Forward Observations: Teamwork Expands The Boundaries

It’s well understood how important teamwork is to an industrial operation’s ability to reach its goals. But as the hands-on aspect of manufacturing naturally gives way to the hands-off procedures guided by automation, remote monitoring and other digital solutions, it’s worth remembering that “teamwork” means more than simply working together. Teams play a vital role in advancing the continuous-improvement journey.

If you’re thinking “kaizen,” congratulations. Those in the know continue to use this diverse-member, hands-on team approach to solving challenges and increasing operational efficiency. Several hundred per year are not unusual at some operations, and if kaizens aren’t happening at yours, management’s contentment with life in the slow lane may be showing. The unadorned meaning of this Japanese term (“to change for the better”) belies the intensity and effort that can be expended over several hours or days in a typical kaizen to improve procedures. The concept is every bit as valuable now as when Deming introduced it to the Japanese in his post-World War II rebuilding efforts.

The idea that groups of people with some (or no) shared experience can be “greater than the sum of their parts” is not new. It dates at least to the early 20th century when, according to legend, a large crowd’s averaged estimates of the weight of an ox proved nearly exact. It has been written about often in the years since. Author James Surowiecki visited the topic in 2004 in The Wisdom of Crowds, where he concluded that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and often smarter than the smartest people in them.” The three conditions necessary for this, he says, include diversity, independence and decentralization.

The U.S. government is putting crowd power to work, too. A recent project created by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research arm of the Office of National Intelligence, featured a contest designed to test the power of team forecasting. It was created in 2011 to determine the ability of various groups of diverse, but pre-screened individuals to predict future outcomes of some 200 world scenarios. Team results would be compared with predictions from individual experts working alone. One team’s predictions proved so accurate—10% more so than those of the solitary experts—that this university-based group continues to provide predictions to the U.S. intelligence community. A team of “superforecasters” representing the best of all the teams is also still at work.

Crowd-based forecasting may not be germane to the needs of today’s maintenance and reliability professionals, but its proven effectiveness has implications for our group in several ways. Failure-analysis of parts (covered this month on page 28), for example, is often part of larger-scale root-cause-analysis and cause-mapping efforts undertaken to determine reasons for catastrophic accident. Both of these procedures gain tremendously from group input. If you have never participated in a real (or simulated) version of a group root-cause or cause-mapping procedure, you should do so. Those I’ve joined have been fascinating, especially one that included a lively Five-Why approach to the Titanic disaster. We not only filled a white board with multiple contributing factors to the vessel’s fate, our group’s engaged “why” reasoning inspired new ways to view this “well-known” event.

The use of teams to determine causes and find new paths to improvement is not meant to detract from the value that experienced individuals bring to any organization. These go-to pros will always be your best source of information. But not everyone can always think of everything. This is where your teams come in. No matter how advanced your operation, a team’s ability to solve problems and make things run better is too valuable not to engage.