The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

part for mindless automata, the human equivalent of robots, or the almost 
mindless Deltas and Epsilons of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We 
have already seen that Ford encouraged his workers to identify waste and 
look for ways to improve their jobs, which is hardly consistent with mind-
less automata.
The foundation of Dr. Shigeo Shingo’s poka-yoke (error proofing) is, 
however, the common sense premise that any job that requires worker vig-
ilance to prevent defects will eventually produce defects. Doctors are the 
real world counterparts of the intellectually gifted Alphas of Brave New 
World, but 80 to 85% of all medical mistakes result from the doctor’s need 
to think about anything other than the practice of his or her specialized 
skills and experience. If, for example, the doctor has to worry about mis-
interpretation of a prescription, or about a mix-up in patient test results, 
there will be serious and possibly life-threatening trouble sooner or later. 
This is what Ford means by “reduction of the necessity for thought on the