What's Bothering Me? Crisis? What Crisis?

I need to go on another photo shoot in some exotic location, for those international readers you may learn something about UK politics but more importantly how history often repeats itself, due to denial.

In 1979 Jim Callaghan (in the UK) was infamously, and incorrectly, quoted by a Sun journalist with the words 'crisis what crisis' on return from an international summit (and holiday in the Caribbean). The background was lack of oil supply and sharp increases in Energy prices. Prior to this 'sunny Jim' had been selected by the incumbent political party (Labour) after Harold Wilson stood down, 'sunny Jim' took this as a mandate to continue as leader. The meltdown and panic cause multiple social issues, the collapse of the Labour party paving the way for a certain Iron Lady (Maggy Thatcher, Conservative) and the production of an album by a hippy band. What followed were general strikes and upheaval in the UK for the following period until we got to the age of 'yuppies', they displaced hippies (sort of).

How things have (not) changed in 2022. The UK (and the rest of the world) have just gone through a rather awful pandemic, climate change, and now we have sharp increases in energy prices with the population struggling to obtain the basics and demanding more money in their pockets causing, of course, discontent and spiralling inflation. Good old Boris (Johnson) who was selected by the incumbent political party (conservative) and thought he had a mandate to continue as leader has gone to pastures new, leaving chaos in his wake. Hippies are of course making a come-back, if the recent Glastonbury is anything to go by and all we need are yuppies (or are they now called 'techies') to complete the picture. We also have governments in denial "this is not the 80's".

So what?

6th July 1988 167 men lost there lives in the Piper Alpha disaster. The Prime minister at the time was Margaret Thatcher who had abandoned plans to invest extra cash into the Safety regime - because it was not a priority (see energy voice). Government Inspectors had also been on-board on the 28th June. The subsequent Cullen Inquiry led to sweeping changes in regulation. You will of course take note of the date and the events leading up to this set of decisions.

In Operations we strive to keep things going at ever decreasing annual budgets in efforts to get something for nothing. All that hard work yields a plant that just keeps steadily turning out the dollars. When a leader is looking to make more money to balance the books (or the economy) it is only natural to look at parts of the business or economy where stability is the norm. That is, "if nothing happens why are we spending money?" or indeed look at public sector pay, slip in a few hidden taxes and hope no one notices or leaves. Budgets are cut and this increases the number of breakdowns, mental and physical. This leads to a decreasing spiral of downward performance - a crisis.

What is hidden is the real cost of all those emergency interventions (dollar x4 du-Pont study), unplanned correctives (dollar x2). This means a decrease in the money left for preventative work and of course a backlog along with a degraded plant condition.

So we may be spending the same amount of money but actually decreasing the amount of work to prevent failure

There are three issues to think about .

1. That is the probability of something bad happening due to degraded condition is increasing it does not mean it is going to happen now, next week, month, year.?Random action rules apply.
2. If your budget holder has no knowledge of the consequences of an event, they are not conditioned to respond.
3. You and your team can't respond (your resilience is low) for any reason. Some of the factors may be Cost, Contingency, Complexity, controls, culture, communication, configuration which I have talked about in previous notes.

To be clear then just in case you have not joined the dots-

CURRENT POLITICAL EVENTS, ECONOMICS, INCIDENT STATISTICS AND CORPORATE BEHAVIOURS all point to a sad inevitable outcome.

My challenge,

?Do you panic and stop doing things, are you heading for a repeat of the 80's

OR

Maintain Resilience(more here)