BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS

Great problem-solvers will overcome barriers to getting the specific information they need. If a machine is moving too quickly for a problem-solver to see a pattern with their own eyes, a great problem-solver will get a camera to record it, and then slow it down. If a manufacturing line doesn’t automatically count units produced, great problem-solvers get out there and do the counting. They work closely with those who best understand the system or process to find where to look to answer each question and find the clearest information.

In a chemical processing plant, some very large (10-ton) pumps were breaking down every 3 months, costing the company tens of millions of dollars per year and posing a safety risk, as containment was lost during failure. The plant had spent years and tens of millions of dollars repeatedly upgrading the pumps to be able to add bigger, harder seals into the pumps to prevent the failures—but they just kept coming.

After yet another failure, a new team had been formed to work on this problem, and it included some members of my team. After the next pump failure occurred, rather than work on even bigger seals back at the desk, we insisted on looking at the pump as it was disassembled in order to better understand what was happening. The team found once again that the seal had been eroded, and there was a smattering of black solid particles all over the seal, mixed into the lubricant. We decided to “smell it” chemically, running it through the lab: The techs there found that the particles were actually an oxidized (or literally “cooked”) version of the very chemical that the pumps were pumping. This was a huge insight for the team and set them up to quickly solve this long-thought impossible problem by digging into the fundamentals. You’ll see how this problem was solved in Chapter 5, “Dig Into the Fundamentals.”