Applying the Swiss Cheese Metaphor

Before you take a bite or melt it for fondue, the iconic Emmental cheese can be sliced up and used to identify and mitigate gaps in your digital transformation initiatives.

The holes that appear in Emmental occur as part of the cheese making process. When sliced, the holes are often large enough to put a finger through.

For this exercise, let’s suppose we have 10 slices of this holey cheese.

Pick up a slice and look at it. The holes are obvious. A single slice might have a quarter of its area as holes.

Pick up another slice and place it on top of the first one. Some of the holes have disappeared. Others have gotten smaller.

Pick up a third slice and place it on top of the first two. The holes might be entirely gone or are significantly smaller.

Each slice of cheese represents a layer of due diligence or redundancy. For each additional layer, the gaps in your organization’s people, processes, or systems are reduced.

This also provides a healthy balance to the obsession over edge cases, exceptions, and over-optimization. While we could have just piled up 10 slices of cheese from the start, it would be wasteful; those slices could be used elsewhere.

TLDR: Think about slices Swiss cheese the next time you’re collecting requirements, designing a solution, or mitigating risks for your program.