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ILLUSION AND THE DEATH OF QUALITY

Written by: James R. Lucas

Article Overview: Illusion--the belief that things are different than they really are--may be the biggest of all barriers to organizational success, high productivity, and ever-increasing levels of excellence. They may be the most devastating of all organizational enemies, but they seldom get addressed in a meaningful way. This article discusses how to identify, expose and shred illusions that keep your organization from flourishing.

ILLUSION AND THE DEATH OF QUALITY

"We encourage creativity." "We look at enough alternatives." "We involve the right people."

All sound like important pieces of the quality puzzle, don't they? Yet, in a recent Yankelovich survey, 41-49% of workers disagreed with these statements. This shows, at a minimum, that quality thinking still has a long way to go before it really permeates our organizations.

But perhaps even worse, only 21% of managers disagreed with the first two statements and 27% with the third. Does this show that managers know more than workers? Or does it indicate that there are two problems: first, organizations still have more quality programs than quality culture; and second, managers are out of touch with how disenfranchised from the process their workers really feel.

Illusion--the belief that things are different than they really are--may be the biggest of all barriers to organizational success, high productivity, and ever-increasing levels of excellence.

The Implications of Illusion

Most if not all organizations are, to one degree or another, reality-impaired. We say one thing and do another. We say "X" is important and then consistently reward "Y". We have problems everywhere but work hard to deny their existence. We tell ourselves that we have high quality but harbor haunting doubts that we are really as good as we can be.

Look at loyalty, for example. If loyalty is defined as "I'm committed to this organization through thick and thin, hell and high water," then few if any organizations have loyalty from (or to) their people. If loyalty includes a willingness on the part of people to highlight deficiencies and inconsistencies rather than challenge the organization to listen and make corrections, then loyalty is more fantasy than reality.

Perhaps it's not even reasonable to expect loyalty to organizations; it's tough enough to get it from loved ones. But we think loyalty is important, so we pretend our people feel it when they don't. In too many cases, what we define as loyalty is really its opposite. We say that people are "with us," real "team players," when the reality is that they are silent about their concerns because they don't want to rock the boat. Sometimes the most loyal thing people can do is disagree, even if they must be lone dissenters. They should be rewarded for this, but much more often they're shot. Quality dies with them.

How can workers produce at world-class levels if they are disenfranchised? Without feeling that their voices are heard, they become disinterested at best and cynical at worst. And much of what they need to say we need to hear. The only problems we can't solve are the ones we don't know about, where the reality of confusion, conflicting priorities, and unworthy goals is masked by the illusion of cooperation and the superficial desire for smooth sailing. Illusion--the denial of reality and the deferral of pain and change--will certainly limit us and likely dismantle us.

Identifying the Drivers of Fatal Illusions

Our organizations "buy into" illusions and deny reality for many of the same reasons we as individuals do so. Some of the biggest drivers:

ƒo Reality is often painful. We human beings don't like pain--we don't like to experience it, we don't like to live with it, we don't like to take the often-difficult steps to deal with it effectively and completely. It's easier to blame lower sales on disloyal customers or on the economy than to face the fact that our product's life cycle is on the wane. It's easier to attack diminishing productivity with a new incentive program than to look at the systemic, process, and procedural barriers that will continue to attack our productivity and make a mockery of our incentive program. Reality confronts us and makes us squirm. The more painful the reality, the bigger the illusion that is required to mask it.

ƒo Change is very uncomfortable. Reality requires us to make continuous changes. Change produces discomfort, stress, confusion, and fear. We can spend our efforts either converting these negatives into positive energies or avoiding them by building webs of illusion.

ƒo We have a vested interest in the status quo. What we're doing may not be helpful, but it's our "reality" and we like its familiarity. This "not invented here" resistance can be very powerful. It can be hard to love someone else's baby. And it's hard to admit the baby is ugly when it's your baby.

ƒo Many illusions are attractive. It's hard to resist ideas that tell us what we want to hear. I get nervous when everyone tells me it's a great idea. Nothing is that good, at least not without a lot of hard work and development. We should always be a little uncomfortable with what we're doing and where we're heading.

ƒo Prior experience can lead to assumption. If we've been burned by people who dropped the ball, we can operate on the principle that people are untrustworthy (some are) and that empowerment is foolish (it can be). This mindset can cause us to keep people out of participation in the quality culture. Or we can conclude that the quality program that was such a success in our last assignment can be repeated, and forget the reality that nothing fails like success in a rapidly-changing world. Prior experience is a guide, not an outline.

ƒo We believe that perception is reality. Perception is not reality. Reality is reality. The culturally-prevalent belief that there is no "reality," that reality is only what we think it to be, is deadly. Success only comes when our perceptions align with reality. The distance between perception and reality is, in fact, an indication of the organization's mental health (if the distance is small), mental illness (if the distance is great), or insanity (if there is no longer any correlation). It doesn't matter if we think we have high quality; it only matters if we actually have it.

These drivers cause illusions to live on, but we can negate their effect if we recognize them and identify their effects.

Identifying and Exposing Fatal Illusions

Illusions come in many forms. A few of the worst:

ƒo Strategic planning is the key to success. The pace of change, fickleness of customers, surprises from competitors, cultural shifts, and our inability to forecast accurately make strategic planning at best a support, advisory activity. We can't rely on it, but that doesn't stop us from trying. The only substitute for rational planning is passion (i.e., active and enthusiastic involvement of all our people), but passion makes us nervous and we can't . . . well, plan it. We need people who are able and willing to react effectively to the vast number of unexpected realities lurking just down the road.

ƒo Everyone knows what quality is. Simply asking our people at random, "What is quality?" would skewer this illusion, but we don't ask. Quality--providing our customers with ever-improving products and services, adding things they value while eliminating waste, using creativity and risk and forgiveness of mistakes to bring about continuous improvement--is the most talked about and least understood of organizational concepts. Most organizations illude about their level of quality, often missing entirely the reality that they are living in a zone of indifference (e.g., saying, "That's good enough for that customer").

ƒo Quality can be measured from a negative perspective. The essence of quality is that it's a positive outcome, but too often we measure it as the number of defects, errors, or customer complaints. It is a massive illusion to believe that we can focus on fumbles and still expect our people to make touchdowns.

ƒo All factors important to our success can be measured and summarized rationally (i.e., with numbers, charts, and graphs). Some of the factors most crucial to our success are actually nonrational, and can only be measured by dialogue, intuition, and instinct. And if the factor doesn't relate to our core issues, we're wasting our time measuring it regardless of how easy it is to measure or how impressive it looks on a chart.

ƒo Complexity and sophistication are symbolic of world-class operations. The reality is that impressive and costly systems are often the things that drive up costs, extend lead times, compound and disguise problems, and color everything with a gray haze of confusion.

ƒo Our top priorities are transparent. The illusion that our people understand and agree with our top priorities collides with some harsh reality: Our people often think our top priorities are to make a lot of money and to fight to the last drop of our blood; they often see that politics and political correctness are more important than truth or what the organization needs; and they often make staying out of trouble and documenting their innocence as their own top priorities.

ƒo We'll benchmark our way to world class. While benchmarking may be useful for getting good ideas, learning from others' mistakes, and avoiding the reinvention of the wheel, it's a disaster as a primary planning tool. Comparisons are insufficient because we can't mimic our way to greatness. By the time we copy the best, they've already moved on. Unless we have something unique to offer, we really have no mandate to exist. And we might not, if we don't benchbreak first and benchmark second.

ƒo Give people a chance and they'll work together. Maybe. And maybe they'll kill each other. Or us. Or the organization. Teamwork suggests synergy and brainstorming and one plus one equals three. But without a lot of work, it often delivers entropy and storms and one plus one equals one. Or a half.

ƒo People shouldn't need incentives to do the job right. One of the great illusions is that people should do it because they're happy to have a job. This denies the reality of human nature and millennia of human experience. It's still true that what gets measured gets done, and what gets rewarded gets done well. A related illusion is that "one size fits all" on incentives. We can forget that what motivates Bill may be a nothing to Janette. We need mass customization of incentives--overall programs that can be tailored to each employee.

The Need for Organization-Wide Illusion Shredding

Illusion is a monster. It deceives us and sets us up for failure. We can add to its effects as we buy in to the illusions of others and create some new ones of our own.

The only way to shred illusions is to get everyone involved in the process. We have to get our people involved for two reasons. First, they can see a lot of the baloney that we can't. And second, if we don't get them involved, their illusions will shred us.

Creating a Fruitful, Illusion-Free Environment

Several key elements are necessary to create an illusion-free environment. We must begin with an organization-wide commitment to truth. This commitment is reached by acknowledging the fact that facing the reality about our products, our processes, our customers, and the economy will always be less painful now than it will be sometime down the road. We can even turn reality-recognition into a competitive advantage as we align our core competencies, skill sets, and latent, untapped potentialities with new, emerging, and even unknown market and customer needs.

The commitment to pursue reality must be accompanied by an organization-wide understanding, discussed often, that there is always a better way. In essence, we're committing to a belief that everything can be improved.

Then we must design vehicles to expose our illusions and uncover the truth about our organization. Some of these vital reality-inducers are face-to-face meetings, anonymous surveys, meaningful exit interviews, and anonymous assessments of productivity or quality problems. After these vehicles are designed, we fiercely must fight the temptation to convert them into a rubber stamp for the status quo.

Training our people to always look for a better way will result in the making of mistakes. If we want to keep their creativity working for us (rather than against us or not at all), we must make an organization-wide commitment to honor, rather than crucify, the taking of risks and the making of errors. This attitude marks a major shift from the typical response of condemning mistakes, belittling failure, and rigidifying action through "one best way" policy and procedures manuals.

Finally, we must utilize broader-based hiring. We need to bring in people who have the personality and the experience to shake things up.

Lessons for Quality Professionals

Illusions may be the most devastating of all organizational enemies, but they seldom get addressed in a meaningful way. Here are some key points to remember if we really want to keep quality alive and kill illusions.

1. Perception is not reality. Let's agree that reality is reality and make an organizational commitment to truth.
2. Illusions are a continuous threat. Like new weeds that replace the old, illusions can sprout up in a moment. Only constant vigilance will keep them under control.
3. Many mistakes are avoidable. Most fires are self-inflicted because we didn't face the truth or take the necessary steps soon enough.
4. The lone dissent or fact may be the most important. Rather than denying or ignoring the voice or data that just won't fall in line, reality-based professionals focus on those thorns and pursue them relentlessly.
5. Pride can lead to disaster. Few points are as dangerous as when we think we've "arrived." Pride destroys our ability to detect our illusions and our will to correct them. Organizational humility is rare but vital to a thriving, self-adjusting enterprise.
In the long run, it isn't quality versus productivity.
It's quality versus illusion.

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Article Tags: belief that, creativity, deficiencies, doubts, existence, fantasy, hell and high water, high quality, illusion, inconsistencies, loyalty, organizational success, productivity, quality culture, quality programs, quality puzzle, willingness, yankelovich



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