Quality was Job One

As I mentioned in some earlier postings, part of my life in the corporate world has been spent as a “quality facilitator”. Don’t worry, I didn’t know what it meant either.

About 20 years ago, you might recall there was this business fad going around that preached the Japanese had figured out the process for building quality into a product rather than tacking it on at the end in the form of a high-priced ad campaign. This was supposedly done by focusing on meeting customer expectations, defining and documenting your production processes, and enlisting front-line workers to contribute their ideas. It all sounded very idealistic even for a leftist like me who saw a certain appeal in having this semblance of democracy on the factory floor.

Before this quality revolution hit our company, I was running a three-person inspection operation out of a converted electrical closet near our shipping department. Our job was two-fold: inspect components before they went into the final product to remove defects early and then, when that failed, scramble around like poisoned ants to find a few quality items to send to our client. Even though everybody who knew anything about our process admitted there were unavoidable variations, we had to reinforce the notion that perfection was possible. We might ship out 10,000 marred and scarred pieces to the client’s distribution warehouse, but me and two other guys had to handpick the best of these 10,000 for a special separate shipment.

Sometimes this fooled the client and sometimes it didn’t. When our ruse failed, we often had to travel to these distant warehouses to go through all 10,000 products to remove whatever defect had gotten through. The most memorable trip was a weeklong visit to a part of Brooklyn where even the cab drivers wouldn’t go to spend five days looking for a spot on a picture of the CEO’s face that didn’t actually exist in real life. (I always thought it would be easier to put the spot on him rather than remove it from his picture, but couldn’t convince my boss).

Upper management eventually became convinced that this was a sloppy way to run a quality operation so they decided to eliminate the inspection department entirely. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the idea was to dump my two inspectors out on the street and groom me to join a new pro-active quality team that was being formed. Seeing as how this came about two months before my son was born, I was all in favor of any idea that kept me on.

For the next two years, I worked with a new quality manager whose importance to the business was evidenced by the fact that she had her office right next to the president. Not that he ever spoke to her, because in fact he hated her. Regardless, she was given huge powers to hire a consultant who trained four facilitators and group of about 25 sales, customer service and production people who learned how to find the root of a problem, brainstorm ideas for fixing it, and then test these to make sure they worked. My three quality cohorts and I were to stand next to a large easel while these discussions were going on, making notes of the participants’ observations, and coaching them through the problem-solving process. This is what was called “facilitation” but felt more like stenography for an angry mob.

The president had assigned us four specific problems to solve, and we were broken into four separate groups to solve them. I remember two of the issues were how to answer the phones more quickly and how to reduce spoilages. Even though our consultant had advised that we pick small soluble problems while still learning our way, these two whoppers were chosen by the chief executive. Unfortunately, empowering the working masses to speak their minds did not include pointing out this bone-headed move. I don’t remember the third problem, but I think it might’ve been something about Third World squalor.

The fourth one – the project for me and my group – had to do with what were called “counts”. Incredibly, our processes were so out of control that we were unable to produce exactly the quantities our customers ordered, and considered ourselves successful if we came within ten percent. Team members were chosen regardless of their knowledge of the process, the logic being that outsiders would be able to exercise a detached common sense to keep the insiders on track. In reality, the outsiders kept their mouths shut and volunteered mostly for the team’s clerical duties, like typing up the minutes and bringing stale bagels. Those in the know would attend the weekly sessions, or not, depending on how busy their departments were. One week they’d express one opinion, then the next week they’d say something different, then the next week they wouldn’t show up. People were alternately passionate and indifferent to others’ opinions, or even their own. It was a mess.

Part of my job was to put a successful face on this fiasco for my manager. The group would bicker and stall and change direction and give up, all in the course of one hour, and I’d have to describe how “dynamic” the session had been. Our team leader, who was head of the IT department, had decided on day one how he would solve the problem and bullied the group toward this end. But we had to put up the façade that we were gathering data before making a final decision. So he coerced everyone into a plan that required counts to be recorded at each step of production and a “variation form” to be filled out when these numbers were off. Unfortunately, nobody could convince the front-line machine operators to be bothered with such nonsense.

So gradually, over the course of eighteen months, our mission changed from getting the counts right to getting people to fill out the forms. The data I was required to submit to management revolved around the issue of compliance to the team’s mandate, a team and a mandate that most of the blue-collar workforce hadn’t even heard of. I’d try to explain to them the esoteric concepts of Japanese quality circles and they’d go off on some rant about how we had won World War II specifically so we didn’t have to listen to the Japanese.

At least my group continued to appear to pursue its goal with regular meetings. The other teams just sort of faded away. My fellow facilitators turned their energies instead to a suggestion box campaign, a chili cook-off to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the initiative and, for one associate who longed to be a muralist, making really nice posters. Eventually a new president was installed who thought the whole thing was a bunch of rubbish and the effort was finally abandoned.

Still, I did learn a valuable lesson about this whole quality experience. When your job finally becomes so intolerable that you have to resign, work in a free-lance editing business for a year and then return to your original company as a contract worker with no benefits.