Periodically a  great documentary repeats on Public Television that describes the building of the Boulder (Hoover) Dam on the Colorado River back in the early nineteen thirties. (Like many, I was never really sure if there were two separate dams ).

This was a project of truly incredible size at the time, one that needed and brought out some really innovative engineering, construction and logistical processes.

However there were some negatives brought out in the documentary, particularly around safety. One has to think  that if OSHA had been in existence at the time, and visited the site, the project would have been shut down pretty much immediately.

As we struggle to move from reactive to proactive maintenance, maybe at some point we just need to stop and ask ourselves the basic question: “Do we really want to be proactive in maintenance? Really? Honestly?”

Again, briefly restating the difference:
Reactive maintenance is dealing with loss issues due to equipment malfunction that show up unexpectedly and repairs have to be done immediately, on a crisis basis, in an unplanned, unscheduled way. Almost always very ineficiently.
Proactive maintenance is monitoring equipment for signs of deterioration and performing the necessary repairs and adjustments, when needed, in an efficient, planned, scheduled way, before a loss issue actually happens.

Who wouldn’t want to operate in the Proactive Mode?

Unless, maybe, you feel reactive behavior is actually useful in some ways?

One way would be:

Managers Using Crises As A Way To Keep Organizations Energized.

In Part 1 of this article we talked of how good managers must always try to keep their organizations energized, moving forward and upward. To do this, they must find ways to constantly disrupt complacent, status quo thinking and behavior.

But finding the right way is vital. Managers cause damage when they constantly demand immediate, unplanned, crisis response to equipment failure (and other) issues, when that level of response is not needed.
This fosters reactive behavior and hurts efforts to develop a proactive culture, as well as damaging overall reliability and organizational improvement.

So, the questions then become:

How Do We Do Both?

• Deal effectively with issues in a proactive way.

• Keep the organization energized.

Caesar Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy is a great biography of Julius Caesar. In reading the book I came across this incident, which triggered some thoughts on problem solving facilitation.

Why Do Improvement Efforts Fail? Or Just Not Sustain?

There are many reasons, but those most often stated, are “lack of commitment” and not “following the process”.

But why is there “lack of commitment”, and why aren’t “processes followed”?

Here are a few of the reasons that I’ve seen:

Over the years, as have many others, I’ve spent a lot of time in discussion, debate (argument?) in plants, over the use of checklists for equipment changeovers,  startups and other processes. I have explained, reasoned, rationalized, cajoled, appealed, beseeched, entreated, implored, pleaded, urged, (ratiocinated?) and I’ll swear, even cried real tears, in efforts to get people to use checklists. So for me it was great to find discussions, , referencing a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found (amazingly?) that hospitals using checklists in their operating room procedures suffer a much lower death rate than those that don’t.

https://www.who.int/news/item/11-12-2010-checklist-helps-reduce-surgical-complications-deaths

 I was glad to see the study, but still my very first reaction on reading it, was really outrage, along the lines of “Why was a study like this even necessary? Operating Rooms don’t routinely use checklists?  What the (expletives deleted)?"

Hopefully the study will ratchet up awareness some and perhaps drive some improvement. (This also gives some indication of the opportunity for improvement in the medical system.)

 But experience has absolutely convinced me, that there is something in the human psyche that fights back desperately against using checklists.

 “We need to get things done quickly. Checklists will slow us down. We know what we’re doing; we’ve done it a zillion times before.”

 Best intentions in the world. Just not a correct statement.

Anyone who has ever done plant maintenance improvement work, trying to move an organization from Reactive to Proactive practices, is inevitably at times accused of just not knowing what it's like in the “Real World” of maintenance. (These accusations are usually stated passionately, and sometimes refer to physically impossible postions)
So here are some of the things I remember from that “Real World” of maintenance.

• It's impossible to get on the plant paging system, because it is always tied up with people paging for maintenance help.
• Maintenance personnel have to carry more than one beeper because one is always busy.
• Maintenance personnel really need to work on their responsiveness, because they have trouble responding to more than one page at a time.
• Maintenance personnel constantly driving by in really fast yellow carts with bright flashing lights and sirens. (Some are actually dressed in blue tights with red capes)
• Everyone really supports the planning and scheduling of maintenance work, as long as they can get a one day turnaround on their work orders.
• The only maintenance scheduler who could ever come close to handling the job used to be a short-order cook.
• Some people say "We'll get to the PMs, sometime, but we’ve just got too many repairs to make."
• Others say "We don't have time to keep the machines in good condition. We're too busy with projects to modify them to make them run better."
• Some people believe Voice Mail is the maintenance schedule.
• Some believe E Mail is the maintenance schedule.
• Others believe they are the maintenance schedule
• The maintenance backlog got to be so big we made some real money selling it to a lumber company.
• Everyone agrees that maintenance needs to focus more on strategically supporting the business, but from the discussions that seems to really mean we need to be able to do emergency repairs faster.
• People say we just can't worry about the cost of an emergency repair. It's like Jack Bauer (of the TV series 24) said, "Whatever it takes". The time to worry is at month end, when everyone is really excited about how far you are over budget.
• There are cab drivers on permanent contract to pick up parts from suppliers.
• There are limo drivers on permanent contract to pick up parts at the airport.
• We have a couple of machines that vacationed in Hawaii on frequent flier miles built up on parts air shipped in for them.

Lately it seems that strong, single minded commitments to beliefs have just about everywhere in the world in some kind of struggling situation. All kinds of groups, everywhere, on all kinds of issues, taking the absolute position that they’re right, the other side is just wrong, and there’s no common ground where some kind of agreement can be reached. Agreement where there might actually be some work done together to make things better for all.

This is not new to people in the world of Maintenance and Operations who have struggled with seemingly conflicting objectives, probably since the very first tool of any kind was developed on the planet. There was no doubt some pretty violent debate back then about when, and how often, that tool should be sharpened, and the truly dire consequences if it wasn’t. (Some might even say the actual sounds of the debate haven’t really changed across the eons).

Like many other admitted golf addicts, I ‘ve struggled endlessly over the years, through frustration, embarrassment, weeping, and of course, the painful gnashing of teeth, trying to somehow learn how to play the stupid game, and all of that just to get to my current level of pretty questionable competence.
Probably the biggest part of the struggle though, apart from absence of hand-eye coordination, and overall athletic nothingness, is that so much of golf is counterintuitive.
“Hit down on the ball to make it go up”, as an example. How obvious is that? And then even if you do know it, can you actually make yourself do it?

Something being counterintuitive means that it’s backwards to what you think it would be. It’s the opposite of what the seemingly obvious common sense approach would tell us to do. It’s just not “natural”. (There is no “natural “golf, my wife has told me for years there’s no natural reason for it).
So counterintuitive ideas normally don’t just occur to most people, even the really smart ones. That means we probably won’t ever figure them out on our own. We'll need to learn them from somewhere or someone, who knows what they’re doing. (And that’s usually not the guys we play with, who typically rhyme off all the usual, non-counterintuitive, advice?. “Keep your head down”, “Keep your eye on the ball”, etc.).
And we will absolutely have to force ourselves to do one of them because most of the fibers of our beings will be screaming that it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.
And we probably still won’t believe in it, until we ourselves, personally, actually, see it really work for us.

Advice to anyone starting out in golf would be to get lessons from a really good teacher and do what they tell you. Don’t even try to learn it on your own. This is evident when enviously watching the current crop of well coached, high school kids with their smooth, trained, consistent swings and comparing them with all the older, more “experienced”, golf veterans on the driving range hacking and smashing and slashing at the ball with this year’s $400 hot club. (while yelling at themselves to keep their &*^$*^%# heads down).

Obsessing about this (no kidding) my belief developed that the biggest reason proactive maintenance processes don’t seem to occur naturally in our world, and when they do occur, have trouble being sustained, is that It’s almost all counterintuitive.
Here's a few examples. There are many more:

Stumbled across some music trivia lately, that the old rock band Chicago finally had their album Stone of Sisyphus released last year. One of the more famous “lost” albums; it was originally recorded in the early nineties, but had languished for years available only in illegal bootleg copies.

That reminded me of using the story of Sisyphus in maintenance training sessions.