Tag: leadership

• Total freedom or total lockdown for AI tools? Wrong question.

  I was at a event last nite, surrounded by serious technology leaders. Someone mentioned a peer company that turned on Copilot but “didn’t even configure it” – said with the kind of horror usually reserved for production outages.

  It sparked a heated debate. I found myself firmly on the side of leaving things largely unlocked, because almost every control we add has unintended consequences that cripple our field workers from doing their jobs better.

  But reflecting on that conversation, I realized we don’t talk about this enough: How much should you actually configure your tech?

  Everyone’s picking sides on the wrong battle – total freedom versus total control. Both extremes will kill your project.

  Zero configuration sounds great. Let the frontline innovate, let AI do its thing, no guardrails. But you’ll spend a decade cleaning up the mess, chasing standards, trying to scale what can’t be scaled. It will take you a decade to get to where you want to go.

  100% lockdown is worse. You think you know how workers will use the tool. You’re wrong. I’ve watched companies spend millions on systems so locked down, so “configured for safety,” that nobody uses them. The tech just sits there, another expensive ghost in the plant.

  The answer isn’t picking a side. It’s finding the balance and never stopping there.

  The best deployment I ever ran had some guardrails, some general configuration but was otherwise wide open for field workers to innovate. The result? They didn’t just use the tool. They made it the most important thing in their kit. Then they turned around and taught my team uses we never imagined. Huge innovation. Adoption rates we’d never seen before. Everyone won.

  That only happened because we configured enough to keep pointed in the right direction, but left enough freedom for people to make the tool theirs. Then we iterated constantly. This applies to AI engines, hardware, applications -everything.

  But here’s the part that matters most: spend time with your people. Watch how they actually work. Listen to what they actually need. The right balance isn’t in a manual or a best practice guide. It’s in the field, with the workers using your tools every day.

  December 16, 2025

  artificial intelligence, leadership

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• If You’re Not Upsetting People, You’re Not Making Change

  I talk to peers across industries and hear the same story: IT blocking progress, a boss protecting legacy systems they built their career on, resistance at every turn.

  Most people in industrial change roles burn out fast. The highs are really high when leadership finally sees what you’ve done for the business. But the lows cut deep – when people fight to protect the status quo, when you’re made to feel like the problem.

  If you feel bullied or alone right now, you’re not alone. That feeling means you’re moving in the right direction.

  Keep one thing true: design your programs and tools with the frontline workforce, not around them.

  Don’t let the CIO or the legacy defenders wear you down. Stay positive. Stay focused on why you started this – to help the workers who keep everything running. That’s the goal. That’s what matters. The resistance is just noise.

  December 3, 2025

  Change, leadership, revolution

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• Why Your Digital Transformation Looks Like a Junk Drawer

  I find senior leaders have no idea where to start with digital transformation. So what happens?

  Someone in safety says incident reporting is a nightmare. Someone in operations wants digital checklists. Maintenance has been asking for a mobile work order system for three years. Quality needs better traceability.

  All reasonable problems. All worth solving.

  So you solve them. One at a time. Different teams, different vendors, different timelines. Two years later, you’ve got four systems that don’t talk to each other and nobody connecting the dots.

  The Kingdom Problem

  This is how most operations approach digitalization. Not as a strategy, but as a collection of pain points that get funded when the pain gets loud enough. Or by a leader that has the wrong motivations and wants to build their own kingdom and grab headlines.

  Your safety VP gets budget for an incident reporting app. Great. Your operations Director gets digital checklists. Also great. Your maintenance supervisor finally gets that mobile CMMS module. Fantastic.

  Except now front line workers are using three different tools during their shift. And none of the data between the tools connect – so those promises made to improve the front-line experience, and deliver on efficiencies, never come to fruition.

  The Real Cost Isn’t the Software

  The promise of digitalization is that it collapses admin work. You report something once, it flows through. You complete a checklist, the data automatically populates your compliance reports. An operator flags an issue, it creates a work order, links to the equipment history, and notifies the right people.

  But that only works if someone is thinking about the whole picture.

  Instead, we’re asking people to be the integration layer. Your supervisor is manually pulling data from four systems to create one report. Your operators are entering the same information multiple times. Your maintenance planners are copying and pasting between systems.

  We’ve digitized the work without reducing the work. Sometimes we’ve made it worse.

  What’s Missing

  Someone needs to own the connected worker strategy. Not just the technology strategy – the actual experience of how your workforce interacts with all these systems.

  When you’re evaluating that next digital initiative, someone should be asking: How does this fit with what we already have? Where’s the overlap? Are we asking people to enter the same data twice? What process is this tool supporting? What’s the motivation behind this initiative? Because if it’s kingdom building… then that ain’t it.

  This isn’t about buying one vendor’s ecosystem for everything. It’s about having an actual strategy for how these pieces connect. What’s the common data model? How do systems talk to each other?

  Start with the Workflow, Not the Tools

  This is the only effective way that’s worked in my experience: Map out an actual workflow your people do today. Pick something that crosses departments—say, responding to an equipment issue.

  Watch how it actually happens. Who enters what, where? How many times does the same information get recorded? Where do handoffs break down? What gets lost in translation?

  Then ask: If we were designing this workflow from scratch with digital tools, what would it look like? Not “what tools do we buy,” but “what does the person doing the work need at each step?”

  Spending time doing up-front strategy by mapping process saves a ton of time and money in the long run. And instead of a bunch of projects done in silos, you have a strategy that’s organized and prioritized.

  Stop Adding to the Junk Drawer and Own the Strategy (For The Right Reasons)

  Digital transformation without strategy is just expensive chaos. You end up with a drawer full of tools that don’t fit together, and a workforce that’s more frustrated than before.

  Before you fund the next digital initiative, ask yourself: Who’s making sure this connects to everything else? Who’s thinking about the operator logging into their fourth system of the day? Who’s responsible for the actual experience of being a connected worker at your site?

  If the answer is nobody, you’re just building another pet project. And your junk drawer is getting full.

  November 5, 2025

  leadership, lean-six-sigma, lean-six-sigma, strategy, technology

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• Dave and his pipefitters

  I think about Dave and his crew more than I probably should.

  We were doing a tie-in to connect seventy-year-old piping to brand new systems. Below grade work. Trench work. The kind where you can’t see what’s happening unless you’re standing right there, looking down into the hole. Dave’s pipefitters were good at their job, but they didn’t know the hazards of what they were daylighting.

  My operators didn’t care much about this kind of work because it wasn’t technically their area – “it’s project work,” so it wasn’t their problem. That attitude – the lack of ownership, was one of those things I kept trying to fix but never quite could. So I became the project babysitter on behalf of operations. I’d be there, watching, making sure the work was getting done safely, making sure everyone knew what was happening in that trench.

  Then I took a day off.

  That morning, the gas detection went off while Dave’s guys were in the confined space. H2S & LEL. An explosive environment, and they were working with open flame. Everyone got out. We were lucky. Nobody got hurt.

  Relying on luck is a loser strategy.

  If there had been more visibility to the work – if the operators had real-time permits that everyone could see instead of a piece of paper in some trainee’s hand and another in the maintenance foreman’s pocket – I can’t help but think this could have been avoided. A digital permit. Something that puts the information where everyone needs it, when they need it.

  This is why I care so much about enabling our field with technology. It’s not about making things flashy or modern for fun. It’s about making life easier and better on the front line. It’s about making sure everyone goes home to their families.

  I still think about Dave and his pipefitters. I’m grateful I get to think about them, and not remember them.

  October 26, 2025

  connected-worker, digital, industrial, leadership, safety

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• You Forgot What It’s Like to Actually Do the Work (If You Ever Even Did It)

  I’ve watched more “digital transformation initiatives” crash and burn than I care to count. You know what the common thread is? Empathy. Nobody building these systems has changed a bearing at 2 AM in six months. Nobody’s climbed a scaffold with a tablet. Nobody’s tried to log into three different systems while wearing gloves in February.

  We’ve turned digitalization into a compliance exercise. Check the box, get the budget approved, roll it out, call it a win. Then we act surprised when adoption is 12% and the front line is still using paper.

  The Empathy Gap

  Here’s what I mean by empathy – and I’m not talking about cotton candy culture crap. I’m talking about tactical, practical empathy. The kind that actually helps you build something people will use.

  Try this: Go do home renovations without your phone for a day.

  You’ll immediately notice what’s missing. You can’t quickly measure that weird corner to see if you need to make another trip to the hardware store. You can’t pull up that YouTube video showing you the specific way to cut crown molding for an inside corner. You can’t text your partner to say you’ll be late because the drywall delivery got delayed.

  That feeling? That’s your operators. Every single day.

  We’re Asking People to Work with One Hand Tied Behind Their Back

  The irony kills me. We go home and we’ve got smart thermostats, we’re ordering groceries from our couch, we’re watching YouTube tutorials to fix our dishwashers. Then we come to work and ask people to navigate systems that would’ve felt dated in 2010.

  Your maintenance tech can probably rebuild an engine in their sleep, but you’re asking them to log in through three different portals just to report that a pump is making a weird noise. Your operators are running complex processes worth millions of dollars, but they’re writing notes on paper because the digital work order system takes seventeen clicks to do what should take two.

  What Real Empathy Looks Like

  Real empathy isn’t a focus group where you ask people what they want and then ignore it because it doesn’t fit your roadmap. It’s simpler than that:

  Spend a shift doing the actual work with the tools you’re building. Not watching. Doing.

  Try to complete a work order on that new mobile app while you’re wearing the same PPE your team wears. See how many taps it takes. See if you can read that screen in direct sunlight. Notice whether you can actually do it with gloves on, or if you have to take them off every single time.

  Walk the route your operators walk. Are you asking them to go back to the control room to log something that happened in the field? Why? You wouldn’t accept that in your own life.

  Try to find a procedure in your document management system. Time yourself. Ask yourself if you’d bother, or if you’d just ask the guy who’s been here for 20 years instead.

  Think about the last time you forgot your phone at home. Remember that moment of panic? That reach for your pocket and the sinking feeling when it wasn’t there? That’s the gap between what your workers need and what you’re giving them.

  Building Empathy Takes Practice

  This isn’t a one-time thing. You can’t shadow someone for an afternoon and check the empathy box.

  The next time you’re at home and you pull out your phone to look something up, pause. Think about what you just avoided – a trip to the library? Calling someone? Guessing? Now think about your operators not having that option.

  When you’re measuring something and you use your phone’s measuring app, think about your millwright who has to walk back to get a tape measure.

  When you quickly text someone an update, think about your operator filling out a paper log that someone will manually enter later.

  These moments build real empathy. The kind that makes you ask different questions and push back when someone suggests a solution that looks good on paper but will be terrible in practice.

  The Bottom Line

  Your program isn’t failing because people are resistant to change. It’s failing because it was designed for steering committee meetings, not for troubleshooting a compressor trip at 11 PM.

  Make it a habit to notice the gaps between what you expect in your own life and what you’re asking of your workforce. Go spend time on the floor with your own tools. Pay attention to the friction. Notice when you reach for your phone and what that solves. Then ask if your workers have that same capability.

  If you’re not willing to do that, don’t be surprised when everyone keeps using the old ways. At least those let them get work done.

  October 10, 2025

  design, empathy, leadership, relationships, ux

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