When I did my Lean Six Sigma training many years ago, I learned about poka-yoke, usually translated as mistake-proofing. I’ve been thinking about it again recently because, although its roots are in manufacturing, the principle feels just as relevant to the emails, forms, bookings and AI tools we use today.
Shigeo Shingo, who developed the approach, explored it in his book Zero Quality Control. The idea is to build protection into the way a task works, so an error is prevented or caught before it causes a problem. For a small business, a useful starting question is: where are you relying on someone remembering?
Imagine preparing a quote by copying the last one you sent. It saves time, and most of the information is probably reusable, but the previous customer’s address or an old price can easily survive into the new version. You could remind everyone to check more carefully, but a cleaner starting point would be a reusable template with no previous customer’s details and clearly marked spaces for the information that changes.
That doesn’t make the quote mistake-proof, because someone can still enter the wrong details. It does, however, remove one opportunity for an error. Designer Don Norman makes a related argument in his writing about human error: we should redesign systems to fit the people using them, rather than relying on blame and more training when something goes wrong.
There are different levels of protection, and it helps to understand what each one actually does. Take a booking that needs a service address. A reminder to collect it still depends on someone noticing and acting. A check that flags missing addresses before jobs are assigned can catch the omission, provided somebody responds. A booking form that won’t submit while the address field is empty goes further by blocking that particular omission, although it still can’t tell you whether the address entered is correct.
All three can be useful. The important thing is to avoid mistaking a reminder for a guarantee. The same applies to a checklist at a handover: it can help people remember important steps, but it still needs to be used. And making every field compulsory isn’t necessarily the answer either, especially if it frustrates customers or encourages them to enter something made up just to get through.
Before adding another control, it’s worth asking whether you could remove the source of the error altogether. If information is being copied into a second record, could that extra step disappear? Once you’ve simplified what remains, check whether your existing software can provide the protection you need.
AI brings another reason to think this way. It can help you examine a task and identify places where information might be missed, but it can also produce a polished answer containing an incorrect figure. Asking it to flag assumptions may help, but it doesn’t guarantee it will recognise its own errors. Where figures matter, a comparison with the original records and a separate calculation should be part of the task before the output is used.
This week, choose one task where somebody has to remember a small but important detail. Make one change that should make the omission harder to make or easier to spot, then deliberately leave the detail out in a safe test. Does the change stop the omission, flag it, or simply remind someone?
You don’t need to redesign the whole business to learn something useful. That small test can show you whether you’ve made the task more reliable or whether success still rests on somebody remembering to be careful.
Two new ways to make work easier
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If either sounds useful, you can register your interest for updates, early access invitations and details of founding offers when available. Joining the waitlist is free and doesn’t commit you to a purchase.
Until next week,
Rob
Better processes first. Technology where it helps.
eliminAIt Process Partners
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Published from Sydney, Australia by Rob Edgar, trading as eliminAIt Process Partners. Questions or feedback? Reply to this email or contact [email protected].
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