Cutting Edge vs. Cutting Costs – What the Titan Disaster Teaches Us About Ignoring Operational Best Practices
Alicia Butler Pierre
Founder & CEO: Equilibria, Inc. | Top 50 Global Operational Excellence Thought Leader | TEDx Speaker | Bestselling Author | Adjunct Instructor: Purdue University | Top 2% Podcaster | Lean Six Sigma Trainer
On April 12, 1912, the RMS Titanic sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On June 18, 2023, 111 years later, in a cruel twist of fate, the Titan submersible imploded during an expedition to see the Titanic.
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Five people died as a result, including the CEO of OceanGate, the company responsible for building the Titan.
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When tragedies like this happen, it naturally begs the question, why? In this case, the answer to that question led to the sickening reality that this tragedy was completely avoidable.
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In this article, we’ll review some tools that serve as operational best practices that, if deployed, would have prevented this disaster. These are tools that you can also use and they apply to any business, regardless of size or industry.
Test, Test, Test!
Though many red flags were waved prior to the Titan’s submersion, the one that stands out for me personally is the blatant disregard for testing. Parts of the Titan were built with carbon fiber composites, a material proven to not have a long “operational lifetime.”
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Rather than retiring the submersible, the CEO made an executive decision to continue with that last voyage. This brings us to the next lesson...
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Heed Warnings
Subject matter experts are hired for a reason – they have the deep expertise and experience required to carry out important missions and execute certain initiatives. Similarly, regulatory agencies also exist as a mechanism for checks and balances. When these folks warn of impending danger, it’s upon us as leaders to listen intently and act accordingly even if it means losing money.
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In the case of the Titan, the warnings were all there and they were clear – DO NOT OPERATE!
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Not only is there documented evidence of a former OceanGate employee pleading to discontinue the use of the Titan, but he was fired. Eventually, OceanGate settled with him out of court but that employee never stopped verbalizing his concerns for operating the Titan.?
Pay Now or Pay Later
I’ve previously written about two Lean Six Sigma tools that I think all leaders should have in their operational toolkits: the Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) and the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Both articles contain links to templates you can download to begin using.
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Failure comes in many forms and when it comes to providing a service or delivering a product, things can go wrong.
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Here's a quick process for using these tools together:
1.????Map the service or product delivery process.
2.????Conduct an FMEA on that process.
3.????Look at those areas on the FMEA that score as “high.”
4.????Calculate a COPQ for each high-scoring area on the FMEA.
5.????Share the results with your team.
6.????Determine the best corrective actions to take to reduce associated risks.
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After calculating the COPQ for each high-ranking failure point identified, this could mean abandoning your service or product altogether. It’s likely that similar exercises led to this conclusion for Titan, but the CEO charged forward anyway.
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These tools serve as preventative measures to avoid danger and disaster. But there is a catch – you must pay attention to their results! In the case of the Titan, the passengers paid the ultimate cost of failure and poor quality with their lives.
Risk vs. Reward
As subject matter experts and/or representatives of regulatory agencies, we are responsible for disclosing warnings and reporting violations. As leaders, we are ultimately responsible for heeding those warnings and making the necessary adjustments to remain in compliance, even if it means sacrificing revenue and profit.
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There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be on the cutting edge of your industry and taking bold steps but doing so at the expense of knowingly putting people’s lives and livelihoods in danger is reckless and downright selfish.
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What really happened to the Titan from a technical perspective? That answer is slowly emerging as the investigation is still active. In my next article, I’ll actually share how to use another tool to determine the factors that led to a problem or catastrophe after it happened. It’s called a Root Cause Analysis.
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The following video brilliantly summarizes some of the events leading up to the Titan’s implosion:
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About the Author
Alicia Butler Pierre is the Founder & CEO of Equilibria, Inc. – an operations management firm specializing in business infrastructure for fast-growing small businesses. She’s a software inventor, author of the two-time Amazon bestseller Behind the Fa?ade: How to Structure Company Operations for Sustainable Success, and host of the top 2% Business Infrastructure podcast.
Alicia’s also an adjunct instructor of Lean Principles at Purdue University and serves as the USA Chair of the G100’s Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises. The Process Excellence Network recognized her as a Top 50 Thought Leader in Operational Excellence. A chemical engineer turned entrepreneur, she’s advised, designed, and optimized processes for companies including Shell Oil, Coca-Cola, and The Home Depot.?
Executive Leadership Coach | DiSC & 5 Behaviors of a Cohesive Team - Wiley Authorized Partner, Org. Change Consultant
1 年Alicia Butler Pierre I've used the FMEA a zillion times, but have never taken the next step of Calculating the Cost of Poor Quality in that format. Very interesting - and helpful in my work with manufacturers. Thanks!
Machinist/Tool and Diemaker
1 年This isn’t being cutting edge, it’s being a moron… Having worked with carbon fiber, the material doesn’t like repetitive flexure… The FAA certified material would delaminate under well controlled machining conditions to the point we had to use special cutters to ensure this wouldn’t occur, it still did sometimes without warning or reason. Granted this material wasn’t being subjugated to 5000 PSI of hydrostatic pressure. This was a foolhearty idea to begin with and absolutely one of the worst applications of this material ever devised… Compression, decompression, recompression, decompression ,compression… Cycling this material through that cycle leads to one thing, The binding adhesive and fibers stretch and bend in and out, that’s where your delamination starts happening. Once it starts the whole cured part of the carbon fiber with the delamination event occurring is compromised. This should have never occurred.
??Connecting people, processes, and technology so you become simpler…faster…BETTER!??Continuous Improvement?? Lean Six Sigma??Operational Excellence??Consulting??Speaker??Training
1 年Alicia, Sometimes the most straightforward tools point us in the right direction. FMEA and COPQ are great simple tools that can be used within any organization and industry.
Maritime, Waterfront and Economic Development Entrepreneur building scalable platforms; Chair, Economic Development, NAACP NY State; Advisory Board Member, NYS OCM. Passionate about community engagement and equity.
1 年Alicia, I generally love following your articles, and I think you identified some key areas for businesses to pay more attention to, but a key point in this article is wrong. Your statement that 'Parts of the Titan were built with carbon fiber composites, a material proven to not have a long “operational lifetime” ' is what I'm referring to. Carbon fiber composites, depending on how they're manufactured, can be both lighter and stronger than both aluminum and steel, and can have a very long, low-maintenance lifespan, which is why they are now used as wings and fuselages for aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. They've been highly tested and their flexibility aids in their strength. The problem in THIS case, is that a carbon fiber hull was subjected to enormous compressive stresses, which is NOT what this material is known for. Titanium is proven to be much better for that, but it is more expensive. We don't fully know what the OceanGate CEO did or didn't do regarding testing, but that will come out in the investigations. But he sure did make the wrong decisions on how to best use the materials he selected.
Data Science | Machine Learning | Artificial Intelligence | Greyhound Rescue
1 年Well stated!!