Quality in management

Last week, I raised the question whether Quality has anything to say about how an organization manages its people and resources internally. To ground the discussion in a concrete example, I referenced a dispute that is currently under way inside the American Society for Quality (ASQ) about funding and budgetary priorities; but honestly I could have picked any number of other companies instead. There's nothing special about the ASQ controversy. From my point of view, really, there were only two benefits to writing about this example: first, I'm a member of ASQ so I happen to know about it (because the topic is unfolding around me in real time); and second, the critical details are already available in public so I could discuss them without violating anyone's confidentiality. (If you check last week's article, you will find footnotes with URL links for all of the substantive data.)

Remember the real question

On the other hand, it's never very useful just to write that "XYZ Corp. did a bad thing." What are the rest of us supposed to do with that? The useful thing is to write information that we can take back to improve our own work. And that brings us back to the original question: Does Quality have anything to say about how an organization manages its people and resources internally?

Last week I took the wrong approach, by checking what ISO 9000:2015 says in the Quality Management Principles. Oh, the information in there is sound enough! But it's all just recommendations, and it's mostly stuff we've heard before. So it's easy to imagine someone in an organization's management saying: 

Look, I believe in providing Quality to our customers. But when it comes to all that talk about "internal transparency" and "treating your employees with respect," I just don't have the time. I want to Ship Product and Make Money; and all that touchy-feely stuff about employee relations and being a Nice Guy—that's all a luxury. Get to work and get your job done. End of story!

Is he wrong?

Getting to work is fine, but he's wrong to call human relations a luxury. But ISO 9000 isn't the best place to see it. Let's back up and remember what Quality is about.

The Quality perspective

Quality means getting what you want, but there are a lot of ways to do that. Critically, Quality is not built in the abstract from a set of axioms or natural laws: there's no set of rules that unfailingly give you Quality. If anything, Quality is more like a giant Lessons Learned exercise, where we cobble together useful techniques by analyzing one failure after another and figuring out what it takes to make sure those failures never happen again. But since there are many different kinds of failures, there are many different Quality techniques—so many that it can be hard to summarize them all.

Still, there are general points that they all have in common. One of them is that if you want some assembly (like a tractor or a stamping machine) to continue to work well, you have to understand the components that go into it and how they are assembled. What kinds of failures are normal for these components? Does this material rust or corrode? Does that material bend or warp? Do these gears need regular cleaning and oiling, or is it better to leave them alone? All of these are normal questions that any Quality Technician responsible for a large machine would consider on a daily basis.

And here is the critical point. The organization itself is a kind of large machine, and its components are human beings! Quality requires that we understand the failure modes of our machines, to prevent breakdowns. Therefore Quality also requires that we understand the failure modes of our fellow human beings, to prevent organizational dysfunction. 

Failure modes

What do we know about human beings, that relates to their possible failure modes in organizations? We know a lot, and there's no way I can summarize it all in a single blog post. But let me list a few facts that I hope we can agree on.

• People are capable of free will.
• People are capable of independent judgement.
• People are capable of rational thought.
• People work together naturally in groups.
• People want to feel respected, and are sensitive to slights. (See research on disrespect, e.g. here.)
• People are, on the whole, more fearful of loss than covetous of gain. (See, e.g., the research on Loss aversion.)

Already, even these six points entail consequences for the management of any organization.

• Because people have free will, they must (at some level) want to be part of an organization, or they will simply walk away. (I discuss this point in more detail in this post back in the spring.)
• Because people have independent judgement, they choose whether to stay with your organization based on their own criteria, and not yours. In fact, different members of the organization might have different criteria from each other.
• Because people are capable of rational thought, you can give them reasons to stay with your organization and expect them to listen. But the reasons you give them should make sense. Also, because people can see with their own eyes, the reasons you give them should match what they can see for themselves—i.e., the reasons should be true. If you give your people reasons that are visibly false, the risk is that they will stop believing you even if you later tell the truth. Also, as I have discussed before, the easiest way to make people think that something is the case is to make sure it really is the case.
• 
  Because people work together naturally in groups—Aristotle called us "πολιτικὰ ζῷα" or "political animals" [Politics 1.1253a]—your people probably want to work for you, by default. And people regularly accept some kind of authority over their work, without chafing at it. But they will not accept just whatever authority you feel like exercising. While a willingness to work together is natural, so is the deep-seated expectation of justice. It is true that people sometimes disagree around the edges about what constitutes justice. But nobody who has a choice will remain part of a community without it.
• Because people are sensitive to loss, be careful before you take things away from them. Of course sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes there are good reasons. But in that case, it is important to counter-balance the loss by giving them something else in exchange. At the very least, you have to explain what you are doing and why. This shows them respect (and people want respect); it also offers them the truth (and people want the truth).

Notice what this means. I have not said one word about Being a Nice Guy. But a small collection of known facts about human behavior (and human failure modes) has already shown us that—if we want to prevent the organizational machine from breaking down—management has got to offer the rank and file respect, truth, transparency, and justice.

This isn't soft-heartedness or soft-headedness. This is just preventive maintenance. And preventive maintenance is one of the fundamental Quality disciplines.

If you are interested, I can use next week's post to review how ASQ has handled its current controversy, in light of these points. Let me know what you think.