The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

  • Home
  • Blog
    • People
    • Data
    • Process
    • Wild Cards
    • Index
  • Podcast
  • Book

Quality Control Doesn’t Work (and how to fix it)

12 January, 2013 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Here is a bold statement, “inspection doesn’t work“; (literally bold).  Yet every organisation I have ever worked for uses and pays for quality controllers.  They can’t all be wrong can they?  What makes me think I am so right? Maybe, if you read this I will convince you: The shadow illusion. Or perhaps this: Fooling […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: error proofing, human nature, quality control, vigilance decrement, wasted intellect

Does the Small Stuff Matter?

1 December, 2012 by James Lawther 3 Comments

How you set your stall out matters.  Even the small things make a huge difference to what your customers think and the way they act.  The design critic Donald Norman made the point beautifully in his book The Design of Everyday Things discussing domestic cookers… Are the controls and gas rings arranged like this:   […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: error proofing, service design, tools to do the job

The Problem With Technology

24 October, 2012 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Alarm Clock

I’m on holiday.  Two weeks in southwest France.  Glorious autumnal weather, misty mornings, bright sunny days and trees with leaves of every shade from burnt copper to liquid gold (very poetic if a little formulaic, sorry). Of course to get here involved a little trauma; no pain no gain.  I had to leave home at […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: complexity, error proofing, form follows function, graphical user interface, interactive voice response, less is more, web site design

Blame Culture: More Dangerous Than You’d Think

10 September, 2012 by James Lawther 7 Comments

Blame Culture

In January 2001, 18-year-old Wayne Jowett died whilst receiving treatment for Leukaemia at the Queens Medical Centre, in my home city, Nottingham. The chemotherapy consisted of two drugs: Cytosine, a drug that is injected directly into the spinal fluid and Vincristine, a drug that is injected into the patient’s blood. A tragic accident The doctor […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: accident prevention, blame, error proofing, medicine, swiss cheese model

Process Design and Human Nature

30 June, 2012 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Mothers were dying In 1840’s Vienna they were dying of “childbed fever”.  In one hospital the death rate was alarming, roughly 1 in 10 mothers perished after childbirth, some months this statistic climbed to a horrific  30%. A young doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, working in the maternity hospital noticed that in a neighbouring hospital death rates were a far […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: accident prevention, error proofing, human nature, medicine, reinforcing behaviour, service design

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • …
  • 11
  • Next Page »

Explore

accountability assumptions beliefs best practice blame bureaucracy capability clarity command and control communication complexity continuous improvement cost saving culture customer focus data is not information decisions employee performance measures empowerment error proofing fessing up gemba human nature incentives information technology innovation key performance indicators learning management style measurement motivation performance management poor service process control purpose reinforcing behaviour service design silo management systems thinking targets teamwork test and learn trust video waste

Receive Posts by e-Mail

Get the next post delivered straight to your inbox

Creative Commons

This information from The Squawk Point is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons Licence
Customer Experience Update

Try This:

  • Should You Punish Mistakes?

  • Glory Lasts Forever

  • The Tiger That Isn’t by Blastland and Dilnot — Book Review

  • New Here

Connect

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • YouTube
  • Cookies
  • Contact Me

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in