Saturday 29 September 2018

Why things go right?



Hi everyone

First things first....long needed housekeeping of the blog has been done....trashy heart burns and shout outs have been digitally cleansed and yes lots of sensitive stuff has been deleted (2017-18 period). Survivors of past rantings have access to blog archives in case they need an access to pin me up.

Coming back to the topic of this week.

I have been thinking for a long time about our obsession to analyse what has gone wrong. This is all prevailing in the society, specially us the engineers. We analyse every failure very seriously, and we must do, to prevent this from happening in future. But there is a basic fallacy in this.

Failure precedes the failure analysis

Our objective is to prevent failures and hence analysing failures only denies us to achieve this. 

There are few failures among hundreds and thousands of things which go right in the organisation. So why not include few successes in our analysis.

These things go right because of the barriers which do not fail, these are the strengths of the organisation. So why not identify these strengths and leverage them across the whole organisation to take ourselves to next level. 

I believe that biggest barrier an organisation has are its people. They work hard to ensure that things go right at all times. Still many of the failure analysis report conveniently pin the blame on people. Few examples:

  • People are the problem to control (useless chaps...aren't they)
  • We need to find out what people did wrong (they are bad people, they plan to sabotage their own lives, morons)
  • We write or enforce more rules (as if current ones are inadequate)
  • We tell everyone to try harder (as if they don't)
  • We get rid of bad apples (hell yeah....we can always replace them)
  • Let's train them ( they are a bunch of idiots, they don't know nothing)
Disclaimer, not all reports end with these conclusions, but many do.

We can see that people become casualty if we focus only on failure analysis. This can be reversed if we start analyzing the reasons for things which are going right. There are committed individuals in the trenches out there who are putting best foot forward to maintain strings of successes. Let's reward them so that positive behaviors are reinforced. Ultimately success feeds success and very soon we are on the upward spiral of positive change.

Few more things which come to mind to prevent failure at all times:
  • Allow diversity of opinion and allow voice of dissent
  • Keep discussion on risk live at all times
  • Revere expertise 
  • Develop ability to say STOP
  • Break down barriers between teams and departments
  • Don't depend on audit findings to improve
  • Have pride in what you do
Will try to develop this thought further in next posts. Till then, pay respect to the departed souls and get ready for a super charged festival season.

Have a safe and motivated week ahead!