Beware Repeated Misatkes

Organizations often repeat their mistakes. Like Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. You should not automatically assume that any given mistake is just a one-off error: it's almost always part of a pattern of similar mistakes – if not in substance, then at least in form.

Several years ago I started in a new position, and I took the opportunity to interview everyone to understand their technical/strategic position, challenges, etc. Quite a few people talked about how this one supplier had started screwing stuff up, and how this had knock-on effects on their development program. How it had caused the program nearly a year of lost progress.

A supplier screwing something up is nothing new, especially when they're producing something custom, and for the first time. The team should have been fully prepared to check and verify the supplier's work, to compare it to spec, to give active feedback, and ultimately to reject non-conforming material.

But none of that was in place. The whole activity was all front-loaded – brainstorm, think, hypothesize, come up with a design that should work; and then throw it over the fence and wait for the supplier to deliver. No specs, no inspection plan, no process owner.

When the first articles arrived, give some gentle feedback, tell the supplier what processes to change (again instead of defining clear specs), and repeat this over and over, all the while paying in full even for parts that were unusable, and which caused downstream processes to fail.

We eventually wrote up some basic specs, and I convinced our technician to inspect incoming parts so we could give systematic feedback to the supplier. This helped us build the case internally for moving away from that supplier.

But moving to a new supplier didn’t help – the same pathologies were still present. My team sent out our design, talked through the requirements verbally rather than in writing (least of all in a contract!), and yet expected it to work.

The lesson I learned from this is: if you see a mistake in an organization's past, dig deep to find out what’s been done to understand that mistake, to determine what caused it and what allowed it to persist, and what’s been done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

It's important to check that the organization has actually dug deep enough. It's easy to attribute mistakes to relatively superficial things like human error, and to fail to generalize the lessons. For the example above, after the nth time receiving bad incoming material from that supplier, the only lesson learned was: closely inspect the appearance before using it.

Much better would have been to ask:

• Why was visual inspection not being done in the first place?
• Why is the supplier still struggling to meet this most basic need of ours?
• What are we doing to fix this problem? Is it working?
• We are being hamstrung by this – why did we not foresee this as a challenge? What other things might we get hamstrung by? How could we avoid that?

A better set of lessons learned here would have been:

• We need to recognize that we lack discipline in managing our suppliers – we need help.
• We need to hold our suppliers to spec.
• We need to define specs.

I don’t mean to make it seem like the team I worked with was a bunch of clowns. They weren’t – they were smart and hard-working engineers, focused on solving an important problem, and trying to get their design working. But even after repeated issues, they failed to take a step back to try to understand what the real problem was, and so they were doomed to keep suffering from it.