The real challenges of deploying the solution-set we created, through so much research and development, breakdown into a few specific extant realties:
· Management by verbiage is so common that the words defy any action being taken that proves the lies accepted, and there is a serious fear factor because executives who know something is amiss are often convinced the “safety group” is best left buried in shadows.
· There is so much mistaken focus on irrelevancies in safety that shifting the thinking of people to grasp the larger context of how safety comes from risk-management is often impossible, and because resources are so poorly expended in that context there is a real resistance to exposing the grievous failures of the past and present.
· There is such an obvious misunderstanding about how safety is created and by whom that the end-result of any discussion is that it is nearly impossible to get to the right people in a reasonable amount of time.
One of the most distressing aspects of our movement away from the purer research and development of the product-set has been deploying it. Even when we have an eager, accepting company, we have found that it can take endless months to get past the “safety personnel” to the people who can make the change function. In the past, so many predestined failures in the shifting safety landscape have created a “don’t bother me” attitude at the executive levels that the idea is seen as another “flavour of the week.” So, even when a good safety manager wants the change, one who actually understands the paradigm shift as necessary, they have a serious challenge climbing into the executive suite long enough to identify the value for their top-level managers.
To change someone from a reactive crisis model to actual risk-management is also troubled by the fact that the lies being told crumble the instant the depth of crisis is exposed. We have had direct problems that highlight the awful management that seems to extend into almost every aspect of even well-managed companies. The most frequent barrier to adoption to the idea of operational risk-management is that the entire process can come to a dead stop as soon as the question, “Who works for you and what do they do?” is asked. Getting an employee list from any company, large or small, is almost impossible; and getting one that actually is right is impossible. In over a decade we have yet to receive even a basic list of worker names that has been correct on the first try, with the average number of cycles to get anything even reasonably accurate being four. That means, operationally, no one is even able to generate a reliable list of worker names; it is no wonder when serious disasters occur, we hear phrases like, “the missing employees have not been identified.” We used to believe it was to assist contacting families, but experience has proved the actual problem is more basic – no one can reliably place a name to the body.
When the executive is onboard the process is not necessarily much smoother, because often they rapidly receive the hard education about how poorly structured their company is. We have occasionally had executives red-faced at the realisation no one in their Human Resources group can produce a list of supervisors and subordinates, or even tell them with reliability what someone was hired to do. When this happens the problem presented is that even if the executive is desirous of making safety extend from management processes, they have to recognise the deep flaws in their general management of information cripple the deployment. This failure-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario makes deploying our solution-set sometimes impossible, and always time-consuming.
To deploy the solution-set then requires education first, and that creates a bizarre situation where our raw time investment often exceeds the value of the contracts given that we can seldom sell an entire enterprise in the first deployment exercise. (We could try, but past efforts have exposed another conundrum, which is that internal information systems are usually so bad that attempting to deploy to a complete company, even of a few hundred employees, creates a deployment track with no reliable timeline – people simply cannot gather basic information.)
Risk-management itself is an easy sell, though, which is an oddity given how much resistance meets the deployment of the same within an enterprise setting. It is easy to get almost every listener to nod to a statement along the lines: “We are talking about a management model that identifies and manages operational controls on a per-risk basis, and scores the risks against your actual operations, which allows you to plan resource applications and measure those results over time, creating cycle of improvement where your highest risks are suppressed most aggressively in a fairly short timeframe.” No one argues the wisdom in that statement, which is a single sentence that actually describes the broad concept exactly.
The resistance begins as soon as the first of many barriers is encountered, when everyone in the communication chain hears something along the lines, “Your multimillion dollar Human Resources system hasn’t been able to give an updated, correct list of employees in the six months since deployment began; your safety personnel cannot find training records for the last five years to confirm the spreadsheet they have that purports to track training; and historical data for incidents appears not to be available, at all, for certain spans of time.” The effect of any statements along those lines is devastating, because while any of them can be surmounted, the reality usually sinks in that the core problem faced in implementation is not with our method or our solution-set, but with generic information systems it depends upon to function.
It is almost impossible to maintain momentum without heavy direct support, and for a company consisting of four bodies, this severely limits simultaneous client deployments. Because of this, the chicken and egg cash flow problem always drives the company in jumps and starts, with almost no room for investing in the resource expansion necessary to harness multiple client deployments.
Executives are willing to expose the lies in the words tossed inside their company if the end result is an improvement that can be measured, but they are resistant to exposing their company to ridicule when the process itself reveals the deep flaws in their overall information management substructures. Ultimately, to engage and maintain their momentum requires direct application of expertise we have, but that in turn limits us as a company, creating a preferred client status for the clients we have, but ensuring our growth curve as a company remains abysmally shallow.
The hard-sell is all about resource dearth.
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