Balancing Short and Long Term in Change with Shon Isenhour

It's my pleasure at welcome back, Shon Isenhour to the podcast, the owner of R and D show.

In this episode we covered:

How do clients get time to move and to start doing some of these proactive things?
How do you manage skill traits? How do we schedule them appropriately?
What are some short-term things we can do to create a little bit of breathing room?

How do clients get time to move and to start doing some of these proactive things?

The level of enthusiasm or excitement. In some cases, they have a reason for change. You know that reason for change can make it easier to do one method over another.

What are some short-term things we can do to create a little bit of breathing room?

It's important to free up time to be able to do the other things that we need to do, which may be more long term. I think RCAs a great way to do that. A lot of people in this industry think of RCA as something you do later in the implementation after you start getting a lot of data and you know; you have a better understanding of your criticality and where you’re having your failures.

I just don’t see it that way. If you are only doing the long-term things, the organization just doesn’t have the patience or the persistence to wait on the result. If we can’t create the little wins market, the little wins sell the little wins to the organization, then we will lose the ability to make the big changes that we know will sustain this thing long term.

Long term things typically are processes. If you leave any of the steps out of that, that process very well may break. We could spend a ton of time writing new FMEAs and developing and understanding all the failure modes and those failure modes effects analysis. But if our PM completion is 18%, all that work really is for nothing, because we’ve done all the hard stuff. We got all the way to the two yard line and we can’t seem to convert. We can’t seem to get it across the line.

How do you manage skill traits? How do we schedule them appropriately?

It’s technical when we do those things. But it’s also easy because we’re doing analysis, we’re dealing with machines, we’re dealing with failure modes. The hard part is driving change within the people.

One of the things we do with a lot of our clients is coming up with a vision for what the organization wants to look like in the future. After that there's a discussion of the guiding principles and those guiding principles list. Having those guiding principles could be a good way to help the organization start understanding where we’re going. There’s nothing to stop you from starting to implement some of those even very early on, knowing that the people change is going to take time.

How does an organization that’s going about this journey determine what the right balance is between that of a product of their maturity and their resource levels?

I think you’re going to have to throw in more short-term wins to be able to show those leaders that are coming in to replace the ones that left or the ones that are losing interest. That is the right thing to be doing right now. We’re not turning off FMEAs. We’re not turning off PM optimization. We’re just simply dialing that dial back a little bit so that we can turn up some of the short-term gains that we can get with RCA focused on specific re-occurring failures.

Having that open and honest communication as opposed to just making switches is important. Organizations that have good master plans or project plans where they can show these parallel paths, but break them down into these size pieces, are able to do what we’re talking about here today. The others are going to feel more like that off and on syndrome flavor of the month.

It’s finding the balance on how much is going; how much emphasis is on this short-term stuff versus how much emphasis is on the long-term stuff. That may vary based on things that happen within the organization and that’s normal and okay. Knowing your organization, documenting your savings, marketing and selling what you’re doing is key to making all this work.

Any parting words of wisdom on how they go about this delicate balance?

I think you really need to look at your vision and your goals. If you don’t have a good plan, the people are going to have a hard time wrapping their head around it. Have a plan, make sure it’s fit for your organization and needs and make sure it balances those short- and long-term activities.

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