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Fabulous Facilitation: Are You Prepared to Work Through Disruption?

Fabulous Facilitation: Are You Prepared to Work Through Disruption?

I knew not to ask the question. I was almost certain I had heard the exchange correctly. I asked anyway, “Jim, I am not sure I understood you. Can you clarify that?”


“I said Ray is a dick,” blurted Jim at a tone that all 30 people in the room clearly understood. “He knows he is. He thinks he is being funny, but he’s not.”


So much for allowing Jim the opportunity to walk it back. Now, as the lead facilitator of a public decision-making group of twenty, I had to get things back on track. There was a deafening silence, only broken by a few smirks. Most of the group looked horrified.

Anticipate Disruption

Disruption is a reality. Disruption will occur. Great facilitators embrace the reality of disruption and are prepared to move through it.

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Using Your CMMS System to Identify Cost-Saving Opportunities

Using Your CMMS System to Identify Cost-Saving Opportunities

Companies are constantly looking for ways to identify and implement cost-saving measures. Computerized maintenance management software is used to record, manage, and communicate day-to-day operations in your maintenance department. It’s possible to use CMMS to save money in a number of ways. The following are areas in which large cost savings can result through the implementation of equipment maintenance software

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The Plant Wellness Way Difference

The Plant Wellness Way Difference

The Plant and Equipment Wellness Way lets organizations make their operating assets world class reliable so they can enjoy operational excellence success. A Plant Wellness Way EAM System- of-Reliability puts the reliability processes, skills, paradigm, and culture into companies that creates world class reliability and operational excellence.

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Do you have a Reliability Department?

Do you have a Reliability Department?

Do you have a reliability department, a maintenance department, or a repair department?

Do you avoid failures? Do you avoid or mitigate their consequences?

Or do you wait for things to go wrong, then fix them?

Repairs are all about fixing what has broken. When something breaks you lose whatever functionality it had. It more than likely broke when you were using it too. So you also lost the benefit of that functionality – often production or service delivery capability. The costs include repair, whatever secondary physical damage occurred, the loss of revenues and profits, plus safety and environmental consequences that arise. When something breaks its “useful life” is reduced – deterioration was allowed to accelerate, so even once repaired, the asset has lost some future useful life. The fix for that longer-term deterioration impact is a capital replacement – earlier than need be. If the breakdown was really bad, then it might be much sooner.

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Simple Doesn’t Mean Easy

Simple Doesn’t Mean Easy

Guest Post by Andrew Sheves (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

I realized a while back that it can be too easy to mistake ‘simple’ with ‘easy’ and I’ve been concerned that promoting a simple approach to risk management might lead people to think that this makes everything easy. Unfortunately, even though a KISS approach makes risk management easier, it doesn’t do away with the need for hard work altogether. Worst of all, it can be easy to mistake shortcuts for simplification.

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Boiler Tube Thermal Fatigue Explained

Boiler Tube Thermal Fatigue Explained

The boiler is the heart of a refinery or power plant. Boiler failures cause forced shutdowns and put the health of the plant at risk. 

Some boiler designs run the risk of thermal fatigue failure. During service, the internal waterside surfaces of the tubes form a thin, protective oxide layer. Yet if the strains caused by the combination of (1) thermal expansion and (2) restraint during temperature fluctuations exceed the oxide strain capacity, the oxide cracks. Each thermal cycle will repeatedly crack the oxide, expose fresh metal when then oxidizes, eventually forming a crack. Technically this mode of cracking is corrosion fatigue-driven by thermal cycling. Yet since the boiler water will always be mildly corrosive, for boiler applications this mode of cracking is simply called “thermal fatigue”.

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Fabulous Facilitation: How Do Engaging Exercises Create Remarkable Results?

Fabulous Facilitation: How Do Engaging Exercises Create Remarkable Results?

Think about the three best-facilitated sessions you have ever attended. I will bet the facilitator used some type of activity that you remember. The exercise was unexpected, exciting, and effective.

Now consider the worst facilitated session you attended. If there were any, the exercises were as boring and uninteresting as the rest of the facilitation effort. My bet is that standard PowerPoint presentations and a traditional sticky dot exercise were part of the worst sessions.

Engaging Exercises Defined

Engaging exercises are that draw favorable attention or interest. Some synonyms for engaging make the point better: alluring, appealing, captivating, charismatic, enchanting, entrancing, fascinating, glamorous, magnetic, and seductive. From experience, a facilitated session has a good chance to achieve its outcomes if its exercises rise to the level of ‘engaging.

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Is System’s Thinking Critical to Root Cause Analysis’s (RCA) Success?

Is System’s Thinking Critical to Root Cause Analysis’s (RCA) Success?

Put another way, Can RCA be successful without the incorporation of system’s thinking? What prompted this question was that according to Drs. Leveson and Dekker in their 2014 paper Get To The Root of Accidents, systems thinking is not currently utilized in the application of RCA.

In this paper they cite:

 “An often-claimed ‘fact’ is that operators or maintenance workers cause 70–90% of accidents. It is certainly true that operators are blamed for 70–90%”. 

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Behaviour Based Safety Program: A Scientific Solution to Getting the Right Safety Practices Used in Your Workplace

Behaviour Based Safety Program: A Scientific Solution to Getting the Right Safety Practices Used in Your Workplace

Behavioural Based Safety (BBS) involves peer reviews of fellow workers’ safety practices. You use members of your workforce who take five minutes out of their day to observe a colleague at work and see if they are truly doing safe work practices

Use of a Behaviour Based Safety Program has seen an exponential rise in recent years. A number of eminent psychologists believe deeply in it, and in its ability to gain positive workplace safety results

Workforce behavioural observation, behavioural based safety, and a behaviour based safety program all involve observing people doing their work and seeing the safety behaviours they use. They are a proactive approach for getting workplace safety rather than a reactive approach to force safety improvement. The use of BBS is proactive because it gets shopfloor people working together to identify their hidden workplace hazards. It also gets unique data on your employees’ interaction with the hazards they have around them.

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The Problematic Project – Ignorance, Curves, Spirals, and Slopes

The Problematic Project – Ignorance, Curves, Spirals, and Slopes

Guest Post by Malcolm Peart (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

A project with a problem…not a new phenomenon and more likely than not ‘business as usual’ for most, but how do we address the problems on our projects?

Theoretically there’s the risk register and plan with a predetermined set of mitigation actions and designated owners who, although being potential scapegoats, are expected to manage risks magnificently while still dealing with the rest of their, hopefully, nonproblematic scope.  Problems plague projects despite alleged prior preparation and proper planning.  But it’s the way that people behave and interact that can make all the difference when resolving the problem and keeping the rest of the project on-track.

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Why Kill Controls?

Why Kill Controls?

“The effects of chance are the most accurately calculable, and the least doubtful of all factors in the evolutionary situation.”

R. A. Fisher, ca. 1953

COVID-19 vaccination claims have changed from “prevention” to “reduced severity.” FDA approved Pfizer’s vaccine for 95% efficacy, compared with the placebo control sample. Pfizer’s placebo sample had 86% efficacy, compared with the US population case rate! Sample subjects resembled each other but not the US population! 

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From Maker to Manager, Part 4: Learning Business Finance

From Maker to Manager, Part 4: Learning Business Finance

Regardless of your technical background, the higher you move within an organization, the more you need to understand about the organization’s finances.

Accounting is often referred to as the language of business. And I believe it. Before I studied corporate finance and accounting, I often felt lost. I didn’t speak the language. I remember sitting in a board meeting where other managers and board members were reviewing the financials for the organization. And I simply didn’t understand what all the numbers meant. By the time I starting making some simple two connections, the meeting had moved onto the next topic.

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Preventive Maintenance: Who Said It First?

Preventive Maintenance: Who Said It First?

Maintenance does not mean the same thing to all people. Operations managers, maintenance supervisors, and reliability engineers can be heard struggling to come to a common understanding. 

Historical definitions of maintenance are quite different.  “Maintenance” was originally the crime of unlawful abuse of legal procedures and attempts to influence courts. The other historical definition is providing money for operating or living expenses.  As a term applied to machinery, maintenance is less than about 150 years old. Preventive maintenance as a literal phrase is even more recent. So who invented this phrase?

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