Mistakes Cost… And Can Kill
Annually, General Electric brings $3 to $4 billion to its bottom line by the savings generated by their Six Sigma error reduction program. A couple of weeks ago, it was disclosed that a mistake in an arrest report led to a gun being issued to someone just convicted of murdering twelve people. Mistakes are costly and can be deadly.
In business and not-for-profit organizations, mistakes cause countless dollars, wasted time, delays and universal dissatisfaction from bosses, employees, customers, beneficiaries and anyone else involved with the organizations. Yet, much of the careless work is tolerated, often overlooked and even planned for.
Errors and mistakes will be made… we are human. However, the successful organizations have these reduced to minimal amounts. An organization’s culture needs to embrace an intolerance of errors with systems that include self-checking mechanisms providing the reliability of errors being caught by the person committing the careless action, and not left for later stages of review or quality control.
The importance of error-free work is obvious with the work done by air traffic controllers, but not so in less critical and stress-filled positions. There will be occasional errors, but they do not have to be so pervasive that large quality control departments need to be established to catch these errors.
I feel that most errors can be eliminated with the proper message, mindset and insistence by organizations’ leaders. So, I attribute wide spread errors as a failure of management. The missive must be established that excellence is expected. Pretty good is not acceptable.
Recently, after my car was serviced, I was asked by the service manager to respond to the survey I was going to receive that everything was excellent – the highest rating. I was asked that if I felt otherwise about my experience, could I explain it so he could apologize and make sure it will not reoccur with the next customer. He told me anything less than excellent was not satisfactory. I was inspired by his great service and request that it be acknowledged in the survey; and then heard on the radio about the careless entry that led to the gun being issued.
For most organizations, it is unlikely people will die because of a mistake, but substantial parts of people’s lives will be lost to productive activity because of mistakes. Widespread errors are a failure of management and the errors and those managers should have no place in most organizations.
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