Why logistics matter

If you are in the business of making and selling things—I mean physical objects, like shoes or handbags or computers or cars—what part of your organization needs Quality? We all know that we are supposed to say "All of it," but in practice where does the attention go? I spent most of my career working with design engineers, so I know there's a lot of Quality attention on design. And many of the basic Quality tools were first developed in the manufacturing environment, so clearly there's a focus on manufacturing. But after you've designed and built the product, what's left? Toss it in a box and call UPS? How hard can that be?

Not so fast.

Last week, on September 9 at about 8:45 am, the container ship Mississippi docked at Pier G of the port of Long Beach, sailing under a Portuguese flag, two weeks after departing from the Yantian port in Shenzhen, China.* Everything seemed fine until the crew started to release the straps holding the containers down. But at that point some of the containers began to slide, crashing into others like a row of dominoes and falling into the water. No injuries were reported at the time, though the next day one worker reported a sprained ankle. But sixty-seven containers fell, into the water or onto the dock.

So far, I have not been able to find any story that identifies a root cause for the failure. But it might have been something very small. I can imagine that one container wasn't aligned quite right, or that a piece of debris kept it from settling snugly into position. Then the containers stacked atop it would have been similarly out of kilter. I'm certain that the port where the ship was loaded has strict procedures to prevent misalignment of containers; but I also know that when the forces are that large—each of these containers weighs from two to four metric tons even when empty—it doesn't take much. The slightest mismatch or error can bring about catastrophic collapse.

And the consequences are out of all proportion to what must have been a small, subtle root cause.** 

• Sixty-seven containers fell into the water or on the deck. Presumably the goods inside those containers—goods bound for retail stores across America—are all ruined. 
• But the ship isn't empty. There are still plenty of other containers on-board, only many of them are now leaning at a funny angle so that they can't be offloaded with the normal equipment. 
• A 500-yard safety zone has been secured around the Mississippi by the Coast Guard, so that other ships don't collide with it, or with any of the floating containers. 
• And Pier G can't be used for any new vessels as long as the Mississippi is docked there. How long will that be? Officials say it could take weeks to finish clearing up the site. So this accident has a follow-on effect on the operation of all Long Beach Harbor.

Just for perspective, Long Beach Harbor is one of the nation's busiest. Forty percent of all shipping containers that arrive in the United States travel through either Long Beach or the immediately adjacent port of Los Angeles (in San Pedro). Disrupting its scheduled operations even partially will trigger new delays on and on, far downstream.

So yes, Quality matters just as much for your logistics as for any other part of the operation—especially now, when supply chains reach around the world. After all, the products you make won't do much good if you can't get them to your customers. And even tiny errors can cost you dearly.

YouTube has multiple videos with news of the disaster. Here's one, as an example:  

__________

* I used the following news articles as source material for this post:

• Cargo containers toppled off ship in Long Beach port | AP News
• Clean up efforts continue at Port of Long Beach after cargo containers fell into water | FOX 11 Los Angeles
• Dozens of cargo containers tumble off vessel at Port of Long Beach - Los Angeles Times
• More than 60 shipping containers fall off cargo ship into water at Port of Long Beach - ABC7 Los Angeles
• Unified Command Responds to Fallen Containers at the Port of Long Beach - Port of Long Beach

** I say the cause "must have been" small because otherwise somebody would have caught it and corrected it!

            

Quality when you have no choices

Last week I argued that Quality has a role in determining the attitude management should take towards workers in the organization; because if management doesn't offer the rank-and-file such simple considerations as respect, truth, transparency, and justice, the organizational machinery is going to break down. In that sense, I said that showing your people respect and justice are just a form of preventive maintenance.

Was I wrong?

I got a reply telling me I was wrong. Specifically, this reader argued that sometimes people are trapped and can't walk away. She reminded me that I have written before about monopoly situations (like public utilities) where competition is absent, and that in such cases customer care often takes a back seat. 

As an aside, it is clear to everyone how these two cases are the same?

Under a monopoly, one party (the seller) provides a good, often a necessity (like gas, electricity, or water). So long as he continues to provide it, he can charge more or less whatever price he wants and can offer more or less whatever level of service he chooses. People who need the good in question will continue to buy from him because there are no alternatives.

By the same token, if membership in some organization offers benefits that some people can't do without—or if an employer hires people who can't afford to quit—those people will stick with the organization on (more or less) whatever terms the organization chooses to offer, because there are no alternatives.

The full comment introduces other examples as well, ranging from slaveholding to contracts with teaser rates. But in all cases the topology of the power relations is the same, even if the magnitudes are very different. 

Anyway my critic concluded—with respect to the discussion of ASQ's current controversies that started this whole thread—that "if there is a benefit to membership that’s (a) independent of the local programs, and (b) unavailable elsewhere, it seems to me that ASQ leadership can do whatever they darn like with your dues, and you members just have to lump it."

"We don't care. We don't have to."

It's a logical argument. We've already discussed that if the lines are too long when you go to renew your driver's license, you can't just patronize a competitor instead; so, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is usually a line. If a public utility messes up your service order, you may not have a lot of recourse short of contacting the regulatory entity that oversees them. And everyone remembers Lily Tomlin's famous line as Ernestine the telephone operator—even people who aren't old enough to remember Ernestine herself: "We don't care. We don't have to." (Ironically, she was spoofing the phone company, which is no longer a monopoly.)*

As for ASQ, whose management controversies, as I say, started this whole thread, there does seem to be a sense in some quarters that the membership are responsible to the management and not vice versa.

• On the one hand, there are regular exhortations from ASQ management encouraging the local sections to find new ways to attract and retain members.
• On the other hand, as noted in an earlier post, headquarters has cut off all the regular remittances of member dues to the local sections (notwithstanding that people are sensitive to loss).
• Nor was there discussion or consultation with the section leadership in advance of this decision (notwithstanding that people are sensitive to slights).
• Nor has there been any public discussion of these controversies inside ASQ. In fact, just last week there was an update to the Community Guidelines for the myASQ discussion forums, forbidding discussion of ASQ's Board of Directors or their decisions.** Nominally the update was to "ensure myASQ remains a welcoming, helpful space focused on our shared professional interests." But concretely that means, among other new provisions, that "Community members shall refrain from using myASQ for activities related to the ASQ Board of Directors or other Society elections, including posting discussions, blogs, and direct messages, unless explicitly authorized in writing." It is not clear to me whether ASQ hopes to keep members from finding out about the controversies, or just wants to push discussion to other locations. (There is extensive discussion on LinkedIn, for instance.) Either way, these developments have all taken place notwithstanding that people can judge independently of how you want them to.

So on the face of it, it does look like there is some point to my critic's argument.

Yes, but no

But I think "on the face of it" is the key qualifier. In general, exploitative monopolies can succeed in the short run, but they fail in the long run. Unless they offer benefits that are worth the cost, in the long run people figure out how to make other arrangements.

My critic talked about slavery. I am no expert in the economics of slaveholding, and I will leave any discussion to those who are. But if we look at a situation that was similar in some respects—I'm thinking of mandatory collective labor in the old Soviet Union—everyone knows that the private or black market economy was far more productive than the official, collective economy.*** It's true that most people couldn't run away. But they were often unmotivated. We've discussed before that the deepest source of Quality is love. For that very reason, though, if you don't care about what you are doing then your work will be no good. It will be at best transactional: Do this to get that. Pretty soon that becomes Do as little of this as you can get away with to get that. If everyone else is doing the same thing, the whole enterprise becomes a house of cards. The joke in the Soviet Union ran, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

Think about it for a couple of minutes and you can come up with any number of other examples. It is true that sometimes the obstacle posed by this or that monopoly is very large. It may seem insuperable. But sooner or later, someone will find a way around it, if the monopoly doesn't fall apart first (like the Soviet Union) from its own internal inefficiencies. The only reason Christopher Columbus tried to reach Asia by sailing west was that the people who controlled the overland route were charging too much for spices.

What about ASQ? The society sells educational materials related to Quality, and it offers certification in the various Quality disciplines. These goods are professionally valuable to anyone in the field. In the terms posed by my critic above, they are "(a) independent of the local programs, and (b) unavailable elsewhere"—at least today. But strictly speaking you don't have to be a member to buy them. Members get a discount on classes and certifications, but non-members can buy them too. So is membership worth it? That's a personal decision, but it does give you the chance to make personal and professional connections with other members. And for some forty thousand people worldwide the answer is plainly Yes.

On the other hand, membership has been dropping. ASQ does not formally advertise membership totals, but Google estimates the following numbers overall:

• In the 1990’s: 136,000 members
• In the early 2000s: 100,000 members
• In 2010: 80,000 members
• In 2020: 52,456 members
• In 2024: 40,000+ members

Was this decline caused by the controversies over ASQ management? There is no way to know. All we can say is that it is consistent with what we might expect if members were unhappy with the direction the society's management had taken, but did not think they had the means to change it. But there could be any number of other causes as well. And, as Quality professionals, we know better than to jump to conclusions.

In the end, I stand by my argument that Quality matters in management. Yes, it is always possible for someone to mistreat his employees in the short run and still get some kind of results. But in the long run, such a system will get brittle and sluggish and fall apart. It's the same thing in the market: in the short term, a fast-talking shyster might fleece a few people out of their cash by selling them the Brooklyn Bridge, or gold-painted rocks. But it never lasts. 

__________

* Yes, this counts as "foreshadowing."

** By a remarkable coincidence, the update came shortly after I published this blog post here.

*** "Collective farmers were allowed to cultivate small plots of land and sell surplus produce in private markets. These private plots, though only about 3% of all farmland, produced a quarter of the country's agricultural output." See this article, "How Did the Soviet Economic System Affect Consumer Goods?" by Andrew Ancheta, Investopedia, September 09, 2023.     

      

The Seven Quality Management Principles (Quality Magazine)

Last week, Quality Magazine published my article, "The Seven Quality Management Principles." It's their article now so I won't post the text of it here, but you can find it by following the link. I hope you find it useful! 

Quality in management

Last week, I raised the question whether Quality has anything to say about how an organization manages its people and resources internally. To ground the discussion in a concrete example, I referenced a dispute that is currently under way inside the American Society for Quality (ASQ) about funding and budgetary priorities; but honestly I could have picked any number of other companies instead. There's nothing special about the ASQ controversy. From my point of view, really, there were only two benefits to writing about this example: first, I'm a member of ASQ so I happen to know about it (because the topic is unfolding around me in real time); and second, the critical details are already available in public so I could discuss them without violating anyone's confidentiality. (If you check last week's article, you will find footnotes with URL links for all of the substantive data.)

Remember the real question

On the other hand, it's never very useful just to write that "XYZ Corp. did a bad thing." What are the rest of us supposed to do with that? The useful thing is to write information that we can take back to improve our own work. And that brings us back to the original question: Does Quality have anything to say about how an organization manages its people and resources internally?

Last week I took the wrong approach, by checking what ISO 9000:2015 says in the Quality Management Principles. Oh, the information in there is sound enough! But it's all just recommendations, and it's mostly stuff we've heard before. So it's easy to imagine someone in an organization's management saying: 

Look, I believe in providing Quality to our customers. But when it comes to all that talk about "internal transparency" and "treating your employees with respect," I just don't have the time. I want to Ship Product and Make Money; and all that touchy-feely stuff about employee relations and being a Nice Guy—that's all a luxury. Get to work and get your job done. End of story!

Is he wrong?

Getting to work is fine, but he's wrong to call human relations a luxury. But ISO 9000 isn't the best place to see it. Let's back up and remember what Quality is about.

The Quality perspective

Quality means getting what you want, but there are a lot of ways to do that. Critically, Quality is not built in the abstract from a set of axioms or natural laws: there's no set of rules that unfailingly give you Quality. If anything, Quality is more like a giant Lessons Learned exercise, where we cobble together useful techniques by analyzing one failure after another and figuring out what it takes to make sure those failures never happen again. But since there are many different kinds of failures, there are many different Quality techniques—so many that it can be hard to summarize them all.

Still, there are general points that they all have in common. One of them is that if you want some assembly (like a tractor or a stamping machine) to continue to work well, you have to understand the components that go into it and how they are assembled. What kinds of failures are normal for these components? Does this material rust or corrode? Does that material bend or warp? Do these gears need regular cleaning and oiling, or is it better to leave them alone? All of these are normal questions that any Quality Technician responsible for a large machine would consider on a daily basis.

And here is the critical point. The organization itself is a kind of large machine, and its components are human beings! Quality requires that we understand the failure modes of our machines, to prevent breakdowns. Therefore Quality also requires that we understand the failure modes of our fellow human beings, to prevent organizational dysfunction. 

Failure modes

What do we know about human beings, that relates to their possible failure modes in organizations? We know a lot, and there's no way I can summarize it all in a single blog post. But let me list a few facts that I hope we can agree on.

• People are capable of free will.
• People are capable of independent judgement.
• People are capable of rational thought.
• People work together naturally in groups.
• People want to feel respected, and are sensitive to slights. (See research on disrespect, e.g. here.)
• People are, on the whole, more fearful of loss than covetous of gain. (See, e.g., the research on Loss aversion.)

Already, even these six points entail consequences for the management of any organization.

• Because people have free will, they must (at some level) want to be part of an organization, or they will simply walk away. (I discuss this point in more detail in this post back in the spring.)
• Because people have independent judgement, they choose whether to stay with your organization based on their own criteria, and not yours. In fact, different members of the organization might have different criteria from each other.
• Because people are capable of rational thought, you can give them reasons to stay with your organization and expect them to listen. But the reasons you give them should make sense. Also, because people can see with their own eyes, the reasons you give them should match what they can see for themselves—i.e., the reasons should be true. If you give your people reasons that are visibly false, the risk is that they will stop believing you even if you later tell the truth. Also, as I have discussed before, the easiest way to make people think that something is the case is to make sure it really is the case.
• 
  Because people work together naturally in groups—Aristotle called us "πολιτικὰ ζῷα" or "political animals" [Politics 1.1253a]—your people probably want to work for you, by default. And people regularly accept some kind of authority over their work, without chafing at it. But they will not accept just whatever authority you feel like exercising. While a willingness to work together is natural, so is the deep-seated expectation of justice. It is true that people sometimes disagree around the edges about what constitutes justice. But nobody who has a choice will remain part of a community without it.
• Because people are sensitive to loss, be careful before you take things away from them. Of course sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes there are good reasons. But in that case, it is important to counter-balance the loss by giving them something else in exchange. At the very least, you have to explain what you are doing and why. This shows them respect (and people want respect); it also offers them the truth (and people want the truth).

Notice what this means. I have not said one word about Being a Nice Guy. But a small collection of known facts about human behavior (and human failure modes) has already shown us that—if we want to prevent the organizational machine from breaking down—management has got to offer the rank and file respect, truth, transparency, and justice.

This isn't soft-heartedness or soft-headedness. This is just preventive maintenance. And preventive maintenance is one of the fundamental Quality disciplines.

If you are interested, I can use next week's post to review how ASQ has handled its current controversy, in light of these points. Let me know what you think.       

       

Does Quality require shared sacrifice?

We usually think about Quality as one aspect of an organization's interactions with its customers. To the extent that we discuss internal behavior, we usually talk about behavior that has an effect on the customer experience: error-proofing, for example; or calibration; or lessons learned.

But does Quality have anything to say about budget management? What would that mean? Let me start with an example.

Once upon a time, I worked for a company that had several offices across the United States. And we hit hard times. (Since most of my career was in tech, I got pretty familiar over the years with the alternation of boom and bust.) To help us weather those hard times, an announcement came out one day that all of us in the rank-and-file were going to be put on 80% salary. We were told explicitly, "Just work four days a week, because that's all we can pay you for."

But that was only half the message. In the same announcement, we learned that:

• the Regional President had cut his own compensation to ZERO for the duration of the emergency. No salary, no bonus. Nothing.
• the rest of Senior Management got to keep their salaries, but their bonuses had been cut for the year. (And for people at that level, the bonuses represented a large fraction of their total compensation.)

In other words: however hard the austerity measures were going to pinch us, they were going to pinch Senior Management too. The message was clear that we were all in this together. So everybody pitched in, nobody grumbled, and after a while things turned around so we could go back to normal.

It's a great story, and the best part is that it really happened. But of course stories like this aren't exactly common. And I found myself reflecting on it as I considered some recent news from the Board of Directors of ASQ (American Society for Quality).

ASQ and hard times

In principle, ASQ is a volunteer organization. That is, there are a number of administrative roles at Headquarters (and perhaps other places) but the bulk of the work is carried out by unpaid volunteers. 

The Society is divided into geographically-based Sections, so that people who live in a common area can get together, get to know each other, and do things in common. The idea is that social interaction can be useful professionally, but also it's just a nice thing to do.

There are also annual membership dues. These dues cover the overall Society activities, and a fraction of each member's dues goes to that member's Section to help pay for local Section activities.

The fraction of annual dues allocated to a member's local Section is sometimes adjusted, but lately has been hovering right around 6.5%. (That's six-and-a-half percent, not sixty-five.) The remaining 94+% goes to the central organization.

But not this year. The money is normally disbursed quarterly. According to the "Member Unit Financial Management and Reporting" policy approved 2021-11-12, clause 5.1(g), "Dues allocations will be paid quarterly during the year and as soon as practical after the start of each quarter but not later than 30 days after the start of the quarter." In fact, though, Q1 2025 came and went with no sign of the quarterly disbursements. Finally on April 16, we received a communication from the Board of Directors that the Q1 dues allocations would not be distributed.* The explanation was that all our dues allocations had been invested in the stock market; and with the start of a new Administration in Washington DC, the stock market was behaving erratically.

Then on August 4, the Board of Directors announced that they won't distribute any dues to the local Sections for Q2 or Q3 either.** This time the explanation was that they simply couldn't afford to make the payments. ASQ's deficits are too high, and the budget is stretched too thin.

Where's the money going instead? 

The Board announcement explained that ASQ is now rolling out a members-only AI tool called Quincy, "offering members 24/7 access to expert insights, tailored recommendations, and ASQ’s extensive content library at your fingertips." (I guess the Board hasn't been following the recent news about how likely AI is to hallucinate answers to technical questions.) 

Also they've been putting a lot more money into the members' website, "which recently received the Community of the Year award from Higher Logic." [I had to look up who Higher Logic is, but I guess this is a big deal for people who know.]

And of course there are the administrative salaries. The Board announcement told us in tones of alarm that over the last three years distributions to the local Sections worldwide had totalled some $850,000 per year. That sounds like a lot of money. 

• But in 2022, Catherine Jordan (ASQ's outgoing CEO) took home $539,594 in total compensation; while Siddhartha Bhatnagar (the incoming CEO) took home $306,784.*** (Overall total for 2022: $846,378.) 
• In 2023, the numbers were a little more modest: Bhatnagar's total compensation had risen to $415,573, while Jordan's had dropped to only $325,110.**** (Overall total for 2023: $740,683.)

I have no more recent information. But if someone asked me where ASQ could find an extra seven- or eight-hundred thousand dollars a year to keep supporting the local Sections, ... gosh, I think about my experience with that earlier employer (where the CEO cut his own compensation to zero) and the arithmetic looks simple and compelling.

Of course, maybe the Board already had the same idea. Maybe our CEO is currently serving for a dollar a year, or less. I don't remember seeing an announcement, but I might have missed it.

So I asked. I emailed ASQ Component Relations a week ago, asking about any announcement on the subject. Just this morning I finally got a reply that said "ASQ does not share information regarding staffing and/or staff compensation." I wish I were surprised.  

In their defense

I had better clarify a couple of points that make this situation different from the one I started with.

Because ASQ is (largely) a volunteer organization, the dues allocations which have been stopped did not constitute anyone's personal salary. Nobody was relying on this money to pay groceries or rent. 

Many Sections had built up savings over the years. Those with no savings who needed money for an event were encouraged to ask their Regional Director for a special emergency allocation.

And Sections are allowed to raise money on their own (within certain limits). There's nothing to stop a Section from offering a dinner event and then selling tickets to cover it. 

What about Quality?    

With all that said, what does this have to do with Quality? Even if we assume the worst about the current state of ASQ executive pay, does the Quality discipline have anything to say about it?

Yes, but it's indirect. In ISO 9001:2015, pretty much the only clause with any relevance at all is 5.1.1(e) which requires: "Top management shall demonstrate leadership ... by ensuring that the resources needed for the quality management system are available." (ASQ management can probably argue they have done that, by telling us to use our savings and offering special allocations where needed.)

ISO 9000:2015 has a little more to say. I'm thinking of the seven Quality Management Principles that we discussed last spring, particularly the principles of Leadership and Engagement of people.

Recommended actions under the heading of Leadership include (clause 2.3.2.4):

• create and sustain shared values, fairness and ethical models for behaviour at all levels of the organization;
• establish a culture of trust and integrity; ...
• ensure that leaders at all levels are positive examples to people in the organization. [All emphasis is mine.]

Recommended actions under the heading of Engagement of people include (clause 2.3.3.4):

• communicate with people to promote understanding of the importance of their individual contribution; 
• promote collaboration throughout the organization; ...
• conduct surveys to assess people’s satisfaction, communicate the results and take appropriate actions.

These are suggestions, not requirements. And for the most part they are written so generally that it is hard to tell what actions satisfy them. (The very last point about surveys can be objectively assessed, but the others are a lot less solid.) Nonetheless, I think they all point to establishing a kind of common interest between leaders and led, a sense that we are all in the same boat. It may in fact not be possible to describe this kind of common interest strictly in terms that can be supported by objective evidence, but I want to say that most of us know it when we see it—and that most of the time we probably agree with each other's assessments (positive or negative).*****  

Using that kind of criterion, the company that I described at the beginning of this post had clearly implemented the Quality principles of Leadership and Engagement of people. For ASQ, perhaps the best we can say is that an affirmative answer to the same question is not obvious without more data.  

What do you think?

Since the formal standards are so vague, what do you think? 

• Does a commitment to Quality require shared sacrifice? 
• When hard times pinch, should top management make it a point to be visibly squeezed as hard as the rank and file? 
• Why does it matter, or why does it not? 
• Finally, what do you wish I had said in this essay, that I failed to say?

Leave me your remarks in the comments.

__________

* See, e.g., this LinkedIn post.  

** See, e.g., this LinkedIn post.

*** Source: ASQ's 2022 IRS form 990, publicized by Dan Burrows in this LinkedIn post. Of course these numbers don't count salaries for other positions, or any other administrative expenses.  

**** Source: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer website. Again, these numbers don't count salaries for other positions, or any other administrative expenses.    

***** Even back in the Middle Ages, the justification for compensating kings and nobles and knights so much better than peasants was always that when danger threatened, the kings and nobles and knights put themselves at risk to protect their people.   

      

"How can we save the polar bears?"

A month ago—almost two, now that I check—I wrote about Kyle Chambers of Texas Quality Assurance, and how he and I came away with totally different understandings when we read the ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group Guidance on: Auditing Climate Change issues in ISO 9001. Kyle summarized his perspective in a podcast with Caleb Adcock. It's a good podcast, and I suggest you go listen to it if you haven't yet.

My earlier post explained why Kyle and I read the document so differently, but in the course of the podcast he and Caleb raised a number of other topics they didn't have time to explore. For example, at about 19:28 they ask,

"What about the company who says 'We have only 100 employees, so how can we save the polar bears?'"

This is a really good question, and it gets to the heart of ISO 9001's new requirement about climate change. 

What does the requirement say?

The first important point is to recognize that the climate change requirement comes in clause 4.1, so it relates to determining the context of your organization. It never says you have to take this or that concrete action to address climate effects. The full text of the requirement is simply: "The organization shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue."

To be clear, there is a lot hidden behind that simple statement. If you decide that climate change is a relevant issue for your organization, then ISO 9001 asks you to do something about it. If you say it's relevant and then take no action, you'll have a lot of explaining to do in your next audit.

On the other hand, that requirement is also common sense. The key word is "relevant." If an issue is relevant to your business, that's not the same as saying it's important. "Relevant" means that the issue affects how you do business in some way, that you have to make a change (positive or negative). 

For example, let's say that you sell hot dogs off the pier, and suddenly you learn that a rogue asteroid is going to destroy the Earth in 30 minutes. That asteroid is obviously important. But there is probably nothing you can do to stop it, so there's no point in making any changes to your business in the next half hour. The asteroid is important but not relevant. 

Therefore, if you decide that climate change is a relevant issue for your organization, that means that you have already determined you need to take some kind of action. If you need to take action, you'll do it with or without ISO 9001. So do what you have to do. Then document it for the auditor, and you should be fine. On the other hand, if climate change makes literally no difference to how you conduct business, then that means climate change is not relevant for your organization. That doesn't mean that you are denying climate change.* It's just a technical evaluation about how you do your work. 

What's a small company to DO? 

Fine, but what is a small company to do? How can a small company save the polar bears?

Well, mostly you probably can't. (If you know a small company that makes VOOM or other magical compounds, they might be an exception.) But the key is to go back and think about whether there's anything else you might have to change.

Here's an example:

I know a small company in the Pacific Northwest. They are in an urban area, but all around them are forests. And every summer, for as long as anyone can remember, they've had forest fires. Forest fires generate smoke, so the air quality turns bad. And the company has a few key employees who suffer from impaired breathing for one reason or another. So whenever there's a forest fire, a few employees call in saying they can't come to work.

Things have been like this as long as anyone can remember, and the company has always planned their employee allocations on the assumption that the bad air from forest fires will last three or four days each summer. But in the last couple of years—no one has exactly kept track of the dates, but it seems like a recent development—forest fire season each summer has stretched from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. As a result, the company has had to rethink all their summer staffing, to account for the longer stretches when certain people are unavailable.

Is this the result of climate change? Probably. At least it might be. But honestly, who cares? What is unquestionable is that the worsening air quality is a documented fact, and that it has forced the company to make changes in their staffing plans. This particular company is not certified to ISO 9001. But if they were, I would advise them to document these staffing changes as their response to the requirement that they determine whether climate change is a relevant issue for them.

If you are a small company, think what this example might mean for you. All your details will be different, of course. But look for any points where you find you have to change how you work, in order to account for changes outside you. Those are the points most likely to be relevant. Then do what you have to do.

Most of the time it should be that simple.

__________

* It is not my purpose here to take any position in the public and political debates about climate change itself, because the Quality business has intelligent people on both sides of that divide. My only point at the moment is that arguing whether climate change is real is a totally different question from arguing whether it is formally relevant to this or that specific business.      

Poka-yoke, or error-proofing

A few days ago, a friend of mine had a minor surgery. (He's recovering just fine.) One of the interesting parts of the preparation, though, was that the surgical team asked him to mark on himself where they were supposed to operate.

Wait, what? Isn't that something they should already know before they get this far?

This is a stock photo and not my friend.
But you get the idea. 

Well yes, sure. But think about it. One of the worst possible mistakes on the surgical table—short of losing the patient altogether, I mean—is the risk of operating on the wrong part of the body. And while it's very rare, nonetheless it has happened: you can google stories of people who went in to have their left leg operated on, and the surgeon operated on the right leg instead. The easiest way to prevent that kind of mistake is to ask the patient—who presumably knows where it hurts—to take a big blue marker and put a circle or an arrow on the spot that needs attention. It's easy to do, and it's just one more line of defense against error.

In fact, error-proofing (sometimes described using the Japanese term poka yoke, or ポカヨケ) is a fundamental Quality method. If you can make an error impossible (or very unlikely) then you save all the time and expense of having to fix it later. And of course in the case of a surgical error, "time and expense" doesn't begin to cover it. 

So how do you error-proof a process? There are almost as many answers as there are processes. But consider the process of cutting wooden rods or metal poles to a fixed length. In principle you could ask the cutter to measure each rod one at a time, and then cut it. This approach is slow, and it also introduces a lot of chance for error: every time the cutter measures a new pole, the measurement is plus-or-minus a certain amount. At the end of the shift, there's a good chance that no two poles are the same length. But you can error-proof the operation by giving your cutter a jig or fixture to seat the poles in. Then if he cuts across the top of the fixture, the poles will all be the same length.

You can go one step farther. Use a table saw with a rip fence. Then you can align every pole exactly the same. Depending on the exact nature of what you are cutting, you may even be able to cut several at once.

By extension, you can think of a lot of safety-guards on machinery as error-proofing devices. What else is a hand-guard, after all, than a device to prevent you from committing the error of reaching your hand inside the equipment while the gears are turning? The simplest hand-guard does exactly that. A more elaborate form is designed so that the machine cannot operate unless the guard is in place: this prevents you not only from reaching your hand into the gears, but from removing the hand-guard and trying to operate the machine without it. And overriding or defeating a machine's safety equipment is another kind of error.

One of the earliest works
describing double-entry
bookkeeping

In an entirely different vein, consider the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the late Middle Ages. Double-entry bookkeeping requires that every transaction has to be entered into two different accounts. 

For example, if a business takes out a bank loan for $10,000, recording the transaction in the bank's books would require a DEBIT of $10,000 to an asset account called "Loan Receivable", as well as a CREDIT of $10,000 to an asset account called "Cash".*

Strictly speaking double-entry bookkeeping is an error-detection tool rather than an error-prevention tool, because the sum of all credits to all accounts must always equal the sum of all debits from all accounts. If these two sums ever fail to match, there is an error somewhere. But the difference between error-detection and error-prevention is more terminological than real. If you detect an error soon enough, you correct it before it has time to compound into larger errors farther along in the process. 

In cases where the cost of error is smaller, the methods for error-proofing are correspondingly less formal. Another friend works in retail. Sometimes customers call in saying, "I was there yesterday looking at the products against the far wall, and I want to buy the one on the left. Is it still there? Can you set it aside for me, and I'll pick it up later?" Of course nobody knows which one was "on the left" back when the customer was in the store, because products might have been rearranged since then. But it's easy enough for a clerk to walk over to the far wall, take a picture, and text it to the customer. "Is this the one you want? Great. It'll be waiting by the register when you come in." The potential risk in case of error is not as great as in surgery, but it's a simple way to double-check and it makes the customer happy.

And that, of course, is the point.

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* Quoted from Wikipedia, "Double-entry bookkeeping."