The Podcast of Failure
18th September 2020
ZMan does his weekly podcast on a subject that most people avoid.
Failure analysis is one of those things that most people do every day, but they don’t think about it that way. Much of what passes for a work in a modern corporation is exception handling, which is just solving the problems that occur when the normal business processes fail in some way. No one calls customer service to tell them that they are happy with the product and have no complaints. Those departments and the people in them exist to figure out what went wrong and remedy it.
At a higher level, smart people making big salaries spend their days trying to understand why complex systems produce unacceptable results. There are people who spend every day studying plane crashes, looking for the cause of the failure. Pretty much every quality control program is just failure analysis. The idea is to measure success against some ambitious standard and then look for the causes as to why the standard is not currently being met.