Transcription
The sort of five-step process. Uh, first, make your requirements less dumb. Your 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, cuz you might not question them enough. Everyone's wrong, no matter who you are, everyone's wrong some of the time. Um, so make your requirements less d. Uh, then, uh, try very hard to delete the part or process. Um, this is actually very important. If you're not, uh, occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough. Right, the the bias tends to be very strongly towards, let's add this part of process step in case we need it. But you can, you can basically make "in case" arguments for so many things. And for a rocket that is trying to be the first fully reusable rocket, there's never been a fully reusable rocket. People don't understand, like, this is like the Holy Grail of rocketry. And so you got to delete the P process step, super important. Um, and and you can't like hedge your bets. Uh, so, uh, that's why the quick, for example, do not fold, fold down, because that's a whole extra mechanism that we don't need. And then also, uh, whatever, if whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department, because, uh, you can't ask the department, you have to ask a person. Uh, and that person who's putting forward the requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement. Otherwise, you can have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with off the cuff, uh, and they don't even have to company anymore. These things are often just way more silly than you'd think.
Okay, so step one, uh, make a requirements less dumb. Step two, delete the part or process step. If you're not adding things back in 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough. Right? Um, and and then, uh, only the the third step is simplify or optimize. The third step, not the first step. Um, the reason it's the third step is cuz it's possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist. Everyone's been trained in in, uh, high school and college to that you got to answer the question, convergent logic. Y, so you can't tell the professor your question is dumb, you'll get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. Y, uh, so everyone's basically, without knowing it, they got like mental straight jacket on. They'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. Right?
And then finally, you get to step four, which is accelerate cycle time. You're moving too slowly, go faster. But don't go faster until you have worked on the other three things first. You can always make things go faster. Um, and then the final step is automate.
Now, I have personally, uh, made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. Literally, I automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted. One example I've talked about before is like the, there were these like five glass mats on top of the Model 3 battery pack that were in between the floor pan and the the battery. Um, and it was one point choking the battery pack production line. And I was like, basically living on the battery pack production line, probly fix the line. It was like choking the entire Model 3 production program. So the the first mistake was I, I like try to fix the automation, like make the robot better. So automating was a mistake. Then accelerating was a mistake. Then optimizing was a mistake. And finally, I said, what the hell are these mats for? Um, and, uh, and I asked the the battery safety team, what are these mats for? Are they for fire protection or something? They said, no, they're for noise and vibration. Then I asked, N V H, noise vibration, hes, team, what's it for? They said, fire safety. So literally, it was like being in a Dober cartoon. Okay, it's like, actually, I feel like I'm in a Dober cartoon quite frequently. So then finally, okay, great. Let's, uh, try a car with the the five glass mats and without. Uh, and they put a microphone in both and and see if you can tell the difference. You cannot. In fact, I was like, which one, which? Um, so we just deleted them and just bypassed this $2 million robot robot sale. It was just a complete pilot offense.