We like to think we make decisions based on information. We don’t. We make decisions based on emotions. And the most important emotion we rely upon for decision-making is confidence. We can be provided all the information in the world, but if we can’t understand it, trust it or believe it, we look for confidence in other ways. Often to disastrous outcomes.
The number of ‘well-funded’ production efforts full of ‘very smart people’ that routinely generate expensive but unreliable products is sadly, very high. And it all comes down to the wrong types of confidence that well-paid decision-makers chase.
Bad ‘confidence’ #1 – what do my expert team say?
It might sound inherently wrong to suggest that leaders and decision makers shouldn’t seek feedback and guidance from their team of experts. And that is because good leaders should always listen to the people that work for them.
But it goes too far when the boss simply signs off on whatever the ‘engineering team’ says should be signed off on. Whether the boss realizes it or not, he or she is exporting the responsibility and accountability for that decision onto the engineering team. When something goes wrong, the boss who didn’t invest any time in understanding the decision will invariably blame those who told him it was OK. This quickly devolves to create a risk averse culture at all levels where decisions are supported only when risk has been assessed as incredibly small.
Which means decisions get made at a snail’s pace, and usually cost more to implement as a result.
Bad ‘confidence’ #2 – test, test, test
What’s wrong with testing? Nothing … as long as it is to inform proactive and timely decisions. But when we rely on testing to confirm that everything we have just done is OK, we create an inherently reactive approach to creating reliability. The ‘build-test-fix’ approach is simply not feasible for efficient and fast production of reliable items and systems.
As soon as you focus on ‘qualification’ tests to validate progress, you create a culture where people are reluctant to even think about failures, and often hide failures when they happen. Many organizations simply discredit failures as being ‘outliers’ or ‘quality-related failures’ as if users or customers will be OK with these types of failures and not others. For them, being able to say we achieved the next milestone is way more important.
So instead of testing to learn, everyone is testing to pass.
Bad ‘confidence’ #3 – monstrous processes
Accountability can be difficult for some of us, especially those with highly developed egos. So when something goes wrong, many organizations are reluctant to lay blame on anyone. And if it wasn’t anyone’s fault, it must have been the process’s fault. The ‘responsible’ person wasn’t trained, didn’t have the correct procedure to follow, didn’t get the right approvals and so on. And so for every mistake, we ‘fix’ it by adding another step in the process.
And very quickly we get a huge, complex process that is exhausting to follow. The problem with complex processes is that they become the product. We are ‘done’ once we have complied with every step in the process and checked every box. And because this is so exhausting and restrictive, we don’t have the mental space or motivation to actually think about designing and building reliable items.
Bad ‘confidence’ #4 – standards and clauses
What’s wrong with ensuring your products and systems comply with steps and requirements in standards? And what’s wrong with putting those steps and requirements into a contract to ensure the contractor designs reliable stuff?
Lots of things.
Standards are at best 5 years behind the state of the art, and can often be decades behind anything approaching best practice. The people who are involved in writing standards are volunteers, who contribute expertise at their own expense. This does not guarantee a wide range of perspectives. And once a new standard is written, it has to be circulated for review and feedback (which often tends to remove many of the ideas that can be considered ‘cutting edge’).
And once we rely on standards, clauses and other things that people we have never met think is a good idea, we stop thinking ourselves.
So … what does good confidence look like?
Confidence that comes from understanding.
When it comes to reliability engineering, you want to be continually re-evaluating which parts of your system are ‘keeping you up at night’ in terms of the risk they have on product failure. This means that from day one, we are focusing on fast, simple, and often free corrective actions and ideas that prevent those scenarios from ever happening. And once you have resolved one issue, you need to understand your system well enough to understand what the next one will be so it can be addressed. Again, if you do this early, it is fast, simple and often free.
Eventually you will have done this enough for you to know that the residual things that will keep you up at night are satisfactory, in that the likelihood of them causing warranty or service-life failures is small or the cost of addressing them is too high. At this stage you just ‘know’ that your product or item is reliable. You know it will pass any test. And bosses need to be expert enough themselves to get here.
You can’t outsource thinking. You can’t rely on an expert team or do anything else that allows you to avoid truly understanding the system yourself. And it just so happens that the organizations who do reliability well have bosses, leaders and decisions makers who know what parts of their product keep them up at night.
So what about you? Does this apply to you as a leader? What about your boss? The recipe for reliability hasn’t changed despite the advent of machine learning, artificial intelligence and Microsoft PowerPoint. So don’t pretend it has!
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