Burn and Scrape
Picture Gordon Ramsay in "Kitchen Nightmares", visiting a struggling diner to help turn it around. As he gets a tour of the premises, the owner explains: "Here's our breakfast station. This is where we toast the bread, and here's where we scrape it."
Ramsay is puzzled: "Scrape?"
"Yeah, you know how toast always has this black, burnt layer? Before we can serve it, we have to scrape that off."
"...well, obviously we have to get rid of the scraping step!"
"Are you crazy? We can't serve burnt toast!"
Here are two quick takeaways:
1. Quality assurance cannot be an afterthought; it must be integrated into the process from the beginning.
2. To simplify a system, consider which components exist solely to address issues that shouldn’t be occurring in the first place.
