The good ship Vasa

I have long thought that project managers should all have a framed painting of the Swedish warship Vasa to hang in their offices. It must be the most famous object lesson in history for the importance of requirements management.

The Vasa was built between 1626 and 1628, to be the flagship of Sweden's naval squadron in the Stockholm Archipelago. [This history is condensed from the article in Wikipedia.] The ship was designed by Henrik Hybertsson (shipwright at the Stockholm shipyard), relying on requirements from King Gustav II Adolf (known to history as Gustavus Adolphus the Great). Hybertsson was a master shipbuilder, and the Vasa should have been a great warship. But after the keel was laid and the fundamental architecture of the ship could no longer be changed, the King kept asking for improvements. The ship needed more sails, and taller ones. It had to carry more cannons, and heavier ones. And so on. No one had the courage to say "No," so the project drifted behind schedule. Then Hybertsson fell ill and died. A new shipwright took over the job. By this time the King was impatient, and wanted the team to finish their work so the Vasa could be launched as soon as possible.

On her maiden voyage, the Vasa left port and sailed roughly 1400 yards into Stockholm harbor. The weight of all her extra sails and cannons meant that she rested very low in the water. After a few minutes, a light breeze tipped her slightly to one side ... and even that little was too far. She began to take on water, and sank on the spot.

Gustavus Adolphus. When he asks
for more cannons, tell him "No."

Although she failed as a warship, the Vasa had a much more successful afterlife as a museum. In 1961, the ship was finally recovered from the harbor floor. It turned out that the mud had preserved her very well, and many of the artifacts on board were still in good condition. Archeologists worked for several years to restore the ship, and in 1990 the Vasa Museum opened to the public.

The Vasa is fascinating as a museum. I've been there, and I recommend it whole-heartedly. But of course it was a complete failure as a warship. And the reason it failed so utterly is precisely that the project team failed to control their requirements.

Once the keel was laid, the ship's architecture was more or less fixed. It could support sails of a certain height, and cannons of a certain weight. No more than that. And these limits derived from the laws of physics, which cannot be overruled by royal decree.

I'm pretty sure that every case of scope creep in every large project since then has the same basic elements: an initial design based on one set of assumptions, work that has progressed far enough that it is not economical to start over, and then new requirements from someone who doesn't understand their consequences and whom no one has the courage to confront. But that's why every project management office in the world should be decorated with a painting of the Vasa. It may be painful to tell your King "No," but it's better than letting your grand warship sink to the bottom of the harbor less than a mile into her maiden voyage.    

           

Pay your suppliers

A few weeks ago, Christopher Paris published an article about companies who don't pay their suppliers—or rather, strictly speaking, companies who make their suppliers wait four, five, or six months to get paid, even when the contract plainly requires payment in 15 days net. He describes having dealt with companies just like this, and I believe it.

Gothmog rejecting an invoice.

Back when I was first starting out, I worked indirectly with a company I'll call Gothmog Enterprises. (Don't even try to guess who they were in real life; my LinkedIn profile doesn't go back that far.) Gothmog Enterprises was a very large company. And there were persistent rumors that they preferentially did business with small, local suppliers who were desperate for the orders. Then when the invoice arrived—so the rumors used to claim—Gothmog Enterprises would pay 60% and stamp it "Payment in Full." This left the suppliers with a painful choice: continue to do business with Gothmog, knowing that they would only ever get 60 cents on the dollar; or cut them off, and be cut out of the massive volume of business that Gothmog made available. Of course it was a terrible choice for the suppliers, and for Gothmog to force it on them was unambiguously evil. 

Maybe it was only a rumor and never really happened.

"ISO 9001 would never let you
mistreat your suppliers!"

Now, Chris Paris sells consulting related to management systems, for example (but not only) those certified to ISO 9001 or AS9100. So it would be tempting to think he shouldn't have to deal with this kind of problem. You might even think to yourself, Surely a company with a functioning quality system wouldn't be allowed to play games like this with their suppliers! But this would be to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. Not sure you agree? Let's check.

ISO 9001:2026 covers all the requirements relating to suppliers in clause 8.4. (Property belonging to suppliers but stored at your workplace is covered in clause 8.5.3.) There is no prefatory material in clause 8.4, but just three subclauses.

• Clause 8.4.1 says that anything provided by a supplier and ultimately bound for your customers must conform to requirements, and must be put under a suitable control to ensure that it conforms.  
• Clause 8.4.2 says that you have to figure out what controls are appropriate, and whether to apply them to the things you buy, or to the suppliers themselves, or both.
• Clause 8.4.3 says you have to tell the supplier about all your requirements, and about all the controls you intend to apply.
• There's nothing about paying your bill afterwards.

And that's it! Oh, I suppose with this latest edition of the standard you could try to build an argument around clause 5.1.1(i), which says that top management is supposed to "promot[e] quality culture and ethical behavior." Maybe you could argue that letting your suppliers wait for months before they are paid is a funny kind of "ethical behavior." It would certainly be worth making the argument. But don't expect to win.

This might look like a gap in ISO 9001, but I'm not sure I agree. I'd rather call it a limitation of scope. ISO 9001 was never intended to describe ever single thing a company should do in order to qualify as praiseworthy or good. It is specifically a quality management system standard, which means that it should be focused strictly on customer satisfaction. If I can make my customers happy while being an unethical jerk to my suppliers, ... well, morally I still shouldn't do it; but as long as my customers don't know that I am an unethical jerk they won't care. In the short term, before my picture starts showing up on social media headlining lurid exposés of my crimes and misdeeeds, my customers will still be satisfied. And in that sense—for that short term—my orc-ish behavior towards my suppliers is out of scope for ISO 9001.

Where the treatment of suppliers does re-enter the larger Quality ecosystem is in the more general consideration of the seven Quality principles (spelled out in ISO 9000). One of these principles is Relationship management, which covers relationships with all interested parties. And in case it's not already obvious, suppliers are always interested parties. The point of the discussion of these principles in ISO 9000 is that even if yes, technically a company can get away with observing the letter of the ISO 9001 requirements while still being a scoundrel in other respects, in the long run it's not a sustainable strategy. Over time, suppliers will walk away from them, blacklist them, and refuse to do business with them—exactly the way that Chris Paris describes in the article I mentioned at the beginning of this post! Any company who wants to secure the ability to do business in the long term has to do more than narrowly follow the rules. 

Among other things, this means paying suppliers.  

           

When half a loaf is worse than none

You work in a small office that's part of a big organization, and the experts at Headquarters just issued a new regulation. Everyone has to comply. You don't have the budget to implement the whole thing, but you could do half of it with no trouble. Should you do that half, just to show good faith? Isn't half a loaf better than none? 

Not so fast. It all depends.

Of course sometimes that's the right thing to do. Implement Part One now, and make a plan to implement Part Two next year when you can afford it. Communicate with the people at Headquarters so everyone understands the situation, and make incremental progress.

But evaluate every situation on its own. Sometimes implementing half a loaf will undermine you, and you would do better to wait till you can do the whole thing at once.

I was in exactly this situation once, years ago. I was working for a small, entrepreneurial startup that had just been acquired by a global company. The global company had a lot of systems and regulations that we had to learn in a hurry.

One bundle of regulations addressed security. Every office and every plant worldwide—except ours—issued employee badges. Those badges let you into the building at your site. If there were restricted areas at your site, your badge could be fine-tuned to let you into exactly the areas you were allowed to access. If you went to work in a new location, your badge could be reprogrammed to open the doors at the new location instead. It was a complex, interconnected system.

We had none of that.

And right away, visitors started to comment. 

"What, no badges? How can you work for Big Company without badges?" 

"Gosh, the next time I need a new printer I'll just fly out here and take one from your office since your security is so lax."

"Does Headquarters know that you guys don't have badges?"

Someone in my department decided we should do something right away. She started scheduling appointments for everyone in our office to have a picture taken, and ordered a box of badge blanks. She was halfway through taking all the pictures before I had a chance to sit down with her and ask what she was thinking.

"Well everyone keeps saying we need badges. I figured I could make badges, and then our guests would be happy."

"But badges are just part of the picture," I reminded her. "What about the electronic keys and the huge IT infrastructure that links us into the rest of Big Company worldwide? Where is the budget for that going to come from, and who is going to implement it?"

"I thought we could do that later."

That was the key. She figured half a loaf is better than none, and in a different case she might have been right. But in this specific case, it didn't work, and couldn't possibly work.

I told her, "Think a minute. Suppose it is the day after you issue badges to everyone, and explain they are mandatory. How are you going to enforce them?"

"What?"

"Say that Frank forgets his badge at home. But he can still get into the building, right? Because the badge isn't an electronic key, so it isn't hooked into the security system. Did you think we were going to hire guards to stand at the door and stop people without badges?"

"No."

"That's right. There's no budget for that. Only then what happens is that everyone realizes the rule about wearing badges has no teeth. They can openly ignore it, with no consequences. And then the next time we have to implement a new rule from Big Company, it'll be twice as hard."

"So what do you want me to do? Should I run around the building every day to check that people have their badges on?"

"No. What I want is for us to wait and do nothing until we can afford to implement the whole package all at once."

That's what we did, and it took a couple of years until the electronic entry system became a high enough priority for our management to pay for it. In the meantime, Big Company understood that we were non-compliant with that specific set of security requirements, and treated the situation as a known risk to be managed. Mostly it didn't take a lot of attention, and we all went about our business just fine. When the day finally came, we did everything at once; we were fully integrated into Big Company's IT infrastructure; and, yes, we got our badges.

Every case is different. There is no substitute for thinking through all the details to understand what happens if you take this option or that one. But sometimes it is simpler just to be noncompliant—fully above-board, so that you are known to be non-compliant—than to get tangled in the complexities of trying to do something halfway.

           

Quality methods for the win!

I've often argued that Quality methods are just as useful in real life as they are in the workplace, but this month's issue of Quality Progress is running a story that makes the point better than I ever could. Jared Watson, a senior quality engineering specialist at L3Harris Technologies, published an article about how he used systematic quality improvement methodologies to win big on the game show "Jeopardy!" 

You can read the full article online. But to summarize, Watson won his first rounds (in June 2023) with only "a month of preparation and a lifetime of enthusiastic—if amateur—curiosity." But then he was invited to compete in the Tournament of Champions, and he realized that his preparation would have to reach a whole new level. So he analyzed his gaps as clearly as possible, and made a plan to address them.

The first step was honesty. In my original run, I’d lost thousands of dollars on geography clues, including two Daily Doubles, and geography is the most frequently tested “Jeopardy!” category. If I didn’t confront that weakness, it would beat me again.

Next came help. Improvement accelerates when we invite others into the process. In my case, I had a sleeping trivia giant in my house ...: my wife, Jasmin. What began as a simple request for a few flash cards turned into more than 10,000 handcrafted study prompts .... Her support became the backbone of my preparation.

But tools and support only matter if you put in the work. Early on, I tried to master new material in a single sitting by drilling the same cards until I was frustrated. It didn’t work. What did work was steady, sustainable repetition: reviewing each card no more than twice a day, trusting that consistency—not perfection—would lock in the knowledge over time. And it did....

This lesson is one our field knows well: Quality improves through honest assessment, smart use of resources and disciplined, incremental effort. Whether on the “Jeopardy!” stage or in our organizations, consistent practice beats the illusion of overnight mastery every time. 

With this solid preparation, Watson posted a perfect performance during the quarterfinals, answering 21 for 21 and all three Daily Doubles. Later he was eliminated in the semifinals, but the power of the method to get him that far was absolutely clear. As Watson himself concluded, "That’s what quality looks like in practice: A commitment to the process, not just the final score."

Congratulations!

           

Where to buy ISO standards

Now that the International Organization for Standardization has released ISO 9001:2026, the latest edition of the world's most famous quality management systems standard, you may be wondering where you can buy a copy? Fortunately there are lots of options. Never let it be said that the Internet passed up a chance to sell a popular item.

Of course, you may already have a well-established channel for getting copies of standards. Maybe the Certification Body that you always work with has already arranged for you to get a copy of the new standard. If you work for a large company, there may be a central office responsible for distributing standards to whoever needs them. Certainly back when I worked for global companies, that was my experience. Even though my own office might be small or easily ignored in the big picture, I could always contact somebody at headquarters who sent me whatever I needed.

On the other hand, maybe you have no access to such an office, and have to buy your own copy. Where do you turn? There are many choices.

The most obvious choice is to buy directly from ISO themselves. They have a website, from which you can derive a lot of useful information about the standardization process, and about ISO's plans for the future. The website also has a store, where you can search any of the products that ISO publishes and buy them directly. In many ways this is the most obvious option, and for some people it will surely be the simplest.  

But ISO works through national standards bodies to develop standards, and by the same token sells their products through the national standards bodies as well. So in the United States, for example, you can buy ISO standards through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Strictly speaking, the standards you buy from ANSI are ANSI standards, but we are still talking about documents with the same words and requirements. ANSI has just adopted the ISO text intact to constitute the equivalent American document. You can find the ANSI website here, and the online webstore here.

Naturally, ANSI isn't the only national standards body that works with ISO. There are many others, and you can buy from any of them that you can reach. With the Internet, it is often easy to reach organizations that are geographically distant. So, for example, you might want to patronize the British Standards Institution, another venerable collaborator with the ISO. Like the other organizations we've mentioned, BSI has a well-established web presence here. And you can buy their standards (including ISO standards that BSI republishes as British national standards) by navigating to this page here.  

Strictly speaking, there is no law that limits the sale of ISO standards to national standards bodies. There are other organizations engaged with the standardization process as well, and some of them are authorized vendors in addition to their other roles. One of the most obvious, at least from where I sit, is ASQ, the American Society for Quality. ASQ works with ANSI to contribute to writing the ISO standards, so it is only natural that ASQ should be an authorized vendor for the final products. You can find ASQ's main home page here, and the online store for publications is here.  

At this point you may have checked several of these online stores, and have discovered that buying your own copy of one of the popular ISO standards can be kind of ... expensive. The prices differ slightly from one site to the next. but if you want a copy of a popular standard like ISO 9001:2026 or ISO 14001:2026, it seems like you can easily pay between two- and three-hundred dollars, or even more. per standard. Is that really the best anyone can offer? Doesn't anyone out there offer a discount?

Right now, yes, there does seem to be an option for budget-conscious customers. Things change fast on the Internet, so I don't know if these offers will still be valid by the time you read this post. But let me recommend that you visit the website of Eesti Standardimis ja Akrediteerimiskeskus, the Estonian Centre for Standardisation and Accreditation. They offer standards in Estonian and in English. They are authorized vendors just like any other national standards body. But as of this writing, their prices on the popular standards seem to run about 10-20% of what everyone else is charging. If you need to pick up a copy of some international standard soon, but can't afford to spend hundreds for it (dollars, euros, pounds ... the unit hardly matters)—check the online webstore in Estonia to see if they have what you need.

Thanks to Chris Paris for his post in LinkedIn that let me know about the prices in Estonia!

P.S.: You might also check this post, to see whether the standard you want is available for free. The terms and conditions are a little awkward, but under the right circumstances it might be just what you need.

           

Political savviness as a leadership tool

Back when he was still editing The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein used to remark that his responsibilities as editor involved little more than "opening the mail." What he meant was that the journal had acquired enough of a reputation that good writers regularly submitted solid and thoughtful pieces for publication with no prompting from his side. All he had to do—or so he claimed—was to open the mail, see what had come in this month, and then send it to the printer.

A blogger's job is rarely so easy, but I am always delighted when I find something I can share with you. This week it is a short video that I found posted on myASQ, ASQ's social media platform. Its title is "Political savviness as a leadership tool," and it was originally posted by Luigi Sille of ASQ's Human Development & Leadership Division. Mr. Sille and the HD&L Division retain all rights to this video, and I gratefully acknowledge their permission to share it here.

The central message of the video is a simple one: political skill is a fundamental leadership tool. It doesn't get the acclaim of talents like vision and strategy, but it is just as important. No matter how inspiring the vision or how brilliant the strategy, there will always be internal friction in any organization when you try to implement them—simply because there is always friction when people work together. Political skill is nothing more than the lubricant for that friction, the ability to work with others inside an organization in order to get things done. 

Many people hear the words "political skill" and think of something bad; they associate the concept with force or fraud, with coercion or manipulation. Of course sometimes those things do happen inside organizations, but they are dysfunctions and they are the exception. Most organizations get along fine without them. And associating political skill with those kinds of behaviors is like associating weather with hurricanes and tornadoes: sure, they are dramatic, but they aren't the whole story.

It's a good video, and it will cost you only a minute. I hope you enjoy it.

  

           

It's published! Now what?

Yesterday, September 16, after months of waiting and hype, the 2026 edition of the ISO 9001 quality management system standard was formally published. You can buy a copy from the ISO themselves, or wherever you normally acquire standards.

Great news! Now what?

Well, that depends. Overall there is a three-year transition period from the 2015 edition to the 2026 edition. But what you have to do during that time depends on how you interact with the standard.

• Do you work for a company that is certified to ISO 9001?
• Do you work for a Certifying Body (CB) that certifies other companies?
• Do you work for an Accrediting Body (AB), that accredits CBs so they can be allowed to certify companies?

In each case the requirements are a little different.

If you work for a regular company certified to ISO 9001—but not a CB or an AB—the requirement is that you need to acquire an updated certificate reflecting the new edition of the standard no later than September 30, 2029. The only way to get a new certificate is for your CB to conduct an audit to the new standard, either as part of your normal schedule or else as an extra, out-of-sequence audit. It will take your CB some time after conducting the audit to process the results and issue your certificate. So you would be well-advised to contact your CB, and ask how much time they need. Then schedule the transition audit early enough to give them more time than they asked for. Unexpected issues always come up towards the end of any transition period, and you don't want someone else's unrelated accident to jeopardize the timely issuance of your certificate.

What do you need to do on your side to get ready for the transition audit? Fortunately, not much. Several months ago I wrote about the changes that were planned for this edition, and not much has shifted between then and now. The consequence is that the updates in this edition are few, and they are mostly pretty intuitive. You shouldn't have to change much about your current management system in order to comply with them. Be sure to read the new edition, of course! Once you do, you'll find in many cases that your current system already meets the new requirements without the need for any change at all (except maybe in terminology). Explain that to your auditor, and you are done. If you do have to adjust something, then plan and implement the updates in a systematic way like you would do with any other changes. But you shouldn't find it a burden.

If you work for a CB or an AB, the requirements are a little more detailed. I'll summarize them here, but they have been compiled into a document published by the Global Accreditation Cooperation Incorporated (Global ACI), the international authority on the accreditation of laboratories, certification bodies, and others. You'll want to download the document for reference. (See links below.🡳🡳)   

In a nutshell, a CB has to develop and implement a transition plan, including communication with all existing clients. As part of their transition plan, they have to communicate with their AB and provide all documentation the AB might request. In the end, the CB must communicate to their AB no later than June 30, 2027 that they can certify companies to the new edition. Then the AB has three months (latest September 30, 2027) to decide whether the CB has made the transition adequately. After that decision, the AB must conduct at least one (preferably more) witness audit of the CB where the CB is auditing a client to ISO 9001:2026.

An AB, for their part, has to be ready to accredit CBs to the new edition no later than March 31, 2027. They too have to prepare a transition plan, and to communicate with both their CBs and Global ACI.

Any new or initial certification to ISO 9001 after March 31, 2028, must be to the 2026 edition.

For more details, please see the documents linked below.   

Global ACI transition requirements for ISO 9001:2026

Global ACI transition requirements for ISO 14001:2026

Global ACI downloadable transition requirements documents page

           

Writing a wiki

Last week, Johnathan Gonzalez of Worthington Enterprises posted a question on a myASQ discussion board, and it has gotten a lot of traffic. He asked, "When Quality depends on one person, do you really have a system?" Then he expanded the question with a little more detail.

Sometimes a process works because the process is strong. Sometimes it works because one person is really good at holding everything together.

Those two situations can look exactly the same until that person goes on vacation, changes roles, or leaves.

Most of us have probably worked with someone like that. They know the history behind a recurring issue. They know which supplier needs extra follow up. They know who to call when something goes sideways. They know which part of the process actually matters because they have seen what happens when it fails.

That experience is incredibly valuable.

The problem starts when that person's knowledge becomes the control. At that point, the organization may think it has a strong process when what it really has is a strong individual....

Where have you seen tribal knowledge become a real dependency in a process, and what actually helped transfer that knowledge to others?

Of course he is absolutely right that the two situations can look the same, and also that it is important to distinguish them. If your company depends critically on information that Tom and Larry carry in their heads, then—to put it gently—you are facing an important risk. And until you can get that knowledge spread across more people, you probably want to discourage Tom and Larry from taking up extreme sports or playing the lottery.

How do you spread their knowledge? Of course there are many ways. You can ask them to give talks over lunch. You can assign them to work on projects with junior colleagues, so that the junior colleagues rub shoulders with them and learn by doing. You can ask them to write procedure documents, though that kind of task is often postponed till the last minute because it's not very exciting.

Another approach is to create a wiki. The advantage of a wiki is that you can build it incrementally, a little bit at a time. But how do you remember all the different bits and bobs of topics that have to be included?

I once knew an engineering manager I've called Franz, who solved that exact problem. His organization had, at the tijme, some very senior engineers with decades of experience, and some new graduates who were just starting out. Naturally the new hires often asked the older engineers for advice, particularly around the design and architecture of the company's product line.

Franz introduced the following rule: "Whenever you ask a question, do it in email. And whenever someone asks you a question, don't just reply! Instead, add that question to the wiki. Write your answer in the wiki. Then reply to the original question by sending a link to your answer."

That was the protocol. It was simple. Everyone understood it. And over time it allowed the wiki to capture most of the tribal knowledge that the senior engineers had accumulated throughout their careers.

No single approach does everything. If you have to collect tribal knowledge, use multiple approaches at the same time, each supporting the others. But I have always liked Franz's protocol for filling up the local wiki with the knowledge everyone needed.   

           

Interviewing for flexibility

How do you meet conflicting requirements in your daily work? I don't know any rule of thumb, but it happens all the time so you have to watch for it.

How do you select employees so that they can meet conflicting requirements? How do you build a department that can handle muddled or conflicting inputs and still perform? Now that's an interesting question! And back in the day, I had some experience with it.

Years ago, I ran the documentation group in a small tech startup. On the one hand, we had strict procedures to follow when it was time to release a new design. On the other hand, we came at the very end of the design cycle, so by the time a project got to us it was usually late. It seemed like we never had the time we needed to execute our strict procedures.

In principle I should have pushed back against the organization, and to some extent I did. But I also recognized that this is what life is like in tech startups. To some extent, my department had to adapt to fit the organization, rather than demanding that the organization adapt to us. We had to work together to find a productive middle ground.

So whenever I hired someone new, I leaned into this dynamic during the interview. Over time, I found that one of my most useful questions was: "What do you do when you have to choose between Doing-It-Right and Doing-It-On-Time?" 

I call that a useful question because I got so many wrong answers. In this context, a "wrong" answer means an answer that told me clearly, This candidate will never thrive in this particular environment, so they are not the right match for the job. Keep looking. Among the wrong answers that I got to this question were comments like the following:

• "I ask my manager." Sorry, but you are going to encounter some version of this conflict every week, maybe every day. You have to be able to work it out for yourself.
• "That's never happened to me." I don't know where you worked before, but that condition is a way of life here. I doubt you'll like it.
• "Always do it right. No matter what." My gosh, I wish I could agree with you, really I do. But that's just not possible. Most projects will be late, and we have to work with them somehow. 

Well then, what were the right answers? There actually wasn't a single "right answer" that I was looking for. What I wanted was to listen to a candidate think through the problem. Successful candidates often started by asking me questions. What's the nature of the process hold-up? What's the priority behind the release? Can we change any of the parameters, so that the conflict disappears? Can we change the process, so it doesn't take so long? All of these were answers that gave me some confidence the candidate could make a sound decision in real life.

One of my favorite answers came from a local engineering student at UCSB, who was applying for a part-time internship. His last position had been working on the UCSB grounds crew over the summer, but he wanted a part-time job that aligned better with his studies. And when I asked him about Doing-It-Right versus Doing-It-On-Time, he gave me a concrete example.

Part of his job on the grounds crew was to trim the hedges. Now, UCSB has a large campus, so unless you have an army of hedge-trimmers you can't trim the hedges all at once. You start with this hedge here; but when you finish it and go to trim that hedge over there, the one you just finished starts growing some more and pretty soon it looks ragged again.

For most of the summer that's no big deal. There was a plan for what to trim when, and he cycled through the plan. But at the end of summer, the school holds festivities for the beginning of classes. All the students return; and in many cases, their parents come too. The campus has to look spotless for the parents.

But he just explained that's impossible! What did he do?

The key is that the parents never go all over campus. Throughout the festivities, the parents are pretty much confined to a few specific places. So the priority at the end of summer was to make sure that every line-of-sight from a spot where parents would visit had to look flawless. That priority was absolute, but it represented only a small percentage of the total campus. For all the rest, the crew did the best they could but didn't worry if it was a little ragged around the edges.

The reasoning was solid. The priority was clear. And it was obvious to me that he understood what I was asking. I hired him.  

So yes, you can select your employees for the ability to reason their way through conflicting requirements. Of course, they'll do the very same thing when those conflicting requirements all come from you. 😀 But in the bigger piucture that's really what you want, isn't it? 

           

"There's an app for that!"

Once upon a time, if you called a company because you had a problem with an order, you were transferred to a customer service representative who resolved the problem. But more and more often these days, it seems that you are given an app which lets you resolve the problem yourself. Often, these apps are advertised as a way to bypass the company's bureaucracy, and therefore as a customer benefit. One hears of travelers whose flights have been canceled, and who use the apps to rebook new flights while everyone else is still standing in line at the complaints desk.

So I want to ask: Do these apps represent an advance in product Quality?

They are certainly sold that way. But I think the final answer is, No. No they don't.

Even on its own terms, there is something ambiguous about the benefit provided by an app. On the one hand, yes it is absolutely true that a company's app lets you do things for yourself rather than requiring you to persuade someone else to do them for you. But notice that this power costs you something. Before you can "do for yourself," you have to know what to do, and you have to understand how to do it in the app. 

Solving your own problems

When you talk to a human customer service agent, all you have to understand is your own problem. Then the service agent translates your problem into terms that the company's system understands, and offers you a couple of choices. If you don't understand what those choices are going to mean for you personally, the agent explains. Finally you pick the option that looks least bad, the agent types your choice into the system, and you can go on about your business.

With an app, there is no one to translate and no one to explain. You have to understand not only what you want, but what the company is offering; and you have to be able to shift back and forth easily between the two perspectives. I think this is why apps are so frequently described in terms of air travel. We all know that there are a few people in the world who travel a lot—far more than the rest of us. These people understand the ins and outs of the system, and are ready to benefit by their familiarity; but the whole task is made easier for them because there are so few options on offer. If you find yourself unexpectedly stranded at the Samarkand International Airport, or at the North Pole, pretty much your only option is to rebook on a different flight. Wherever you were originally trying to go, you're not going to change your mind suddenly and decide to stay for a few months in Samarkand [it might be a nice place, but you likely don't have the right visa] or at the North Pole [because it is very cold]. So it is comparatively easy to switch from thinking like a customer to thinking like an airline.

The second job you have to master is to understand how the app itself works. Some are easier, and some are more difficult. Again, with a human agent, you don't have to take on this task. The human agent works with the same system all day, every day, and knows exactly what to do. Confronted with a brand-new app, you don't have that advantage.   

Why do we have apps?

But there is another side to this question. Why do we have customer service apps in the first place? Why are companies investing in them?

It's not because they are trying to be nice.

The motivation, surely, is that customer service apps cost companies less than customer service departments. Whizzbang Corporation can release an app, lay off the corresponding department, and be money ahead.

From the customer's perspective, for the reasons I sketch out above, replacing a human agent with an app often results in reduced levels of service. In this respect, the advent of customer service apps is just one more aspect of the slow tide of product enshittification that I described a few months ago. But in this one case, the introduction of a customer service app is a form of product degradation that can be sold as customer empowerment! There aren't many of those, so it is no surprise that companies are jumping on the bandwagon of this particular one.

What's behind it?

Why do we see such a trend towards product enshittification? Opinions differ. Cory Doctorow, who invented the word, blames it on rent-seeking by the providers of new online platforms. Other people have taken the concept and run with it. I browsed the Internet for references before writing this post, and found an article by someone who insists that global elites are consciously trying to destroy the world. (Maybe I read the piece too quickly and missed a little nuance somewhere, but consider yourself warned.)

For myself, I'd actually rather extend a little charity to the companies caught up in this cycle, even as I deplore the deliberate degradation of their products. John Michael Greer has argued that we are entering a period of prolonged economic contraction; and he has added more recently that enshittification (which he calls "crapification") is one of the normal strategies by which companies caught in an economic contraction try to keep their heads above water. Their costs are going up, and their revenues (measured in real dollars) are going down. Either they go out of business, or they have to cut the budget somewhere. So hamburgers get smaller, houses get flimsier, appliances break in five years instead of fifty, and customer service departments are replaced by apps. It's sad, but it's a much bigger problem than the avarice of a handful of tech executives. 

At the same time, even if the companies had no other choice, rolling out these apps isn't really Quality.

           

Quality out in the open

Over the last couple of weeks I've written about a recent disagreement between me and the organizational hierarchy of ASQ (American Society for Quality), and about what that disagreement can tell us about organizational behavior generally. (See specifically this post and then this one.) The situation has not really improved—not yet, at any rate—and I'll get to that in a minute. But I want to stop first to talk about an important principle that this whole discussion has brought to light.

The principle is transparency. As much as possible, manage your business out in the open. When it comes to Quality in your products or services, manage that out in the open too. (Incidentally, I make this very point with respect to process management in an article I posted just five years ago.)

Obviously this doesn't mean telling your competitors all your trade secrets. It doesn't mean exposing any information that you are legally required to keep confidential. 

But transparency generates trust. If you are open and honest with your employees, or your customers, or the public, then they will be inclined to trust you because they can see that you aren't double-dealing.

By the same token, if you are sly or silent or secretive—if you hide things—you encourage people to distrust you. They will all think, What are you doing that is so bad that you have to hide it from me? And their imaginations will conjure up pictures far worse than anything you are really doing! So you'll do better to own up to whatever it is, rather than let them imagine something horrible.

Transparency and justice

I spent my high school years at the Webb School of California. Like all private schools, it had rules. The students were teenagers, so perhaps it is not surprising that some of them challenged those rules. Once in a while, a student was expelled. 

Stephen and Ann Longley
in the 1970s.

Ongoing disciplinary actions were always kept confidential, of course. But as soon as the boy had left campus, the Headmaster (Stephen Longley, back in those days) addressed the school. Keeping the story simple and trans­parent, he told us what the student had done, and that he had been asked to leave. He was clear and to the point, with no needless detail to muddy the picture.

The impact of this honesty and clarity was enormous. In the first place we all knew that we wouldn't be seeing Fred or Herman around campus any more, and we all knew why. But there was more than that. We knew that Fred or Herman had been removed for violating an objective rule, not because someone took a subjective dislike to him. We understood that if we did the same thing he had done, we would be expelled the same way he was. But we also understood that if we didn't break the rules, we were safe. The objectivity of the rules secured us. And the relentless clarity of the communication promised justice.   

Failure to communicate

Does that mean we should just let it all hang out? Not really, because that is rarely an effective way to communicate. (Note that Stephen Longley's announcements were very focused.)

This is the mistake I made in my most recent exchange with ASQ. In last week's article, I told you that some administrator deleted one of my posts from the myASQ discussion forum on August 6, and then it took them another six days to send me an email explaining why. By the time I got that email (August 12), I was so full-to-bursting with things I wanted to say that I dumped all of it into my reply the same day. But that just meant that my email back to the administrators was full of sound and fury. Perhaps it is not surprising that they set my account to a status where everything I post is automatically queued for moderation. (Most people can post directly with no delay.) I don't know if this status will expire one day, but it was still in place yesterday (August 19). 

What I meant to say ....

Naturally I don't like being on permanent-moderation status, but I recognize that it's partly my own fault for not communicating with ASQ more clearly. But what I meant to tell them was what I am saying here and now, about the virtue of transparency.

The whole disagreement started back when I wrote about some minor mistakes in the roll-out of an updated election procedure. Very bland stuff. Someone in the administration might have felt attacked by the criticism, and in any event asked that it be deleted. The person who wrote me suggested that I take up the issue privately inside the administration.

What I wanted to explain is this:

• If my login doesn't work, that's a personal problem.
• But if a general procedure doesn't work, it already affects everybody.
• That means that people are already talking about it.
• Once people are already talking about it—and they are, today—the only way to silence them is to make the whole thing very public. If you try to suppress the discussion, people will imagine horrible things, far worse than reality.

I failed to make these points because I buried them under a lot of useless bombastic noise. But I am convinced that they are true.

Robert Townsend on secrecy

One of the best management books I have ever read is Robert Townsend's Up the Organization. Find a copy and read it. Here's what he says about secrecy.

Secrecy is totally bad. It defeats the crusade for justice, which doesn't flourish in the dark.

Did you ever ask yourself why there's a private payroll? Or why all wages and salaries aren't posted on the bulletin board? According to the lore of the free-enterprise system money is really a scorecard. So why aren't the scores posted?*

Of course the company would have a revulsion (or a revolution) if everybody had to look squarely at a list showing the salaries of the president and his nephew, who are paid four times what they're worth, and the salaries of Izzy, Derek, and Susie, who are making a third of what they're worth.

In the case of most marketing or new product planning, secrecy is sinister. It defeats your loyal opposition and protects you from your best friends when you need them most. Secrecy implies either:

1. What I'm doing is so horrible I don't dare tell you.
   or
2. I don't trust you (any more).

__________

* I'm not suggesting that you should post salaries. For one thing, it would over-emphasize the importance of money. But you shouldn't tolerate a situation in which you're ashamed to post them. Like you are. 

           

Can you report bad news?

Quality professionals have to report bad news. It's part of the job.

That's why many organizations make Quality report directly to the CEO or General Manager, instead of tucking the department under Operations or Engineering. It's not that Quality's headcount or budget are so large that they have to be managed at that level. The idea is that Quality has to report the true state of things, without the risk that someone will hide the news.

"The widgets coming off Line 2 are defective, and if we ship them we risk a $2-million recall in the next six months."

"The prototype Mark IV Fantabulator still fails five of its fouteen critical tests and leaks radiation all over the user."

"The packaging machine in Logistics is out of alignment again, even though they just fixed it last week."

These are things the organization needs to know, even though they might embarrass someone. And it is Quality's job to speak up.

Or is it?

Last week I wrote about some hiccups recently as ASQ rolled out an updated procedure for electing officers in the geographical Sections. On the whole it wasn't a dramatic topic. Then after I posted the article here, I wrote a notification to post in myASQ, which is ASQ's in-house social media platform. I started with a brief and—I hoped—non-threatening introduction:

Was anybody else as confused as I was by the roll-out of the new procedure for electing Section officers? We heard that there were changes coming, but my Section (at least) didn't get specific information until we had already missed some deadlines. I don't know if anyone else had the same experience. But is there a chance that the organization could do a Lessons Learned analysis on this roll-out, in order to make future ones go better?

I talk about it in a little more detail here:....

Then I gave a link to last week's article. In other words, I tried to keep it as bland and professional as I could, in the hopes of starting some kind of discussion about what went on.

Within fifteen minutes, an administrator deleted my post.

I post a lot on myASQ, and this is the second time I've had a post deleted. The first time was just about a year ago, when I posted an article critical of the Board of Directors. That time, the removed post was a link to this article here; and I discussed its removal very briefly in this one here. In a nutshell, last year's post was taken down ostensibly for violating the myASQ Terms of Service; but in fact it didn't violate the Terms of Service that were current when I posted it. Those Terms were updated 24 hours later, specifically to forbid any discussion of the things I was talking about.*

This time around? I got an email yesterday from ASQ HQ, six days after the post went down, with a partial explanation. The heart of it is a reminder that myASQ is the wrong forum for complaints about procedures that aren't working. The email suggested that I contact this office or that officer instead.

Public or private?

In principle it makes sense to specify that this channel is only for this kind of communication, but in this case I wonder. If I contact an office or an officer, the ensuing discussion will be private. But when the topic is a failed procedure—and a procedure that affects many people—I think the communication really has to be public.

The point is that people are already discussing the issue. When I asked, "Was anybody else as confused as I was?" it was a rhetorical question. I'd already talked to people in other Sections who had the exact same experiences and the exact same questions. So in a sense I was asking my questions on their behalf as well. In my reply to the email from HQ, I tried to make the point that a lot of people in the Society are already whispering in the corners about this very topic. If ASQ came out and addressed it publicly, they would silence a lot of whispering. And they would give members a renewed confidence in ASQ as an organization. It would be a win all the way around.

Of course—I tried to reassure the officer who wrote to me—discussing the issue publicly never means naming names! No one expects the Society to say "It's all the fault of John Jones and Fred Smith." But it is always possible to say "A Member misunderstood the procedure and therefore did X; then an Administrator followed up using the wrong template and did Y. We are currently investigating how to error-proof the process so that it is impossible to make those mistakes again." And, as I say, it would boost confidence to do so.

I don't know if I was persuasive or not. I guess we'll see.

Where do we report bad news?

Ultimately that's the important question: Where do we report bad news?

• We have to report it somewhere, because that's what we Quality professionals do.
• ASQ has urged us for years to channel all our communications into myASQ, so my first guess is that that's where we should report administrative failures like this one. 
• On the other hand, if myASQ is the wrong place to report bad news, then that's fine too—so long as we know what channel to use instead. And for practical reasons, it should be a more-or-less public channel, one that other people can consult. Is there another channel inside ASQ with these features? Or how about LinkedIn? Facebook? The New York Times? 

I'm ready to use any of them, so just let me know. 

__________

* Yes, I downloaded copies of the Terms of Service document—with date stamps—before and after, just to be sure.

           

Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?

Quality professionals have to know at least something about a lot of different fields. 

• We don't have to be logicians, but we have to know enough logic to work through a 5-Why analysis or to build a cause-and-effect diagram. 
• We don't have to be statisticians, but we have to know enough statistics to manage processes with a control sheet, or to sort failures with a Pareto chart. 
• We don't have to be experimental scientists, but it helps if we know something about the design of experiments.

We also have to understand organizational behavior and management. Most of the improvements we identify can't be implemented without the help of other people, generally people who don't report to us. So we have to know when and how to introduce changes so they can slide into place with the least disruption. It helps to develop a feel for the organization we work in, so that our colleagues in other departments are disposed to support us rather than to block us. 

That's why I was so startled at the very casual way I learned that ASQ had recently updated the procedure to elect leadership committees (or "Boards") for local geographical sections.

• I first heard an announcement (with no special urgency) that there would be a training class on the updated procedures on July 15. I was going to be out of town that day, so I made a point to listen to the recording as soon as I got back.
• Sure enough, I listened to the recording on July 23. It outlined a complex new procedure but specified no deadlines.
• That evening there was a general leadership meeting, and someone asked what the deadlines were for the new procedure. No one in the meeting knew, so the organizer took an action to find out and let us know.
• Only the next day, on July 24, did the meeting organizer send us a screenshot that the first deadline for the new procedure had been on July 8—more than two weeks earlier!

The discovery that we were already late caused a little consternation among our regional leadership. Our contact in leadership found and supplied two documents to clear up the confusion. Unfortunately they disagreed. One said to hold elections for two weeks, starting in October, with a slate of candidates compiled in August. The other said to hold elections for four weeks, starting in September, with a slate of candidates compiled in July.

Some time later I tracked down a copy of the procedure document itself. Turns out the new version had been released back in February, and the first deadline for the election process is actually July 1. But the first time anybody was told about it was in a training class two weeks later that didn't specify deadlines. As I say, the notification was very ... relaxed.

OK, you might say, so it was a simple bureaucratic mix-up. No big surprise. These things happen all the time. Why should it matter to you so much?

And my real answer is an emotional one, not a reasoned one. But we're ASQ! We're supposed to know better than that. We're supposed to be better than that!

But are we? On reflection it's not so obvious, for at least two reasons.

First, ASQ is an organization like any other. It has to hire staff, like any other. ASQ's members are Quality profes­sionals, but there is probably no require­ment that the Society's profes­sional staff all spend a certain number of years in the Quality trenches before coming onboard. Such a require­ment would be, at the very least, highly unusual; it would also force ASQ to pay well above market rates for office staff. 

Second, even seasoned Quality professionals sometimes make bone-headed mistakes. I know I have.* What we hope for, when working with Quality professionals, is not that they be perfect, but that they be ready to examine their own mistakes openly and dispas­sionately in order to learn from them. And naturally we hope also that they bring with them the memory of past lessons learned, perhaps in the form of a checklist or procedure, so that they don't have to learn from any particular failure more than once. But to ask that they never fail is simply to ask too much.

Maybe ASQ can carry out a root-cause analysis on the mistakes in this roll-out, and then assign long-term corrective and preventive actions. In other words, maybe ASQ can use the current muddle to improve the process for handling updated procedures. That kind of outcome could turn today's jumble and disorder to advantage. Let us hope.

__________

* Tip of the hat to the memory of the great Graham Chapman, in "The Mouse Problem."