This is what David Nelson wrote:
> I've been intrigued by the couple of notes about failures. Our operaton is
> team based, with low supervisory coverage. Recently we've been disturbed by
> a pattern of errors. The characteristics are:
>
> - Simple, repetitive jobs
> - Done by experienced, competant people who know how to do them right
> - After, the person's self-analysis "I was was on automatic."
>
> We had been working to raise consciousness of this exact sort of risk. In
> spite of that the pattern goes on. Typically we deal with these events as
> a learning experience unless there's evidence of willful disregard, in
> which case disciplinary action may be taken.
>
> Any thoughts on how, without departing from a team based approach, we
> could either reduce erros or increase the energy of people to anticipate &
> prevent them?
>
Here is my response:
We are also facing a similar kind of situation. When you are doing a job
of repetitive nature, errors tend to occur due to oversight, over
confidence, time pressure etc. When the error is located you end up
feeling oh! how could I have missed that.... So we in the team have
decided to leave the processed papers in one distinct tray. The other team
members will just glance through the papers in that tray before they are
really executed. In case of an error the same will be corrected. We tried
this and have noticed that one can locate errors in papers being processed
by other teammembers easily. This does involve some extra time one has to
spend going through papers but definately it has minimised the errors.
-- Affectionately Daisy Patel "Daisy Patel" <DAISYP@anand.nddb.ernet.in>Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>