Poka-yoke is Japanese for “avoid mistakes.” In “Poka-Yoke is Not a Joke” (Harvard Business Review, February 4, 2010), Michael Schrage tells the story of how Shigeo Shingo introduced his idea to Toyota assembly line workers, describing his clever techniques to make production processes “idiot-proof”:

“One of the plant’s employees burst into tears,” Schrage writes. “‘I am not an idiot!’ she cried. A stricken Shingo quickly recanted. He scrapped ‘idiot-proof’ in favor of declaring his initiatives essential to making assembly lines ‘mistake-proof.’”

The spell checkers in document creation software, from word processing to email creation to filling out online forms, “mistake-proof” your writing. They are poka-yoke devices that have saved us all from embarrassment. New luxury cars use technology to stop the car if the driver falls asleep or isn’t paying attention to how close the car in front is getting. That’s poka-yoke. Hospital employees draw an “X” on an arm or leg on which surgery will be performed. Poka-yoke.

Poka-yoke works because we are all idiots, especially when it comes to tasks we repeat so often that we stop paying attention to how we do them. Like writing. Or driving. Or operating, if you’re a surgeon.

In the Process Management category of the Baldrige Criteria, you are asked how you prevent defects, service errors, and rework. Poka-yoke is one way to do that. If you make it almost impossible to screw something up, you will prevent mistakes from happening and improve the quality of the product or service the process produces. As Shingo noted, “Defects arise because errors are made; the two have a cause-and-effect relationship.”

To learn more about poka-yoke, check out this article by John R. Grout and Brian T. Downs: “A Brief Tutorial on Mistake-Proofing, Poka-Yoke, and ZQC.”

To read more about process management, click on these articles:

• 10 Critical Questions: Process Management
• 5 Powerful Process Questions
• Process Management: DMAIC for Everyone
• Lean and Baldrige