Quality and Innovation

For the past few months, I’ve been working on an article to describe and define quality consciousness. Someone recently told me that there have been a lot of people asking about this concept lately (which I find really cool because as far as I know, I’m the only one actively studying it under this banner), and that I should blog about what quality consciousness is ahead of the publication. (That said, if you’re also researching quality consciousness, let me know in the comments section below! Let’s play with this idea together.)

So here’s a synopsis of the story of quality consciousness:

• The existential question that motivated this line of inquiry: If ISO 8402:1994 says that quality is the “totality of characteristics of an entity that bear upon its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs,” then what if that entity is YOU? What are the totality of characteristics of YOU that bear upon YOUR ABILITY to satisfy the stated and implied needs of your stakeholders?
• The term “quality consciousness” was first used, from what I can find, in a 1947 keynote by C.R. Sheaffer to the first convention of the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC), the predecessor to ASQ. To answer the question “what does top management expect from quality control [people and organizations]” he notes that a change in quality consciousness is expected. Attitudes must shift from an acceptance of what’s good enough to the constant pursuit of making things better. People must be able to take pride in their high-quality work. (from Borawski, 2006)
• Consciousness, according to the Random House dictionary, is 1) awareness of one’s own thoughts feelings, and surroundings, 2) the full activity and engagement of the senses, and 3) the thoughts and feelings of individuals and groups.
• Based on this definition, I believe that quality consciousness can be summed up by 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).
• From reviewing the literature, I find that there are four elements that contribute to developing awareness, finding alignment, and focusing attention. These are Action, Reflection, Interaction, and Education. I’ll go into more detail in the article on how these are all related.
• I think that quality consciousness is exactly what Deming was after… and that it’s the moral of the story of his 14 points. But whereas the unit of analysis for his 14 points was the organizational level, we need to internalize those points within ourselves. What if Deming’s 14 points were geared towards YOU developing your quality consciousness… what do you think he would have said differently?
• The absence of focus on developing a quality consciousness is, I believe, the distinguishing factor between companies that have implemented the Toyota Production System successfully (ie. Toyota) and companies that have implemented the Toyota Production System with limited results (e.g. pretty much everyone else).
• A personal path for developing quality consciousness might include asking yourself the following questions: What do YOU need to expand your awareness? To enhance your mood and affect so that you’re aware of the vast landscape of innovative potentials available to you (e.g. http://qualityandinnovation.com/2011/09/29/why-positive-psychology-is-essential-for-quality/)? What do YOU need to align yourself with your organization? What do YOU need to be able to focus your attention on the most productive thing you can do at any given moment – resulting in effortless action, optimal flow and productivity, and positive affect that will cycle back to expanding your awareness even more?

Borawski, P. (2006). The state of quality: 1947 and 2006. Journal for Quality and Participation, Winter 2006, p 19-24.

I was waiting for a session to begin at the Agile 2011 conference a couple weeks ago when the guy next to me struck up a conversation. What’s your name? What do you do? (You know, typical questions one conferencegoer will ask another to more comfortably pass the in-between time.) When he found out I was a college professor with a specialization in quality and quality management he said “Hey! I have a quality question that’s been on my mind for ages. Maybe you can answer it.”

Side Note: At first I thought he asked whether I liked kickball. I have some nerve damage in one of my ears, which means I have a hearing problem, especially in a large conference room where there’s a lot of crowd chatter. I told him I LOVED kickball. After he contorted his face and gave me the furrowed eye of confusion, I asked him to repeat the question, got a clarification of the question (OOPS), explained my auditory predicament, and we quickly got back on track.

“So here’s my question,” he said. “Some people use PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) to structure continuous improvement, but then other people use PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act). Are they different? Should you use one instead of the other under different circumstances? Or are some people just getting it wrong?”

I was really intrigued by this question, because my assumption had always been that they were both valid methodologies – only that PDCA was to be used for more straightforward improvement scenarios, and PDSA was to be applied in more complex scenarios – when the metrics that you were CHECK-ing and the environmental conditions surrounding those metrics required more extensive REFLECTION. I hadn’t thought that the distinction would not be intuitively obvious.

CHECK implies that you’re asking the question “How does the state of the system compare to what you were expecting?” STUDY, in contrast, requires you to ask the question “What can we learn from how the state of the system compares to what we were expecting?” The STUDY aspect of PDSA also suggests, albeit a little subtly, that you take what you learned about the system and use that new information to better achieve the goals of the product or process in question. (Dan Strongin seems to agree, in “PDCA… PDSA, is it as simple as a C or an S?”)

But this question also made me realize that I had no idea which came first, PDCA or PDSA? Which was the chicken and which was the egg? I quickly found the answers I was looking for in Moen & Norman’s November 2010 Quality Progress article entitled “Circling Back.” PDCA emerged from a lecture given by Deming in Japan in 1950. In that presentation, he described his interpretation of the continuous improvement cycle proposed by Shewhart in the 1939 book, “Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control,” which was based on the scientific method that had emerged much earlier in the 1600’s. As described by Moen & Norman, the characterization of this approach as PDCA was a further interpretation of the lecture by the Japanese attendees.

In 1986, Deming amended his description of PDCA to emphasize the importance of reflecting on the meaning of whatever metrics you’re checking, and thus PDSA emerged. Deming was emphatic about the importance of not just checking, but using that knowledge to better understand the product or process being improved – hence his recommendation to use PDSA as a natural evolution of PDCA.

Also check out John Hunter’s comments on PDCA, PDSA, and friends.

(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of Hyperactive Multimedia at http://www.hyperactive.to)

I call this Part I not because I know what Part II will be… but because I know there will be at least one followup to this post sometime in the future.

Last weekend I finished preparing the report that will be used for my Annual Performance Appraisal (or whatever they’re calling it). To do this, I had to reflect on (and in some cases, remember) all the contributions I made to my job and to society between May 15, 2010 and May 14, 2011. Our department head will use this report, and presumably his interactions with me over the year, to determine whether I’m worthy and where I need to improve. As a result, I’ve been thinking about the nature of performance appraisals over the past few days.

One of Deming’s “Seven Deadly Diseases” is the practice of performance appraisals, which naturally includes merit reviews and annual reviews. Such reviews are ubiquitous in most industries, and often, pay raises are tied to the results. Humorously, at my last job, the HR department routinely ensured the workforce that our performance reviews were NOT in any way related to our pay increases – even though as a manager, I was aware of many cases where the information did indeed influence the numbers (consciously or subconsciously).

I believe, from reading Deming’s books and a whole host of journal articles on Deming-related topics, that he had two reasons for feeling this way: 1) performance appraisals are anathema to “driving out fear,” one of his 14 points, and 2) the practice of performance appraisal assumes the duality of manager vs. employee; (s)he who wields power vs. (s)he who does not; the active evaluator vs. the passive evaluated. By instituting a performance review process, we are establishing a power structure whether we want to or not. Progressive managers might use the performance review as an opportunity for two-way dialogue and a cooperative exploration of strengths and opportunities for improvement. Progressive organizations might use a 360-degree approach, a la Jones & Bearley, but the underlying dynamic is the same: I’m telling you what I think about you and that’s my evaluation. I’m not familiar with any managers or organizations who can pull this off with impartiality and avoid the many sources of bias that can creep into the process.

What if I’m just a really bad observer? What if I’m observing you based on the wrong criteria – or worse, criteria that I just don’t have the experience to honestly evaluate you against? According to quantum physics, there’s no such thing as an observer. The presence of an observer makes him or her a participant in the dynamics – and thus outcomes – of the system. There’s no way to sit outside the system and just watch without affecting what happens.

So what’s the solution? Here’s my idea for today, and I don’t think it’s that revolutionary: 1) Each individual should actively take responsibility for his or her own performance to standards and performance improvement (yet another one of Deming’s 14 points), and 2) Teams should engage in continuous dialogue about individual and collective performance meaning that everyone is responsible for making sure the following questions are asked repeatedly by every member of the team:

• What are we trying to accomplish together?
• How are we doing? Are we making progress, and if so, what should we keep doing?
• If so, what’s working right? If not, what can we do to fix it?
• Then commit to doing whatever it is you decided to do.

Like I said, not really revolutionary. The only new idea here is that the individual should aggressively manage his or her own contribution to the objectives of the team or organization, seek out others’ opinions of his or her strengths and weaknesses, seek out quality standards to measure one’s self by, and take responsibility for helping the team ask the important questions above. If the individual is responsibly managing his or her own performance and demonstrating continuous improvement, the system of performance appraisals becomes moot.

It turns into a pull system rather than the push system than it is now.

The obvious problem? Not everyone cares about their own individual continuous performance improvement. As a manager for over a decade, I’ve had employees who were intellectual lazy, physically lazy, intellectually weak and trying hard to cover it up, or just in the job for the paycheck so they would do anything to avoid doing real work. Performance appraisals serve the purpose, in my opinion, of forcing dialogue with these employees who otherwise might not talk about their performance at all. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In many cases managers and employees trudge through the performance review process on autopilot. It becomes a drawn out paper exercise; an infrequent opportunity to shield a company from liability in case a disgruntled employee feels they’ve been wrongly terminated.

According to some researchers, it’s the end of the world as we know it – sometime this century, in fact. Economists and policy researchers have actually envisioned it coming for about three centuries, though.

The most recent tap on this subject came on March 7, 2009, when journalist and Hot, Flat, and Crowded author Thomas L. Friedman published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, entitled “Is the Inflection Near?” He describes how the economic, financial and political systems that we have established in the world – particularly in the west – are inherently unsustainable, and that in order to achieve a truly green world, our fundamental systems for living life must shift:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

We can’t do this anymore.

What would you think if I told you that this was actually not a new idea, and that the notions Friedman presents were determined by a simulation done over thirty-five years ago? Furthermore, what if I let you in on the fact that people have been thinking about this conundrum since the late 1700′s? It may sound outlandish, but in this case, truth is stranger than fiction.

The simulation that I refer to was done in 1972, with a model called World3 which was coded in the object-oriented Modelica environment. It’s the subject of the Club of Rome commissioned study called “The Limits to Growth” (full text is here). Although the model has received criticism for some of its assumptions, a redaction in 2002 upheld many of the outcomes of the model. In 2009, Dr. Dennis L. Meadows (who directed this research) was awarded the 25th Japan Prize from The Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. Recall that the Japanese were the ones who initially recognized Dr. W. Edwards Deming for his contributions to revitalizing the economy – decades before the Americans embraced Deming’s teachings – and spawned the quality revolution in U.S. business in the late 1970′s and 1980′s that has embossed the landscape of how we do business today. From the Japan Prize announcement:

Dr. Dennis L. Meadows served as Research Director for the project on “The Limits to Growth,” for the Club of Rome in 1972. Employing a system simulation model called “World3,” his report demonstrated that if certain limiting factors of the earth’s physical capacity – such as resources, the environment, and land – are not recognized, mankind will soon find itself in a dangerous situation. The conflict between the limited capacity of the earth and the expansion of the population accompanied by economic growth could lead to general societal collapse. The report said that to avert this outcome, it is necessary that the goals of zero population growth and zero expansion in use of materials be attained as soon as possible. The report had an enormous impact on a world that had continued to grow both economically and in population since World War II.

We also have a rich literature dating back centuries that has studied the relationships between population, environment and technology. In the 1700′s, English economist Thomas Robert Malthus studied these relationships in terms of the projected effects of uncontrolled population growth. “Before Malthus, populations were considered to be an asset. After Malthus, the concept of land acquisition to support “future large populations” became a motivating factor for war.” (citation) The 20th century Boserupian Theory of Ester Boserup, in contrast, suggests that advances in technology will drive the capacity of the world to support population. Researchers like Steinmann & Komlos (1988) have simulated the interplay between both paradigms over time and suggest that there is a cyclical dominance. (I note that references to Malthus and Boserup, let alone Meadows’ World3 model, are rarely on the lips of policymakers.)

In my opinion, it is not climate change we should be worried about per se, but the social, economic and global political system that drives human interactions with each other and with the environment. Climate change may be a symptom, but it is just a tracer for the attitudes of unbounded material growth that are contributing to the effects (if you want to learn about climate change and policy, Prometheus is a good place to start – my point is not to argue the merits of “is it” or “isn’t it” happening because others including Pielke, Jr. do that very well). Regarding climate change, we need to decode what the data is trying to tell us about how we’ve structured our large-scale systems of interaction with one another – rather than merely trying to control our personal “carbon footprints” or recycle more (though these may be important ingredients in the solution).

There is nothing new under the sun. Only today, the forces of production, consumption and population have metamorphosed into a crisis of sustainability – a “perfect storm” to test our ability to live and work in the limit case.

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Steinmann, Gunter & Komlos, John (1988). Population growth and economic development in the very long run: a simulation model of three revolutions. Mathematical Social Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 1, Aug 1988. 49-63 pp. Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Software is the executable representation of knowledge. [1] As a result, I find that software development provides a fruitful basis for exploring how problem solving is done by diverse team members in a cooperative (or even combative!) context.

Here is one example. In June 1997, Tom Gilb wrote an article for Crosstalk on “Requirements-Driven Management”. He noted that his purpose was intended to discuss, among other things, “some of the current major problems in systems engineering.” I stumbled upon this article again over the weekend, and it’s still as relevant now as it was a decade ago.

Standards are a prerequisite for systematic continuous improvement; the means to achieve an improvement process, not the ends, according to Glib. Furthermore, he remarks that Deming’s perspective on continuous improvement establishes, in part, that the reason we should adopt standards is to normalize our project to other projects . Once we do that, we’ve opened the doors to be able to use industry best practices, derived from other projects who also applied the standards – so that we can “clearly see the effect of any changes experimentally introduced into a process and not have to worry too much about other potential factors that impact the results.”

Learning, learning, learning. It’s all about continuous improvement through continuous learning, and in presenting this, Gilb is essentially promoting the same philosophy as Alistair Cockburn’s Cooperative Game Manifesto for Software Development. Both see the learning process as the key to successful software development. (So why do we not focus on this aspect of development more?) Glib addresses the issue of learning directly:

“The time has come to recognize that projects are so large, so complex, so unpredictable, and so state-of-the-art new that we have no practical alternative except to maximize our learning process during the project and as early as possible in the project life. “

In this article, Gilb also presents “Evo” – short for “Evolutionary Project Management” – which has been used at IBM since 1970. It’s an implementation of Deming’s PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach, and the author likens it to Humphrey’s Personal Software Process (PSP).

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[1] This definition is credited to Eric Sessoms, who I consider a true artisan of software development. See some of his work at libraryh3lp.com. He likes the elegance of simplicity in his software.

The DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) methodology is one of the cornerstones of a Six Sigma project. It provides a useful heuristic that can remind you how to structure your project when you apply Six Sigma. This is important for two reasons. First, by reminding you to DEFINE your project’s goals, its deliverables to external customers, its deliverables to internal customers, and most important – your definition of a defect – you establish the solid foundation for actually delivering process improvements that meet tangible goals. Second, DMAIC provides a common language for Six Sigma practitioners so that new teams can spend time solving problems instead of searching for their own standard operating procedures.

If you’re familiar with Deming’s PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, DMAIC is essentially equivalent, but with a very important addition at the end:

• Planning = Defining
• Doing = Measuring
• Checking = Analyzing
• Acting = Improving
• (Sustaining/Continually Learning) = Controlling

There’s nothing magical about DMAIC – it’s just a helpful reminder to guide you as you structure a Six Sigma project. And remember that a Six Sigma project is hopefully not the end of the improvement – ideally, a process team will leave behind a new foundation for identifying more efficiencies in the future.