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At Favimar Coaching, we specialize in helping businesses and individuals understand and improve human behavior in the workplace. Our team of experienced consultants offers customized solutions to enhance communication, productivity, and overall performance. Trust us to guide you towards success in the competitive landscape of Houston, Texas.

Closing the gap

What would happen if, tomorrow morning, every person entering your workplace followed every procedure exactly as written — no deviations, no adjustments, no judgment calls?

Would your results improve?

After more than forty years leading in industrial environments, I can tell you the honest answer: probably not as much as you would expect — and in some operations, not at all. Not because procedures are wrong, but because no written rule can anticipate every situation that reality presents.

Procedures are essential. They give us a frame to work within and demonstrate our commitment to operating inside the boundaries of the law. That is precisely why questioning whether our rules are truly workable feels so uncomfortable — we fear that opening that door could turn quiet, undeclared deviations into accepted practice, and erode the very legal ground our procedures exist to protect.

But here is what decades on the shop floor, backed by a growing body of research, have taught me: people don't blindly follow procedures. They interpret them. Especially in complex, non-repetitive work, there is always a gap between how a task was designed and what actually happens during execution. Life is complicated — and every day, people on the floor quietly and successfully close that gap.

This is not a call to relax compliance. It is a description of how work actually gets done — and pretending otherwise doesn't make us safer; it only makes us blind. The goal is the opposite of silence: to bring these adaptations into the open, where they can be examined, improved, and — when they prove better than the rule — built into better procedures, keeping us effective and on solid legal ground at the same time.

We tend to notice the gap only when something goes wrong. Then the written procedure becomes the reference for diagnosis, the deviation becomes a central finding, and "human error" takes a prominent place among the conclusions — often the most visible one. As if the same adaptation, performed successfully a hundred times before, was never an error until the day the outcome was bad.

Understanding why people adapt does not remove accountability. It changes the question we ask: not only "who deviated?" but "why did following the rule and getting a good result point in different directions that day?"

Every leader in operations knows this tension, and I was no exception: the legitimate pressure to deliver the short-term results the business needs, and at the same time the responsibility to go deeper — to help your teams navigate the daily dilemma between the written rule and the best decision for the company in the long run. Carrying both at once is the hardest part of the job.

There is good news and bad news.

The good news: there are real opportunities to build a more effective organizational dynamic. The bad news: there are no silver bullets. I have participated in many courses and initiatives that promised to close this gap. The general solutions work for a few weeks, then fade. Lasting change requires something harder — working on the organization and its people together: on the systems that define how work is designed, measured, and managed, and on the behaviors of everyone within them — not only those who execute the work, but above all those who shape the organization itself.

Because the organization drives the behavior — at every level, including mine when I sat in the leadership chair. That is where FAVIMAR's proposal is centered.

At FAVIMAR, I work with organizations to bridge two worlds I know well: the insights that organizational research offers as a starting point, and the daily reality of a manager under pressure — where every idea must prove its worth. Practical answers, not another flavor-of-the-month program.

Procedures are essential, but they are not perfect. Recognizing both truths, together, is where improvement begins.