Is there a reliability intelligence failure at your organization?

Is there a reliability intelligence failure at your organization?
by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

I just finished reading an article that reported on a recent Pentagon study about our battlefield effectiveness and performance in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The report states, “that U.S. troops didn’t understand the basic realities of society, culture and power structures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and couldn’t explain what they were doing to skeptical populations.”

“We were slow to recognize the importance of information and the battle for the narrative in achieving objectives at all levels,” according to a May 23 draft of the study.”

“In operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere,” the report reads, “a failure to recognize, acknowledge and accurately define the operational environment led to a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions and goals.”

The report considers these issues less a strategy failure than an intelligence failure.

Think about that.  The United States military arguably has the best strategies, techniques, technologies and tools available yet by ignoring things as important as the local culture and history, they were not able to use the resources to their advantage. They suffered intelligence failures.

In addition, the U.S. soldiers and leaders were unable to effectively “tell the story” of the mission to the locals in a way that they would not only stop them from undermining U.S efforts but might actually get them to “buy-in” and “support” the mission goals.

The Pentagon thinks that understanding culture and using an effective narrative is so important that one solution you will likely see in the future will be a sociologist embedded with U.S. forces in order to get a better understanding of local culture.

Does any of that sound familiar to you?

While your maintenance reliability program likely does not enjoy the level of resources available to the U.S. Military, you probably have a good strategy, good techniques, good technologies and tools.

Do you have a full understanding of the workforce culture? 

Are you and your team members able to tell the story (the narrative) of your reliability mission so that operators, purchasing and management “buy-in” and “support” the goals? 

As a maintenance reliability leader, you must be an effective Reliability Sociologist to ensure you understand the culture of the workforce you will be working with and the story that your own team is telling.  That is how you will win the battle and the war!

Please comment on these points.