Generally, people do what works for them.

In many cases, they may not have had a quality incident as a result of doing their job in an at risk quality way.

This may be true but over time the risks stack up against you.

Heinrich’s Triangle

Heinrich’s triangle although specific for safety related issues suggest that for every 330 unsafe acts, 29 will result in minor injuries and 1 in a Major or lost time incident.

A parallel can be drawn in quality terms that for every 330 at risk quality acts, 29 will result in minor non-conformances / compliance issues and 1 Major product recall/compliance issue.

Having trended such issues in the past the correlation of 300 to 30 to 1 is about right.

Greater the Probability

Overtime the greater number of at risk quality behaviors that you accumulated the greater the probability that minor and eventually major issues will occur.

People behave in an at risk quality Behavior for a number of reasons.

For example:

• When more steps are introduced to a workflow without consideration to adding additional time to complete the steps
• Additional checks added with no additional time to complete them
• Line managers ignoring bad practice
• Increased product demands
• And steps that should be completed in a process are having other negative impacts on the operator and is not understood at the time. The operator stops performing the required steps because of these negative impacts

Generally, the reasons for the at risk quality behavior reveal themselves during the ABCD analysis phase of BBQ.