Ten90 Solutions LLC

I love human beings, I really do, even when wondering how we ever made it this far down the evolutionary road.  I mean, come on...we're the crown of creation? 

I love human beings even when I think how much happier I'd have been, if I had been born a dolphin rather than a human being.  How much happer, I mean, if I didn't hate being in water, which I do. Salt water, fresh water, lakes, oceans, rivers, ponds, doesn't matter, don't put me in it.  Sure put a crimp in my surfing career. 

But here's the thing about human beings.  We adore, positively adore, finding out the reasons for things being the way they are.  We hate, positively hate, taking responsibility for things being the way they are.  More often than just once in awhile, that love and that hate work at cross-purposes,  and we get....ideology.  Ideology is something that pretends to explain the reasons behind events, relations etc. while absolving everyone, except non-believers in the ideology, from any responsibility.  Ideology provides answers regardless of the question, and the answers are correct no matter what the facts, trends, evidence, may be.  Ideology is the anti-history.  It works everywhere, everytime, and therefore is meaningless. 

We've had an ideology that told us that railroads were archaic in organization, obsolete in the enforcement of discipline, repressive in culture.  The ideology held that failures in service and safety, in performance were the products of this culture; that the culture was the obstacle to progress. 

Incidents were the confirmation of ideology, were the servants of a theory, regardless of the trends, the history. 

Turned out, however, that the actual history refuted the ideology.  Improvements in safety, in performance, over the last 40 or so years have been steady, consistent, and cumulative to the point where steady and consistent have become outstanding. 

Then we got another ideology.  This ideology explained that the safety failures of the railroads were due to the overemphasis placed on on-time performance.   In this ideological iteration, the drive for on-time performance produced a sort of outdoors tunnel vision where only one single goal could be seen.  The hundreds of efforts necessary to satisfying the thousands of tasks essential to that goal were ignored, disregarded, and discarded. 

It's a convenient explanation, because it effectively excuses everyone from responsibility since on-time performance is the reason for having a railroad in the first place.  And......

And the explanation presents a convenient solution-- devalue on-time performance and the railroad will become that much safer.   

Of course, this only recreates the conditions of irresponsibility that actually gets the railroad in trouble in the first place.  Manage a railroad?  Actually make decisions on what must be done, and how to get it done?  Nope. Avoid the responsibility then by chanting the mantra of on-time performance.  Avoid the responsibility now by chanting the mantra of safety. 

Create and execute a plan, a schedule of maintenance to the physical plant of the railroad that maximizes value to cost ratios?  Nope, avoid that responsibility then by chanting the mantra of on-time performance.  Avoid that responsibility now by chanting the mantra of safety.   

No railroad has ever been made more safe by degrading its operating performance, its service delivery.   Any railroad that is less than precise in stating and meeting its service goals, will necesssarily be less than precise in its application and enhancement of safe operating procedures.  

"We'll tolerate no compromise of safety to benefit on-time performance," say the ideologists. 

Let's be serious, everything we do is a and is to compromise safety with performance so we can actually deliver the service while minimizing the risk of  hurting anyone. 

Putting a train in motion is a compromise between safety and performance. Colleagues in the UK, exercising a bit of the old British gift for understatement and irony that forms sarcasm say, "All signals are red, all trains are stopped.  The railroad is perfectly safe." 

Of course, it's not exactly a railroad anymore, is it? 

The point of all of this is...is to point out that a railroad, railroading, requires effective management, effective supervision.  Effective supervision is one that develops and executes a service plan that cannot be achieved separate from the safety requirements that are essential to infinite successful repetitions of the plan itself.   

Anyone who does not have that time frame in mind is in the wrong business.   

David Schanoes

January 23, 2019