Behind every screw-up, behind every poor decision, behind
every botched project there lurks a conflict.
Someone, somewhere was not sure about what to do, or they favored the
wrong thing, or they just plain misjudged the situation and bad things
happened. Bad things, man. Life for a manager is tough enough and then
fate throws bad things down. How many
times this week have you had to drop the good stuff to go pick up the debris
from a conflict?
Trouble is, you rarely know a conflict is brewing. They don’t teach ESP at Harvard last I heard,
and they didn’t teach it at my beloved Podunk state school either. There are pretty twisted people in my
department, whether it is natural or self-induced, and I doubt I would want to
know what they are thinking anyway. But
for their own good (and my own good) I need to know. Maybe I can guess…
I’m not talking about the traditional definition of
“conflict” here. We don’t have employees
nearly coming to blows, although we could probably sell tickets and make some
money if we did. These are internal
conflicts. For example…
We have a forklift operator who is conscientious about his
activities. Like most people he intends
to do a good job for all the usual reasons, but mostly because it makes him
feel good about himself. (By the way,
amateur psychotherapy is just another service I offer.) We have rules about everything (we are a
mature org) and one of our rules is that the mechanics must use some sort of
hand protection, though the caveat (management weasel words) is that the
employee should choose the correct type of protection so that they do not get
injured. We are also unbelievably
dysfunctional about spending money. We
almost beg our mechanics to not spend any money. The corollary to not spending is to find ways
to make money, like saving scrap we can sell.
SO…we have created a conflict. On one hand, we want our guys to wear the
right gloves, and to get the right gloves a guy (or gal) would have to go to
the material shed and check out new ones.
But this would be spending money, which we’ve already told them they
should not do.
Back to the forklift driver (remember him?)… His job one morning was to dump a small trash
dumpster into a bigger trash dumpster, and then take the bigger dumpster to
storage. A glimpse into the small
dumpster made him stop, though. It was a
ribbon of steel that had come off a lathe, and it was in the trash, not the
recycling. So there’s conflict #1 – the
ribbon is sharp and he should just leave it in the dumpster for trash, but we
need to save money and that ribbon has some value for scrap. Then, conflict #2, he knew he should not
reach into a dumpster to grab something sharp without the correct gloves, but
another set of gloves costs money, and we’re not supposed to spend any. Obviously, he reached in to grab the ribbon,
cut his hand, and became a recordable.
As I’ve written before, this is always a cause for management to go
completely bat sh_t crazy. If they just
went bat sh_t I’d be fine with it, but they tend to flat lose their minds. Anyway, sorry about that
frustration-boiling-over sidebar, back to the topic at hand…
You might think it would be exceptionally easy to cure a
case of the conflicts. If you set
priorities and stick with them, the guys might be able to run down the list and
make their own decisions. Since our
first priority is personal safety, followed by environmental safety, followed
by operational efficiency, and THEN cost effectiveness (I mean, seriously, fourth!)
the driver should have been able to use one set of fingers to determine what
was most important. As you all know, it
aint that easy. It aint that easy and
then mgmt makes it harder.
First into the stew goes the conditional ways in which we
use our goals/priorities. Let’s say our
driver and all his friends go to the material shed to get the right set of
gloves. WWMD? Damn right – they would complain about all
the money we’re spending on gloves (and by the way this is EXACTLY what
happened following this incident).
Example #2 – impellers (the prop in a centrifugal pump for you business
majors) tend to get sharp as they wear, and one day we had a line down to
replace a pump that was not keeping up because the impeller was toast (though
we did not know it at the time – I suppose we could have guessed). When we saw the shape it was in, I sent the
mechanic to the shed for the right gloves.
It took about 10 minutes, which extended the downtime. I was told later that this was
unacceptable. Oh well – sometimes when
you choose the right thing you get nailed and when you choose the wrong thing
you’re a hero.
But back to conflicts.
In this case we had a conflict between stated policy and actual
practice. This is common – I’m sure you
will find a few w/o having to look very hard.
The question is what to do with the ones you find.
An evaporating cloud is one approach that I like and that
I’ve used successfully. As with any
tool, it doesn’t work well if you don’t use it well, and it isn’t the miracle
drug some TOC folks would suggest. But
it is dam close to penicillin…
This webpage
has a link to a couple ppt files that explain a cloud really well. I met the author and I found that I agreed
with most everything he said.
Unfortunately it appears the website itself is abandoned and
lonely. For other information, try this
page (this one has references to Col John Boyd, USAF, who is not well known but he
should be. Check out his story in thishere book.)
We used the evaporating cloud method to solve the forklift
driver issue. In the second powerpoint
article on the acloudaday site, the author writes about surfacing assumptions
once you have your cloud created and verified.
We made the assumption that he would have used the gloves if they were
right there and available. Each morning
when he jumps on his rig he has to fill out a vehicle condition check sheet so
we added an item to it – “Cut resistant gloves”. Now, before he even turns the key, he either
has the right stuff or he’s going to get them, and, sure enough, he wears them
all the time now. It worked so well we
extended it to all the shops – each one has a bin with gloves that is filled
every week. We haven’t had a hand injury
since. Knock on wood [gently].
Comments
Post a Comment