This article is written by David E. Elliott, Senior Service Designer, Transport Canada.

  • The problem: Teams often don’t know what aspects of their work are critical to the achievement of the work’s desired outcome.
  • Why it matters: Energy is misallocated (over-invested) into non-critical elements while critical elements remain under-supported.
  • The solution: Collectively as a team identify the Single Point of Failure items in your work and then use this to both prioritise activities and the allocation of resources (time, people, money, etc.)

In the Netflix documentary ‘Unknown – Cosmic Time Machine’ where they explore the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they talk a lot about their list of single point of failure (SPOF) items. This got me thinking, can this concept be helpful outside of traditional engineering?

In your work, do you know your SPOF items?

I’ve used this concept but didn’t know it was a formal tool as I don’t work in nor have been trained in engineering.

The JWST had over 300 single point of failure (SPOF) items. Many I assume are associated with launching an object into space, the others are very specific to the JWST mission. Essentially, they had a series of origami-like unfolding and assembly sequences that had to occur, hundreds of thousands of kilometres from Earth. No one is around to nudge something into place. No rescue mission is possible to replace a broken part given the very distant orbit. No power, no mission. No sun shield, no mission. Misaligned mirrors, no mission.

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Knowing the list of SPOF items helped the team focus and invest in mission-critical elements.

Transferring SPOF to the workplace

This is a valuable concept that I think more of us could make use of when managing projects and more specifically, deciding how we allocate time and resources. Identifying and acknowledging our project’s single point of failure (SPOF) items, the items that if they fail, the project fails, can help us focus on what is critically important. Everyone usually thinks everything is important – we need to be more nuanced.

A definition from Wikipedia:

“A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. SPOFs are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system.”

I think most of us would pick a car with reliable and effective brakes over one that has a nicer seat, but unreliable brakes.

My work predominantly relates to performance improvement and often involves learning interventions (instructional design and facilitation).

With a learning intervention, there are multiple SPOF items. In general, I would identify them as:

  1. LEARNING – Learning must occur.

  2. RETENTION – The learning must be remembered in order for it to be used.

  3. APPLICATION – The learning must be applied, successfully and consistently (one out of ten times is not a successful application of the learning) – this step can also be considered the desired behaviour change.

  4. ALIGNMENT – This new behaviour, produced as a result of the learning, needs to have been correctly aligned with the problem being addressed. If the “solution” or new behaviour doesn't address the problem, the desired future state (problem solved) won’t be achieved. This logical relationship between the problem, the solution (the new behaviour) and the learning required to support the new behaviour all needs to be done in the planning phase as it informs the design.

    Imagine you have a sales problem and you attempt to address it with “sales training”. This will only be effective if the sales problem is a result of poor sales skills. If the problem is price, quality, service, inventory, etc., the lack of alignment with the proposed solution (sales training) and the actual problem (e.g. quality) means that the solution will not generate the desired results – improved sales.

Another common problem encountered is that the final mission outcome is not clear to everyone involved – problem solved / desired future state achieved. Knowing the specific desired future state is essential to creating alignment. Alignment is critical to being able to correctly identify the SPOF items.

Identifying sequences and dependencies

If we were to sequence these learning SPOF items in order:

  1. ALIGNMENT
  2. LEARNING
  3. RETENTION
  4. APPLICATION

Hitting a bulls-eye, the centre of the target, requires alignment. Alignment allows the other efforts to bear fruit. Alignment is the most critical of these four SPOF items.

Effective learning, retention and application of misaligned abilities is all waste. Learning, retention and application are critical and are still SPOF items on their own but they require alignment to be addressed first so that they are correctly informed and designed.

Can you assess your work and identify single or multiple SPOF items? Do you understand the sequence and dependencies? Can this concept help you better focus your time and resources?

Identifying what’s SPOF and what’s non-SPOF

I like to play with analogies. A “successful” car needs an engine, brakes, steering, etc. that work. A broken stereo or a sub-par seat doesn’t stop the car from accomplishing its primary function – transportation. Once we have all the SPOF items identified and rock solid, if there is time and resources available, then we can put additional investment into the non-SPOF items. Investing in non-SPOF items excessively, before the SPOF items are robust, is premature and robs time and resources away from where they should be allocated.

This line of thinking can also help with the focused development of a minimum viable product (MVP), a version of your work that functions and is able to achieve its purpose but likely isn’t as refined as you or your audience may wish. However, it gets the job done.

I think most of us would pick a car with reliable and effective brakes over one that has a nicer seat, but unreliable brakes.

Back to the field of learning experiences and performance improvement. Great graphic design is a non-SPOF item. You don’t want the layout to be incoherent, but decent design isn’t terribly complicated. Investing beyond decent design while SPOF items like meaningful planning (alignment), effective learning design and useful learning transfer support are underattended is poor management of time and resources. If there is a failure in any of the SPOF items (alignment, learning, retention, application), all of the effort applied has been wasted as it has not been positioned to deliver impact (problem solved).

If we focus on what truly matters, the SPOF items, and get them functioning correctly and reliably, I think we are more likely to be successful. I plan to bring this discussion forward and draw team members' attention to identifying the SPOF items so that collectively we can agree on what is critical to enabling mission success.

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