FAQs are a Sign of Failure

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about Lean Manufacturing; it seems to me that most organizations are either unaware of the concepts behind Lean, or they are inconsistent in their application of said ideas. One of the things that really gets me is FAQs.

If one believes in one of the central principles of Lean, that people don't make mistakes, but only expose flaws in process, than an FAQ is less a useful tool an organization provides to help its customers and more a list of the highest visibility and longest outstanding bugs.

While an FAQ might be a reasonable stopgap, a static FAQ is an implicit sign of organizational failure.