Embrace your failure!

Earlier this month, I published two posts that were directly connected to current political issues in the United States, first here and then (as a follow-up) here. The political issue in question was illegal immigration. My focus in the articles was: first, to review the results of the Administration's recent "root cause" policy on immigration; and second, to suggest how the Administration's root cause analysis could have been improved—possibly to support a more effective policy, but at any rate to be completer than it was. And my overriding imperative was to handle the subject in a non-political way.

After I published the first article, a good friend argued that if I really thought I could keep the discussion non-political, then I was fooling myself. More exactly, her argument was as follows:

• Since Vice President Harris was put in charge of the "root cause" policy, any evaluation of the policy will necessarily be construed by others as an evaluation of her. If I say that the policy failed, readers will construe me to mean that she personally failed.
• Any personal evaluation of the success or failure of a candidate for the Presidency—if expressed during the middle of a campaign—will necessarily be construed by others as a partisan statement, either an endorsement or an attack. If I say that a candidate failed at something, readers will construe me to have attacked the candidate.
• Therefore I shouldn't publish such an article unless I am prepared for my writing to be used as artillery in the campaign by one side or the other.

We talked about it for a while, and I told her I disagree for at least two reasons. In the first place, I simply don't have that wide a reach. Mostly my posts are read by a small pool of people interested in aspects of the Quality business. And it's highly unlikely that anything I say about the technicalities of root cause analysis will drive you to change your vote. I assume you already know how you are going to vote, and nothing I say will make the slightest difference.

More importantly, the whole point of Quality analysis is that we can learn from our mistakes by analyzing them, so that we do better next time. In this sense, it is critical to embrace your failures, and not hide them! Because when we fail at something, it's never on purpose. Always we think we are doing the right thing; we have a plan of some kind, and we are following it with the intention of reaching a goal. This is what deliberate behavior looks like. But the consequence is that the very next time we have another goal, we'll do exactly the same thing—unless something stops us. Unless we intervene with ourselves to make a change.

If our plan is right and we succeed, of course that's fine. But if we fail—that's when it gets important to pay attention. If we fail, that means the plan wasn't right, which in turn means that there was something we missed when we analyzed the situation. If we aren't careful, we'll miss the same thing again next time and fail in the same way. Conversely, if we don't want to fail the same way next time, we have to figure out what we missed last time and take care not to miss it again.

This is why we have to own our failures and understand them.

As for the Administration's "root cause" policy on immigration, when I say that it failed that's no more than a historical fact. The plan was that by taking these actions, the Administration intended to bring about those outcomes. But in fact the actual outcomes were very nearly the opposite of what the Administration had in mind. (I explain the details in my article, and give links to external documentation that substantiates all the historical data.) 

OK, fine. This happens all the time, to administrations from both parties. There's nothing partisan in recognizing the facts. The next step should be to look at the analysis and find the flaw, so that the next time around will be better.

Of course, there are a lot of moving parts in any political situation. And right now we are facing an election. It is unlikely that today's Administration will launch a major new initiative in the last months of this year. Maybe something will be done next year, but at this point we don't know who will be responsible then. So it's hard to know what to expect.

But understanding your failures is still a really valuable thing to do.    

                

Root causes on the back of an envelope

Two weeks ago, I posted an article in this space about the "Root causes of illegal immigration." I started from a Congressional Research Service report entitled "Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy"; and I argued that the Administration's root cause analysis went astray by failing to distinguish between bounded cases (where the number of causes is strictly limited) and unbounded cases (where solving some causes just makes room for others). Then I asked readers whether they would like to see me work out my own root cause analysis of the same problem.

At this writing, seven readers have said "Yes." So I'm going to give it a shot—partly to respond to their interest. 

But the exercise drove home for me another important fact about problem-solving. Finding the root cause is only half the battle! After your analysis has generated a list of potential causes (and for many complex problems there are more than one), you then have to decide which causes you can address. And from that smaller list, you may have to filter again to find which causes you are willing to address! Admittedly if your widget-stamping machine is out of alignment, this last part is easy. Of course you're willing to re-align the widget stamping machine. But in other kinds of complex problems—especially in system problems, of which political problems are prime examples—every action taken over here will have some unintended side effect over there. So before you charge in to fix stuff, you have to weigh what it is worth fixing.

This is important, and I ran smack-dab into it while working through this example.

With that said, let me make a couple of apologies and disclaimers.

Nothing here is brilliant. My earlier post sparked a discussion in the myASQ community, and Jason Wesolowski of TX-RX Systems made all the same points I'm going to make here, with breathtaking elegance, in a couple of paragraphs. My version is longer so I can show my work; but my hat is off to Jason for seeing the issues right away, and for expressing them with admirable concision. 

I am no expert on illegal immigration. There will be points that I miss. This article is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, nothing more. All I really know is the logic of root cause analysis. So if you understand illegal immigration as a subject-matter expert, please take the systematic method that I show you here and flesh it out with better real-life information.

I said this before, but it bears repeating: This is not a post about immigration, nor about the election! In the first place, as noted, I am no expert on these topics. I have no idea what the best immigration policy should be. In the second place, there is lots to discuss here at the level of data and logic, without letting political opinions slow us down. I will keep my opinions out of the conversation.

The discussion unfolds in three steps. First, is there a problem? Second, what are the potential causes? Third, let's evaluate those causes to see which we want to address.  

Is there a problem?

First we have to check whether we have a problem at all? Don't go to a lot of effort to find the root cause for something that's not a problem. So, ... Is illegal immigration a problem?

I think the answer has to be Yes, for at least two reasons.*

From a procedural point of view, it is always bad when an organization's written procedures say one thing, and people in their daily work do something else. (And in civil society, the laws are our "procedures.") When the written procedures and the daily work disagree, it's at best confusing. Nobody knows what the real rules are. Also there is a risk that you'll get punished today for doing what got you praised yesterday. It's maddening.

The solution, when there is a gap between the written procedures and the daily work, is always—always!—to bring them back together. Maybe you enforce the procedures as written. Maybe you rewrite them to match the familiar habits. Maybe you meet in the middle. But tolerating a situation where the organization is chronically out of compliance with its own procedures degrades performance, degrades trust, and degrades morale. It is poisonous. (I talk more about the role of procedures in this post, among other places.)  

From a humanitarian point of view, when someone enters the country without the protection of the law, unscrupulous people can abuse or exploit him. His landlord or his employer can mistreat him, and he has no recourse. If he complains, the authorities discover that he is here illegally, and deport him. So the landlord and the employer are free to do a lot of bad things.

Temporary foreign workers clear
a field west of Montreal. (CBC)

Abuses can turn up even when a migrant enters the country legally. Just a few days ago, the United Nations issued a special report on Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program, comparing it in some instances to a "contemporary form of slavery."** However the case may turn out with Canada's TFW program once the dust settles, it is at any rate a legal public program. How much greater are the opportunities for abuse when the migrant worker has entered the country illegally and can claim no public protection!    

What are the root causes?

This post is already too long, so I have pushed the details of the analysis to another page. YOU CAN SEE THE ANALYSIS BY CLICKING HERE!

Also, when I started work on this I began trying to arrange the root causes on an Ishikawa diagram. I didn't get very far, but you can see the results at the bottom of this page.

But here is the list of potential root causes coming out of that analysis:

• Things are bad in a migrant's home country.
• The US is a big country with a large population.
• The US has very long land borders.
• The US has very long coastlines.
• The US is a good place to live.
• Lots of people find jobs in the US.
• Sometimes the filters at the border might fail to detect an illegal entrant.
• Sometimes the procedures at the border might fail to detain an illegal entrant.
• There is no reliable way to track someone once he is out of official sight.
• The legal entry procedure is very difficult and takes a long time.

If anything here doesn't make sense, the analysis goes through the reasoning in detail.

Now we get to the hard part.

Evaluating root causes, deciding where to act

Some of these points are not actionable. Of the rest, most are facts we probably don't want to change. There is one point that holds promise, but even it is tricky. Let's look at them.

Facts we can't change

The first four points on the list are simple facts that are out of our power.

Things are bad in a migrant's home country.

My last post explained that this fact is the one the Administration tried to change in their "Root Cause" initiative. And they succeeded in improving conditions in three countries. But bad conditions in other countries meant that the next year saw more migrants anyway. Pragmatically, the world is too large and there are too many countries where people are suffering for this to be a useful line of approach. 

That doesn't mean we should never help other countries! I take no position in this article either for or against foreign aid. But we can't expect foreign aid to reduce the immigration pressure.

The US is a big country with a large population.

Yes it is.

The US has very long land borders.

If you want barriers along our borders, that might have a deterrent effect in some places. But there are a lot of miles to cover.

The US has very long coastlines. 

You can't build walls in the water, and there's a lot of coastline.

Facts we (probably) don't want to change

Now we get to points that are more actionable. But we might want to think twice before acting.

The US is a good place to live. 

If we deliberately made the US a post-apocalyptic wasteland, no one would want to come here. But that's crazy. Let's not do that, OK?

Lots of people find jobs in the US.

Norway is a nice place to live, but there are very few illegal immigrants because it is almost impossible to find a job if you don't have legal status. An article from 2017 explains that "'Norway must be one of the most transparent societies in Europe.' It’s also highly regulated, where residents’ addresses are registered with local authorities and banks can’t open accounts for people lacking official identification numbers." Or consider New Zealand: an online discussion thread on exactly this topic explains that New Zealand prosecutes employers who hire illegal immigrants, and the fines are devastating. 

In principle we could do the same in the US, but do we want to? That depends. Most of my professional work has been in high-tech, and whenever I have taken a new job I have been required to show proof that I can legally work in the US.*** But I'm pretty sure there are industries or professions where the rules are not so strict, and I think there is a limit beyond which more rules would feel burdensome. If you ask the teenager down the street to babysit for a couple of hours, do you really have to check that her papers are in order first? (And then keep records to prove that you checked!) Or where is the line? There may be a little room on this front, but I expect not a lot.

Sometimes the filters at the border might fail to detect an illegal entrant.

I don't know if this ever happens, but logically it has to be evaluated. The problem is that every detection system has a failure rate. If we increase the sensitivity of the detection system used at the border, there will be more false positives. In other words, a more sensitive system is more likely to deny entry to normal citizens returning from vacation! Such an "improvement" won't be popular for long.

Sometimes the procedures at the border might fail to detain an illegal entrant.

Again, I don't know if this ever happens, but logically it has to be evaluated. But supposing it were true, what then? Are we asking for sturdier holding facilities at each port of entry? Are we asking for officials to deploy tougher methods? I don't know, but none of that is likely to look good on the evening news. So again, such an "improvement" won't be popular for long.

There is no reliable way to track someone once he is out of official sight.

Here's another point that is in principle easy to fix. Just make the US a police state, where no one can go anywhere without official papers and permission. Every time you arrive in a new town, check in with the Secret Police before you even find a room for the night. Then if anyone does slip past the border illegally, it will be child's play to track him down.

But who wants to live in a country like that?? I don't. You don't. Nobody does. So again, let's not do that! 

This leaves one last cause to consider.

The last root cause

The legal entry procedure is very difficult and takes a long time.

Honestly I think this one looks the most promising, if only because the others look so bad. In principle, "all it takes" to fix this is for Congress and the President to agree on something simpler than what we have now. (Quit snickering! 😀) And it's a common­place of process management that you get people to follow your processes by arranging things so that compliance is easy and noncompliance is hard. Make following the procedure the easiest way to do something, and everyone will follow the procedure. It's the same here. If it is easier to obey the law than to break it, everyone will obey the law. That's what we want.

Or maybe not. Maybe getting that agreement is hard. Maybe we as a country haven't come to a consensus on what we want here. That's not a problem that root-cause analysis can solve. The best I can do is to expose the problem, so that at least we know what we have to answer. But actually to answer it requires political work, and not Quality work.

Don't forget that a complete solution might involve several initiatives at once. Notwithstanding everything I said about the other root causes, they might be involved in partial measures that overlap each other to keep the problem from getting worse while a full solution is implemented.

But, speaking purely from the perspective of this Quality analysis, I think that tackling the last root cause—i.e., reforming immigration law—comes the closest to a winning play.

That doesn't mean it will be easy.

__________

* If you think there are more reasons than these two, that's always possible. I don't claim this is a complete list. 

** You can find the UN report here. For news reports, see here and here. The Canadian government responded on August 16 with a blistering news release accusing that the UN "special rapporteur" "spoke to no employers, did not visit a single farm, and spoke only with 100 workers." Up till now I have been able to find this news release only on LinkedIn, here.  

*** Since I am a citizen, that has not been hard to do.    

 

Do you want people to avoid you?

Yesterday I read a post in LinkedIn by Ekaterina Potemkina of Fluence, where she reminisced about the worst advice she was ever given in her career. (Fortunately, she never followed it!)

Some time at the beginning of my Quality Journey one of external auditors I worked with told me:

"When you walk into the office and see that people try to disappear or pretend to be extremely busy, so that you, maaayybee, don't approach them - that means you are doing your job right!"

Seriously? Is that how we want people to act around us?

Of course not! More to the point, it doesn't have to come with the job.

In all the years I audited, I never tried to make auditees suffer. I never tried to squeeze them just to make a point. But that didn't mean making the audits artificially easier, either.

My intent was always to say, Look, we both know we have to do this. So let's do it and make it meaningful. But it's like soccer: we can still be friends afterwards regardless which of us scores the goal.

One useful strategy that I learned was to look for issues that actually made a difference to the department's ability to achieve its goals. I'm grateful that I never had to work to a quota (shudder!). As a result I could afford to spend less time on topics that were just window dressing (even though every organization has some of these) and more time on basic operations. Naturally I had my share of misfires, like anyone else. But I think over the years I had fewer than I would have had with a different approach.

Another strategy, that I discussed a couple of years ago, was to be willing to work with the organization after the audit: to explain the findings, and to help rectify them. For external auditors, it is important to build a hard wall between auditing and consulting; but for internal auditors, that wall is not only sometimes impractical but often counterproductive. The choice depends critically on the subtle details of the internal situation, so you have to be attentive to those details: then you can stand aside when you are not needed, but step in diplomatically when you are. 

As for the "walk-into-the-office" metric? At one point our unit had eight offices or plants, and I did internal audits in all of them. And every time I walked into one [not counting my home office, obviously] I could count on someone waving to me in the hallway and calling out, "Hey, Mike! Great to see you. Wait—are you auditing me today?"

That's what you want to hear.

                

Root causes of illegal immigration

Whenever I hear someone use technical Quality terminology in an unexpected venue, my ears perk up. So I sat up sharp a few days ago, when I was reading an article about the upcoming election and it mentioned that Vice-President Harris was given an assignment back in 2021 to address "the root causes that drive migration to the United States." [Emphasis mine.] Really? I thought. We tackled the root causes of something? Cool. I wonder how that turned out? 

[You might guess that I don't always keep up with the news.]

Before I go on, let me be clear. This is not a post about immigration, nor about the election! My interest here is in the application of root-cause analysis as a problem-solving tool, because I think this story highlights a useful point. As for the political questions … you don't need my opinions because you've got your own, and yours are probably better. I'll keep mine to myself.

In some ways we should expect it to be very difficult to identify root causes for a large-scale social phenomenon. The classic understanding of a root cause is that when you turn it on and off, the effect turns on and off as well—like a light switch. But social groups are systems in the technical sense, and systems involve delays. So even if you find a root cause and switch it off, it might take a while for the effect to disappear. 

On the other hand, it is tempting to look for root causes of social phenomena, for the same reason that we look for the root causes of more tractable problems. If you solve a root cause, the problem goes away and you don't have to keep fixing it. This is a powerful inducement. 

So what was done? 

On February 2, 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order that called for the development of a Root Causes Strategy. (You can find the full document here.) A month later, he asked Vice President Harris to lead this effort diplomatically and organizationally. The analysis did not start from zero, but built on earlier analyses carried out under the Obama administration. (See references in, for example, here and here.)

What root causes were identified in this analysis? 

A Congressional Research Service report by Peter J. Meyer, "Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy," acknowledges that "motives [for migration] vary by individual," but identifies four broad categories of root cause: socioeconomic conditions, natural disasters, security conditions (this means crime and violence in the home countries), and governance (which covers such topics as autocratic rule, low public investment, and systemic corruption). 

What was the action plan?

Not only did the responsible team look for root causes for migration, but they carried out a Pareto analysis to identify the countries-of-origin providing the most migrants. The answer was that—after Mexico (with whom other programs were already in place)—the largest numbers of migrants came from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. (See this document for detailed statistics.) Therefore the Administration focused its efforts on a combination of humanitarian assistance, direct investment, and government-to-government initiatives with these three countries. [source] In addition, the Administration "created more legal pathways of entry for migrants …. [and implemented] harsher punishments … for crossing illegally." [source]

How did it work out?

Not as planned. Initiatives were put in place promptly in 2021. The next year, total apprehensions at the border hit record numbers.

It would be tempting to wave away these results by pointing out (as we noted above) that there are delays built into any complex system, so perhaps the high numbers in 2022 reflected some causal activity from before the program even started. But the details don't support that simple an answer. In fact, migration from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras dropped significantly between 2021 and 2022. But increased numbers from other countries—notably Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti—more than made up the difference.

Where did the analysis go wrong?

Wait—maybe that question is premature. Did the analysis go wrong?

At the most basic level, yes it did. The analysis predicted that a certain course of action would have a certain result; and while the narrow result fit expectations, the overall result did not. Illegal migration from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras dropped, but overall illegal migration into the United States rose. The empirical data show that something has to have been left out of the original planning.

To be clear, I recognize that these phenomena are enormously complex, and that we cannot expect the kind of precision we would demand in a laboratory experiment. I hope it is equally clear that I am saying nothing either for or against the specific policies that were implemented. Even if the reasons behind a policy are weak, that says nothing about whether the policy itself is helpful or harmful. Sometimes people do the right things for the wrong reasons.

But the reasoning here was weak in at least one spot: the application of the Pareto analysis was premature.

It was a nice idea, to be sure. In industrial manufacturing, if most of your mechanical failures come from the same step in the process, and if you can fix that step, then you have gone a long way to fixing all your mechanical failures. But that only works when the universe of failures is bounded. Then you can nibble away at one cause after another until you've solved them all.

In the unbounded case, eliminating one source of problems simply makes room for another source of problems to elbow its way in. Gardeners are familiar with this. Years ago my mother's garden was being crowded out by some aggressive ivy; once she had the ivy removed, that made room for a ficus vine to do the same thing.

The Administration's strategy on managing immigration recognized that people come to the United States for reasons including socioeconomic conditions, natural disasters, security conditions, and governance. But many countries in the world suffer from these same problems. Therefore a strategy focused on improving conditions in only a few countries while ignoring the others is not really addressing an actionable root cause. And root causes have to be actionable.

Two final thoughts

First, from the pure problem-solving perspective these empirical results are a good thing, because they teach us more about the problem. Remember that in processing an 8D, after you finish the action plan in D6 you have to check whether the implementation was effective. Did you make the problem go away? If yes, you can proceed to D7. If not, go back to D4, using the new information that you have just learned (namely, that your action plan didn't work) to re-do your root cause analysis. In this case, the results of the Administration's strategy at the border help us to figure out (as we saw above) that their application of the Pareto analysis was premature. That information should help make future analyses stronger.

Second, does anyone want me to try to sketch out what a full root-cause analysis of immigration ought to look like? (I mean one that incorporates the lessons learned that we discussed above.) I won't generate anything useful, of course. The issue is far too complex for any back-of-the-envelope scribbling to be practical. But if you think it would be conceptually helpful, leave me a comment. 

         

The "Miseducation" of Quality

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of attending a rollicking, dynamic talk by Dr. Yvonne Simmons Howze about the roots of Quality. Maybe "rollicking" isn't the first word you think of to describe that topic; but for this talk—"The Miseducation of Quality"—it's hard to think of a better. Dr. Howze's energy was infectious, and she covered so much material with such élan that it was like drinking from a fire hose. I'll try to give you one or two of the main points, but there's a lot more where this came from.

Her fundamental point is simple. Too often we are miseducated to think of Quality as a collection of gimmicks and tricks to improve operational or organizational performance. You can find whole libraries on problem-solving, statistical methods, risk mitigation, and the rest. And of course these things are important. But Howze sees through, or past, all this busy-ness. She recognizes that the foundation for the whole structure is the pursuit of personal excellence. If you try to do Quality work without building on personal excellence, you will crash and burn. Several times during the talk, she reminded us of the importance of self-assessment, to understand what you truly bring to the table.

Her next step was to talk about the main threats that undermine Quality. But the critical threats that she identified are not external effects—not even "human error." They are internal events, internal to the workplace and even internal to the individual human soul:

• incivility
• burnout
• poor communication
• lack of engagement

Any one of these can destroy your Quality focus. Any one of them can make you stop caring—and, as we have discussed before, caring is the key to Quality.

But notice also that cultivating personal excellence can defend you against all four of these threats.

• If you know that you bring value to the table, you will feel confident enough that you won't be rude to others. And if someone is rude to you, you can weather it because you know it says a lot more about them than it does about you.
• If you know that you bring value to the table, you'll feel less anxiety or stress about your contributions. And you will feel confident enough to take a weekend off when you need it.
• If you really know what value you contribute, you'll be able to explain it to others. Slow down, speak from the heart, and it will come out clearly.
• And if you know your own value, you cannot help but understand how it fits into the big picture. As caring is the key to Quality, so it is impossible to be excellent and disengaged at the same time.

Dr. Howze provided a lot more information about these threats, including a battery of statistics about their frequency and their effects. Check out her published material for more of the details. And then she began to talk about solutions. Of course in a sense the solution to all of them is to cultivate personal excellence, but fortunately she broke that advice down into more manageable pieces.

To begin, she reminded us—one more time—how important self-assessment is. And she referenced a number of self-assessment tools from her website: some complex, others very simple. Then, she identified what she calls the "Five C's." These are qualities to strive for in daily work, qualities that support the journey towards excellence:

• curiosity
• creativity
• courage
• civility
• communication

Dr. Howze explained what each of these looks like in practice, and gave us examples from her own experience. Step by step, she showed us how each of these qualities helped to drain the four big threats out of the room, so that people working together can focus on doing their best. I don't have room to tell her stories here—she really did cover a lot of ground!—and in any even they are hers to tell. But many of us must have similar stories of our own, and in any event the point was well made.

An engaging talk. A dynamic speaker. And a foundation of personal excellence. Who could ask for anything more?