Thursday

Every site knows when its owners are coming, and every site looks better that day than it does on any other day of the year. Nobody thinks of this as dishonest, and they are right not to. It just isn’t the plant.

The aisle is being cleared, and the pallets that live in the aisle are going somewhere they do not live. The floor markings are being repainted along a line that has been under a stack since spring. In the corner, newly empty, the paint is a different white from the paint around it. On Friday the pallets come back, because there has never been anywhere else for them and nobody has asked for anywhere else.

A visit is a performance with a date, and performances get rehearsed. That is not a character flaw; it is what any group of people does when they are being looked at by the people who decide things. The cost is not the tidying. The cost is that the tidying removes exactly the evidence a visitor came to find, and removes it most thoroughly in the places where the constraint is worst.

The bill is paid in the decisions taken afterwards. Capital gets allocated against a picture of a plant that exists for one day a year, and the corner that was empty on Thursday is still the reason the aisle does not work in March.

So when a floor is being prepared for a visit, there is one question worth asking out loud while it is still being moved: what are we moving, and where does it live the rest of the year? The answer is usually the site’s oldest unsolved problem, wearing a forklift.

Where this shows up: Operating partner — reading the operation from outside, and taking the seat if it needs filling.