Читать книгу Root Cause Failure Analysis - Trinath Sahoo - Страница 13

Failure and fault are virtually inseparable in households, organizations, and cultures. But the wisdom of learning from failure is much more than from success. Many a time we discover what works well, by finding out what will not work; and “probably he who have never made a mistake never made a discovery.”

Thomas Edison’s associate, Walter S. Mallory, while discussing inventions, once said to him, “Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?” Edison replied, with a smile, “Results! Why, my dear, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”

People see success as positive and failure as negative phenomena. Edison’s quote emphasizes that failure isn’t a bad thing. You can learn and evolve from your past mistakes. But in organizations executives believe that failure is bad. These widely held beliefs are misguided. Understanding of failure’s causes and contexts will help to avoid the blame game and create an atmosphere of learning in the organization. Failure may sometimes considered bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good in organizations. In most companies, the system and procedures required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply. Even the context‐specific learning strategies are not appreciated many times. In many organizations, managers often want to learn from failures to improve future performance. In the process, they and their teams used to devote many hours in after‐action reviews, post‐mortems, etc. But time after time these painstaking efforts led to no real change. The reason: being, managers think about failure in a wrong way.

To be able to learn from our failures, we need to develop a methodology to decode the “teachable moments” hidden within them. We need to find out what exactly those lessons are and how they can improve our chances of future success.