Working yourself out of a job

We sometimes hear that the goal of a certain position is to "work yourself out of a job." If your job is to set up a system, or train people on a new process, or facilitate some kind of sea-change in an organization, the idea is that you will only be successful when they no longer need you: when the "New Normal" has become routine—just regular, old "normal." So long as the organization still needs you, the change isn't complete yet, and the "New Normal" is still new; but this means you haven't done your job. On the other hand once you succeed, there's nothing more to change and you become superfluous. Bye! It's been great working with you!

Is the Quality business like that? Sometimes it feels like there should be something self-limiting about our work. Yes, at a production level someone will always have to do preventive maintenance on the machinery, or calibration of the measuring tools, because these things wear out with use. But how many times to we have to redesign the production system? Once it's up and running, once our widgets are rolling smoothly off the line, do we really have to do it again and again? Or what about the management system? Surely there the case for leaving it alone is even stronger, once we've ironed the wrinkles out. 

Besides, if there's nothing self-limiting about our work, then we run the risk of standards and compliance "eating the world" in Scotlyn's* felicitous phrase—expanding to the point where they drive out value-added production.

Now, I don't support Quality eating the world. (In my discussion with Scotlyn I proposed a "Goldilocks" model for our role.) But neither do I expect us ever to work ourselves out of a job. At the operational level, this is just because randomness means there will always be errors to fix. But at a systems level, this is for two different but related reasons.

One reason is innovation. As long as we sell into competitive markets, competing widget-manufacturers will introduce improvements to steal market share. Then we will have to improve our own widgets—at the very least, by playing catch-up; or, preferably, by leap-frogging their improvements to build something even better. Either way, our production methods will have to change: there will be new materials, new designs, new assembly methods, and the rest.

In time, product innovations will also drive changes to the company organization, and therefore inevitably to the management system. Maybe our early widgets were mechanical, but now we are going to add software: that means we need to hire software engineers, to build a software department, and to implement a software design process. Maybe the latest trend is to advertise widgets on social media: that means we need to hire people who understand social media and keep current with it, resulting in still more changes. And so on. Even if the high-level architecture of our systems remains the same, the details will have to change.

The other reason is that there is no perfect process. Sooner or later, flaws will open up in any process you use; and when they get bad enough, you will have to resolve them. But the improved process you put in place will have flaws of its own. And so on.

You've heard me say this before. But I was discussing it with a friend yesterday, and I actually stopped to ask: "Is that really true? Can we be certain that every process has hidden flaws?"

Of course, she said. Don't be silly. Here, think of it like this: First, the universe is infinite. The Butterfly Effect guarantees that any action—any change, any intervention—will have an infinite chain of consequences. But our minds are finite. So there will always be consequences that we cannot anticipate, and therefore cannot plan or intend. The likelihood that all of those consequences will prove beneficial is vanishingly small. So yes, every time you intervene to make an improvement, that improvement will contain the seeds of new flaws. It might not be worth it to you to address those flaws until later—but they are still there.

So there you have it. Every process has hidden flaws. Every improvement has a shelf-life, after which it will require further intervention and improvement of its own. And those of us who work with Quality systems are not at risk of working ourselves out of a job. 

In other news, today is the Winter Solstice. The calendar year is rapidly winding to a close. For some businesses, this means people have time off to recharge; for others, it means a last-minute flurry of activity to get a few more things done before the New Year. Whichever case describes your situation, I hope the season goes well for you. I'll be here next week, but in the meantime let me wish you a good holiday season and a very happy New Year.

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* Scotlyn is a reader with whom I engaged in a four-part discussion over a year ago, on the relative value of Quality standards, compliance, documentation, and certification, compared to actual production. The series started with this post here.