Manufacturing resilience depends on building a culture of adaptability where people have the capability, information, and authority to make decisions when conditions change, rather than relying solely on flexible equipment or advanced technology.
- Three essential elements enable effective decision-making: capability to understand decisions, access to necessary information, and authority to act within clear boundaries.
- Cross-functional understanding is critical—teams must recognize how their decisions affect others across the organization to respond effectively to disruptions that cross departmental lines.
- Normalized "what if?" thinking prepares organizations to adapt by regularly questioning assumptions about suppliers, people, machines, and systems during planning and operations.
- After-action reviews capture learning from both successes and failures, converting individual heroics into repeatable organizational capability.
- Resilience requires trade-offs—cross-training, broader knowledge development, and maintaining spare capacity may appear inefficient during normal operations but create essential options when disruption occurs.
(Other articles in The Adaptable Plant Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
A tale of two factories
It was the best of production; it was the worst of production.
Okay, perhaps the difference wasn’t quite that dramatic. But two ice cream factories I worked with demonstrated remarkably different approaches to adaptability.
Both factories had processing lines that produced a wide variety of ice cream flavors and filled single-serving cups. Production runs varied considerably. High-volume products such as vanilla and chocolate might run for several days, while seasonal or lower-volume flavors such as eggnog or double chocolate strawberry might run for only half a shift.
That variety made ingredient availability important. If a factory unexpectedly ran out of frozen strawberries, for example, continuing with the planned schedule was no longer an option.
At one factory, the shift supervisors had access to ingredient inventory information and the authority to adjust the production schedule. They understood what ingredients were available, what products could be made, and how long those products could run. Within established boundaries—they could make the decision and keep production moving.
At the other factory, the supervisors couldn’t access the same ingredient information and weren’t authorized to change the schedule. When something went wrong, they had to contact the operations manager, who might then consult scheduling and sales before determining what the plant should produce instead. That process applied whether the problem occurred Tuesday morning or during a weekend night shift.
Here’s the interesting part: The first factory was older, with older equipment and less data connectivity. The second was newer and far more connected, yet the older factory was considerably more efficient on this line.
The difference wasn’t the technology. It was how the organizations thought about the people running it. You can engineer adaptability into a plant and then manage it out of the organization.
Capability, information, and authority
An adaptable organization needs people who can respond when conditions change. But simply telling people they are “empowered” isn’t enough. Effective decision-making requires three things: capability, information, and authority.
People need the capability to understand the decision they’re making and its consequences. They need access to the information required to make that decision intelligently, and they need the authority to act within appropriate boundaries.
Take away any one of the three, and the system begins to break down.
Authority without capability creates risk. Capability and authority without information lead to poorly informed decisions. Capability and information without authority create bottlenecks and frustration.
The concerns at the newer ice cream factory weren’t unreasonable. What if a supervisor changed the schedule and consumed ingredients needed for an important customer order? What if the decision created a shortage of a high-demand product? Those are legitimate risks, but eliminating decision authority isn’t the only way to manage them.
Develop people’s capability. Give them the information they need. Establish clear decision boundaries. Then allow them to act.
That doesn’t mean every decision belongs on the plant floor. It means decisions should be made at the appropriate level by people equipped to make them.
Adaptability across boundaries
Dr. Bryan Griffen is the President of Griffen Executive Solutions LLC and the author of The Practical AI Partner. He was previously Senior Director of Industry Services for PMMI, and he held a number of roles for Nestlé during his many years there.Griffen Executive Solutions
A production issue can quickly involve maintenance, quality, engineering, and scheduling. An ingredient shortage may involve procurement, operations, warehousing, scheduling, and sales. Each function may have different priorities, all of which are perfectly reasonable when viewed individually.
That’s where organizations can get into trouble. A plant can be locally efficient and organizationally fragile.
If every function optimizes only its own performance, the overall organization may become less capable of responding when conditions change. Adaptability requires people to understand enough about the broader system to recognize how their decisions affect someone else.
That doesn’t happen for the first time during a disruption: It develops through normal cross-functional communication, shared problem solving, and an understanding of organizational priorities.
When something changes, the question shouldn’t be, “Whose problem is this?” It should be, “What does the operation need now?”
Make “what if?” normal
Adaptable organizations don’t predict everything that might happen. They become comfortable questioning the assumptions behind what they’re already doing.
- What if this material isn’t available tomorrow?
- What if demand increases faster than expected?
- What if this person isn’t here?
- What if the constraint moves somewhere else?
- What other options do we have?
The objective isn’t to turn every possibility into a project or develop a contingency plan for every conceivable event. Do that, and eventually you’ll spend more time preparing to run the business than actually running it.
Instead, make “what if?” thinking part of normal conversations.
When teams plan a project, introduce a new product, modify a process, or make a capital investment, occasionally challenge the assumptions underneath the plan. Where are we dependent on one person, supplier, machine, or system? Which assumptions would create the greatest difficulty if they changed? Where do we have options, and where don’t we?
You can’t prepare for every disruption. You can prepare your organization to respond to disruption.
Learn, then adapt again
Adaptability also improves through experience, but only if the organization takes time to learn from it.
One of my favorite tools for doing that is the after-action review (AAR). The approach has its roots in military operations, but I’ve used it extensively in manufacturing and leadership workshops because the questions are remarkably simple:
- What was supposed to happen?
- What actually happened?
- Why was there a difference?
- What should we sustain or change next time?
One reason I particularly value AARs is that, when conducted correctly, hierarchy takes a back seat to learning. The person lowest in the organization has the same opportunity to identify what could have been done differently as the person running it. Sometimes that means telling the boss what the boss needs to improve. That can be both empowering and humbling.
Manufacturing already has plenty of tools for investigating failure. We perform root-cause analysis, use 5 Whys, build fishbone diagrams, and conduct corrective-action investigations when things go wrong. But adaptable organizations should also ask why things went right.
Perhaps a supervisor recognized an alternative nobody had considered. Maybe an operator’s previous experience allowed the team to respond quickly. Perhaps maintenance and production communicated unusually well. Those successes contain information, too. If we don’t understand why a team adapted successfully, the result may remain individual heroics or good luck rather than becoming organizational capability.
Maybe we occasionally need to perform root-cause analysis when something goes unusually right.
When resilience looks inefficient
There is another challenge to building a culture of adaptability: Some of the things that create resilience can look inefficient when everything is going according to plan.
Cross-training requires time that could have been spent producing. Developing broader business knowledge takes people away from their immediate responsibilities. Maintaining relationships across functions takes effort. Alternate capabilities may sit unused. Giving people enough breathing room to solve problems can appear less efficient than maximizing their utilization.
None of this means manufacturers should accept unnecessary cost or build redundancy everywhere. But maximum efficiency and maximum resilience aren’t always the same thing. Organizations need to understand where having alternatives creates value and where eliminating every bit of apparent slack also eliminates the ability to respond. Efficiency asks, “How well are we using what we have today?” Adaptability adds another question: “What options will we have when tomorrow isn’t what we expected?”
The adaptable organization
When we began this series, we started with a simple premise: Manufacturing resilience isn’t about predicting the next disruption, it’s about creating an operation capable of responding when conditions change.
Over the course of the series, we’ve looked at that challenge from several directions. We’ve explored flexible equipment and modular line design that make physical changes easier. We’ve examined the people who provide the judgment and skills behind operational agility. We’ve looked at connected systems that create visibility without making the operation unnecessarily fragile. And we’ve considered why scalable facilities and infrastructure can preserve options as the business changes.
Each contributes something different—equipment creates options, people create capability, connectivity creates visibility, scalability creates room to change—but none of them operates independently of the culture surrounding them.
An organization can invest in flexible equipment and refuse to change how it schedules production. It can collect enormous amounts of data and keep that information away from the people who need it. It can cross-train employees and still require every meaningful decision to move through layers of management. It can design a plant for future flexibility and then create organizational processes too rigid to take advantage of it. That’s why the final component of the adaptable plant isn’t something you install. It’s how the organization thinks.
An adaptable plant isn’t one that correctly predicts what happens next—none of us can do that consistently. It’s one whose people, equipment, information, infrastructure, and culture give it options when reality doesn’t follow the plan.
Resilience isn’t knowing what comes next. It’s building an organization ready to adapt when it arrives.
