A couple months ago, I saw a fun cartoon on LinkedIn. It was attached to a perfectly sound article which you can find here. But the cartoon is what I wanted to share.
And of course this is right. Sometimes analysis sputters out. You might not have the data you need to get a first-class root cause. Other factors might interfere as well. This work can be hard.
It's still valuable to do, of course.
Last week, I wrote about an organization I once knew that accomplished amazing results with almost no formal systems. Among other things, I said, "When the number of people is small, and when the average tenure in jobs is high, you can accomplish a lot of good work following the Everybody-Just-Knows methodology." It sounds promising.
But how small is "small"? At what size do you lose the magic of "smallness" and have to start putting systems into place?
It's sooner than you think.
A friend of mine works for a retail firm with around sixty-five employees—maybe more now and then for short-term or seasonal work. It's a "small company" in anybody's book. But a little while ago they ran into a situation that proved the need for some formal systems.
What happened is this. The company generates product information sheets for their products. These sheets are used by several departments internally, and they are also made available to customers. Some time ago, the Social Media team decided to update these information sheets to make them "easier to read": in practice this meant adding some colorful graphics and rearranging the text so there is more white space on the page. For sheets with too much text to rearrange, they just deleted anything they found boring.*
But the Sales and Support teams, who interact directly with customers to resolve problems, urgently needed all that deleted text. So they in turn just kept copies of the earlier versions, and continued to duplicate those outdated versions when they needed more. At no point did anyone escalate the issue to the responsible manager to get a ruling on how to proceed, because no manager is specifically in charge of the information sheets. They could have gone to the General Manager, but no one wanted to escalate the issue that high.
I don't blame the company. No company starts out with all these systems on Day One, and it is usually through episodes like this that they learn they need more than they've got. Also I wanted to tread a little lightly because the company wasn't a client. They'd never asked for my advice—my friend was just telling me about having a bad day at work. So I made a few suggestions for her to take back to the office, to see if she could nudge things in the right direction, and left it at that.
But how is this any different from the team I described last week? If that team could do consistently good work with no formal systems, why shouldn't we expect the same results here?
The easy answer is that there are no tricks in the world that will guarantee you do good work. Even a formal Quality Management System won't guarantee that. At most, the Quality techniques will help you avoid a lot of familiar known mistakes that otherwise recur over and over. So while I say that a small team can do good work without formal systems, that doesn't mean they will.
Beyond that, there are two or three differences between the Repair Center I described last week and my friend's retail store. That is, there are two differences which definitely bear on this question, and a third which might.
The retail store's problem with information sheets arose largely because some people (the Social Media team) didn't know the needs of others (the sales and support staff). The first two points above mean that could never have happened in the Repair Center. Everyone there knew what everyone else was working on—and what they needed, and almost what they were thinking—because they all did the same task and they had worked together for so long. The last point, about seniority, might have helped too, because one of the benefits of long experience is that you've already had plenty of years in which to make foolish mistakes: after a while you should have already committed most of the relevant mistakes, and learned from them.
So when I say that a small team can do good work without formal systems, there are a lot of other conditions that have to be in place instead. The team needs to be really small, small enough that all-to-all communication is easy and immediate. They have to be knowledgeable and experienced. There are personal characteristics that they have to have, as well: conscientiousness, focus, and a host of others. It's possible, but it's not easy.
If you want to grow larger, consider starting to put formal systems in place.
If someone retires, look closely at what he used to do. Often someone will start doing basic document or system maintenance on his own time, just because he sees that it needs to be done. When he leaves, it may be time to formalize it.
And remember the other extreme, just to keep everything in perspective: that you can have sophisticated formal systems in place and still make alarming mistakes.
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* That's probably an exaggeration; but in light of what came next it might as well have been true.
From time to time I've written about the question whether it's possible to achieve Quality work without having a formal Quality system. (Here is one recent post where I touch on it, for example.) In general my argument is that it is always possible, but on any large scale it becomes staggeringly difficult. From this point of view, all our Quality methods are (so to speak) just tips and tricks—gimmicks, if you will—to make it easier to get the results we want.
With this background in mind, let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, I worked for a California startup that had just been acquired by a much-larger company headquartered in Europe. One of the new initiatives was to get us integrated into their ISO 9001 system. To kick-start that activity, Mother Company sent an Auditor out from the Old Country to do a complete review of our system.
There were a lot of mis-matches. The Auditor expected meetings to start on time, but company culture at the startup meant people usually drifted in about 10 minutes late. A lot of procedure documents were either missing or badly followed. The Auditor's opinion soured quickly, and didn't improve as the week went on.
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| By Dell Publications., Public Domain, Link |
The Repair Center was housed in a space that was scarcely big enough. Cabinets were full of old equipment, with tools and supplies shoved in at odd angles. Technicians regularly had half-completed jobs teetering on the edges of their workspaces, put on hold because they had to contact the customer for clarification of a question; but meanwhile they had started work on another job. There might be more equipment under the desks. It all looked like Fibber McGee's hall closet.
Here the Auditor drew a line. He stopped at the entrance of the Repair Center and stood stock still. He leaned in to look around, but he would not cross the threshold. I don't know if he was afraid he might dislodge something or trip over it. But he looked around, scowled, murmured quietly "This center will never meet ISO 17025," … and left.
From then on, whenever anyone asked him genially, "How's the audit going?" the Auditor talked about our Repair Center. He described as much of it as he had been able to see, and explained how many regulations it failed to meet. If anyone asked how much work he thought it would take to bring it up to snuff, he just shook his head sadly.
Sooner or later, word got to our Head of Operations. This fellow was a long-time employee of Mother Company, but he was an American; and he had been sent out shortly after Mother Company acquired us, to offer a guiding hand as we assimilated into the larger organization. So he asked for a meeting with the Auditor. I was the Auditor's official host, so I tagged along.
Head of Operations: I hear that you don't like our Repair Center. What's wrong with it?
Auditor: It's cluttered. It's disorganized. There is no control over the space or the tools or the work. I don't see how they can function.
Operations: Compared to what? Are you comparing it to the Customer Equipment Laboratory in the home office, back in the Old Country?
Auditor: Yes, exactly.
Operations: Well help me understand this. Because the Repair Center here is a profit center, that generates something like 25% of the company's annual revenue. Meanwhile that Laboratory you are comparing it to is a cost center, and every year those costs are significant.
Auditor: I'm not concerned with how the company organizes its departments financially. I'm looking at compliance and customer satisfaction.
Operations: Fine, but that's another point. Back on my desk I have a stack of customer complaints an inch thick, complaining about the Customer Equipment Laboratory in the Old Country. And in my files I have just as many notes from customers expressing gratitude for the quick and professional service they got from this Repair Center. So who's offering more customer satisfaction?
Auditor: ISO 17025 has clear requirements that laboratories have to meet, and this Repair Center doesn't even come close.
Operations: Does that standard apply to this Repair Center?
Auditor: I don't know, but I am going to check.
In the end, it all worked out. The Repair Center tidied up their space, labeled their cabinets, and adopted some rules about how to handle work if you have to interrupt it to wait for a customer callback. After some research, the Auditor determined that ISO 17025 did not apply to the Repair Center's work, and the tidying that they did was good enough for ISO 9001.
But how were they able to do such good work all along? Isn't tidiness important? Does it really not matter whether your storage cabinets are labeled?
Of course it matters. The key is that everyone who worked in the Repair Center had been there for a decade!* This was a small company, with a dedicated staff and very little turnover. They didn't bother to label the cabinets, because everybody just knew where everything was. They didn't write down a lot of their operational procedures because everybody just knew what to do. They didn't bother to label work-in-progress because everybody just knew who was working on what.
And this is a valid Quality strategy for some organizations. When the number of people is small, and when the average tenure in jobs is high, you can accomplish a lot of good work following the Everybody-Just-Knows methodology. The only problem is that this approach doesn't scale well, and it's hard to bring on anyone new when your employees start to retire or die.
As soon as you start to grow, or as soon as you have to work with anyone new, the traditional Quality tools suddenly become a lot more useful.
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* Strictly speaking I think the New Guy had been there only seven or eight years.
In the most immediate sense of the question, No, it doesn't. The ISO 9001 standard contains requirements for what top management shall do, and its companion volume ISO 9000 contains discussion about the concept of leadership. But there are no ISO requirements anywhere that say "Name George as CEO, and not Fred." On the other hand, if you take a step back to look at management theory more generally, it's possible to find some indications.
Drucker approaches this topic from a lot of different angles, and I strongly recommend that you read the article regardless what your current work happens to be. But part of his advice on understanding how you work can be adapted into advice on who should occupy certain roles. (In what follows I have modified Drucker's terminology a bit, to make my own point clearer. But I promise he says these things. 😃)
Specifically, Drucker points out that there are people good at thinking, and there are also people good at deciding—but they are rarely the same people. People good at thinking thrive as advisors, or technical specialists. They can analyze a situation thoroughly, and map out the three approaches most likely to succeed. But when you ask them to pick one, they see too many subtleties and hidden implications, and so they get lost trying to play out multiple chess-matches in their heads. Wait, if I move here then he'll move there, and that means I have to ….
By contrast, people good at deciding may not be able to understand all the ramifications of this or that policy unaided. They definitely need the support of their advisors or technical specialists to clarify, If you choose X, then Y is sure to happen as a result. But once they have all the facts, they know exactly what course they want to take, and they are happy to bear the responsibility for choosing it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once characterized Franklin Roosevelt as having "a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament." Most of the time, that's the right mix.
