ISO haunted house

Next Tuesday is Hallowe'en. 

So in honor of the holiday, here's a quick glimpse into the ISO/ANSI office Hallowe'en party. If you dare ....

All thanks and credit go to Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd. You can find the original of this comic online here.

           

An overlooked Quality skill

Let me continue my line of thought from last week by asking, What skills do you need in your Quality department? Of course there are a whole list of Quality methods that you have to command to be at all effective: auditing, problem-solving, and documentation are high on that list, for example. Depending on the kind of work you do, you may need experts in inspection, or metrology, or statistical process control. And certainly I have argued before in this blog that you need to understand how your system as a whole holds together.

But there's another skill that is often overlooked. Let me tell you another story.

Years ago, I was responsible for the Quality system in a couple different locations, and had to report back to the Home Office. Now the company sat in the high-tech space, and most of the Quality personnel at the Home Office had a scientific or technical or engineering education. It was a point of pride for our whole department to be able to meet the company's engineers on their own ground when tracking down an elusive product defect.

But in one office that I was responsible for, the local Quality representative was a woman I'll call Lee Ann [not her real name] whose background was non-technical. She had a perfectly good grasp of 5-Why methodology, and was a reliable and systematic auditor. But she wasn't an engineer manquée, and never pretended to be. This caused some grumbling back in the Head Office. I even heard people mutter questions like When was I going to get rid of her and replace her with somebody more technical?

In fact there was no way I would have ever traded Lee Ann for someone more technical. I didn't need someone technical in that office. Yes, there was a small engineering presence there; but they were all solid, competent engineers. When product problems surfaced (rarely) they had all the expertise they needed to figure out what was wrong. But most of the personnel in that office were in Service or—especially—Sales. In many companies, Sales acts like The Department That ISO Forgot: yes, ISO 9001 has always had a requirement for Contract Review, but other than that the attitude (all too often) is close to, "Procedures? We don't need no stinking procedures."

So what I needed in that office was someone who could connect with the people in Sales and Service, to make them understand why the Quality system applied to them and to make them feel invested in it. And Lee Ann was a master of relationship-building! One by one she sat down with these people and talked with them informally. She found out what they did, and related their work in a simple way to the Quality requirements that applied to them.  Without making a fuss, she trained them on the system and its rules, in such a way that they were invariably grateful. She made it look easy enough that I'm still to this day not entirely sure how she did it. But she was a marvel, and her special talent was just what that office needed.

My general point is just that we in Quality can't achieve anything without the willing cooperation of all the other functions in the organization. For that reason, relationship-building has to be an essential part of the Quality toolkit.

   

          

"You're having dinner with me!"

A couple of months ago, Rose Duncan posted a list of "10 Tips for Starting in the QHSE Function." It's a good list; by all means check it out. What particularly impressed me is that, besides the business-oriented topics ("Identify key issues," "Align with the organization," and so forth), Rose prioritized some fundamental, relationship-building goals. "Build relationships with everyone" "Ask questions and learn." "Get to know the stakeholders and their perceptions." These topics are easy to overlook for Young Professionals in a Hurry. But they can spell the difference between reasonable success and abject failure.

Years ago I learned this point in the most unforgettable way. Let me set the stage: I was working for an American company that had recently been acquired by a large European one. The Acquiring Company had two American offices (us and one other); we were in different states, and didn't interact much. But my boss—who had been sent out from the Home Office in Europe—was responsible for the Quality function in both. He stayed on the job until both offices got our initial ISO 9001 certifications, and then accepted a promotion into a totally new role. I was selected to take his place, managing the Quality function in both offices. So shortly after my promotion, I took a trip to visit the other office for the first time—just to meet people and let them get to know me.

When I got there, my reception was ... polite but very subdued. Nobody said much, and at first I was left alone a lot. After I asked around, people slowly began to explain that my former boss had made a lot of enemies during the 12 months that he had been driving the ISO 9001 program. Time and again he had gotten into arguments with the people responsible for one function or another, insisting that things had to be done this way and not that way. When anyone tried to push back that they'd been doing it successfully the other way for years, he was implacable: they had to do things a certain way in order to get ISO certification, and ISO certification was a corporate directive, so they could just go argue with the Company President back in the Home Office if they didn't like it!

That was the act I had to follow. No wonder nobody wanted to talk to me.

Then one afternoon a woman came striding up to me and introduced herself as the Customer Service Manager. "Are you the new Quality Manager? The one replacing ——?"

"Yes, I am."

"You're having dinner with me!" It was not a request.

Then she explained that my predecessor had left such a bad impression that she figured the only way she and I could ever work together is if we started off with something pleasant like a nice dinner. Also she was something of a wine specialist, and she knew just the place.

It was a lovely dinner. We talked about a lot of things outside of work. We even began—slowly, gingerly—to talk about work itself. I explained my approach to Quality management: that it has to be pragmatic; that no company ever earned a dime by following a documented process; that Quality just means getting what you want; and that all the formal techniques in the world are just gimmicks to help get you there. I may even have shared some of my thoughts about whether ISO 9001 compliance is really worth it. (This was a long time ago, so I don't remember if I got that far.) 

By the end of the meal we were on the same side. And in the long run I was able to work with that office very successfully for many years.

I'm not sure that many Quality departments would be willing to expense candlelit dinners with good wine in the name of stakeholder engagement.* But one way or another it is critical to meet your stakeholders where they are, and to let them see that you are all on the same side.

__________

* Actually, even though I was the one on travel at that point, she insisted on covering the meal. She argued, just as I remarked above, that the Quality department probably wouldn't cover it. I wasn't sure I understood: "You mean Customer Service will?" She smiled. "Before I was in Customer Service I worked in Sales. I've learned everything there is to know about how to get expense reports through the system." 😀

          

Problem-solving with Marcus Aurelius

There are a lot of special tools that we use in the Quality business to analyze problems and identify causes, but it can be helpful to remember that the core idea is a very old one. It is simply that we can learn from our mistakes if we approach them with calm and curiosity rather than with hatred, anger, or scorn.

In a delightful synchronicity, last week (while I was posting about 5-Why problem-solving) Ryan Holiday of the Daily Stoic posted on this exact topic under the heading, "You Should Ask Yourself This Question When You Mess Up." He wrote, in part: 

Look, we all mess up. We take certain people or clients for granted and a relationship deteriorates. We get distracted and make an unnecessary mistake. We are overwhelmed by a passion or a temper and do something bad.

We’re humans. It happens.

What follows are consequences. The client leaves us. The mistake costs money to repair. An apology turns out to be insufficient.

And what follows consequences is often regret, and sometimes shame. Or, if we are less self-aware, anger and blame.... 

This sort of self-flagellation is not what Stoicism is about. It’s backward looking–the worst, most purposeless kind of personal evaluation. Instead, when we mess up, and when we come face to face with the consequences of our actions, we must ask: What can I learn from this?

Literally, we can ask that to the client who is leaving us (What can I do better next time? What warning signs did I miss?). We can look at our habits and study where we got distracted and made that boneheaded mistake.... 

One way to look at Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is that it is ... admonishments to himself after messing up. He was cruel to someone, and so the next morning he wrote about controlling his anger. He’d been wasting time recently, and so he wrote about the shortness of life.... 

It’s inevitable that you will do wrong. You may even mess something up five minutes after reading this email. What matters... is not the mistakes .... [but] what lessons emerge from the missteps, and how we improve because of them.

I read this and thought, Isn't this just what we've been talking about here, all along?

• "Look, we all mess up." ("'Human error' is not a real root cause [because it's not actionable]. We'll never get rid of 'human error' any more than we can live on a planet without oxygen.") 
• "What follows are consequences." ("The whole difference between success and failure came down to meeting minutes. For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost.")
• "When we mess up ... we must ask: What can I learn from this?" ("It is not going too far to see the whole collection of Quality methods as the output of a huge, ongoing, worldwide Lessons Learned activity.")
• "What matters... is not the mistakes .... [but] how we improve because of them." ("Lying to your auditor is like disabling your fire alarm: sure, the noise won't interrupt you, but wouldn't you rather know if there were a fire?")  

And so on. These examples were the first ones I found, almost at random; I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take long to find others that work just as well or better.

Knowing that the Quality point of view was anticipated by the Stoics two thousand years ago doesn't make it any easier in the moment. When we send a whole shipment of tools to Amsterdam and they all fail out of the box, we still have to put in the hard work to figure out what went wrong. But it can be reassuring to know that someone else has been down this road before. And when we learn that even Marcus Aurelius had trouble holding his temper in a crisis, oddly enough that may help us hold ours.