Attending Quality Conferences

Julia McIntosh of the American Society for Quality has created a really nice summary on why attending meetings promotes networking [see: http://asq.org/blog/2015/04/the-pros-and-cons-of-conferences/ ].  And many thanks for pointing to my blog on one of the challenges of meeting travel [see http://www.medicallaboratoryquality.com/2014/07/quality-standardization-and-mh17.html ]. 

To be clear, let me underscore that I absolutely agree with Julia.  First and foremost, I know there are some inherent risks, but on greater balance, attending meetings is  critically important to Quality and Communication.  As the old adage goes “the most important part of a meeting is that people meet”. 

When people get together, creative juices flow and innovation and collaboration and synergy opportunities abound.  It is tough (but certainly not impossible) to duplicate that over a telephone or by watching and participating through a computer or tablet screen.

But it is also fair to say that meetings can have costs which have to go into the planning mix.  Yes, even attending meetings is a Deming PDSA opportunity. 

You can’t be in two places at the same time, and sometimes urgent things can happen while you are way, and the longer the meeting, the greater the risk.  Also, it is pretty clear that the more flight legs it takes to get to a meeting, the higher the probability of a problem.  Lost luggage, missed connections, jet lag, and common colds, phlebitis, and more recently it seems, measles, can mess up your meeting.  And let’s not even talk about flying in or out of the North-east anytime between mid-December to early-March (?) with predictably unpredictable weather. 

And then there are the financials to take into consideration.  In my world, an average 3 day meeting can consume between 4 and 5 thousand dollars, for travel, hotel, registration and per diem costs.   

So I can agree that attending meetings is important, and you can optimise the up-side benefits and reduce the downside hazards, with the following:

1.    Ensure the meeting is worth the risk.  Are the people that you want to meet or listen to likely to be there?  In my world, ASQ meeting are right up at the top.

2.    And as an extension to the above, if you go to a meeting and talk only to your friends, or even worse, talk to nobody, that is opportunity lost.

3.    Look for meetings in the sweet spot, May-to-October, (maybe avoid August) to reduce risks of weather.

4.    Make it a meeting worth your while by balancing travel time against meeting time.  Do you really want to travel for hours-and-hours just to attend a one-dayer?  And on the other hand, do you really have the time to be away for 4-5 or 6 days?

5.    Look for meetings in locations that you can get to on one or two flights.  More than four flights is probably a guarantee for at least some lost luggage or a missed connection.

6.    And as another extension, look for meetings in places where you might like to visit. 

7.    Look to save some cash.  Book meetings at the Early-bird registration rate.   Usually the meeting hotel is going to give a good discount and sometimes, meals are included as part of the meeting. 

So ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Nashville, in a few weeks for most folks in North America would meet all those criteria. 

Where also would be an ideal meeting to consider, if you are in the medical laboratory/healthcare/safety business, is to think about visiting Vancouver BC and the UBC Program Office for Laboratory Quality Management Conference in October 28-30, 2015. 

Visit: http://polqm.ca/conference_2015/home.html

Encourage the Next Generation of STEM Professionals

ASQ asks the question about the next generation of STEM (Science,Technology, Engineering and Math) professionals.   My personal experience is that STEM is very much alive and well, with lots of opportunity to grow, especially in Canada and the United States.  

On a personal note, mentoring and motivating is what I do all the time.  

More importantly, both my sons went through science programs in their university years.  One moved on to the world of high tech and internet start-ups and the other to medicine (In an on-line survey [ http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2009/12/06/do-you-consider-medicine-and-t/ ] that asks the question are medicine and allied health professions STEM disciplines(?), over 80 percent vote to the affirmative).  Both have great careers, and importantly have integrated Quality and Improvement into their professional activities and development.

At my university, Engineering is thriving very well.  It continues to have far more applicants than places and continues to require extremely qualified students.  The faculty apparently offers courses in a broad diversity of sub-disciplines at a variety of levels, and apparently all are filled to capacity.

It is difficult to talk about how well or unwell STEM disciplines are doing.  In another fairly recent study [see: http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/education/graduates-science-math-computer-science-engineerin.aspx] it appears that there is opportunity for growth in STEM education in North America (see the figure), although I have to say that if this figure is an example of the state of STEM knowledge we have a very serious problem. 

Measuring by percentage of graduates has to be just about the poorest application of statistical analysis, ignoring more important issues like, population size, numbers of universities, variety of faculty choices, and many more important variables.   Without looking too deeply, one can say with absolute and total confidence that the United States creates many, many, many fold more STEM graduates than does Finland. 

If we have an apparent increase in vacancies in STEM positions, I think there are a variety of factors that need to be taken into account, at least in Canada, and probably the United States.

• At one time the United States dominated in science and technology positions.  Today the positions have become far more internationally distributed. 
  
• Since the economic downturn in 2008, the pace of manufacturing job increase has dropped dramatically.  While certain parts of the sector, especially high tech has grown significantly, many other jobs are either sitting, or have left the continent.    As the economy becomes more stable and a sense of confidence returns, many positions will open.  They may look very different from what they looked like in the past,
  

• The costs of university education have continued to climb, and many people are questioning the wisdom of leaving school with debt of $200K or more.  Scholarships can make the entry decision easier, but having the confidence of an opportunity when the smoke clears is probably at least as important.

• If the classifiers of STEM disciplines classify their positions narrowly, they are excluding many graduates that are indeed science oriented. Fields including biotechnology, genetics, pharma, nano-tech, tele-health, are making revolutionary change who we are and what we do and will continue for many years to come.   

PS: Join us at the UBC Program Office for Laboratory Quality Management Quality Conference

Why Should Quality “Go Global”?

Bill Troy asks an interesting question about the global nature of Quality, although I might argue the question could equally be framed in a number of other ways:  “Does Quality have a national identity?” or “Is the world being well served by the global nature of Quality?” or “Can Quality become even more global in 2015?”  or “Is there a global Quality community and what does it look like?”

Like most people I know who are involved in the Quality arena, Quality was something that I discovered long after my education and training.  If I had any prior experiences they tended towards the negative images:  “Quality means don’t use white-out, or don’t make scratch-outs when you write”.  But I was lucky and the opportunities for initially an interest in Quality found me (rather than the reverse).  Overtime that interest became passion and commitment in almost every aspect of my career. 

As I  moved along, I learned to appreciate that much of the modern Quality narrative is told from an early American perspective (Shewhart, Deming, Juran, Crosby, Feigenbaum) but almost as quickly the narrative takes on international focus through organizations like the Japanese Union of Science and Engineers (JUSE), and British Standards Institute (BSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) and the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua) and of course (waving my own national flag!) the Canadian Standards Association (CSA).  So from the very get go, the international community as been on-board and very active with the Quality movement.

The last several decades has seen great strides in Quality adoption, especially in the arena of healthcare, and in my particular little part of that world, the medical laboratory.  Through programs and initiatives including, but certainly not limited to World Health Organization, and the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, the landscape of laboratory Quality in many African countries has jumped forward through active programs in Quality Management (including the recently developed Strengthening Laboratory Management Toward Accreditation (SLMTA) initiative).  And importantly one can point to the activities and leadership of my friend and colleague through the Saudi Quality Council.

In my own small way I get to participate in providing training in Quality Management for participants around the world on a near daily basis through our own university based course and through international training provision in Proficiency Testing.  And hosting the UBC POLQM Medical Laboratory Quality Conference in October 28-30, 2015 (More on that later!!).

So that there is strong and active Global interest in Quality is not in question.  But the larger questions of coordination of efforts that could lead to more effective integration is still an open topic. 

Personally I see great hope for integration.  First off, within the limitations and realities of resources, the message around the world is the Quality is Quality, and matters not who is the messenger. 

As I get to move from meetings to conferences and on to international committees, I more and more see many of the same people, all working in a variety of roles surrounding Quality Partnerships.  One day the topic is standards, the next quality management, and the next quality assessment or quality assurance.  And all are involved in the arena of Quality Knowledge.  What this means is that many of the barriers that have existed between Quality Partner groups are very much breaking down.  The broad topics with Quality Partnerships are harmonizing.

And that is a good thing.

And if I have not made my point clear enough, let me be very specific.  ASQ has been a leader in Quality for a very long time, and its broadening interests to the arena of International Quality can and will and does may Quality better.

The Quality Conversion and ZAMM

Bill, and Brooks Carder set out an interesting and challenging thesis that Qualitologists have gone through some form of epiphany and conversion that “we know in our hearts we can help make this world work better.”   As I read this I was intrigued, but with a nagging feeling that this was not the first time I had heard of Quality expressed in near-religious terms.

Back in the seventies, when I was barely out of medical school, and certainly not anywhere near the quality path, I read Robert Pirsig’s novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  (affectionately referred to as ZAMM).  Pirsig was not so much a novelist; he was much more focused in Eastern philosophy with a passion for motorcycles to sooth a troubled spirit (a sort of Steve McQueen character).

ZAMM was not a light read, but was very much a book of the times.  Reading ZAMM was a way of signalling to yourself and others that you were “cool” and “in” and “hip”.  Talking about ZAMM was a great way to find women (or so we thought). 

The book tells the story of a father and son as they travel across America on a motorcycle, but is more about the human internal and external condition.  A key theme that ran through the book was his notion of Quality and its importance in all of life’s decisions.   

One gets the sense that many people of my generation who moved towards a career in Quality were influenced by Pirsig and ZAMM.  For example when Persig writes of Quality in it greater context it is always capitalized.  When discussed in a more prosaic smaller sense, it is in lower case.  I thought this was a style of my own invention.  Probably not.

Further in support, in the commentary of Brooks Calder that Bill includes in his entry, he says: “After all, … quality is responsible for many of the things that make life better.”  And his proposal for a new ASQ mission statement includes:  “To improve the function and value of goods and services worldwide, and to facilitate the development of new products and services that improve the quality of life.”

Parallel that with Pirsig who wrote:  “A person who connects with Quality … is filled with gumption, or enthusiasm, which literally means filled with God”.  A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around and stewing about things.  He is at the front of the train of his own awareness and watching to see what is up the track” and further, and perhaps more importantly,  “when a person loses sight of Quality they lose enthusiasm for what they are doing”.   

Not to get too far down the road or too much off the deep end, Pirsig’s philosophical view of quality had a sense dualism: that it was perhaps, in part subjective, a part of the mind, and at the same time was in part, objective, a part of the material world.  Or it was neither and was a third entity and independent of both.

To Pirsig, Quality was more a sense of excellence and spirit.  It would be hard to fit into prosaic terms.  “Quality is another name for truth, but is something indefinable …“The moment you define it, the meaning of it changes.  But while definition remains aloof, it inexplicably makes things brilliant.   

In 1979 Philip Crosby (5 years after ZAMM) published his “4 Absolutes” of quality including  “Quality is defined as conformance to requirements, not as 'goodness' or 'elegance”  Certainly not as ethereal as Persig would have stated it, it is none-the-less  elegant in its own way.  I wonder if Crosby had been a ZAMM reader and if his definition of Quality was in some way a pragmatic response to a philosophical dilemma .

My point of writing about Pirsig and ZAMM is to indicate that the notion of a Quality conversion is not new.  Rather than being viewed as overly ambitious, I  see it as being the true core of what we are.  I encourage those of you of a more recent generation to pick up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and contemplate your greater self.

As a side note, Brooks uses the term “a bunch of nerd engineers” to describe the quality community.  Perhaps a bit too self-diminishing.  Pirsig saw Quality a little differently.  Said Pirsig’s in his immediate post-sixties era phraseology “When you subtract Quality, you get squareness.   Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.  We are not the nerds, indeed we are the hip.

And as a final note, Robert Pirsig, is 84 years old.  He was interviewed by the BBC in 2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8zdT5jYlro) It is well worth watching.  Should  ASQ recognize him for his contributions to the study and recognition of Quality.