Getting it wrong

During a recent gemba visit, I realized I had got it wrong, and told the guys I was with straight up. The first time I went to this company they showed me a rework-loop that was implemented because there were defects on every product, or so I thought. What they considered defects were actually minor cosmetic abnormalities that had no bearing on the functionality of the product. For all intents and purposes, they made almost defect-free products. So now what?

We can't argue against striving for perfection, but it also seemed they were doing it because they thought it was what the customer wanted. However, these products are not what you would marvel at in a convention, in fact, they mostly serve a functional value in rough conditions so things like robustness, tightness, and sturdiness come to mind if one asks the user of these products about what they value in them.

In lean we always start with quality, fix quality first as Deming said, and everything else follows from there. After all, it's useless to flow a product that is not up to scratch. It's also by investigating quality that we discover our misconceptions about the engineering of our products. Something is not working as it should, or we haven't found a different way around it so we make it very expensive. In this case, the strive for perfection was arguably getting in the way of profitability, because the only way they could make the product perfect was through rework.

Getting it wrong is not a bad thing though. It just means that you we a working hypothesis to confirm, adjust, or reject in the first place. Even Taichii Ohno points this out in his Workplace Management book. In fact, it's the first chapter. "The wise men mend their ways". In it, he recalls the Chinese proverb that states that a wise man might be right 7 out of 10 times, but even a thief is right 3 times out of seven. So for us mere mortals getting it right half the time is not so bad. It also means we need to accept that we get it wrong half the time and not be afraid to admit it and update our hypothesis.

When was the last time you got it wrong?