The Case Against Quality

 

I can hear my critics now – “Does Michael always have to play the contrarian?” Well, not always … only around 68.3% of the time. But it’s my perception that around 99.7% of the articles and blogs on the topic of quality council the same thing: you gotta do it if you’re not, and, if you are, you need to do more of it (quality analysts: We see what you’re doing there! Those percentages are one and two standard deviations from the mean on a nominal curve! You’re not that clever, Hatfield!). With this prevailing narrative so entrenched, it virtually invites charlatanism masquerading as legitimate management insight. And, just for the record, management science charlatanism doesn’t need much of an invitation to take root and spawn multiple business pathologies.

Take one of the more common tools used by the quality managers, the Causality Analysis. If your organization is producing sub-standard products or services, the first, most obvious question is “Why?” The typical Six Sigma analyst will begin here, by taking the recognized fault and tracing it back to its origins. They do this by interviewing the members of the project team who were involved in producing the sub-standard output in order to construct the narrative of the products’/services’ journey from its beginning to the end-user, who found it unacceptable. Common sense, right?

Here’s my problem with that: outside of the quality control meme, few people have a clear grasp of the difference between proximate cause and material cause, rendering their proffered narratives on what happened during the delivery of the substandard product/service entirely subject to their own, biased perceptions. Without a clear philosophical understanding of this and other differences, it’s not long before causality links are being created, connecting events that have nothing more to do with each other than having occurred sequentially, leading to things like sports fans wearing specific clothing on game day, or the observance (or even celebration) of Groundhog Day.

There’s also the issue of what represents an appropriate level of quality. A Rolex® Submariner sells for between $7000 and $10000 (USD), and is accurate to within 6 seconds per day. There are $30 (USD) digital watches that would need years to be off by 6 seconds. Obviously, people are paying for more than the ability to tell time accurately when they purchase the Submariner – but to the tune of 99.7% of the watch’s price? (Quality analysts: stop with the precise alignment with the standard deviations, already!) And this is my point – should outside Six Sigma “black belts” be brought in to Rolex’s plant in order to search out a problem, my guess is that the first investigation on their agenda would be to discover ways that their watches could be more accurate, since that is the nominal job of a timepiece, after all.

Such an analysis would clearly miss the point. However, should a certain blogger with iconoclastic tendencies who writes for ProjectManagement.com actually assert that (a) sometimes what the quality gurus are bringing to the table isn’t appropriate to the product or service, and (b) even when standard QC techniques are called for, it’s easy for all sorts of biases to enter in to the narrative of causality, then the accusations of being “against quality” become fairly easy.

Look, I’m not “against” quality per se. I want my devices functioning properly for long periods of time, and fully expect the manufacturers of those devices to perform whatever quality control or quality management they need to do in order to fulfill that expectation – or else I’m taking my business elsewhere.  But that’s my final point: the free marketplace will signal your company or project team when its quality of output has become a problem, not the quality gurus who are ever on about how we should be observing ISO 9000 or else we’re poor managers, yada yada yada.

Now, if my readers will excuse me, I’ve got to re-read this blog 99.7 times to make sure I haven’t made any syntax errors…