Origin Story
Paul Vragel, founder and President of 4aBetterBusiness, started at age 23 development of techniques for assisting management and employees with implementation of large-scale change.
I was trained in ship design and construction. A year into my first job after college, working in a shipyard, I was offered a job by an international company managing a ship construction project in Spain. I was excited about the job – international experience and a great learning opportunity working with people I trusted.
One of the inspections of the main engine bearings reveals that all of the bearing material that should have been in the bearing was lying on the crankshaft journal, in pieces. This is a very bad situation, and everybody is concerned.
I call and describe the situation to my boss in Chicago. He listens, then gives me two words of instruction. FIX IT.
I’m 23 years old, have no authority, I don’t know how bearings are made, no staff, no budget and I didn’t speak Spanish or Portuguese. Further we did not have a contract with the engine builder, who built the engine under license from a company in Denmark. Pretty challenging, but I was determined to validate my boss’s confidence in me.
I go to the engine builder in Spain and ask what their plan is to resolve the issue. They have no plan, and simply blame the Danish designer.
Sitting in my hotel room in Spain, reflecting on the situation and how I would proceed, I reluctantly conclude I have nothing. Except, I am there, and I’m convinced I can still get to a solution.
It gets worse. I get permission to go down into the shop to see how the bearings were made. Of course the employees only speak Spanish, and I only speak English. However, I discover that management had told the employees that I would tell them how to fix the problem. I didn’t even know what they did. This made the situation dangerous. They will do anything I say, but I fear– no, actually I’m sure, that trying to tell them what to do would not solve the problem.
Instead, I’m thinking “what if I turn my lack of knowledge to my advantage?” I communicate to the employees that I don’t know anything about making bearings – and that they were the experts in knowing what they did. I say to them lets work together to connect your knowledge of your process to what we see in the bearing.
Works beyond my wildest dreams. They enthusiastically participate and contribute and in a few weeks, we together fix the issues, and permanently raise their manufacturing capability. Even better, because of the way I invented or was forced to work with them, management and employees own the process and the results. They are the heros, and have both a sense of accomplishment and pride in their work.
I was astounded at the power of this approach of engaging employees to rapidly achieve buy-in and implementation of change.
Two core principles I developed from this experience, which I still use today:
- FIRST, 90% of the issues that waste time and money and produce poor results in a company are embedded in how a company’s processes and interactions actually work. Further, these usually work differently than documented or expected. That was certainly the case for making the bearings.
- SECOND, employees are the world’s experts at knowing what they actually do – their local processes.