Published Airpower Journal - Winter 1996
LT COL JAMES W. SPENCER, EDITOR
COME ON, admit it. You and I have let our good friend Col Denny Drew, USAF, Retired, get us off the "quality" hook. Everyone remembers his column published in Air Force Times a while ago. It was beautiful. He managed to say what we had always wanted to say about the advent of quality in our professional lives. It was almost like he was there in the trenches with us. We allowed him to articulate all of the frustrations we experienced (read "four straight days of training," "I need metrics next week," "not walking the talk," etc.).
There are still Quality Air Force Assessments (QAFA) and inspectors who don’t exactly have the system figured out yet (Deming turns in his grave). There are people claiming they can reinvent government using quality. A blind man can see that quality has nothing to do with it. Leadership can be the most frustrating of all sometimes. Of course, my leaders are great (so much for the gratuitous effort at keeping my job—let’s cut to the chase).
Quality Air Force (QAF) sprang on the scene quickly and has hung around a while. Now it seems that almost as quickly as it was ushered in, QAF appears to be on the way out. "Quality is part of our culture now," our leaders tell us. "We don’t need a special program or budget line or separate function at headquarters." The old paradigms are broken. We have teams now—many teams; many, many teams. But before we launch out on our next benchmarking effort, perhaps we should stop and examine where we’ve been. That’s what I did recently when I signed up for an Executive Quality Leadership (EQL) course. And it wasn’t my first.
Our Professional Journals Division experienced a lot of growth last year and handled it rather successfully, due in part to a strategic plan we developed (OK, I developed) about two years ago. We’re sitting on a world-class process our Internet journal, Air Chronicles but none of us have the time to push for that standing among our peers. Would knowing that we’re "world-class" matter to you? With our next QAFA on the horizon, I thought I’d attend another EQL to pick up some planning tips, ideas for updating our original plan, and see if there were any pointers for the upcoming Air Education and Training Command (AETC) assessment. I walked into the classroom totally unsuspecting of what I’d find. There would be a modicum of pain. Five years had elapsed since my first EQL. So, even though I was an old dog, that was OK; these were old tricks. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
No longer was the word pronounced KOO-WAL-I-TEE as it had been five years earlier. Every time the word came out of the instructor’s mouth in that first EQL, I was scurrying for my dictionary, even at that tender age (now any age before 40). By this time, use of the word Quality was hardly necessary during the entire two-day course. You and I have always known that quality was simply an extension of good management practices and principles by other means. And now it seemed that our instructor, Lt Col George ("Trash") Harper, was finally articulating that very idea: you don’t need buzzwords, catchphrases, or names like Deming, Juran et al. attached to your efforts at making good management practices and principles work. That’s right; when the word was used, it was properly pronounced with three syllables or it wasn’t used at all. In all fairness, I have also heard it pronounced with only two syllables (KWUL-TEE) in some regions of our country.
The old "new uniform" took quite a beating from us all when it appeared. But if Air Force leadership was only trying to get us to think differently about our jobs, they accomplished that very well. After all, the moment you walked into your closet each morning, you viewed your job differently. QAF programs are supposed to work the same way. Like installing a new operating system on our computers, quality is supposed to help us think about our shops differently and hopefully more productively. Unfortunately, the QAF infrastructure generated so much bathwater that we couldn’t see the baby anymore. And my fear is that we’ve all given up on quality to the extent that we’ve forgotten the baby’s still out there where we’ve dumped everything else.
Are we really giving up the Baldrige criteria for our assessments? That’s one system that is so objective no one can argue with the results, and subjective inspections (my apologies again, Brother Deming) don’t have to happen. I’m reminded of the individual who reacted to an innovation by saying, "That’s such a good idea that we couldn’t kill it even if we wanted to." Seems now that many who have always wanted to do so (albeit secretly) are tossing everything associated with QAF—like the Baldrige system—onto the meat wagon.
Not long ago, a friend called to relate an organizational "condition" pervading his relatively new staff office. The organization had experienced early successes but now was stagnating in its work, reticent to venture out into new territory. He described an office falling prey to the perceptual anxiety of unrealized expectations. "Sounds to me like you need a little `leadership commitment and operating style that inspires trust, teamwork, and continuous improvement’," I responded, never using the three-syllable word. Don’t you think that was good advice? And if you do, you have just advocated the Quality Air Force credo as well. Forget the bathwater and go get that baby.
When Trash Harper was finished, I didn’t feel patronized or placated—something new for me after quality training. And why was everyone attending our two-day class buoyant and complimentary after the course was over? Wasn’t this supposed to be painful? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Our shop’s giving quality another look and we may discover that strategic quality planning is really just strategic planning. This time, we’re all going to have a part in developing the plan. I’m turning on an offsite. You’re invited. What we all need to realize is that we’re sitting on potential world-class processes and that there’s a baby out there who just needs a little time to grow. We’re pushing Air Chronicles as world-class. You can help us, or tell us what you think about that later.
Colonel Drew is still my good friend and cohort in professional publishing. But I reviewed his article again and promptly circular-filed it a few days ago. You should, too.
[ Back Issues | Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor ]