"Keep the trains running" leads to management denial?

My son and I played with with his train set a couple of days ago. We had made "an accident track" - a perilous system of curves and hills where trains regularly fall off.

Now if he only had one or two trains then they would have enough space between them, and no accidents would occur. But he put on lots of trains, and they travelled at different speeds because of variations in battery power, and so we saw accidents. Lots of accidents.

And I found myself saying "Keep the trains running". A phrase that I have heard from numerous CEOs in companies that I have worked at. A phrase which I had always thought of as management padding when a more honest "we have made changes, you will not find them easy, you have not felt the full impact of all these changes yet, so we expect you to keep doing your job despite the change". Or a more cynical "look, just make the changes work and quit moaning, cover up our mistakes".



But however I heard it, it should have meant "we have made changes, we know what we want to achieve, we will keep changing until we get there, you will probably have to change the way you work."

And yet what I saw played before me as my son played with his toys mirrored what I saw when the CEOs made these statements.

• the track had inherent limits on how many trains and how far apart they should run


• the track could not accommodate trains pushing one another

We had built a system with inherent flaws.

I did not advocate:

• "change the track to allow all the trains to travel safely".


• "change the speed at which the trains run so they all run at the same speed and so don't push each other off"


• "put on fewer trains until we have worked out how to fix the system"

Instead I said "keep the trains running" which had the effect (the desired effect for my son) of running about after trains as they fell off, or pushed each other off the track, and us putting them back on. Only to hear another accident behind us which we rushed to fix as another accident happened off to our right.

For us, this chaos represented the game. For us, this un-productivity and thrashing, when the 'system' had inherent flaws, made the game.

In the real world - and your experience may differ - I have seen this 'unproductive thrashing' where the workforce work harder to achieve the same ends, in spite of an obviously broken 'system' leading to management believing that the 'changes' work. That the "trains keep running, so every is OK".

Lessons:

1. "Keep the trains running" should only ever have a temporary life span.


2. We should know what the end point for the 'system' we want looks like.


3. We should know how long we need to thrash to "keep the trains running".


4. We should know the steps we need to take as we adapt to the change.


5. If we keep saying "Keep the trains running" then we have adopted a position of denial.

"Keep the trains running" should not act as a 'motivational' phrase. We should use associate its use with a warning, and start fixing the system so that "the trains keep running".