Adam Sand argues businesses should use data to prevent failures rather than chase marginal gains. He points to examples like a sandwich shop preventing botulism through daily machine cleaning and a roofing company avoiding costly mistakes by focusing on consistent execution over minor optimizations.
And what you're looking for is how to optimize for things not going wrong more so than trying to optimize for things going right. You want to see the speed and accuracy in which people are doing things the right way. When you're looking at a sandwich shop, you're trying to stop people from getting botulism. You're not really too worried about whether the shave of the slice of deli meat was 1 millimeter or 1.5 millimeters thick. That's not useful data analysis. Are we cleaning the machine every day at 7 o' clock and are we cleaning it properly? Because. Because if you control that variable, you control the million dollar lawsuit from happening. You might have a 15% profit fade on your meat, but there's so many little things happening in your roofing business that 15% of any one thing doesn't matter. It's how do you optimize for things not going wrong. And so the speed and accuracy in which you're performing your process consistently makes a bigger difference. Save this video and execute on it later.
