I continue to find that many are reinventing the wheel with AI workflows. There are many tools and methods that have been around for decades and in some cases over a century for traditional manufacturing that map cleanly to this new era. One of these I keep mentioning is FMEA or failure mode and effects analysis. FMEA is a risk management methodology that allows you to review your designs and processes prior to implementing them. The process is as follows: - List out the sequential steps of your process, design or workflow - List the potential failures modes one by one at each process step. What can go wrong and how - List the potential causes that could result in that failure - Rate the severity (how bad is it if the failure occurs), occurrence (how often does the failure happen or is likely to happen), and detection (how good is your ability to detect that failure when it occurs or before it occurs). A score combining the three is calculated What this does it assign a numerical value to each risk to prioritize attacking them in order of most to least importance. You can fix any gaps and reevaluate the new workflow. All of this is done before shipping anything. If you make a change to the workflow, adjust the FMEA and make sure there are no gaps. I’ve included an image of what one of these typically looks like. Try it out on your workflows. Do you see any gaps? Any failures you didn’t think of before or something that you can build a feature to catch? Let me know what you think below ⬇️

This is a little bit of a rant cause I can’t post these thoughts anywhere else. At least, I’m not ready to get publicly crucified yet, so… I cannot talk to almost anyone I know about ai. They have no idea what’s going on, or about the kind of stuff we do. It’s all doom and gloom. There is something that really bugs me about it, beyond the naivety and half-glass-full mentality. It’s that, gatekeeping does nothing for humanity and is a selfish mentality at its core. So ai has access to lots of data, and artists data. So what? If you’re really good, it doesn’t matter. Great products, great services, great talent all have one thing in common which makes them in-demand. They’re great. And greatness is witnessed by all the people who consume their work. There’s no gatekeeping because it’s literally on display. From Harry Potter to Michael Jordon, Disney to Taylor Swift, Steve Jobs to Crayola Crayons. If no one is trying to copy you, then your work isn’t loud enough. Either because it’s not good enough (yet), or because you’re hiding it away from the world out of fear. Bringing it full circle… Nobody lost money cause I finally had a tool that could do work for me for free. Rather, everyone in my companies will literally make more money because of massively efficient operations. It also means we’ll be able to afford remarkable talent with the extra profits we bring in due to that efficiency. I’m SO glad I have more options to take care of the people I bring into my sphere. One last thought… a little side quest here.. Whenever I ask people about why it isn’t a good thing that robots will be able to farm all the organic food we need at extremely low costs to produce compared to what we have now, no one has a good answer. I used to be of the mindset that really rich people should use their money to fix problems like world hunger. Then I actually looked at the challenge of getting the recipients to use money the way it’s intended, and crunching numbers to see how long they could solve it for, and full stop, it doesn’t work. Complex problems require complex solutions. A billion dollars solves world hunger for how long… a day? A week? A month? And then what?