I recently picked up Claire’s Hughes Johnson’s book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. (I highly recommend it for anyone in a quality or business leadership role. I’m sure you’ll see more highlights from it in my own writing as I read it over the next few months.) Given we talk a lot about quality processes and systems here at Deconstrategy, her thoughts on process on page 107 I felt were important to share:
“Process has become something of a pariah in modern business environments. It’s known as the thing that slows people down and sucks their souls. […]. Bad processes cause bloat, but good processes help provide clarity, which leads to faster execution.”
She goes on further, saying:
“In environments without clear owners and decision-makers, something starts to happen that I call defensive – or, more bluntly, cover-your-ass – process. These types of processes tend to crop up when something has gone wrong and, instead of coming up with a clear owner to avoid the mistake in the future, someone creates a process.”
- Does your quality process suck out the souls of your team members?
- Does your quality program lead to faster execution? Can you measure it?
- How many steps in your quality program exist because something went wrong?
I posit that most quality processes are defensive processes, bloated with every incident – quality, safety, or otherwise – that went wrong at the company. This is our problem with inspections also – they are repositories for wrong; too much for any one person to keep track of.
In our high-risk industry, I would argue that we do need defensive processes, however we’ve gone too far in many cases. If we put the right people in the right positions and provide opportunities to exchange their ideas and learn from one another, this would alleviate the pressure to feel like we need to have super intense, defensive processes that cover everything that ever went wrong.
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