Entries by Nathan Ives

Human Performance Management Best Practice 11 – Color Coding

Today’s industrial complexes and office spaces employ vast numbers of redundant systems so to ensure continued operations in the event of equipment failure. Consequently, those who operate and maintain these systems are constantly challenged to perform their work on the appropriate equipment train. In order to avoid wrong-train accidents, operators and maintainers should employ error reduction tools that help them identify the appropriate system train on which to conduct their work.

Documented and Retained Causal and Action Intelligence

Performance measures reflect the organization’s successes and shortfalls over extended periods of time. Well-maintained metrics include a periodic performance analysis summary capturing underlying drivers and associated follow-on actions. These summaries, however, are typically overwritten with the next analysis rather than being preserved; robbing leaders of critical lessons learned information that could support future performance improvements and more rapid decision-making.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, part 2 of 6

Leadership Role #1: Reading the World and Creating a Vision No business is an island. Each organization exists within a rich and ever-evolving set of social, economic, political, cultural, and institutional environments. To a large degree, an organization’s success depends on how well it positions itself in the world. Therefore, one of the most important […]

Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 5 – Identifying Mostly Strengths

All organizations, including the best of the best, have room for improvement and those not improving inevitably find themselves falling behind competitors. Self-critical evaluations are therefore critical to achieving continuous performance improvement and remaining competitive. Evaluations identifying mostly strengths offer little opportunity for organizational growth.

Automated Notification of Responsible Individuals

Organizational performance measures drive behaviors but, in order to be effective, the information they provide must be known and acted upon in a timely manner. Today’s business leaders can easily be overwhelmed with information; obscuring critical performance metric action prompts. Furthermore, the fixed publication frequency of performance monitoring reports may preclude leaders from receiving action-prompting information in a timely manner. Automating performance notifications, triggered at the time of occurrence, can help alleviate these issues.