Quality, Back to the Start! Misunderstanding Quality (Part 1)

Where did your "quality journey" start? In this first episode of a new series on quality, Bill Bellows shares his "origin story," the evolution of his thinking, and why the Deming philosophy is unique.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey in the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is a new series called Misunderstanding Quality, and the topic for today is Quality Management, what century are we in? Bill, take it away.

0:00:35.7 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. [chuckle] All right.

0:00:39.5 AS: Exciting. I'm excited to hear what you've got going on in your mind about this Misunderstanding Quality.

0:00:45.6 BB: Well, first let me say that whether you're new to quality or looking for ideas on quality and quality management, quality improvement, quality management, the aim I have in mind for this podcast series is to improve your ability to manage quality through deepening your appreciation of the Deming philosophy and how to apply it. But specifically, a focus on quality, time after time, which is where most people heard about Deming, was through Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position. For example, the title of his first book. And relative to the title, what came to mind is an anecdote shared with me by two mentors that both spent a good deal of time with Dr. Deming. The first, Gipsie Ranney, who was a professor of statistics at University of Tennessee when she met Dr. Deming, went on to become a senior statistical consultant to GM and the first president of the Deming Institute, when Dr. Deming and his family, shortly before he died, formed a nonprofit called The Deming Institute. Gipsie and I used to speak literally every day, driving to work, driving home, we... "What's up, what's up?" And we always... It was so cool. I wish I had the recordings. Anyway, she once shared that she once asked Dr. Deming, "What do they learn in your seminars? What do attendees learn in your seminars?" To which she said Dr. Deming said, "I know what I said, I don't know what they heard."

[laughter]

0:02:26.0 BB: And along those lines, in the same timeframe, Bill Cooper who just turned 90, he and my wife share a birthday. Not the same year. Bill turned 90 last November and he was senior civilian at the US Navy's aircraft overhaul facility in San Diego, known as North Island. So as aircraft carriers are coming into San Diego, which is like the... I think they call it... It's like the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet. So as aircraft carriers are coming back, planes for which the repair work cannot be done on the carriers fly off to North Island. And Bill was in charge of, he said, some 5,000 civilians. And his peer on the military side, Phil Monroe was in charge of all the military people, and they got exposed to Dr. Deming's work in the early '80s, went off, left there, became Deming consultants. Anyway, Bill said he once asked Dr. Demings, says, "What percent of the attendees of your seminars walk away really understanding what you said?" And he said... Bill said Dr. Deming said, "A small percentage."

[laughter]

0:03:44.0 BB: And so what I had in mind in this series is... One is, what makes it hard to understand what Dr. Deming is talking about? And so for the listeners, what I'm hoping we can help you understand, what might be some invisible challenges that you're having in your organizations trying to explain this to others. So maybe you think your understanding is pretty good, but like Dr. Deming, maybe people are having a hard time understanding what you're saying. And I know what it's like to be in a room, presenting to people. And I had that same experience. I had one Rocketdyne executive... Rocketdyne was sold a few times. Every time it got sold, our Deming transformation efforts got set back a few years. So when the latest management team came in six, seven years ago, I met with one of the very top people, was explaining... Trying to explain to him for the first time what we had accomplished with some, I thought, absolutely amazing work by managing variation as a system. And he said something like, "So are people rejecting what you're saying?" And I said, "No, that's not it." He says, "So they're accepting what you're saying?" I said, "Well... " he said, "What's the problem?" I said, "What they accepted is not what I said." [laughter]

0:05:19.5 BB: I said, we're not in disagreement, but what they think they heard is... And that's when I found that I've experienced that. So anyway, so I wanted to get some background. So my first exposure to quality circles, and this is like... So I was living in this parallel universe, a heat transfer engineer working on rocket engines, and Quality comes into the organization. And unbeknownst to me, there's this quality movement going on, inspired by Dr. Deming, and we're on this wave. I had no idea. All I know is all of a sudden, we got Quality Circles, quality teams, every department...

0:06:03.8 AS: What year was that, roughly?

0:06:06.1 BB: 1984.

0:06:08.9 AS: Okay.

0:06:10.5 BB: Yeah. And I remember a book I was... I remember there was a pamphlet... You mentioned that. The company was AVCO, A-V-C-O, the Aviation Corporation, which is nearly as old as the Boeing Company. So it was one of the... So, Boeing gets into airplanes, the Wright Brothers get into airplanes, people are... Investors getting in, and AVCO, A-V-C-O, was formed by someone you likely heard of, Averill Harriman, major Wall Street guy at the time. And so anyway, I remember there being an AVCO book on quality circles. As you mentioned, I remember seeing that. And I remember just going along for the ride. I'm new to corporations, I'm just a subject matter expert in gas turbine heat transfer, and we're going to the... We got these things called quality circles, whatever. And I remember our department formed... Our department was a team, we had goals, and I remember going to these quality meetings, and let's say the goal would be that we read an article about heat transfer or something. I was just kind of fumbling with this thing called quality circles.

0:07:28.6 BB: But I remember, looking over the shoulder of the department secretary with a IBM Selectric typewriter, and this is before PCs, so we're using IBM 3270, dumb terminals. And I remember being over near the secretary, Kathy, and she's typing away the weekly activity reports, Friday morning kind of thing. And on a routine basis, I'd be over there and she'd be typing along. And then on the very last page, under the title, "Quality Circles," she would type in "Quality Circles are progressing as planned." [chuckle] 'Cause then these would be distributed to people in the department. So I'm watching her now create the next original. And it dawns on me, two things. One is, it's the very last topic in the meeting, in the weekly minutes, and two is it's the same damn thing every time, "Quality Circles are on plan." And I remember saying to her, "Why don't we just have that printed into the stationary?" [laughter]

0:08:39.5 BB: This is before I knew... For me, quality was just a seven-letter word. I don't know. So this is my exposure. And I remember thinking one of the quality goals we're thinking of in our department is... I think somebody even really brought this up, is we're gonna answer the phone by the second ring. That's gonna be our quality goal. And then, I remember we're negotiating for cleaning services. The floors were a mess. Tile floors, they were just a mess. And I remember in our department, we were lobbying to get better janitorial services, have the things cleaned more often. And next thing, we're negotiating with the VP of Engineering relative to, "Well, if your quality circles are on track, then I'll think about that." And it was just like... So it's some really ugly memories [chuckle] of this whole quality thing.

0:09:34.3 BB: But then I got into... I mentioned on the very first of our previous podcast, getting involved as a problem solving decision-making facilitator. I was hanging out with the HR training people, they had some... Their director of training, our director of training was a very astute guy and he was... I'm convinced, having met many people in that role, he knew what was going on. He knew a lot of the names in quality, not so... He knew of Deming's name, he knew of De Bono's name, Kepner-Tregoe, but he seemed to know his stuff. He's a fun guy to be with. And so, that's likely where I first heard Deming's name and that first book would've been Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, which is... It's almost impenetrable, but I can remember at some point looking at that.

0:10:29.7 BB: But anyway, but in the fall of '87, I started being assigned a taskforce as helping... 'cause now I'm a problem-solving facilitator. But I still don't know... I don't know what quality is. All I know is I get invited to help solve problems. And we were looking at a very bad wear problem, these gears wearing each other out, enormous visibility to the Pentagon, because the tank engines we were making, 120 a month, were being shipped to the tank plant. And then, these tanks with these engines were being sent... The majority of them, sent to Europe. And they were the frontline of defense in Western Europe. This is the Cold War, Andrew.

0:11:17.4 AS: Right.

0:11:19.2 BB: And so the problem that came up was that a couple of these tanks had these gears wear through each other within 50 hours. And I've never been on such a high visibility taskforce because the Generals concern was that every one of those tanks was likely to not operate. And that mi