New Secret Mentors
Right off the tail of reading Upstream, by Dan Heath, is the awesome book The Logic of Failure, by Dietrich Dorner.
Within the realm of facilities management, we all shoot for the glorified predicative maintenance program. However, we usually reside in a reactive position. It’s mentally draining. Unmotivating.
How come we cannot seem to get past that stance? I say “we” because I’ve worked for many organizations and have seen levels ranging from both extremes. It’s brutal that the thinking is not the same in the industry. This one-two combo of books is a great way to extract a solid plan for your facility, more important though is how to develop a plan to calculate success.
The Upstream notion is difficult for most as the current thought is - if it isn’t broken, why fix it. This is common. Dan mentions “Downstream work is easier to see”, so then the dilemma is, when we do not think about something consistently, we lose sight of it. Then a year passes, then two, unconsciously we slip into a run-to-fail scenario. Imagine the emergency lighting in your facility. Have you checked it lately? Have you saved funds to replace any? Now if you are in a facility with one, that’s not much and can be accommodated well. The struggle for the organization is – what other things will be slipping into end-of-life? Now the next scale of organization may have a larger burden of expense. And let’s not forget about the safety of your staff.
Upstreaming is the golden level of preventative maintenance. But it is hard to pay a worker to fix things before they break. Right? The balance comes from trying to find that line where you reduce the occurrence of repairs to zero and increase the value of the employee to contribute to the profit of the organization. This is the crux.
Now without spoiling the book for you there are a few barriers to becoming an Upstream hero – “problem blindness” or that’s just how it is mentality. Refusing to see the problem in hopes that it will magically disappear. Not good. These authors showcased the dangers within ourselves to struggle with not being able to see the problem as a condition of the environment we are in. Their suggestions/hypothesis was centered around the idea our inability, in general, to not be able to visualize the situation and the unintended consequences was at the heart of the trouble. The mastery of these books is that they have shared many tools that can be used to map out a situation and test the hypothesis of the outcomes.
There were two major examples given in the books that were traced out in beautiful detail. The Chicago Public School graduation rate and the Chernobyl incident. Tracking the change in situation and using the model they used the unintended consequences of not doing anything were clear. The walk away from this was a siren call to perform after action reviews from any project.
“ “If we act on the basis of a more or less randomly generated list of complaints, we necessarily remain captives of the present moment.””
One major highlighted quote (Dorner) is “If we act on the basis of a more or less randomly generated list of complaints, we necessarily remain captives of the present moment.” – this encapsulates the concept of reactive maintenance. To switch from this stance an investment of time, money, and/or material is needed. There is no way around it.
Heath and Dorner have now become secret mentors of mine. Their direction within the books is not simple nor do they claim to give a simple answer. Predictive results require planning and reviewing.
