Don't blame, reward people that surface their own mistakes!

In Lean thinking errors or mistakes are seen as opportunity for improvement and growth. But in lean, mistakes don't come alone, they also provide an opportunity for the team to create a poka-yoke tool/device. Poka-yoke stands for "mistake proofing", i.e. making sure the same mistake does not happen again. This can only be done by changing the process or tools.

All of these things stem from the most important value in Lean Thinking: Respect for people.

When Toyota started exporting their ideas outside Japan they found out that in some countries the culture was to "blame", not to reward the honesty of admitting a mistake.

There's this story (thanks for the link Jukka!) of an american enginner (let's call him Mike) working in Japan. Mike was working on the line and while assembling a part in the car he scratched the paint. Influenced by his culture he was afraid of admitting the mistake, so he thought twice before pulling the andon cord (the device that notifies others when there is a problem). After a few seconds of struggling with the dilemma he pulled the cord and waited. The team leader immediately came to the workstation and was able to fix the defect quickly. The line did not stop.
At the end of the day while the daily meeting was going on the team had brief exchange in Japanese that Mike did not understand, but his fear was that they were just criticizing him in Japanese so that he would not feel so bad. He was wrong. Soon after that the team started applauding and looking at Mike, he was confused. When asked, the supervisor clarified: "the team was proud of you admitting the mistake and wanted to express that!".

This is why mistakes should be "admitted" by those who make them, not just "blamed on" the people that made them. Admitting the mistake and wanting to improve based on the learning is the most important part of surfacing the mistakes and "stopping and fixing". A culture that only assigns blame for mistakes will only create a need to hide those mistakes.

Let people admit their mistakes and create a welcoming environment where people actually will be proud of surfacing and fixing their mistakes. Don't just blame, blame kills improvement.

Update: Updated to add link to the story about Toyota.

Admitting mistakes is the first step to learning, not just for you, but also for your team and company

Here is an excellent piece from the blog Evolving excellence about how a worker at Toyota battled his fear of admitting a mistake and was rewarded by his pears and supervisor for not hiding, but rather disclosing the mistake he had done.

Admitting you committed a mistake is a very important part of continuous improvement. The andon cord (a sort of error alarm) should be pulled as soon as an mistake/error/defect is created or found.

Finding mistakes is not a blame game in Lean thinking, it is a key part of finding ways to avoid mistakes altogether through poka-yoke or mistake proofing our work methods!

Behind this willingness to show and learn from mistakes we make are some concepts in the Toyota Product System (TPS):

1. If the student has not learned the professor has not taught.
2. Most mistakes are caused by the situation or the system and not by people's incompetence or willingness to do their best.
3. Respect for people (one of the key pillars of the TPS)
   

These concepts together with other key concepts in TPS allow people to concentrate and focus on continuous improvement and not play the very ineficient and unproductive blame game that mostly impedes learning.


Updated: with a link to the Respect for people principle in Toyota's website.

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