By Berend Booms
My wife and I used to have a movie pass for our local cinema. This was back when we were newly married, and we didn’t have any kids – otherwise I’m sure we wouldn’t have had the time. But with a lot of free time on our hands, we went to the movies about twice a week. I must have seen hundreds of movies over the few years we had the subscription, and I remember less than a handful of them.
Nowadays, I barely go to the movies, and when I do, I rarely get to choose what we watch. More often, I’ll sit down to watch the latest happenings in Adventure Bay, where the Paw Patrol save the day once again. On the rare occasions I do get to choose the film, I try to make it count. This time, I chose Christopher Nolan's “The Odyssey,” mainly because I had read parts of Homer’s Odyssey as part of a literature course at university, although I never quite finished the full epic. With all of the hype surrounding the movie, I convinced myself that it was time for me to revisit the story.
As I started reading some of the press coverage surrounding the film, my eye was caught by a bunch of small stories about how a few hundred people had managed to work together on one of the most ambitious film productions in recent years. Being naturally interested in teamwork and collaboration, this gave me a really weird frame of reference before sitting down to watch the movie: I decided to treat “The Odyssey” as a lesson in how to work better together, and try to figure out how to apply this to asset management.
In my mind, a film set and a plant floor aren't as different as they seem. Both rely on dozens of specialists doing precise, physically demanding work under pressure, on a schedule that doesn't forgive delay. And at the end of the day, both depend on trust between people who each hold a piece of a larger job. After watching the movie and re-reading a bunch of press tour coverage, these are the five lessons asset-intensive organizations can learn from Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”.
1: Show up where the work happens
Every day of filming, the cast made a 1,000-foot hike to reach the set. Nolan made the same walk, every day, alongside them. When he apparently considered skipping it, his wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, wouldn't hear of it: if he was going to ask people to make that climb, he needed to make it too.
Great leaders don't ask their teams to do anything they wouldn't do themselves. When you talk the talk, make sure that you also walk the walk. Plenty of maintenance leaders manage from a dashboard: work orders arrive, dashboards fill up, and leadership gradually becomes something practiced from behind a screen rather than on the plant floor. But a technician troubleshooting a seized bearing at 2 a.m. notices whether their supervisor has ever done that job themselves. I believe that presence and experience build a kind of authority that earns trust in a way no CMMS or EAM report ever will. If you want your team to take the 2 a.m. callout seriously, you should know what it feels like too.
2: Carry your own gear
Matt Damon told a story about the first day of shooting in Greece. He arrived at set and realized his wardrobe assistant had carried his armor up the hill for him. He hadn't asked for it, it had just sort of happened, the way small deferences happen around people with status. Damon said he was embarrassed, apologized, and made sure it never happened again.
Now think of the senior technician who lets an apprentice handle the dirty, awkward job while they supervise from a clean corner, or the engineer who’ll tell you the report is wrong without ever having touched the equipment. There usually is no maliciousness in any of this, it’s just what sort of happens when nobody corrects it. Good teams notice this early and correct course, the same way Damon did.
3: One person's discipline sets the tone
The most striking story from the cast was about Jon Bernthal, who spent hours half-submerged in freezing water for a single scene, shivering so hard he had to press his hands together to steady enough to speak his line. Nolan checked on him repeatedly, while Bernthal just told him to keep rolling. Damon said that moment set the standard for the rest of the production. Nobody complained after that, because everyone had seen what the bar looked like.
Every maintenance team has their own Jon Bernthal: the person who works through a brutal shutdown without making it anyone else's problem, who takes the job nobody wants and does it without theatrics. That attitude does more for morale and team spirit than any onboarding video ever will. If you want a team that doesn't complain about tough conditions, you need at least one person setting the example for what that looks like, and you need to notice and credit them when they do.
4: Do your part well, and trust the rest
When asked about his role on set, Matt Damon described his job as simple: remove as much as possible from Nolan's plate, so Nolan could focus on the hundred other things only he could handle. Instead of trying to solve the whole production, Matt Damon tried to be excellent at his one piece of it, so that someone else’s job got easier.
This is the heart of good maintenance work, and good asset management generally. A technician who understands what their one piece looks like, does their part well, logs it properly, and hands off clean information has a compounding effect when it comes to freeing up bandwidth for a planner, a reliability engineer, or a manager to do their job better. Ownership of one narrow piece, done properly, is what lets a whole operation move faster. Nobody needs to carry the whole operation alone; they need to trust that the next link in the chain is solid.
5: Give credit to the person who did the work
I’ve seen Matt Damon in a ton of movies, but it still stood out to me how buff he was in this. When he was asked about his physique, Damon immediately redirected the praise to his stunt double, who he said deserved most of the credit for how his arms looked on screen. Whether he meant it as modesty or not, to me this small gesture signals something much bigger about leadership.
Maintenance work is full of invisible labor like this, that tends to go unnoticed: the person who caught the fault before it became a failure, or the technician who flagged a part wearing out three weeks early. Their names rarely make it into the report that gets read in the boardroom. Leaders who make a habit of recognizing people publicly build teams that keep looking for problems before they become expensive ones.