Circle of Trust

Shared that at my plant we will be shutting down this summer for 2 months to perform major maintenance.  We only do this once every seven years.  Otherwise our operations are 365/7/24 in the unit I’m responsible for.  We will spend over 100 million dollars during this time.  The planning for this outage started over 2 years ago and we are approximately 5 months out from the start.

We began our training sessions for everyone that will be supporting the outage this past week.  For the people that have completed one of these, we all have the proper respect of what this takes.  We all we be working 13 days in a row, 1 day off, and 13 hour days.  Our headcount will peak at about 1500 people/day.  It’s a real big deal.  Approximately 50% of our Technicians who operate the process have never experienced one (hired within the last 6.5 years).  From the body language of some you could tell that they were questioning why we needed to train 5 months ahead of the event.

In general it is human nature to procrastinate and not have the appropriate sense of urgency for something in the future.  Depending on the difficulty though, preparing well in advance is absolutely critical for success.  I challenged the PAX to fight this resistance.  If they have something hard in their future, don’t wait to start preparing yourself.  With the proper preparation, even hard things then can be enjoyable in the moment and your likelihood for success increases exponentially.