When the ISO 9001 standard requires you to take action to address your risks and opportunities, it includes this admonition in clause 6.1.2: Actions taken to address risks and opportunities shall be proportionate to the potential impact on the conformity of products and services.
OK, I guess that's fine, but what does it mean? What does it take for your actions to be "proportionate" to the risks they address?
The word is never defined—or at any rate, neither ISO 9001 nor ISO 9000 define it. But intuitively I think we all have a sense for what it means, don't we? The basic idea is ancient: Nothing in excess.* If you face a risk that might, at worst, cost you $100, then it is foolish to spend $1000 to prevent it. That cost, or that level of effort, is disproportionate to the $100 downside that you face from the unmitigated risk. Most of the time, we probably don't need a definition more exact than that.
But "sometimes the clearest way to explain what a rangatang [sic] is, is to 'tell what it ain't.'"** A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon a blog post from 2016 that explains the concept of disproportionality with crystal clarity. The author of the post—Quinn Dunki of Blondihacks—just wanted to set up an automated cat feeder, so that her cat would be fed on time and she didn't have to watch the clock every day. Simple, right?
Turns out her cat had a different idea. Her cat's idea was, "How do I get this machine to give me more food than Quinn wants me to have?" So Quinn had to make some adaptations to her automated cat feeder, to protect it from the prying paws of her cat. As she says at the opening of her blog post, "The trick is to be smarter than the animal with a brain the size of a walnut."
But of course, Quinn worked on this problem part-time, and her cat worked on it full-time.
You can read the results here.
In the end, Quinn won. But I'm pretty sure nobody would say that the effort she expended was proportional either to the benefits she gained or to the risks she was avoiding.
Verbum sapienti sat.
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* "Μηδὲν ἄγαν" was one of the three proverbs said to have been inscribed at the entrance to the Greek temple at Delphi. See here for more information.
** Owen Ulph, The Fiddleback: Lore of the Line Camp (San Francisco: Browntrout Publishers, 1995), p. 23.
Perhaps proportionate is realizing you could have peace of mind by simply going home to feed your cat. Outsmarting a cat—big whoop! Being ‘right’ is the risk! And, that is a BIG ego-related issue in leadership development.
ReplyDeleteOh I agree that her approach wasn't "proportionate" by any reasonable definition of the word. And yes, there may have been some ego involvement. I think she might also have felt the conviction that every problem has a correct solution, so it's her job to find it. I've worked with a number of engineers who operated on that conviction. It made then dedicated engineers, even if the approach seems a little over the top in other contexts.
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