Why straight line targets demotivate your team and undermine your plans. The monthly plan says we have to get 140,000 tonnes from this machine this week, so what should the target be for each shift? Easy right, there are 14 shifts in a week (7 days, 2 shifts per day), so we need to get 10,000 per shift. No need to over think it. That’s what goes in the daily/shiftly plans. Right?! Or better, we know that the machine should do 1200 per hour, we expect 90% availability and 80% utilization so 1200x.9x.8x12hours = 10,368T so that’s the target, seems fair? Then just stick it in the shift plan for the rest of the week and let’s get back to planning. => BUT Sadly, the supervisor (your customer) looks at these targets during the start of shift process, shakes his or her head and either attempts to do the impossible (damaging gear and taking risks) or has a cruisy shift and easily meets a low ball target. Hold on, what do you mean, these targets were developed with good solid logic, why doesn’t this work. The Cyclist Imagine you’re going out for a mountain bike ride, the ride is 30 km long and you know you can average about 10km per hour, so you tell your wife you’ll be back in 3 hours. When you get to the track you remember that you need to pump up your tyres and oil your chain, that takes 10 minutes. You start the ride with a solid uphill grind for 10km, that was tough, you worked hard, really hard, but you look at your watch, it took you 2hrs to get to the top, you only managed 5km per hour, you stop for a drink and to recover for 10 minutes. The next stretch is 10km along the ridge, you get going at 10km per hour and an hour later you go straight into the downhill averaging 20km per hour for 30 min to get to back to the car. Phew, that was fun! BUT, you look at your watch and it’s taken you 3hrs 50min and you still haven’t got the bike in the car. 10 minutes later, you’re on the way home, a bit stressed out. You’re an hour late. What happened here? What can we learn about short term planning from this and what are we going to tell the boss? If you look at most operational tasks they are similar to this mountain bike ride, there are parts which are hard and slow and there are parts which are easier and faster, when you develop a “plan” you tend to use averages because they work reasonably well in the time horizon that you care about. But when you break this into smaller bits e.g. shifts, these averages can be very misleading and plain wrong. The cultural problem with this kind of error is that it encourages the wrong kind of leadership behaviours. If you were the manager of this cyclist, you might have expected him to be at the top of the hill at the end of the first hour, you would have looked for the causes of the variance and might have decided that the rider was no good because he couldn’t hit the target. By the end of the second hour you could be convinced that he was the wrong guy for the job. You might give him a spray and tell him he’s no good, the rider is not going to like this as he’s worked really hard and despite his hard work he has got in to trouble, he may not try so hard the next time. The next 10 km the manager is grumbling and trying to make the rider go faster and then on the downhill he’s kind of happy again because the rider has really sped up, but he’d really like him to go faster to catch up the lost time, so the rider might be pushed into taking some unnecessary risks. At the end the boss pats the rider on the back and says well done for catching up so much time but bemoans the fact that we’re going to be an hour late and it’s obviously because we lost so much time on the up hill. How do you think the rider feels about this experience? What kind of learning is going to happen here? Do you think we’re going to find the real causes of variance? A better plan for the mountain bike ride would have broken it down into the obvious phases and asked the rider what he thought he could do in these phases, ideally using some past performance data to help with this. This would have given us three things, Reasonable targets for each phase A better estimate of the overall time to complete the task. Commitment by the rider to meet these reasonable targets This would have set the rider and the leader up for success and given them an opportunity to learn from their performance at each phase when compared to the reasonable and committed plan. They could then come up with some ideas for how to make the whole ride go faster that they can try out next time they get on the bike! This seems like a much better place for people to work. How do you think you could apply this approach on your operation? A few actions you can try on your site are. Don’t just hand the weekly plan to supervisors and expect them to follow it. Ensure you actually have a documented day/shift plan that has been developed with targets that are reasonable for the conditions that each machine is in. See “Shift Plan”. Use the “shift handover” and “preshift briefing” processes to get supervisors to compare the plan with the reality in the field and formally commit to the targets they believe are reasonable for their shift. Do “short interval control” to check in on progress and help the crew solve any problems. Don’t be afraid to give planners feedback when their plans are unreasonable, they need to learn to make better plans. https://opskit.app/the-cyclist-with-an-impossible-plan/