Why is it that we find a the last names Wainwright, Cooper, and a Fletcher in telephone directory listings today? Will it be long before we see the last name Millwright there? For those who are wondering what I’m talking about I’ll explain – a Wainwright was a skilled builder of wagons, a Cooper skillfully made barrels. An arrow only flew true because they were made by the highly skilled Fletcher. So before they became surnames, they were skilled trades that have all but disappeared. So why do I suggest that Millwright may go the way of the Dodo?
In the first blog entitled ‘I Just Can’t Get Buy In’ we concluded that when we find ourselves in a situation where Change hasn’t gone the way we wanted, we have no option but to trace the steps back and find out where the initiative went off track. In the example, we used which involved moving from one on one shift communications to computer recorded, it was that some employees had English as a second language. Quite often it is not something as drastic as that but no matter what the reason for the sidetrack it is only recognized after a failure. This approach is very much like employing Reactive Maintenance as your maintenance strategy – we wait until something fails and do whatever we need to fix it.
