Q4: What has been your most satisfying TOC achievement, to date?
A4: There are many stories that I might relate because I have loved doing all of them. The refinery project in the late 1990s was perhaps the most demanding – I was asked to work with a Strategy team that had 64 UDEs on the table that they wanted to explain to the CEO about why their Turnarounds weren’t working properly. Before I could begin to work with them to produce a proper work I had to find a way to show them that what they had already done off their own bat was a complete mess. They had constructed a tree that used some effect-cause-effect logic and a good mix of flow logic. They had a tree that filled a large cabin wall – but it couldn’t be read in a way that I knew how to read them. It took me a week to get to them to the point where they could see why they had to tear up the tree that they had produced. A point of satisfaction came when their training manager who had come in as an observer that day came to me and asked –“Where did you learn to facilitate like that?” I responded – “Twenty-one years as a trainer.” I loved the smile on his face.
I think that maybe my work with a Gliding club was perhaps the most gratifying – it was done to produce an improvement plan at a club that had the worst accident record in the UK – they had a reputation for being a club where too many pilots died. I only hope that they can sustain what has been achieved in the past two years under the direction of my friend and long time associate who is now their CFO. He was the guy who got me in there to act as a facilitator to produce the plan.
