Michelle: So, recently you wrote a column for Quality about overcoming obstacles to quality culture. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired the idea for this column?

Daniel: There are a number of things. One practice is that a lot of times companies and organizations will do a SWOT analysis where they look at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and quite often the threats across organizations are constant. So, what I wanted to do is highlight what are the common things that can occur and what are the remedies. I'm a big fan of David Letterman, so I tried to do it in a top 10 list. So it's, those of you who remember his show, every show he had a top 10 list for various topics. I think that's how people can highlight things that they're trying to brainstorm or they're trying to determine.

So of the 10, when you rank them in that column, were they in order or was there one that was most commonly seen or anything you've seen like that? I don't think they're in order so much as chronologically, but more so, the first, the top ones, were kind of the simplest and should be done first. And I guess starting with irrelevance, quite often if whatever project we're doing, whatever initiative we have, it's very easy to get distracted and to or to overemphasize low priority items. So by the countermeasure to this is alignment and yeah the theme is not just to say what's wrong but as by having a countermeasure that could orient the reader to devote their energy to how do we address this? How do we solve it in the context of our own organization?

Having everyone aligned, make sure that the energies and the limited time you have are focused to the priorities and the solutions, and that you minimize the distractions of why you're there, because ultimately you're there to accomplish a particular purpose or to show progress. And if you have irrelevance, that will be a major obstacle to progress.

Michelle: For listeners, maybe we can just go through the list and give them a list. So the top one you mentioned was irrelevance. Then there's apathy, anxiety, disharmony, exclusion, inadequacy, stagnancy, redundancy, discontinuity and crises. So you just talked about irrelevance and obviously that's very important and then ending with crises at the end. You mention that you'd seen some of these personally? Can you give us an example of what you've experienced?

Daniel: These are drawn from my personal experience and yeah what you described are the states and so we'll go through the next one. Disregard toward apathy. So people are disregarding. When I make reference to the quality culture that's a very generic term but what that represents could be extends beyond the management system to anything that is involved with producing a product or service that are intended for customers or users to not only enjoy but to use safely and achieve their purpose and we're all part of a continuous cycle and if that something in that cycle or that chain is broken then that is very disruptive. Now something about apathy, apathy is a characterization of an organization where people don't believe in the goal or don't want to devote any of their time and attention toward the fulfillment of that goal. And then the evidence of that is that if you have regular checkpoints or people have expectations and they fall short and you get absenteeism. Absenteeism is a very big problem in North American companies. Another term is quiet quitting. So you have the apathy without the joint efforts of everyone, the chance of success is much lower. So the countermeasure to apathy is the engagement. I've felt this personally with projects that I've led and one of the simplest things is simply to bring food to the meeting. You know it draws people out of their routine and say well I'll come for the food and then stay for whatever it is now that can lead to a trap where the meat comes in expectation and an entitlement. If you have a meeting without food they're like hey we're the donuts or some people want healthier options. But at least it gets and it's especially good to get people from different departments, different functional areas who would not normally interact or engage with each other. So it's a very important to have that have that participation build that in.

Another way to engage people is to really establish the relevance. And that comes back to the first point of alignment. Quality and a quality culture should draw down from the company's vision, mission, key objectives, KPIs. I don't think I'm saying anything new, but the reason that that's so important is that when someone is doing something for the purpose of quality, they're also doing something for the greater good of the overall strategic purposes of the company. So doing quality, they have a vested interest in improving their quality culture. So establishing vested interest and engaging them respectfully will induce their involvement. I like the simple solution of food at the meetings. That seems like a really easy way, but then you're right, people are enthusiastic. Just bring enough for everyone.