Failure built in garbage. A story of Visual Control & Perception.

This story comes with a spark of outrage, a huge piece of enlightenment, & a bit of sadness stirred in.

Of course I want to start at the beginning, but WHERE actually is the beginning? Is it the point of failure itself? ...And who's failure --there is the perceived failure that I originally saw, then there is the *actual* failure. If I begin there...

Perhaps the beginning is where the process starts? But if this is the case, is it the users process --which, is what we should be most concerned about, or is it the supplier's process, which of course has the most impact...

If I think about it though, I/we don't actually know anything about the supplier's process itself --other than that it is somehow flawed, and that somewhere in their system they did not have the revelation that I did...

So let us begin in this way: I am wholly saddened that I perceived a 'willing worker' as having not paid attention to something 'so easy as the colors of the bins'.

Furthermore, I am wholly saddened on at least four levels here:

First, how did I perceive this person to be like this in this particular situation, when in so many others, I would never perceive them as inattentive to their 'work' or surroundings?

Second, how did I perceive this person in this way, when, for other people of similar stature/status, the thought would NEVER cross my mind?

Third, I am saddened that the organization which created this situation has continued to do so for several years (a discovery I later made).

And (so far) last but not least, I am saddened that the person --the willing worker of whom I speak of above in the first line, actually had to make this mistake in order for me to realize all that is happening here -- to you my most sincere apologies.

Outrage, is 'all the rage' these days. Perhaps it has been for a while, tho typically not my thing --except, of course, when I can so easily point and say 'Hey Idiot!'

Here, in this situation --my discovery of plastic bags full of Trash in the Compost bin, and Compost in the Trash bin, that is exactly what i did! Well that is exactly what my behaviour was, even if I didn't say these exact words.

Wait, what, you say? Don't we all inadvertently make that mistake on occasion --yeah the bins are colored, but don't they all go to the same place anyways?

Certainly I know I have...

Visual-controls are a tool we use to make a process easier to follow --to help us make it fail-safe as best as possible, no matter what that process is or does. Of course our prime example of this is in automobile traffic control with red, yellow, & green colors denoting the different actions we should be taking.

In our case here, there are three bins --each of a different color: Green, Blue, Grey.

So as I mentioned, when I discovered that there were plastic bags full of trash in the compost bin, after my initial outrage, I thought how could this be? I then spent a moment to consider how to neutrally present what I saw, to the 'willing worker' --after all I am a Continuous Improvement professional. When investigating an issue, there is no reason to be accusatory of someone deliberately doing wrong.

The reply I received, was "I was following the instructions."

So I found, & looked at the instructions myself. My initial reaction was still that something must be amiss with the 'willing worker', because the first page showed a graphic with the three colored bins labeled as I knew them to be...

Then the enlightenment...

As can be seen, the first photo clearly indicates the bin-types by color, --Green for Garbage, Blue for Recycle, and Grey for Compost/Yard-Waste. Yet when we look at the detailed instructions for what goes where, we see that the color-shading has changed!

As a CI professional, I realized that once again here was a system that presented itself to the 'willing worker' with a built-in failure mechanism!

As I studied the instructions, I thought a bit on the process for creating them, and how could the entity (actually a partnership of entities) that created them be so, so idiotic --would they, nay SHOULD they not have recognized that any 'willing worker' who wants to have their trash/recycling/compost hauled away from the curb, would make this mistake?

So right away I responded to the 'willing worker' that I had seen and understood how the mistake was made, and that I was not faulting them for it. Rather, I was faulting the entity themselves --after all, it is their instructions.

Later, I realized I knew there-existed an older copy of these instructions (2019), and upon reading them I spotted the same issue --both the bin-labeling & instructional color shading were the same as the current instructions!

Now my work is cut out for me --to find the right person within the partnership of entities who can help implement a proper change to prevent this type of mistake again.

Eric Jennings

ASQ-CQE; ASQ-CSSGB