I couldn’t believe it, I got a puncture at kilometre seventy-three on a ride I’d been looking forward to for weeks.
Rural road. No mobile signal worth speaking of. A tyre that had picked up something I never found. And the dawning realisation that my spare tube was the wrong size.
Forty-five minutes by the side of the road, with nothing for company but the nagging feeling it was my fault.
By the time someone eventually stopped to help, it was clear to me I’d not prepared properly.
I knew the route. I’d checked the weather. I’d fuelled correctly – there was a supply of my favourite chocolate. What I hadn’t done was audit my kit. I’d assumed everything was there and right because it had been there and right the last time I’d needed it.
Which was months ago.
An assumption that cost me forty-five minutes and a ride I didn’t finish the way I’d planned.
The kit I didn’t audit. The assumption I didn’t question. The outcome that was entirely preventable – and entirely my fault.
Truth is, I think about that puncture when I’m doing site visits. Not because the situations are equivalent – a failed pharmaceutical connection is not a puncture.
But the psychology is identical.
Sites fail at the joins. At the moments where one thing transitions to another – one shift to the next, one procedure to the implementation of it, one person’s understanding of the standard to another’s.
And those failures almost always happen not because nobody knew the right thing to do – but because everyone assumed it was already being done.
So, from then on, the puncture taught me to check the kit. Every time. Not because I think it’ll be wrong. Because the moment I assume it’ll be right is the moment it won’t be. I’ve found that sites that don’t have issues with connection management have the same habit.
They check. Not because they don’t trust their team, because they know that trust without verification isn’t operational confidence. It’s optimism. And optimism is a terrible maintenance strategy.
Speed bumps made sense before speed cameras existed. Scheduled inspection made sense before continuous monitoring existed. Neither of them is wrong, they were just the best available tool at the time.
The question is whether you’re still using yesterday’s tool for today’s problem.
The failure you didn’t see coming is almost never truly unforeseeable. It’s usually the place where you’d stopped checking because things had been fine.
Check the kit.
Every time.
PTL – helping pharma and bioprocessing teams stay ahead of the failure nobody saw coming.
Talk to us
