How I feel about mistakes: It's so much easier to avoid them than to correct them.
Especially if they're links in a chain of events that go off the rails as a results.
This book was originally published in hardcover by Productivity Press in 1995.
The best $8.85 you'll ever spend.
Excerpts below.
This book is about mistakes and how to prevent them from ruining your business. It's about how to rescind Murphy's Law. In this book we present a way in which you can control the mistakes that cause the defects. It allows you to go back into the process, weed out the mistakes, and ensure that they will never be a problem again. We call this mistake-proofing.
Mistake-proofing is really quality control in its strictest sense. It does not redesign a process as reengineering does, nor does it track problems as statistical process control does. It simply keeps the system performing as it was originally designed to perform.
As a method, mistake-proofing is comprehensive. You can apply it to services just as easily as to manufacturing. This is because mistake-proofing is designed to deal with defects that originate from human mistakes as well as those that originate from equipment and materials.
Most importantly, mistake-proofing is the only method we know that includes customers' actions in the quality control system. The importance of this is emphasized by one study that estimates that customers of services are responsible for one-third of the the problems they complain about.
Another big advantage of mistake-proofing is that it is simple — you don't need a Ph.D. in statistics to apply it. In reality, mistake-proofing is more like a structured form of common sense.
Mistake-proofing is also inexpensive relative to its design alternative, redundancy.
Mistake-proofing works on the principle that if you look behind every defect, you will find a mistake that caused it. For our purposes, we define a mistake as the result of an activity, either mental or physical, that deviates from what was intended. If you can correct or prevent the mistakes in your business, you will eliminate the defects.
Machine mistakes, being generally mechanical in nature, are better understand than human mistakes. They are, therefore, more predictable and easier to control. If we look closely at the different types of machine mistakes, we see that they fall into two categories: those mistakes we can see coming and those that catch us unaware.
Employees experience a continuous stream of encounters — one defect is a low failure rate. Customers experience a single defect as a 100% failure rate.
Mistakes are random events and therefore we must continuously watch for them. Sampling is not good enough. It looks at only a small proportion of the outputs in a process. It assumes that the rest of the outputs will be similar to the sample and that, therefore, we can draw conclusions about the entire output.
The best way to ensure the detection of a mistake is to make sure that something in the environment makes it very obvious that one has been made. A good example of an environmental cue is the inevitable "extra" parts that remain after a do-it-yourself repair project. These parts make it very clear that you have not reassembled the item correctly.
The key to creating mistake-proofing devices and procedures is not to do too much at once. Instead, concentrate on clever, inexpensive methods to check for only one mistake at a time. If you have two possible mistakes, develop two separate devices or procedures to catch them.
Toyota, which is very experienced at mistake-proofing, averages about twelve devices for each machine.
Go/No-Go gauges are not limited to the shop floor. Customers often use such gauges to detect and prevent mistakes. Some amusement park rides require riders to be above a certain height (so they do not slip through the safety restraints) or below a certain height (to keep larger people off of rides meant only for small children). Parks do not want customers to discover they are too small or large after waiting in a potentially very long line. By placing a gauge at the front of the line, customers can tell if they are tall enough (or short enough) to go on the ride without waiting in line.
Remember that the goal is to develop clever, simple and inexpensive devices. Don't immediately opt for the high-tech solution.
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