"People Before Process"

A few weeks ago, I had the good luck to attend a webinar called "People Before Process." This webinar was a real treat. It was clear, engaging, and insightful. And it touched on themes that I have discussed before about the role that defined processes play in achieving Quality — in getting what you want.

Before I forget, here are a few particulars. The talk was sponsored by the ASQ's Quality Management Division, and speaker was Jeff Griffiths ("About" page, LinkedIn). If you are a member of ASQ, you can access the video here. But he discusses some of the same concepts in less detail here (no need for an ASQ membership) and you can find him in a number of video conversations here.

Griffiths's fundamental point throughout these talks is that, if you want to get results, there is no substitute for having the right people to get you those results. Starting from that foundation, he then discusses various ways that an organization can plant, nourish, and grow the needed competencies in their people. In the webinar I joined he introduced the Dreyfus model to distinguish multiple levels of skill acquisition, and described client quality problems that his firm had helped resolve specifically through enhancing worker competency rather than by introducing new procedures.

To make the point that people are more important than process, Griffiths proposed an interesting thought experiment. Suppose, he said, you have a table like the one below, and that your organization can fall in one of the four quadrants depending whether your people are strong or weak and whether your processes are strong or weak.

Of course anyone who has a choice wants to be in quadrant II, with strong people and strong processes. Likewise we can all agree that our last choice is to be in quadrant IV. That part is easy. But what if we have to choose between quadrant I and quadrant III? Griffiths argues that we are far better off in quadrant III, because if the people in the organization are fundamentally strong and competent — but they have been saddled with processes that are weak or badly-designed — the people will change the processes into something that works better, and thus will pull the organization in the direction of quadrant II. But if you have weak people — poorly trained, uncaring, or actively disengaged — the best process in the world can't overcome them.

Quadrant III is better because it is temporary: it is always pulling towards II.

Is it true? I think so. Even when an organization is not in control of their own processes*, they can make improvements at a daily level by interpreting the rules so they support the work, applying and enforcing them in ways that are helpful and productive. There is no single instruction for how to do this that fits all cases, no one-size-fits-all formula. Each situation has to be evaluated on its own. But in my experience it is possible.  

When I look at the table, I see something else too, something Griffiths never says explicitly. I bet that quadrant I is always pulling towards quadrant IV. Think about it. Suppose you have an organization with an excellent set of written processes, but where the people are poorly trained for the work and don't understand the processes — or don't care. What happens? That's easy: Scott Adams has made an entire career writing about it in Dilbert. Look at all the jokes made at the expense of ISO 9001: the standard itself is more or less a body of formalized common-sense, but when it is badly implemented or badly-applied it becomes a punchline. And so, bit by bit, processes which were once helpful and robust are misused and misapplied; enforcement is either too strict or too loose (or veers unpredictably between one and the other); the processes thus become obstructions rather than enablers; and the organization drifts from I to IV.

If people are so much more important than process, why do I write about process? The simplest answer is that I write what I know; further, I never said process was irrelevant. Obviously your business processes and the structure of your QMS still make a significant difference to your outcomes. But the overriding theme of this blog is that any QMS has to be applied pragmatically; this means that the system itself can never solve all your problems. The centrality of your people is one huge reason why not. 

If you find yourself wondering what to do about that fact and where to turn next, check out Griffiths's organization and blog. You'll find some advice there. 

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* This can happen in, say, a global company that requires all units to follow the same processes even if they do different work.