Confidence is a Dial: Turn It with Evidence, Not Guesswork

We turn late-stage design surprises into a strategic plan by assigning explicit confidence levels, stacking evidence, and using the three-dial model of time, cost, and confidence boost. We show how to work backward from a system test to cheaper steps that drive faster, clearer decisions.

• applying the three dials of time, cost, confidence
• sequencing with the work-backwards strategy
• avoiding overtesting, undertesting, wrong testing
• turning confidence into a team communication tool
• practical next steps to build the confidence muscle

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Transcript

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Welcome And Series Context

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Quality During Design podcast. In Quality During Design, we were talking about engineering aspects of product development. Pierce the Design Fog covers concept development, which is early product development before we've actually designed anything, although we have an idea, but we still need to work with our team to develop that idea into a product. Now here in October, November, December on Substack, we're exploring late stage design failures. So we're through product development, we've already settled on a design, we're verifying and validating it, and we've found a problem or a hiccup, or there's a decision we need to make and we're not that confident in it. This is different than planning things out ahead of time when there's a space of cool heads and calm planning. This is more of an emergency situation. Something unexpected came up and we're trying to address it. In the last episode, I talked about evidence stacking. In October, we identified more about the problem, describing it, and assigning a confidence level. And that gives us a starting point to do other things. It gives us an inkling of what activities we should do based on the problem that we're facing. It also gives us a starting point for stacking evidence. Because if we are 40% confident in something, how do we get to 80% confidence? So we can start looking at stacking evidence to be able to get to the confidence level that we need. Today I want to talk about how we can choose the right sequence of activities to boost our confidence efficiently without wasting time and cost. Let's talk more about it after this brief introduction. Welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love, for less time, less money, and a lot less headache. I'm your host, Diana Deaney. I'm a senior quality engineer with over 20 years in manufacturing and product development and author of Pierce the Design Fog. I help design engineers apply quality and reliability thinking throughout product development, from early concepts through technical execution. Each episode gives you frameworks and tools you can use. Want a little more? Join the Substack for monthly guides, templates, and QA where I help you apply these to your specific projects. Visit qualityderingdesign.com. Let's dive in. Here's the scenario. I described it a little bit in the introduction, but let's get a little more into it. Late stage failure, what do we do about it? We've already assessed the risk of it, meaning we've identified what kind of impact it has and our confidence level in it, and that's helping us to make decisions and what to do. And now we also recognize that

Defining Late-Stage Failures

SPEAKER_00 2:59

we can stack different tests or analysis methods to be able to get us to a more confident decision. Again, these are really useful tools in the heat of the moment. It helps us to avoid those knee-jerk reactions, and it gives us a systematic approach to be able to solve a problem that everybody's panicking about. You can also use this in your planning in the earlier stages of product development. But for now, we have a problem, we already have evidence, we have a low confidence, it's a high impact to our project. What do we do first? At this point in the project, well, let me back up. At any point in the project, we're always considering time and cost. In late stage development, when we're in late stage development with these surprises, these surprises are introducing a time and cost debt. I want you to think about when you're deciding what to do first to improve your confidence level, is to think of three dials. Think of time, cost, and your confidence boost. Every type of test, research, expert consultation that can help you improve your decision. Consider not just the time and cost, but also the confidence boost that you're going to get from it. This kind of goes along with what we talked about last month, assigning a confidence. As engineers, we would do well to get better at assigning confidence in some of our decisions, and then be able to back that up with the reasons why we're assigning that type of confidence level, whether it's our uncertainty, whether it's the level of impact, what is leading us

The Three Dials: Time, Cost, Confidence

SPEAKER_00 4:45

to that uncertainty. And then we can also do that when we're choosing activities in order to boost our confidence. Really think about how that activity is going to be adding confidence to your decision and name the confidence, name the confidence level, assign it a value. This forces you to be strategic about what you're doing. For example, a literature search is low cost and low time, and it might give you a moderate boost in your confidence. Compared to a system level test, which is going to cost a lot, perhaps take a lot of time, and would give you an extremely big confidence boost. Which one should you do? Should you do both? Should you do both at the same time? Should you skip the literature search and only focus on the system level test? It depends. We need to make a decision. And we can use the time cost and confidence boost to help us make a decision. Here's a strategy that you can use when you're facing this kind of decision. Use the work backwards strategy. You can start with the most difficult, expensive endpoint, which could be your system testing, but then walk backwards from that to find cheaper preliminary steps that build toward it. If your options are literature standards, consultation, analysis, or simulation, component testing, and then system level testing, maybe don't just jump to system level testing. And maybe don't just do them all at once trying to fast track your decision. Think backwards from what you think you might need to these earlier problem solving methodologies, like the component testing or the analysis and simulation. Always consider those three dials: time, cost, and confidence boost. I know that this concept isn't foreign, and as you're listening to it, it probably sounds pretty obvious because we're engineers, we're trained to be able to work through problems like this, to be able to make decisions. But we can get stuck when we're having these emergencies in focusing on not just the time and cost, but also getting explicit about the confidence boost that whatever analysis is going to give us is going to help us make decisions about what

Work Backwards Strategy

SPEAKER_00 7:10

to do first instead of doing all the things. Really pause and give it an assignment. When you step back and look at it, you may realize that, you know what, a literature search, an expert consultation, this isn't going to help us in this situation. It's only going to give us a 5% boost in total. So we're not going to waste our time doing that. By assigning a confidence boost to your test plans, you're more critically assessing and thinking through what kind of information that you need that you really need to be able to be more confident in your decision. This is the switch that I encourage you to make. Take these natural thought processes that you have toward test design and solving problems and stop and start assigning a confidence level to them. Assign a confidence level to the problem, and then assign a confidence level boost to whatever solution that you have. This is going to not only help you plan out how to react to the situation, it can also help you work with your team to develop a test plan that will actually help you make a decision. And if it ends up being that you really need that component test or that system level test in order to solve this problem, having a confidence boost and using confidence levels will help you articulate the level of impact that this kind of test will have on your decision and on the project as a whole. Combining that all with evidence stacking and acknowledging that there are time and cost constraints that we need to think about, but these other methods aren't going to give us what we need, or they will get us pretty far, and let's start with those. Where you might get stuck is it is difficult to start assigning confidence to things. For one, it's uh it's like a muscle that we need to train with. We need to practice it in order to get good at it. But breaking it apart, like I've shown on Substack, on the posts in October, really help us get far in being able to assign a confidence level, which is why I promote it. And another reason is that we don't want to look like bad engineers or indecisive people. We want to be seen as technically competent and um good at our engineering jobs and at our design. But would you rather work with somebody that was overconfident or somebody that had an honest uncertainty that they communicated with the team? Would you rather have an engineer who's 90% confident but can't explain why? Or an engineer who's 60% confident and articulates exactly what they're uncertain about and what would increase confidence. Most of us would say B. Being strategic with these late-stage design decisions and problems that pop up is going to help us be the engineer who can describe their confidence and articulate what they're uncertain

Avoid Over, Under, And Wrong Testing

SPEAKER_00 10:20

about. When we don't do this, we risk over testing. So wasting months on tests that only move our confidence 2%, or under testing, missing critical unknowns until it's too late and reaches production, or testing the wrong things, meaning we're testing what's easy versus what matters. So the fix for all of this isn't more testing, it's strategic testing. It's understanding the impact and our current confidence level, understanding how we can stack evidence and how each layer of our evidence stacking gives us a confidence boost. And being able to assign what confidence boost that would give us. So what's today's insight to action? Start flexing and using those confidence assigning muscles. Start using it in your planning, your test planning sequences, and start using it when you're reacting to problems and issues that come up later in development. It will help you to make better design decisions. Now from this month, you have the stacking principle, the three-dial model, and the work backwards strategy. If you want the sequence and the case study and ready-to-use templates that save you time and prevent errors, subscribe to the Substack. This is the toolkit you need to implement this framework. Why am I pushing you to Substack and not just describing it here? Because these are not easy concepts to be able to explore in a 10-minute podcast. On Substack, I'm providing more details about it, guidelines, visuals, and examples that help you apply this idea to your work. So visit quality duringdesign.substack.com, or you can get the transcript of this episode and many other podcast episodes at Dinienterprises.com. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.