You Should Be Hunting For Deer Sign

I often see posts on LinkedIn talking about leading vs lagging indicators, or how TRIR is not a reliable metric. They try to give new and “improved” metrics to use, but all of these seem wrong to me. It’s not that I disagree, but that something in my gut tells me they are missing the point. To me, the reporting of metrics is an indicator of past performance, not one of future performance. Even leading indicators are not really what we as leaders need to be focusing on in the field. As a leader, you would be better off looking for “deer sign,” signs of performance degradation, and using intuition to push a culture of excellence.

Let me start by defining what I mean by “deer sign” – I am not talking about the yellow signs on the side of the road indicating a deer crossing. I am talking about the subtle marks left by a deer that allow you to track them. It’s a hunting term to describe tracks, scat/poop, beds, rubs, scrapes, and browse. These are signs hunters use to tell there are deer in the area, what the deer are doing, and what paths the deer take. These are not metrics like deer population in the area or average number of fawns per doe. These are the practical and applicable ways that hunters know there is an opportunity in the area.

Our responsibility as leaders is to look for signs of potential problems in our systems and address them before disaster. So, let us look at the common types of “deer sign” we should be looking for.

Sign 1: Dented Guardrails and Dirty Drip Pans

During my first internship with a global reliability department, my colleague shared his secret for telling whether a facility’s culture was good or bad. He said that the first thing he checked at any site was how dirty the drip pans under the equipment were and how dented the guardrails were. The more dented or dirty, the bigger the indication of trouble, especially if the site is not concerned about it. That is a sign they have normalized the behavior. For reliability, this is a sign that the plant is waiting for problems to occur rather than preventing them.

Sign 2: Dirty Bathrooms

Another common example of “deer sign” is bad housekeeping, specifically in the bathroom and break rooms. I discussed this in a previous TapRooT® Podcast.

If they are not taking care of the little things, you can be sure they are missing some of the big things. Ken Reed told me that when he would audit a sub, he looked for lightbulbs that were out. A lightbulb is such an easy thing to fix; if they are not fixing them, then they are either so overwhelmed with issues that they can’t, or they are apathetic to issues that no one feels is their responsibility to report.

Sign 3: Old Abandoned Gemba Boards/Signs

Gemba Boards and Signs are meant to give information to users and leadership. There are tons of examples of Gemba boards, 5S shadow boards, production targets, past-due items, safety signs, and more when you include warnings and labels. So, what does it say about the management system at a site when it abandons them without taking them down?

If a simple management board is not only not maintained but left to rot on the shop floor, how will they maintain the discipline required for something as complex as process safety?

Sign 4: Wet Paint

One sign we haven’t talked about is the cover-up. This is when you know leadership is going to be doing an inspection or audit, and you cover up the problems to make your site or department look as good as possible. I used to call this the fluff and buff. Mark even has a story about when their CEO came to visit: the site would only paint the fronts of the buildings you could see from the road, and they had a team of people who went ahead of the CEO to pick up trash on the road. These actions give the appearance of a functioning management system, but managers need a sign to tell if this is really just covering up a rusted core.

Admiral Rickover had a good sign to detect this type of problem. Wet Paint! If a ship had wet paint on its arrival, it meant they had painted it for it and not just as routine maintenance. It meant they had prepared for his visit and his findings would be a false indication of readiness. Whenever Rickover found wet paint, he knew he needed to dig much deeper and change his normal audit process.

Sign 5: Inventory Sitting Around

A common aphorism in lean is that overproduction is the worst of the 8 wastes because it includes all the others. A good deer sign for overproduction is inventory sitting around or processes that are waiting on other steps. The act of inventory sitting is a good sign that something isn’t happening that should and a good leader knows to ask questions when they see a stop in product or processes.

More Signs?

There are, of course, many more deer signs that you can use to look for trouble. Comment your favorite that you’ve seen or experienced below.

If you are looking for guidance on what you really need to focus on, consider hosting the Stopping Human Error Course.

We cover a wide range of Human Performance Tools to help improve your systems and reduce human error.

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