I get asked a lot of questions. Sometimes the “ask” comes from senior management, sometimes from middle-level management, and sometimes even from the shop floor. People and companies need help to achieve more than they are today.
In most cases, their performance is much less than desired. Change is needed and that means new ideas. After all, if they had the ideas themselves, they may have tried something different before calling me in. Sometimes they have, and it hasn’t worked. They are stuck.
I’ve written books to help, but not many maintainers and operators are big on reading. Even if they are, they will find that following the advice and methods in the books is no easy task.
Companies exist to provide some value to society in the form of goods or services. They are usually very good at producing whatever they produce and delivering whatever services they deliver. They are good at achieving whatever they are achieving today and usually, they are good at sustaining that. But, they are often rather bad at maintaining the assets they use in that delivery, and they are often very bad at changing the ways they do things.
All too often, they’ve made a decision to improve, but haven’t truly chosen to achieve the improved results by making all the choices needed to deliver those results. We’ve all seen it too. There’s little value in ordering someone to improve if you don’t provide the means to do so. Nurture must follow and accompany, command.
A decision is just a mental concept. Decisions are made by senior management and those same senior managers expect to see results from whatever it was they decided upon. Those managers depend on their employees (who should be specialists) to deliver. Of course, their subordinates are measured against those new desired results. In an effort to look good to their bosses, they do whatever they can to make sure it looks like results are being achieved. Perhaps some improvement has been achieved too, but not as much as desired. Why?
I see this as a lack of choice. Decisions are not choices. Choice requires that the entire organization does whatever is required to achieve the desired results. Why doesn’t that happen?
The ones making the decisions, senior management, are trying to cause change by edict. That only goes so far and usually not far – we are not in the military so we don’t all follow orders.
People will make minor adjustments to what they do, and argue that they followed the orders, but they will also remain within their own personal comfort zones. Any real change requires that you get out of that comfort zone and most people just won’t go there on their own.
People are usually afraid to do that. They might make a mistake, be punished for it, lose a bonus, etc. So they stay within their comfort zones while appearing to do things differently. When the results are not achieved, they can argue that they did their part and, without even blaming anyone else, they imply that others did not do their parts.
Compounding this confusion, are middle-level managers who are being held back by their budgets. Change requires doing something different and if that change idea comes along after the budget is approved, it may not happen for an entire budget cycle. After all, it might require funds that are not allocated.
The irony is that even if the change will save them more than they’d spend, they hold back. Budgets are a source of perversity in maintenance when you truly do have a good idea.
If the payback is in reduced downtime which translates into more revenue, the money won’t get spent. Maintainers, operators, and even accountants, rarely think like a CFO about spending where it does the best for the company overall. When you think about that, it’s kind of crazy. But it makes sense if your thinking is narrowly focused on budgets. I suppose that’s why horses in races have blinders – they can only see ahead.
For example, they won’t spend on training in reliability, if they don’t have the training budget, even if the training might result in reliability improvements that will save the training money many times over in failures avoided or production increases.
Accounting systems are only geared to measure what was spent and earned, not what wasn’t spent or not earned. Sadly that means that even a great idea that will save a lot of money or avoid losses and generate more earnings, is difficult to justify. Most managers will, therefore, do what they are expected to do – keep the boat steady and not rock it. So mediocrity continues.
Meanwhile, the change leaders are trying to rock the boat and typically will have little success in doing so. They get very frustrated!
That happens a lot, especially in larger and more bureaucratic organizations. It’s why they are typically slow to change and adapt. Smaller, more nimble companies, often with less constrained reporting are far more flexible and able to change more readily. Their owners are usually entrepreneurs who are on the lookout for opportunities. One of their biggest challenges is that few except the owners have the authority to spend on good ideas. Smaller companies also have their challenges too.
Like their bigger counterparts, many are not good at change and they have cultures that are rooted in the present state.
Culture is hard to change and it leads to a lot of excuses – the most common is, “that will never work here”. Culture is said to trump everything – logic, good reasons, good arguments, and even strategy. It’s true.
Part of what sustains culture is the system that the company uses to manage itself. If budgets and accounting against specific accounts are important then culture will resist doing anything counter to that. If people have been punished for taking risks that didn’t work out as hoped, then risk-taking is discouraged. Combine those two, as is often the case, and you get a company that just won’t change – at least not quickly. Indeed, nothing new will work there at more than a snail’s pace.
There’s no shortage of writing and discussion about change and how it is critical to survival. It is. Yet companies and people don’t change – at least not enough. We are actually good at change when we choose it, but we are resistant to it when someone else calls the shots.
Bottom line:
Knowing this is a start. Doing something about it requires new thinking and understanding. It requires the sort of help we get called to provide. Yet even when asked, our customers still resist. Sooner or later it catches up and they will listen, often long after they’ve spent or lost a lot more than they might have spent or lost had they acted sooner when their gut feels impelled them to call. Why wait?
To get started, why not see just where your Maintenance and Reliability Maturity are today? If you are not in the green in this self-assessment, then you are leaving money (maybe even a lot of it) on the table. Click here.
