Even with strong data and advanced systems, decision-making can break down when organisational priorities are not aligned. Different teams often optimise for their own objectives, creating unintended trade-offs. This insight focuses on how misaligned incentives affect outcomes.
Even when data is widely available and systems are technically connected, decision quality can still suffer if incentives are misaligned, as different teams often view the same information from different perspectives.
For example, performance teams may focus on fuel efficiency, operations teams on execution and schedule reliability, and commercial teams on revenue and exposure. “They are pretty intertwined at the moment, with charter demands on emissions, especially in the EU, costing us money or costing our customers money. So they’re quite aligned now,” said Head of Decarbonisation, Global Shipping Company with responsibility for emissions and decarbonisation strategy.
When targets are set independently, decisions that improve outcomes in one area can damage performance elsewhere.
The tension between compliance design and commercial reality can be sharper than it appears on paper. “The regulatory framework that is happening right now and the commercial decisions that we take in the field, those are completely different” said Jeet Banerjee, a sustainability and emissions data specialist with experience across auditing and ship management.
Continuing, Banerjee added that there are “a lot of mismatches happening in the commercial scenario and the regulatory framework scenario.” This gap leaves organisations trying to align commercial reality with regulatory demands after the fact.
Research shows that disconnected KPIs can encourage decisions that optimise individual indicators while damaging overall organisational outcomes. Access to better data does not resolve these issues on its own.
When the structures supporting decision-making do match with the realities of how choices among competing priorities are made, data tends to reinforce established habits rather than driving better outcomes. Aligning incentives and responsibilities is as important for improving decision quality as access to better information.
The accumulation of different tools and policies on crew adds to the complexity of their workload. “They are constantly adding tasks to the crew members. They make this situation difficult for crew members to follow. They usually follow the procedures without actually knowing what they do. So they are trying to comply without understanding why they have to comply,” said Jeet Banerjee, a sustainability and emissions data specialist with experience across auditing and ship management.
This reality risks turning compliance into a ‘tick box’ exercise for crew members, rather than a decision-support mechanism.
Download “The Great Integration: How connected maritime technology is unlocking compounded value across performance, compliance, and operations”, and discover how shipping companies can move from fragmented systems to more connected, decision-ready operations.
