Does Quality require shared sacrifice?

We usually think about Quality as one aspect of an organization's interactions with its customers. To the extent that we discuss internal behavior, we usually talk about behavior that has an effect on the customer experience: error-proofing, for example; or calibration; or lessons learned.

But does Quality have anything to say about budget management? What would that mean? Let me start with an example.

Once upon a time, I worked for a company that had several offices across the United States. And we hit hard times. (Since most of my career was in tech, I got pretty familiar over the years with the alternation of boom and bust.) To help us weather those hard times, an announcement came out one day that all of us in the rank-and-file were going to be put on 80% salary. We were told explicitly, "Just work four days a week, because that's all we can pay you for."

But that was only half the message. In the same announcement, we learned that:

• the Regional President had cut his own compensation to ZERO for the duration of the emergency. No salary, no bonus. Nothing.
• the rest of Senior Management got to keep their salaries, but their bonuses had been cut for the year. (And for people at that level, the bonuses represented a large fraction of their total compensation.)

In other words: however hard the austerity measures were going to pinch us, they were going to pinch Senior Management too. The message was clear that we were all in this together. So everybody pitched in, nobody grumbled, and after a while things turned around so we could go back to normal.

It's a great story, and the best part is that it really happened. But of course stories like this aren't exactly common. And I found myself reflecting on it as I considered some recent news from the Board of Directors of ASQ (American Society for Quality).

ASQ and hard times

In principle, ASQ is a volunteer organization. That is, there are a number of administrative roles at Headquarters (and perhaps other places) but the bulk of the work is carried out by unpaid volunteers. 

The Society is divided into geographically-based Sections, so that people who live in a common area can get together, get to know each other, and do things in common. The idea is that social interaction can be useful professionally, but also it's just a nice thing to do.

There are also annual membership dues. These dues cover the overall Society activities, and a fraction of each member's dues goes to that member's Section to help pay for local Section activities.

The fraction of annual dues allocated to a member's local Section is sometimes adjusted, but lately has been hovering right around 6.5%. (That's six-and-a-half percent, not sixty-five.) The remaining 94+% goes to the central organization.

But not this year. The money is normally disbursed quarterly. According to the "Member Unit Financial Management and Reporting" policy approved 2021-11-12, clause 5.1(g), "Dues allocations will be paid quarterly during the year and as soon as practical after the start of each quarter but not later than 30 days after the start of the quarter." In fact, though, Q1 2025 came and went with no sign of the quarterly disbursements. Finally on April 16, we received a communication from the Board of Directors that the Q1 dues allocations would not be distributed.* The explanation was that all our dues allocations had been invested in the stock market; and with the start of a new Administration in Washington DC, the stock market was behaving erratically.

Then on August 4, the Board of Directors announced that they won't distribute any dues to the local Sections for Q2 or Q3 either.** This time the explanation was that they simply couldn't afford to make the payments. ASQ's deficits are too high, and the budget is stretched too thin.

Where's the money going instead? 

The Board announcement explained that ASQ is now rolling out a members-only AI tool called Quincy, "offering members 24/7 access to expert insights, tailored recommendations, and ASQ’s extensive content library at your fingertips." (I guess the Board hasn't been following the recent news about how likely AI is to hallucinate answers to technical questions.) 

Also they've been putting a lot more money into the members' website, "which recently received the Community of the Year award from Higher Logic." [I had to look up who Higher Logic is, but I guess this is a big deal for people who know.]

And of course there are the administrative salaries. The Board announcement told us in tones of alarm that over the last three years distributions to the local Sections worldwide had totalled some $850,000 per year. That sounds like a lot of money. 

• But in 2022, Catherine Jordan (ASQ's outgoing CEO) took home $539,594 in total compensation; while Siddhartha Bhatnagar (the incoming CEO) took home $306,784.*** (Overall total for 2022: $846,378.) 
• In 2023, the numbers were a little more modest: Bhatnagar's total compensation had risen to $415,573, while Jordan's had dropped to only $325,110.**** (Overall total for 2023: $740,683.)

I have no more recent information. But if someone asked me where ASQ could find an extra seven- or eight-hundred thousand dollars a year to keep supporting the local Sections, ... gosh, I think about my experience with that earlier employer (where the CEO cut his own compensation to zero) and the arithmetic looks simple and compelling.

Of course, maybe the Board already had the same idea. Maybe our CEO is currently serving for a dollar a year, or less. I don't remember seeing an announcement, but I might have missed it.

So I asked. I emailed ASQ Component Relations a week ago, asking about any announcement on the subject. Just this morning I finally got a reply that said "ASQ does not share information regarding staffing and/or staff compensation." I wish I were surprised.  

In their defense

I had better clarify a couple of points that make this situation different from the one I started with.

Because ASQ is (largely) a volunteer organization, the dues allocations which have been stopped did not constitute anyone's personal salary. Nobody was relying on this money to pay groceries or rent. 

Many Sections had built up savings over the years. Those with no savings who needed money for an event were encouraged to ask their Regional Director for a special emergency allocation.

And Sections are allowed to raise money on their own (within certain limits). There's nothing to stop a Section from offering a dinner event and then selling tickets to cover it. 

What about Quality?    

With all that said, what does this have to do with Quality? Even if we assume the worst about the current state of ASQ executive pay, does the Quality discipline have anything to say about it?

Yes, but it's indirect. In ISO 9001:2015, pretty much the only clause with any relevance at all is 5.1.1(e) which requires: "Top management shall demonstrate leadership ... by ensuring that the resources needed for the quality management system are available." (ASQ management can probably argue they have done that, by telling us to use our savings and offering special allocations where needed.)

ISO 9000:2015 has a little more to say. I'm thinking of the seven Quality Management Principles that we discussed last spring, particularly the principles of Leadership and Engagement of people.

Recommended actions under the heading of Leadership include (clause 2.3.2.4):

• create and sustain shared values, fairness and ethical models for behaviour at all levels of the organization;
• establish a culture of trust and integrity; ...
• ensure that leaders at all levels are positive examples to people in the organization. [All emphasis is mine.]

Recommended actions under the heading of Engagement of people include (clause 2.3.3.4):

• communicate with people to promote understanding of the importance of their individual contribution; 
• promote collaboration throughout the organization; ...
• conduct surveys to assess people’s satisfaction, communicate the results and take appropriate actions.

These are suggestions, not requirements. And for the most part they are written so generally that it is hard to tell what actions satisfy them. (The very last point about surveys can be objectively assessed, but the others are a lot less solid.) Nonetheless, I think they all point to establishing a kind of common interest between leaders and led, a sense that we are all in the same boat. It may in fact not be possible to describe this kind of common interest strictly in terms that can be supported by objective evidence, but I want to say that most of us know it when we see it—and that most of the time we probably agree with each other's assessments (positive or negative).*****  

Using that kind of criterion, the company that I described at the beginning of this post had clearly implemented the Quality principles of Leadership and Engagement of people. For ASQ, perhaps the best we can say is that an affirmative answer to the same question is not obvious without more data.  

What do you think?

Since the formal standards are so vague, what do you think? 

• Does a commitment to Quality require shared sacrifice? 
• When hard times pinch, should top management make it a point to be visibly squeezed as hard as the rank and file? 
• Why does it matter, or why does it not? 
• Finally, what do you wish I had said in this essay, that I failed to say?

Leave me your remarks in the comments.

__________

* See, e.g., this LinkedIn post.  

** See, e.g., this LinkedIn post.

*** Source: ASQ's 2022 IRS form 990, publicized by Dan Burrows in this LinkedIn post. Of course these numbers don't count salaries for other positions, or any other administrative expenses.  

**** Source: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer website. Again, these numbers don't count salaries for other positions, or any other administrative expenses.    

***** Even back in the Middle Ages, the justification for compensating kings and nobles and knights so much better than peasants was always that when danger threatened, the kings and nobles and knights put themselves at risk to protect their people.   

      

"How can we save the polar bears?"

A month ago—almost two, now that I check—I wrote about Kyle Chambers of Texas Quality Assurance, and how he and I came away with totally different understandings when we read the ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group Guidance on: Auditing Climate Change issues in ISO 9001. Kyle summarized his perspective in a podcast with Caleb Adcock. It's a good podcast, and I suggest you go listen to it if you haven't yet.

My earlier post explained why Kyle and I read the document so differently, but in the course of the podcast he and Caleb raised a number of other topics they didn't have time to explore. For example, at about 19:28 they ask,

"What about the company who says 'We have only 100 employees, so how can we save the polar bears?'"

This is a really good question, and it gets to the heart of ISO 9001's new requirement about climate change. 

What does the requirement say?

The first important point is to recognize that the climate change requirement comes in clause 4.1, so it relates to determining the context of your organization. It never says you have to take this or that concrete action to address climate effects. The full text of the requirement is simply: "The organization shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue."

To be clear, there is a lot hidden behind that simple statement. If you decide that climate change is a relevant issue for your organization, then ISO 9001 asks you to do something about it. If you say it's relevant and then take no action, you'll have a lot of explaining to do in your next audit.

On the other hand, that requirement is also common sense. The key word is "relevant." If an issue is relevant to your business, that's not the same as saying it's important. "Relevant" means that the issue affects how you do business in some way, that you have to make a change (positive or negative). 

For example, let's say that you sell hot dogs off the pier, and suddenly you learn that a rogue asteroid is going to destroy the Earth in 30 minutes. That asteroid is obviously important. But there is probably nothing you can do to stop it, so there's no point in making any changes to your business in the next half hour. The asteroid is important but not relevant. 

Therefore, if you decide that climate change is a relevant issue for your organization, that means that you have already determined you need to take some kind of action. If you need to take action, you'll do it with or without ISO 9001. So do what you have to do. Then document it for the auditor, and you should be fine. On the other hand, if climate change makes literally no difference to how you conduct business, then that means climate change is not relevant for your organization. That doesn't mean that you are denying climate change.* It's just a technical evaluation about how you do your work. 

What's a small company to DO? 

Fine, but what is a small company to do? How can a small company save the polar bears?

Well, mostly you probably can't. (If you know a small company that makes VOOM or other magical compounds, they might be an exception.) But the key is to go back and think about whether there's anything else you might have to change.

Here's an example:

I know a small company in the Pacific Northwest. They are in an urban area, but all around them are forests. And every summer, for as long as anyone can remember, they've had forest fires. Forest fires generate smoke, so the air quality turns bad. And the company has a few key employees who suffer from impaired breathing for one reason or another. So whenever there's a forest fire, a few employees call in saying they can't come to work.

Things have been like this as long as anyone can remember, and the company has always planned their employee allocations on the assumption that the bad air from forest fires will last three or four days each summer. But in the last couple of years—no one has exactly kept track of the dates, but it seems like a recent development—forest fire season each summer has stretched from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. As a result, the company has had to rethink all their summer staffing, to account for the longer stretches when certain people are unavailable.

Is this the result of climate change? Probably. At least it might be. But honestly, who cares? What is unquestionable is that the worsening air quality is a documented fact, and that it has forced the company to make changes in their staffing plans. This particular company is not certified to ISO 9001. But if they were, I would advise them to document these staffing changes as their response to the requirement that they determine whether climate change is a relevant issue for them.

If you are a small company, think what this example might mean for you. All your details will be different, of course. But look for any points where you find you have to change how you work, in order to account for changes outside you. Those are the points most likely to be relevant. Then do what you have to do.

Most of the time it should be that simple.

__________

* It is not my purpose here to take any position in the public and political debates about climate change itself, because the Quality business has intelligent people on both sides of that divide. My only point at the moment is that arguing whether climate change is real is a totally different question from arguing whether it is formally relevant to this or that specific business.      

Poka-yoke, or error-proofing

A few days ago, a friend of mine had a minor surgery. (He's recovering just fine.) One of the interesting parts of the preparation, though, was that the surgical team asked him to mark on himself where they were supposed to operate.

Wait, what? Isn't that something they should already know before they get this far?

This is a stock photo and not my friend.
But you get the idea. 

Well yes, sure. But think about it. One of the worst possible mistakes on the surgical table—short of losing the patient altogether, I mean—is the risk of operating on the wrong part of the body. And while it's very rare, nonetheless it has happened: you can google stories of people who went in to have their left leg operated on, and the surgeon operated on the right leg instead. The easiest way to prevent that kind of mistake is to ask the patient—who presumably knows where it hurts—to take a big blue marker and put a circle or an arrow on the spot that needs attention. It's easy to do, and it's just one more line of defense against error.

In fact, error-proofing (sometimes described using the Japanese term poka yoke, or ポカヨケ) is a fundamental Quality method. If you can make an error impossible (or very unlikely) then you save all the time and expense of having to fix it later. And of course in the case of a surgical error, "time and expense" doesn't begin to cover it. 

So how do you error-proof a process? There are almost as many answers as there are processes. But consider the process of cutting wooden rods or metal poles to a fixed length. In principle you could ask the cutter to measure each rod one at a time, and then cut it. This approach is slow, and it also introduces a lot of chance for error: every time the cutter measures a new pole, the measurement is plus-or-minus a certain amount. At the end of the shift, there's a good chance that no two poles are the same length. But you can error-proof the operation by giving your cutter a jig or fixture to seat the poles in. Then if he cuts across the top of the fixture, the poles will all be the same length.

You can go one step farther. Use a table saw with a rip fence. Then you can align every pole exactly the same. Depending on the exact nature of what you are cutting, you may even be able to cut several at once.

By extension, you can think of a lot of safety-guards on machinery as error-proofing devices. What else is a hand-guard, after all, than a device to prevent you from committing the error of reaching your hand inside the equipment while the gears are turning? The simplest hand-guard does exactly that. A more elaborate form is designed so that the machine cannot operate unless the guard is in place: this prevents you not only from reaching your hand into the gears, but from removing the hand-guard and trying to operate the machine without it. And overriding or defeating a machine's safety equipment is another kind of error.

One of the earliest works
describing double-entry
bookkeeping

In an entirely different vein, consider the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the late Middle Ages. Double-entry bookkeeping requires that every transaction has to be entered into two different accounts. 

For example, if a business takes out a bank loan for $10,000, recording the transaction in the bank's books would require a DEBIT of $10,000 to an asset account called "Loan Receivable", as well as a CREDIT of $10,000 to an asset account called "Cash".*

Strictly speaking double-entry bookkeeping is an error-detection tool rather than an error-prevention tool, because the sum of all credits to all accounts must always equal the sum of all debits from all accounts. If these two sums ever fail to match, there is an error somewhere. But the difference between error-detection and error-prevention is more terminological than real. If you detect an error soon enough, you correct it before it has time to compound into larger errors farther along in the process. 

In cases where the cost of error is smaller, the methods for error-proofing are correspondingly less formal. Another friend works in retail. Sometimes customers call in saying, "I was there yesterday looking at the products against the far wall, and I want to buy the one on the left. Is it still there? Can you set it aside for me, and I'll pick it up later?" Of course nobody knows which one was "on the left" back when the customer was in the store, because products might have been rearranged since then. But it's easy enough for a clerk to walk over to the far wall, take a picture, and text it to the customer. "Is this the one you want? Great. It'll be waiting by the register when you come in." The potential risk in case of error is not as great as in surgery, but it's a simple way to double-check and it makes the customer happy.

And that, of course, is the point.

__________

* Quoted from Wikipedia, "Double-entry bookkeeping."  

      

What is the process approach? — take 2

Yesterday morning, Manufacturing Tomorrow published my article, "What is the process approach?" It's their article now so I won't post the text of it here, but you can find it by following the link. I hope you find it useful!

For those keeping track, this is the article I promised you back in the beginning of April. The publishing process has its own timelines that aren't always obvious to the rest of us. 😀

How do you manage "special responsibilities"?

One of the first things you learn when you write formal procedures is, Don't use personal names! 

Let's say you are writing a calibration procedure. As long as anyone can remember, Dave has been checking the calibration of all your tools on a rolling cycle, so he checks each tool twice a year and records the results in an Excel sheet. Finally you get around to documenting what he does in a procedure. What you must not write is, "Dave checks the tools twice a year on a rolling cycle." Why not? Because if you use Dave's name in the procedure, sure as anything he'll move to Tahiti next month and you'll have to update the document to name someone else.

So you replace Dave's name with a functional title, and write: "The Calibration Coordinator checks the tools twice a year on a rolling cycle." Note that this isn't Dave's job title. In many companies, Dave's job title is something like "Engineer 2" that can be correlated with his pay grade. And you certainly don't want just any old "Engineer 2" to do this job. The person who does it—Dave, or his successor—has to be qualified by knowing about calibration. That's why you create a special functional title just for the sake of this specific document, and you call Dave the "Calibration Coordinator."

As you write procedure documents for your operations, you'll do this several times—half a dozen, maybe more or less, depending on how complex or specialized your operations are. When you are done, you'll have a collection of functional titles that exist only in your procedure documentation, to account for specific roles your quality management system needs. These functional titles identify your QMS's Special Responsibilities. Of course in practice they just point to Dave and Pat and Sue and Sam, who handle the respective tasks. And when the auditor reads your Calibration Procedure and asks, "Calibration Coordinator? Who's that?" right away you say "Dave."

Then the auditor asks, "How do you know?"

Make a list 

One way to manage these assignments is to make a list. Seriously, it can be that easy. Just read through the formal procedures in your QMS, and write down every Special Responsibility they define. Then publish a List of Special Responsibilities (LoSR). For each entry in the List, identify the following four pieces of information:

• 
  Title of the role? (e.g., Calibration Coordinator)
• What document defines the responsibilities? (e.g., Calibration Procedure)
• Who is assigned to that role? (e.g., Dave Smith)
• Who is the Proxy, in case the regular assignee is out? (e.g., Pat Jones)

And that's it. The next steps are just as straightforward: 

• Make sure the List is formally approved by a suitable authority. (Since the list covers roles throughout your QMS, the "suitable authority" is usually your top management.)
• Formally identify the List as part of your QMS documentation.
• Maintain the List through formal change control, so that it is always up to date and so that the assignments are communicated to all stakeholders.

Enhance your documents

There's one loose end, but it is easy to tie up. Remember I said that not just anybody can be Calibration Coordinator? Spell out the qualifications for the role. 

An easy place to document them is in the same procedure document that defines the role in the first place. For example, your Calibration Procedure explains all the steps required to calibrate your equipment; so you can easily add one extra paragraph that spells out the necessary qualifications for the Calibration Coordinator. 

Then Dave's training records include an entry that shows how he met the qualification requirements. Maybe he took a class and got a certificate; or maybe he learned on the job from his predecessor, who sent an email when Dave was ready. Either way, the assignment and Dave's qualifications are fully traceable.

• The List of Special Responsibilites assigns Dave to his role, and references the document that explains it in detail.
• The document also lists the qualification requirements.
• And Dave's training records show that he meets those requirements.

If you have used other approaches you like better, leave me a note in the comments.

    

What’s Changing in ISO 9000 (Quality Digest)

This morning, Quality Digest published my article, "What’s Changing in ISO 9000?" It's their article now so I won't post the text of it here, but you can find it by following the link. I hope you find it useful! 

Does AI have a Quality problem?

We've all seen articles about the incredible power and potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whole industries are being restructured to make use of AI's capabilities. One article from last year—that I chose almost at random—lists the use cases for Large Lanuage Models (LLMs) as follows: 

• 
  Coding: "LLMs are employed in coding tasks, where they assist developers by generating code snippets or providing explanations for programming concepts."
• Content generation: "They excel in creative writing and automated content creation. LLMs can produce human-like text for various purposes, from generating news articles to crafting marketing copy." [Gosh, are they any good at writing niche products like Quality blogs? 😀 Just kidding, of course!]
• Content summarization: "LLMs excel in summarizing lengthy text content, extracting key information, and providing concise summaries."
• Language translation: "LLMs have a pivotal role in machine translation. They can break down language barriers by providing more accurate and context-aware translations between languages."
• Information retrieval: "LLMs are indispensable for information retrieval tasks. They can swiftly sift through extensive text corpora to retrieve relevant information, making them vital for search engines and recommendation systems."

And so on. The article lists eight more use cases before summarizing with a list of half a dozen general benefits of LLMs. (I found myself wanting to ask if the author has an LLM in the family, perhaps as a favorite cousin or an in-law.) In short, LLMs can do quite a lot.

But LLMs hallucinate! 

We are discovering, though, that it is not safe to rely on LLMs for an accurate description of what is out there. When LLMs summarize content or retrieve information, sometimes they report things that aren't true. The first time I saw such a story, it was in this post from LinkedIn back in 2023, where Marcus Hutchins posted a conversation he had with the Bing AI chatbot. The bot claimed that it was still 2022, insisting "I know the date because I have access to the Internet and the World Clock"—even though it was verifiably already 2023!

Then more stories started rolling in. To my mind the most dramatic has been the recent legal case SHAHID v. ESAAM (2025), Docket No: A25A0196, decided on June 30, 2025 by the Court of Appeals of Georgia. The summary description of this case makes for delightful reading, and I enclose a selection below in an extended footnote.* But the gist is that one party's pleading must have been generated by an LLM tool. No human lawyer could have written it. The pleading rested almost entirely on bogus case law: either cases that never happened, or cases that had no relation to the point at stake. This is the kind of mistake that junior paralegals get fired for. Even worse, the initial trial court accepted it without blinking. The bogus citations were caught only by the Court of Appeals.

So employing LLMs comes with a risk. You can't just blindly trust whatever they tell you without cross-checking it, because they fabricate content so effortlessly. Looking back at that list of use cases at the top of this post, I have to qualify the claim that you can use them in writing or summarizing: maybe LLMs can suggest an interesting idea you didn't think of before, but they can't do your work for you. Some people, though (like Sufyan Esaam's attorney) want to use them for just that.

It's a problem.

What about Quality?

But is it a Quality problem? Here the answer is not so clear, because it depends how exactly you define Quality. You remember that I prefer to define Quality as "getting what you want"; and in that sense—especially if "you" means the end-user of the AI tools—then AI hallucinations constitute a big Quality problem. When AI hallucinates a false answer to my question, I'm not getting what I want.

But there is another definition, which says that "Quality is conformance to requirements." And with that definition the situation is rather different ... because the LLM programs are doing exactly what they have been told to do! 

Jason Bell of Digitalis.io made this argument in a recent LinkedIn post. The point is that the LLM tool is not programmed to see what's really there. It is not programmed to perceive reality, and it is not programmed to tell the truth. Its only programming is to say something that sounds good, subject to certain parameters that define what it takes for something to "sound good." But perceiving reality and telling the truth are never part of that definition, because AI has no mechanism or equipment to allow it to carry out those tasks.

In a sense, then, the problem is not with AI itself, but with user expectations. It's like if I use a hammer to comb my hair: the results are pretty sketchy, but it's not the hammer's fault.  

Of course I have no idea how long AI will be a big deal, or how much of an impact it will have on our work and our lives. But as long as it is here, it will be useful for us to be clear on its capabilities and limitations, so that we can distinguish reality from science fiction. In its current form, AI has no cognitive component, and therefore cannot observe reality or distinguish truth from falsehood. But it is very good at sifting through piles of words according to defined rules.

And honestly? That's enough for now. Let's use it for the things it really can do, and not try to make it comb our hair or understand the world. After all, if AI ever develops a cognitive component, that addition will doubtless bring new problems of its own. 

HAL 9000, of course.

__________

* [Emphasis is mine, in all cases.] 

After the trial court entered a final judgment and decree of divorce, Nimat Shahid (“Wife”) filed a petition to reopen the case and set aside the final judgment, arguing that service by publication was improper. The trial court denied the motion, using an order that relied upon non-existent case law. For the reasons discussed below, we vacate the order and remand for the trial court to hold a new hearing on Wife's petition. We also levy a frivolous motion penalty against Diana Lynch, the attorney for Appellee Sufyan Esaam (“Husband”)....

Wife points out in her brief that the trial court relied on two fictitious cases in its order denying her petition, and she argues that the order is therefore, “void on its face.”

In his Appellee's Brief, Husband does not respond to Wife's assertion that the trial court's order relied on bogus case law. Husband's attorney, Diana Lynch, relies on four cases in this division, two of which appear to be fictitious, possibly “hallucinations” made up by generative-artificial intelligence (“AI”), and the other two have nothing to do with the proposition stated in the Brief.

Undeterred by Wife's argument that the order (which appears to have been prepared by Husband's attorney, Diana Lynch) is “void on its face” because it relies on two non-existent cases, Husband cites to 11 additional cites in response that are either hallucinated or have nothing to do with the propositions for which they are cited. Appellee's Brief further adds insult to injury by requesting “Attorney's Fees on Appeal” and supports this “request” with one of the new hallucinated cases.

We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court's order. As the reviewing court, we make no findings of fact as to how this impropriety occurred, observing only that the order purports to have been prepared by Husband's attorney, Diana Lynch. We further note that Lynch had cited the two fictitious cases that made it into the trial court's order in Husband's response to the petition to reopen, and she cited additional fake cases both in that Response and in the Appellee's Brief filed in this Court.

As noted above, the irregularities in these filings suggest that they were drafted using generative AI....

What KIND of Customer Focus?

What is it with the airline industry?

Last year it was Boeing that kept making headlines, with a series of spectacular equipment failures, leadership changes, criminal investigations, and the apparent suicide of a whistleblower just before he was scheduled to give testimony. (See this post for a quick list of links.) In the twenty-three weeks from January 25 to July 4 last year I wrote eleven posts focused on the rolling disaster that Boeing had become in the public eye. And in fact, Boeing has had at least one more highly-publicized crash this year, but I can't tell if it represents any fundamentally new root causes.

Not to be outdone, Delta recently announced a plan to move to individualized pricing, managed by Artificial Intelligence.* Delta president Glen Hauenstein recently explained to investors, “This is a full reengineering of how we price and how we will be pricing in the future.... [Eventually,] we will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual.”

What is "individualized pricing"?

Delta president Glen Hauenstein

What factors will go into determining that price? Airlines already charge different people different prices for the same trip based on such factors as how far in advance they book, or how they buy the ticket (such as whether they shop through a travel-agent or a price-comparison website). In the last few days before a flight is to leave, an airline might drop the price if they need to fill seats, or might raise the price if it's a popular route or date. Everyone knows that flying the day before Thanksgiving will cost you a lot.

But individualized pricing goes farther than that. If you are logged into a site while buying your tickets, Delta knows who you are. They have access to your flying history, so they know what you have paid for tickets in the past—and therefore they can guess what you plan to pay for this one. They know not just whether you are on a bargain-ticket website today, but how often you shop through bargain-ticket websites in general. They can watch your behavior on the website to determine whether you are casually checking prices, or in a hurry; whether you might change your mind, or whether you need to get that ticket right now and can't be bothered to waste time over a couple of dollars. I'm sure there are more factors that I'm not devious enough to think of. And all of these will affect the individualized price they offer you. 

To be very clear, the AI tool will use all these inputs to calculate the maximum price you are willing to pay for this flight on this day, and then that's what you'll be charged. This is why Delta expects individualized pricing to provide a huge support to their profitability. 

Is that Quality?

When I first read about this plan, ... well, as a customer I was worried. Sorry, but I cannot imagine this ever working out to my benefit. But as a Quality professional, I was actually intrigued. Can this possibly count as Quality? I'm pretty sure no customer ever dreamed of asking for such a thing, but how does it line up with the letter of the law?

At a first reading, I don't see any violation of the rules in ISO 9001. Those rules are mostly procedural: if you do wicked things but you plan them carefully and do them in the right way, ISO 9001 mostly won't stop you. (See also this post, for comparison.) But ISO 9000 spells out the quality management principles underlying those rules, principles that we examined in some detail earlier this year. Is there any conflict with those?

The very first quality management principle is Customer Focus. And right away I can imagine someone from Delta arguing, Of course this pricing plan involves Customer Focus! We focus on the customer with a microscope. We know his habits, his likes and dislikes—everything about him. We know how much he'll be willing to pay even before he knows it himself. That's the beauty of the whole scheme, after all.

And yes, that's all true. But that's not what the ISO means by "customer focus." Let's look at the text of ISO 9000:2015. Clause 2.3.1.1 states:

The primary focus of quality management is to meet customer requirements and to strive to exceed customer expectations.

I guarantee no customer has ever required or expected a pricing mechanism that studies him personally to squeeze out the maximum he will pay. Clause 2.3.1.2 continues:

Sustained success is achieved when an organization attracts and retains the confidence of customers and other relevant interested parties.

Roger Dooley, writing in Forbes, argues that this pricing tool will undercut customer confidence.

Every aspect of customer interaction provides an opportunity to create more value for the customer.

Note that it says "create more value for the customer," and not "extract more value from the customer"!

I could go on, but you get the idea. The rest of clause 2.3.1 reads the same way. It calls, in short, for an approach that doesn't have much to do with Delta's approach to individualized pricing. Unfortunately, it is not possible to write nonconformances against ISO 9000.

The death of Adam Smith

From a Quality perspective, that's pretty much it: individualized pricing does not contradict the procedural requirements of ISO 9001, but it seems to sit awkwardly with the spirit of the law. None­the­less, there is a wider significance to this innovation.

Ever since the time of Adam Smith, the strongest moral justification for laissez-faire capitalism has always been that it benefits customers—that it provides better goods at cheaper prices than any other economic system, and that it prevents the accumulation of vast wealth by sellers. After all, the argument goes, if one baker sells bread so dear that he can afford to dress in silk, then another baker who is content to dress in wool or cotton will sell his bread cheaper and take away all the first one's business. Therefore the "invisible hand" is supposed to keep business profits to a minimum.

Historically it hasn't worked out that way, for a number of reasons. Innovators are given a legal monopoly on their innovations for a period of years, so they have an opportunity to get rich until their patents expire. Some individuals collude with the government to restrict their competition. And there are plenty of other reasons as well. But behind the abundant list of instances where it has failed in practice, the principle has remained that buyers and sellers meet on a level playing field; then sellers offer their goods at the best price which will still keep them in business, buyers select from among the choices, and the winners are those who can meet their (more or less) similar expenses most efficiently in order to sell for the lowest price.

That principle ends now. With the introduction of AI-powered individual pricing, Delta will seemingly no longer set prices based on any calculation of their costs, nor yet of what margins they need to stay in business. There will be no way to measure Delta's efficiency at serving their customers, over against competitors like United, American, or Lufthansa. Prices will no longer be set, in fact, with any clear relation to Delta's own operations at all. Instead, prices will be targeted exclusively on the customer: just low enough to lure him in, but otherwise high enough to get the maximum benefit out of his trade. This looks like predation. And it may be the face of the future: the articles that I link in the footnote suggest that plenty of other industries are watching Delta with an eye to following them. But if we ever reach the point where a majority of customers feel their routine commercial relationships to be predatory, I fear the response may not be pretty.

Perhaps even now there is time to back away from this threshold and reconsider.

__________

* See, for example, articles like this one and this one that explain it. See also multiple discussions through social media online, e.g. here and here.     

       

Priorities in repair

There are costs when you develop a product. One of the easiest to forget is the cost to repair it later. I don't mean when the customer breaks something by mis-using it; you can charge for repairs like that. I'm thinking of the ordinary cost of warranty repair. What happens when the product breaks down through normal wear and tear, inside the warranty period? Or in a product powered by software, what happens when the customer has an unexpected use-case, and discovers a brand-new bug?

You fix it, of course. All reputable companies do. But that costs time and money. In the high-tech case, it may require the attention of very talented engineers.

Long ago—and yes, it seems like it was in a galaxy far, far away—I worked for a startup that had a problem. We were developing a NewProduct™ that was late. It relied on a very specialized technology. The whole work rested on just one or two of our engineers.

To make things worse, we had recently released an OldProduct™ that relied on similar technology. When problems were reported, they were routed to the same engineers to fix. But every hour those engineers spent fixing a bug in the OldProduct was one more hour they weren't working on the NewProduct. So the NewProduct continued to get later.

One day, our President had had enough. In a moment of frustration, he fired off an email that said, "Effective immediately we will stop fixing bugs on OldProduct until NewProduct is released!" Clearly he hoped that this message would set the right priorities for the company, so that we could finally make some progress.

By coincidence, our annual ISO 9001 surveillance audit was scheduled for just a month later. And you can probably guess what happened. At one point the auditor asked me, "How do you respond to customer complaints?" In the course of the discussion, I mentioned the recent email about OldProduct.

Our auditor took a very dim view of this story. Had we really stopped fixing all bugs on OldProduct? He reminded me that clause 8.5.2 of ISO 9001:2000* specifically requires the organization to review nonconformities, including customer complaints. If we really had stopped fixing all reported bugs, he would have to write that up as a Major process nonconformity in the audit. 

I hadn't worked closely with this product, so I called the Customer Service Department. They explained that no, we hadn't stopped fixing bugs. When he sent that email, our President was just blowing off steam. What we had done in reality was to set up a filtering system to prioritize bug-fixing.

• If OldProduct genuinely didn't work, we fixed the problem.
• But if OldProduct actually did work, but just not the way the customer wanted it to work—this was by far the majority of the cases!—we took the customer's improvement suggestions and put them all in a big pool to be addressed when we had time. This meant we would look at them after NewProduct finally got released.

The Customer Service folks brought objective evidence to prove that yes, one or two bugs really had been addressed since President's email, so the filtering system was working. Our auditor downgraded his finding to a suggestion that it would be helpful if everyone in the organization had the same understanding about this policy, and the rest of the audit was uneventful.

This all took place long ago, but I remember it because the distinction is important. 

• On the one hand, there are things—like repairing genuine flaws under warranty—that you simply have to do: all responsible companies do them, and they are required by external standards like ISO 9001. 
• But on the other hand, you often have broad latitude to prioritize your work in a way that makes sense based on current conditions.

This flexibility can make all the difference. 

__________

* Yes, we were still working to the 2000 edition of the standard. Remember this was many years ago!   

    

What is "ISO thinking"?

A while ago, I ran across a thin little book called Why Adopt ISO Thinking? I use the word thin advisedly, as the whole work is less than 50 pages long. But I was curious about the title. I thought to myself, I'm sure I can think of reasons why to adopt it. But what exactly does the author mean by "ISO thinking" anyway?

I should add that the author doesn't approach the question the way I would, which is part of why I wanted to understand his answer. The author, by the way, is Robbie Sheerin of DV Die Cutting in Danvers, Massachusetts; Quality Manager by day, and fiction writer by night. (You can find his personal website here.) As he explains in the foreword, he came to the ISO 9001 standard from a career in welding, machining, and aluminum dip brazing. His perspective is resolutely practical rather than theoretical. He shows no interest in taking the reader on a guided tour of the seven Quality Management Principles, as I did this spring.

What does he find important? He doesn't break it out this way, but I think the three critical points for him are these:

• Standardization
• Root-cause analysis
• Process approach

Over and over, he explains how these simple points can make all the difference in your business, if you take them seriously.

His description of standardization starts with a hair-raising example: the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.

Aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire

"With 1231 firefighters, 57 fire engines, nine trucks, two hose companies, one fire boat and one police boat, the fire still raged on for thirty-plus hours. 1526 buildings were destroyed. A total of 2500 businesses were lost. More than 30,000 people were left unemployed, and a staggering $150 million in damages, which in today's money is into the billions. Incredibly, only one person died. Why was the destruction and cost so large? Threads!! Firefighters could not get enough water because of the variety of threads on the hydrants and the hoses." [page 4.]

Sheerin then explains that standardization does more than save lives. Even when lives aren't at stake, it saves money by simplifying operations.

When he sketches out what the clauses of ISO 9001 represent, he gives multiple examples of the right and wrong ways to correct problems or to address customer complaints. He makes it clear that if you address only surface causes then you will have to keep solving the same problem over and over again. This means that the costs for solving that problem never stop adding up. On the other hand, if you can find and address the root cause, you only have to correct it once. So in the long run, doing it right is far cheaper than doing it fast.

As for the process approach, Sheerin introduces this along with root-cause analysis. If you understand your work in terms of processes, you can tell where to act so that you have the most leverage—whether you are fixing a problem or introducing an improvement. And he gives a concrete example which sounds like it might really have happened (or something much like it).

Let's say the customer wants a brass connector. But every time these are produced, there is a small burr .... It has always been removed by hand .... One day the customer complains that the burr is not completely removed or that there are scratches where the burr was removed. A CAR (Corrective Action Report) is created .... During the investigation, it is discovered that the operator does not have adequate hand tools for this job. It also takes the operator 4 hours to rework 500 parts by hand .... [but] by adding a 5-second pass of the part in the machine, the burr can be removed. Now you have removed the rework op and gone from 4 hours to 41 minutes (extra machine time). [page 19.]

Look at the whole process—study it as a process—and you find ways to make the work both easier and more reliable.

Sheerin insists that you can benefit from adopting one or two clauses of ISO 9001, even if you don't bother to comply to the whole thing. When I first picked up the book, that idea sounded odd to me. But this example illustrates what he means. Any improvement is an improve­ment. If you can't afford to take on the whole standard all at once, something is better than nothing. A bit of standardization here, a bit of root-cause analysis there, and an overall awareness of your work as processes—step by step these can help you improve. 

It's a pragmatic approach, and an encouraging one.    

    

Climate change and bad audits

A while ago—six weeks, now that I check—I wrote about how to audit the recent Climate Amendment to ISO 9001. I based my advice on a guidance document issued by the ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group, entitled (unimaginatively enough) ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group Guidance on: Auditing Climate Change issues in ISO 9001. At the time, my basic conclusion was that the requirements were not heavy or onerous.

A couple of weeks later, Kyle Chambers and Caleb Adcock of Texas Quality Assurance released a podcast on the exact same topic. (See the YouTube link below.) I usually appreciate Kyle's pragmatic approach to the ISO standard, so I assumed he would see this guidance the same way I did; but it was a while before I had time to listen to his podcast. It turns out, though, that his take is almost the opposite of mine! He summarizes the APG document as "a whole guidance document of gotchas!"

How is this possible? After listening to the rest of Kyle's podcast, I think I see what happened. Like so much in the ISO world, it all comes down to context and interpretation. Also, it seems like some of Kyle's clients have been saddled with really poor auditors. I'll explain what I mean as we go on.

Agreements

Let me start with the parts where we agree. Kyle's basic advice to his clients (around 21:00) is that you shouldn't need to do anything you aren't already doing to manage your business. But you may have to document what you are doing, and wrap it up in the language of risk management. Caleb makes the same point in different words (around 22:10) by spelling out that if you have determined that climate change has a significant impact on your business, then naturally you are going to implement steps to manage that impact so that you can keep your doors open. You'll do this with or without ISO. So just document it.

If you believe that climate change has no impact to your business at all, Kyle suggests (24:48) that you should still keep an eye on the legal and regulatory aspects affecting you, in case they change.

And Caleb makes the critical point (13:53) that "The auditor is not the risk police." In other words, when a business makes this or that determination about the relevance of climate change to their operations, it is not up to the auditor to overrule them.

I agree with all of this. 

Bad audits

Where Kyle and I part company is over what to expect in your audits. When I read the guidance document, I approach it as an auditor and I think about what I would do. Practically speaking, an auditor is constrained by the clock: you've got to get through the whole organization, and you've got only a few hours to cover it all. So mostly you don't have time to add any new topics, because the old topics will already keep you busy enough. (I discuss some of the auditor's mindset in this post here.) Therefore, if I were the auditor, I would scan through the ten-page document to look for two or three extra questions I could ask. Then, depending on the answers, I'd see where the trails led from there. Obviously this guidance document includes a lot more than two or three questions—it's ten pages long, after all!—but there are lots of different companies out there to audit. Questions that work for one won't work for another. So the document includes a lot of examples to choose from. 

But some of Kyle's clients have had auditors who took a very different approach. He describes (at around 8:00 and following) having long arguments with auditors who insisted that the client organizations had to answer every single question in the document, or at least a couple of questions from every section—regard­less whether the questions made any sense for the business! Kyle kept saying, "The company doesn't do that," and the auditor kept insisting, "My Certification Body gave me a form to fill out and I have to put a piece of evidence in every blank. So I don't care if it's irrelevant. Give me an answer anyway!"

This argument went on for a long time.

In a sense I feel bad for the auditor. If the CB really did give him a form like that, and if they really did insist that he had to fill out every blank, then they set him up for failure. But whoever is ultimately responsible, this is bad auditing! How much time did the auditor waste arguing over these points? Whatever it was, he didn't get it back later. The more time he spent barking up the wrong tree on climate change, the less time he had to check calibration, operational controls, handling of noncon­forming material, documents and records, internal audits, or management review. In fact, if a company were unethical, they could use arguments over climate change evidence to run out the clock, so they never had to confront hard questions in other parts of the operation. And any auditor who lets himself be played like this isn't good at his job.

I wish I could say this will never happen, but obviously I'd be wrong because it has. All I can say is that no experienced auditor should let himself get tangled up like this, and I'm sorry that Kyle's clients got stuck with someone who did. 

Other topics

Podcasts are conversations, and conversations meander. In the course of this discussion, Kyle and Caleb raise a number of interesting or tantalizing side topics. 

• At about 15:30, Caleb asks if there's a difference between addressing risks from climate change and addressing risks from natural disasters. (Answer: It depends.) 
• At 18:50, Kyle asks how it is possible for a really big company to get certified to ISO 9001, because it has so many parts that they can't all play together. (Answer: I've worked for global companies that were committed to ISO 9001 certification, so it's possible. But you're right that it ain't easy.) 
• And a little later, at 19:28, they ask, "What about the company who says 'We have only 100 employees, so how can we save the polar bears?'" (Answer: I've talked to small companies too, and yes, that's a concern. But some of the answers are interesting.) 

Each of these deserves a longer answer, along with plenty of other questions that they raise but don't have time to pursue. I won't take the time here. But if you'd like me to address one or another of them, leave a comment to let me know.

Meanwhile here is a link to their podcast on YouTube.