In Shakespeare's famous Merchant of Venice these beautiful lines flow (pun).
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
Lately those lines have been resonating around in my head from two primary directions: my practice of Quakerism (How 2), and my practice in Quality Assurance (How 2-2). Simply, if I do not feel the direction with all my soul and heart, how can I explain it to someone else? Shakespeare did it in two lines, so why do we create thousands of pages and hours of confusion trying to do the same thing—silence works really well. Can one indeed sort through complexity to select quality in the practice of both one’s faith and one’s work, or should one just let it flow?
I received some insight into this dilemma from attending a leadership workshop offered by the Boulder Quaker Meeting. Not being exempt from human Sturm und Drang, the Meeting was having leadership issues with a few of the many volunteer committees that run the place. We were really fortunate to get an awesome presentation from Arthur M. Larrabee, the General Secretary of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and a frequent presenter on leadership skills and Quaker process for Quaker meetings and committees across the U.S. Larrabee is a lawyer who founded the Larrabee, Cunningham and McGowan law firm, though he no longer practices. I’ve attended many leadership workshops, but since this was not about work, and I’m a newly convinced (i.e., inexperienced) Quaker, I came to this one with a completely open mindset. As a result, I left the workshop looking at some of my old beliefs from a new perspective.
One of the most frequent questions I get asked about both Quality and Quakerism is “Yes, but what does it / do you / do they do?” And many times, from the perspective of a Quaker as well as from that of a long time practitioner and fervent believer in Best Practices/Quality Assurance, that can become a tricky question to answer. I struggle to describe both the Quality of Quality and the Quality of Quakerism—and as they become increasingly entangled in my life, I see so much common ground.
The books, manuals, directories, and “how to”s of Quality Assurance and quality control could bury Europe in a ten-foot layer of paper. The texts are often contradictory and confusing, and each is usually introduced with an exhortation to “believe me not them, because they are wrong / evil / nasty / [other really negative term].” The author writes as a master speaking down to an acolyte, assuring you that you need years of continual training by wise men (which coincidentally usually involves paying big bucks to the teachers) to get you where the master—not you—knows you need to go.
Quakers have been writing books, Testimonies, Faith and Practice, and journals for far longer than Quality experts, and often (though not always) in a far less strident tone. But these texts, too, can be contradictory and confusing. There are Quakers who advocate Programmed Worship, and those who advocate Waiting Worship; there are (that I know of) Conservative, Liberal, Evangelical, Universalist, Gurneyite, and Non-theist Quakers—and each author writes in the sure and declared conviction that her or his stance is right and the others’ misguided.
I see many parallels between the pursuit of Quality and being a Quaker. Both Quality Assurance and Quakerism are centered around people and processes, and both promote the documentation and sharing of best practices. In both cases, successful practice means embodying a simple set of principles in the daily exercise of one’s work or life. In both, there is a high premium given to walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Where both most often fail is where there is a wide disparity and contradiction among what is said, what is written, and what is really practiced.
When I do a Quality Assurance due diligence analysis, I tend to find that the Quality program can be classified as taking one of two very different approaches. The most common—and generally the least successful—is what I’ll call a compliance approach that looks from the outside in. The other—and usually more successful—is a holistic approach that depends on everyone involved in the process internalizing a set of core beliefs and manifests on the outside as replicable behaviors.
The compliance approach begins with someone in the top echelons of management listing loads of legal reasons why this or that needs to be done. The dictate is often accompanied by weighty documentation suitably veiled in acronyms from mighty organizations such as ISO, DIN, Six Sigma, and so on. Compliance is documented by reams of checklists and forms to be completed by the people who do the work but have never seen the form before, and signed off by a lengthy chain of command, most of whom have not looked at the work. Compliance is enforced by QA police, called “auditors,” who look at the checklists and forms and determine that the work was or was not done correctly on the basis of what has been noted on the checklists and forms.
The holistic approach begins with the belief that Quality originates from teams of people who share a commitment to the spirit of Quality. It manifests as teams of people working harmoniously together to constantly improve both the quality of the product and the quality of life of the organization, since the two are interdependent. A core belief is that if you see something that is not functioning correctly and affects the spirit of the company, you have a mandate to do something about it. In my view, George Fox and W. Edwards Deming were writing about the same concepts, the former as applied to one’s spiritual life and the latter as applied to one’s working life.
When I was starting my career in Africa, much of the focus of our professional work was looking for better ways to do things with the very scarce resources we had. We came across the works of Deming and there we found our Quality Bible. Deming’s famous 14 points (not quite Shakespeare’s two lines, but getting there) were our guiding commandments, and what we understood from his life and work was that it’s all about people. When I give talks about Deming and all the Quality Assurance systems that came after and built upon his writings, I always say “If you remember nothing else, remember Deming’s points 8 and 12: Drive out fear, and Remove barriers to pride of workmanship.”
So, to paraphrase the Bard, “Quality is not strained. It droppeth as a gentle rain, vanquishing fear and awaking pride of endeavor.” OK, I am not Willie but I’m working on it.
Often in both the QA business and the administration of a Quaker meeting, due diligence for problem-solving leads to focusing on “whodunit” and how do we extract retribution. Our Quaker Meeting had invited Arthur Larrabee to present his workshop because we had a long list of concerns for discussion, including some pretty pointed ones like “what to do about a rogue leader (in Quaker parlance, a rogue clerk)?” Everyone expected the great Arthur to declare judgment, give us his verdict and provide us with a procedure to deal with the problem, but that is not what happened. Instead, Arthur began by asking “What is the function of the clerk?”
In his humble opinion, the answer is fairly simple, but he led us to build the logic ourselves: it’s to protect, nurture, grow the spirit of the meeting (or committee). Light bulbs went off in my head (which they frequently do but luckily my dear wife does the priority arbitrage). It’s a really stunning declaration because it swings the mind automatically from focus on problems and blame to focus on solutions—and that, my dear friends, should also be the focus of Quality Assurance.
The clerk of a Quaker committee or Meeting is also the facilitator of a process of decision-making that sometimes calls for the participants to contemplate in silence what each speaker has said before the next person speaks. The intrusion (yes) of silence is also far more productive than the intrusion of verbal noise, and leads to much better spirit as well. A Quaker Meeting has its Faith and Practice, its Testimonies, its minutes that record the advice of “weighty members,” and its wise elders, but as Arthur led us to discover, right decisions come not from reading those “manuals,” but from hearing and heeding the spirit of the meeting.
A company that believes compliance is the sole way to go will soon be lost, while one that begins with the spirit of Quality and then builds the system to demonstrate compliance will always survive, often in spectacular ways. A long time ago, in my first year in the U.S. (1980), I went on a customer call to two airlines that had dynamically different operations: Braniff and Southwest Airlines. The first was large, pompous, and arrogant, with layers and layers of management. The other was so small the arrogant one predicted quite confidently they would be driven out of business inside six months. We spent nine months at Braniff just setting up the service call, and even with the support of their risk team and their financial backers could not get sense into their heads about the pursuit of Quality.
On our last day there, as we were leaving we asked the receptionist if there were any other airlines in the vicinity and as luck would have it she was about to jump ship and go work for Southwest and directed us across the Love Field tarmac to them. What the heck, we thought, we have nothing to lose, let’s cold call. I’ll never forget the sight of the third person we met: after swiftly being taken to the head of aircraft maintenance we were walked straight into the CEO’s office. It happened to be around Easter, and CEO Herb Kelleher had just gotten back to his office after going round to wish all the passengers and staff a Happy Easter—dressed in a pink rabbit suit and smoking a cigarette.
The discussion that followed, and continued for hours, was all about the spirit of the company and what we could do to help. Arthur Larrabee and George Fox could have attended that meeting and been perfectly at home. Secretaries, flight attendants, and ground crew at Southwest had (and still have) more power to make things right in their company than executive directors in the boardroom of Braniff. Look at the results today: Braniff is long gone, and in 2011 Southwest carried the most domestic passengers of any U.S. airline and marked its 39th year of continued profitability. It is still beloved by shareholders and employees and customers.
Simply, the spirit of Quality of the company is built right in and practiced every day; there may be a manual now, but all the employees have it written on their hearts as they do it every day. If you think that sounds like what Quakers should do, I think you would be right. You can read the Bible, all of the Journal and letters of George Fox, and all of the writings of every Quaker since, but if you do not walk the walk, believe till it hurts, and live your Testimonies every hour of every day, it’s not worth a hill of beans.
So, my dear friends, I will close with my previous line slightly modified: “Faith of Friends’ Quality is not strained. It droppeth as a gentle rain, vanquishing fear and awaking pride of endeavor, delivering light to mankind in this world and beyond the cosmos.”
In the Light
(: (; pete
This article is dedicated to Lisa, a friend, a Friend, and a member of the next generation of Quality Assurance practitioners.
