Livingstone Cap. 3 — Managing Pressure

1. Overview

LIVINGSTONE, Grant H.; LIVINGSTONE, George H. Shiphandling, the Beautiful Game — Volume 1. London: The Nautical Institute, 2025. Chapter 3 — Managing pressure (Weisinger & Pawliw-Fry and the COTE outlook; Croatia at the 2018 World Cup; the technique of managing pressure; confirmation and continuation bias and the loss of El Faro; managing bias and complacency; two philosophies of risk and safety-critical task analysis; deliberate calm and self-differentiation, US Airways Flight 1549).

Anexo 2-B, Seção VII (Conhecimentos Gerais), item VII.6 — LIVINGSTONE v.1, Caps. 1, 3, 11, 12 (Cap. 3 prescrito). Anexo 2-A, Seção VII — fatores humanos: pressão, viés cognitivo, percepção e gestão de risco, calma deliberada na decisão de manobra.

Working under pressure is normal for shiphandlers, and this chapter is about doing it well. In Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best (2015), Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry studied 12,000 people over 20 years and overturned a common belief: performing at one's best under pressure is statistically rare. Pressure usually degrades cognitive ability and physical skill, so we generally perform below our best — and it is insidious, often building unnoticed inside us.

Their antidote is to manage the pressure of the moment by focusing on your experience, your skills, and your perception of the challenge. Perception is the lever: a positive perception does not dilute the challenge artificially, but lets us judge our ability to meet it objectively, which lowers the felt pressure and raises the odds of success by opening access to experience and calm, rational thought. The authors capture the positive outlook in the acronym COTE — confidence, optimism, tenacity, enthusiasm — to which they add experience.

The chapter then works outward through cases: Croatia at the 2018 World Cup for perception; the loss of El Faro for confirmation and continuation bias; two philosophies of managing risk; and US Airways Flight 1549 for deliberate calm. The thread is constant — fact-check feelings, slow down, and stay deliberately calm.

2. Pressure: Croatia at the 2018 World Cup

In the 2018 World Cup final, France beat Croatia 4–2 — a David-and-Goliath match, since Croatia had never won and France had played 16 World Cups, winning twice. Before an earlier game, Croatia's coach Zlatko Dalić told reporters his team did not fear their opponent. That positive perception of the challenge altered the pressure his squad felt and their chance of success; but for an own goal, the final would have been a close 3–2.

The lesson is the Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry finding in the flesh: Croatia was under tremendous pressure but managed it far more effectively, greatly reducing its negative potential. Those who falter less under pressure use their natural tools — thoughts, physiological response, body movement, senses — to create an inner dialogue, a reframing that keeps them focused and increases their awareness of how actions lead to results.

3. Managing Pressure

The best at mitigating pressure are sensitive to their body's own stress signals — rising heart rate, fear, confusion, which for the shiphandler means loss of situational awareness. That self-awareness then triggers a controlled, deliberate response. In summary, the handler should:

mentally slow things down; breathe more slowly; reassess; gather more facts with less opinion and emotion; delegate tasks; recognise the stress trigger and respond to the pressure it creates; and focus on the next execution required. Weisinger and Pawliw-Fry sharpen the aim:

"In a pressure situation, there is only one response requirement: that you get the job done correctly… In a stressful situation, reduction of stress is the goal. In a pressure moment, success is the goal. Thinking you have to be successful all the time means you are under pressure all the time."

Recognising anxiety in oneself is the first step. When angry, fearful or anxious, the author asks: "At what moment did my emotional state change? What triggered my reaction?" Over time, patterns emerge. Once personal triggers are identified, they can be recognised in advance — so the handler is forewarned, not ambushed, and can interrupt the fight-or-flight response with rational thought: slow the breathing to get oxygen to the brain, and put the mission foremost — what is the next manoeuvre required to handle the ship safely? It is a learned, practised process of self-awareness, and any stressful situation is a chance to practise it.

4. Confirmation and Continuation Bias: El Faro

The loss of El Faro with all hands in 2015 is studied here for one dominant factor: a persistent bias that shaped how the tragedy unfolded. On day one, Hurricane Joaquin lay hundreds of miles to the south-east of the ship's track — but the two were on a near-constant bearing and decreasing range, a collision course that the hurricane updates made clear over the first two days.

The Master — a conscientious professional — had decided before leaving Jacksonville that the ship would pass safely south of the storm, and he did not change that opinion until the ship was overwhelmed and sank about 40 nm north-east of Acklins and Crooked Island.

NTSB (2017): "…a further possible explanation of the captain's actions is what is known as confirmation bias — the tendency to search for, interpret, favour and recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs… Once the captain made his decision to continue on the planned route, he was not swayed by information that contradicted his plan, including his officers' suggestions of route changes to avoid the storm. The captain was also unwilling to change course even though weather forecasts led the officers to believe they would come within 22 nm of the hurricane's eye."

USCG (2017): "The Master of El Faro failed to carry out his responsibilities… failed to download the 11:00 PM BVS weather data package and failed to act on reports from the 3/M and 2/M regarding the increased severity and narrowing of the closest point of approach to Hurricane Joaquin, and the suggested course changes to the south."

4.1 Managing Bias and Complacency

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek and favour information that aligns with existing beliefs while ignoring what contradicts them. Complacency is self-satisfaction with a loss of risk awareness — and it is sticky precisely because the conditions that create it feel pleasant, so the risk is not felt. Continuation bias is the unconscious drive to stick with the original plan despite changing conditions. The three reinforce one another, and many maritime disasters began in benign conditions where catastrophe was the last thing on anyone's mind.

5. Managing Risk — Philosophy

The most common risk question — "Should we move the vessel?" — is subjective and attracts opinion. The book insists on a better one: "Is it safe to move the vessel?" — direct, objective, and answerable only with facts. Those facts come from a standard set of questions.

With those facts in hand and the go/no-go decision made, two philosophies of risk appear.

The two are not equal in a crisis. When wind, current, fog or mechanical failure arrive after a manoeuvre has begun, the handler is forced to work in those conditions — and success is possible only with prior training and experience in them. This is the "Catch-22": a handler who has only ever avoided high-risk manoeuvres has no library of experience to draw on when extremity arrives, so focusing solely on avoidance, to the neglect of high-risk training, actually increases risk. Risk cannot be eliminated, only managed, and how we perceive it determines how we manage it.

5.1 Safety-Critical Task Analysis

From a human-factors view, safety-critical task analysis examines the tasks — such as berthing and unberthing — where human error could cause or fail to avoid a serious incident. The conditions that raise the likelihood of human failure include complex or hard-to-perform tasks; insufficient training; too little time; boring, repetitive or unfamiliar steps; inaccessible or hard-to-use controls; poor interfaces, labelling or alarms; unclear signals; reliance on error-free communication amid noise; poor working-environment factors such as lighting and line of sight; over-reliance on spotting hazards in a dynamic situation; multitasking and interruptions; and fatigue, stress and preoccupation. The aim is to eliminate or redesign a task to reduce error and improve detection and recovery — and, throughout, exceptional skill and experience further reduce risk.

National Research Council, Minding the Helm (1994): "Mariners are inherently familiar with risk, not in probabilistic terms but in practical threats to safety that must be avoided or accommodated in operations." Given identical real-world views and tools, what differs between handlers is the individual reaction to the inputted information — an emotional component in decision making, shaped by each person's mental model, which can itself be inaccurate.

6. Deliberate Calm: US Airways Flight 1549

On 15 January 2009, two minutes after take-off from LaGuardia, US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of geese and lost both engines. Captain Sullenberger took the controls, made a Mayday call, and three and a half minutes later landed the Airbus A320 on the Hudson with only a few serious injuries — the "Miracle on the Hudson", which was no miracle but the product of skill, experience and deliberate calm.

Brassey et al, Deliberate Calm (2022): "He did not panic and… did not rely on a standard playbook or protocol to give him a false sense of security. Instead, he recognized the situation, mastered his internal response, and made the difficult yet necessary decision to… land the plane on the Hudson."

Sullenberger described it as drawing on a lifetime of "small, regular deposits in the bank of experience, education and training", so that on that day "the balance was sufficient… to make a very large withdrawal." His preparation had three parts — physical preparation, recognising all available resources, and remaining calm — to which the authors add objective self-assessment, mental preparation and continuous professional improvement.

6.1 Managing Deliberate Calm and Self-Differentiation

Calm reflection under pressure is possible through self-differentiation: in a hospital emergency room, the first pulse to take is your own, and on a ship the Master must do the same.

Dr Paul Taylor (2023): "Differentiation of self is a psychological state in which someone can maintain their sense of self, identity, thoughts and emotions when emotionally or physically close with others… The higher the level of differentiation, the higher the ability to acknowledge these feelings without becoming misguided by them."

The opposite is corrosive: when anxiety intensifies it "multiplies and paralyzes… we cannot see options, the big picture of objective reality" (Steinke, 2019), and we replace thought with emotion. So when an incident develops, the handler must first grip the emotional reaction — "talk yourself off the ledge" — then concentrate on the immediate next step, micromanaging the fix rather than the panic, and guarding against the "deer in the headlight" syndrome. Deliberate calm reveals alternative solutions that panic hides.

Gregory and Shanahan, The Human Element (2010): "Bigger rule books and more gadgets increase uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity… Automation in particular creates greater distance between people and the world around them… People can be lulled into a false sense of security by confusing the reliability of technology with its robustness" — which the authors link to the widely used expression "radar-assisted collisions".

The chapter closes on a practical demand. Shiphandlers need an emergency manoeuvring playbook — to have thought through and discussed emergency manoeuvres before an emergency — and to learn to manage anger, fear, anxiety and panic through self-awareness and self-differentiation beforehand. Emotions are contagious and spread fast, for good or ill: remaining deliberately calm steadies the whole bridge team and draws out their contribution, whereas the absence of calm "opens the door to panic — and panic is a cognitive assassin." Deliberate calm will not always prevent an accident, but it is the best state of mind for solving or mitigating one.