Week 6: The Shopfloor Knows More Than the Boardroom. Always.
The Shopfloor Knows More Than the Boardroom. Always.
I want to tell you about a single observation that saved $50 million.
It was during a Gemba walk at a Shell facility. Not a planned management tour. Not a scheduled audit. Just me and two colleagues walking the production area, talking to operators, watching the process.
We stopped at a section where a critical piece of equipment was running. I was asking the operator standard questions -- throughput, cycle times, recent issues. Standard stuff. Then the operator said something that changed the trajectory of an entire capital investment programme.
"You know that new unit they are planning to install? It will not work with the current tie-in configuration. The flowline angles are wrong. We told engineering six months ago but nobody listened."
I stopped walking. "What do you mean?"
He explained. In detail. With the kind of process knowledge that only comes from spending years physically operating that equipment, day and night, through every weather condition and every operational scenario that theory cannot predict.
He was right.
The engineering team had designed the new unit based on P&IDs and 3D models. They had done their calculations. Their design was technically correct -- on paper. But it did not account for the physical reality of how materials actually flowed through the existing infrastructure under real operating conditions. The operator knew this because he lived it every shift.
That conversation triggered a review. The review confirmed the operator's concern. The design was modified before construction began. The cost of that modification was minimal. The cost of discovering it during commissioning -- which is when it would have been discovered without the operator's input -- would have been catastrophic. Months of delay. Tens of millions in rework and lost production.
One operator. One observation. One conversation that almost did not happen because the original plan was for leadership to do the Gemba walk without stopping to talk to people.
The 12,000 FTE Lesson
At Shell, I was involved in deploying CI across a programme that ultimately covered 12,000 full-time employees across multiple regions. Malaysia. Aberdeen. UK operations. Different cultures, different operating environments, different challenges.
But one pattern was consistent everywhere.
The best improvement ideas came from the people doing the work.
Not from the boardroom. Not from the strategy team. Not from external consultants. Not from the CI department. From operators, technicians, team leaders, and frontline supervisors who understood their process at a level that no amount of data analysis can replicate.
I will give you the numbers because I believe in specifics, not generalities.
In one region, we tracked the source of all validated improvement ideas over a 12-month period. Sixty-eight percent came directly from frontline employees. Another nineteen percent came from frontline supervisors synthesising observations from their teams. Only thirteen percent came from management or the CI team.
Thirteen percent from the people who attend the strategy meetings. Sixty-eight percent from the people who do the actual work.
And yet, in most organisations I have worked with -- and I have worked with 40+ of them -- the improvement strategy is set in the boardroom. The priorities are determined by people who have not physically seen the process they are trying to improve. The targets are established based on financial modelling, not process understanding.
This is backwards. It has always been backwards. And it continues to be backwards in the majority of organisations I encounter.
Strategy Without Shopfloor Input Is Fiction
I am going to say something that will make some senior leaders uncomfortable.
If you set your operational improvement strategy without direct input from the people who operate the process, your strategy is fiction. It is a well-formatted, beautifully presented work of imagination.
I have sat in boardrooms where the leadership team debated improvement priorities for hours. Charts were presented. Business cases were argued. Votes were taken. Strategic improvement themes were selected.
Then I went to the shopfloor and asked the team leaders what their biggest problems were. The answers had almost no overlap with what the boardroom had decided.
The boardroom had selected "improve planning accuracy" as a priority. The shopfloor's biggest problem was that the planning system did not reflect reality because nobody updated it. The root cause was not planning methodology. It was that the interface was so cumbersome that operators had stopped using it and were running the process from handwritten notes.
The boardroom had selected "reduce quality defects" as a priority. The shopfloor's biggest problem was that the inspection equipment had not been calibrated in four months because the calibration team had been reassigned to another project. There was nothing wrong with the quality process. The measurement system was broken.
The boardroom had selected "improve asset utilisation" as a priority. The shopfloor's biggest problem was that they could not get spare parts delivered in under three weeks because the procurement system required five levels of approval for any purchase over $500. The asset was available. The parts were not.
In every case, the shopfloor had the answer. The boardroom had the wrong question.
Why Leaders Stop Going
I understand why senior leaders stop going to the Gemba. I genuinely do.
Their calendars are full. Every hour is scheduled. The demands on their time are real and relentless. And a Gemba walk does not have a clear deliverable or a tidy ROI calculation. It is not a meeting with an agenda and action items. It is walking around and talking to people. It can feel unproductive.
But here is what I learned at Shell, at Johnson Controls, at KCA Deutag, and at every organisation where CI actually worked: the leaders who go to the Gemba regularly make better decisions than the leaders who do not. Not slightly better. Fundamentally better.
Because they have context. They understand what "improve throughput" actually means for the people who have to do it. They know which systems work and which ones the team has already worked around. They hear the problems before they become crises.
And perhaps most importantly, their physical presence signals something that no email, no townhall presentation, and no corporate video can communicate: I care about the work you do enough to come and see it.
That signal is worth more than any motivation programme, any recognition scheme, any employee engagement initiative. A leader who regularly shows up, listens, and acts on what they hear creates more engagement in one shopfloor conversation than an entire HR department can create in a year.
The Gemba Cannot Be Delegated
One more thing. And this is the point where some leaders will push back hardest.
The Gemba walk cannot be delegated.
You cannot send your CI manager. You cannot send a junior engineer. You cannot read a report about what the shopfloor thinks. You have to go yourself.
Because the point of the Gemba walk is not information gathering. It is relationship building. It is showing the frontline that leadership is connected to the work. It is hearing things that people will only say in person, not in a survey.
At Shell Malaysia, the most effective leaders I worked with had a non-negotiable Gemba routine. Same days, same areas, same commitment. The operators knew they would come. And because they knew, they prepared. Not in a performative way. They had observations ready. They had data to share. They had ideas they had been thinking about.
Those conversations were the richest source of improvement intelligence I have ever encountered. Richer than any data warehouse. Richer than any AI analysis. Richer than any consulting engagement.
Because the people doing the work understand the work better than anyone else. Always. Without exception.
The question is whether your organisation is structured to hear them.
When was the last time you -- personally, not through a report or a dashboard -- heard directly from the person closest to the process? If it was more than a week ago, what does that tell you about your improvement strategy?
Build the discipline of performance management from the process up. The Stormholt Performance and Process Management Mastery programme connects boardroom strategy to shopfloor reality.
https://stormholt.org/products/performance-and-process-management-mastery