Interviewing for flexibility

How do you meet conflicting requirements in your daily work? I don't know any rule of thumb, but it happens all the time so you have to watch for it.

How do you select employees so that they can meet conflicting requirements? How do you build a department that can handle muddled or conflicting inputs and still perform? Now that's an interesting question! And back in the day, I had some experience with it.

Years ago, I ran the documentation group in a small tech startup. On the one hand, we had strict procedures to follow when it was time to release a new design. On the other hand, we came at the very end of the design cycle, so by the time a project got to us it was usually late. It seemed like we never had the time we needed to execute our strict procedures.

In principle I should have pushed back against the organization, and to some extent I did. But I also recognized that this is what life is like in tech startups. To some extent, my department had to adapt to fit the organization, rather than demanding that the organization adapt to us. We had to work together to find a productive middle ground.

So whenever I hired someone new, I leaned into this dynamic during the interview. Over time, I found that one of my most useful questions was: "What do you do when you have to choose between Doing-It-Right and Doing-It-On-Time?" 

I call that a useful question because I got so many wrong answers. In this context, a "wrong" answer means an answer that told me clearly, This candidate will never thrive in this particular environment, so they are not the right match for the job. Keep looking. Among the wrong answers that I got to this question were comments like the following:

• "I ask my manager." Sorry, but you are going to encounter some version of this conflict every week, maybe every day. You have to be able to work it out for yourself.
• "That's never happened to me." I don't know where you worked before, but that condition is a way of life here. I doubt you'll like it.
• "Always do it right. No matter what." My gosh, I wish I could agree with you, really I do. But that's just not possible. Most projects will be late, and we have to work with them somehow. 

Well then, what were the right answers? There actually wasn't a single "right answer" that I was looking for. What I wanted was to listen to a candidate think through the problem. Successful candidates often started by asking me questions. What's the nature of the process hold-up? What's the priority behind the release? Can we change any of the parameters, so that the conflict disappears? Can we change the process, so it doesn't take so long? All of these were answers that gave me some confidence the candidate could make a sound decision in real life.

One of my favorite answers came from a local engineering student at UCSB, who was applying for a part-time internship. His last position had been working on the UCSB grounds crew over the summer, but he wanted a part-time job that aligned better with his studies. And when I asked him about Doing-It-Right versus Doing-It-On-Time, he gave me a concrete example.

Part of his job on the grounds crew was to trim the hedges. Now, UCSB has a large campus, so unless you have an army of hedge-trimmers you can't trim the hedges all at once. You start with this hedge here; but when you finish it and go to trim that hedge over there, the one you just finished starts growing some more and pretty soon it looks ragged again.

For most of the summer that's no big deal. There was a plan for what to trim when, and he cycled through the plan. But at the end of summer, the school holds festivities for the beginning of classes. All the students return; and in many cases, their parents come too. The campus has to look spotless for the parents.

But he just explained that's impossible! What did he do?

The key is that the parents never go all over campus. Throughout the festivities, the parents are pretty much confined to a few specific places. So the priority at the end of summer was to make sure that every line-of-sight from a spot where parents would visit had to look flawless. That priority was absolute, but it represented only a small percentage of the total campus. For all the rest, the crew did the best they could but didn't worry if it was a little ragged around the edges.

The reasoning was solid. The priority was clear. And it was obvious to me that he understood what I was asking. I hired him.  

So yes, you can select your employees for the ability to reason their way through conflicting requirements. Of course, they'll do the very same thing when those conflicting requirements all come from you. 😀 But in the bigger piucture that's really what you want, isn't it? 

           

"There's an app for that!"

Once upon a time, if you called a company because you had a problem with an order, you were transferred to a customer service representative who resolved the problem. But more and more often these days, it seems that you are given an app which lets you resolve the problem yourself. Often, these apps are advertised as a way to bypass the company's bureaucracy, and therefore as a customer benefit. One hears of travelers whose flights have been canceled, and who use the apps to rebook new flights while everyone else is still standing in line at the complaints desk.

So I want to ask: Do these apps represent an advance in product Quality?

They are certainly sold that way. But I think the final answer is, No. No they don't.

Even on its own terms, there is something ambiguous about the benefit provided by an app. On the one hand, yes it is absolutely true that a company's app lets you do things for yourself rather than requiring you to persuade someone else to do them for you. But notice that this power costs you something. Before you can "do for yourself," you have to know what to do, and you have to understand how to do it in the app. 

Solving your own problems

When you talk to a human customer service agent, all you have to understand is your own problem. Then the service agent translates your problem into terms that the company's system understands, and offers you a couple of choices. If you don't understand what those choices are going to mean for you personally, the agent explains. Finally you pick the option that looks least bad, the agent types your choice into the system, and you can go on about your business.

With an app, there is no one to translate and no one to explain. You have to understand not only what you want, but what the company is offering; and you have to be able to shift back and forth easily between the two perspectives. I think this is why apps are so frequently described in terms of air travel. We all know that there are a few people in the world who travel a lot—far more than the rest of us. These people understand the ins and outs of the system, and are ready to benefit by their familiarity; but the whole task is made easier for them because there are so few options on offer. If you find yourself unexpectedly stranded at the Samarkand International Airport, or at the North Pole, pretty much your only option is to rebook on a different flight. Wherever you were originally trying to go, you're not going to change your mind suddenly and decide to stay for a few months in Samarkand [it might be a nice place, but you likely don't have the right visa] or at the North Pole [because it is very cold]. So it is comparatively easy to switch from thinking like a customer to thinking like an airline.

The second job you have to master is to understand how the app itself works. Some are easier, and some are more difficult. Again, with a human agent, you don't have to take on this task. The human agent works with the same system all day, every day, and knows exactly what to do. Confronted with a brand-new app, you don't have that advantage.   

Why do we have apps?

But there is another side to this question. Why do we have customer service apps in the first place? Why are companies investing in them?

It's not because they are trying to be nice.

The motivation, surely, is that customer service apps cost companies less than customer service departments. Whizzbang Corporation can release an app, lay off the corresponding department, and be money ahead.

From the customer's perspective, for the reasons I sketch out above, replacing a human agent with an app often results in reduced levels of service. In this respect, the advent of customer service apps is just one more aspect of the slow tide of product enshittification that I described a few months ago. But in this one case, the introduction of a customer service app is a form of product degradation that can be sold as customer empowerment! There aren't many of those, so it is no surprise that companies are jumping on the bandwagon of this particular one.

What's behind it?

Why do we see such a trend towards product enshittification? Opinions differ. Cory Doctorow, who invented the word, blames it on rent-seeking by the providers of new online platforms. Other people have taken the concept and run with it. I browsed the Internet for references before writing this post, and found an article by someone who insists that global elites are consciously trying to destroy the world. (Maybe I read the piece too quickly and missed a little nuance somewhere, but consider yourself warned.)

For myself, I'd actually rather extend a little charity to the companies caught up in this cycle, even as I deplore the deliberate degradation of their products. John Michael Greer has argued that we are entering a period of prolonged economic contraction; and he has added more recently that enshittification (which he calls "crapification") is one of the normal strategies by which companies caught in an economic contraction try to keep their heads above water. Their costs are going up, and their revenues (measured in real dollars) are going down. Either they go out of business, or they have to cut the budget somewhere. So hamburgers get smaller, houses get flimsier, appliances break in five years instead of fifty, and customer service departments are replaced by apps. It's sad, but it's a much bigger problem than the avarice of a handful of tech executives. 

At the same time, even if the companies had no other choice, rolling out these apps isn't really Quality.

           

Quality out in the open

Over the last couple of weeks I've written about a recent disagreement between me and the organizational hierarchy of ASQ (American Society for Quality), and about what that disagreement can tell us about organizational behavior generally. (See specifically this post and then this one.) The situation has not really improved—not yet, at any rate—and I'll get to that in a minute. But I want to stop first to talk about an important principle that this whole discussion has brought to light.

The principle is transparency. As much as possible, manage your business out in the open. When it comes to Quality in your products or services, manage that out in the open too. (Incidentally, I make this very point with respect to process management in an article I posted just five years ago.)

Obviously this doesn't mean telling your competitors all your trade secrets. It doesn't mean exposing any information that you are legally required to keep confidential. 

But transparency generates trust. If you are open and honest with your employees, or your customers, or the public, then they will be inclined to trust you because they can see that you aren't double-dealing.

By the same token, if you are sly or silent or secretive—if you hide things—you encourage people to distrust you. They will all think, What are you doing that is so bad that you have to hide it from me? And their imaginations will conjure up pictures far worse than anything you are really doing! So you'll do better to own up to whatever it is, rather than let them imagine something horrible.

Transparency and justice

I spent my high school years at the Webb School of California. Like all private schools, it had rules. The students were teenagers, so perhaps it is not surprising that some of them challenged those rules. Once in a while, a student was expelled. 

Stephen and Ann Longley
in the 1970s.

Ongoing disciplinary actions were always kept confidential, of course. But as soon as the boy had left campus, the Headmaster (Stephen Longley, back in those days) addressed the school. Keeping the story simple and trans­parent, he told us what the student had done, and that he had been asked to leave. He was clear and to the point, with no needless detail to muddy the picture.

The impact of this honesty and clarity was enormous. In the first place we all knew that we wouldn't be seeing Fred or Herman around campus any more, and we all knew why. But there was more than that. We knew that Fred or Herman had been removed for violating an objective rule, not because someone took a subjective dislike to him. We understood that if we did the same thing he had done, we would be expelled the same way he was. But we also understood that if we didn't break the rules, we were safe. The objectivity of the rules secured us. And the relentless clarity of the communication promised justice.   

Failure to communicate

Does that mean we should just let it all hang out? Not really, because that is rarely an effective way to communicate. (Note that Stephen Longley's announcements were very focused.)

This is the mistake I made in my most recent exchange with ASQ. In last week's article, I told you that some administrator deleted one of my posts from the myASQ discussion forum on August 6, and then it took them another six days to send me an email explaining why. By the time I got that email (August 12), I was so full-to-bursting with things I wanted to say that I dumped all of it into my reply the same day. But that just meant that my email back to the administrators was full of sound and fury. Perhaps it is not surprising that they set my account to a status where everything I post is automatically queued for moderation. (Most people can post directly with no delay.) I don't know if this status will expire one day, but it was still in place yesterday (August 19). 

What I meant to say ....

Naturally I don't like being on permanent-moderation status, but I recognize that it's partly my own fault for not communicating with ASQ more clearly. But what I meant to tell them was what I am saying here and now, about the virtue of transparency.

The whole disagreement started back when I wrote about some minor mistakes in the roll-out of an updated election procedure. Very bland stuff. Someone in the administration might have felt attacked by the criticism, and in any event asked that it be deleted. The person who wrote me suggested that I take up the issue privately inside the administration.

What I wanted to explain is this:

• If my login doesn't work, that's a personal problem.
• But if a general procedure doesn't work, it already affects everybody.
• That means that people are already talking about it.
• Once people are already talking about it—and they are, today—the only way to silence them is to make the whole thing very public. If you try to suppress the discussion, people will imagine horrible things, far worse than reality.

I failed to make these points because I buried them under a lot of useless bombastic noise. But I am convinced that they are true.

Robert Townsend on secrecy

One of the best management books I have ever read is Robert Townsend's Up the Organization. Find a copy and read it. Here's what he says about secrecy.

Secrecy is totally bad. It defeats the crusade for justice, which doesn't flourish in the dark.

Did you ever ask yourself why there's a private payroll? Or why all wages and salaries aren't posted on the bulletin board? According to the lore of the free-enterprise system money is really a scorecard. So why aren't the scores posted?*

Of course the company would have a revulsion (or a revolution) if everybody had to look squarely at a list showing the salaries of the president and his nephew, who are paid four times what they're worth, and the salaries of Izzy, Derek, and Susie, who are making a third of what they're worth.

In the case of most marketing or new product planning, secrecy is sinister. It defeats your loyal opposition and protects you from your best friends when you need them most. Secrecy implies either:

1. What I'm doing is so horrible I don't dare tell you.
   or
2. I don't trust you (any more).

__________

* I'm not suggesting that you should post salaries. For one thing, it would over-emphasize the importance of money. But you shouldn't tolerate a situation in which you're ashamed to post them. Like you are. 

           

Can you report bad news?

Quality professionals have to report bad news. It's part of the job.

That's why many organizations make Quality report directly to the CEO or General Manager, instead of tucking the department under Operations or Engineering. It's not that Quality's headcount or budget are so large that they have to be managed at that level. The idea is that Quality has to report the true state of things, without the risk that someone will hide the news.

"The widgets coming off Line 2 are defective, and if we ship them we risk a $2-million recall in the next six months."

"The prototype Mark IV Fantabulator still fails five of its fouteen critical tests and leaks radiation all over the user."

"The packaging machine in Logistics is out of alignment again, even though they just fixed it last week."

These are things the organization needs to know, even though they might embarrass someone. And it is Quality's job to speak up.

Or is it?

Last week I wrote about some hiccups recently as ASQ rolled out an updated procedure for electing officers in the geographical Sections. On the whole it wasn't a dramatic topic. Then after I posted the article here, I wrote a notification to post in myASQ, which is ASQ's in-house social media platform. I started with a brief and—I hoped—non-threatening introduction:

Was anybody else as confused as I was by the roll-out of the new procedure for electing Section officers? We heard that there were changes coming, but my Section (at least) didn't get specific information until we had already missed some deadlines. I don't know if anyone else had the same experience. But is there a chance that the organization could do a Lessons Learned analysis on this roll-out, in order to make future ones go better?

I talk about it in a little more detail here:....

Then I gave a link to last week's article. In other words, I tried to keep it as bland and professional as I could, in the hopes of starting some kind of discussion about what went on.

Within fifteen minutes, an administrator deleted my post.

I post a lot on myASQ, and this is the second time I've had a post deleted. The first time was just about a year ago, when I posted an article critical of the Board of Directors. That time, the removed post was a link to this article here; and I discussed its removal very briefly in this one here. In a nutshell, last year's post was taken down ostensibly for violating the myASQ Terms of Service; but in fact it didn't violate the Terms of Service that were current when I posted it. Those Terms were updated 24 hours later, specifically to forbid any discussion of the things I was talking about.*

This time around? I got an email yesterday from ASQ HQ, six days after the post went down, with a partial explanation. The heart of it is a reminder that myASQ is the wrong forum for complaints about procedures that aren't working. The email suggested that I contact this office or that officer instead.

Public or private?

In principle it makes sense to specify that this channel is only for this kind of communication, but in this case I wonder. If I contact an office or an officer, the ensuing discussion will be private. But when the topic is a failed procedure—and a procedure that affects many people—I think the communication really has to be public.

The point is that people are already discussing the issue. When I asked, "Was anybody else as confused as I was?" it was a rhetorical question. I'd already talked to people in other Sections who had the exact same experiences and the exact same questions. So in a sense I was asking my questions on their behalf as well. In my reply to the email from HQ, I tried to make the point that a lot of people in the Society are already whispering in the corners about this very topic. If ASQ came out and addressed it publicly, they would silence a lot of whispering. And they would give members a renewed confidence in ASQ as an organization. It would be a win all the way around.

Of course—I tried to reassure the officer who wrote to me—discussing the issue publicly never means naming names! No one expects the Society to say "It's all the fault of John Jones and Fred Smith." But it is always possible to say "A Member misunderstood the procedure and therefore did X; then an Administrator followed up using the wrong template and did Y. We are currently investigating how to error-proof the process so that it is impossible to make those mistakes again." And, as I say, it would boost confidence to do so.

I don't know if I was persuasive or not. I guess we'll see.

Where do we report bad news?

Ultimately that's the important question: Where do we report bad news?

• We have to report it somewhere, because that's what we Quality professionals do.
• ASQ has urged us for years to channel all our communications into myASQ, so my first guess is that that's where we should report administrative failures like this one. 
• On the other hand, if myASQ is the wrong place to report bad news, then that's fine too—so long as we know what channel to use instead. And for practical reasons, it should be a more-or-less public channel, one that other people can consult. Is there another channel inside ASQ with these features? Or how about LinkedIn? Facebook? The New York Times? 

I'm ready to use any of them, so just let me know. 

__________

* Yes, I downloaded copies of the Terms of Service document—with date stamps—before and after, just to be sure.

           

Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?

Quality professionals have to know at least something about a lot of different fields. 

• We don't have to be logicians, but we have to know enough logic to work through a 5-Why analysis or to build a cause-and-effect diagram. 
• We don't have to be statisticians, but we have to know enough statistics to manage processes with a control sheet, or to sort failures with a Pareto chart. 
• We don't have to be experimental scientists, but it helps if we know something about the design of experiments.

We also have to understand organizational behavior and management. Most of the improvements we identify can't be implemented without the help of other people, generally people who don't report to us. So we have to know when and how to introduce changes so they can slide into place with the least disruption. It helps to develop a feel for the organization we work in, so that our colleagues in other departments are disposed to support us rather than to block us. 

That's why I was so startled at the very casual way I learned that ASQ had recently updated the procedure to elect leadership committees (or "Boards") for local geographical sections.

• I first heard an announcement (with no special urgency) that there would be a training class on the updated procedures on July 15. I was going to be out of town that day, so I made a point to listen to the recording as soon as I got back.
• Sure enough, I listened to the recording on July 23. It outlined a complex new procedure but specified no deadlines.
• That evening there was a general leadership meeting, and someone asked what the deadlines were for the new procedure. No one in the meeting knew, so the organizer took an action to find out and let us know.
• Only the next day, on July 24, did the meeting organizer send us a screenshot that the first deadline for the new procedure had been on July 8—more than two weeks earlier!

The discovery that we were already late caused a little consternation among our regional leadership. Our contact in leadership found and supplied two documents to clear up the confusion. Unfortunately they disagreed. One said to hold elections for two weeks, starting in October, with a slate of candidates compiled in August. The other said to hold elections for four weeks, starting in September, with a slate of candidates compiled in July.

Some time later I tracked down a copy of the procedure document itself. Turns out the new version had been released back in February, and the first deadline for the election process is actually July 1. But the first time anybody was told about it was in a training class two weeks later that didn't specify deadlines. As I say, the notification was very ... relaxed.

OK, you might say, so it was a simple bureaucratic mix-up. No big surprise. These things happen all the time. Why should it matter to you so much?

And my real answer is an emotional one, not a reasoned one. But we're ASQ! We're supposed to know better than that. We're supposed to be better than that!

But are we? On reflection it's not so obvious, for at least two reasons.

First, ASQ is an organization like any other. It has to hire staff, like any other. ASQ's members are Quality profes­sionals, but there is probably no require­ment that the Society's profes­sional staff all spend a certain number of years in the Quality trenches before coming onboard. Such a require­ment would be, at the very least, highly unusual; it would also force ASQ to pay well above market rates for office staff. 

Second, even seasoned Quality professionals sometimes make bone-headed mistakes. I know I have.* What we hope for, when working with Quality professionals, is not that they be perfect, but that they be ready to examine their own mistakes openly and dispas­sionately in order to learn from them. And naturally we hope also that they bring with them the memory of past lessons learned, perhaps in the form of a checklist or procedure, so that they don't have to learn from any particular failure more than once. But to ask that they never fail is simply to ask too much.

Maybe ASQ can carry out a root-cause analysis on the mistakes in this roll-out, and then assign long-term corrective and preventive actions. In other words, maybe ASQ can use the current muddle to improve the process for handling updated procedures. That kind of outcome could turn today's jumble and disorder to advantage. Let us hope.

__________

* Tip of the hat to the memory of the great Graham Chapman, in "The Mouse Problem."     

           

Can a Checklist Replace Your Audit Program?

A couple days ago, Quality Magazine published my article, "Can a Checklist Replace Your Audit Program?" 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 hard times

In last week's post, I remarked on the risk that mismanagement can teach employees not to care about the quality of their work: specifically, if employees are penalized for doing good work, they will quickly learn not to repeat the experience. A reader commented that this outcome doesn't even require active mismanagement; the simple failure to reward good work can do damage by itself. She wrote that the absence of any "consistent opportunity for reward can create a 'well, why bother then?' atmosphere." And of course she's right. I suspect many of us have experienced contemporary examples of exactly this dynamic at one point or other. In further discussion, she gave me a concrete historical example from the history of the British Royal Navy, whose officer corps had become so crowded during the nineteenth century that no further promotions were possible. Nor were there a lot of wars for the Navy to fight, once Napoleon was defeated in 1815. So with no chance for fighting and no hope of promotion, many officers stopped caring about their work and the corps began to rot.  

'What comes next? They become careless of themselves; most of them take to drink, more or less, for that is a habit almost impossible to wholly abstain from, while leading that kind of monotonous life; from that they become despised by their seniors in the service'.... The diary of a seaman in the Leander in the Pacific in 1863-5 notes seven officers court-martialed for drinking, not counting the chief engineer who died of it.*

Not officers, but you get the idea.

But this observation raises a further question. What does reward mean? Are rewards always money? If yes, we have a problem, because no company can count on consistent profitability, year in and year out. One year, somehow, times are going to be tough. One year, somehow, there won't be any extra cash on hand to distribute rewards for even the best service. And it would be painful to think that hard times might destroy the incentive for quality work.**

I have worked for companies that hit hard times, and my experience is that we continued to do good work. But everyone's case is a little different. There were a couple of people who were just there for the paycheck, or who had financial obligations that couldn't wait: they left promptly for greener pastures. And there were a couple who were laid off as the company retrenched. But many of us stuck it out, and continued to do the best we knew how.

If I ask myself Why? I see a number of factors. One is that we had already built up an ésprit de corps from working together in better times, so that none of us wanted to let down our colleagues. We weren't supporting The Company (which is more or less an abtraction), but we were supporting Larry in the next office, and Frank down the hall—people with whom we might bicker about little stuff, but whose work we still respected.

A second factor is that management communicated with us openly, and—so far as we could tell—treated us fairly. They rolled out information in All-Hands Meetings, so that everyone got the same message at the same time. And they let us know, "Here's what we can do for you today; here's what we want to do for you but can't right now; here's how we plan to get there." Knowing that we were all in the same boat made a difference. Knowing that we weren't being played for suckers made us willing to do our part.  

We discussed similar points in this blog last year. Mostly people like working together, so they are willing to cut the company some slack when things go wrong. But people can think for themselves, so they want you to tell them the truth. (And they can usually tell if you are lying!) People need you to give them honesty, respect, and simple justice every single day—which is far more often more than they ask for a raise or a bonus. So if you (as manage­ment) are willing to fulfill your obligations to give your people honesty, respect, and justice—even when you can't back those up with more money—they are generally willing to return the favor by continuing to fulfill their obligations to you. 

Thus can you ask for quality work even in hard times. But only thus!

__________

* From N.A.M. Rodger, The Price of Victory (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2024), p. 75. I thank Terri Williamson for raising the point out of her study of the Royal Navy, and for providing the citation. 

** The point would become even more acute in case the economy as a whole were ever to enter a contraction spiral, because then employees couldn't just jump to a profitable competitor. For explorations of this possibility, see e.g. the research of J.M. Greer, for example here.