Too many years ago I saw a painting in a friend’s father’s study. This was probably the first piece of art which really communicated a strong message to me. I recall a simple group of stick figures arranged around a boulder. There were two groups each apparently trying to move the boulder in opposing directions. Evident in the forms were thought, planning, and frustration as the two groups worked against each other.
There have been many times I have thought about communication, coordination, and control in business and recalled this painting. I’ve recreated it as best I can. My version doesn’t convey the emotion I recall from the original.
One project provides a couple of specific examples. I was managing engineering of very large machines which applied coatings on glass sheets- up to 3×6 meter sheets. We shipped a multi-million dollar retrofit to an old system that had been operating for at least a decade. It seems the installation team had stalled and the customer wanted their line running. I was invited to an early morning meeting. After an update on the status the GM said, “I think we need to send a team.” About a dozen people became silent, not wanting to draw attention to themselves. As a senior manager and probably the most knowledgeable on all aspects of the system I volunteered; a few hours later I was on a flight to Belgium.
First thing the next morning I gathered our entire team in a conference room and spent the next three hours creating a detailed list of every item preventing the system from operating. The list filled a white board. We then spent the next hour indentifying which items were truly required and which were just “nice to have” or cleanup items. The list was now down to three software items. We estimated one programmer could do two items in an hour each, the other programmer could do the third in about two hours. I could almost end the story here- a multi-million dollar installation was stalled and an emergency team flew to Belgium for four man-hours of work.
About noon I gave our team very specific assignments to complete the three items on the list and do absolutely nothing else. I made a gamble and told the customer we’d have the production line up by 5pm. Then I walked out to the shop floor to see how work was proceeding. The production line was rumbling as pumps and conveyors idled- PLC’s allow code changes while the logic is running- the noise could be felt as well as heard. Looking over the shoulder of one of the programmers I noticed the code he was working on had nothing to do with his assignment. He replied, “I just wanted to clean up a program label. Trust me.” He hit the enter key as he finished speaking. There was a clatter as hundreds of contactors banged open, dozens of pumps shut off, and huge valves clanged shut- then silence and a blinking red fault light in the control cabinet. So many lessons in one little enter key press- engineering is not based on faith or trust, consequences of an apparently minor action can be significant, and four hours of consideration, communication, and apparent consensus can be thrown out when one person goes off task.
We still managed to start the line around 5pm and the first glass ran through the line at 6pm. I remained in Belgium for a few more weeks, until I was confident I could leave without issues erupting.
An intermittent electrical problem encountered during that same trip provides another communication lesson. A gauge was shutting off whenever a valve cycled resulting in shutdown of one end of the production line. The installers were guessing there was a leak or pressure surge tripping the gauge off when the valve moved. I had our install manager bring a digital oscilloscope down to the end of the line and we began watching signals while cycling the valve. We immediately saw a huge electrical spike on a gauge control signal which was shutting down the gauge. I pulled the wires out of the cabinet and discovered that our manufacturing guys had created a 2 foot diameter loop of wire in the electrical cabinet and had used about 6 feet of wire to go from one terminal to another terminal located about 3 inches away. The valve wires made a similar loop creating a single turn transformer which coupled the valve signal into the gauge input. We pulled out the wires and ran the gauge inputs on a direct path a three inches long- problem solved.
Our installers were very uncomfortable with this fix. It seems there was some rule about prettiness of wiring and always going in giant counterclockwise loops instead of taking the direct path. When I got back to my office I explained the problem to the VP of manufacturing. His stunning reply, “We can’t tell the workers how to run the wires in the cabinet.” So, it’s OK to ship systems with mysterious intermittent problems and no hope of reliable operation, but it’s not OK to tell our own employees how to assemble our systems. I ended up taking an executive position at an organic display startup before finding a solution to our internal issues.
Somehow, as an immature, inexperienced teenager I saw all of this in that one painting too many years ago. I’m still working on solving/preventing the same issues and challenges. Closing the loop in communication by monitoring, measuring, and correcting what is actually happening is critical. The military uses (used?) C3 (Command, Control, Communications) to which I would add a few more C’s- collaboration, coordination, cooperation, consensus, concurrence, confirmation, and correcting to create a complete C9 management scheme, and maybe a few more C’s for Documentation, Metrics, Feedback, and Learning if I can find synonyms.
