24 min
Meeting Requirements Is Not Enough: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 2) In Their Own Words
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- Management
What is quality? Does it mean always meeting specifications? What if the calculus for specifications means little and tells managers almost nothing about the process or its potential for improvement? Dr. Bill Bellows discusses the negative consequences of this kind of black-and-white thinking and what to do about it.
0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I am continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is: What is quality? Bill, take it away.
0:00:27.5 Bill Bellows: Thank you Andrew. That question brings me back literally 30 plus years. I was at home studying on leave from work. I got a bunch of books on quality. I bought every book on quality I could find at the Yale Bookstore. I started reading them. And I'm reading Phil Crosby, I'm reading Six Sigma Quality, I'm reading Genichi Taguchi, I'm reading Deming. And I, naively, am thinking that quality means the same to all of them. As a heat transfer engineer, in the world of engineering, heat transfer engineers have a common language, they use common terms, so I naively thought everyone in the world of quality has the same explanation of quality. And I'm looking through these books. I had met some seasoned experts in the field. I started calling them and saying... I remember talking one guy and I said, "I don't think these books are the same." And he laughed. He said, "Bill, you're onto something."
0:01:24.0 BB: Well, the traditional way of looking at quality in most organizations gets me to what I now refer to as question number one and that is, Does something meet requirements? Does the task meet requirements? Does the dimensions meet requirements? Does the product meet requirements? And, Andrew, there's only two answers to that question, yes or no. That's how most organizations look at quality. Boeing's advanced quality system... How do I know? I worked for a company that was owned by Boeing for nine years. Boeing's advanced quality system, which is no different than anyone else's quality system, is question one, Does is meet requirements? Yes or no.
0:02:08.5 AS: Is that like go/no-go?
0:02:11.4 BB: That's go/no-go. It's black and white thinking, Andrew. It meets requirements or it doesn't. Question two is, How many ways are there for this thing to meet requirements? And there when I tell people if you take into account decimal places, an infinite number of answers, I have somebody laugh and say, "Infinite?" And I say, "Okay, 463." But the idea is there's variation in how you meet requirements. And so going back to the question "What about quality?" what I began to see is that most quality thinkers are thinking question one. I had been exposed in that same timeframe to Dr. Taguchi and his thinking is more about question two. And what got me really excited by Dr. Deming's work when I saw The New Economics is that I realized that his quality focus was also question two and that's what got me really, really curious. But the big thing was, holy cow, we've got different explanations of quality.
0:03:15.0 AS: And can I ask you a question about this? When you talk about how many ways are there for this to meet the requirements, are you saying how many methods are there to get there or how many outcomes are in the range of what is quality?
0:03:31.6 BB: What I'm saying is question one is, Does your car have gas? Yes or no.
0:03:38.2 AS: Yep. Yes it does.
0:03:39.3 BB: Question two is, How much gas is in the car? Is it a quarter of a tank, an eighth of a tank, a sixteenth of a tank, a full tank? So there's a lot of different answers. And that's what I mean the infinity is, there's a lot of degradations from empty to full and that's a much different question
What is quality? Does it mean always meeting specifications? What if the calculus for specifications means little and tells managers almost nothing about the process or its potential for improvement? Dr. Bill Bellows discusses the negative consequences of this kind of black-and-white thinking and what to do about it.
0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I am continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is: What is quality? Bill, take it away.
0:00:27.5 Bill Bellows: Thank you Andrew. That question brings me back literally 30 plus years. I was at home studying on leave from work. I got a bunch of books on quality. I bought every book on quality I could find at the Yale Bookstore. I started reading them. And I'm reading Phil Crosby, I'm reading Six Sigma Quality, I'm reading Genichi Taguchi, I'm reading Deming. And I, naively, am thinking that quality means the same to all of them. As a heat transfer engineer, in the world of engineering, heat transfer engineers have a common language, they use common terms, so I naively thought everyone in the world of quality has the same explanation of quality. And I'm looking through these books. I had met some seasoned experts in the field. I started calling them and saying... I remember talking one guy and I said, "I don't think these books are the same." And he laughed. He said, "Bill, you're onto something."
0:01:24.0 BB: Well, the traditional way of looking at quality in most organizations gets me to what I now refer to as question number one and that is, Does something meet requirements? Does the task meet requirements? Does the dimensions meet requirements? Does the product meet requirements? And, Andrew, there's only two answers to that question, yes or no. That's how most organizations look at quality. Boeing's advanced quality system... How do I know? I worked for a company that was owned by Boeing for nine years. Boeing's advanced quality system, which is no different than anyone else's quality system, is question one, Does is meet requirements? Yes or no.
0:02:08.5 AS: Is that like go/no-go?
0:02:11.4 BB: That's go/no-go. It's black and white thinking, Andrew. It meets requirements or it doesn't. Question two is, How many ways are there for this thing to meet requirements? And there when I tell people if you take into account decimal places, an infinite number of answers, I have somebody laugh and say, "Infinite?" And I say, "Okay, 463." But the idea is there's variation in how you meet requirements. And so going back to the question "What about quality?" what I began to see is that most quality thinkers are thinking question one. I had been exposed in that same timeframe to Dr. Taguchi and his thinking is more about question two. And what got me really excited by Dr. Deming's work when I saw The New Economics is that I realized that his quality focus was also question two and that's what got me really, really curious. But the big thing was, holy cow, we've got different explanations of quality.
0:03:15.0 AS: And can I ask you a question about this? When you talk about how many ways are there for this to meet the requirements, are you saying how many methods are there to get there or how many outcomes are in the range of what is quality?
0:03:31.6 BB: What I'm saying is question one is, Does your car have gas? Yes or no.
0:03:38.2 AS: Yep. Yes it does.
0:03:39.3 BB: Question two is, How much gas is in the car? Is it a quarter of a tank, an eighth of a tank, a sixteenth of a tank, a full tank? So there's a lot of different answers. And that's what I mean the infinity is, there's a lot of degradations from empty to full and that's a much different question
24 min