SOURCE: Kay Sever: May 1, 2025
In 2025 we will focus on sustaining the gains achieved via the optimization process. Why spend a year talking about sustainability? Your optimization gains are at risk of being lost in future months/years unless certain preventive actions are taken. This risk is worth some investigation and contemplation.
During the first quarter, we explored how mindsets and choices driven by mindsets that empower your ability to sustain optimization gains for many years… choices that remove barriers and propel you forward OR choices that create barriers and cause gains to vaporize over time.
How can you prevent the shrinkage of optimization gains over time? The answer is simple: remove the barriers that cause losses BEFORE the losses occur. The next few articles will expose some of those barriers and management’s role in removing them.
Why Do Management Choices Impact Success with Optimization?
For those that are new to this topic here’s a quick review:
- Traditional management metrics, tools and strategies help leadership teams develop/execute operational strategies to meet budget. Some of these metrics, tools and strategies lack elements required to reach/sustain the next level of performance… optimization or “best possible”.
- To empower management teams to move to this new performance level, their current perspectives, metrics, tools and strategies must be aligned/upgraded.
- Management must “choose” to make these alignments/upgrades as part of their “scope of work”. Important Note: None of these choices will compromise safety… ever!
- If the management system is not upgraded, significant gains from optimization cannot be captured or will be at risk of being lost, which means the dollar values of this particular management choice is equal to the gains at risk… often millions of dollars at larger operations.
What does this choice mean to those with management responsibilities?
The optimization alignment effort must be a team effort… no different than a sports team where every team member has an equal desire to win. Every team member must be committed to the following:
- Incorporating a few new data-points into decision-making.
- Communicating in a slightly different way about performance.
- Building a team with an “expanded goal” of achieving “best” performance. The move to this goal makes budget easier to achieve.
- Adopting new standards for communicating about problems and involving the right people in solutions.
- Supporting each other so team members remain aligned to a goal of “best possible” results. If one team member reverts back to old ways of working, all your optimization gains are at risk.
Some Choices Are Not Optional in Optimization
Here’s a partial list of non-negotiable choices that must be made to align a management system with optimization goals:
- You MUST STOP doing some of the things you may have been doing for a long time (examples):
- Using only the budget to measure your success.
- Accepting department silos as “something you cannot change”.
- Excluding the organization and the management system from optimization work.
- Assuming your organization does NOT create losses since it does not produce a product.
- Giving people on the management team the power to choose to participate in this effort. If the management team is given the power to make this choice, the company loses big-time but the leadership team will not understand that this choice is a core reason for lost ROI, unsustainable change or failed initiatives.
- You MUST START doing things you may have never done before (examples):
- Quantify the unreported losses in every department.
- Use that information to prioritize management’s focus and educate the workforce about the financial value linked to doing their “best” work.
- Integrate “best” values into budget analysis, expansions, centralization, etc.
- Focus on organizational performance like you focus on operational performance.
- Measure/eradicate unreported losses within and between departments.
- Measure losses “vertically and horizontally” across the value stream.
- Optimize support departments that touch the value stream.
- Involve each department in optimization.
- Initiate conversation about “best possible” in every department.
- Quantify the unreported losses in every department.
- Understand that it’s easier to START (or STOP) new behaviors than it is to STOP old behaviors, which means it is easier to revert back to old behaviors than continue with new behaviors. If you ever wondered why your company seeks out a new initiative every two-three years, this is one of the reasons.
- Create a united team with one overarching goal… to achieve “best” every day in all activities. Achieving ‘best” does not minimize the importance of budget goals… it maximizes your ability to consistently achieve/exceed budget.
- If you decide to STOP SOME BEHAVIORS but not others, you will forfeit a portion of what was possible to achieve. There is no gray area here. You can’t have it both ways.
The GOOD NEWS: If your team embraces and adopts ALL of management’s optimization alignments and upgrades, you can absolutely maximize the financial results at your operations over the long term.
Thought for the year: Connecting intentional strategies to the sustainability of optimization gains is a winning combination. Your team can maximize the chance to sustain today’s gains (and gains yet to be discovered) with tactics designed for that purpose. Taking intentional actions to sustain gains is an overlooked strategy for “being the best” in your industry and maximizing shareholder value long-term.
Kay Sever is an Expert on Achieving “Best Possible” Results. Kay helps executive and management teams tap their hidden profit potential and reach their optimization goals. Kay has developed a LIVESTREAM management training/coaching system for Optimization Management called MiningOpportunity – NO TRAVEL REQUIRED. See MiningOpportunity.com for her contact information and training information.
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- About Us
Kay has worked side by side with corporate and production sites in a management/leadership/consulting role for 35+ years. She helps management teams improve performance, profit, culture and change, but does it in a way that connects people and the corporate culture to their hidden potential. Kay helps companies move “beyond improvement” to a state of “sustained optimization”. With her guidance and the MiningOpportunity system, management teams can measure the losses caused by weaknesses in their current culture, shift to a Loss Reduction Culture to reduce the losses, and “manage” the gains from the new culture as a second income stream.
