Parasitic certifications? Part 4, Standards eating the world

My last two posts (here and here) discussed Scotlyn's charge that the proliferation of formal standards actually degrades Quality rather than enhancing it. But that is only half of her argument. Her other major point is that jobs in Quality are parasitic on the productive economy, replacing (and thereby eliminating) jobs that make things or add value, and therefore that the Quality business as a whole will ultimately destroy the economy that it lives on.

How far is this true?

Quality as parasite

In a strictly literal sense, of course, it is absolutely true that Quality is parasitic on productive jobs, in exactly the same way that Management is. Neither Quality nor Management is involved in the creation of value (unlike Design, Manufacturing, Logistics, or Service). Both Quality and Management are involved in the organization and monitoring of other people's work. In that sense, they have a lot in common.* 

So the first answer to the charge that Quality is parasitic should be, "Yes, but is that a problem?" If told that it is, we should pursue the analogy with Management to understand why it is a problem. Scotlyn expresses concern that Quality jobs can push out productive jobs, by consuming the resources that would otherwise have paid for them. In the same way, there are some companies where the members of Management assign themselves a disproportionate share of the proceeds, so that the firms cannot pay their other bills and go belly up. We know this sometimes happens, but nobody thinks that such failures invalidate the general concept of Management. All they prove is that — as a manager — you can't afford to get greedy. While it is possible for Management to ruin the enterprise, the answer is to do a better job of implementing Management, and not to do away with it altogether.

Does the analogy hold? I think it does. I have argued before in support of clerical staff, because they offload important work from people who should really be doing something else. And I propose that the same thing is true of Quality staff. Somehow there is an optimal level of administrative functions (by which I mean management, quality, and clerical work all bundled together) — in other words, a level at which the organization flourishes. With too few people in these functions, the organization trips and falls because there is no infrastructure to clear simple obstacles out of the way;** with too many, the organization chokes on its own bureaucracy and runs out of money by paying too many unproductive salaries. Somewhere in the middle has to be a Goldilocks point where the size of the administrative staff is just right.   

That, then, is what we should do. That is how we should implement Quality systems. And as you may have noticed, that has been the approach I have tried to advocate throughout this blog. But Scotlyn makes one final argument: regardless what we should do, she predicts, in fact "the global standards and certification industry will eventually eat production and the economy, and bring the whole thing to a collapse from too much top-heaviness, and too little bottom sturdiness."

Is she right?

Eating the world

The answer depends partly on the number of new global standards that are written, and partly on the number of industries that make them mandatory. On the first point, I think she may be on the right track; on the second, I am a little more sanguine.

What encourages the proliferation of standards is that there are no known limits on the number of things that can go wrong. And whenever something goes wrong, the easiest solution is to make a rule so that it can't happen again. So I see no obvious reason why the number of global standards — the number of rules — should ever level off, until the day comes when our whole current economic system turns obsolete and is replaced by something else that we can't imagine today.

Of course the problem with reflexive rule-making is that the first time you do it, you look decisive. After the twentieth time, you start to wonder whether you have unintentionally tied yourself in knots.   

Bear in mind, though, that any company which hires too many people into non-productive functions will sooner or later go bust. This is why I say I am more sanguine about the question how many industries will make these standards mandatory. In industries with wide profit margins — like aerospace, aviation, or the high-technology industries generally — we should expect global standards to be ubiquitous, because those industries can afford them. But in other industries, those with narrower profit margins, I think we can expect that standardization will get next to no foothold at all, because none of the firms in those industries can afford to hire the personnel. In other words, after the highly profitable industries are saturated with global standards, I tend to think that the spread of standardization will slow or stop. This may help to postpone the collapse that Scotlyn foresees. 

Thunderous noise

If Scotlyn is right — if the whole system does collapse and "make thunderous noise as it falls" — will that really be a problem?

For those of us with jobs in the Quality industry, it will likely mean unemployment. At a personal level, yes, that generally counts as a problem. But for the rest of the world?

It would be a serious setback to global trade if buyers and sellers stopped using uniform weights and measures, or if the specifications for ball bearings and light-bulb sockets were no longer reliably standard around the world. But those standards are the least likely to be abandoned, for exactly that reason.

It would be nice to think that some acceptable level of safety standards for food and appliances will remain in force internationally, but I don't know enough to make an argument that it's certain. Maybe it's not certain, and — if true — that would be a sad fact.

As for the management system standards, the ones that I know best, these would probably trigger the least immediate harm if they suddenly vanished. (For professional reasons, naturally I wish I could say otherwise. But no such luck.) In that sense, they are probably the most optional of the lot. If the global system of standardization collapses, the best case for the management system standards is if they remain as guidelines to best practices for managing organizations. That way, at least they could still benefit organizations who chose to implement them, even if external certification were no longer available or meaningful.

Summary

Where does this leave us? Let me summarize briefly the main points of Scotlyn's argument, and my replies to each, in order:

• "The relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional."
• It is certainly non-deterministic.
• "The standards will never be the products, nor ever be able to satisfactorily describe them."
• True.
• "It follows that the more standards, the less quality. Standardisation is, in fact, an essential component of the “crapification of things."
• Not so fast. Some level of standardization has its place — e.g., for critical health and safety aspects.
• Also the management system standards are valuable guidelines to good basic business practices.
• But yes, there is certainly a risk that too much standardization can undermine product quality.
• "The relationship between certified standards and the actual economy is parasitic, ...." 
• True. Just like management, no more and no less.
• "... in that the more jobs that are created to certify, to inspect, to manage, to comply, to produce documentation ..., the more that productive jobs ... are destroyed."
• Yes, all true. 
• But some non-zero number of administrative and Quality jobs are needed to allow the organization to function. 
• The key is to find the magic Goldilocks number, and the great trick is never to exceed it.
• "The global standards and certification industry will eventually eat production and the economy, and bring the whole thing to a collapse from too much top-heaviness, and too little bottom sturdiness."
• There are forces pushing in this direction, and others pushing against it. I don't know which forces will win. But you might be right.
• "Out of which, small, light, and fast non-compliant producers and purveyors who can stay below the radar and out of the limelight, will emerge and begin to create whatever comes next."
• From your lips to the ears of Heaven. 

Answering Scotlyn's remarks has been my longest single exercise of analysis and exposition since I started this blog, and I thank her — deeply and sincerely — for pushing me to do it. At the same time, I am well aware that other readers might disagree with some (or all!) of what I have written here. As always, please add your comments so we can make this a living discussion. The only way we can achieve continual improvement in our theory and practice of the Quality business is to talk to each other.

As always, let's talk.             

__________

* As an aside, I note that I've heard complaints about the uselessness of Quality far more often than I have heard the equivalent complaints about Management. I'm not sure why.   

** In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams characterizes this extreme as the point at which the entire Golgafrinchan population dies off from an infectious disease contracted from an "unexpectedly dirty" telephone.

        

Parasitic certifications? Part 1, The challenge

Just about a week ago, I got a comment on one of these posts that (in a sense) I had been waiting for since I started the blog. The comment, by a reader named Scotlyn, was in response to my post asking whether the Russo-Ukrainian War might bring about the end of the global standardization and certification schema, but it raised issues that go far beyond even as broad a topic as the war. 

As for saying that I've been waiting since the start of this blog, you remember that right in my very first post I explained that my fundamental goal here is to encourage people to talk back to their Quality systems, forcing the Quality systems to justify themselves in ways that make sense. I said I wanted to discuss "what works and what doesn't work" – and I tried to make the point that if a Quality system can't justify itself in rational terms, then we should change it or get rid of it.

This is the challenge that Scotlyn takes up. She suggests point-blank, on the basis of personal experience, that formal Quality systems and formal certification add no value whatever, and are in fact parasitic on productive work. I don't  think I quite agree, but we have all heard people say these things before. If we can't discuss the question honestly and give a decent defense of the Quality business, we can't ask anyone to take us seriously.

Scotlyn's comment is fairly long, so for convenience I'm going to reproduce it here. Then in next week's post, I'll start to answer it. Meanwhile, if you have anything to add to the discussion on your own account, please feel free to comment as well. We can make this conversation as broad and general as it has to be.

So, to begin, Scotlyn wrote as follows:

I have a great personal interest in the theme of standards and certifications, since I worked for many years as compliance officer for a local fish processing company. That is to say, I was the person in the company that interfaced with the global standards and certification industry. By the time I left my job I was convinced of these things:

(1) that the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional. Making the product is one domain that is stubbornly incommensurate with the quite separate domain of documenting, and monitoring compliance with product standards. (in almost exactly the same way as the Tao Te Ching states that the names we can give a thing are not the thing). The standards will never be the products, nor ever be able to satisfactorily describe them.

(2) that, because of (1), it follows that the more standards, the less quality. Standardisation is, in fact, an essential component of the “crapification of things”.

(3) that the relationship between certified standards and the actual economy is parasitic, in that the more jobs that are created to certify, to inspect, to manage, to comply, to produce documentation (including my own entirely non-productive job), the more that productive jobs (the making, transporting of goods, and the providing of services) are destroyed.

(4) that, because of (3), the global standards and certification industry will eventually eat production and the economy, and bring the whole thing to a collapse from too much top-heaviness, and too little bottom sturdiness. Out of which, small, light, and fast non-compliant producers and purveyors who can stay below the radar and out of the limelight, will emerge and begin to create whatever comes next.

I have to tell you that the prospect of a set back to the global certification industry would not cost me a hair’s worry. It contains enough of its own contradictions and unstable weight to collapse without help. Although, to be sure, those employed in its giant documentation fabricating enterprises will resist being made redundant. And it will make thunderous noise as it falls.

On the whole, I'd call that critique pretty thorough. Next week I will take up these points to discuss them. Stay tuned.

        

Parasitic certifications? Part 2, The crapification of things

In last week's post, we looked at a broad and fundamental criticism from a reader named Scotlyn, indicting the whole system of global standardization and certification as (in essence) fraudulent and parasitic. Now I want to examine each of Scotlyn's points carefully, to see how far I agree with her. 

Please note that I actively encourage your participation too. Add your feedback in the Comments. Tell us what you think.

Scotlyn's first charge is that "the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional," and that "it follows that the more standards, the less quality." Is this true?

There are two sides to this charge, which I want to treat separately: product standards, and management system standards. I will discuss product standards here, and management system standards next week.

Part of the difficulty in discussing product standards is that many of the most basic ones have become so ubiquitous in the industrialized world that they are almost invisible. I'm thinking of the kinds of basic safety standards for food or equipment that were unheard-of 150 years ago but that we take for granted today. Whatever else might be said for or against the modern meatpacking industry, for example (and it is not a specialty of mine), I'm pretty sure that practices are more sanitary than they were back when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. You can probably think of other examples on your own. And I assume that nobody will argue for abandoning the most basic safety standards, except perhaps as a rhetorical exercise. But as the number of product standards proliferates, we begin to see at least two problems. 

The first problem is that each standard imposes constraints on the design of a product, and requires some non-zero fraction of the designer's attention. The more standards there are, the more of the designer's attention has to go into meeting basic requirements, leaving less attention available to put towards the inherent quality of the design. The only way to counter this effect (to the extent that it can be countered at all) is to take longer designing the product. Once upon a time, maybe it took a month for a small team at WidgetCorp to design and test a really good widget. But after the introduction of a lot of Mandatory Widget-Industry Standards, it might take twice as long to design the very same widget. The designers now have to read all the standards, and confirm that their design meets them in theory; and then testers have to run tests for every single standard to make sure each one has been met. The end result might not be any different from what it would have been otherwise, although the team will know a lot more facts about the product than they would have without the standards, and they will have recorded all those facts in a huge stack of documents. But all this work takes time and effort, with the result that WidgetCorp now takes twice as long to bring a new widget to market, and charges twice as much for them to recoup the added development costs. And as a direct result of this hefty increase in time and cost, ....

The second problem is that a competing manufacturer (Fly-By-Night Widgets) will enter the market designing widgets that strictly comply with the standards, but that are in other respects as slapdash as possible. With this approach, Fly-By-Night brings out their widgets faster than WidgetCorp does, and sells them for cheaper. And we all know that — other things being equal — the market favors whichever competitor is faster and cheaper. After a while, Fly-By-Night drives WidgetCorp out of business, and the market is saturated with widgets that comply with standards but are otherwise worthless. This long-term process is what Scotlyn describes as the "crapification of things." (See also this Dilbert cartoon for a summary of the same observation.)

Is there a solution to this dynamic? At a theoretical level and in the general case, no, I don't think so.* I believe the best we can hope for is one or another pragmatic settlement.** By a "pragmatic settlement," what I mean is two things. 

• First, some companies will continue to make products which are so obviously superior that customers will willingly pay more for them. (I once audited a VP of Sales who said his department's whole job was to explain to potential customers why they should pay five times as much for one of this company's products as for a competitor's. Mostly they succeeded in doing so.) 
• Second, maybe we can come to some kind of agreement around a basic level of standards (for, e.g., health and safety) which clearly represent a bare minimum — maybe we can agree not to sell laudanum as a cure for a broken leg, for instance  — and then stop there. If it were clear that "meets standards" is not the same as "good enough," we might be able to hold back the threat of encroaching crapification, at least for a while.

Or perhaps this answer isn't good enough, in which case I invite your contributions. How would you address the conundrum? 

Next week I'll talk about management systems.

__________

* Or if there is a solution, it involves modifying some of the assumptions behind this description (for example, the principle of economic competition) in ways which are far beyond the scope of this blog and even farther beyond my competence as an author.

** For the distinction between solutions and settlements, see Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics, "Addendum: The Myth of the Solution."      

Working yourself out of a job

We sometimes hear that the goal of a certain position is to "work yourself out of a job." If your job is to set up a system, or train people on a new process, or facilitate some kind of sea-change in an organization, the idea is that you will only be successful when they no longer need you: when the "New Normal" has become routine—just regular, old "normal." So long as the organization still needs you, the change isn't complete yet, and the "New Normal" is still new; but this means you haven't done your job. On the other hand once you succeed, there's nothing more to change and you become superfluous. Bye! It's been great working with you!

Is the Quality business like that? Sometimes it feels like there should be something self-limiting about our work. Yes, at a production level someone will always have to do preventive maintenance on the machinery, or calibration of the measuring tools, because these things wear out with use. But how many times to we have to redesign the production system? Once it's up and running, once our widgets are rolling smoothly off the line, do we really have to do it again and again? Or what about the management system? Surely there the case for leaving it alone is even stronger, once we've ironed the wrinkles out. 

Besides, if there's nothing self-limiting about our work, then we run the risk of standards and compliance "eating the world" in Scotlyn's* felicitous phrase—expanding to the point where they drive out value-added production.

Now, I don't support Quality eating the world. (In my discussion with Scotlyn I proposed a "Goldilocks" model for our role.) But neither do I expect us ever to work ourselves out of a job. At the operational level, this is just because randomness means there will always be errors to fix. But at a systems level, this is for two different but related reasons.

One reason is innovation. As long as we sell into competitive markets, competing widget-manufacturers will introduce improvements to steal market share. Then we will have to improve our own widgets—at the very least, by playing catch-up; or, preferably, by leap-frogging their improvements to build something even better. Either way, our production methods will have to change: there will be new materials, new designs, new assembly methods, and the rest.

In time, product innovations will also drive changes to the company organization, and therefore inevitably to the management system. Maybe our early widgets were mechanical, but now we are going to add software: that means we need to hire software engineers, to build a software department, and to implement a software design process. Maybe the latest trend is to advertise widgets on social media: that means we need to hire people who understand social media and keep current with it, resulting in still more changes. And so on. Even if the high-level architecture of our systems remains the same, the details will have to change.

The other reason is that there is no perfect process. Sooner or later, flaws will open up in any process you use; and when they get bad enough, you will have to resolve them. But the improved process you put in place will have flaws of its own. And so on.

You've heard me say this before. But I was discussing it with a friend yesterday, and I actually stopped to ask: "Is that really true? Can we be certain that every process has hidden flaws?"

Of course, she said. Don't be silly. Here, think of it like this: First, the universe is infinite. The Butterfly Effect guarantees that any action—any change, any intervention—will have an infinite chain of consequences. But our minds are finite. So there will always be consequences that we cannot anticipate, and therefore cannot plan or intend. The likelihood that all of those consequences will prove beneficial is vanishingly small. So yes, every time you intervene to make an improvement, that improvement will contain the seeds of new flaws. It might not be worth it to you to address those flaws until later—but they are still there.

So there you have it. Every process has hidden flaws. Every improvement has a shelf-life, after which it will require further intervention and improvement of its own. And those of us who work with Quality systems are not at risk of working ourselves out of a job. 

In other news, today is the Winter Solstice. The calendar year is rapidly winding to a close. For some businesses, this means people have time off to recharge; for others, it means a last-minute flurry of activity to get a few more things done before the New Year. Whichever case describes your situation, I hope the season goes well for you. I'll be here next week, but in the meantime let me wish you a good holiday season and a very happy New Year.

__________

* Scotlyn is a reader with whom I engaged in a four-part discussion over a year ago, on the relative value of Quality standards, compliance, documentation, and certification, compared to actual production. The series started with this post here.      

           

Parasitic certifications? Part 3, Certified systems vs. quality

Just as a reminder, I am still discussing a broad-based critique of Quality standards and certifications from Scotlyn, a reader whose fundamental challenge you can find here. 

Scotlyn began by arguing that "the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional," and that "it follows that the more standards, the less quality." Last week I discussed whether and how far I can support this critique with respect to product standards. In what follows below, I address management system standards.

How far the charge is true

When we turn to management system standards, it is certainly true that certification to a quality management standard like ISO 9001 does not guarantee all your products are good. Just following the right rules won't give you Quality.

In the same way, it is perfectly possible for a company to turn out excellent work, on a reliable and repeatable basis, without ISO 9001 certification. I once worked for a small regional outpost of a huge, global company. One of our regular suppliers — a firm we had worked with for years — was not certified to ISO 9001. Our global headquarters issued a directive that no company could be rated as a Preferred Supplier unless it met a variety of criteria, including certification. At first our local Purchasing Manager tried to protest that this was the only supplier from whom we had never had a major problem — and even when there were minor issues they were always perfectly responsive. Headquarters was unmoved; the regulation had to be implemented worldwide, with no exceptions. So our local Purchasing Manager dutifully categorized this supplier as "Non-Preferred," and then went right on ordering from them exactly as before. I joked that we should have a special category for "Non-Preferred Suppliers That We Like a Lot."

But I almost think this supplier counts as a special case, rather than a simple counterexample against ISO 9001. It was obvious to anyone who did business with them why their work was so consistently excellent. This was a family firm owned by a man who had put everything into it, and who identified with it totally. He was personally committed to flawless workmanship, most of the employees were relatives, and nobody was willing to let down the family. It was a powerful combination, but not one that many companies are in a position to imitate.

This is one reason, though, that I have spent some of my time in this blog posting about topics like employee engagement, competence and attitude. While management systems are important, no system can do all the work by itself. So I have been happy to highlight the work of specialists like Jeff Griffiths, Dawn Ringrose, and Angie Alexander, who study and teach ways to encourage that personal connection between the people doing the work and the felt desire to do it right.

That said, this forum is primarily about Quality systems. And I'm not prepared to write them off yet.

In what ways the charge is false

In the first place, most of the requirements of a standard like ISO 9001 are little more than formalized common sense. With a standard or without it, companies that don't keep meeting minutes or do design reviews will have trouble sooner or later. And while it catches our attention when we see an uncertified company doing flawless work or a certified company shipping garbage, the times that quality and certification align are less striking — precisely because they are more expected — and therefore harder to see. But we have to take account of that side of the ledger as well.

I've worked in startups where there are no systems in place. They are energetic and creative places; the ones where I worked made solid and useful products. And normally everyone got along fine without a lot of system overhead. But when something went wrong, nobody knew how to react; when an unexpected bug brought one of our software products crashing to the ground, nobody knew where to find it, because the code wasn't modular and there had been no unit testing. I don't say that ISO 9001 by itself made all our problems go away. But the introduction of some kind of system was key to making them more manageable. And ISO 9001 is a perfectly decent framework for the kind of system I mean. (Note that ISO 9001 is only a framework. You still have to design your own system for yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. But ISO 9001 tells you what kind of shape it should have when you are done.)

Another story

Here's another example, and maybe a deeper or richer one. Recently I was talking with a woman who owns a small, local business that fills a very specialized niche. In her line of work, certification is now effectively mandatory: if you aren't certified, you have no customers. But it wasn't always so, and she has been in business long enough to remember the changeover. She told me that when certification became available — and then mandatory — it was a huge help to her because it enabled her to require a wide range of good practices that she had wanted for a long time but had been unable to implement effectively. Suddenly she didn't need to listen to any Good Reasons™ from her employees about why this or that practice would never work; her answer to all of them was, It has to be done by the time the auditor gets here, or we fail the audit and go out of business. Discussion closed. Then as she continued to reminisce, she casually mentioned that before certification became a requirement she knew of 250 small companies just like hers doing the exact same kind of work; then, as certification became mandatory, the owners of 100 of them decided that the burden imposed by certification was too much for them in either time or money, so they closed their doors. When the dust cleared, a field of 250 small businesses had shrunk to 150, a loss of 40%.

The reason that I call this example deeper or richer than the first one is that it makes two points very clearly.

On the one hand, the imposition of a Quality system has to potential to improve a business in a meaningful way. Potential to improve. No Quality system will ever guarantee that a company becomes good; but it can in any event make the company better than it was before. And sometimes that's a great achievement anyway. Moreover, as always, the standard does nothing by itself; it does nothing without the engagement and support of the people using it. The value comes when the systematic approach required by the standard becomes second nature, when it is fully incorporated into a company's way of working. If some company just wants to game the system so that they can get a certificate without having to change, they might be able to get away with it for a little while (probably not forever). There is no system in the world that cannot be gamed. But that fact is less a reflection on the standard and more a qualification of what the certificate means.   

On the other hand, nothing in life is free. Implementing and maintaining a Quality system requires effort. That effort costs money, because you have to pay somebody to do it; and it costs time, because that person can't do something else while working on this. You surely can't ask your existing staff to implement a Quality system on top of their regular jobs without affecting their productivity. 

This last point is entirely valid. It is important. And it leads us directly into Scotlyn's next charge, which I will take up next week.

      

What is Quality in government?

A couple of days ago, I started a conversation with Dawn Ringrose on LinkedIn, about the role of Quality in government. Dawn, you may remember, is the founder and principal of Organizational Excellence Specialists. She and her team of experts study and teach a set concrete behaviors that improve business performance, and I have referenced her work in earlier posts, for example here and here.

Anyway, our discussion began when she recommended a book (Democracy in Canada) by Donald J. Savoie highlighting issues in some of Canada's governmental institutions and proposing remedies. At the same time, she referenced an hourlong talk of his, available on YouTube, which summarizes some of the themes in his book. I haven't read the book yet, but I watched the speech. What I found fascinating was the way that Savoie's speech and my subsequent discussion with Dawn kept echoing topics we have already discussed here in other contexts.

One point that Dawn made early on was the following: "In my experience, I have found the most difficult question for people working in government to answer is 'Who Is Your Customer'? To me, this speaks volumes." And of course it is clear that if you don't know who your real customers are, you can't possibly understand what it means to satisfy them. In that case, how can you tell whether you are doing a good job?

But I think it is equally clear why the question might be baffling for someone working in government service. Think of all the different people who might have a legitimate claim to the title of "customer":

• The member of the public standing right in front of you, who has brought you a problem and is asking for help. This might seem to be your "customer" in the sense of service, but he's not the one paying for the service.
• The Taxpaying Public as a collective whole. These are the people paying for the services you offer, but it's hard to ask them all what they actually want from you. What is more, they likely don't agree with each other. (That's part of why we have governments in the first place.)
• The elected government* who are constitutionally presumed to speak on behalf of the Taxpaying Public. This means the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, at any rate until there is a vote of confidence or another general election.
• Your immediate superior in the civil service bureaucracy. This is the one person that you clearly have to satisfy to avoid getting the sack. But then who is your boss's customer?

We've seen this exact problem before, in our discussion whether you can ISO-certify a university. At that time we examined several contenders for the title "customer of the university," including: the students themselves, their parents, their future employers, regional governments (to the extent that they subsidize some or all of the educational process), and society-at-large. All of them get some benefit from universities, but the alignment between "Who gets the benefits?" and "Who pays the costs?" is pretty rough. At the time we concluded that maybe the best solution is to use the language of ISO 9001:2015 and call them all "interested parties" (i.e., stakeholders) without trying to get more precise. And maybe that's the right answer when talking about governments too.

But it doesn't stop there. One point that Savoie makes at some length in his speech is that there have been multiple initiatives** to encourage public institutions to learn from the management of private ones, and that the main consequence of these initiatives have been a proliferation of metrics and reports; but (he goes on) the metrics don't measure anything useful, the reports go unread, and the only practical consequence is a slow degradation of the organization's ability to perform. 

Does this sound familiar? It should. Whenever you implement a system of monitoring and measurement, there is always a risk of measuring the wrong things. And my recent exchange with Scotlyn on parasitic certifications included a discussion of her charge that jobs in monitoring and certification will progressively drive out jobs in production [or service, as the case may be] until Quality eats the world. In theory there is some kind of brake on this behavior in for-profit organizations, because when the Quality overhead gets too large it starts to affect the bottom line; and at that point the organization presumably cuts back. I won't claim that there are no such brakes in government service, because departments are given budgets and expected to adhere to them. But in any event the braking function must look very different.

Can governments benefit from the application of Quality expertise? Of course they can. We in the Quality field—and in Quality-adjacent fields like Excellence—specialize in understanding how organizations can go wrong and what it takes to set them right. In this sense our work applies to any kind of organization whatever. But we have to apply our expertise pragmatically, and we have to be aware of the ways in which public service is different from private enterprise. Next week I'll look at a few of those differences.   

__________

* Using the word in a parliamentary sense.  

** Savoie is specifically talking about the Canadian federal government, though I have no doubt the same thing has been done elsewhere too.         

Are management systems really systems?

This last week I've been reading about basic systems theory—specifically, Donella H. Meadows's primer, Thinking in Systems. And I've started to wonder about the management systems that we work with in the Quality business. Do these qualify as "systems" in Meadows's terminology? And if so, can systems theory teach us anything useful about how to design or implement a QMS?

The answer to the first question is an easy Yes. Meadows defines a "system" as "a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time." Since a management system is "a set of policies, processes and procedures used by an organization to ensure that it can fulfill the tasks required to achieve its objectives," it obviously qualifies. But the second question is more interesting, and I don't have a final answer yet.

What I have seen is just how well her basic list of the features of systems maps to our everyday experience. In Chapter Three ("Why Systems Work So Well") she lists three important features.

Resilience

Systems generally have feedback loops that allow them to self-correct when they go too far out of alignment in any direction. This doesn't necessarily mean that systems are static—quite the contrary! But it does mean that they respond and adapt to changing circumstances. And of course management systems are designed to do this too. 

• Organizations set goals, and then evaluate whether those goals have been met; in case the goals were missed, the organization has to make a decision how to react, and this typically means analyzing what went wrong and then correcting the goal (or the system) based on the analysis. 
• Formal management systems generally require internal (and sometimes external) audits, in order to find places where the system has broken down or is not effective; then the responsible functions have to take corrective action to repair the situation. 
• And formal management systems require some kind of regular management review, which again looks for areas that have to be improved. All of these methods involve providing a kind of feedback to the organization that allows it to adapt to circumstances.

What's more, Meadows's discussion of resilience also picks up some of the dysfunctions we have discussed when talking about bureaucracy. She recognizes that bureaucracy is how large organizations communicate internally, but when it gets too large the communication becomes too slow. 

Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion. [p. 78]

That was exactly the point of discussion between Scotlyn and me last spring.

Self-Organization

Normally when we ask about an organization's management system, we mean the part that is defined in the documentation, the part we can audit. But every organization displays regular, stable behaviors that are not covered in the documentation. All of these are the result of self-organization on the part of the people in the system, and they have an enormous impact on the way work gets done. 

Some of these behaviors can actively subvert the purpose of the management system, such as when people game their metrics to ensure they are always green.

Sometimes the behaviors don't affect the management system directly for good or for ill, but they define the spirit or culture of the organization.

And of course sometimes the unplanned (self-organized) actions of the people on the floor can be an enormous help. The whole reason that our profession now uses Quality Circles is that they are a formalization of what must originally have been a self-organized discussion among line workers who were trying to solve some production problem. Today we say that Quality Circles are part of the formal, documented system; but it is not possible that they started that way. We all know that informal methods always precede formal ones.

Hierarchy

Clearly every management system assumes the existence of some kind of hierarchy in its organization. The ISO 9001 standard, for example, has multiple references to "top management." (See clauses 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 9.3.) One of the first artifacts we auditors ask an organization for is an org chart, so we can understand the hierarchy and the associated responsibilities. Even in cases where a group of people are working together without any hierarchy at all—at first—Meadows says you can watch one grow spontaneously (as a result of self-organization!) in order to reduce chaos and confusion by imposing some kind of organization. (The German sociologist Robert Michels once stated, "Who says organization, says oligarchy.")

What fascinates me is a remark Meadows makes about how hierarchies develop:

Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up—from the pieces to the whole, from cell to organ to organism, from individual to team, from actual production to management of production. Early farmers decided to come together and form cities for self-protection and for making trade more efficient. Life started with single-cell bacteria, not with elephants. The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better. [p. 84. Emphasis added.]

This means the next time I do an audit, I should be able to ask the top management, "How do you help the people on the production line do their jobs better?" I want to remember that!

So management systems are indeed "systems" in the technical sense, and the common features of systems are things we all know from long experience working with management systems. I haven't decided yet whether there are other lessons to be derived from systems theory that might help us in the Quality business to do our jobs better. But I am continuing to think about it. If you know more than I do about this, please say so in the comments.