within the messdeck. Recruits began discussing problems rather than simply trying to avoid them. Information was shared more freely. A question asked by one person often helped several others.
The same boys who had initially been concentrating on avoiding mistakes were now actively looking for answers.
They had not suddenly become different people.
They had simply discovered that the safest route through training was not always avoiding error. It was understanding why things were done and learning how to do them properly.
Looking back, the change seems obvious. At the time, it was a discovery made gradually and collectively by a group of young recruits trying to find their way through an unfamiliar system.
The fear remained, but it had changed character.
It was no longer simply fear of getting something wrong.
It became the determination to get it right.
Pusser's Method part 3 - The Book That Explained the Navy
Annexe 123 - Primary source: RN-013
RN-E-157
Comments