LUMA Energy - x-ray of a failed change

How low are the criteria to “assess” LUMA Energy? When do we call a fiasco by its name?

Despite a few real organizational successes, change remains elusive and few manage the process as well as they would like.

The brutal fact is that around 70% of all change initiatives fail. (Harvard Business Review)

The result is that most change efforts come at a high cost, both human and financial. To improve the odds, it is imperative to understand much better the nature and process of change. But even that is not enough.

Organizational research as a science suggests that there are two archetypes, or theories, of change as to why and how changes should be made.

Theory E is change based on economic value.

Theory O is change based on organizational capacity.

Both are valid models, but the E-theory strategies are more common than the O- theory strategies.

The deep and broad problem with LUMA Energy is that it has failed both perspectives, from both an economic value perspective and it has failed miserably on achieving a minimal organizational capacity.

Why does LUMA Energy fail so miserably, is a multi-layered question.

In a change approach, the goal is to build corporate culture and human capacity through individual and organizational learning: the process of changing, getting feedback, reflecting, and making more changes.

LUMA Energy has not achieved any of the above.

Conventional wisdom tells us that “what starts badly ends worse.”

After 14 months of setbacks, LUMA Energy is similar to that of the sports organization whose team has not achieved a victory throughout the season but instead a string of embarrassing defeats, is excluded from the final series, has lost its fans and the franchise is bankrupt.

The truth is that metrics are useless when used as a rationalization tool to try to justify the obvious. There is no possible creativity that overcomes the absolute existential fallacy.

More service interruptions, low customer satisfaction, higher rates, inability to achieve efficient cost controls, worse, inefficient, and longer repairs, dangerous electrical explosions and charge fluctuations, and inability to assemble an adequate workforce sums LUMA Energy's failings.

The fiction is over.

So how stuck in the mud do we have to be to realize that not only won't we get out of the mud this way but sink deeper and deeper into disaster?

I remember the case of an incompetent student who, upon receiving his poor grades, Igor’s to ask for an academic review and the professor simply has to tell him that an “incomplete” F is insurmountable, it is subzero, he/she failed, period. 

There is no valid probatory because there is simply nothing left to prove.

Pachi Ortizfeliciano

Postscript.- Perhaps the alleged non-existence of “metrics” is just a miserable excuse or unacceptable subterfuge to not admit what 90% of the Puerto Rican people know: LUMA Energy has not served us and does not serve us, period.