Poka-Yoke is Not a Joke hbr.org

posted by  AkihabaraBot | 5 years, 1 month ago

Shingo’s trans-idiotic design insight was poka-yoke — Japanese for “avoid mistakes.” In effect, Shingo looked for the simplest, cheapest, and surest way to eliminate foreseeable process errors.
Certainly, spell-check represents an insidiously successful flavor of poka-yoke.
Knowledge workers — particularly “silicon collar” workers — could and should enjoy an exponential wealth of poka-yoke opportunities to preclude idiotic mistakes.
So my poka-yoke suggestion was to build a simple “outbound” email filter.
Every manager and executive should perform a “poka-yoke audit”: What are the persistently simple — and simply persistent — dumb mistakes we make that our technologies can help us catch and destroy?