URSABLOG: Adapting Functionality

Sometimes, as I struggle to keep up with the day-to-day challenges of my life, I fail to acknowledge – or even notice – the more fundamental changes taking place to me, or to the world around me. Recently I have felt as almost as if a subterranean river has been flowing deep beneath the surface of who I consider myself to be – a unique product of upbringing, environment, history, education – and the steady current has been slowly but surely eroding the foundations of my assumptions and ideals, the very essence of who I am.

Don’t be alarmed, it is one of those gradual changes, and as such almost unnoticeable, even by me. I will not suddenly take up sky-diving, join a mysterious cult using mind-bending substances to tap into deeper levels of consciousness, or even indulge a hitherto unknown passion for the σκυλάδικα of Περιστέρι. (For those not familiar with these, it is almost untranslatable, but those who know, know.)

This change of perspective is manifesting itself in many ways, but one of the most noticeable has been in how I describe what we shipbrokers do. Leaving aside the old definitions of matching buyers with sellers, or cargoes with ships, with shipbrokers as necessary – if sometimes noisy – intermediaries, I have – perhaps unwittingly – begun to express new ideas without consciously theorising about them beforehand.

I have come to believe that shipbrokers provide solutions to the problems of their clients, even when their clients didn’t realise that they had a problem to start off with. In the past, certainly when I started work as a shipbroker, it was about being instructed by owners to sell their ships, and finding buyers for them, or finding ships for buyers of a specific type, age, size and budgets. There was little else beyond this basic work, and the key to success was speed, diligence, aggression and as many contacts as possible. Sure, relationships and trust, duty of care and sociability counted too, and those blessed with confidence and charisma, and appetite did well, as they do now.

But this was back in the days where every communication – by phone, fax, telex or post – cost something, and travel was more expensive and difficult, as well as disconnecting us from what was going on in the office, or in the market. Although travelling on business was a good thing, connecting you with the market – clients, brokers, new knowledge – it came with a cost: intermittent communication with the office, and relying on colleagues (and bosses) to keep you informed, which was not always forthcoming. This had its good side: you could disappear for a while without having to check-in all the time, leading to opportunities for fun and relaxation in whatever form you found agreeable. But the downside was indulging in fun and relaxation meant missing other opportunities, for business at least, that would pass by unattended in your absence.

Now that all communication is exponentially cheaper than it was, and long-distance travel is safer and more predictable – for now at least – the need to be on top of things all the time brings new stresses. Speed, diligence, aggression and as many contacts as possible is built into the system and we can sometimes be overwhelmed by the amount of information and potential uses of it to the point of stasis.

But I believe that when all market information is current and universal, and everything can be found out very easily and more or less accurately, the onus on the broker is more to be an intelligent filter, processor, analyst and interpreter of the information rather than the delivery mechanism itself. Deals do not happen because of the chemistry and physics of the market – by that I mean the inputs, reactions and outputs of information at the speed of modern computer processing and bandwidths – but by intelligent problem solving, a computational process, where function is more important than form.

This idea is nothing new.  Aristotle introduced his philosophy of hylomorphism around 2,500 years ago: he thought that abilities such as vision were less about the biological shape and matter of eyes and more about the function of sight. This led – a long time later – to Charles Darwin and others to stop defining organisms by their material components and chemistry, and instead began defining traits by focusing on how organisms adapted and evolved – in other words, how they processed and solved problems. The adaptable survived, not necessarily the strongest or the fittest.

The machines and technology which drove the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries were important because they duplicated fixed laws of operation to manufacture textiles, and then other materials and goods to consistent standards and specifications. But from the 1930s onwards, machines were being conceived of that could store, analyse, process and then react to more complex instructions than ‘build 300 of these widgets this way’.

The original was not just a big calculator, but the most general model of computation: the universal Turing Machine. This simple (but infinite) programmable machine is an abstract model of how our powerful modern computers work. The function of the machine, and its’ adaptability, is more important than the structure and the materials made to make it. In fact the materials now used to make computers, big or small, are not only completely different from those that made the original Turing machine, but also from those that powered our simple database when I first started as a shipbroker 31 years ago.

So it is with markets, any market. The shipbroking market has always had the function of broking sales or fixtures by shipbrokers solving the problems of finding buyers for sellers, or cargoes for ships, and vice versa. The ways we do it and the tools that we have used have changed significantly in my broking life, and whilst I continue to meet many brokers, and owners and charterers too, who bemoan the demise of the old ways, from whatever perspective they are looking from (even down to the fact that they can’t disappear from the action to step into an establishment of their liking for a few lost hours), I believe it is not because the function of the market fundamentally has changed.

But I do believe that although on the surface nothing much seems to have changed, there is a fundamental shift in how the market is serviced by shipbrokers taking place, the steady erosion of long held ways of doing things which is not noticeable from day to day, but can be seen over longer periods of as the world changes around us. A lot of the information shipbrokers provide to clients and each other is largely irrelevant and the method of delivery is outdated.

For any business to stay in business, they have to adapt to new environments, recognise, acknowledge and resolve their problems, and only then can they endeavour to provide solutions to the problems of their clients, even when the clients didn’t realise they had any. And then they have to execute. No one likes a friend – in shipping and in life – who just points out your shortcomings without at least hanging around to assist in overcoming them.

The change in my perception of the world – in shipping and in life – and my place in it is – I am sure – a product of many different things. I didn’t just read a book, watch a film or have a conversation that suddenly changed my life. I have read too many books, watched too many films and certainly had too many conversations for one to have such an effect. But certainly an accumulation of data – from many different sources, too diverse to mention let alone reflect on – has changed not only how I think about life, but also how I should, and could, go about it. I think less about construction (how I was made) and more about function (what I do).

The world that I live in – in shipping and in life – is changing quickly, and I will have to adapt as soon as I can to make sure I am still relevant in it. We can sit and complain about how things have changed, and about how things were better in the past, a reaction – I think – of being fearful, or worse, a feeling of being powerless against the things that are coming. We can do nothing about the past, and little about the shape of the future, but we can adapt to change better if we are more than an ‘input’ / ‘output’ machine, programmed to do things that have always been done that way. It is pointless to fight against the future, or hide from it. It is not a matter of whether or not I can prevent the world from changing, but what I can do in my world once it has. More than that, it is me that is responsible for it. This seems, right now, a very important revelation for me. Let’s see how I adapt to it.

Simon Ward