The last large company I was engineering manager at had a corporate culture of avoiding the word “failure”. Unfortunately, this came from the ownership level and therefore complacency and incompetence ran amuck.
After a couple of months of being there, my boss told me that the most significant thing I had done was bring the word “Failure” out into daily discussion. I refused to accept a blip in scrap numbers or equipment failure without investigation, explanation and a response plan. I was not very popular for not believing that these things just happen.
Failure is a seen as a harsh and negative judgement on people or their efforts. But until each failure is acknowledged, the process of root causing it, preventing it through a control and fixing the system that allowed it to go unidentified until it occurred, will not start. That list of activities, which “failure” intiates, sounds like Continuous Improvement. Instead of just have a CI initiative, let the failures that are costing money direct the CI efforts.
