14. Good People, Broken Systems: Why Root Cause Beats Blame in Your Shop

hey guys welcome back to the manufacturing blueprint today we are talking about something every manufacturing leader has dealt with good people struggling inside of broken systems when a job's late setup takes too long quality issue gets missed or communication breaks down it's easy to point to the person closest to the problem but many times that person is just where the issue showed up And that may not be where the issue started.

So as we get into this episode, one of the things I want to talk about is how often do we have the wrong assumption, right? When something goes wrong in the shop, leaders often assume that someone didn't care, someone didn't listen, someone didn't try hard enough.

Sometimes that's true, but oftentimes good people can be stuck working inside a broken system.

So good people can only perform as consistently as the system around them supports.

That's

right.

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

So when the team struggles finding the root cause.

will help shift the focus away from blaming individuals.

And then we can concentrate on fixing the broken processes.

We got to avoid our natural tendencies to blame a person's character because it's usually the operational or the the environment the situational factors usually that cause the issue and not the not the person

yeah i think i've i've been guilty uh in the past of thinking like okay so we we missed a deadline or we had a quality issue and somebody was being lazy or somebody was being careless and that has probably been accurate at times but you know just because that setup got delayed doesn't mean that somebody was performing slowly you know i think it's really important that we are careful not to confuse our symptoms with our root causes.

And I think you kind of touched on that.

That was really a good point.

Like we've got to, you know, have to dig down, figure out exactly what is going on in the back because it's easy to start pointing fingers.

It's easy to start laying blame on people, but that's not always the case.

So have you ever, you know, been in a situation where it looked like a Once you dug into the problem, you really found out maybe the system had a little bit of a lapse in it.

I know I have.

I think I've seen that everywhere.

In fact, sometimes it's me, right? I'm the problem.

I'm the person who's not performing, but it's the systems, right? And I've seen it at all levels.

There's this famous guy, Edward Deming, I think.

Anyway.

Yeah, Edward

Deming.