Cashing the Prevention Check: An Executive Guide to Leading an Organization to Prevention

Some argue that life is so complex that things must be expected to go wrong. Yet even simple tasks fail to be done correctly. Invoices contain erroneous information or arrive late. Documents are misfiled or lost. Mail is delivered to the wrong address. Managers fail to communicate with everyone involved in key business transactions. The list seems endless.

Still others argue that the reason things will always go wrong is due to some natural law. Work processes decay, or fall apart, a little at a time, until the outcome of the process is totally unpredictable and must be continuously crutched to keep it going. This natural decay is more easily seen in manufacturing processes, but the tendencies are just as true and unforgiving in service industry processes. The questions are 'Why?" and 'What causes this decay?" Is the fact that things go wrong something people have to accept as inevitable, or is it possible that people can cause work processes to go right instead of wrong?

What is needed is an organizational approach that anticipates and prevents problems rather than an approach that reacts to things after they have already gone wrong. This needed approach is based on prevention rather than fixing. Prevention is not only possible but also quite practical.