The Next Step Knows About the Last

Care does not start with moving slowly. It starts with understanding the chain.

Before acting it helps to picture:

• what will happen immediately afterwards;
• which options it will close off;
• who will use the result;
• whether a mistake can be corrected;
• what data will be needed later;
• whether we are creating a problem for the next person.

A hole is drilled not only where the drill is convenient to hold right now, but with the pipe behind the wall in mind. A spreadsheet is made not only for today’s author but for the person who opens it in a year and sees twelve columns without units.

Deliberate sloppiness rarely saves as much as it promises. It moves the cost further down the process, where fixing it is usually more expensive.

Maximum care is not universal either. A rough mock-up does not need the finish of a production item. A temporary diagram can be simpler than final documentation.

The level of thoroughness is set by the consequences of an error and by how the result will be used.

Work especially carefully where:

• the error is hidden;
• correction is expensive;
• the result gets replicated;
• others rely on it;
• safety is involved;
• the source data will later disappear.

Care is not an aesthetic virtue. It is a way of not leaving traps for the next people in the process, disguised as work already done.

The price of sloppiness is always visible at assembly. A designer puts a fastener where it is convenient to draw, and the fitter later works the wrench in at an angle that does not exist, spending twenty minutes on the joint instead of two. In a production run that is a cost line of its own. Exactly the same in a kitchen: a cook who cleans his station “however it turned out” saves four minutes in the evening and takes fifteen from whoever comes in the morning looking for the knives and wondering why the salt is in a container labelled sugar.

Sloppiness rarely disappears; it changes owner. Usually it passes to someone who took no part in the decision, does not know the reasons for it and can no longer argue with it.