style="font-size:15px;"> For some firms, poor reliability and its impact on production are far more serious than for others. For those that operate on a continuous basis – they run 24 hours per day seven days per week – there is no room for unplanned shutdowns of the production equipment; any loss of production is often difficult or even impossible to make up. For others that do not operate in a 24/7 mode, recovery can be easier, but nevertheless time consuming and expensive, reducing profits.
Many programs available in the industry are designed to help businesses improve reliability. They are identified in trade literature, promoted at conferences and over the web, and quite often they are in place within the plants in your own company. Most of these programs are what I refer to as “hard skill” programs. They deal with the application of resources and resource skills in the performance of a specific task aimed at reliability improvement. For example, you decide that you want to improve preventive maintenance (PM). To accomplish this you train your workforce in preventive maintenance skills, purchase the necessary equipment, and roll out a PM program accompanied with corporate publicity, presentations of what you expect to accomplish, and other forms of hype in order to get buy in from those who need to execute it. Then you congratulate your team for a job well done and move on to the next project.
Often at this juncture, something very significant happens. The program you delivered starts strongly, but immediately things begin to go wrong. The work crews assigned to preventive maintenance get diverted to other plant priorities; although promises are made to return them to their original PM assignments, this never seems to happen. Equipment that is scheduled to be out of service for preventive maintenance can’t be shutdown due to the requirements of the production department; although promises are made to take the equipment off-line at a later time, this never seems to happen. Finally, the various key members of management who were active advocates and supporters at the outset are the very ones who permit the program interruptions, diminish its intent, and reduce the potential value. Often these people do make attempts to get the program back on track, but these attempts are often half-hearted. Although nothing is openly said, the organization recognizes what is important, and often this is not the preventive maintenance program.
I have simplified the demise of the preventive maintenance program in our example. Yet this is exactly as it happens, although much more subtle. In the end, the result is the same. Six months after the triumphant rollout of the program, it is gone. The operational status quo has returned and, if you look at the business process, you may not even be able to ascertain that a preventive maintenance program ever existed at all.
For those of us trying to improve reliability or implement any type of change in our business, the question we need to ask ourselves is why does this happen? The intent of the program was sound. It was developed with a great deal of detail, time, and often money; the work plan was well executed. Yet in the end there is nothing to show for all of the work and effort.
Part of the answer is that change is a difficult process. Note that I didn’t say program, because a program is something with a beginning and an end. A process has a starting point – when you initially conceived the idea – but it has no specific ending and can go on forever.
Yet the difficulty of implementing change isn’t the root cause of the problem. You can force change. If you monitor and take proper corrective action, you may even be able over the short term to force the process to appear successful. Here, the operative word is you. What if you implement the previously-mentioned preventive maintenance program and then, in order to assure compliance, continually monitor the progress. Further suppose that you are a senior manager and have the ability to rapidly remove from the process change any roadblocks it encounters as it progresses. What then? Most likely the change will stick as long as you are providing care and feeding. But what do you think will happen if after one month into the program you are removed from the equation. If there are no other supporters to continue the oversight and corrective action efforts, the program will most likely lose energy. Over a relatively short time, everything will likely return to the status quo.
The question we need to answer is why does this happen to well-intentioned reliability-driven change process throughout industry? The answer is that the process change is a victim of the organization’s culture. This hidden force, which defines how an organization behaves, works behind the scenes to restore the status quo unless specific actions are taken to establish a new status quo for the organization. Without proper attention to organizational culture, long-term successful change is not possible.
Think of an organization’s culture as a rubber band. The more you try to stretch it, the harder it tries to return to its previously un-stretched state – the status quo. However if you stretch it in a way that it can’t return and leave it stretched for a long time, once released it will retain the current stretch you gave it and not return to its original dimensions. That is going to be our goal – to figure out how to stretch the organization, but in a way that when the driver of the process is out of the equation, the organizational rubber band won’t snap back.
I have been involved in the world of change management for sometime. Quite often I have been involved in projects that were well planned and executed and then, when attention was turned to other initiatives, they disappeared in the blink of an eye. I as well as a great many others had difficulty understanding why this happened. Were the projects or effort ill conceived? Not really. They addressed specific business needs and had the potential for delivering value to the company. Were they poorly designed and not rolled out to the organization properly? No, some of the smartest people I know were involved in many of the efforts. Was the organization out to destroy the effort? Actually when these projects were rolled out, there usually was a lot of enthusiasm and interest from the organization. So what was the cause of the failure?
Some of the work I did on my last book, Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A Users Guide, explored the causes by examining the eight elements of change – leadership, work process, structure, group learning, technology, communication, interrelationships, and rewards in a holistic fashion via The Web of Change. From this and other work I have done, I recognized that properly addressing the eight elements was very important. But beyond these there are two concepts that are critical success factors to the longevity of any change. These are readiness and sustainability.
Coupled with my book and workbook was a training program using my concepts to help deliver successful change. However, as I developed training plans, I recognized that in training people to use new ideas and concepts, readiness and sustainability were two important drivers for success. However, knowing this raises a question. Why are readiness and sustainability required to help implement newly-learned ideas in a plant or any other setting?
It was around this time that I had several discussions with other change practitioners. Although they were not talking about readiness or sustainability, it was clear that both of these elements were an important part of a much larger concept. This concept focused on the need to change the organization’s culture in order to successfully implement new initiatives.
This raised questions in my mind. What is organizational culture and why do you need to change it to have a successful change process implementation? To answer this question, I began doing research on the topic of cultural change. What I discovered is that the concept is talked about, but what it really is and how you go about changing it was not crystal clear. In my search, I again ran into three types of books on this subject, as I had found during my research on my previous book. These books included CEOs describing how they made change at the senior management level; books by academics who explained the concept, but in ways not applicable to middle management; and consultants with many good ideas, some of which were available in the book, but others that required a fee for services.
The conclusion –
