Must Try Harder? Time for That Skywriting Font Again

Whenever I hear supervisors warning workers to pay more attention or to be sure not to forget anything, I cannot help thinking that the workers are being asked to carry out operations as if they possessed divine infallibility.  Rather than that approach, we should recognise that people are, after all, only human and as such, they will, on rare occasions, inadvertently forget things.  It is more effective to incorporate a checklist - i.e., a poke-yoke - into the operation so that if a worker forgets something, the device will signal that fact, thereby preventing defects from occuring.  This, I think, is the quickest road leading to attainment of zero defects.

Shigeo Shingo - Zero Quality Control: Source Inspection and the Poka-yoke System
 

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