Solving Process Decay

Walk any plant floor eighteen months after a new SOP rollout and you'll find the same story: the binder is still on the shelf, the laminated job aid is still on the wall, and nobody follows either one anymore.

Leadership calls it a discipline problem. Retrain, write someone up, rework some bad product, deal with the personnel fallout, explain it up the chain, move on.

But it isn't a discipline problem.  It's really not even willful.  The workers are departing from expectations, but the leadership is accepting it and the process isn't stopping it.

It's almost always systemic.  And it takes a system to beat it.

Process Decay

Loss of process adherence doesn't happen all at once. Processes erode step by step, and the mechanism is mechanical: habits only stabilize around actions that run every single cycle. The steps that happen every time, the core motions of the job, get wired in.

Now, ideally, this includes every step the business wants/needs.

But sometimes, something interrupts a process.  Rushing, fatigue, frustration, or even just normal interruptions cause people to stop their habitual process and consciously think about what's happening.  That's when processes change.  

If we're in a hurry, maybe we skip a step or we end a wash cycle early to save a few minutes.  Maybe there's pressure to get changeover times down and we're almost to target.  Or maybe an interruption just caused us to forget something.

And then nobody notices we skipped a step.  Or maybe a hard task got easier because of the change.  

So we do it again and repetition of this new easier way makes it the new habit.  The process has now changed. Once it becomes habit, we are no longer conscious of the decision to skip that step.  It has become automatic.

The steps that are occasional or which could be skipped most of the time without a visible consequence are perishable. A verification check, a pre-use inspection, a setup step you only need once in a while - they all start to fall off.

Perishable process steps will always eventually be lost if there isn't a process to protect them. Nothing bad happens the first few times, so nothing corrects it. Eventually the step is no longer part of the process.

You can't discipline your way out of this because by the time it becomes visible, the workforce is skipping it habitually. Which is to say they skip it without conscious thought.

Any accountability you deliver at that point will be experienced as unfair persecution because everyone was doing it wrong. The person who gets punished is viewed more as unlucky than as deserving of the punishment.  Everyone skips the same process, only one person got in trouble because that person had the consequence appear on his watch.

The fix has to be a process that protects perishable steps before they fail.

The three problems that your system must solve:

1: Attention

Leading a horse to water does not make it drink.

People only pay attention to information they think they can use.  If they do not believe the information will be necessary for them to have in the future, they will simply not listen.

Your system MUST create a situation where they believe the information you're giving them will be necessary for them in the future.

2. The Forgetting Curve

Even when people pay attention, they still have to retain it.  This is the second major barrier influencing people's habits.  They have to be able to remember the right process.

Ebbinghaus mapped the rate at which people forget information over a century ago: knowledge decays fast and predictably after a one-time training event.  No matter how well delivered or studied, the information is mostly forgotten within weeks. 

Most manufacturing training programs are built entirely around a single thorough exposure.  Single exposure isn't a very effective method.

The fix isn't more training. It's spaced repetition: short, correctly-timed touches that catch and reinforce the knowledge before it fades.  The rate of forgetting is slowed with each reinforcing event until the knowledge eventually becomes permanent.

That's a scheduling and system problem, not a curriculum problem.

3. Habits

Once you manage to get everyone to listen and you are able to get them to remember the process, then you face the most substantial barrier yet: habits.

If they are already doing the job, chances are they have habits.  And habits don't live in the conscious range.  Your people are performing tasks with a high degree of automation and may not be fully aware of what steps they're doing or skipping.

Changing those habits requires quite a lot of effort.  

Logically, we know this.  We know people who have habits they would like to change.  Information alone doesn't change those habits.  It takes something more.

The checking of a standard isn't what changes a habit.  Habits are most efficiently affected by the anticipation of a check... and that requires that we build a system that generates the necessary anticipation.

What does such a system look like?

Repetitive checks on knowledge and process compliance will satisfy the first 2 barriers, but then you have to do something a little differently for the third.

Anticipation of a check requires the belief that a check will occur, but also requires some uncertainty about whether it'll be passed.  

You see, if there is no risk of failure (because you know the check will be no challenge), the anticipation of the check will immediately die.

That means that you must create an expectation of a check. But that check must have enough uncertainty to justify preparing for it.

This is the engine that allows us to change habits at 180 OPEX.

How do we handle failure?

We do not punish failure.  Failure is an expected byproduct of the repetitive checks because of the barriers mentioned above.

Retraining, information, and clear expectations are provided administratively to each missed question or check, but no punishment is rendered.

People need to be free to go through the stages of their own change management process as we stand up these systems.

We have experimentally found this takes less than 30 days for most organizations to achieve substantial gains.

Inevitably, the entire organization will learn and master their processes.