Maintenance Technology July 2017 - 7

KICKER
UPTIME

from personnel: "Nothing happened;
the machine is running perfectly."
If true, that would basically reflect a
state of reliability at its best, a highly
unlikely situation. Be sure to ask why
that machine is running perfectly.)
Although curiosity should be used
to drive your reliability program,
roadblocks are a fact of life. For
example, how often do you hear these
statements in your workplace: "We
don't have time." "It's not my job to ask
why." "I've often wondered why, but
every time I bring it up, there seem to
be bigger issues." They're indicative of
low levels of desire to know or learn
more about an issue.

Motivation to be curious
Organizational curiosity is a requirement for improving and sustaining
reliability. The question is, how do we
motivate individuals, and the organizations they comprise, to be curious?
Benefiting from curiosity in a workplace depends on the work culture that
top leaders create. The motivation to
be curious on the job is more than an
individual factor. While an individual
may be internally motivated to be very
curious on the job, the organizational
(external) motivation to be curious
may not be there. Individual curiosity
may be stifled, not recognized, and/or
not appreciated.
Business author Harvey Mackay
described the potential of individual
curiosity this way: "Pay attention to
those employees who respectfully
ask why. They are demonstrating an
interest in their jobs and exhibiting a
curiosity that could eventually translate into leadership ability." In other
words, curiosity is also fundamental to
effective leadership.
High-performing organizations
have a passion for eliminating
problems, improving performance, and
engaging everybody in the process.
A compelling business case, in turn,
can be a real motivating factor for
JULY 2017

Curiosity is how
humans learn.
How do we
motivate
individuals to
be curious?

improving organizational performance
and reliability, as well as improving
equipment performance and reliability.

Inspiring and
enabling curiosity
Leadership is the heavy-lifting component in motivating curiosity. Whether
it's top management or group leaders,
plant leadership must be inspirational
in the quest for organizational and
individual curiosity. Consider the
following real-world example.
Serving as a long-term consultant
to an established manufacturing
operation, I noticed what appeared
to be excessive amounts of finished
product being discarded as scrap. To
be sure, legitimate defects, some big,
but mostly small, were leading to the
situation. Still, I felt it reflected a waste
of good money-in terms of material,
labor, and overhead-and a huge loss
of equipment effectiveness and sales
revenue.
When I asked why those mountains
of scrap were being produced and
thrown away, the response was
typically, "That's the way it is here."
While the organization, as a whole and
individuals in it, clearly understood
the scrap as waste, they considered it
acceptable, i.e., already built into their
costing and production-planning standards. Despite the collection of waste

data in production-report databases,
no waste metrics were being trended.
At some point, after extensive work
with this operation to improve equipment performance, I found a relatively
easy way to put a dollars-and-cents
value to the waste. It came from asking
"why" and exploring the production
database for answers. My calculation
of the actual seven-figure cost to
produce scrap at the plant evidently
resonated more with management
than the previous reports of waste
amounts and percentages. As a result,
the site's C-level leaders launched a
waste metric and engaged work groups
at the machines and in the manufacturing process to regularly ask "why."
Scrap products are now counted and
monetized, something that's reportedly
setting the stage for cost savings.
What about your operations? How
can you motivate organizational
curiosity and inspire individuals to ask
"why." Consider these tactics:
■ To paraphrase W. Edwards Deming,
maintain a "constancy of purpose
for the improvement of product
and service."
■ Become obsessed with the elements
of the organization's competitive
advantage.
■ Model the way: Walk the talk, ask
"why," and invite others to pitch in.
■ Disrupt the status quo as it interferes
with performance improvement.
■ Celebrate improvement efforts
and wins.
In the meantime, never forget that
answers to "why" questions are the first
steps toward reliability improvements
in your plant. MT

Bob Williamson, CMRP, CPMM,
and member of the Institute of Asset
Management, is in his fourth decade
of focusing on the "people side" of
world-class maintenance and reliability
in plants and facilities across North
America. Contact him at
RobertMW2@cs.com.
MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM | 7
http://www.MAINTENANCETECHNOLOGY.COM
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology July 2017
