When shipboard activities don’t go as expected and when there are incidents happening, the organisation often wonders why such a thing would happen despite having a comprehensive safety management system (SMS). The company is left pondering why failures have occurred despite the Safety Management System (SMS) being written in such details to cover all outlined shipboard tasks. As a base expectation, we expect this ‘system’ to deliver as imagined. The question is, ‘is SMS a system or merely a set of procedures?’ Understanding the system A system, by definition is: “A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements working together as parts of a mechanism, or interconnecting devices functioning/programmed to deliver a specific function” e.g. – traffic light system, computer system, alarm system, etc. A ‘system’ may also be a “set of principles and procedures according to which something is done”, SMS of the company is, in principle, a set of disciplines, procedures, processes, derived from company core values, industry guidance, best practices, regulations, experiences, learnings and various other checks and balance system. The SMS by itself is ‘NOT’ programmed to function, SMS can only deliver if the most important element associated with it is able to perform – which