Even SDOs have customers.

It has been a while since I have felt the need to vent in this space, but the events of today lead to exasperation and venting here in public/private seems like a good way of dealing with it.  

I will tell you that I have spent nearly my whole career in and around standards development, some at the very local level, some provincial, and some national, and a lot international.  In the beginning, I think my major motivating driver was ego, that I was in a space where I could “impose” my ideas on a larger professional group.  After a short while this wears off, and the driver gets replaced by being motivated to have your profession steered by sound principles that come in large part from understanding customer needs.  By listening to what other laboratorians tell me, I am told that I am competent at translating those needs into requirements that work well in standards at all levels.  

For example, when working with laboratories in developing countries it was pretty obvious that the best way to introduce quality management principles was to break a sophisticated document like ISO 15189 (medical laboratories – requirements for quality and competence) into bite size pieces and introduce them on chunk at a time, along with mentorship assistance until they have worked through a series of implementation and gap analyses until they are ready for international accreditation. 

That is now a very common and popular model for success.

I have had my successes and I have had my failures, perhaps the largest being my inability to get the measurement of uncertainty removed as a requirement from biology based laboratories.  From what I can see, after 20 years of experimenting with uncertainty, few laboratories get it, and the consequence is that they throw some numbers into a formula and get a number which they then ignore, as quite rightly they should.  

I will say that from the laboratorians that I talk with, and increasingly the number of accreditation bodies that have to work with the standard, I see that the tide is slowly turning, and in time I will be vindicated.  Sooner or later, the customer is always right.

But today was not about MU, it was about a clearly and shining arrogance displayed when some standards developers are intent on pointing out how smart they are and how dumb are the people that are going to be required to use the documents they are creating.  

One person actually relayed a story about how he went to talk with a significant user and asked why he was concerned about a new standard version being created and was told that the new version was not going to work well with his peers.  He felt the new version deviated substantially from the existing version.  

As he recounted his story his response was along the lines of “this fellow is a nice guy and I consider him a friend, but in this case he was dead wrong and his opinion was garbage.”  Good way of listening to the document users.  

Then he went on to say that the document that was being created was complicated by including definitions of terms when they could be equally found in another document.  The solution was simple.  Take them out of the new document and require users to buy two documents, one with the standard, and another with the definitions.  “When you buy a book, if you don’t understand the words then you go out a buy a dictionary.”  Good attitude towards addressing customer needs.  

What was interesting that this group also thought it was be a good idea to go through a document validation process before making a decision on next steps.  For those unfamiliar with the concept, document validation means going to a group of users and asking them if they understand the document and discover if their understanding is consistent and compatible with what the crafters intend.  It actually is a good idea, but can be a lengthy and complex process, and requires an open mind and the ability to accept criticism.  It is the Check step of PDCA.  

With what I heard today I think we have all the makings of a new PDCA – Plan, Do, Check, and Argue that the customer is a jerk and just doesn’t appreciate how much smarter we are than they.

Deming would be livid.

So am I.

Doing it Right or Doing it Wrong?

Doing it Right

Recently I was reading the recent (August 2013) edition of ASQ’s Quality Progress and came across an opinion article by Bob Kennedy who jumped into the fray between W. Edwards Deming and Philip Crosby and said that in his opinion that Crosby’s first essential, Do it Right the First Time (DIRFT) was wrong on every level.  The foundation of his argument was that Deming proscribed against slogans and therefore Crosby and DIRFT was wrong.

 I have to say that Crosby was NOT wrong, and that DIRFT was NOT wrong.  I am not sure that Deming’s concerns about sloganism was meant to include concepts like DIRFT, but if they were, then in all due respect, in this circumstance, I would have to side with Crosby.  Even a pioneering genius like Deming could not always be correct all the time. 

When is comes to concepts like DIRFT, Crosby was spot on, and Deming should have acknowledged it.

First off, let me put some context around my opinion.  I understand Deming’s point of view.  There are some slogans that I think are unhelpful.  “There is no such thing as an Accident” .  “Accidents poison to our organization”.  “Time is money – time loss kills growth and progress”.  These are not slogans, they are less than idle threats that lead people to hide slips and simple mistakes.  There is little place for threats in the workplace.

But DIRFT is not a threat, and indeed makes sense.  Given the alternative I would hope that a neurosurgeon makes triplely sure he does it right the first time.  And by the same token, the same goes for the airplane pilot.  Even the woodworker says, “Measure twice and cut once”. 

DIRFT is in fact a reiteration of a concept that Deming was so proud to adopt, even if he did not state it, “PLAN DO CHECK ACT”.  (For the origins of PDCA see Deming did not create PDCA.  [ http://www.medicallaboratoryquality.com/2012/06/deming-did-not-create-pdca.html ] .

What DIRFT was intended to mean was before you do something, make sure that you have organized your thoughts before you put a plan into action.  It is the essential corollary to PDCA.  Think before you do. 

In the medical laboratory we have tons of examples where things don’t work that way.  Tests get implemented without proper validation.  Tests are done and reported before checking the Quality Control results.  Reports are sent to the wrong person before confirming who was truly was the intended receiver.  These happen all the time and in every instance they result in external failures with potential false reports, misleading information, loss of confidentiality and huge cost of poor quality.  And most of them were pointless and preventable. 

A few seconds or at most minutes of thought and planning could prevent most of these problems, and save the laboratory from embarrassment or potential liability, and save the patients from inconvenience or harm.

Perhaps in Deming’s time, folks were very aware and sensitive to threats in the form of slogans.  Labor protections, either under the umbrella union protection or workplace legislation either did not exist, or were in their infancy.

That is not the world in which we live today.  Today we live with 40 character headlines and 140 character tweets, and thirty second commercials.  We live in a slogan society, and we by-and-large put them into a more current context.  We may see slogans as jargon and trite or sophomoric, but we don’t see them as threats.

Personally I see DIRFT as rather aspirational.  I fatigue of avoidable errors, or repeated mistakes.  I embrace the notion that doing things RIGHT is better than doing things WRONG, and believe that many errors result from automaton-like behaviour.  I absolutely support “Plan before you do; Prevent the avoidable error”  and even more importantly, “Learn from mistakes; support continual improvement”.

So to Bob Kennedy I think with respect it is OK to relax on the absolute adherence to Deming’s word.  It is time to embrace context and circumstance, and to acknowledge that it is also possible to acknowledge that both Deming and Crosby were giant contributors to our current concepts of Quality. 

Deming did not create PDCA

Thanks to Google there is a fun game for entertainment and insight.  Create a sentence in English, and pass it through Google Translate and convert it to another language, and then retranslate it back to English and compare what you started with and what you got.  Sometimes the results take an interesting twist.  Recently I heard about a company that has a commercial interest  in the phrase “come alive!”.  Unfortunately when that phrase was translated into Japanese it became “may you ancestors return from the dead”.  Gives a whole different tone to your soft drink pleasure.  Another is the German translation of “knapsacks” or “fanny packs” in “body bags”, or In Italy, a campaign for Tonic Water translated the name into Toilet Water.  It reminds me that we are not all that far away from the biblical Tower of Babel.  

But if you think that translations always go from good to bad, there seems to be an important Quality story that suggests the contrary.  The source for this comes from Ronald Moen and Clifford Norman who wrote an interesting article “Evolution of the PDCA Cycle”.  You can find it on the web.  It was originally published as Circling Back in Quality Progress in November 2010.

According to these two well informed Qualitologists, when Shewhart first raised the notion of a structured quality cycle in 1939, it was in a manufacturing framework.  The notion was that first one creates the Specification, and then creates the product by Production based on the specification and then tests the product through Inspection.  

By the time Deming adopted this and took the concept to Japan in 1951, Shewhart’s three phase cycle evolved to four phases:  first there is a product Design which is followed by Production to the design.   Then the design and product are studied through the customer’s response at the time of Sales.   If the customer is not happy and registers a complaint, then the process from design to sales (or release) is Researched, and if necessary revised to improve customer satisfaction.  One can see that this clearly has the flavour of the current cycle.

What happened next is the point of my story.

According to Imai (through Moen and Norman) Japanese executives, taking Deming’s notes from his lecture with the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) and translated Design-Produce-Sales-Research (see above) as PLAN-DO-CHECK-ACT.  So while the concept may have come from Shewhart and Deming, the words came from the English-Japanese-English translation. 

This is a perfect example of innovation [see: http://www.medicallaboratoryquality.com/2012/04/invention-and-innovation-and-new.html] which in this case may have been a consequence of intent (if the executives knew the potential power of going from the manufacture specific language to more generalized terms) or serendipity (if they did not). 

Either way, the creation of a generalizable science concept for Quality contributed largely to the wide application of PDCA in education, service, and health, and government in a way that the Shewhart or Deming manufacture specific language could not. 

Of interest the first place that Deming actually published the use of the term PDCA (which he subsequently changed to PDSA) was not until he published his book Out of Crisis in 1986, over 30 years later.  

I am not trashing Deming or Shewhart.  Both were clearly  leaders in expressing Quality in scientific terms.  But the term PDCA cycle was not their invention, it was the creation of the Japanese executives responsible for the translation.  And I think that we do history a disservice to continue to attribute the cycle as we do.

  I think my son Steven has said it best.  Life loves a good story.  While mythology needs to have heroes and clean stories,  history rarely works out that way.  

Sometimes you have to decide what you want - the story or the fact.  

Deming did not create PDCA.  Deal with it.