You’ve made mistakes in the past. How can you use them to improve your critical thinking skills?

As a seasoned Operations professional, discovering a mistake is one of the most valuable events for continuous improvement. Taking severity into consideration, I would rather spend 90% of my time trying to describe the mistake using the most relevant cross functional quality tools and 10% fixing it. Many times the corrective action has been virtually written in the final part of the error description, when done correctly. The RCA is done to describe the issue. Oh and don’t forget, to be proactive, your corrective action might well be relevant in many other areas of your business.

I believe it's important to first understand the severity of the mistake. There absolutely needs to be a change, but the amount of thought regarding the issue needs to align with depth of consequences. Utilizing an 8D to investigate a simple, non-complex issue may cause us to overlook a simplistic fix that would prevent the same mistake from being made.

Learning from past mistakes is one of the most important techniques in improving task efficiency. When an error occurs, it's important to investigate its cause. Once the root of the problem has been identified and fixed, it's important to share this information with the team. Doing so can prevent similar mistakes from happening in the future, and if they do occur, the team will be better equipped to handle them quickly and efficiently. This not only saves time but also increases the efficiency of the process.

Examine all of the elements that went into the mistake, including the procedures, the equipment, the personnel, the surroundings, and the objectives. To find the root causes of the issue, you can employ techniques like the Fishbone Diagram, the 5 Whys, or the Root Cause Analysis.

Using "5 whys" and root cause analysis have been helpful to determine why things have gone wrong. A proper planning of risk analysis with concerned parties has also been helpful in avoiding errors...

Evaluate the effect they had on the final product, the cost, the quality, and the pleasure of the client. Measurements such as the amount of waste or rework produced, the additional time or resources needed, the comments or complaints received, and the divergence from the planned results must all be made.

You must come up with a list of potential fixes, enhancements, or modifications that could deal with the underlying issues, lessen the effects, or remove the possibility of a recurrence. To assist you in coming up with alternatives, you can utilize resources like the Six Thinking Hats, the TRIZ, and the SCAMPER. You may broaden your horizons, spark your imagination, and challenge your presumptions by coming up with alternatives.

The procedures, materials, roles, and schedule for the implementation must all be planned. Monitoring the implementation's course as well as performance and feedback is also necessary. You may exhibit your professionalism, dedication, and accountability by putting your plans into action.

You are always learning. So understand what happened in the past (conditions, decisions and outcome) so you can identify those behaviors that can be adapted in the future.

One thing that I have found helpful is sharing the experience of past mistakes and solutions with your team and management. There are often people who have a lot of experience and have solved many problems. These experiences can be used as training and learning tools for others. This can help with preventing issues or improving the time required to achieve a solution. The critical thinking has often been done before and simply needs to be documented and communicated. Part of the puzzle is understanding the depth of knowledge and experience on your team and utilizing that in the critical thinking process.

Everyone made mistakes in some point in their professional career, but is key review it, analyze and share with the team the points to understand and don’t repeat again. Learning the lesson, generating an action plan to put preventive actions to avoid mistakes helps to the team to grow.

Everyone made mistakes in some point in their professional career, but is key review it, analyze and share with the team the points to understand and don’t repeat again. Learning the lesson, generating an action plan to put preventive actions to avoid mistakes helps to the team to grow.

Mistake it self considered as experience. The actions and decisions taken during that situation for sure added to my skills too much. Without trials without mistakes you cannot build experience or even improving your skills

As a general concept most of the things you do are opportunities for lessons, meaning both failures and successes. You don’t have to do a full on 5-phase for everything you do, and that would make you crazy. Sometimes you can look at a situation and think that went pretty well, was there one thing that was different than the past. Also, when considering past events don’t let new information that wasn’t yet available impact your analysis or opinion of a decision, but do considerate new ways to get information are now available.

You can only approach a situation with the limited perspective that you have. You should always be open to listening to others and learning to think differently. Getting coaching or insights from outside of yourself is critical.

You have to be very careful with the “nice” people working around you. They are cheating and stealing from their clients and getting away with it and steal yours. We have a person who all ways seems nice but steals others business. They even slept form their clients until them get caught. Is is save to share this info with business???