Don't Blame the People, Instead Improve the Process

Agile and Lean brought to organizations the idea of a continuous improvement cycle.

The basic idea is that, from time to time, teams should stop to think about their progress and analyze what could be improved for the next cycle. Most teams do that in retrospective meetings.

This simple practice can make a huge difference in a company culture and accelerate results in the mid-term.

It creates an environment where every team member should take responsibility for making things better (not just management).

In Lean Thinking, this process of working in small improvement to make things better every cycle is called Kaizen. 

How you are dealing with failure?

Every startup book talks about the importance of accepting failure as part of the process of creating a successful business. But I would bet most companies still have problems in dealing effectively with them. 

I am not trying to say that failing is good. It sucks, I know! But, even when you do your best, sometimes you are going to fail. That's just part of life and its part of the process. Now, what really makes a difference is how you deal with them. 

Your goal should be to learn something new every time you fail and use that to make things better.

Many companies punish people when they make mistakes. And that hurts innovation and make people passive and afraid to try new things. 

If you want to have a continuous improvement and innovative culture in your company pay attention to that: what do you do when something goes south? Do you try to discover who was responsible for the mistake, so you can fire them or punish them somehow? Or do you try to think about how to make your process better, so people won't screw up again next time?

Your focus should be to create a better process. That's much more effective!

If you just punish the people, not only you will make them understand that you don't want them to try new things, but also you will still have a process that allows that same fail to happen again.

Instead, if you focus on improving the process you have a better process every time somebody screws up.

The Japanese call this Poka-Yoke.

To understand how this works, think about ATMs.

Have you ever forgot your debit or credit in the machine after using it? Well, many people have.

Traditionally, the bank could just blame the people that forgot their cards and label them careless. Besides, they could add a very high fee to emit a new card to punish them. 

If they apply Poka-Yoke, instead, they could rethink the process to make it harder for people to forget their card, right? So that is exactly what they did.

First, they added an alarm, in case the user left his card in the machine after withdrawing his money. That reduced the number of forgotten cards.

Then, they inverted the order, so first people had to take their card out of the machine, and only then the machine would handle them their money.

Finally, they improved the system with new technology, so people could withdraw money using only their fingerprints and with no cards involved. And that's how it is done today!

Now, think about your company. How many opportunities of improving the process you have lost so far? Does it make sense to change that now? 

If so. My advice to you is:

• Every team (it doesn't matter what department sales, engineering, marketing, product, etc.) should have a retrospective meeting of 30 minutes at least once per month.
• The something goes wrong, don't look for who should be blamed, but instead, think about what could be changed in the process so that the same mistake never happens again.

If you do that, you should expect:

• More engagement from your team members
• Your company to be always improving (in quality, productivity, etc.)
• People will not be afraid to try new things and bring innovations to life

Let me know your thoughts about that.