Wednesday in the Woods 019 - Keep 'em Sharp
Channel: Licensio, LLC
Date: 2022-02-02

🪓💯 

The not-so-secret secret behind Wednesday in the Woods is that it's not really scripted. I normally just take a chore like picking up trash from our marsh (Happy Wetlands Day!) and bring a camera. Armed with vague metaphors and auxiliary puns, I start talking try to keep it together - Bill Hader or Jimmy Fallon-style - for one whole take.  That's it.

Sometimes, I modify the task to make framing the shot easier.  On that note - please, do not free-hand your KA-BAR with an 8000-grit stone.  

Anyway, the real question is why I'm grinding my axe and knife this week. And the real answer is simple - to stay sharp. Just like you should try to keep your people, processes, and technology sharp.

We think about proactive maintenance all the time. But for some reason, we only seem to apply it in the context of capital goods like cars or factories. In the general sense, though, we should be proactively maintaining and improving all of our organization's assets - that means the big three: People, Process, and Technology.  

When we don't keep all three of these things sharp, we pay for it.  

Sometimes, we pay a little bit as measured by efficiency or margin. Trees that used to take 10 strokes might take 12 or 15. If you're at least measuring, you can decide when the margin impact outweighs the cost of sharpening.

Sometimes, we pay for it with quality and defect rates. When cleaning the corners of your face cut out, you might pop the wrong angle. Then, you're redoing the whole face cut - "rework" that wastes time and energy. Even worse, if you don't notice and correct the defect, the tree might fall the wrong way...

And sometimes, just like many microscopic nicks in a blade, we can't even see when our people, process, and technology need help. The first evidence might be customer turnover or margin slippage. And when you look for that smoking gun in the root cause or after action, you might not see one big problem. In our experience, the problem normally comes back to letting your people, process, and technology get dull...

So what can you do? Just like any risk or quality program, stay on top of monitoring and proactive maintenance. Give your team purpose and incentive to commit time to honing their own skills and sharpening the technology and processes that fill the organization's "toolshed." Don't wait for things to go wrong - but when they do go wrong, make sure to identify issues, correct them, and think about how to proactively prevent them in the future. When you can't put your finger on it, don't be afraid to ask if you're even using the right tools in the first place.

Me, today? When I'm done pushing 9" of snow with the tractor, I'll be back in the barn, cleaning and repainting the loader bucket.  

Stay warm - and stay sharp!