Improving Maintenance and Reliability Through Cultural Change. Stephen Thomas G.
that in our planning and scheduling process work is not scheduled until planned and ready. It further implies that equipment won’t simply be repaired by throwing manpower and materials at it. Instead, the maintenance organization will take time to understand the reason for the failure, then execute reliability-based repairs so that the equipment doesn’t fail again.
However, our new planning, scheduling, and reliability-based repair initiative is working against a culture that holds the following basics assumptions:
• Maintaining production is what is important
• Maintenance exists to serve production’s needs
• When equipment breaks down it needs to be repaired as quickly as possible
• The maintenance crews need to be available to make repairs, not to do non-value-added work such as preventive maintenance.
How well do you think a reliability initiative would succeed in an organization with these basic assumptions? The answer should clearly be that it would not succeed at all. The new initiative is in direct conflict with what the organization believes to be true about maintenance work. Because they are still in business (at least for now), these assumptions have been validated and taught to new members. They exist as the sub-foundation of the business as described in Figure 2-2.
It should be clear to you at this point that change is very difficult to accomplish when it runs in conflict with an organization’s culture. Yet it can be accomplished.
2.3 Why Is This Definition Important?
In Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A Users Guide, I mentioned the three elements needed for successful change – a vision of the future, the next steps to get there, and dissatisfaction with the current state. The third element of these requirements for change indicates how you can overcome the resistance to change imposed by an organization’s culture. Although I will explain this in detail in the balance of this book, an example will provide clarity.
Suppose we work in the company described above. They have a culture that values reactive repair, little or no planning, and a belief that maintenance simply exists to respond to production’s needs-of-the-day. These are the basic assumptions validated over time. Suppose, however, that these assumptions no longer work, the equipment is always breaking down, and the company is losing money. In this instance, a change to a proactive work process is possible because one could challenge and clearly point out that the expressed value of reactive repair considered valid by the company is not valid. Such a challenge opens the door to new change initiatives and allows for the introduction of new assumptions. This dissatisfaction with the current state sets the stage for change.
2.4 Types of Organizational Culture
There are many types of organizational cultures; each one acts and inter-reacts differently. It is important to understand this if we want to be able to initiate a successful change program because, being different, each requires a different approach.
The differences in cultural type can be portrayed by a quad diagram – a diagram that compares two factors in a matrix format. In this case the x-axis is how the organization acts towards change. The two types are closed and open. A closed organization is slow to change and, in some cases, reluctant or even adverse to change. It believes that what has worked in the past will continue to work in the future. On the opposite side of the spectrum is the open organization. It is very open to change because it knows that to remain static is unacceptable if one wants to optimize or even stay in business.
On the y-axis is feedback. If you remember the definition of culture, it addressed the issue of organizations validating their group assumptions. It is through the validation of feedback process that the organization learns that its behavior is correct and appropriate. It learns this through feedback resulting from its collective behavior. The y-axis shows two types of feedback – slow and fast. Some process changes provide instant feedback. For example, a maintenance organization reacts to a plant problem, fixes the equipment, and receives instant praise from production for rapidly correcting the problem. Other changes, such as seeing the results of a preventive maintenance program, are associated with slow feedback. In these cases, you implement a preventive maintenance (PM) program and often do not see the results for a year or more when your failure-tracking metrics show a steady decline in the failure rate.
Taking these two factors – change acceptance (closed or open) and change feedback (slow or fast), I have developed a quad diagram depicting the various types of organizational culture – Figure 2-3
Let us examine the four types as identified by the numbering scheme in the figure.
1. Closed – Slow Feedback
This box represents change adverse organizations. They are highly conservative. As a result, everything that they do is overly analyzed. This process takes a long time and results in slow feedback regarding success of their change efforts. Coupled with slow feedback on any changes they introduce, they get caught up in analysis of the situation to the point that changes are never undertaken. Essentially these groups are in denial. They believe that what they have is what is best. Organizational progress is slow or non-existent, and failure is often the end result.
2. Open – Slow Feedback
These organizations are open to change and successfully deal with the fact that feedback from their change initiatives is slow. They set a vision, develop goals, initiatives and activities, and stay the course over the long haul. An example of this type of firm is one that institutes a preventive or proactive maintenance program, then works hard over an extended time to make it work.
Figure 2-3 Cultural mode
3. Closed – Fast Feedback
In this part of the quad diagram are the companies that are conservative in their approach to change, but when they do undertake initiatives, they seek rapid feedback. These companies need hard evidence that a change program will work before they are willing to attempt it. These are the “show me” firms. However, they do not wait to acquire 100% of the feedback from their efforts. They believe that once value is clearly demonstrated, they can safely proceed. Often this issue can be addressed by pilot programs to test a new idea and gain acceptance. The other aspect of this quad is that the feedback is quick. What this means for the change agents is that they will need to spend a lot of time convincing the company of the need for change. Once the effort has started, however, the rapid feedback will allow for rapid deployment.
4. Open – Fast Feedback
The last part of the quad diagram covers companies that are open to change and seek rapid feedback on the success from their efforts. These organizations recognize that change is sometime accompanied by failure. They are willing to accept that failure is a way of learning and are always open to attempting new things. An example would be a company that moves from a reactive work environment to one of planning and scheduling of the work. In this case, feedback as to the success of the planning effort would be rapid – the plans had value or they did not. In a “learn-by-doing culture” the successful parts of the process would be retained; those that were not successful would be discarded and new ideas tried out.
In their book Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, authors T. Deal and A. Kennedy describe the four components of a corporate culture – values, heroes, rites and rituals, and the cultural network. Their concept that organizational culture is composed of four key parts