← Factory Futures
Factory Futures
Reliability | Gerard Wood - Only Tradies Improve Reliability: The Culture Problem Nobody Talks About
00:40:04
Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Factory Futures podcast. Join us as we dive into the world of innovation and best practice in manufacturing. We sit down with industry leaders in reliability operations and production with a mission to uncover new technologies making a real impact, driving performance and enhancing profitability. Of your site, we explore the leadership journeys of our guests, learning from their challenges and gaining from their insights. Subscribe on your favorite app to stay ahead of the curve with our latest episodes. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show.
- [00:36]
B
Gerard, welcome to the show.
- [00:38]
C
Hi, jp. Thanks very much. It's great to be here.
- [00:41]
B
Yeah, well, look, the pleasure is ours. You are the man of the moment at present with the release of the second book. So, you know, thanks so much for coming on and sharing the message with us. I'd be keen for you, in your own words, to introduce yourself to our listeners.
- [00:56]
C
Yeah, thanks, JP. Yeah, my name's Gerard Wood. I spent about 26 years of my career working in all the roles you can do in maintenance, primarily in mining. You know, I worked up from tradesperson to supervisor, maintenance planner, superintendent, manager, central improvement roles, and sort of general manager level of maintenance. And that took me around Australia, Indonesia, overseas in Chile and, and a lot of places in between. After, after that long, I had sort of done everything I could do in maintenance, achieved a lot of great things, but also there was some parts of my career where I wasn't quite satisfied, you know, in terms of the results. And I always measured myself based on the reliability of the equipment. And then I went out consulting for 13 years. I started a consulting company called Bluefield, which eventually we joined Deloitte after 11 years. And most of the team's still there with Deloitte these days. And in that role, I was able to continue to travel around the world and help mining companies improve their maintenance and reliability, and primarily with a focus on culture. And during the sort of, probably about eight or nine years into that company, I wrote a book called Simplifying Mining Maintenance to give back what I'd learned. And, and then after a few years in Deloitte, I decided to retire. And then I realized after a year that retirement's great but a little bit too boring and I needed to do something more. So I decided to. Actually, I decided to write my second book, which was going to be called Accelerating Reliability Improvement. And I thought about how this would add value to companies and people who read it. And I thought, you know what, it's great. What I was going to write in that book's awesome, but it's not going to add any value unless they already have a culture within their trade workforce of consistent quality work and you know, just doing things well and doing things properly. So I thought I have to write that book first. And hence only tradies improved reliability emerged over the last sort of 12, 14 months.
- [03:10]
B
Excellent. What a journey. What an interesting journey. And so are we getting a sense here that there's a whole series of
- [03:16]
C
books coming and definitely accelerating reliability improvement's got to be my third now once companies arrive at the trade you've committed,
- [03:25]
B
now you've said it on a podcast. I'm sure people are already lining up to you know, to pre order on. On Kindle but you know that that's, that's fantastic journey and it's, it's great that you've come to this conclusion which, which a big part of our conversation today is to highlight the reasoning behind this, this, this realization that you had goal of the episode. I'd say that in my mind it's a really challenge how you think about reliability at the site and to, to challenge the view that reliability is, is systems, it's high level and it's technology and, and to maybe reframe it as something that's, that's a proper trades culture driven by visibility and, and pride and in your work. Which is, which is something I, yeah, I really want to get to talking to you about. So as a first step, I'd love for you to, to say some more. You, you said there in this introduction realization that this, that you needed to publish a previous book on it. I imagine that this came from your experience both when you were in the industry and consulting. Can you say more about was this driven by you observing the same problem or was it driven from something else?
- [04:29]
C
Yeah, look, I suppose through my career I started out in the days before we had CWMS systems. So I was the first person at the mine site to turn the, the MIMS terminal on in those days. You know, it was like we didn't know it then. We weren't conscious of the fact, but we had a good culture of doing good quality work at a trade level because it was the only lever we had to get reliable equipment. And when we turned the MIMS terminal on, we got smarter. We didn't forget about jobs and we got better planning and that helped us improve. And then over the years that became the norm that sites have used computers and systems and processes. And I went right deep down the path of documenting work management processes and got into all of that technology and it was great. And when I got into the central Improvement roles. I started to learn about root cause analysis and RCM and all these reliability improvement theories and I was amazed and loved it and absorbed all of that stuff. And one of my roles was to go around the sites and train people in how to do root cause analysis, how to, you know, improve reliability of equipment. And we were doing that across the company and it was great. But broadly speaking, was the plant and fleet availability or reliability continually improving? The answer was no. You know, you'd get little peaks and improvements here and there, but on a holistic basis, you couldn't see this continual improving trend over time. And I started to wonder, well, why is this? And I'd go out to the sites and I'd look at what the reliability engineers were doing and it was great, great projects, just as they'd been trained to do, identifying the issues, implementing improvements, following up afterwards to make sure that that defect had, or that chronic failure had been eliminated and had been. But what I started to notice is that whilst they were doing good work, there was all these other things appearing, other chronic failures, popping in and popping out, you know, and, and that came down to this inconsistent, I'll call it, level of execution of PMs and quality of work, and it just wasn't there. And then I started to understand this a bit more. And then when I went out consulting, I was able to work with clients and really hone in on that specific issue and help them improve. And I was amazed, even myself. It surprised me how much improvement these clients got from just focusing on that culture around quality execution, doing PMs properly. Don't do temporary repairs everywhere. If you do a temporary repair, make sure it's in the system to fix later and all that sort of stuff. So if we're talking, you know, mobile mining equipment, we'd be looking at a 5% uplift in availability. So 85 to 90% and stay there consistently just through that, just through that lever of that culture of good quality work and the guys owning it. If we're talking fixed plan, if they're around the 90%, you know, 92, 93% availability uplift, which is worth a lot of money to these companies. And it surprised me how much improvement these companies got. You know, it didn't stop me looking at before the AI boom that we've just seen and are just, and are going through, you know, I, I was doing trained AI to look at oil sample analysis and I still love technology and systems and process, but if they're put on the top of a culture where you've got random quality work, you just get a random quality outcome.
- [08:11]
B
Yeah, it's a very timely message, isn't it? Today's day and age. And it's a really funny. Yeah, it's such a good, interesting journey where you've. After the event of all of this technology and all of these advances, like we almost realized at the beginning when we didn't have any of that, we were almost better off because we, you know, we had to, to make do it what we had and didn't have. So that's, that's interesting and it. And brings us nicely to the second segment of what I think you call and you label as the uncomfortable truth. And yeah, I'd say, you know, my question here is simply for you to dive deeper into the last part that you said there and just try to unpack some more as to, you know, why our systems, tools and strategies fail without the right culture in place. Why do you think that's happening?
- [09:00]
C
Yeah, look, don't get me wrong, I still love systems and tools and technology and I know that when we had good quality work and that was our only lever, putting those things on top gave us an availability uplift and a reliability. So, you know, don't think that I'm saying I'm against those sorts of things. What I realized is that when that culture isn't there, when the culture is in place, you know, we can. It doesn't matter what system you put in place, doesn't matter what process you try and improve. If the work is getting done to variable standards, inconsistent standards, you get a variable inconsistent outcome. And in the worst case, if you've got a culture where, you know, no one really cares at all, you get a poor reliability outcome no matter what systems you put in place. One of, one of the other things that made me realize this was I was in like a GM level maintenance improvement role and I thought we've got to learn from the airline industry. And I took a delegation up to Canada, actually to Boeing, and spent a week with those guys, just going through all of their processes and comparing that against our processes, reliability improvement and all of those sorts of things. What I realised, you know, the airline industry has MSG 3, which is their maintenance strategy, Group 3, which is how they come up with a maintenance strategy for a plane. And it's really defined and takes years to develop and it's very disciplined. On top of that, their reliability improvement programs and processes and condition monitoring, everything is pretty much the same as what we had back in those days, or maybe even not as well documented, not as detailed. But the difference was the people who work on those planes do not vary in terms of the standard of work that gets done. It is absolutely ingrained to do quality work and you know, they have double sign off of everything and especially critical tasks and all of that sort of stuff. So that was another thing that made me realize that the only difference there is this, this level of discipline around execution.
- [11:15]
B
Yeah. Such a telling story, isn't it? And great that you would have had the opportunity to do that. Is that something that you proactively created yourself or did an opportunity present itself to you?
- [11:25]
C
No, I, I reached out to Boeing and eventually they put me in touch with, they had like a consulting business in Vancouver.
- [11:34]
B
Okay.
- [11:34]
C
It was, I can't remember the name of it now. It was part of Boeing though. And they were doing exactly what I was after, helping people, you know, with reliability improvement. The guys out there said to me it was weird that someone from Mining had reached out because they were generally working in the airline industry. But yeah, it was so valuable in terms of the learning that we got through that week and with the realization at the end that, hey, the difference was just the execution.
- [12:04]
B
The next thing we want to talk about is why, why you still have great good trades that produce poor outcomes. And I think that in your book you're wording on this is the simple don't know, don't care, don't see. Can you tell us more about this, like why you came up with these terms and what they mean to you?
- [12:21]
C
Yeah. You know, if you agree with the point that a variable quality of work is going to deliver variable quality outcomes, then you got to ask yourself, why don't the tradies do consistent, quality, good quality work all the time? And when I ask that question, what jumps to mind is they don't know. They don't know what to do properly, they don't know how to do the work properly or they just don't care. But actually there's this other element in there which is the don't see element, which is what I believe is by far the biggest problem. They just don't see the issue. And you know, when I talk about don't know, it means, you know, there's a, there's a technical element to doing the work that it needs to be done to a specific standard or, you know, and there are some breakdowns and reliability issues due to that type of issue, but they're pretty rare. Like when I look at the downtime Pareto charts and the Data, which I've done dozens and dozens and dozens of times. The top five chronic failures, which represent 50% of your unscheduled downtime, are always the same sort of things. And then they're simple things. It's hydraulic hoses, you know, accessories on engines. And, you know, it's not these highly technical tasks that need to be done to a specific standard that are causing all the. All the downtime and don't care. Look at all the tradies. I know they actually do care about how they're perceived. And, you know, they go to work and they want to do a good job. You might find a few that don't, but they're very, very rare in my career. I've come across maybe, maybe one. I was working on a drag line, and there was these holes in the electrical cabinets where some overload reset buttons had been removed. They weren't required anymore. And an inspector came out, and he wouldn't let the machine go back to work until these holes were filled. And I just thought this guy was so unreasonable because I'd been there for, I don't know, three, four years, and they'd always been there and have never caused a drama. And, you know, this is a really unreasonable person. After I reflected on that, I realized, no, he had the right standards, I had the wrong standards. But I couldn't see it. I just did not see that as an issue. A few years ago, I was doing a job in a plant in Canada, and we're up there to help them with their electrical downtime, actually. And one of the issues they were saying was causing all this electrical downtime was dust. And we were walking around the plant with the supervisor, and I walked past an electrical cabinet that was slightly open. I thought, that's not good. Dust is going to be getting in there everywhere. And I went over and said, I wonder why this is like this? And it was open because there was a lock that had been put in there, and it stopped the door from closing, and it had a tag on it. And it'd been there for like six months. And the supervisor knew immediately. And he said to us, after, you know what? I've walked past that so many times. It's just become normal. It just disappears. So there's these defects. Walk around a plant, if you get hired into a place, the standards that you find are the ones that you think are normal. So you don't see the issues. You don't see that these defects are the problems that are causing the downtime. You know, I can rave on about umpteen dozen more examples of that type of thing where people don't realize it's an issue like where they're doing. I come across a fleet that was full of temporary repairs that were causing these breakdowns, but people weren't seeing the issue. And you know that that was the biggest cause of why they don't consistently do, you know, quality work. It's just not, it's not obvious to them. Disappears.
- [16:08]
B
Yeah, it's a little bit of like a, you know, you don't know what, you don't know type thing, but in a different, different way. I suspect, you know, that we, we have, we have a run sheet here where we want to continue direction, but I think people want to know like immediately how, how does one go about to, to overcome that, that super common and misunderstood big problem? How do you get someone to see what they don't see?
- [16:37]
C
Yeah, well, you know, that's the good thing. It's actually quite simple.
- [16:41]
B
Oh, great.
- [16:43]
C
All you do, what I call is you make quality visible. So you start to highlight these. And the process to do that has been around for ages as well in Lean and Safety and all those sorts of things. You know, it's just, just using the learnings that we've got from many, many years and making these things visible. So, you know, as simple as just bringing photos to a morning meeting and sharing the photos, talking about what they are. Could be, you know, bad conditions on the plant or a job we did that wasn't up to standard or a PM checklist that we did that was clearly, you know, everything was ticked as good. But then you go and look at the machine, it's terrible. But also in sites where we've helped them implement that type of process, we always implement the process where they bring good quality stuff too, because every site has people doing good quality work. And you don't want it to be a negative experience in these meetings, you want it to be a positive experience. And you know, where you're talking about a negative thing. We didn't do good quality work, but we're talking about in a positive way because we can, we can get better. You know, it's like when you play team sport, you go to training, you play the game, inevitably someone makes a mistake, you get back to training, you talk about what went wrong and you learn and everyone learns. Positive improvement process. The, the, the meetings need to be held in that way. It can't be a negative type of thing all the time. But you need to address and talk about the negative Issues, the things that you find. When I was in my last maintenance manager's role some years ago, one of the planners just bought some photos of our part storage and stuff. He just went out and took a bunch of photos, brought them into the meeting and hand them around. And we're like, we immediately knew it was terrible, you know, we were losing parts and it was an issue to find them on services and things like that. And we knew that we just needed to do a cleanup and we needed to set up some daily routines to keep that stuff to a standard. And it was almost like he didn't even need to say anything. He just needed to show us what the real conditions were. And so that was one of the experiences I used to bring into this process. And I wrote it all in the book. The book has examples of what sites have done. And when I say what sites have done, my involvement in those projects is really just enabling them to own what they've got to do. You know, they need to own the process at a trade level, at a supervisor level. They need to be the ones who are behind. Yep, we're going to talk about this, we're going to do this, we're going to have a morning or something like that. It can't be something that some consultant comes in and brings to the table or someone with passion, you know, at a particular time does, because those things fall off. It needs to be owned by the team and needs to become part of the culture, because that's what stays, you know, it's the culture that stays.
- [19:52]
B
Yeah, that's great. Yeah. The simplicity of it is what makes it powerful. I think in any case, there's no way that we'll be able to steal all the fire from the book in a short 45 minute conversation. So if you don't mind, can you share with us maybe one more example of that process taking place at a site?
- [20:10]
C
Yeah, like there was a site that we did some years ago where actually I'll talk about two. This one was a mobile site and it was a fleet of trucks that had never ever achieved more than 85% availability for, you know, over a decade. New maintenance manager comes in, he goes, you know what? Trucks should be at 90%. That's where I expect them to be. So he got us to come in and when we got there, we started looking around in the workshop, looking at breakdowns and taking photos and looking at service sheets and things like that. And the people saying there's no way these things could ever achieve 90% because it's just their design, you know, they got. They had noise attenuation. So in summer there's just too much downtime. And when you looked at the data in summer, there was a. A little. But didn't explain the 7% or so that was available there. And we found things like, you know, oil filters that were leaking because the seals weren't changed on service, because it was a hard job to do, and people just put the seals in the locker and stuff like that and just heaps and heaps of examples of their own work, creating breakdowns effectively. And we weren't popular to show that to them. You know, the superintendent in particular, they. They weren't happy with what we showed them. They agreed to some processes, which I just explained, you know, the morning meeting and talking about things. Then when I went back about a month later, I said, how's it going? Yep, it's all done, we're doing it. And I went to the meetings, there was nothing happening, no one knew anything about it. So I said, no, it's not done. You haven't done it. And that made him even crankier. But in that meeting, there was some of the tradies in there and they said, we don't know anything about it. And then he realized it wasn't done and he really took ownership. And I just saw this switch change. He owned it. He was going to make this happen and he was going to own it. I went back again a couple months later, totally owned it. He was talking to the supervisor at the shift start meeting, making sure that they gave the message in the right way, you know, to make it a positive thing, but also talk about negative standard or bad standards and make their fleet availability in six months was at 90%. And I watched that fleet data for four years and it was at 90% the whole time or above. Got up to 92 and it was quite amazing. And they were so proud, you know, they had this sense of pride in where they worked and it really did impact the culture. And I just thought that was amazing. We eventually did all the other fleets at that site too. And then this other site was an issue around fluid cleanliness and, you know, where we went in there and they didn't even believe that it was fixed plan and all of their gearboxes and all of those sorts of things. The fluid in there wasn't at a standard that's gonna sustain the life of the gearbox. And this is. It's not something that sort of comes up as a breakdown all the time, because gearboxes can go for Ages and it takes a long time to wear them out. But they might have been changing them out at seven and a half years instead of 15 years or 20 years, you know, so it has a cost impact and more scheduled downtime impact on the business and same thing. We did a similar process and after a few months they sent me this little sort of a flyer that they had done up to explain the improvements and they talked about all of their oil compartments hitting in the green in the good area and they were so proud. You know, they had this little guy, little meme of this guy going fist pump a little baby. And they said, oh, yes, we did it. And you could just tell the pride. And that's what I loved. That's the satisfaction that I got, was just seeing this team that was so proud of the work they'd done and proud to be working in a place that was getting really good results.
- [24:02]
B
Yeah, maybe that's the point that doesn't get like broadcasted big enough is, you know, some people may have the. Not that they're completely in a don't care mindset, but they're, they may be partially there because they're like, well, you know, what's in it for me? Like what, what am I going to, you know, I'm going to come here, do the same hours anyway, get the same pay. So like, why, why go to that, all this extra effort and so what you're talking about there is. It's got so much value in itself. Not, not more, not more bonus or whatever, but just that feeling that you've achieved something that was difficult. There's. Yeah, there's so much in there isn't that there is.
- [24:40]
C
But it also has an impact on their career. Like a lot of the guys from the first side I was talking about, you know, over the years they had opportunities in their career to do other things because when, when they know how to get, you know, a good reliable fleet and how to do good work, every company wants that, you know, they're very, very employable when they can talk about those stories. And I saw that happen to some of the guys that I stayed in contact with. Their careers went much further, you know, it was great.
- [25:12]
B
Yeah, well, I'm glad you made that point. That's so true. I think some people would think of this and think, you know, how, how is it that another site is going to know all the improvement I've done? But I think what you're suggesting here is that, well, that's not necessary. You, you yourself can make a good A good point on that. When you communicate your achievements in, in any like, you know, interview or, you know, can be proactive about that.
- [25:36]
C
Yeah.
- [25:37]
B
Is that what you mean?
- [25:38]
C
A hundred percent. Also, if they're part of a business that has several sites or part of a larger company that the site performance gets recognized. The maintenance manager there, that site did tell me that other sites would come and look and see why were they so amazing? Why were their results so amazing? And they would, he said they always took away. We had these lean boards and the floors were painted and you know, that was all the stuff they were going to go back and do. Paint the floors and get the lean boards and everything. But that's not how it started. It was the culture that changed first and the outcome was control in the workshop organization. All of those things were sort of almost the output of the culture changing. It wasn't go and do that and the culture changes and fixes itself. I've seen other sites try and paint their floors and put in mess and that sort of stuff. And there's five people painting the floors and then there's 120 people coming behind just putting stuff everywhere and making a mess. So it, that doesn't, taking away those things wasn't going to change their site. It's the culture change that they need to understand. But it's less obvious.
- [26:52]
B
Yeah. And I think so far, you know, you've done a really good job at providing really clear examples that are super good and talking through a simple methodology of like, you know, in the daily meeting, bring photos, don't make it a blame game by only, only talking about the things that are not working well. I imagine that there are, there has to be like a few other specific routines that you observe work well in this favor. Like can you talk some more about outside of the things we may have already mentioned? What, what helps? What, what else helps?
- [27:25]
C
Yeah, I definitely, you know, one of the big things is actually creating an environment where people can talk about mistakes. And that in itself requires start that culture. They need to talk about the mistakes that they've made themselves. You know, I talked to a guy that I mentioned in the book, Martin Grant, a while ago down at Snowy River. Scheme has been there for years as a maintenance manager and he, they've got great results, you know, and he talks about how he shares with the team the mistakes he's made and creates that space where people can openly talk about their issues. Not their issues, but the mistakes they've made. You know, and he gave an example of one Guy who, he didn't take the samples properly on an oil service. And the next day he fessed up, he said, look, I didn't take those oil samples probably yesterday, they're probably going to be contaminated, blah, blah, blah, you know, and he was worried about it, but he was open to sharing that with the whole team. And what that does is creates this learning, right? Because his peers hear him talking about that and go, wow, you know, I better make sure I do it properly next time. It's sort of. So it has this infectious type, type of impact on the culture. But it is really important one. It's the leaders creating that space where people can share their mistakes and share what they did wrong. Because that creates a learning environment. If you don't have that, you can't learn if people are trying to, are too scared to talk about what they've done wrong.
- [28:59]
B
Yeah, that's a very good point. Certainly not limited to the field of reliability in any shape. Right. We hear about that very often, yet tend to forget it as often. Well, in terms of what we wanted to talk about, I think we've done a good job. There's a lot of things we covered with the next point being why high performing sites win. And the point here was that they don't rely on more processes, they build culture. One of the things I wanted to ask you on, on this piece is then to which extent does that culture translate into processes in the future? Like do you use that winning mentality that you start to get momentum on to then create standards and SOPs and that sort of stuff? What is your comment on this? Does that matter at all or does it not matter? Tell us more.
- [29:53]
C
I think that every site has safe work procedures, ops, all of those types of things and that process of updating them and improving them and all that sort of stuff is, is going to exist in some, in some way that's been around my whole career, 40 years, maybe not so much in the early days we needed more and we need to be more conscious of those things. But they were introduced to help improve safety and all of those sorts of things. And I believe that in the safety journey you can get too involved in changing documents and updating them and all those sorts of things rather than making sure that you're doing the ones that you've got correctly first. You know, and I've seen that often you'll have a safety incident. And the one that I'm thinking about was when I was in a mining company some years ago, there's a light vehicle that rolls away because it wasn't parked up properly and didn't have the handbrake on. The park up procedure was that you make it fundamentally stable, that it can't roll away even in neutral, then you put it in gear, then you apply the handbrake and that's fine, right? But the business, by looking at the procedure and going through the investigation, they come up with the rule that you've got to chock the tyres, put wheel chocks on the tyres, and I'm like, how's that going to help? It just makes it harder to comply to, you know, if, if the person wasn't going to park it, fundamentally stable, put it in gear and apply the handbrake, they're not going to put the wheel chocks on. So it just makes it more and more complicated, you know. So I think that a culture that does things properly means you don't have to go down that path of tying yourself in knots, updating documents and creating bureaucracy. I think that a culture where you do apply the procedures properly is one where you can be successful and, you know, you can also be practical. I've proven that too. You know, like in our business in Bluefield, it was very low bureaucracy, but we did quality work. We, we had simple processes around that and if we made a mistake, which we did, we owned it, we talked about it and it was always the fact that we didn't apply our simple processes properly.
- [32:06]
B
Yeah, that's good, that's, that's really good. Let's go to the future then, the future of trades and reliability. Yeah, I'd love to, to hear your thoughts on, you know, if we get this right, what industry look like in
- [32:17]
C
10 years, you know, if we were to get this right, get the culture right, then we would be able to really get value from what's happening now with technology and AI and all of those sorts of things. I would love to see that. My whole goal really is that all of this culture, all the basics is done well, then we can get into some really interesting projects, you know, like the stuff you guys are into, using AI to do things, that requires already the basics to be there, that people are doing, doing work, right, to get an outcome for the business. So I think in the future we get all these things right, we do focus on the right culture and there are sites with it too, by the way. There are sites with good culture that do get consistently high performance all the time. And if they implement a technology improvement or a new system or whatever, they'll get the benefits from that and I can't wait for it, you know, and we're going to need tradies for a very, very long time even, you know, I'm an advocate for getting more robots and doing the work as much as possible, but someone has to fix the robots as well. You know, we still need tradies that can work in an environment that isn't sort of uniform and consistent like robots are good at. So there's a, there's a huge future for tradies, even more so tradies that are updating their skills to use new tools and greater technologies and those sorts of things. That's still very important. And I really hope that these things I've written about in this book only trade is improved reliability. I really hope that we can get effective trades culture in all organizations so that we can get the benefits of the technology that's really starting to explode.
- [34:02]
B
Yeah, yeah, my hope is the same and I totally agree with you there. No, that's amazing. It's a nice way to portray, you know, where we're wanting to get to. I think a lot of people will agree with you on this, certainly on the point that trades will be necessary for a long period of time. Especially with the recent demos we're seeing of robots. Of course I'm impressed, but you know, it's also in some ways not as impressive as we might like to see them. The video of robots unloading dishwashers have all made us laugh. If that's hard to do for a robot, how are we going to do a complicated piece of work on valves? But who knows? We may get there faster than. Than I think. Last thing to discuss is our classic and well loved closing and quick fire round here. We don't expect you to have any preparation to this. This is meant to be funny and fun. So I'll just ask you questions and, you know, you say whatever comes to mind without putting the pressure on yourself to have a perfect answer. Just. Yeah, just say what comes to mind first. So starting with the first one. What's one belief about reliability that you think is completely wrong?
- [35:14]
C
That you need to do an RCA every time there's chronic failures?
- [35:19]
B
Okay, that's good. Second, if you could fix one thing on every site tomorrow, what would that be?
- [35:27]
C
Trade culture.
- [35:28]
B
That was nice and easy. What's a small habit or routine that separates great tradies from average ones?
- [35:36]
C
A small habit or routine, I would have to say, you know, preparation and slowing down, taking their time to do their job.
- [35:45]
B
Well, that's great. What's Something leaders do that unintentionally destroys a trades culture.
- [35:53]
C
They only care about getting the machine back to work and that's all on their mind.
- [35:58]
B
Yeah, that's a good one. A lot of people agree with you in one sentence. What does a high performing maintenance culture actually look like?
- [36:09]
C
A high performance maintenance culture allows people to talk about problems and takes pride in doing the work well its standards.
- [36:20]
B
What do you hope tradies listening to this episode take away?
- [36:24]
C
I'd really love tradies to actually take pride in their work and also think about how they can continue to improve their own work place, you know, like, and their own, their own enjoyment of their work. You know, not come in and be down all the time. You know, life's too short to be cranky at work. Come in, enjoy the work and get something out of it that really floats their boat. I'd love them to know that it is in their hands. It's not just the organizations that that's at fault.
- [36:59]
B
Yeah, that's a, that's a good one. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much. You, you were an amazing guest and you know, with your answers and examples. Thank you so much. Now we've talked about and mentioned this book a number of times. If someone listens to this and they think, you know, I will get a lot by reading the book itself. What would be the preferred method to get the get the book in their hands?
- [37:23]
C
Look, it's on Amazon. The audiobook will be out soon. But they can also get it from my website, jaredwood.com. you know, I would love for some businesses to think, you know what, the tradies need to have a copy of this as well. And you know, that's why I've produced it in an audio book. So maybe tradies that don't like to read can listen to it and buy it for all of them. You know, like in the Bluefield days, we used to buy a copy of RCM2 for every new employee. We expected them to know those principles. So, you know, yeah, it's available everywhere. But if they, if they've got any specific requests, they can always reach out via that website as well.
- [38:08]
B
And I'll guarantee you one thing as well, that book's gonna be an easier read than rcm2 and you're gonna fall asleep a lot less whilst you read it. That's amazing. Fantastic. I totally like the point that you said there. I think if a leader is gonna buy one for every tradie, they should definitely do the reading of it themselves as well, that's also a. And that audiobook's going to be perfect. You know, we've got a, what, 40 minute commute to the site when we are staying at mine camp to the site. So that's, you know, only a few, a few days and you'll be done. Are you doing the narrating of the book yourself or have you got another narrator?
- [38:46]
C
No, I narrated it myself and I was very nervous about that actually, but the publisher said it's okay. We've got someone who can take you through it and help you get it right because it's not something that I, I really thought I could do. But they, they, they controlled the process and made sure that, you know, they picked me up when I said it wrong or didn't, you know, stumbled over words or whatever, which is what I normally do.
- [39:13]
B
Well, that's why you sounded so good and clear today. You've had the practice of reading a whole book. Fantastic. Well, thanks again so much, Gerard. Is a. Yeah. Lovely conversation. Great to have you on and hopefully we get the opportunity again when book number three comes out. Yeah, that would be pleasure to us.
- [39:31]
C
I'd love to talk again, J.P. and, and look, all the best to you guys. I, I find it really interesting what you're doing and I hope it all goes really well.
- [39:40]
B
Thank you. It was very kind of you. Thanks so much. You enjoy the rest of your day.
- [39:44]
C
You too, jp. Bye.
- [39:45]
A
And that's it for this week's episode, folks.
- [39:48]
B
Thank you so much for listening in and tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode and think it would be valuable to anyone else,
- [39:55]
A
feel free to give it a share of on LinkedIn and feel free to
- [39:58]
B
subscribe as well on your favorite app.
- [40:01]
A
Enjoy the rest of your week.