While it was truly wonderful to see the celebration of normally unheralded skills and talents at The Sochi Winter Games, I could not help but feel that many of the real heroes and skills that advance the global economic prosperity were being overshadowed. So what do we do to fix the fixers and build more disaster preventers? Actually there were several lessons exhibited that the Reliability and Maintenance Industry needs to adopt so that perhaps we can have more golden moments in our infrastructure and technical operations.

The tiny country, the Netherlands, won over much larger countries with much deeper resources. To understand why this occurred, I found an article on LinkedIn by Gijs van Wulfen titled “Why the Dutch Dominate the Olympics in Sochi”. Below are his elements that create the culture of success but that I have modified to incorporate maintenance success.

1. FOCUS. Why don’t more countries focus on building more maintenance and reliability talent? What we glorify is what we get. Why don’t we have more media outlets showcase more technical skill development? Wim Vancauwenberghe’s team at the Belgium Maintenance Association (BEMAS) does an outstanding job of celebrating top maintenance leaders. His competitions receive major recognition in government and industry. I venture to say that the maintenance manager that only gets honorable mention in Belgium is superior compared to maintenance leaders of much larger countries.
2. INVEST. What if more countries rewarded more top talent with scholarships and additional development? Many of the technical schools went out of fashion. Now countries are scrambling to build large talent pools to attract more businesses to move into their area or keep existing companies from leaving. The Worlds Skills competitions are gaining in notoriety, but are a far cry from where they need to be.
3. INNOVATE. The Maker Movement is quickly taking off around the world. Even in New Zealand groups are converting shipping containers to prefabbed maker spaces complete with tools and 3d printers, along with electrical outlets. I am working to build a Makerspace, and it is amazing to watch the cross generational exchange of ideas and new innovations emerge. In North Carolina, www.greensborohackerspace. org added these elements to help boost advancement of our profession.
4. HERITAGE. It was interesting to see during the Olympics how many medal winners were descendants of past Olympians. Sadly, many of the existing leaders of the Maintenance and Reliability industry are not encouraging their own descendants to pursue a technical or engineering career pathway. I love meeting sons and daughters of Reliability Pros as many have demonstrated a level of competence beyond their years; like Christer Idhammar who passed the torch onto his son, Tor Idhammar, who now leads the maintenance consulting firm, IDCON.
5. PASSING ON THE TORCH. As the boomer generation exits the workforce, developing strategies is needed to capture existing knowledge and for passing it on. Martin Tauber just won the best presenter award at the International Maintenance Conference during his session “How to Write a Procedure” at which he shared a serious break-through in training by creating custom videos of the best practices and sharing them on a 24 hour flat screen monitor in the company break room. We all need to work extra hard to avoid preventable catastrophes that populate our headlines of bridge collapsing, nuclear fallout, pipes bursting, pollution emissions, product defects, lost profits, and worse…loss of lives.

So I hope that you help us go for the gold and help fix it forward!