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It was next suggested that “since what cannot be measured cannot be managed”
a programme of statistical process control should be implemented. A highly qualified
team from a relatively local, but very widely respected technical university was given
the task of teaching statistical process control to the manufacturing workforce of some
several thousand men and women of widely divergent educational attainment and
experience. The highly qualified team understood the mathematics, but failed to
understand the business. As a result the workers made no use of what was taught,
but it was clearly seen to be in place of “all that psychological nonsense” which was
now firmly set aside.

On the assumption that quality was still something of a Holy Grail to be sought,
the Crosbie organization were invited to produce a “sheep dip” programme to involve
all managers. The costs of approximately £1 million (DM3 million) were to be shared
between a British and a German division. It did little for the credibility of the team in
the eyes of delegates from the automotive world that the leader of those conducting
the workshops made it clear that he had last managed a failed motorcycle
manufacturer before being recruited into the world of TQM. (That manufacturer that is
fondly believed by the automotive industry to have responded to the Japanese
challenge by fixing an ashtray to a motorcycle fuel tank.) Those executives that I
interviewed who attended the workshops told me that they had learned that “quality
is a good thing and that they ought to be planning to do something about it”, but
they had been left uncertain as to what to do.

What they did was to seek guidance from the Deming Institute, not with the clear
information of what had gone before, but giving the impression that they were
starting with a clean sheet. The Deming people never stood a chance. Employees at
every level had by now developed what I call the “bus queue syndrome” – the belief
that this is merely the most recent of a never ending line of arrivals that can be safely
ignored if necessary because “there will be another along in a few minutes”. The
expensive implementation of BS 5750 (ISO 9000) met with a similar display of
indifference for the same reason.

Change had been piled on change with the effect that no change, no matter how
potentially useful, that could be traced back with the most flimsy reasoning to appear
to have a relationship to what had gone before stood a chance of effective
implementation. After all, as everybody knew, “there will be another one along in a
minute”.

The danger is that unless someone is asking the difficult questions training may be
piled on training until delegates take the view that “this does not have to be taken
seriously. There will be another sheep dip of new knowledge to go through very
soon.” Once people take that view training will have the same value to them as to the
junior supervisor who, when asked why he was attending a training programme
answered: “I think I’m being victimized”.

Ask yourself

Do we unwittingly suggest to our people that they can ignore this piece of
training because there will be another along in a minute that appears to
contradict this?

Stop wasting the training budget! 205