How failure can drive your site's success

Learning from mistakes has never been more important as European manufacturers looks to get the edge in a competitive global industry says Steve Spear senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Pharma firms call it 'failing fast': the idea that if a product in development is not working out, you're better off canning it an early stage of development before spending a tonne of time and money on it. And increasingly, instilling a culture of continuous learning into manufacturing organisations is an integral part of ensuring development teams are able to quickly discover issues earlier and identify potential solutions. If you're truly trying to create a high-performing manufacturing organisation, you need to teach a group of people who are engaged in highly integrated, highly orchestrated and highly harmonised work how to perform so that collectively they're learning from their successes and mistakes at an accelerated rate. That means incorporating all the layers connecting the shop floor to the production manager right up to the boardroom. If we can teach each element how to discover collectively, they can generate products, services, processes and systems that fit their own context. What we have to do is make sure that we create a good learning environment in the first place. It's a model that has proved successful at a number of industry leading organisations including Toyota and the US Navy's Nuclear Reactor Programme. You must draw attention to failure because only by drawing attention to the disruption, the difficulty or the problem can we discover what we don't know. And only by discovering what we don't know can we convert that into an opportunity for improvement. Such a journey becomes particularly important in a period of economic uncertainty. The need for organisations to focus on execution, identify what's not working for them and their customers, and have the posture, the structure and the dynamics to cope with very rapid improvement, innovation and adaptation is imperative. The stakes are much higher and the slack is much less. As both the technical systems and the organisations that deliver the technology get more complex, the need to be able to discover good solutions as opposed to just designing good solutions has gone up. Very few companies have caught up with that reality, so there's still ample opportunity for most organisations to take advantage." Nurturing a culture of learning and collaboration as a means of driving greater and faster innovation is an issue that will be top of the agenda at the Next Generation Manufacturing Europe Summit 2011, For more information click on the Events icon of WM's site.