Debug Your Thinking: A Guide to Elon Musk’s Self-Correction Process
In a Starbase Factory Tour with the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel Elon explained his five step engineering process which he explains he wants everyone at Starbase to implement rigorously:
“The sort of five step process is:
(1) First make your requirements less dumb.
If the requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you.
It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements, because you might not question them enough.
Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.”
(2) Try very hard to delete the part or process.
This is actually very important. If you are not occasionally adding things back in you are not deleting enough.
parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted.
Musk noted that the bias tends to be very strongly toward “let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.”
Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can.
(3) Simplify and optimize the design.
This is step three as the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.
(4) Accelerate cycle time.
Elon says: “You’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”
(5) Automate.
An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed.
If a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate there is no need for in-process testing.
Everyone is wrong sometimes. Work on being less wrong and you’ll get the right results.