The term, poka-yoke (pronounced poh-kah-yoh-keh), may sound vaguely familiar and kind of fun, and even conjure up images of a dance at wedding receptions; however, poka-yoke is a quality tool that has prevented incalculable waste in the manufacturing industry for more than 40 years. Poka-yoke, a Japanese term roughly translated as “mistake proofing,” is the use of a method or device that prevents a mistake from being made or makes the mistake obvious at a glance.

Here’s a good example of poka-yoke in manufacturing: At a Toyota truck plant in India, workers were sometimes forgetting to tighten certain bolts on a vehicle. To prevent this, wrenches were kept in a bucket of brightly colored paint. If a bolt had been missed, it lacked the splash of colored paint, thus reminding the worker to tighten the bolt.

For a completely different example, here’s one of poka-yoke working in healthcare. The error was esophageal intubation—putting a tube into a patient’s stomach which was intended for their lungs. The poka-yoke prevention was this: After the tube has been inserted into the patient, take the bulb in hand, squeeze the bulb then attach the bulb to the end of the tube. If the bulb inflates, the tube is in the lungs, if not, the tube is incorrectly placed in the esophagus.

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