Focus and Quality

Back in January, I wrote that "the deepest source or spring of Quality is love: love for the work or love for the product." But it's not that love is some kind of cartoonish magic power that conquers all effortlessly. Rather, the point was that when you love something—the work or the product—you look deeply at it. And that deep looking is essential for doing a good job.

We all know this in reverse. Nobody can expect to do a good job while constantly distracted. This is why some people resent mobile phones so badly, or social media. It's why some executives declare that they will only open their email during certain hours and not the rest of the time. Matthew McConaughey makes the same point in a video attached to this LinkedIn post from about a month ago.

To be sure, your focus has to be on the work at hand. What you focus on is what you get good at. If you will forgive another LinkedIn reference, this post from last year makes the point that when you do a lot of any kind of work, usually you get better at it. You figure out what to do and what not to do. This is why experienced professionals generally turn out better work than dilettantes or amateurs. We read about exceptions from time to time: everyone has heard that Mozart began composing music when he was four or five years old. But the only reason we read about them is that they are exceptions.

But where in all of this do the familiar Quality tools show up? We all know that the implementation of a Quality Management System means the imposition of uniform procedures: but how do procedures and auditing generate a deep focus on the work?

The short answer is: they don't. No gimmick can make you care about your work. No procedure can make you brilliant or successful.

But the longer answer is: they help. In particular, they can help you focus.

A product design procedure won't guarantee that you design your product well. You need good design skills for that. But it should ensure that you have all the information up front about what you are supposed to be building: is it a fighter jet, a sound system, or a birdhouse? And if you know the requirements up front, you are less likely to be distracted by someone running in from the Marketing Department saying, "Oh, just one more thing ...!" (See also the cartoon at the bottom of this post. I once worked on a large project where nearly every single engineer had a copy of this cartoon over his desk. And yes, there was a reason.)

When something goes wrong in one of your products, a problem-solving tool can't guarantee that you will find it. But each problem-solving tool in the Quality arsenal helps reduce the number of possibilities so that you don't get distracted by irrelevancies:

• A fishbone diagram spurs you to broaden your thinking, so that you consider all possible causes and not just the first one that jumps to mind. 
• An IS / IS-NOT table helps you eliminate the ones that cannot be relevant.
• A Pareto chart points you to the specific areas of investigation that are likely to be most fruitful. 
• Even the overall 8-D structure of a problem-solving effort focuses your work in a way that has been compared to the scientific method.

So no, none of these tools can make you care. None of them can force you to do a good job. But with luck, if applied correctly, they can turn down the ambient noise so you can get back to work in peace and quiet.