Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
    • About Us
    • Colophon
    • Survey
  • Reliability.fm
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • NoMTBF
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • ASQR&R
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Maintenance Management
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • RCM Blitz®
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Field Reliability Data Analysis
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability by Design
      • Reliability Competence
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
      • Reliability Knowledge
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Institute of Quality & Reliability
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Statistical Methods for Failure-Time Data
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Glossary
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinar Sources
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • Your Courses
    • Live Courses
      • Introduction to Reliability Engineering & Accelerated Testings Course Landing Page
      • Advanced Accelerated Testing Course Landing Page
    • Integral Concepts Courses
      • Reliability Analysis Methods Course Landing Page
      • Applied Reliability Analysis Course Landing Page
      • Statistics, Hypothesis Testing, & Regression Modeling Course Landing Page
      • Measurement System Assessment Course Landing Page
      • SPC & Process Capability Course Landing Page
      • Design of Experiments Course Landing Page
    • The Manufacturing Academy Courses
      • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Statistics
      • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
      • Quality Engineering Statistics
      • FMEA in Practice
      • Process Capability Analysis course
      • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
      • Return on Investment online course
    • Industrial Metallurgist Courses
    • FMEA courses Powered by The Luminous Group
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • How to be an Online Student
    • Quondam Courses
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home
  • Barringer Process Reliability Introduction Course Landing Page
  • Upcoming Live Events
You are here: Home / Articles / Making Decisions That Work For You!

by Greg Hutchins Leave a Comment

Making Decisions That Work For You!

Making Decisions That Work For You!

Guest Post by Ed Perkins (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

There is a lot of literature written on decision making, ‘how to’, best practices, process, factors and so to follow to make ‘good’ decisions.  We have been exploring ‘risk based’  decision making in these blogs.  We have looked at factors, process, frameworks, psychology and bias.

But we have not discussed perhaps the most important aspect of any decision – implementation or that double edged word ‘execution.’  (Of course this assumes that the decision maker wants something to actually happen as a result of the decision, but that is a topic for another day).

Let’s use the nicer word – Implementation – which implies there is a course of ACTION, with a timeframe for results to be produced or to occur.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

The decision has been made, orders given – implement it – what could possibly go wrong?  Well there is a whole taxonomy of things that could make the implementation go sideways.  Resources are not provided, the alternative chosen is too risky for immediate application, unknown factors arise (or known ones that were conveniently ignored).  And perhaps most importantly, but also mostly ignored – can the organization actually perform the steps necessary to achieve the decision?  So, things to think about include:

  • Do you have the right talent?  People are not plug and play.
  • Timeframes must be realistic.  Even if a company culture is receptive to change or has agreed to an ambitious schedule, there is a limit to the amount of change a person, organization or technology can absorb before rate of change becomes destabilizing.

This issue – of organizational capability – is especially evident when implementation involves new/changed  process, procedures, or compliance.  Organizational culture goes hand in hand with capability.

MECHANISTIC VS. ORGANIC QUALITY THINKING

A recent CERM® Insights post, ‘Mechanistic vs. Organic Quality Thinking'[1] discussed the effects of organizational culture applied to processes and quality.  Mechanistic cultures can be described as ‘closed’ with a high degree of procedures and control, where organic cultures as ‘open’, with less formality and more adaptability.

The authors note that the “essential difference between robots (the mechanical ‘cogs in a machine’ approach) and an organic approach is the degree of involvement and variability in behaviour of people”.  In reality, no organization can operate exclusively in each approach, as the authors note “organisations, and parts of them, are all at different positions on the continuum from Organic / open management systems at one end of the scale to Mechanistic / closed management systems at the other”.

These management approaches reflect and also create the organizational culture. Organizational culture is one of the most important aspects of decision making. Culture affects how effective key management decisions are (or how they “stick”).

Capability maturity models (aka CMMs) are popular to describe organizational culture and the ability of organizations to behave (perform) in a repeatable (mechanistic) manner. Organizational maturity level has a very important impact on the successful implementation of decisions.  The more mature (and repeatable) the organization, the more on the mechanistic end of the continuum it is.

No matter how good your risk-based decision making, if the implementation requires more ‘rigor’ in process repeatability from the organization than it is culturally capable of giving (performing), then your decisions are either in vain or will require a long and painful adaptation.

This is especially evident with decisions to enforce compliance with regulations and best practices, requiring a high degree of rigor, which employees may not see as adding value to the product or service they provide.

There is an organic approach to CMM that works with both Mechanistic and Organic organizations.

If an organization has to change to remain effective, then you won’t have long to wait for something to break.. When something goes wrong, employees will be happy to accept an appropriate, possibly incremental, addition of a process rather than worrying about becoming the scapegoat for the breakage.

Watch for a discussion of ‘Organic CMM’ in a future post.

Reference:

[1] Mechanistic vs. Organic Quality Thinking – Ian Rosam / Rob Peddle; CERM® Risk Insights #33;

Filed Under: Articles, CERM® Risk Insights, on Risk & Safety Tagged With: Decision making

About Greg Hutchins

Greg Hutchins PE CERM is the evangelist of Future of Quality: Risk®. He has been involved in quality since 1985 when he set up the first quality program in North America based on Mil Q 9858 for the natural gas industry. Mil Q became ISO 9001 in 1987

He is the author of more than 30 books. ISO 31000: ERM is the best-selling and highest-rated ISO risk book on Amazon (4.8 stars). Value Added Auditing (4th edition) is the first ISO risk-based auditing book.

« Heating Liquids by Steam Sparging
Increase Productivity and Competitiveness with MRO Technology – Part 2 »

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CERM® Risk Insights series Article by Greg Hutchins, Editor and noted guest authors

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

Recent Articles

  • Leadership Values in Maintenance and Operations
  • Today’s Gremlin – It’ll never work here
  • How a Mission Statement Drives Behavioral Change in Organizations
  • Gremlins today
  • The Power of Vision in Leadership and Organizational Success

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy