What use is book learnining in the real world?
At a meeting on Friday afternoon, P.B. introduced to some of the supervisors a template for creating work instructions. I regret that I once again demonstrated my talent for being an obnoxious questioner. I questioned whether there was really the political will to accomplish the arduous work of creating and maintaining a comprehensive set of documents, pointing out that none of the staff (except the brand new personnel manager) were present and that similar “mandatory” audit programs had been waved around ineffectually in the past.
The intent of my questioning was to provoke a show of force, as it were; to secure a credible guarantee that benign or callous negligence would not be permitted to stop such a program once begun. But the effect of my questions was more to heap scorn on the idea that such a program, once conceived, could ever by carried through by Acme.
My skepticism has warrant, and if P.B. had been presenting to an audience inclined to be sympathetic toward him or to his idea, then my broadside might have rallied the troops. One or two present did react to my questions, with some annoyance, but these were not in a position to affect the adoption of this program in the most critical area, the “shop floor” (production area of the factory). The three mid-level managers present mostly kept quiet, and if I am permitted to guess their thoughts, they had no animosity towards P.B.’s proposal but felt that my insinuation that it would all come to naught was much more on track. Thus my fearless questioning likely provided a means for them to confirm themselves in their belief that it was a pointless charade, and harden them against any further progress.
The senior management at Acme has demonstrated repeatedly that they have not the fortitude to stand by a principle of good management that does not produce immediate results. Many proven useful management concepts have been introduced at Acme, and floundered when some competing interest intervened. For instance, the idea of preventive maintenance, of inspecting and repairing equipment on a schedule so that the equipment does not fail and become unavailable at a critical unplanned time, has been bandied about, but it always disappears when some customer starts screaming for an expedite and we have to run the machines non-stop. Most often, concepts which have some benefits and some drawbacks are introduced incoherently, and compete with each other for attention until they are all supplanted by a new wave of initiatives. General extinction is the more likely outcome of uncontrolled natural competition, after all.
But let us leave aside the unhappy ecology of Acme for a moment. Should anyone in any place expect to reap positive results from disciplined use of a work documentation program? P.B. certainly believes so, from his past experience at a different manufacturing facility that was bought out and reformed to much more contemporary manufacturing processes. He says that in this factory the work instructions are available with a few keystrokes on computer terminals throughout the plant, and all employees must audit one work instruction each month, with the result, after initial start-up, that the ongoing changes are minor, since the process has not evolved much since the last revision.
I think that, once established, the maintenance of such a program is feasible, although not so painless or simple as P.B.’s recounting might suggest. The challenge is the discipline to impose the requirement on a resistant body of employees, and maintain a high level of active enforcement through the first three to five waves of revisions, as major discrepancies between theoretical and actual job practices are sorted out. Relevant to this, where P.B. saw such a program implemented, a temporary workforce was brought in to take care of the documentation, and their employment was extended indefinitely to maintain the resultant documentation. Acme is currently looking to cut manpower, and cut deeply.
The question then must be, is there any value in such documentation to justify the expense of maintaining it? Is not the best work done by craftsmen who have years of accumulated lore that cannot be translated usefully to sheets of paper?
I concur that a craftsman cannot be replaced by a book, and years of experience will always add to an employee’s ability to perform the job. But looking off so far in that direction ignores what is happening now. The generation who worked for life in an industry is retiring from factories across America, not just our local Acme. Craftsmen are increasingly unavailable. Temporary workers, the answer of the day to the problem of fluctuating workforce needs, know nothing whatever of their jobs. White-collar office workers across Acme are entering their jobs ignorant of who they need to work with and what those people do; a recent warehouse consolidation has increased the volume of e-mail I get that is misdirected or inconsistent with business practices. Some of these have told me that they are inventing their jobs one step at a time, which I was doing myself about 15 months ago.
A substantially incomplete or obsolete set of documentation is worth far less than documentation that is detailed and up to date, so much less that it is not worth any half-hearted efforts to maintain. If the resources won’t be available to maintain the documentation, the question of creating it is moot. But the cost of doing without complete documentation should be weighed as well. Foremost is lost productivity, and along with that increased defects and (depending on the nature of the work) injuries. There are basically two ways to pass along knowledge on how to perform a task, apprenticeship or documentation; in the modern American employment system an employee leaves a position abruptly, with only a short time to train a replacement at best, and the effort to minimize labor costs means there is also minimal redundancy. This means that whenever an employee finds a new job or has unexpected health problems, or retires or even takes vacation, their job must be performed ad hoc by whoever is their sudden replacement.
Documentation could never capture all the complexities of my job or any other job, and can never reach that touted ideal of enabling anyone to come off the street and immediately perform my job as well as I did. But it might enable them to complete all the critical functions on their very first day, and it could well reduce their learning time in half, or less. And constantly-reviewed documentation provides a mechanism of critique to improve my job even while I am doing it.
One of the supervisors present at the meeting remarked that implementing a documentation program would require greater organization of the work areas, so that there could be a meaningful written reference to the location of necessary tools. This speaks volumes; clearly labeled organization is one of those fragmentary Good Management Practices that has been talked about as long as I have been at Acme, and was even the focus of one of the previous mandatory participation initiatives that was never really enforced by anyone more impressive than myself, at the time a temp in the office. If the management were to actually put weight behind this documentation program, it would drive people to make their work process simpler and more repeatable just for the ease of documenting it. Furthermore, it is an admitted but uncontested plague in Acme that people in all steps of the production process are using their own methods for completing their jobs; and different people filling the same job are using different methods. The engineers have specified one way for making a part, and the machinist on first shift is using a different method. The second and third shift machinists are each also using a different method, and there is no settled and enforced opinion on which method is superior. A machinist might be using a different tooling to run the job faster and think that he has outsmarted the engineers, but he may also be making more scrap parts because of the tooling’s inability to maintain the part specification.
If asked to choose between a craftsman with a lifetime of experience and a neophyte with an instruction manual, all wise people would choose experience. If your actual choice is between a craftsman you can’t keep and instruction that you might be able to buy for the neophyte you will wind up with, the instruction manual takes on a whole new appeal.