Quality and Innovation

(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

In his February post, ASQ CEO Paul Borawski writes about the importance of encouraging today’s youth to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). In particular, he asks what we can do to help young people get more interested. This first post is part of a three-part series that I’ll present in February to explain some of my thoughts on how to do this: I) Rethink the Educational System, II) Get Rid of Grades, and III) Develop Better Gateway Drugs.

(The first theme is general, and applies to both STEM and non-STEM disciplines; the third one will be particularly fun, but you’re going to have to wait until the end of the month to find out what I mean by this!)

This post, Part I, is about rethinking the educational system. I know that I’m not the first person to do this, nor the last, and my goal here is not to be comprehensive or justify my opinions – but to give you a sense of how I feel as a STEM educator at the college level.

I’d like to do this from the quality perspective. So first, it’s important to recognize that there is a difference between perceived quality and perceived value (according to Mitra’s Model). Here’s the difference:

• Perceived quality is your assessment of how well a product, service or experience will satisfy your expectations before you buy, adopt, or experience it.
• Perceived value depends on how well the product, service or experience meets your expectations after you buy, adopt or experience it.
• Perceived quality and perceived value are moderated by your expectations. Your expectations can (and often do!) change after you buy, adopt or experience something. Perceived value is NOT invariant, nor is it independent – your perception of value can change after you buy, adopt or experience similar products or participate in similar activities, because then you have a more rich basis for comparison. Perceived value can also change over time.
• Actual quality is the totality of characteristics of the product, service or experience that enable it to meet the stated and implied needs of all stakeholders (ISO 9000: para 3.1.5).

If the perceived value of your higher education remains strong over time (e.g. 10, 20 or 30 years after you graduate), this is a good indication that the quality of the program was high – that it enabled you to meet your needs, the needs of your employers as stakeholders, and/or the needs of your communities and society in general. Even if one of these three classifications of needs is satisfied, perceived value will be preserved over time. If we improve the quality of the educational system now, our personal perceived value of our own educations should be high – and remain high – over the course of our careers and lives. So that’s what I think we should aim for. But how? Here are some ideas:

#1 Institute a Kanban Educational System. You don’t actually learn something – like really learn something – until you need to use it. As educators, we need to change our “push” system of education to a “pull” system, where students can signal for new knowledge and resources as the problems demand. Quality Bob’s recommendation of combining Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge with statistical thinking (http://roberthmitchell.blogspot.com/2012/02/stem-and-quality-statistical-thinking.html) would be helpful here. So would a more widespread adoption of team-based learning, which has become established as a pedagogy.

#2 Abolish “Throughput” as the Key System Performance Metric. Granted, it’s more difficult to set up Socratic exercises (like those that would be required to drive a “pull” educational system) that will lead students to discover the principles and techniques that drive solutions. It’s not difficult, however, to set up the kind of environment that you might encounter in any office: we have a project that needs to be done, and someone’s going to have to sit down and figure out how to do it. But even this approach takes time, effort, and a lot of interaction between the students and their educators, and between the students and other students – it does not align with the dynamic duo of performance metrics, the production of student credit-hours and the number of degrees granted.

Higher education has become more commoditized over the past few decades, which (I believe) is eroding the overall quality of the institution itself. But “getting rid of the urge to push people through” is a tricky suggestion, because it also implies that we may have to reconsider the notion of higher education as a profit center. I would love to keep students in my class until they achieve a minimum level of competence, even if it takes years. But that’s not necessarily practical, and as I think back on my own experience as a STEM undergraduate, there are plenty of things I didn’t “get” until years later when I NEEDED them to get my job done. Refer to point #1 above.

#3 Admit that the Customer is Not Always Right. A recent study indicated that increasing patient satisfaction in hospitals raises healthcare costs and leads to more patient deaths.

What the patients think is best, and what makes them the happiest as consumers of the healthcare system, is not what keeps them alive. And so it is with students in higher education. Students have a financial and emotional incentive to just get through a class. Particularly since they’ve been conditioned to speculate vacuously about how ANY of the stuff they learn could POSSIBLY be useful once they get out of school, it will be difficult for them to anticipate – let alone appreciate – the value of what they are (in many cases) being forced to think about. Some students, as well, will not be satisfied unless they get an easy A without having to do any work. So I advocate tempering the notion of student satisfaction as a measure of how well we’re doing as educators.

#4 Abandon Grades. One of Deming’s Seven Deadly Diseases was the practice of performance appraisals, and grading in academia is no different than what he was rallying about decades ago. There are tons of reasons why grading is not an appropriate – or even an adequate – practice for assuring credentials or credibility. My friend Mary Pat has more to say about this, in particular, because she advocates standardized testing as a “minimum hurdle” that we should expect students to be able to accomplish (or else, not give them the “magic piece of paper”).

Some teachers are hard, some teachers are easy. An A in my class is not the same as an A in another professor’s class. Furthermore, how can I say that what I allocated the most points to on that last exam was really the most important thing my students needed to know? For STEM courses, the recent ASQ survey indicated that there is a perception that way too much work is required, and it would be hard to get the grades that would lead to a good job. This “perception of difficulty” leads many to steer clear of STEM fields, and is entirely rooted in the whole grading nightmare.

More on this particular can-o-worms in Part II.

Note: This post is NOT about soup. If you’re searching for really good soup to eat, you will not find it here.

This post is, in contrast, about something that @ASQ tweeted earlier today: “QP Perspectives Column: Is the quality profession undermining ISO 9000?”

In this February 2012 column, author Bob Kennedy examines reflected on a heated discussion at a gathering of senior-level quality practitioners regarding the merit of various tools, methodologies and themes in the context of the quality body of knowledge – what I refer to as “quality soup”. These paragraphs sum up the dilemma captured at that meeting:

Next came the bombshell from a very senior quality consultant: “No one is interested in ISO 9000 anymore; they all want lean.” In hindsight, I think he was speaking from a consultant’s perspective. In other words, there’s no money to be made peddling ISO 9000, but there is with lean and LSS.

I was appalled at this blatant undermining of a fundamental bedrock of quality that is employed by more than 1 million organizations representing nearly every country in the world. The ISO 9000 series is Quality 101, and as quality practitioners, we should never forget it.

If we don’t believe this and promote it, we undermine the impact and importance of ISO 9000. We must ask ourselves, “Am I interested in ISO 9000 anymore?”

When I see articles like this, and other articles or books that question whether a tool or technique is just a passing fad (e.g. there’s a whole history of them presented in Cole’s 1999 book) my visceral reaction is always the same. How can so many quality professionals not see that each of these “things we do” satisfies a well-defined and very distinct purpose? (I quickly and compassionately recall that it only took me 6 years to figure this out, 4 of which were spent in a PhD program focusing on quality systems – so don’t feel bad if I just pointed a finger at you, because I’d actually be pointing it at past-me as well, and I’m still in the process of figuring all of this stuff out.)

In a successful and high-performing organization, I would expect to see SEVERAL of these philosophies, methodologies and techniques applied. For example:

• The Baldrige Criteria provide a general framework to align an organization’s strategy with its operations in a way that promotes continuous improvement, organizational learning, and social responsibility. (In addition to the Criteria booklet itself, Latham & Vinyard’s users guide is also pretty comprehensive and accessible in case you want to learn more.)
• ISO 9000 provides eight categories of quality standards to make sure we’re setting up the framework for a process-driven quality management system. (Cianfrani, Tsiakals & West are my two heroes of this system, because it wasn’t until I read their book that I realized what ISO 9001:2000, specifically, was all about.)
• Thus you could very easily have ISO 9000 compliant processes and operations in an organization whose strategy, structure, and results orientation are guided by the Baldrige Criteria.
• Six Sigma helps us reduce defects in any of those processes that we may or may not be managing via an ISO 9000 compliant system. (It also provides us with a couple of nifty methodologies, DMAIC and DMADV, that can help us structure improvement projects that might focus on improving another parameter that describes system performance OR design processes that tend not to yield defectives.)
• The Six Sigma “movement” also provides a management philosophy that centers around the tools and technologies of Six Sigma, but really emphasizes the need for data-driven decision making that stimulates robust conclusions and recommendations.
• Lean helps us continuously improve processes to obtain greater margins of value. It won’t help you reduce defects like Six Sigma will (unless your waste WAS those defects, or you’re consciously mashing the two up and applying Lean Six Sigma). It won’t help you explore alternative designs or policies like Design of Experiments, part of the Six Sigma DMAIC “Improve” phase, might do. It won’t help you identify which processes are active in your organization, or the interactions and interdependencies between those processes, like an ISO 9000 system will (certified or not).
• ISO 9000 only guarantees that you know your processes, and you’re reliably doing what you say you’re supposed to be doing. It doesn’t help you do the right thing – you could be doing lots of wrong things VERY reliably and consistently, while keeping perfect records, and still be honorably ISO certified. The Baldrige process is much better for designing the right processes to support your overall strategy.
• Baldrige, ISO 9000, and lean will not help you do structured problem-solving of the kind that’s needed for continuous improvement to occur. PDSA, and possibly Six Sigma methodologies, will help you accomplish this.

Are you starting to see how they all fit together?

So yeah, let’s GET LEAN and stop wasting our energy on the debate about whether one approach is better than another, or whether one should be put out to pasture. We don’t dry our clothes in the microwave, and we don’t typically take baths in our kitchen sink, but it is very easy to apply one quality philosophy, methodology or set of practices and expect a result that is much better generated by another.

Bob Kennedy comes to the same conclusion at the end of his column, one which I fully support:

All quality approaches have a place in our society. Their place is in the supportive environment of an ISO 9000-based QMS, regardless of whether it’s accredited. Otherwise, these approaches will operate in a vacuum and fail to deliver the improvements they promise.

Yesterday, I posted about TRIZ, a 1940′s era device for stimulating innovation. I’ve always had this visceral feeling that we need a new, more modern, more right brained approach to innovation along the same lines as TRIZ, but with the art and panache of the 21st century – and with Eric S. Townsend’s new collection of business-stimulated haikus, I think we’re on to something.

Eric, a self-defined “supercreative” in business and search engine optimization, runs Eric S. Townsend Marketing, a firm dedicated to general marketing, internet marketing, corporate identity, branding, publicity, and totally-needed stuff like that. Only Eric is not from this planet. At times, I think he channels the Pleiadeans (which might not be a bad thing, considering what’s needed to be ultra-competitive in the era of the post-economy).

Eric’s new book features 206 pages of business-related haikus – riddles that might help stimulate you to new directions in business growth and accomplishment. I suggest that the Bizkus are used for brainstorming and in quality circles. Set a meeting time, get some stakeholders involved, identify a problem that you need to solve – and then randomly open up the Bizkus book and read – these things are meant for oral interpretation. Discuss, as a group, what you think the implications may be – or may be not.

Some of the bizkus are totally hard to figure out. But aren’t all problems in business? As a result, this approach has GOT to help you right-brain yourself out of current issues, and into emerging opportunities.

I give Eric’s Bizkus three thumbs up. Leave me comments if you decide to use it to stimulate innovation in your organization… I’d like to hear about your experiences. I’d also love to facilitate an article for Quality Progress on new approaches to stimulate innovation too, so let me know if this tool (or others like it!) serve such a purpose for your place of business. (Note: if you purchase the Kindle version, Eric will give you the PDF for an extra $1.29. I think you have to email him to make this happen.)

Jim Collins, author of Built to Last (2004) and Good to Great (2001), released a new compendium of his research this fall entitled Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that these authors have also stumbled upon the importance of quality consciousness – awareness, alignment, and selectively focused attention! These are the keys to developing a highly successful “ten-X” (10X) organization (one that outperforms its industry index by at least ten times, especially during times of great volatility in the business environment).

Collins and his co-author, Morten Hansen, don’t call it quality consciousness, though – they call it “Level 5 Ambition.” And Level 5 Ambition consists of three traits: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. Each of these traits demonstrates one or more aspects of quality consciousness. Here’s how (using excerpts from p. 35 and 36 of the book):

Fanatic discipline: 10Xers display extreme consistency of action – consistency with values, goals, performance standards, and methods. They are utterly relentless, monomaniacal, unbending in their focus on their quests [emphasis added].

Consistency of action is enabled by awareness of quality standards, and unrelenting attention towards achieving them.

Empirical creativity: When faced with uncertainty, 10Xers do not look primarily to other people, conventional wisdom, authority figures, or peers for direction; they look primarily to empirical evidence. They rely upon direct observation, practical experimentation, and direct engagement with tangible evidence. They make their bold, creative moves from a sound empirical base.

By aligning the actions of an organization and its players with what the evidence shows will work, everyone is more confident and able to engage fully in the pursuit of shared goals. A data-driven approach, familiar to anyone who understands quality improvement practice, allows an organization to test its ideas on a smaller scale before committing to major changes.

Productive paranoia: 10Xers maintain hypervigilance, staying highly attuned to threats and changes in their environment, even when – especially when – all’s going well. They assume conditions will turn against them, at perhaps the worst possible moment. They channel their fear and worry into action, preparing, developing contingency plans, building buffers, and maintaining large margins of safety.

Hypervigilance is heightened awareness of the external environment, even during times of peace and productivity. The aspect of productive paranoia that I think is most instructive, however, is that it involves a choice of where to focus your attention: instead of harboring worry and panic about what might happen, the productively paranoid manager will focus on understanding failure modes, developing contingency plans, identifying backup strategies, and planning to branch off on alternative paths, if necessary. The attention is purposefully and positively diverted from unproductive emotions (worry and panic) to productive emotions (the positive feelings associated with being prepared).

Even though nearly 40% of the end of the book is an “Epilogue” containing more detail about Collins and Hansen’s research methodology and results, this is still a very substantial read, and one with very practical advice for businesses aiming to succeed through a challenging economy. My graduate students in technology management enjoyed it too.

(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

In a previous article, I described the notion of quality consciousness that I’m currently preparing an article about.

To achieve quality consciousness, we ask the very important question (cf. ISO 8402) “What are the totality of characteristics of YOU that bear upon YOUR ABILITY to satisfy the stated and implied needs of your stakeholders?”

The reason we WANT quality consciousness is because we know that the more in tune with the essence of quality that we are, within ourselves, the better we will attune to the needs of our customers and clients – to be able to help them achieve their goals for making things better, more streamlined, and more cost effective.

I summarized quality consciousness as the “3 A’s” – Awareness, Alignment, and Attention:

Quality consciousness implies awareness of yourself and the environment around you (including what constitutes quality and high performance for people, processes and products – most importantly, YOU). It also suggests that you must achieve alignment of your consciousness with the consciousness of the organization, which will aid in full activity and engagement of the senses. Your attention must be selectively focused onto what you can accomplish in the present moment according to that alignment (which implies that you are able to effectively filter the rapid and voluminous streams of information coming at you).

It struck me today how similar this whole notion is to Timothy Leary’s appeal to the counterculture of the late 1960’s, to achieve breakthrough innovation in individual and collective perception of the world to “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out”! The message, according to the summary on Wikipedia, was intended to “urge people to embrace cultural changes… detaching themselves from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society.”

So if you want to improve a product, a process, or yourself, embrace the breakthrough innovation that is promised by quality consciousness!

• TURN ON = Become aware of quality standards and the true meaning of excellence, for you and for the domain you work in.
• TUNE IN = Align yourself personally and professionally with your goals, and those of your organization!
• DROP OUT! Focus your attention on the essentials… don’t be distracted by the down economy, by social upheaval, or the perils of ever-increasing competition.

Deliver value… to yourself and those around you! Make it a personal imperative and watch the avalanche of breakthrough innovations begin to cascade around you and your inspirational attitude.

I have a 6-year-old, which means I also must have sparklers on the 4th of July. (And that’s about it; I don’t trust my klutziness to be in the proximity of most explosives.) So this year, I drove down to South Carolina on the eve of the 4th to make my purchase. I got 96 sparklers for $5.00 – WOW, that’s only 5.2 cents per sparkler, I thought – what a great value! We got them home, night fell, emotions got high, and my kid was concerned that our sparklers would be so fantastic that all the neighbors would come to watch. (“Do we have enough seats in the yard?” he asked.)

It was dark… we were ready. We lit the sparklers. Expecting a ball of sparks at least 6 inches in diameter, I jumped back after I lit the end of the stick. I was looking forward to the part where we could write our names in the dark air, letting the letters hang there – a rite of passage in youth, or so I assumed. A little tiny penny-sized flare zizzled up, and a few sparks shot out straight to the ground, and 10 seconds later it was over. Just 3 sparklers left giant, noxious clouds of irritating ash and dust that filled up the neighborhood, to the point where we couldn’t light any more after just one round.

WHAT????!!? I thought. I wasn’t alone… I looked over and saw a sad, puzzled face looking back at me. “Are you sure you got real sparklers this time?” I was sure, but what I’d purchased – though a great perceived value, at first – turned out to be very low perceived quality. Why? My expectations were that any decent company making sparklers would have standards… nice ball of sparks, 60-second-plus duration, smoky cloud that would not put you in the hospital or give you Black Lung. My expectations were unmet by the product, and as a result, both perceived quality and perceived value plummeted.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, there is a difference between how you perceive quality, and how you perceive value (according to Mitra, 2002):

• Perceived quality happens before you buy, adopt, or experience something.
• Perceived value depends on how well the product, service or experience meets your expectations after you buy, adopt or experience it.
• Perceived quality and perceived value are moderated by your expectations. Your expectations can (and often do!) change after you buy, adopt or experience something. Perceived value is NOT invariant, nor is it independent of perceived quality – your perception of value can change after you buy, adopt or experience similar products or participate in similar activities, because then you have a more rich basis for comparison.

This made me wonder just why people are buying these sparklers… as a sparkler connoisseur since this incident, I have noticed that pretty much all sparklers that are sold are the exact same variety that we got. Which means there must be a lot of people buying this brand of sparklers… and the company certainly wouldn’t be making them if people weren’t buying them. If we keep buying low quality products, how will manufacturers ever know that they’re not meeting minimum quality standards? I know this is significant in safety critical industries, or industries where there’s intense competition, but this whole sparkler debacle made me realize that as consumers, there are probably many fronts where we’re selling ourselves out. I’m sure there are plenty of families who also bought the same sparklers and thought they sucked, but they probably rationalized it by thinking that any sparklers are better than no sparklers for my kids. I might have thought the same thing, but I’m now of the opinion that NO sparklers are better than crappy sparklers, because buying duds sends the wrong message into the Invisible Brain of our Invisible Hand-guided global economy.

So what does this have to do with bagels? Here’s what. As I was lamenting the sad state of the sparklers, I thought to myself, “This would never happen in New York City if we were dealing with bagels.” Why? Because people there know a good bagel when they eat one, the price point is well known (as is willingness-to-pay), and people will not tolerate bagels that are subpar. They will vote with their feet. Bad bagels will cease and desist. The market will eat them, if they don’t meet the very high quality standards of the local bagel consumers.

My appeal to consumers is to ask yourselves this question. How bad does the quality OR value of a consumer product have to get before you’ll just say no, and send a proper signal back into the economy? If you don’t signal now, what makes you think the quality levels will stay the same as they are now?

LET EVERYTHING BE YOUR BAGEL. Don’t settle for minimally acceptable quality unless you’re ready for it to sink even lower.

(This post is the result of a collaboration between Amy Shelton and Nicole Radziwill. Image Credit: Doug Buckley of Hyperactive Multimedia at http://www.hyperactive.to)

In our first post on this topic, we talked about the thirty-something entrepreneur who, after building a career working for others, is now ready to be her own boss. In our second post, we talked about possible attributes of a mature entrepreneur (perhaps you are an A player?) and why such individuals might find themselves doing a start-up. From a business point of view, both of the previous posts were focused inward, that is, they explore the qualities of the people behind a start-up.

But how does your customer benefit from your creativity, and your freedom to explore big ideas? Face it – a business will not last long without customers. Ultimately all your work and energy must create value for your customer. And you’ve got so much energy to make your great idea fly! So share that energy with your customers.  Listen to and apply customer feedback. Co-create a great future together.

Probably, the first step you took on your journey into entrepreneurship was to identify a need. In fact, many start-ups spring up because a founder either personally has a need, or knows someone who needs a particular product or service. The “A player” that’s typically at the helm of a start-up will take that identified need — and immediately start brainstorming ways to meet it. “A players” have “the room to explore hypotheses and make mistakes” within the environment of a start-up. Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who marry creativity and innovation with customer desire.

But how do you actually listen to them? What can the magic of your entrepreneurial environment do for your customer, in a practical way?

One actionable way to leverage this freedom is to employ the Lead User process pioneered by 3M. How do you do it? Just pick a group of 3-5 users who definitely need your stuff – you might be one of these users, or already know them – and then let them dictate how your product or service will satisfy their needs! It’s that easy. Keep them with you as trusted advisors throughout the development process.

Future posts will explore creative ways to make “listening to your customer” an actionable task. They’re already out there talking, on Twitter, and Facebook, and discussion boards… what else can you do to hear them, and interact with them, and work together constructively?

A start-up can excel where others have failed. Listen to the needs of your customers. Think creatively. Take risks. Create some magic. Make your customers happy.