Folks working for the TSA in airports pretty much always perform to an impatient, critical, assessing audience, as most of us are forced to watch them work for much longer than we want to. And if you're just standing in line impatiently waiting, then observing and criticizing is really all you have to do, (or you can talk loudly on your cell phone).
Just as an aside, having worked through plenty of manufacturing quality issues in plants over the years, and from that, knowing just how inherently unreliable 100% inspection really is, even with the most dedicated and capable individuals. It's just really hard to watch the TSA at work and not be critical. And wonder also how long it's going to be before we give up on this, and find something that really works, with much less inconvenience and vastly lower cost. Unfortunately it seems that terrorism is something that we need to build into our lives now, it's not going to go away any time soon, and we just need to find better ways to deal with it.
But for most of us standing there, it seems that pretty much any time, most of us would identify some individual who apparently, as the saying goes, perhaps might be better suited to another line of work. Some of the frustrated folks standing around me have been pretty obnoxiously, verbal about this on occasion. (The other obnoxious ones are still on their cell phones). But there are many TSA folks that clearly feel that they’re dealing with customers, and really try to make the process smoother, quicker (and even friendlier) for them.
So this started me thinking about all the various plant maintenance and manufacturing assessments I’ve been involved in over the years, and the success (or not) of the various improvement efforts tried to them.
I've been reading the book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer these days, and was surprised to find that all the supposedly rational judgments I thought I was making over the years, were really mostly emotional. The emotional part of the brain is just tremendously more capable, and can deal with vastly more information than the puny little rational part, and I guess I started to realize maybe how I really was making these assessments.
Basically the actual assessment really doesn’t take very long, just enough time to walk around the place, observe, and talk to some folks. What takes the time is compiling the evidence to support the assessment, and using that for the discussions that help the plant build their improvement plan.
Thinking about it, in judging a plant the emotional brain is getting a fix on two things. One would be Intensity and the other would be Respect
Intensity would be the overall purposefulness that people display, a sense that they value their time and their function as important, and they need to do the most with it.
The other would be Respect, respect in many forms, respect for the product, respect for the equipment, respect for the facility, respect for each other, respect for their customers, respect for managers, managers having respect for employees, (an absence of us and them statements and behavior on both parts). One of the places I always make a point of visiting is the plant washrooms, that’s a place where the overall level of all kinds of different respects in the place is pretty much immediately evident.
Going a step further, the intensity really comes from the respect. If you value what you’re doing, then you tend to do it well. If the value is not there, then doing it well is difficult.
The third thing would be the work processes, or lack of them, that are in place.
We can work all we want on the actual processes that just do the work, but if the intensity and respect are not there, the very best we can get to is mediocre.
But if we incorporate feedback mechanisms into those work processes to routinely involve and develop people, then the respect and the intensity will come, and this is how we really get on the road to excellence.
As an unrepentant checklist fanatic and junkie, http://johncrossan.com/my-blog/1-maintenance-blogs/7-why-wont-we-use-checklists.html I recently found me picking myself up off the floor in an airport newsstand (not a bookstore, it was there too, but a newsstand). There with all the romance novels, the Dan Brown books, and the latest silver bullet management books, was The Checklist Manifesto by Dr Atul Gawande. A best selling book about checklists. Checklists! Can you believe it? The world wants to read about checklists?
The beginnings of hope for the world. A great book that I obviously recommend reading, and giving copies to everyone you work with. (The price of the book is nothing vs the value it delivers). The writer is becoming somewhat a rock star, I heard him interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air and even saw him on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart talking about using checklists.http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-3-2010/atul-gawande . A practicing surgeon, he goes over the pretty incredible reductions in hospital deaths and infections achieved with the use of checklists. In an eight hospital study the was a 36% drop in major surgical complications, and a 47% drop in deaths. 47%!!
Highly skilled, busy people forget basic, key things and don’t even realize it.
Just think of the productivity improvement potential. What expensive capital projects can deliver this type of improvement?
The point of book is that with the growing complexity of everything these days, no one, not even the best trained most capable people, can possibly remember everything. So let’s make sure we don’t miss any of the basic routine, essential items. The ones we’re most likely to forget. Use checklists. . There was a negative review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, but the reviewer evidently missed the fact that one of the fairly important parts of writing a book review is that you actually have to read the book.(A witty blog comment was that if he had had a book reviewers checklist he wouldn't have missed that item.) The reviewer made the standard argument that real experts just don’t need checklists because they are just that good, and just that smart, and they sure don’t need checklists holding them back.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
The reviewer tries to make the point that checklists would only have gotten in the way of a great pilot like Chesley Sullenberger successfully ditching in the Hudson River. The book talks in detail about this, and how Sully was free to focus on gliding the plane because he and his copilot had taken care of the emergency basics with checklists, and he didn’t have to think about them. In Sullenberger's book Highest Duty he describes how within 8 seconds of hitting the birds, control of the plane had switched to Sully as he had more experience flying the A320, and the copilot was looking through the QRH (Quick Reference Handbook) for the checklist on Double Engine Failure for the restarting procedure.
Even successfully ditching could still have been a disaster if the cabin crew had not followed their emergency ditching checklists, and done all the things necessary to get all the people smoothly and quickly out of the cabin. Sullenberger himself refuses to consider himself a hero, and insists that this was a disciplined team effort with each member following their defined process responsibility. Successful even despite individuals never having worked together before. But that’s pretty boring stuff and we all seem to like the story much better with heroes.
It doesn’t hurt either that the guy can write. The book is a pretty quick enjoyable read. (But needs to be reread a bunch, so it all really sinks in and get used.)
A few other great items in here are:
Checklists need to include communication items, not just tasks.
How checklists help effective teamwork, to where the more limited, knee jerk, command and control approach just can't compete.
How to build an actual useable checklist, How Boeing does it, and how they build checklists for alarm conditions. Focus on the key basic routine items that get missed.
Training by itself won't succeed. Even the best trained people forget basic things.
Another related item I heard on NPR Fresh Air was an interview with the author Jonah Lehrer talking about his new book How We Decide and how easy it is to overload the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This is the relatively puny part of the brain responsible for organizing the conflicting signals coming from all the other parts of the brain into making the best decision.. A Stanford University study compared the resolve of some diet conscious folks on whether to eat chocolate cake or fruit salad. They were split into two groups. One group worked on memorizing two digit numbers and the other worked on memorizing seven digit numbers. The groups then had to make the diet choice and the seven digit group was more than twice as likely to choose the chocolate cake than the two digit group. The added mental effort affecting their decision to make the responsible choice. . Another argument for using checklists, to just plain reduce the workload on the brain so it can work better.
So I’m writing this before the Superbowl and I plan to watch Peyton Manning and Drew Brees really closely, because you just know that somehow these teams, with the complexity of what football has become, have to be using checklists, and I want to see if I can see how they’re doing it.
Planning Maintenance With Production Support John Crossan and Randy Quick, Manufacturing Solutions, Intl. Everyone has to be involved in equipment and facility care, not just the maintenance department. But for too long, this responsibility has been separated, based on old beliefs that maintenance and production have different objectives. Progressive plants have moved past this unnecessary separation and built systems that better manufacturing overall. There are different skill sets and tasks, but only one objective. How is this done? Crossan and Quick describe many ways maintenance and production can be brought together.
