Making Corrections Versus Making Speed

When you perform an action slower, you have more time to make little corrections to get the action right. We have all experienced this. The same holds true for processes, too. The slower an organization performs a process, the more time it has to make corrections to get the process right.

During this weekend's rowing practice, my crew made a significant strides in our ability to row together. For the longest time, we have struggled to keep the boat balanced while we rowed. This interfered with our ability to stay together. The faster we rowed, in fact, the harder time we had rowing in sync. For weeks, we could row in sync no faster than 22 strokes per minute (spm). As soon as we increased our rate to 24 strokes a minute, we fell apart, and our oars would move out of time so that we looked more like an octopus than a crew. We have recently been making changes to our individual rowing technique to correct our balance. We have practiced these adjustments at a low rating of 16 to 20 strokes per minute. This gave us the opportunity to concentrate on what we were doing (for me, it was not dropping my hands in between strokes).

On our Sunday row, with good weather and an energetic crew, our boat captain put us to the test. We performed a series of drills to test how fast we could row using our new found balance. We would row hard one minute at a specified rate, then rest one minute, then start again rowing hard at a higher rate. We started out at 22 strokes per minute, which was well within our comfort level. Then we tried 24 strokes per minute, which is where we had been falling apart. We stayed in sync and rowed well. Then we tried 26 spm, we still held it together After another minute of rest, we bumped it up to 28, then 30. We rowed a full minute 36% faster than we had ever rowed as a crew before. We increased our speed once more to 32 spm. Suddenly, I saw the oar handle of the guy in front of my flying toward my face – he had “caught a crab” and lost his oar. He leaned back, I leaned back, and l lost my own oar. At 32 strokes per minute, there is no time to make any corrections or to recover (I have, in fact, recovered from “catching a crab” at 22 spm, but I have no chance at 32 spm).

Despite losing grip on our oars at 32 spm, the practice was a rousing success. Losing the oars got me thinking about speed and the ability to recover. As I said in the beginning, processes work this way, too. When you perform a process slowly, your team has time to make adjustments and corrections. When you work a process quickly, you have to get it right or risk disaster.

When starting a new process that involves a lot of human touch or input, it is wise to set up a checking process – a quality assurance process – to correct mistakes and set up a feedback loop to your employees. These checkers prevent errors from impacting your customers, or at least mitigating the impact of the error. The weakness in using checkers to correct mistakes is that it takes time to complete the checking process (in my rowing story above, we performed internal quality assurance checks by making adjustments to our stroke, which we had the time to concentrate on when we were only rowing 22 spm).. The quality assurance checking places a cap on the maximum speed at which your process can operate.

A solution for overcoming this speed governor is to set up a way of sunsetting your checking process. This means that, at some point, your employees need to be able to perform the task or carry out the process correctly themselves without someone correcting their mistakes. To get to this point, you need a feedback loop in your checking process. It isn't enough that your quality assurance checker corrects the mistake. You must also get the message back to employee of how to correct the error: what was the mistake, discovering why the employee make the mistake, and taking action to correct the mistake.

As part of this feedback loop, you need to identify the root causes of the employee mistake. If the employee didn't know, update your training or retrain the employee. If the employee didn't have a necessary resource, get the resource. If there is a disincentive to the employe doing the process right, remove the disincentive.

Having the employee perform the task right the first time enables you to redeploy your quality assurance checkers to another, newer process. Your employees, performing the task correctly the first time, can now operate at a faster speed. The benefit is that your team is now providing service faster to the customer. The risk in operating at this faster speed, is that when mistakes do occur, they will impact the customer before you can make any corrections. Just like when the oars went flying on our boat when we were rowing 32 strokes per minute, you won't have time to correct the error that your team makes operating at a high speed. The question you have to answer as a leader is, does the higher speed and greater efficiency of the process outweigh the impact of the errors?