Be Passionately
Curious

DON’T LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE.

Whether it’s a critical failure or hardly a blip on the radar, everything that goes wrong can be prevented from happening again.

A countermeasure is one way of preventing an issue from recurring. It prompts you to come up with a new way you’ll do things from now on, in response to experiencing a failure or identifying an issue.

Your countermeasures won’t always work, but if implementing countermeasures becomes routine for you and your team, you can tweak it or replace it with a new one until the problem is a thing of the past.

For example, if you have a pool in your backyard, you may have had an experience with a broken drinking  glass by the pool. Hopefully that was all, or maybe the liner got cut by a piece of the broken glass, or worse, someone cut their foot on it. No matter how big or small the incident was, there is an opportunity to prevent it from happening again. You could insist everyone wears shoes, even in the pool, to prevent someone else from getting cut on a piece of broken glass. Okay, not a great example. But it might be someone’s first idea that gets a bit of a laugh that you can build on. Maybe no glass in the pool, or go entirely to non-breakable cups outside. The trick will be training everyone to follow the new countermeasure. You might consider a trigger, or reorganising your inventory to make it the most convenient option when you are going to enjoy the pool next time.

What to do:

❶ Identify an issue or experience you don’t want to reoccur and can do something about it.
❷ Identify the root cause of the problem by asking the Five Whys, or how you can change the scenario to take the chance of the issue out of the equation.
❸ Document the countermeasure in a way that ensures it will be implemented.
❹ Try it out, to test if it solves the problem and can be easily adopted by others.
❺ If it doesn’t meet your needs, try building on the countermeasure or trying something else.
❻ Once it is determined to be a sustainable solution, adjust any systems, processes, or standard operating procedures to bake it into the way you do things.