“Why do you think I’m the best player in the world? Because I never get bored with the basics.” – Kobe Bryant – Legendary basketball player, 2-time Olympic gold medalist

Bryant said his now famous line when speaking to a sports reporter who had gotten bored while watching Bryant intensively practice basketball fundamentals. The reporter asked him why the best player in the world would want to work on such basic things. Full story here

When I was in engineering school, I had a part time job as a calculus tutor for first- and second-year engineering students. I thought of myself as a sophisticated and technically strong engineer. So I was in for a surprise when I got into working in an industrial context.

Out of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of root cause analyses I’ve done on production or maintenance issues, the root cause commonly comes down to sloppy fundamentals somewhere within the organization. Even problems that appear complex at first, are eventually found to have a very basic cause, even if it’s not obvious at first.

It’s important for us as engineers never to get bored with strengthening the basics of our organization. We should never feel like we’re too sophisticated for simple solutions.

Many of the most effective corrective actions I have ever taken have been in strengthening the basics of my team: Prefer visuals to writing for communication. Use the right tool for the right job. Use the right parts for the right job. Never let a temporary fix become permanent. Keep your plant’s documents organized so they’re available when you need them. Write work orders clearly. Use a picture or a sketch when it’s hard to explain in words. Keep work areas clean. A place for everything, and everything in its place. First-in/first-out for parts usage.

So how can we strengthen fundamentals? In my context it meant lots of things, but one of the most important was to partner with our blue-collar workers to make their lives easier. When my technicians brought me a problem, I would make it my business to solve it permanently, or to help them solve it themselves.

The example that comes to mind was an initiative to improve our preventive maintenance system. When we announced what we wanted to do, our technicians were clearly hesitant. They objected that the system is a mess and constantly assigns them non-sensical work orders. “Ok, when you get one of those, bring it to me, and we’ll fix it permanently,” I told them. And my team delivered on that. Every day I would get another one, or sometimes several, and the two of us (the technician who brought it and I) would go into the system and fix it one at a time. That continued about 6 months. But at the end of 6 months, we had clear and understandable work orders and, equally important, we had rebuilt the trust our team had in the system.

What about you? What does strengthening the fundamentals look like in your organization?