Development of effective decision-making skills and behaviors is the foundation of human reliability. This human element is crucial to your equipment and process reliability.

Process-oriented organizations drive value by improving their business processes and equipment performance. At the same time, however, a number of applications, including asset management, work process improvement, defect elimination and preventive maintenance, among others, can be powerful but incomplete applications when seeking to sustain a competitive edge.

To implement and sustain high-performing, reliable cultures, managers need to be as rigorous about diagnosing, designing and implementing changes to the human decision-making process as they are with their business and equipment processes. Equipment and process reliability ultimately rest with human reliability. Thus, cultural change at its deepest level requires examining human reasoning and its resulting decisions.

To establish a culture-of-reliability requires going beyond the traditional stew of copycat approaches and learning how to: (1) use actionable tools to implement and sustain reliability improvements and bottom-line impact by (2) collecting cultural action data and (3) learning how to use that data to uncover hidden bottlenecks to performance.

In the quest for high performance, well-intentioned managers often launch cultural change efforts using what they believe to be applied methods, like employee surveys, team building, empowerment, leadership style, systems thinking, formal performance appraisal, 360° feedback, you name it, only to be disillusioned in the end by the fact that more change efforts fail than succeed. Although they may be well-accepted, traditional change methods are not precise enough to create and sustain cultures-of-reliability and typically evolve into the next flavor of the month.

The learning exercise
For the past 16 years I have been conducting a specific learning exercise related to cultural change. The purpose is to help participants understand why implementation is so hard. There are

1. To discover root cause of implementation barriers;
2. To illustrate the interdependent relationship between learning and error;
3. To determine how participants personally feel when they make mistakes;
4. Based on their experience of error, to understand how humans design a culture-in-action to avoid errors and mistakes; and
5. To determine the costs of error avoidance to business and human dignity.

To start, participants construct a definition of competitive learning which, at its root, is defined as the detection and correction of mistakes, errors, variance, etc., at ever-increasing rates of speed and precision—the heart of reliability. Through poignant illustrations, they...(Read whole article)