Fishing for answers - Part 1.

Making things happen is a key competency of any successful business leader.

Most organisations, especially those within regulated industries, have defined processes to manage how changes are assessed and implemented. Despite this, many businesses often confuse change control with how documents are stored and updated. Many more do not fully appreciate that change management goes beyond planning and implementing change, but includes how change becomes embedded in the culture of organisations.

Rarely does simply updating a document change the world.

But this edition of Quality Rebooted isn’t about change per se.

It is about a more fundamental question.

Are you making the right change ?

Or more specifically:??

Are you fixing the right problem with the right solution?

Over the last 30 years there has grown an industry of experts, consultants and continuous improvement practitioners – including myself - who will give you sage advice on the best approaches to identify problems and find your correct fix.

The general approach is embedded in methods from lean / 6 Sigma to the foundations of Total Quality Management borne out of the 1950s. It is based on the notion we can gain control of the world around us if we put in enough effort and just focus on the right things.?

But has it worked ?

One would expect after the application of such approaches over the past decades we would be surrounded by a sea of highly efficient, defect-free businesses all running highly capable processes. Non-conformances and deviations would be absent, recalls unheard of and?customer complaints relatively rare.?

Does this describe your business today ?

Well, clearly as a generality, this is not the reality we all face today.?

I would make the bold case that these approaches have simply not been good enough for the challenges faced. They need supplementing with ways that better appreciate how the real-world actually works. And maybe more provocatively, that the Quality movement has maybe been rather slow moving on from past approaches. Hear me out.

I am surprised how even organisations, ones closely aligned with the pursuit of quality, and ones trumpeting they are part of the vanguard of a new digital-age are still entrenched in methodology that has moved on little over the past years i.e: Root Cause Analysis; Plan, Do, Check Act, etc, etc.

They have clearly not provided all of the answers needed yet, but are still being presented to businesses as the solutions required, and often as contemporary approaches.?

Now, the foundation of all these tools is one of cause-and-effect. Inputs can be controlled and outputs verified. The world behaves like a machine. It is an engineering perspective. But this isn't always the case. Sometimes the world is machine-like, but often it isn’t.

But this engineering approach is appealing, as it offers the opportunity to provide simple solutions that play to our desire to control and convince ourselves we are masters of our own destiny. However, these tools are at times inadequate to deal with the intricacies, and as we will come on to, the complexities of the real world around us.

Let me give one example using one of the most popular tools in continuous improvement: the “5 Whys”.?

The tool is based on the assumption that if you ask “Why ?”, five times or more, you can drill down to the root cause, whose correction will prevent the original issue from ever happening again.

Sounds easy doesn’t it ?

In practice a whole industry based around root cause investigation has been spawned, focusing on the need to get to the?root-cause and away from superficial answers.?The “5 Whys” speaks to our desire for unintuitive solutions, solutions which will reveal themselves if we strip away superficial causes using the rigour of the methodology.?The tool is often used with almost religious fervour.

But in truth the tool isn’t very good.

Yes, it is simple to use – simplistic some would argue - but has many disadvantages which others have pointed out [1].?

" The positive reputation enjoyed by TPS/Lean provides an aura of credibility for ‘5 why's' " Alan Card (2017)

Sadly, the world at times doesn’t always behave as we want it to, making the use of simple tools somewhat ineffective. It is a world that is messy, changing, evolving and at times highly unpredictable.?

This make the whole exercise a highly frustrating one for a Quality professional. As an analogy, for those who go fishing. Fish do not do always do what you want them to do i.e. take the bait.

But there is a way forward.

Over the last 20 years, alternative ways of looking at the world - ones more reflective of how it really behaves - have been embraced by the social sciences. These explain far better how the real world, and by definition how your business works.??Buried in academic journals and rarely read - though insightful - books you will find how this research has been applied to the Quality System and Quality organisations, at times largely unnoticed [2-5].? It accepts that the real world is at times..well, uncontrollable.

“Organizations may be in constant turmoil due to reorganizations, change of personnel, fluctuations in leadership style … or turbulence as a consequence of market and customers.“????Petter ?gland (2008)

It is the world of complexity.

This alternative understanding has not generally made the leap into more general Quality Management, one which is still in bedded in a world where cause-and-effect always holds. And in truth for a die-hard Quality professional with an engineer's view of the world is not a comfortable one to consider or have to operate in.

“ For me, management has come to mean living with both sides of the control paradox at the same time. This means acting on the basis of an expectation of an outcome, knowing full well that it is unlikely to materialize, requiring me to be ready to handle the consequences whatever they may be. " Phillip Streatfield (2001)

Complex systems are changing, moving, self-organizing and unpredictable. To understand them you need patience and have to observe rather than act. Interventions often generate unintended consequences. But they are the world around you, and how your business actually operates.

As an example, a shoal of fish is a complex system. It evolves, moves, changes, self organises and that is why fish are so hard to catch.

" That's interesting, " you hear you cry, " but how does this help me fix my problems and manage quality more effectively ? "

Well, in my defence, in our forthcoming book - my co-author Ian Wells and myself - explore amongst other things how a better understanding of the world of complexity can lead to improved ways of managing quality, and inform more effective decision-making if you supplement past approaches with this different way of thinking [6].

In the next edition of Quality Rebooted I’ll give you a peek of what will be in the book, with some practical ways you can fish for more effective for answers. Answers your business probably needs to be more successful.

I hope you take a look next time.

Best regards

matt

[1]???????Card, A. 2017 The problem with “5 Whys”. British Medical Journal Qual Saf. 26: 671-677 https://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2016-005849

[2]???????Alba N. Zaretzky. “Quality management systems from the perspective of??organization of complex systems”,?Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Volume 48, Issues 7–8, 2008, Pages 1170-1177, ISSN 0895-7177, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mcm.2007.12.023.

[3]???????Dooley, Kevin, Timothy Johnson, and David Bush. “TQM, chaos, and complexity.”?Human Systems Management. 14. 1995: 1-16. 10.3233/HSM-1995-14403.?

[4]???????Streatfield, Phillip.?The Paradox of Control in Organizations. Routledge: London and New York. 2001

[5]????????gland, Petter. “Designing quality management systems as complex adaptive??systems.”?Systemist, 30(3), 2008, 468-491

[6]??????Wictome, Matthew P. and Ian Wells. Transforming Quality Organizations: A Practical Guide. Business Expert Press, New York. 2023, In press.