I felt like seeing how many people I could enrage with this one. So i'll be direct. theses systems are absolutely the way to operate. It isn't the systems, it is the implementation. Deming set forth the gospel and industry, in so many ways, has deviated. The deviation keeps us all from our potential on a daily basis. I have identified five areas where I see this as most prevalent. In. an effort to not simply be a drag, I will speak to some solutions.
Your vocabulary is shutting down conversation
The excessive jargon-speak has become a gate-keeping mechanism for companies and young professionals alike. Lean and Six Sigma are amazing tools and have transformed the manufacturing industry. The issue is, without massive inroads to public education and in secondary as well, nobody knows the language. You are going to get exactly nowhere walking into a shop spouting the glossary from the Six-Sigma Green Belt handbook. No. Where. Vocabulary is a good way to hide a lack of understanding. Shiny words can be interpreted as understanding where there is none. Most of the amazing process improvement success stories I write about here happened before I knew who Deming was. One of my favorites is about material handling improvements and it touches something like 10-12 key lean principles.
We fix this by helping our brothers and sisters in business. We help them by getting these tools into the school systems wherever we can. And we simplify them to maximum extent possible.The point of all of this is have as many people capable of process improvement as we can. So let's start with teaching them early. Little kids will work out theory of constraints problems without thinking about it, so perhaps we teach them what they just did? Deming was a huge proponent of knowledge, so let's spread it around.
Management by objective ignores quality and the customer
Management by objective is rampant in these systems as practiced. KPIs everywhere, lack of focus on customer needs vs. quarterly dividends. I'll hit one particularly hard here. I worked at a manufacturer where output was king. We had to meet production metrics. Period. We created schedule pressure when there were problems. We created quota pressure at end of month. We created needless disciplinary actions to hit numbers. Rather than a hard look at why those goals existed, leadership sought to meet a revenue goal without putting in the work to refine the system to make the goal possible. They expended their human capital to meet their near-terms...over and over again.
Deming was correct about building quality and refining the system. Output will come when you have focused on quality. With your people focused on fixing what is broken, they will meet the system needs in time. Now, we cannot ignore the need for purpose here. Your people need to understand we are serving the customer and their expectations. If you can do this, you will get to the numbers you seek. Scalability is always a buzzword we see and it typically means "throw people at it without thought". Another place I worked would just surge with temp agency people when they were busy rather than dig into systems and figure out bottlenecks.
Objective thinking leads to short-term thinking
Short-term goals have become the norm in many organizations. Share-holder actions vs. customer actions. the odd conflict of interest here. I still don't exactly understand the decisions public companies make to screw their customers to reward the owners. I really don't get it. This is all stemming from objectives. Once you are stuck on meeting the quarterlies (money), then soon it becomes "where's my dividend?". I am not suggesting shareholders (owners) should get screwed. I'm suggesting shareholders should understand their benefit comes from leadership who understands the customer and the quality they demand is in charge. It makes exactly zero sense to compromise quality and/or customer expectations for the quarterlies. Better miss on your revenue than pay for it later. If anyone needs to be reminded of what this looks like, go find a Kmart, or a Sears. I'll be here.
Leadership is the cure. Leadership communicating up and down and outside the organization what the purpose is and why quality is the metric. Howard Shultz of Starbucks exemplifies this ideal in his book Onward. A great read, by the way. Leadership, purpose, and customer focus saved Starbucks. The same focus can save other companies too. Better yet, institute leadership now and you are less likely of requiring a savior.
Quality is everyone's job yet we silo it into a department
The "quality professional" as a term is the opposite of the intent of quality. Quality is the concern of everyone in an organization, not just one department. I might get into trouble with this one from my ASQ friends. Don't really care. Deming, a founder of ASQ, was direct about internal collaboration. A large portion of industries would now refer to me as a "quality professional". This term misses the point of what and where quality must be a focus. Everyone in an organization should be well versed in quality principles and some of them should be experts. Leadership should be in the group with some expert knowledge. I will die on this hill specifically due to the numerous organizations where "quality is the bad guy department". Now, this is a leadership failure for certain, yet no one in those quality departments understood how to fix it.
Leadership, collaboration, and pride of workmanship can fix this. You do need a quality group. Make sure your leadership isn't allowing other departments to cede their responsibility to those people. As quality workers, we need to become excellent relationship builders. We need to be the voice of our customer and teach our colleagues why quality is so critical. This takes time, and occasionally you are in an organization with lots of animosity. Put in the work, it is worth your time.
Very, very few CEOs or C-suites are filled with quality people
The lack of leaders originating in quality roles lends to the constancy of large organizations very publicly failing. Boeing comes to mind. There isn't much digging needed to find other examples of this problem. The siloing of quality and the abandonment of leadership responsibility to quality has put us in this situation. Deming, Ohno, and others showed us the way for leadership to be present and own quality. The ridiculous prevalence of accountants in leadership roles without the understanding of where work happens is visible everywhere. I'm not against anyone becoming a leaders, please, please do it right and understand your business from top to bottom.
We fix this when the boards of these companies decide leadership, real leadership, not play-pretend MBA class role playing, is again required. We fix this with finding the right purpose and focusing on quality. We fix this with leaders who see the production floor and are seen on the production floor.
Rant over?
Leadership and quality. The customer determines what quality is and leadership must facilitate delivery. This is true if you have no employees (like me) or 500,000. The customer pays the bills, so everything we are doing must serve them. If we can, in large part, shift focus back this way, and depart from my five points above, we might get things into a better place.
If you enjoyed my ranting and Ould like to hear more, reach out. Consultations are free.
