Eliminate the Small Errors

Posted September 26th, 2005

Take Care of the Little Things is a country song from the 1960s. It tells of a divorced man telling the new man in his woman’s life to cut the grass, fix the washing machine, and love his sweet baby. It was due to neglect of the little things that he lost the big thing – love.

A Wall Street Journal article on September 13 quotes Dr. Robert Helmreich, a human error expert, who says, ” You can’t eliminate human error, but you can minimize the consequences.” I have studied some of Dr. Helmreich’s papers and writings about crew resource management and aviation safety. The article points out that there is some type of error made in the cockpit of airlines on over 60 % of flights. Most of those errors have no serious consequence. We hear about the serious consequences when an airplane crashes.

When the company I worked with started an operational excellence program, there was little information in our industry. We learned about error management from the aviation, nuclear, aerospace, military, and chemical industries. The key lessons are pay attention to those minute details, recognize and correct small errors quickly, change unsafe practices and behaviors, then communicate the lessons learned to others.

There is zero tolerance for accidents in today’s world, so the target is always zero. That is a tough standard, but a worthy one.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Operational Excellence.