Random Thoughts on Manufacturing, Innovation, What We Appreciate, and More

The approach of the end of the year offers a chance to clear my idea file by noting some observations that are worth sharing, but do not require an entire column to express.

Here goes:

Manufacturing is about making vital objects so well and so efficiently that we forget how vital they are. Manufacturing thus brings about disregard for manufacturing. Unfortunately, war reboots our appreciation.

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There is a lag between what is and what is possible. We are all cautious; we will stick with the old way as long as we believe we are not hurting ourselves by doing so. The future is here and it is real, but we have to wait for the present to find it.

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Make choices based on reason rather than feeling. Feeling changes and it is never satisfied.

Except: Without the feeling of purpose or possibility, I would make no aspirational choices.

So feeling is in there somewhere. I need it in order to begin. I then need it to get out of the way so I keep going.

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When I tour new manufacturing facilities, my hosts often show me their CMM room and they show me the open field adjacent to the building. These are the two most uneventful spots on any production campus. Yet I nod admiringly because I know why they are showing me this. They are saying: We value quality and we are ready to expand.

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Not nearly enough is done at the state and local level to support and incentivize education in the skilled trades. I am not just talking about machining and toolmaking, or even manufacturing. I also mean HVAC, plumbing and electrical trades.

A person who seeks a college education of four years or more is a person likely to leave the community, as they move to wherever the jobs are for that particular major or field.

But a person who learns a trade is likely to remain in or near the community and ply their trade there, becoming an asset to the community, its employers, and the comfort of other community members apt to directly or indirectly have need of that trade.

Skills training is in part an investment in the future work and population of the community.

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Do what is simple, foolish and right.

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Production parts exist within a timeframe different from technology development. A manufacturer needs to keep on making and delivering parts without interruption. The technology developer can pivot dramatically in the aims and offerings of the company, but the manufacturer cannot afford to pivot — this company suffers if it does not have access to someone consistently available to support and service its machines. This mismatch becomes pronounced when the technology being developed is specifically aimed at manufacturing. The very phenomenon of manufacturing technology development creates an impediment to manufacturing embracing the technology.

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Earlier this year, I visited NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. An impression: Engineering innovation happens in spaces that seem incomplete and in some spots disordered. The places where engineering innovation occurs are not seamlessly futuristic like a starship deck or Reed Richards’ lab. NASA Goddard invents unusual systems for testing other unusual systems — testing spacecraft subassemblies until they break. This inherently requires a workshop, to make the unique machines that could be realized only at the heart of a workshop. Examples include the biggest audio speaker I’ve ever seen, to blare rocket noise to simulate launch; a car-sized vibration platform; a centrifuge as big as a jet. This last machine includes a chamber meant to simulate other aspects of launch that never quite worked as intended, but still works as a counterweight, because part of experimentation is salvaging previous experiments. Engineering innovation entails all this. Clean systemization is more of a possibility for production, a possible result of engineering innovation.

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Corruption does not necessarily feel dirty. It can feel tidy, in the way it runs in parallel with prevailing currents. When you act ethically, or in a way that is true to what you believe, that is the moment when you are apt to feel dirty, because doing this is going to make a mess.

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For an airline to lose luggage has become rare, but widespread discussion of the possibility makes it seem common and even to be expected. Shark attack is like that, too: a low-frequency occurrence that is much anticipated and discussed. And I think we are approaching a point where manufacturing plant closure will be like that as well. Even now, most manufacturing facility closures are because the facility has moved to a new space, often nearby. The long arc of reshoring that I think we have begun will not spare manufacturing from ups and downs, but it will give an ascendant incline to manufacturing investment. Community and civic leaders will speak of the dangers and the impact of manufacturing plant closings, even as the widespread incidence of this settles into being a phenomenon of an earlier time.

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The thing takes longer to fix than you think. It is not fixed when everyone agrees on the solution, because the fix is harder than that. The thing is fixed when the fix works, the fix holds, the fix’s unexpected consequences have all been seen and addressed, and it becomes safe to stop thinking and talking about the thing that was broken.

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At the end of the work week, I want to say to people I work with, “Have a nice weekend.” If one of them is going on a trip, I want to say, “Safe travels.” And I want to hear these things. There is something more going on in this than just disposable pleasantries. We are aware of one another, and we acknowledge when a little extra time is going to pass before we are sharing the same mental orbits again.

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Innovation is incremental. The value of an advance is sometimes uncertain, and unseen at the time. We discover later, only in retrospect, how this advance prepared the way and laid the groundwork for the advance that came next.