City Shift Finance: Why do transformation efforts lose momentum even when the issues are clear?
Frank U Hess: Transformation efforts often lose momentum even when the organization understands its problems, because recognizing a problem is fundamentally different from changing the behaviors and decisions that created it.
In many companies, the initial diagnosis is convincing: costs are too high, reliability is too low, processes are fragmented, or digital tools are failing to deliver the expected value.
Progress must become visible through operational outcomes instead of being measured only through completed project milestones. The real test comes on a difficult Tuesday morning, when production is under pressure and employees must decide whether to follow the new operating discipline or return to familiar behavior.
The leadership team launches an initiative, establishes targets, and communicates a compelling mission and vision; however, once the initial energy fades, the organization often returns to its established routines. Transformation is frequently managed from the top down as a temporary program, while the organization’s operating environment remains largely unchanged. New dashboards, workshops, and governance processes are introduced, yet employees continue to face the same incentives, conflicting priorities, departmental targets, and time pressures; under those conditions, familiar behaviors, particularly firefighting, usually prevail.
Transformation also loses momentum when employees experience it as something imposed on the asset management function without sufficient involvement from the people responsible for the assets and processes. When those closest to the work cannot see how the change will improve their ability to make decisions, the initiative becomes an additional administrative burden. Sustainable transformation therefore requires more than a clear case for change; strategic intent must be translated into new decision rules, responsibilities, routines, and feedback mechanisms.
City Shift Finance: What keeps companies from turning operational knowledge into consistent execution?
Frank U Hess: Most companies possess far more operational knowledge than they are able to apply consistently.
That knowledge exists among experienced employees, within maintenance histories, engineering feasibility studies, performance reports, production data, and countless spreadsheets; much of the insight remains fragmented, implicit, and disconnected from the moment when a decision must be made. Operational knowledge and decision-making are often highly dependent on particular individuals. An experienced supervisor may understand which asset presents the greatest risk, which intervention can safely be postponed, or why a recurring failure continues to return; however, that knowledge may never become part of a shared decision process.
When the individual is absent, moves into another role, or retires, the organization loses both expertise and consistency. Functional boundaries make the situation more difficult. Operations understands the consequences for production, engineering understands technical risk, maintenance understands execution constraints, and finance understands the economic impact. Each perspective is valid; however, companies frequently lack a common mechanism for combining them. Execution then depends on who is present, who argues most convincingly or forcefully, or which problem appears most urgent at that moment. Comparable situations produce different decisions, and performance becomes unnecessarily variable.
Organizations can reduce this inconsistency by converting individual knowledge into transparent decision logic. This requires agreement about which information matters, how competing objectives will be evaluated, and who owns the final decision. Consistency preserves human judgment while giving it a stronger and more reliable foundation. Comparable decisions can then be evaluated through comparable reasoning without requiring every decision to be identical.
City Shift Finance: What separates technology that improves performance from technology that adds complexity?
Frank U Hess: The strongest technology also creates a learning loop. It records what happened, what was decided, why the decision was made, and whether the expected result was achieved; over time, this allows the organization to improve the quality and consistency of its decisions. My rule is that technology should be able to explain which decision it improves and how that improvement creates lasting value; otherwise, it is probably digitizing complexity while leaving the underlying problem unresolved.
Technology improves performance when it makes a relevant decision easier, faster, or more accurate; it adds complexity when it creates more data, interfaces, alerts, and administrative work without improving what people ultimately decide or do.
This distinction is particularly important in asset-intensive industries. Companies have invested heavily in enterprise asset management systems, sensors, predictive analytics, digital twins, and artificial intelligence. These technologies can create considerable value; however, that value appears only when the technology is connected to a clearly defined operational situation. A prediction, for example, does not automatically produce a better outcome.
Knowing that an asset may fail becomes valuable only when the organization can determine what action to take, when to take it, what the production consequences will be, and whether scarce resources should be redirected from another priority. I describe this as prescriptive maintenance, which moves beyond predicting what may happen and supports a decision about what the organization should do next. Effective technology therefore begins with a clearly defined problem or use case and connects available data or tools to that operational need.
It provides the necessary context, presents meaningful alternatives, clarifies trade-offs, and supports action within the existing workflow; it should reduce cognitive burden instead of creating another layer of complexity for employees to manage.
City Shift Finance: Where do companies most often lose alignment between operations, finance, and technical teams?
Frank U Hess: alignment is most often lost when a shared business objective is translated into separate departmental targets.
Operations is measured on throughput and schedule attainment; maintenance is measured on cost, work-order completion, and compliance with the maintenance plan; engineering focuses on technical integrity and long-term risk; finance emphasizes budgets, quarterly performance, cost predictability, and capital discipline. Each objective is legitimate, although conflict emerges when every function improves its own measure without considering the consequences for the organization as a whole. A maintenance deferral may reduce the current month’s spending while increasing future production risk. Continuing to operate a deteriorating asset may protect today’s output while creating a much larger loss later.
An engineering solution may be technically excellent but economically unjustifiable. Each decision can appear rational from one functional perspective while destroying value elsewhere in the organization. The disconnect is reinforced by differences in professional language. Technical teams speak about failure modes and asset condition; operations speaks about capacity and customer commitments; finance speaks about cash flow, risk exposure, and return on investment; maintenance speaks about emergency work, resource limitations, and work-order priorities. Without a common definition of value, important decisions are debated through competing professional lenses.
Companies restore alignment by creating shared decision criteria. Technical risk must be translated into operational consequences and economic value; financial constraints must be reflected in transparent operational priorities; all parties must understand the assumptions supporting the decision. Alignment allows every function to retain its distinct priorities while evaluating trade-offs against the same understanding of organizational value.
City Shift Finance: What are the earliest signs that an operation is becoming inefficient before the financial impact is visible?
Frank U Hess: These signals often appear well before conventional financial measures reveal the full impact. Costs may remain within budget for a period, while risk, deferred work, and lost production opportunities continue to accumulate beneath the surface. Leaders therefore need to pay attention to decision variability and operational friction. When comparable situations repeatedly produce different priorities, or when extraordinary effort is required to achieve ordinary results, inefficiency is already present, even when the monthly financial report still appears acceptable.
The earliest signs are usually visible in operational behavior long before they appear in the financial statements.
One of the clearest signals is a growing level of reactivity. More planned work is interrupted, priorities change more frequently, and teams spend increasing amounts of time responding to emergency requests. Each intervention may appear manageable when considered separately; taken together, they indicate that the organization is losing control of its workload. Another warning sign is the normalization of recurring problems. The same assets fail repeatedly, temporary repairs become permanent, and known defects remain in the backlog.
Employees become highly skilled at recovering from disruption, which can create the dangerous impression that the operation is resilient; the organization may simply be becoming better at firefighting. Over time, employees may even begin to regard firefighting as their most valuable capability, although that belief reflects an unstable operating environment. Other early indicators include increasing schedule instability, more last-minute expediting, repeated planning changes, declining compliance with the maintenance plan, rising overtime, unavailable materials, aging work orders, and growing dependence on a small number of experienced individuals.
Decision-making also becomes more subjective; priorities are established through escalation, negotiation, and organizational influence instead of transparent criteria.
City Shift Finance: Why did you choose to tell these operational challenges through a business novel in The Decision?
Frank U Hess: I chose the business-novel format because operational transformation is ultimately a human story. Traditional management books are often effective at explaining polished methods, concepts, and established practices;
However, they frequently present change as a rational sequence in which the organization identifies the problem, designs the response, implements it, and measures the result. Anyone who has worked inside a complex organization knows that reality is far less orderly. Transformation involves pressure, conflicting interests, professional pride, personal history, organizational politics, and fear. A technically sound recommendation may still be rejected because it threatens someone’s authority or contradicts years of established practice. A manager may recognize the correct long-term decision and still hesitate because of the current quarter’s financial target.
These dynamics are difficult to communicate through diagrams and conventional business language alone. The Decision is written as a story, although its message is practical. It presents sustained performance as the result of consistent decisions, particularly before a crisis occurs, rather than isolated acts of heroism. The book presents industrial transformation and change-management programs without romanticizing them; it portrays the frustration, politics, resistance, uncertainty, and emotional cost of change, while showing what can become possible when people move from reaction to foresight, from blame to learning, and from firefighting to deliberate performance management.
At its core, The Decision argues that the decision system behind the equipment, processes, and people often creates the underlying problem, which means it can be changed. After more than 30 years in asset performance and operational transformation, I have learned that people rarely change because they receive more or better information. They change when they are able to see their own reality from a different perspective, which is something a story can provide.
The Decision therefore extends beyond improving maintenance and explores how organizations think, how people respond under pressure, and why better performance begins with better decisions.
