Years ago, I got into a spirited discussion with a colleague about a quality measurement he wanted each production unit to use within all of our manufacturing sites. He wanted a single performance measure that could be trended over time that showed a production unit’s ability to produce a quality product the very first time. He proposed that we would sum into a single value our already derived individual percentages of rejects, rework, and reallocation of our produced product

When conducting investigations, we often allow our assumptions to get in the way of our investigation. We see something that we perceive is obvious and latch on with a biased opinion, failing to observe the other evidence that is part of a new scenario. We see things and default to assume that the failure mode is similar to something we have previously experienced. We share our historically documented mental transcript, sometimes leading the team with the confidence and prest

In the 1950s Solomon Asch conducted a social experiment referred to as the Solomon Asch - Conformity Experiment. It was an experiment to see if an individual would comply with the masses on a decision that was the wrong decision. In a room of eight individuals, seven of which were in on the experiment, each individual vocally compared the length of an individual line to three other lines of different sizes to establish the match. Seven of the individuals had a predetermined s

A statistic I came across the other day indicates that 6.3 billion prescriptions were dispensed in the United States in 2020. Combine that with another statistic indicating that 1.5 million errors occur annually in the United States harming the prescribed individual. That is approximately 1 in 5,000 prescriptions issued per year are wrong. I admit this scared me. I have many friends and family members that if they were given 25 mg of a prescribed drug versus the 50 mg needed,