These articles have a common tie (at least to me) so rather than post on each one I thought I would post them together. The first shows that our government culture has the potential to yank its head out of its ass long enough to realize that it really isn’t so bad standing up straight and not sniffing shit all day:
FAA says new ‘safety culture’ will stress solutions, not blame
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/14/travel/faa-nonpunitive-reporting/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7
Imagine, a safety group actually focused on safety rather than blame?! Shockingly, they are finding that if reporting errors (now called the less threatening ‘incident’) is not associated with punishment, people are more likely to own up to their mistakes. Indeed, by including the mistake-ee in the evaluation, they can often get a really good insight into why the event happened in the first place. Of course, it is subject to abuse (like anything in the human sphere), but there are plenty of laws that address people who deliberately put lives or assets in danger so I am confident that these changes will result in even greater safety in our airlines. This reminds me of some research on quality control in manufacturing I read years ago. It seems that the general way of managing manufacturing defects is to have a dedicated group of people fix any defective products. Amazingly, the identical defects kept coming up day after day. Finally someone came along and said, howzabout we ask the people responsible for the defects to fix them, then ask them for suggestions on how to keep the defects from happening in the first place. I always recall this particular instance used as an example: this company that made wiring harnesses kept having defective wires where the insulation had been nicked and in some cases stripped leading to all sorts of problems. This had been going on for years and years but once the people responsible for the defects started to fix them, one of the workers realized that what was happening was as they built the wiring harness the long wires were draped over their chairs, which happened to have very sharp metal edges. The simple fix? Put some tape along the edges of all the metal chairs and bingo! the problem went away. Stop making the (non criminal) source of defects adversarial and all the sudden you have the potential for a vastly superior product.
Speaking of the potential for superior product, given our current government is pretty close to being so defective it is impossible to imagine it getting worse, here are some recommendations to make our government less dysfunctional:
Three simple ways to make Congress work
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/15/opinion/avlon-fix-congress/index.html?hpt=hp_bn3
I try to be an optimist (despite my constant drone about apocalypse, yes I know it is hard to reconcile those two issues) and like to think that it is possible for our society to avoid catastrophic collapse. Were Congress able to pass such laws as mentioned in the above article I might finally be able to develop some faith that things can get better in the future. Until then, I think I am better served by being a pessimist, at least that way I can spend some time evaluating alternatives when/if our economy collapses.
Similarly to how the FAA got a brain and proposals are being put forward to inject intelligence into Congress (boy, those will have to be some huge needles!), this article discusses what is plausibly behind the defective culture that has grown up in our banking industry:
What’s really wrong with Goldman Sachs
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/15/opinion/lessig-goldman-sachs/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9
It is plausible to me that the ‘simple’ change of making a partnership organization into a publicly traded company can lead to dramatic cultural changes. Professional organizations are not supposed to be able to duck personal liability (why they created partnerships in the first place) and based on my study of business it resonates with me that such a simple (on the surface) change can lead to dramatic differences. When partners equally share liability two very substantial behaviors are highly prevalent: first, the individuals are less likely to take huge risks as they stand to personally lose and second, their peers are likely to very closely watch their behavior since their peers are also personally responsible (they all share equally in liability, meaning when one fucks up they all pay the price just the same). However, once you incorporate then all the sudden the personal liability issue goes right out the window and risk taking becomes consequence free. I am not sure it is possible in our current oligarchical climate to change any of this, but it is an interesting idea.
You’re really punching some of my buttons today. I’m not disagreeing, I’m just commenting, maybe adding some information. (You’re the fount, I’m just a squirt.)
The NTSB investigates and makes recommendations regarding safety issues. The FAA is not required to rule or regulate in response. Budgetary issues and lobbying efforts have the airline industry behind the curve, in terms of safety. It’s virtually a miracle that safety is so good, given the increase in traffic. Everyone is doing a fine job, given the parameters. (I still despise flying anywhere in the vicinity of NYC — it’s a large tragedy waiting to happen, flagged so far by only small tragedies.)
The NextGen system will be a large step forward, if it ever gets implemented. Even so, technology currently exists to simplify flying, increase traffic safely, and reduce fuel costs. It has existed for a decade. I’m talking about GPS navigation and Collision Avoidance systems.
No one wants to spend the money to install the equipment. The FAA hasn’t even set up GPS approaches to many airports – they continue to rely on VOR to get the craft to the ILS. I daresay that, percentage-wise, there are more modern navigation systems on private aircraft than on commercial airliners.
Hell, with the proper equipment an airliner can land itself in zero-visibility conditions. I wouldn’t want to rely on it, but it’s one hell of an aid in those situations where every possible alternative has been exhausted. (Fortunately, such bleak situations are very rare.)
I can also tell you stories about why some manufacturing defects are in no way the fault of the assemblers, yet an adversarial quality program is essential. But I’ll save that for another time.
I have been following the FAA upgrade saga for a number of years and have worked with a couple of people who have been involved in one form or another. The scale of the problem is pretty amazing and I believe the projected cost to upgrade the entire fleet (at least that part that flies in the US) and all the airports is on the order of several hundred billion. One way or another that is going to come out of our pockets since that is the way things are. With the airlines in such a death spiral with ticket prices it literally would take an act of Congress to force them to raise rates high enough to pay for it in a meaningful amount of time. The kicker, though, as I have heard it, is that the airlines have already been paying into a fund for decades for just such upgrades but somehow that fund has nothing but government IOUs in it (sort of like our social security system) and the airlines are understandably reluctant to be forced to up their rates until the govt. has produce the ‘missing’ money. Thus we are in a giant Mexican standoff.
Purt near every time I fly I vow it will be my last, the experience is so miserable. I had a real problem understanding why the experience was so consistently miserable (though I recall clearly that pre-9/11 things were no where near as bad and we used to fly every few months back then) until I read that the average passenger only flies once every 5 years or so, thus every time they had to make a decision on which airline to take the decision was exclusively on price. Even if they vowed never to fly on that particular airline again, the airlines all know they won’t be back for another 5 years and the airline might even be bankrupt by then, so why care?
I’d like to hear some stories about adversarial quality control, please do tell.
This one company I worked for invented the digital cassette recorder. We were well ahead of the competition. Our customers were people like HP, DEC, GE, Western Union, et.al.
The problem was that the original mechanical design was faulty. If it didn’t break in shipment, it crapped out within a couple weeks and came back in the door on warranty. There was absolutely no way the production peons could build it properly.
Quality Control was under the Director of Operations. His brief was to ship units and get accounts receivable. The costs to repair ate up the profits, but that didn’t count against him.
I asked for the QA hat, reporting directly to the president, and also asked to be allowed to redesign the mechanics. I didn’t know anything about either discipline, but I got the go-ahead, redesigned the unit, and ripped the inspection and test departments out from under the ops guy.
That established a REAL adversarial relationship at the managerial level. When it became possible to build the unit properly a lot of defects, simple misadjustments and such, still crept it. Our first shipment to HP of the new units was returned: 100% rejects, 400% defects. (HP was PICKY, but unbelievably supportive.)
It was absolutely necessary to crack down on the production line because the defects were due to simple schlocky procedures, just as the original problems had been due to schlocky design on the part of the ME.
You’re right about the fix, though. Inspectors found the problems, the assemblers had to fix them. Each assembler’s record was posted, so a competition developed. Piddly rewards were given: comp time, monthly best awards, stuff like that.
The adversarial relationship between QC and production fizzled out rather quickly and the units became a source of pride rather than an object of scorn.
The company was very profitable for a few years, but management was blind to the advance of technology. Just as we killed off paper tape, the invention of the floppy saw to our demise.
The ironic part is that the inventor of the floppy drive, which wasn’t IBM and Alan Shugart, came to us for funding and we turned him down. Heh.
Thanks!
I see the goal is what you were able to achieve, QC working with production cooperatively to find and fix the root of the problem rather than mindlessly fixing the same defects over and over again.