Did it happen suddenly?

I was the Engineering Manager in a paperboard plant in India. It was my responsibility to prevent breakdowns and keep the equipment in a healthy and productive condition. 

A recurring breakdown was the failure of ball and roller bearings. The paper-making machine has hundreds of bearings and runs 24/7. Even when one bearing fails, the complete machine stops and leads to a huge loss of production. 

When such a failure happened, I would question the area engineer why he could not prevent a breakdown by replacing the bearing during a planned shutdown. He would tell me that the bearing didn't show any prior sign of failure. This is not true for such bearings. They always show symptoms like vibrations, sound, or heat before a failure.

I would dramatize this point to the Engineer sitting before me by the following demo.

The drama of the paperweight (of olden days)

I pick up the glass paperweight (a common item on the desk in the 1970's) and place it in the middle of my desk. The table is clear of any objects from the paperweight to the side of the table close to the Engineer. I move the paperweight a few inches towards the edge of the table. I stop, look at the Engineer in front of me, and say, “Nothing happened! Right?” Again, I move it a few inches towards the edge and say, “Nothing happened”, right? Again, I move a few inches and say “Yes, nothing is happening”. I repeat this moving and saying till it falls on the hard floor with a thud. Then I say in a dramatic manner, “The paper weight suddenly fell. It was sitting fine on the table, a few seconds back!”

The Engineer who watched the demo would smile. He would admit that some warning signs must have appeared before the failure. His team might not have observed them. Or the signs were noticed, and he thought that the symptoms were harmless. Or he noticed them and thought that it didn't make sense to stop the machine to replace one bearing only for fear of its failure. He hoped that it would survive till the next planned shutdown. With this approach, the defective bearing was bound to surprise one day.

Ignoring the warning signs

This concept applies to physical, mental, and relational health. We tend to ignore the early warning signs and underestimate the possibility of a crisis. The cumulative deterioration over time is bound to result in a (sudden?) failure of some kind.

This could happen for many reasons. We may not observe what is happening in the things and people around us. We may not know what a healthy situation is and what an unhealthy one is. 

The solution is to have clarity on healthy and unhealthy conditions, keep an eye on the creeping deterioration, and err on the safe side by taking corrective action as early as possible. 

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