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Basic Failure
Basic failures are the wrong kind of wrong. A basic failure is an undesired outcome that is caused by a single factor, usually a human error. You could have a day where there are basic failures all day long. You forget the car keys. You’re late for the dentist appointment. They are usually small and unimportant. Still wasteful, but not all that important. But some basic failures are enormous. Back in August 2020, three Citibank employees accidentally transferred $900 million instead of the appropriate number, which was $8 million, to a client organization. When they tried to get that money back, unfortunately, they were not able to do so. That is a classic example of what I call a basic failure caused by a small but consequential, in this case, human error, that led to an outcome nobody wanted.
Basic failures are unproductive because there’s no new knowledge there. You already had the knowledge you needed to remember to charge your cell phone. You already had the knowledge you needed to get the result that you hoped for. Many basic failures happen because we just weren’t paying attention, or we don’t have the training we need to do something well, or we neglect things like preventative maintenance that lead to a vehicle breakdown on the side of the road. And so you can easily see how these are all things that when we are at our best, we can prevent nearly all of the basic failures in our lives and in our organizations.
Strategies for Individuals
There’s a variety of self-disciplines that help prevent basic failures. Failure-proofing techniques are the kinds of things that you do to just make it much easier to not screw up. So, for example, if you can never find your keys, a failure-proofing technique would be to have a little key hook right by the door and always systematically hang your keys as soon as you walk in the door on that hook. That’s an example of a failure-proofing technique. It helps to be mindful, to pay attention, to do things fully rather than being distracted and thinking about several things at once. So that’s a kind of core habit.
If you’re doing something, especially if you’re doing something where there might be risk or danger, do it with attention. Do it with focus. You can prevent basic failures by ensuring that you have the knowledge that’s available about how to do something. Let’s say you want to make a batch of cookies and you say to yourself, oh, I’m pretty sure I know this recipe by heart. I’ll just go make them; probably a better idea to actually open it up and double check. So in known territory, where there really is a recipe for how to get the result you want, use it, use it carefully.
Strategies for Organizations
In organizations, do everything you can to minimize the occurrence of basic failure. And that includes training programs to help people get the knowledge they need to do the tasks that they’re assigned to do. That includes great teamwork where we can catch and correct each other’s errors when they invariably happen. That includes designing systems and processes so that they’re easier to do. Doing the wrong thing is harder. The failure-proofing kinds of techniques that you could put in place – there’s a great deal you can do to support people in producing excellence rather than basic failures, including making sure they have breaks or they don’t have overly long shifts where fatigue could easily get in the way of doing the right things.