Avoid Hazardous Design Flaws

Although Chinese manufacturing sites produced many of the toys that have been recalled in recent years for safety flaws, the vast majority of those flaws came not from China but from companies in the United States and other developed nations. Problems with lead paint (which is a manufacturing flaw) aside, most errors that lead to recalls—not just of toys but of all kinds of consumer goods—are design mistakes. As such, they are the responsibility of the companies that dream up the products in the first place. And these mistakes are highly preventable: Our study of U.S. toy recalls indicates that companies can do a much better job of learning to avoid them. The trick is to treat potential errors just as seriously as the ones that have already been made and to learn from both types. Even companies that have never been responsible for harmful product flaws should be diligent about prevention because recalls can happen to any consumer-product maker. It’s understandable that China has figured prominently in the recent public discussion of toy recalls. After all, about 80% of the toys recalled in the United States in 2006 were manufactured there. But 68% of those 25 recalls were due to design flaws. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission maintains a public list of the top consumer hazards and reasons for recalls. Flawed design—sharp edges, long strings, and small detachable parts, for example—has been the cause of three-quarters of all U.S. toy recalls since 1988. What’s more, the same causes repeat year after year, even as the number of toys that have been taken off the market because of safety concerns has steadily increased. Our research, which entailed a systematic study of some 600 U.S. toy recalls from 1988 through 2007, along with interviews of design engineers, manufacturing executives, and consumer advocates, suggests several steps companies can take to reduce design flaws. First, firms should establish a learning culture in which employees feel safe reporting their concerns about design flaws and in which mistakes are not ignored. Such a culture begins with managers simply being receptive to employees’ ideas and criticisms. Companies should also engage in reactive learning: Once a product flaw is discovered, the firm should examine and improve the systems and processes that contributed to it. In addition, companies should engage in the four major types of proactive learning: Study competitors’ recalls, overall recall trends, issues leading to recalls, regulators’ comments, and even medical journals, which sometimes report health problems resulting from product use or misuse. A decade before the first recall in 2006 involving small magnets in toys, for instance, medical studies reported children rupturing their intestines after swallowing such items. Even after that recall, other companies, presumably unaware of the problem, continued to produce toys containing magnets. Listen to design and test engineers, whose concerns are often downplayed or overlooked in the excitement of taking a new product to market. Graco, for example, produced a cradle in 1989 with nothing to prevent babies from sliding into a corner and suffocating, despite engineers’ warnings, according to Marla Felcher’s It’s No Accident. After several infant deaths, Graco recalled all 160,000 of the units sold. Test effectively for safety issues. Too many toy companies rely on live humans to test product appeal but not safety features. While dummies are clearly appropriate in crash-testing car seats and the like, companies can spot potential dangers by having people use many products in realistic settings. At the least, such tests would guide companies in providing clearer instructions and warnings. Track customer feedback to look for patterns that might reveal product flaws. In September 2007, one million Simplicity cribs were recalled because their drop rails detached and created a gap in which children could get stuck and asphyxiated. More than three years before that, however, several customers had alerted the company to the issue, but to no effect, according to a Chicago Tribune investigation. Doing all this properly requires that companies buck the trend of downsizing design and testing departments. It also requires that teams be set up to monitor the vast amount of useful information out there, from recall data to customer complaints. And it requires that these teams be coordinated at the highest organizational level—by the executives with responsibility for looking, unflinchingly, at the big picture.

Avoid Hazardous Design Flaws

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