Early in my career, I saw a project celebrated for having almost no nonconformance reports.
Months later, during commissioning, the problems came all at once. Wrong cable sizes, missing test records, equipment installed to an outdated revision. None of it had been reported. People had simply fixed what they could and moved on.
That project taught me something I still carry: few open NCs rarely means high quality. Most of the time, it means people stopped reporting. And every issue that goes unreported is a lesson the organization never gets to learn.
Since then, I've tried to do a few things differently:
→ make reporting easy, with a simple form, a short path and no blame for raising an issue
→ treat early NCs as the cheapest ones a project will ever have, because they are caught before they are built into the next step
→ look at trends, not just closed records, because when the same NC shows up on three projects, it's a process problem, not a project problem
A healthy quality system is not the one with the fewest NCs. It's the one where people trust the system enough to report them.