Should Boeing get certified?

Last week we talked about Boeing's recent quality problems. I made the point then that no Quality Management System can ever prevent all possible failures, but that a good QMS can reduce the incidence of failures dramatically. In addition, a QMS can tell you how to react when a problem occurs, to mitigate or prevent bad consequences. And clearly Boeing's QMS has helped keep things from being worse than they have actually been.

But building aircraft is hard. ^{[No citation. I assume this is obvious.]} So it is fair to ask if Boeing's QMS is already as good as it can possibly be, or is there room for improvement? A second question, continuing the thought, is whether Boeing's QMS could benefit from formal certification to AS9100? It is well-known that Boeing supports the use of AS9100 and requires certification of all its suppliers, but does not hold a certificate of its own (although some of its subsidiaries do). Readers may remember that I discussed this irony a little over a year ago: in brief, Boeing made an internal business decision not to seek certification, and they have taken some criticism for it. And many companies seek formal certification of their QMS'es as a tool to drive continual improvement. Could Boeing benefit?

Clearly I'm not close enough to know for sure, and in any event Boeing has not asked for my advice. All I can offer are a few thoughts.

Any process can be gamed

We know from the outset that Boeing's existing QMS is already very good, or things would be a lot worse than they are. And Boeing says overtly that their QMS is "based on AS9100." So, many of the pieces should already be in place. But any system can be corrupted—any process can be gamed—if the underlying business culture doesn't support it. And there have been a lot of articles in the news lately about Boeing's business culture. (For just a small sampling of articles published in the last week, consider this, this, and this from LinkedIn, or this from Australian Broadcasting News.)  

Here's an example to explain what I mean when I say that any process can be gamed. Consider checklists. A checklist is one of the simplest process controls there is, and it is amazingly powerful. Introducing checklists into the practice of emergency medicine has saved countless lives. What's more, it almost seems like a checklist is too simple to game. But let me tell you a story.

One day I was auditing a warehouse. They had a forklift, and they explained they had a requirement to do a safety check every morning before using it. 

I asked, "How do you make sure that check is done every morning?" 

They explained, "The responsible operator has to fill out a checklist, and then he signs it and dates it."

"Great. Can I see the checklists for this week?" (It happened to be Wednesday.)

"Sure. Here." They handed me a clipboard.

So I looked through the papers on the clipboard. Here was the checklist for Monday, filled out and signed; then for Tuesday; then for Wednesday (the day of the audit); ... and then—wait, what's this? Next came the checklists for Thursday and Friday, dated in the future, fully checked off, and signed.

Obviously they had filled out a week's worth of checklists all at once. Had they ever done a safety check on the forklift? Since I couldn't trust the checklists, I had no way to know.

That's what I mean by "gamed" or "corrupted." You can have the best processes in the world—on paper—but people will always find a way around them unless there are strong incentives not to. The best case is to have the kind of company that always prides themselves on doing things right, so that no employee—from the C-suite to the production floor—would stoop to getting around the rules.

Could formal certification prevent this kind of corruption? Maybe not, but it could make it harder. And that's because ….   

Don't lie to yourself

In the story I just told, I found the problem with the checklists by doing an audit. Since Boeing's QMS is based on AS9100, they must certainly do internal audits. In principle, that should be enough to catch any corruption of the system. 

But if you walk past something every day, after a while you don't see it any more. And if there are strong cultural incentives not to uncover certain kinds of sloppiness, you may come to find the sloppiness so normal that you stop questioning it. Even if you start with the best will in the world, it is possible to drift through the routine, day after day and year after year, until you end up lying to yourself.

This is bad. Don't let this happen.

One way to reduce the risk of lying to yourself is to bring in a stranger, who can look at your operation with fresh eyes. That's the service performed by an external auditor from your Certification Body. So while we've all met auditors who are a little goofy, and we have all gone through audits that felt pointless, nonetheless an external auditor sees with fresh eyes to give you an outside perspective. An external auditor is better placed than anyone internal to tell you whether your system retains its fundamental integrity. 

An external auditor can help keep you from lying to yourself.

Again, I don't know the true source of Boeing's recent troubles. I don't know if certification and external auditing would fix the problems. But they might help. They couldn't hurt.