3 Ways to Improve Your Reliability Thinking

3 Ways to Improve Your Reliability Thinking

I often joke that being a reliability engineer makes it difficult to get on an airplane. Yet air travel is by far the safest method of transportation. Maybe I just think about failure too much.

When a project manager views the day’s tasks, she sees timelines, connections, dependencies. When a marketing manager views a product idea, she sees benefits, sales channels, and profits. When a reliability engineer views a prototype, she sees the many ways it can fail.

Underlying how we view the world includes our assumptions, reasoning, and experience. We understand the world around us via the set of filters we use. We form conclusions and make decisions much the same way. Quickly and mostly automatically.

When faced with an important decision, building a plan, or making an important proposal we should deliberately shift from auto-mode to critical-thinking-mode. Question assumptions, reason through logic and diversify thought, done consciously helps us to create our best work.

Question Assumptions

As engineers, we make assumptions in order to solve problems. The homogeneous blending of materials, statistical independence, minimal measurement error, etc. Some…