From a leadership perspective we, at Ledet Enterprises, think it is important to provide proper rewards and recognition to succeed at improving organizational performance. However, we think different rewards are important in the different domains. Strangely enough, it appears that the Reactive domain has the rewards built into the work itself. When equipment breaks or won’t do the job, there is a lot of satisfaction derived from the act of restoring the functionality of the equipment. There is overtime for the hourly employees who are needed to take the equipment down, restore the functionality, and get it running again. These are the typical “overtime heroes” who wrestle with the equipment and get “pats on the back” from everyone because they were able to repair the equipment and get it running again. There is innate value in restoring equipment to serve the purpose it was intended to serve. The problem with this mode of behavior is that it has many hazards associated with it. The most obvious ones being the risk of hurting people and the environment because of the chaotic way things happen in the reactive mode. While this chaos is stimulating and creates some excitement in life, it can easily become overwhelming for employees. This basic mode of operation is a fight between the equipment and people to see who will win or lose with the equipment taking the initiative.

Therefore, the motivation to go from the Reactive domain to the Planned domain is to avoid the losses, waste, and hassle of the Reactive domain. Planning behavior is basically a mode where the people impose their will on the equipment through techniques that anticipate the modes of failure and take action before the failures can happen. This mode is not innately rewarding because you can’t tell if the amount of planning you are doing is enough. The outcome of perfect planning is that no failures happen, but it is impossible to know when the planning is over done because the consequence is that nothing happens. The motivation to do something disappears when the memory of the last failure fades. This causes the Planned domain to be rather cyclical where the planning is improved to the point that the failures are much smaller, and this leads to doing less planning until something happens. In organizations where planning has been successful, there are people with strong personalities pushing the planning in order to impose their will on the equipment. It is our experience that strong egos have to be fed. Therefore, it is important to reward these people with things that will pump up their self-esteem. Some monetary reward is needed to compensate them for the overtime they are not getting but more importantly, status must be awarded to sustain the strength of these egos. People without status can’t impose their will on the equipment, or on other people who are not motivated. This is the domain where T-shirts, hats with logos, jackets, and other status symbols are so important. Of course, if you want this behavior to continue for 20 or 30 years, you have to find ways to reward people for the same amount of time. Extra T-shirts, baseball hats, etc. will not suffice as rewards, and the recognition will have to extend to promotions or other power giving status symbols. So the hazard associated with the Planned domain is it can become boring and even high status can’t provide the excitement that people need to enjoy life. If the work becomes boring, people become complacent and quit doing the tedious work it takes to prevent all failures. People intuitively know that all failures are not predictable and therefore even with an infinite amount of planning you could not prevent every failure. The temptation then is to let some of the planning go until something happens. It could take quite a bit of time for something to happen to the equipment if planning has been done well over the years. In the mean time the resources to do the planning are gone and you have to start all over again. This experience has led Dan Townsend, formerly at ARCO and Valero and now Program Director at H.B. Zackry Construction and Maintenance, to conclude that the Planned Domain is not as stable a domain as the Reactive and Precision domains and has led Vince Flynn, the leader of DuPont’s Corporate Maintenance Leadership Team, to conclude that the Planned Domain is fragile. Vince said that in his experience, in general, people are not willing to keep up the systems that are necessary to stay in the Planned domain. The discipline of Master Data maintenance is the foundation for good planning, e.g. MRO Material Master Data, Bills of Materials, Preventive Maintenance Plans and Task Lists. We have seen instances where the Master Data resources are eliminated and the CMMS system data becomes inaccurate, with the result being lost productivity in the planning process. The discipline of planning deteriorates until something bad happens, like the maintenance costs reach some new unacceptable level, and the process starts all over again. The basic process is that people are imposing their will on the equipment by taking the initiative early enough to avoid failures.