by Mike Hoban

BY MIKE HOBAN

This story ran on nwitimes.com on Saturday, January 28, 2006 12:03 AM CST

An employee in one of the auto plants I'm working with recently got a little excitable about being asked to aim for being defect-free in her job on the line. "C'mon, we aren't robots! It's unreasonable to expect us not to make a few mistakes every day. We're only human!"

And while she was right -- people are "human," and few of us get through the work day without making a single error, whether we are a waiter, a manager or, yes, even a consultant -- errors in the workplace can have a huge impact on consumers, patients, employees and business owners.

Consider 99.9 percent defect-free quality. That means 1 error in 1,000, whether you are building a house, running lab tests or writing software. That sounds like a mighty high standard and seems close to flawless performance. Yet, at a 99.9 percent "quality" level:

-- We would have no electricity for 10 minutes each week;

-- 2.8 million phone calls in the U.S. would reach the wrong number every day;

-- 810 commercial airline flights would crash every month;

-- Our heart would miss 32,000 beats each year;

-- 107 incorrect medical procedures would be performed every day;

-- We'd have 43 minutes of unsafe drinking water coming out of our faucets each month;

-- 76 newborn babies each month in the U.S. would be given to the wrong parents.

You get the picture. Most of us depend on people and processes and equipment to get it right the first time. And in many cases, that happens. For the first 10 months of 2005, for instance, there were almost 8.5 million commercial flights in this country and not a single fatal accident.

On the other hand, it's estimated that almost 100,000 Americans die each year from medical errors, and not much progress has been made since that startling statistic was communicated in 2000.

While airplane and medical safety are certainly examples of high stakes for defect-free performance, we all experience day-to-day examples of defects, that while not life threatening can certainly be annoying, like the rattle in your new car, or the letter that gets delivered to the wrong address.

Many businesses have started "Six Sigma" quality programs, with six sigma being a statistical term for 3.4 defects per million. In the early '90s, some folks at Motorola are said to have tried unsuccessfully to apply the principle and set of tools to making a "six sigma" blueberry muffin. In the end, it just wasn't worth the effort.

Defects don't usually occur because someone is lazy or doesn't care about good quality. It's more complicated than that. But excellent quality does start with employees and bosses who are committed to doing it right the first time for their customers, their patients, their clients.

That auto plant employee thought her work was "good enough." But "good enough" is almost never really good enough.