This month I want to highlight a blog post, Quality and effort, by Seth Godin. This short post describes a case study of how work is error-prone, regardless of our best efforts, and how mechanisms solve this problem. As Jeff Bezos famously said: good intentions don’t work, mechanisms do. Seth’s example brings a non-Amazon flavor to the mechanisms discussion and reminds us to continue searching for durable ways to avoid errors using mechanisms.

https://seths.blog/2018/11/quality-and-effort

“Years ago, I created a trivia game for Prodigy. The first batch of 1,000 questions was 97% perfect. Which is fine, until you realize that this meant that 30 questions had an error. And every error ruined the experience for the user. The second batch, we tried extra hard. Really hard. Our backs were against the wall and we couldn’t afford any errors. Our effort paid off in a 50% decrease in errors. We were down to 1.5%. Alas, that’s still 15 game breakers.

Then, I got smart and I changed the system…”