Dr. John Sullivan

Unless you have been living off the planet Earth, you have probably already read or heard about several mechanical failures in Toyota automobiles that led the auto maker famous for quality to recall nearly nine million cars worldwide. In addition, poor handling of the issue in the public eye has damaged the automaker’s brand reputation and caused sales to decline to their lowest point in more than a decade.

This think piece wasn’t written to inform you further about the mechanical failures, but rather to reflect on the following premise:

Toyota’s current predicament is a result of poorly designed practices and weak execution on the part of the human resource department!

To Find the Root Cause, You Must Look Beyond Gas Pedals

The mechanical issues plaguing eight Toyota models are not the result of human resource professionals assuming product design roles and producing faulty accelerator pedals and onboard computers, but anyone who has studied failure analysis knows that the breaking point of a product or service is seldom the underlying or root cause of the failure. Using the sinking of the Titanic as an example, the damage caused by the hull colliding with the iceberg ultimately sank the ship, but the collision was the result of a series of poor decisions to travel too fast given weather conditions. While hull design flaw contributed to catastrophe, the root cause of the problem was human error.