Real Deal Pro Articles
The Cycle of Doom 1
The Cycle of Doom 1
The Cycle of Doom 1
If you have been in manufacturing long enough, you have seen chaos show up without warning. It looks random. A pump that worked fine yesterday starts leaking today. A motor that should have run for years fails early. Technicians feel like they are always reacting. Leaders feel like they can never get ahead. Everyone feels busy but not effective.
The Cycle of Doom 2
The Cycle of Doom 1
The Cycle of Doom 1
If ambiguity is the first crack in the system, bad design decisions are the first visible signs that something upstream went wrong. They appear small. They look harmless. They blend into the normal rhythm of project work. But these choices create failure modes that last for decades. They shape the entire life of the equipment. They determine whether a plant becomes stable or reactive.
The Cycle of Doom 3
The Cycle of Doom 1
The Cycle of Doom 3
If the second stage of the Cycle of Doom is where shortcuts take physical shape, the third stage is where those shortcuts finally wake up. Hidden defects are the failures installed quietly on day one that do not show themselves until the system is under load. They sit beneath the surface through startup and early operation, completely unnoticed. Then, months later, they begin to surface!
The Cycle of Doom 4
The Cycle of Doom 4
The Cycle of Doom 3
There is a moment in every plant when the failures outpace the people. Not gradually. Suddenly. A machine goes down. Then another. A line stops. A valve sticks. A conveyor jams. Calls hit the radio faster than your team can respond. You start one repair and get pulled to another. You close one work order and five more open. Nothing is stable. Nothing is predictable. The plant is no longer operating. It is surviving.
The Cycle of Doom 5
The Cycle of Doom 4
The Cycle of Doom 5
Some plants don’t just break equipment.
They break the people who keep trying to hold it together. Burnout is not loud. It shows up in the lies we tell ourselves just to get through one more shift.
“This is just part of the gig.”
“I promise I'll be home for dinner tonight.”
“I won’t miss the next game.”
“This overtime won’t last forever.”
The Cycle of Doom 6
The Cycle of Doom 4
The Cycle of Doom 5
Every plant has a graveyard of good ideas.
TPM boards that started strong & died quietly. PM improvements that never made it past the first cycle. 5S zones that fell apart after one shift. Standard work that lived on paper but never on the floor. Root cause efforts that turned into binders no one touched again. Daily tier meetings updated out of obligation instead of purpose.
The Cycle of Doom 7
The Cycle of Doom 7
The Cycle of Doom 7
There's a moment when failure stops surprising people. Not because it got better. Not because it was fixed. But because everyone learned to live with it. “That machine always fails on changeovers.”
“We expect a lot of downtime during ramp-up.” “That line is just fragile.” “Don’t worry about it, it’s always been like that.” “Yeah, that asset is a headache, but we manage.” These phrases are not complaints anymore. They are facts of life.
This is the final stage of the Cycle of Doom.