People and Quality

Something that was made very clear to me from my earliest association with any Quality practice is that true Quality is a reflection of how people are affected by the process they are involved in. Their actions reflect the way the process impacts them, and that interaction between the people and the process in turn affects the outcome of the activity.    
     
In traveling first between the two different worlds of Africa and Europe, and now throughout North America, I perceived so clearly that in Africa people are paramount, whereas in the western world processes rule. In Africa, processes are transparent; in the West, they become convoluted and complex.

Do people who are deeply satisfied with a process smile a lot?

When I was a boy in Africa, I was employed by my uncle’s construction company to run around the job site and report back which crews were smiling and which were not. At seven years of age, I did not understand the blueprints, but I understood (sometimes better than the adults) whether the crew felt engaged and productive or frustrated and angry. Invariably, a lot of toothy grins and joking amongst a crew led to good Quality workmanship, whereas scowls and frustration led to rework. (We called this job assignment Mood Indigo—more on MI coming up )

People and processes change from social group to social group and often from country to country, continent to continent. Despite the utopian dream of a worldwide standard that everyman can recognize, the social results of what people and process are doing are different from culture to culture. 

What is deemed totally correct or Quality-compliant in one culture is often offensive in another. Humankind has grappled with this issue throughout the ages, and often the result has been cultural fiat by force of arms to subjugate a culture that disagreed with another’s conception of Quality.

 

Ask whether the crew are smiling in Europe or North America and your sanity will be questioned. Satisfaction with a process is judged by a review of the reported results (paperwork, digital or not). The western world seems to insist that the work-processes that most of its inhabitants are involved in should normally be unrewarding and unchallenging, almost like a penance. It is unfashionable to speak of a vocation except for clergy or artists. The rest of us talk about our “day jobs,” “keeping our noses to the grindstone,” and “advancing our careers.” This view of work as a penance is reinforced by contrasting to it a glorified view of retirement as a great change after which Quality of Life radically improves, if the retiree is not too exhausted and has not forgotten how to enjoy life.

This is also the process format the developed world is exporting to Africa, and we are still stunned at the poor results and promptly blame the recipients of our superior western or pseudo-eastern wisdom. In the western (metaphorical) world, we are much more comfortable with the paper mask results that people wear—What school did you go to? What are your qualifications? How much money do you make? What car do you drive? What type of house do you live in?—than with the real person behind the mask. Ask any person in most western companies about the Quality of what they do as it relates to the satisfaction they feel by doing it and you will probably get this type of response: “I do not really enjoy what I do because of XXXX, but you have to make a living, so …” To say that this has no reflection on the Quality output of what they do is naive. 

 

This is also the process format the developed world is exporting to Africa, and we are still stunned at the poor results and promptly blame the recipients of our superior western or pseudo-eastern wisdom. In the western (metaphorical) world, we are much more comfortable with the paper mask results that people wear—What school did you go to? What are your qualifications? How much money do you make? What car do you drive? What type of house do you live in?—than with the real person behind the mask. Ask any person in most western companies about the Quality of what they do as it relates to the satisfaction they feel by doing it and you will probably get this type of response: “I do not really enjoy what I do because of XXXX, but you have to make a living, so …” To say that this has no reflection on the Quality output of what they do is naive.
 

 

1. In the beginning.

Truly I started this blog with great reluctance. It was only after a meeting with some of my colleagues who kept saying "We can always depend on you to keep us grounded in good quality. You make a great defense of quality in everything you write--you need to get all these ideas down in a blog." that with a huge sigh I agreed.

Mentioning quality assurance or control of any kind these days normally just produces glazed eyes, which is sad because fundamentally good quality adds to the quality of life and poor or negative quality does the opposite.

My view is probably a little bit different, with regard to this subject, as I grew up in two worlds--Europe and Africa. Shuttling between the two for most of my life, I saw how in Africa we had to do a lot with very few resources, and in Europe it seemed to be the opposite. In our contracts and work in Africa we had to practice basic quality of everything as a survival technique, but in Europe it seemed that you could do anything you wanted to as long as the documentation was in order. In the US we are sadly emulating the Europeans.

Another thing that became obvious to us in Africa is that when we tried to emulate the European dictate of doing this or that procedure of anything (let alone that each European nation had its own slant on what was best) disaster and failure became our companions. Quality for us in mother Africa meant a human endeavor to do our best that sometimes was documented and sometimes was not, but all involved knew which direction our mental compass was firmly focused on.

Early on, trying to dig deep into this morass of advice from the western world, these lists of "do this but don't do that," I came across the work of W. Edwards Deming. With the able assistance of many of his colleagues, Deming laid out very clearly the rule sets of how, when, and why Quality of any form should be applied--and most importantly how you could measure the success of its application.

Of Deming's "14 Points for Management," 8. Drive out fear and 12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship resonated at all levels to the wonderful teams that I worked with, no matter the perceived European standards of education and literacy they did or didn't meet. It was fairly stunning in the early 80s to be recruited to the US to teach this same methodology (which "The Boss" would proudly sing was "Born in the USA") on huge sophisticated projects to an American audience who had apparently forgotten the basics.

That has been my rewarding life's work ever since.

I hope this blog will take you on an enjoyable journey of discovering and understanding what Quality really means, with some wonderful examples of how it's done in the real world, and hopefully along the way you will join me in becoming a Defensor Bona Qualitatis.