Category Archives: People & Leadership

What’s Causing the Increase in Mental Health & Well-being Challenges for our Maintenance Workforce?

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Mental health continues to be a major issue in the workplaces of our MAINSTREAM community. This rated as the #1 challenge in the annual MAINSTREAM State of Asset Management Report. Many companies reported that the issue is greater than it’s ever been and getting worse. Poor mental health can have a significant impact on an individual’s health, attendance, performance, engagement, and safety. Several Causes The significant increase in mental health and wellbeing challenges over the last few years are a result of job insecurity, high job demand and pressure to perform, lack of empathy and understanding from leadership, and the imbalance between effort and reward. But by far the biggest reasons for this increase, according to the research, are the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and relentless organisational change. Ongoing effects of COVID-19 During the pandemic, whether it was mining, manufacturing, power generation or transport, almost all companies applied the strategy of having critical operational and maintenance people working on site in A and B teams, whilst non-critical operations, management and corporate functions completed much of their work from home. After two years, the us vs them divide that often existed between operational teams and corporate teams has become amplified. Due to people being sick from Covid or having to isolate because of close contact restrictions, the long and sustained hours and overtime required, has changed some organisation’s approach to reliability and equipment maintenance. Examples include choosing to run machines to failure because it was a better strategy. Another … Continue reading →

Developing Women Into Operational Leadership in Asset Management

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Globally the face of the workforce is changing. Now more that ever, there is an upswell of awareness and support around improving gender equality in every workplace. In the asset management space – an industry that has historically employed an almost entirely male workforce – the shift towards creating opportunities for women is challenging. But some companies are making great strides towards gender equality and are discovering that greater diversity of thought and style will surely drive Australian industry towards world’s best practice. Jess Torpey, Transformation Implementation Leader, Operations Services at Aurizon will be presenting at Mainstream Conference 2018. As a female business and journalism major employed to write speeches for our senior execs, Jess never imagined that she’d find herself in a front-line leadership role in a heavy haul rail workshop. One day, she was enjoying life in Brisbane’s CBD and the next she was the team leader of the Traction and Machine shop, one hour from Brisbane, leading a team of 12 tradies and apprentices. Opportunities to take a leadership role don’t come along very often so she was keen to make the most of it and as daunting as it appeared initially, it was the best thing that happened to her career. Jess is well positioned to share her insights into how companies can use their existing people and by simply placing the right people in the right jobs, with a little lateral thinking, can impact their businesses and the lives of their staff positively. We chatted … Continue reading →

Risk Management is Boring: Brain Hacks to Protect Your Business

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One challenge for many businesses is the wonderfully unsexy world of risk management. Due to the overwhelming optimism of entrepreneurs, stopping the bad things happening can often be overlooked. However, when you let people rip you off, exploit your weaknesses or you just leave a small door open to be manipulated, it can be fatal, says Daniel Murray CEO of Empathic Consulting. Daniel gave the keynote address to over 400 people at Mainstream Conference 2019 in Melbourne, demonstrating the incredible power that empathy has to build business relationships in our digitally focused but disconnected age. In this article he gives us a different way to look at risk management and shares some ways to encourage people to engage their “moral compass” in order to self-regulate risk. It Turns Out We’re All Cheaters There were a number of interesting experiments conducted by professor Dan Ariely from MIT regarding cheating. They asked people to complete a challenging test, then they give them the answers to self-mark their effort, walk to the front of the room and shred their paper before telling the administrator the number of correct answers they correctly answered. They then receive payment for each correct answer. So, do people cheat? What was interesting was not that some people cheated, but that all people consistently cheated. Ariely had tampered with the shredder so they could check and indeed, almost all people cheated, not by a lot, but on average they increased the number of correct answers from 3 to 4 … Continue reading →

AGL’s Energy Efficiency Journey: Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

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AGL were unknowingly losing $20m per year on fuel costs by operating with many feedwater heaters out of service. For years individuals had attempted to get them back into service because they felt it was the right thing to do. But consistency brewed complacency. AGL used human-centred design techniques to identify the root cause – we’re not talking technical root cause, rather behavioural root cause. Then they started on an ambitious journey to change the culture. Sarah Hannah, Head of Asset Systems (Acting) at AGL Energy will be outlining the astonishing results achieved in her session at Mainstream Conference 2019. Here she tells us why you should be focusing on culture transformation instead of initiatives, and outlines how they have engaged AGLs leadership to come on their transformation journey. Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast How many initiatives have we seen started in our companies which seemingly evaporate with no real value delivered. As asset management professionals, we are continually delivering initiatives to improve our asset management systems, our asset performance, our maintenance strategies… the list goes on. How much of the time that we spend delivering these initiatives do we focus on ‘how’ we are delivering rather than ‘what’ we are delivering? And do we know ‘why’ we are delivering it? “People are our most important asset and bringing them along on the asset management journey is not an option, it’s essential.” The phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ talks to the fact that if you aren’t identifying the … Continue reading →

Realising the Benefits of Asset Optimisation

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The field of asset management and asset investment has moved into the spotlight. No longer on the fringes of business awareness, it has become a top strategic objective for organisations of all sizes. A key driver of this change is the spreading belief that optimising asset investment plans will deliver tangible benefits to organisations as well as the adoption of ISO 55000 across the globe. However, these drivers also create the challenge of living up to expectations as new, risk-based asset management practices are implemented and then supporting technologies to achieve the standards. Companies can meet that challenge by forecasting two futures, one based on how the organisation used to make decisions, and one based on the principles of advanced asset management. Push Toward ISO 55000 Compliance ISO 55000 stakes out two primary areas of benefit, financial performance and stakeholder value. Some of these benefits have direct dollar impacts, while others such as reputation and social responsibility are harder to quantify, though they clearly link to asset management activities. Most of the benefits are reliant on the hypothesis that an organisation can make better decisions by using risk as the basis for optimisation. This includes balancing short- and long-term goals, managing risk, improving sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness. All these benefits require an investment in process, data and software. The list of benefits from ISO 55000 may be long and seem obvious to asset managers, but eventually the investment in processes, people and technology will have to be justified to executives … Continue reading →

7 Habits Of Highly Successful Losers

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At the last Olympic Games, just over 92% of the 10,960 athletes who took part did not win a medal. Except for the odd draw, every time two sporting teams meet, one will lose. Thousands of books and articles are written about how to win, yet seemingly none on losing. Strange when one considers how regularly losing happens. As a recent World T20 loser, Paddy Upton knows a thing or two about losing, and he’s not afraid to admit it. Paddy is a world-leading expert in human performance and an international cricket coach. His disruptive leadership approach propelled the Indian team to become World Test Cricket Champions in 2010 and to win the 2011 ICC World Cup. But it hasn’t been all gold medals and triumph along the way. His view is that losing, and more importantly losing successfully, is an important part of building a winning culture. Ahead of his session at Mainstream Conference 2019, he shares seven traits that highly successful losers have in common, and how you can use these as a springboard for success. Successful Losing As a recent World T20 loser, I thought I’d write about losing successfully. Not so that we can become good losers or better at losing, but so that we can optimise losing as a springboard out of the disappointment and back towards success. Let’s start by looking at what effective losing is NOT. It is not acting pissed off, walking around kicking things or throwing your bat when you come … Continue reading →

How to Prime Your Mind for Innovative Thinking

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Your brain is pretty smart. It’s amazing. If your brain were a person, it would be in both the super-hip and the super-smart crowd. Your brain is designed to make creativity happen, to think innovatively, and to come up with killer ideas. But before you can get to the killer idea part, you need to take a step back and prime your brain for innovative thinking. Think of it like being the pre-work you before you paint a wall (but much easier). You know that if you create the right conditions, the painted wall will look kick arse. Establishing a high-performance environment for your brain will keep the innovation stream clear and the ideas sparking happily. The good news is there are two easy things you can do right now to create the right environment to fuel ideas: 1. Open your eyes to really notice the things around you; and 2. Freshen up your space. 1. Open Your Eyes and Look Up (and Down, Around and Under) The No.1 thing you need to remember with developing great ideas and market leading thinking is: Great things in = great things out. Brilliant chefs, artists, designers, architects, and authors have all known this for years. Every time you open a book, read a report, or connect with new people and have a conversation, you take in new things. The same is true when you go somewhere different or experience something new. You allow in much more information. That helps you to create … Continue reading →

Why You Can’t Skip the Journey to Destination Digitisation

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Digitisation offers opportunities for improvements to industrial processes that were only dreamed of a decade ago. Digital twins, autonomous vehicles, drones and remote sensors are changing the way assets are maintained, helping to extract the value desired by stakeholders. Nowhere is this disruption more evident than in the mining industry, where vast quantities of earth and rock are moved each day and even a minor improvement in production methods can result in huge financial gains. But implementing these changes requires asset stakeholders to have a common understanding of exactly what that value is, and the metric by which it is to be measured. For over 20 years, WesTrac has provided mining equipment services to operations in Western Australia, NSW, the ACT and China. Jean Ferreira is General Manager for Technology with WesTrac in WA. His teams are responsible for the deployment, maintenance and support of the largest autonomous mining fleet in the world – roughly 130 autonomous Caterpillar trucks, all based in WA. Ferreira spoke at this year’s Mainstream Conference about the challenges faced by mining operations as they transition from spreadsheets to digital twins and autonomy. Because when looked at closely, even the simplest of links in the extraction chain renders surprising layers of complexity. Mining Value Chain The mining process is a chain of functions. After raw material is extracted from the earth, excavators and trucks begin loading and hauling operations. The ore is taken to a plant that crushes it into workable fragments. This is sent by rail to … Continue reading →

Devon Energy: A Data-Assisted Asset Integrity Approach

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In 2008, the combination of technical breakthroughs in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies started a wave of industry transformation and disruption that continues today. One US company at the forefront of this is Devon Energy, headquartered in Oklahoma City. A Fortune 500 oil and natural gas exploration and production company, Devon has some 3,400 employees and a capex of $US 2.4 billion. In Canada, Devon produces heavy oil through steam-assisted gravity drainage, producing some 35,000 barrels a day from each of three plants. Then there’s the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale oil deposits throughout the US. Working in some of the most adverse conditions in the world, Devon’s asset integrity approach is based on constantly monitoring data from its rigs. Data technology, along with team-building in its WellCon rig control centres, is not only improving drilling accuracy, but enabling the implementation of autonomous processes. Ben Williams, VP and CIO of Devon Energy, shared his insights into the company’s challenges and its asset integrity approach at this year’s Mainstream Conference. Asset Management in a Harsh Environment Williams says Devon has invested heavily in asset integrity because of the hazardous environments its rig locations present to workers and equipment. “Our asset integrity teams on the oil-producing plants have the unenviable problem of having to keep up with inspections on a highly complex asset,” Williams says. “They do inspections on pipelines and plants at times of the year when these are virtually inaccessible. The ground is like tundra, it … Continue reading →

Being ‘Bullet-Proof’ is a Flawed Definition of Resilience

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Recently we have been delivering Mental Well-Being and Resilience programs to leaders for one of our clients, and it has become apparent that there is a flawed definition of Resilience that results in not only less effective leadership but lowered resilience. The flawed definition of resilience that I am hearing is this: Resilience is being bullet-proof and being able to handle everything that is thrown my way (Flawed Definition of Resilience). I have two key issues with this definition.  The first and most significant, is that at some point in time there will be a bullet big enough to crash through the bullet-proof vest, at which point there is likely to be a massive break-down. My second issue with this definition, is that this approach sets up a barrier to experiencing emotion and ultimately disengages the individual from their people, their loved ones and their friends.  Being an emotionless being IS NOT being resilient – it is in fact IGNORING emotion. Being bullet-proof results in isolation from support and avoids taking responsibility for actions and decisions.  Ultimately, while it may ‘feel’ resilient, it is in fact not resilient or high performing. A Better Definition of Resilience Resilience is being able to quickly reform to the original state following a significant setback or challenge. Every one of us experience setbacks and times when we feel broken.  Resilience is not ignoring our experience of being broken, but rather being able to process and own the emotional experience and then proactively work toward … Continue reading →