In talking with a friend of mine this past week, he described how a series of inspections in his department did not go as well as expected.  This surprised him, as it should have.  The pre-inspection audits he had conducted uncovered a few discrepancies, which he expected his team to then correct prior to the inspection.  While his team made the on the spot corrections, they did not put a process into place to prevent the same error from happening again.  And of course, when inspection time came, the same errors were uncovered.

A process is a methodology put into place to ensure a job is done correctly.  Without a process, corrections to errors are made, but are soon forgotten in the stress and activity of day to day operations.

When you find an error, correct it, but also acknowledge what caused the error.  Ask yourself, “what can I do to ensure the same error is not made again?”  The action you do to prevent the error from happening again is a process.  Capture the process, publish and broadcast the process, and then make the process a part of your culture.

I believe the only tragic errors are errors we don’t learn from.  By noting the error and then capturing the process that will prevent the error in future, we set ourselves and our teams up for success.