In many organizations, like those discussed in this chapter, countless small problems routinely occur, presenting early warning signs that the company's strategy may be falling short and needs to be revisited. Yet these signals are often squandered. Preventing avoidable failure thus starts with encouraging people throughout a company to push back, share data, and actively report on what is really happening in the lab or in the market so as to create a continuous loop of learning and agile execution.

Early signs of gaps between results and plans must be viewed first as data – triggering analysis – before concluding that the gaps are clear and obvious evidence of employee underperformance.

He learned that trust – employees feeling trusted by management – was key, and that time clocks, break bells, and locking inventory in cages inhibited that trust. Chapman describes immediately getting rid of what he calls “trust-destroying and demeaning practices” inappropriate for responsible adults. Listening sessions, as they are called, have since become institutionalized times where team members are asked to speak their minds.

In retrospect, the erosion seen in the engineer’s Champlain Towers South inspection seems a clear signal of imminent collapse—but at the time it was undeniably ambiguous. Ambiguous threats are problematic because of the natural human tendency to downplay them. It’s natural, and more pleasant, to assume nothing’s wrong and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Perhaps you’ve heard of confirmation bias-our tendency to see what we expect, thereby reinforcing an existing belief or prediction by paying attention to confirming data and failing to notice disconfirming data. Becoming more self-aware, as you will see in the next chapter, is one element of learning to notice early warnings—and to actively seeking disconfirming data, just in case. But it’s natural to adopt a wait-and-see attitude instead of getting curious and taking a closer look at some subtle signal of irregularity. The financial industry turned a collective blind eye to the risk of mortgage-backed securities, composed of shaky loans granted to people with neither assets nor income to ensure repayment.

It starts with changing your attitude about false alarms. Recall that any worker in a Toyota factory can pull an Andon Cord to alert a team leader of a possible error before it turns into a production failure. The team leader and team member examine the potential problem, however small, and together either fix or dismiss the threat. If only one of twelve pulls of the Andon Cord stops the assembly line for a genuine problem, you might think the company would be upset by wasting supervisors’ time chasing the eleven false alarms. It turns out that the opposite is true. A pulled Andon Cord that does not identify an actual error is framed as a useful drill. The false alarm is instead experienced as a valuable learning moment, a welcome education on how things go wrong and how to adjust so as to reduce that possibility. This is not a cultural nuance. It’s a practical approach. Every Andon Cord pull is seen as a valuable episode that in the long run saves time and promotes quality.