It is funny how we tend to react to rain, even today when most work is indoors the instinctive reaction is a desire to stop and wait it out or at very least stop and watch it for a little while.* These days we work right on through storms and I can’t help but wonder if that disconnect does odd things to us.

A project can’t get delayed because of the weather, but perhaps it should?  The modern ‘on time’ ‘lean’ culture has a great many benefits, but it also has some drawbacks.  Sometimes, they are obvious: watching two guys load a very large and expensive bit of machinery in the middle of a thunderstorm because it had to be at another facility by lunch time.  No slack in that schedule or in that operations budget, but what is the long term cost?

In paperwork, there is no safety concern about working through the weather. But, is there a mental quality to it? Would it actually be a negative if we did what that deep, old bit of instinct tells us to do and simply watched the rain for a few minutes? Maybe I’m just a Luddite!

 

*Assuming one is not so deep in the bowels of a building that one can’t even hear it.