The Value of Quality: Aligning Business and Quality Performance

Transcript

[00:01:02] Josh Santo: Our guest today is a metallurgical engineer turned quality leader with more than 15 years of experience across automotive, defense, and metal manufacturing industries. Now, like many in the field, he stumbled into quality pretty early in his career. During that time, he was exposed to and trained up on continuous improvement methodologies earning his black belt in Lean Six Sigma.

[00:01:24] Josh Santo: Throughout his career, he’s led major quality transformations across foundries and machine shops, including performance improvement plans That reduced rejections by 80%. Authored corporate quality standards in A PQP systems. Implemented Six Sigma projects with six figure savings and developed data-driven processes and training programs that improve both performance and culture.

[00:01:47] Josh Santo: Today he’s the quality manager at Wisconsin Metal Parts where he helps simplify quality systems, reduce non-value added work, and build sustainable improvement processes that align quality with business performance. 

[00:01:59] Josh Santo: Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

[00:02:02] Mike Fank: Thanks for having me, Joshua.

[00:02:04] Josh Santo: No, really glad that we can make it. I. came across Mike with the ASQ. So there was an ASQ conference in Denver. I saw that Mike was speaking, and I decided to reach out and see if Mike would share some of his lessons that he was sharing with ASQ with the audience here.

[00:02:19] Josh Santo: So Mike, really glad that you agreed to be a part of it. Now you are a quality manager. My first question for you is, what’s a day in the life like for you?

[00:02:30] Mike Fank: I, I love that question ’cause, No two days are the same. That’s part of what draws me to this profession. I dabble through many different areas and through the entire hierarchy, the entire length and width of an organization, my days can start with the customer complaint. Uh, we can dabble into continual improvement.

[00:02:49] Mike Fank: We can try improving how we hire people in the HR process, or maybe we have to go deal with maintenance today, because they’re having a PM issue and we need to do some data analysis for them. So I kind of go wherever the problems go, and that’s where I find myself working. and that’s part of what makes quality so dynamic and fun.

[00:03:09] Josh Santo: It sounds like one of the first things you said was that no two days are the same, and then you, you kind of ended it with it’s, it’s the fact that there’s some variety there. It’s always something we’ll say different. I don’t know if it’s always something new. What are your thoughts on that? is it the difference?

[00:03:23] Josh Santo: Is it the new.

[00:03:25] Mike Fank: It’s not always new. and right after you spend some time in quality, you realize that same problems keep recurring. You know, they, they, they morph a little, so it’s not exactly the same, but maybe we had, I don’t know, a failure to meet some type of customer requirement in one division of a company.

[00:03:42] Mike Fank: And, and guess what? Well, okay, the other company, the other side, has a very similar type issue and so we can. So it’s not always new. There’s definitely a lot of diversity to it. Like you said, it can be different but not new.

[00:03:54] Josh Santo: Yeah, I’m sure you can take some lessons learned from one situation, apply it to another, start to see similar patterns and ways of tackling those things. I like what you said, you go where the problem goes. Now, I am not a quality professional myself, no secret here, but I’m often surprised by how often quality seems to get involved with more than just what seems to be a pure quality scoped.

[00:04:20] Josh Santo: Situation. One of the examples you, you brought up was talking with HR on working with who we hire and the profile for that. What are your thoughts on on quality and quality scope? ’cause it sounds much bigger than me as someone who hasn’t been in that experience much bigger than I expected.

[00:04:37] Mike Fank: Yeah, so this is, without diving too much in the history, this, it. of the development over quality and over the years where we’ve started off with quality control, which was very much so what people think of as traditional quality. And that’s, I have a part and I need to make sure that this part is this big and this long. And, and that’s what it used to mean. and over the years, quality has definitely evolved and we’ve, we’ve understood that, you know, inspecting is not the best way to make sure the part is good. Maybe we should actually just make the part good to begin with. And then go there and we continue to develop, develop.

[00:05:11] Mike Fank: So that was more like quality assurance. and then as we continue, we continued to grow, we realized, well, hey, isn’t just about parts or widgets. It’s about, all of the processes that surround it too. so we, we have to make sure that. The person making our widgets knows what they’re doing. So that’s now a training process.

[00:05:28] Mike Fank: Okay. Well, quality applies to that because we wanna make sure that the training is quality. Right. So kind of the, I, I like, prefer the historic definition of it. it’s just quality means good. It’s very simplistic. It’s, it used to be of, Hey, you did a quality job there. and that just meant you did a good job. like that definition ’cause it’s simplistic and it sort of encapsulates everything. ’cause nobody wants to show up to work to do a bad job. so now it’s really just a how can I help you do a good job as easy as possible.

[00:06:00] Josh Santo: So quality. Yeah. Quality then is, is not a. Set of tools or a set of actions, it’s away from what I’m hearing from you.

[00:06:08] Mike Fank: Yeah, that’s, I’ve kind of turned it into, that’s my mantra. I. I like quality. The joke I have is I am quality it’s my, my belief system. 

[00:06:18] Josh Santo: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:18] Mike Fank: work well at home. I would avoid that or any listeners don’t, don’t do it at home.

[00:06:22] Josh Santo: Don’t do it at home. And why is that?

[00:06:26] Mike Fank: Uh, it turns out. So if you’re trying to improve recipes, or trying to

[00:06:30] Josh Santo: I.

[00:06:31] Mike Fank: your lifestyle at home, sometimes you can, you can butt heads with those dearest to you. So

[00:06:36] Josh Santo: Ah,

[00:06:36] Mike Fank: wife and I, she doesn’t want me critiquing and finding a better way to cook spaghetti. let’s just keep it, keep it simple.

[00:06:44] Josh Santo: yes. tale as old as time right there. That’s for sure. Well, let’s, let’s continue on this topic of quality. So I like, you know, breaking down your perspective on quality and I appreciate you kind of simplifying it, that with quality is good, quality is a way you are quality. I’d imagine we could extrapolate that a little bit further.

[00:07:04] Josh Santo: An ideal perspective on quality is we are quality ’cause we’re all responsible for quality. Just like we’re all responsible for safety. those are good thoughts. I’m curious. You’ve probably encountered a lot of perspectives and opinions on quality in your career. What is a common perspective or thought process that people tend to get wrong about quality in manufacturing?

[00:07:30] Mike Fank: Yeah, we touched on it a little bit too, is say the, the easy or the most likely thing that people get wrong is they kind of put quality in a box. Then We think of it from kind of a historic perspective where quality really is just compliance. If you think of it as only a compliance or only inspection, you’re missing a lot of the benefit of working on this.

[00:07:50] Mike Fank: And like you said, truly, truly it is, we are quality.  because ideally, a perfect world, if organization was run perfectly. no reason to improve and you don’t, you no longer need quality because you’re perfect now, that’s perfect perfection, and we’re not gonna get there.

[00:08:07] Mike Fank: So quality’s here to help us get one step closer and continue that, continue on that journey, right? It’s, it’s a journey to get better there constantly.  but like you said, going back to your question is what people get wrong about it is really that we put quality in a box and we try to, we try to limit what it can or cannot do. Comp work on compliance only, or treat it like those, check the box activities where it’s like, I, I just need to check this off so that I, I can get rid of, this, get this person off my back type of thing. So those, those limiting beliefs I mean, frankly, it’s a, it’s a limiting belief on the entire organization.

[00:08:39] Mike Fank: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:39] Josh Santo: So seeing it as a set of tools or a set of actions as opposed to kind of how you put it, as a way, as a, as a way of operating is. Detrimental to your approach to quality. that reminds me conversations I’ve had with, with folks around, implementing Lean and how there is a common misconception that if you do certain tasks right, like if you, if you perform a five s then you are lean.

[00:09:08] Josh Santo: And that’s kind of, it’s kind of the same thing that you’re describing here. It’s not a set of tools, it’s not a set of activities. There are tools and activities. That are extremely helpful for implementing a quality culture. But at the end of the day, if, if you’re just viewing it as a set of activities and not in the greater purpose of what quality is there to represent, then you’re missing out on the value add That can be from the quality team and the quality professionals.

[00:09:36] Mike Fank: absolutely. And I get a little weird in this one as I actually roll lean into quality. Because to me, a customer wants their, they want good stuff. They want it on time when they need it. which means you gotta, you gotta make it efficiently. so if, if that’s a purview of what the business needs, then that’s another function that we can improve.

[00:09:54] Mike Fank: And another, another part of quality, making it efficiently.

[00:09:59] Josh Santo: Continuous improvement being a critical part of quality. Well, I imagine it has to be. So we talked about, I. You know, ultimately solving problems, problems that are being experienced in the organization, and what is continuous improvement, if not identifying those opportunities for improve and then taking action to making that improvement.

[00:10:18] Josh Santo: Now, when we talked about this idea of people getting, uh, what they get wrong about quality, what’s your experience been? Is that quality professionals who are looking at it that way, or is it folks outside of quality?

[00:10:34] Mike Fank: I, I put blame on both sides of the aisle on this one. I see really two, there’s two main arguments and you’ll see that if you like search for quality problems, there’s a, a very perpetual fight between both quality and production and quality and leadership. ’cause quality always believes they don’t have enough resources or where I see the problems really is, and on the, on the quality side. We’ll start there. We’ll blame her. I like to blame myself first, but if we get down in the weeds where we work too much on the nitty gritty details, can lose the big picture. So if we don’t see, if we’re not acting on the big picture of what the business truly is caring about, or what the organization cares about, we are kind of intentionally making ourselves small. Which is problematic, right? ’cause then nobody’s gonna see us as important because we’re stuck in the weeds. If we, if we’re working on, we’re using complex or technical jargon, nobody understands what we’re talking about. And they’re like, I don’t know what that means. And then you also don’t get in there. if you stuck working on just, well I have to do this because ISO said so. Which that cringes, I cringe every time I hear that is, don’t, that is another one where you, you sort of have this external implied standard of, well I need to do this because, and you’re turning so from a quality point of view, you’re turning quality into a check the box activity by making those statements, right.

[00:11:51] Mike Fank: And so those are kind of the problems on the quality side. And from a leadership side, they’ll see quality is a cost, you know, Hey, I have to inspect parts while I gotta pay this guy to do this, and that’s not helping me. And it just becomes a burden on the organization. And then it’s really stuck again.

[00:12:06] Mike Fank: So leader leaders aren’t seeing it for what it can be. They see it for kind of the older historic mentality on it. and if, if you look through some of the history and some of the arguments there from Crosby, one of the quality gurus, his statement was, quality is free, right? ’cause the idea is making a good part right the first time doesn’t cost you anything. It’s when you screw up. When you don’t do quality, now you’re paying for it because that’s where inspection comes in. You’re inspecting because you can’t do it right the first time. That’s inspection’s, not a quality functions inspection is a fact that you can’t get it right. so that, so seeing quality as a cost is one from a leadership standpoint. Another one is short term thinking. from a leaders, they tend to focus really heavily. Some companies will focus on, on monthly or quarterly metrics. And if you’re really stuck in beating those, You don’t have that longer term perspective. And a lot of times quality improvements may take three to six, nine, you know, 12 months to really materialize some, some ROI on those, that’s both, that’s truly both sides of the aisle.

[00:13:07] Mike Fank: Quality has some improvements there. Leadership has some ideas there that we can get some, get them talking. You’ll be more successful. And the third thing I’d put on leadership too, is when. are succeeding without having a quality program. They’re like, well, we’re good enough. sort of this ego of, I’m good enough, why do I need to get better? and so I see this a lot in companies that have had reasonable success. They don’t necessarily understand, well, great, you made $50 million, had you been more efficient, that would’ve actually been 60. They’re happy with 50, and maybe that’s okay. But it’s an area where quality definitely has a, it gets a little shortchanged if it’s like we can, we can do better.

[00:13:49] Josh Santo: So opportunities on both sides to improve the understanding of quality. I like how you started with that. You started with, you know, what can I as someone in quality control first? And then it also is important to call out what is the typical situation of leadership, not necessarily having the right perspective or lens of.

[00:14:12] Josh Santo: What is the value of quality and how it can impact them. so just to recap some of the things that you called out. You, you talked about, quality, getting too deep into the nitty gritty with, technical jargon, stuff that’s only really gonna resonate with folks who are doing that day in and day out.

[00:14:28] Josh Santo: And so in that case, there might be a little bit of a, a translation. Issue, something lost in translation where you’re talking about something that’s important to quality, thus important to the broader organization, but there’s a, a bit of a delta and understanding there. And so what can the quality professional do to adapt that message to make sure it.

[00:14:49] Josh Santo: Resonates with leadership so that it gets the priority and the attention, that it deserves. You talked about, you gave a specific example of, a terrible thing to do is to say, well, this is what ISO requires, so that’s why we’re gonna do it. it sounds like that. Kind of goes, it’s against what you’re talking about of quality being the way it starts to turn it into, well, we have to check this box because we’re required to check this box.

[00:15:13] Josh Santo: And it’s kind of counter to the exact thing that you were describing of the way that we should look at quality. You also called out the e success despite the quality, right? While we’re making the parts, we’re making the money. People seem to be. Decently happy with it. So why would I prioritize any initiative like that?

[00:15:36] Josh Santo: It’s kind of tied back to what you were describing earlier of, hey, how do we translate what’s happening here to the broader, broader business terms? Those are all important things to call out. The more specific you get, the more you can can do things about that. You know, I heard a couple of times that that concept of translating, so talk to me about your experience of converting quality.

[00:15:59] Josh Santo: Speak into. Leadership speak.

[00:16:03] Mike Fank: Yeah, that makes So in quality, we’ll talk a lot about non-conformances or calibration or, you know, the ISO standard has a lot of unique. Things like monitoring and measuring equipment, or management review, these very specific terms in the ISO world that have, they have a meaning. but if you’re not in, you know, invested or you don’t have a deep knowledge of what does that ISO standard mean?

[00:16:27] Mike Fank: I mean, I’ll use this, this is my, the best example is the context of the organization. it was added in the 2015 edition of ISO 9,001. If you ask somebody, Hey, what the heck is your context of the organization? They’ll look at you and be like, huh. It’s very, it doesn’t mean a lot. So, right? That’s an easy one to translate.

[00:16:46] Mike Fank: ’cause what is that? What’s your mission, your vision, your values? And in a business standpoint, that’s easy. Everybody knows that. If I, I ask, Hey, what’s the mission of the vision? The business? You should know that. what are your values? what are your beliefs? What are you trying to accomplish? that’s iso just wrote it in iso speak. so. I mean, those are some examples, but it’s really important. And this is, personally, and I take a lot of, accountability in this, in this fashion, is that if, if leadership doesn’t understand quality, start with, start with quality first. What, what is it that we in the quality department can, can change? do we improve first? And then sure, later on down the road we can talk about leadership too and, and trying to get them on board. But really it’s, it’s. Hey, let’s, let’s speak their language. Well, how do we get quality integrated in the business? Kinda this point too is get that language barrier out of the way.

[00:17:40] Mike Fank: Have quality speak what the management team wants to hear.

[00:17:45] Josh Santo: I like how you put that if leadership doesn’t understand quality. Start with quality first. What I love about that is that you’re taking this extreme ownership approach. ’cause it can be very easy to say, no one gets it, so I can’t be successful in this role, as opposed to flipping the script of, well, what can you control?

[00:18:06] Josh Santo: Right? Maybe even performing your own root cause analysis. Okay? Leadership is not prioritizing this initiative. Okay? Why? Right? Why, why? Same. You know, these, these tools we talked about, maybe not appropriate for home, like you mentioned earlier, but can certainly be used in a variety of different ways beyond just solving, you know, some issues that you’re experiencing with the product or the process, et cetera, can be used for how do we work better as a team?

[00:18:34] Josh Santo: How do we communicate more efficiently? So I love that you. Touched on that idea of extreme ownership. What can we control? Why is it that they’re not prioritizing this? What can we do in order to influence that, change it, et cetera? Really focusing on control.

[00:18:49] Mike Fank: Yep.

[00:18:49] Josh Santo: And on the flip side, I would imagine that there needs to be reasonable expectation that leadership provides an environment in which these types of conversations can happen.

[00:19:01] Mike Fank: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean there, there are, and this kind of, this goes with any relationship, right? Is there, there’s certainly relationships or business relationships or companies where. You’re, you’re really, there’s, you control all of the aspects where you can and you’re just not getting somewhere.

[00:19:19] Mike Fank: and yeah, that’s, those happen, there’s certain companies where that exists and that’s where leadership really needs to. It’s on, it’s on them to have that environment. But then we’re not necessarily talking about a quality issue. We’re talking more of just a giant culture issue. ’cause that, that would be a company where leaders aren’t listening to their org, their employees, where, it’s very dictatorial, you know, do, as I say. that type of company. and, and if you’re in kind of one of those, you know, what you see is what you’re gonna get. If that’s kind of this hierarchy and mandate and dictation, that’s how the company’s gonna run based off of the leader you have there. and there’s a lot better ways run a company.

[00:20:01] Mike Fank: And, and I think if there’s a lot of good leadership books about this that talk a lot more about, hey, we wanna, wanna work with people, we want to have more collaborative styles. it’s not saying that you can’t have a transformative leader, but. I’m we’ll steal from Jim Collins is good to great, right?

[00:20:15] Mike Fank: When he talks about a level five leader in there, he’s not talking that this one person has all the answers. It’s a, this one person is comfortable with discomfort and being wrong, and they care more about finding the right answer than being right. and so, I mean, this way I can kind of highlight what a good company looks like is when you’re pursuing truth of what is the right thing for us to do next.

[00:20:40] Mike Fank: Not. My way, gonna be a lot more successful. So that’s, yeah. When you’ve got a company that’s not doing it, I can’t say you’ve got a quality problem. I think you’ve got a culture problem.

[00:20:52] Josh Santo: Hmm. And I think unfortunately that is very common. That’s a very common experience from folks that I, that I speak with. The idea of culture problem, the idea of. Maybe not having the best leaders in place and I don’t say that to critique the person that the leader is, rather to highlight that leadership is a skill one that frequently doesn’t get taught or trained.

[00:21:18] Josh Santo: In any sort of official capacity within an organization, a lot of times people get promoted to these positions without anything to support, you know, that transition and, and you leave a lot to the individual, either their natural abilities or, you know, the outside of work pursuits. but there’s, there’s a lot that can be done to effectively develop leaders.

[00:21:36] Josh Santo: So anytime you kind of run into this cultural problem, it could just as likely be. A lack of training, a lack of support, lack of mentorship that has led to those circumstances. But again, you can, I think kind of one of your broader points is like there’s only so much you can control. So you want as a quality professional to ask yourself, okay, if people aren’t getting it, if they’re not prioritizing it, what can we do?

[00:21:58] Josh Santo: But recognize there is going to be a limit to the factors that you can control. Um, yeah, I think that’s an important call out. I think it can also be kind of hard to. Discern between some of those things, between what they can control and what they can’t control, or to discern when, the organization is, is viewing quality as that check the box activity versus that, that kind of way of doing it.

[00:22:24] Josh Santo: In your experience, what are some of the, the signs that our listeners can look for to determine whether this misperception of quality exists within their organization? I.

[00:22:36] Mike Fank: Yeah, I mean, so if, if you have a, the perception problem, so that’s a solvable problem. most of the time, but that’s where you’re looking for things. Like if you have that, if you have the, the constant struggle between production quality, what production’s like, I need to get it done, and quality says slow down. that, that is kind of  this misperception. People aren’t understanding what quality’s meant to do. Quality is Meant to actually grease the wheels of production and make it better.  the other one, if quality doesn’t have any visibility in decision making, you know what? Quality may not be sitting in the C-suite.

[00:23:08] Mike Fank: You might not have a person there, but you should have some communication with their leaders Hey, I see we’re doing something. Why are we doing that? That’s a good thing. If you’re not getting that type of communication, that’s another type of, where you may not be seen as valuable. It’s like, oh, you just need to go take care of your stuff and don’t worry about what the actual business is doing.

[00:23:27] Mike Fank: Okay. that’s the problem.  and again, I take, like you said, the extreme ownership side of it is where there’s, there’s things you can do if ask those questions and try to put yourself in those scenarios. Um, and then the other, the other one that it kind of comes to mind too about misperceptions,  Is when we’re talking about reactive activities. So if everything your organization is doing is they’re just kind of charging forward, and the only time quality gets involved is when, uh, you know, the proverbial stuff hits the fan, then you know, that’s, that’s another area where it’s like, maybe quality isn’t quite seen as that proactive approach.

[00:24:02] Mike Fank: Maybe we need to kind of work on that. All of those are fixable and all of those are things that as long as your leadership is willing to listen and kind of have that. That dialogue, it’s all stuff that even on the quality side, we can, we can work on it.

[00:24:17] Josh Santo: This is a topic that comes up pretty frequently, the constant invite in between quality and production. I think that’s, that’s one that’s. I, you know, I had to ask some people when I first heard about that, like, well, what’s going on? ’cause you know, again, this perspective is like we’re all trying to accomplish the same thing you, we think.

[00:24:35] Josh Santo: Right. But, the way in which we try to accomplish that starts to differ. And to your point, that leads to some friction between the two, the, the two departments. But you mentioned that quality is there really to grease the wheel to enable production to do its job. So what’s going on with that misconception?

[00:24:53] Josh Santo: Why is there this infighting between the two groups?

[00:24:58] Mike Fank: I think it starts a lot with, Probably the best way to start this would be how production’s measured. So what are your, what are your reinforcing mechanisms in this, in the kind of the system? and I’ll we’ll throw this from, this is a quote from Deming, right? Your, your company, your system is perfectly designed to get the results you get today.

[00:25:15] Mike Fank: I. so it like, that’s again, right? Your, your company or system is perfectly designed to get exactly what you’re getting today. So production, if they are reinforced on, on-time delivery, production rate, or cycles per hour, and that’s their, that’s, that’s their metric. And maybe they get bonuses off that, and all of a sudden you get a guy coming in saying, Hey, stop, stop, stop.

[00:25:37] Mike Fank: You got bad parts. You need to stop. Well, that person now just took away their bonus for the month ’cause he told them to stop. Well, guess what? You’ve immediately got, had no headbutting Now, so this is where, and then, so this is where that really broad view of quality comes in, of we need to understand the entire system and say, Hey, well, okay, let’s look at those reinforcing mechanisms.

[00:25:58] Mike Fank: It’s, this isn’t a personality conflict. Now it’s truly a, I was giving you a bonus if you hit a number of cycles and, and quality. I told quality that they get a bonus if you, if they have a perfect quality score. I was like, I’ve intentionally. Optimize my system to cause you two to fight. so like, it’s almost something. It’s usually this, this system, this background stuff that gets that built in. if you look at more holistic metrics and, and you don’t necessarily have lopsided metrics, you’ll be, or even bonus structures, you’ll get a lot more collaborative approach.

[00:26:34] Josh Santo: I, I love that you’re like peeling that back to, to call out, you know, the why, well, why is production operating this way? Why is quality having to get involved and you’re, you’re peeling it back a lot of times. What is. The incentive of the two groups. What are you either rewarded with? What are you praised on?

[00:26:51] Josh Santo: What are you guided to do? What are you coached on doing? But really understanding that concept that you brought up, whatever’s happening is happening because the system that you’ve built has been designed to allow this to happen, whether that’s intentional or not, and again, that comes back to that idea of extreme ownership.

[00:27:10] Josh Santo: You’re getting the results that you deserve right now. So if you want different results. What needs to change.

[00:27:17] Mike Fank: Yep.

[00:27:18] Josh Santo: Yeah, I love that breakdown. Now, one of the things you also called out in, you know, taking a look and seeing if a misconception of quality exists within one’s own organization. One of the next things that you called out was, visibility within decision making or a lack of visibility, a lack of having maybe not necessarily a seat at the table, but understanding of what decisions are being made, why they’re being made, and having a, a voice or an advocate.

[00:27:44] Josh Santo: Raise what’s important to quality at those decision making, ventures? talk to us a little bit more about that situation. What’s going on there?

[00:27:54] Mike Fank: So, I mean, this one, can cause significant issues. I, I’d say the most common one is let’s, quality has some initiative and they wanna make some process better. Management just says, Hey, no, we’re not doing it. Well, if you just have that much information, you’re like, oh, well leadership doesn’t support quality.

[00:28:09] Mike Fank: And that’s an easy conclusion to draw. But if we just, like you said, I’m gonna use your wording, I like it. If we peel that back a little further, we say, okay, you know what? Maybe, right now the company has, let’s say, losing money in a certain division and you’re kind of in an emergency situation where. We can’t spend extra money. I don’t care how good the profitability or the ROI or whatever you’re gonna get out of it, because we just need to stop the bleeding right now. ’cause there’s just something bad going on. Well, okay. that’s, typically the type of information that’s reserved for the highest ups.

[00:28:41] Mike Fank: Right. They’re not gonna share all the companies and big problems, but, and, and maybe they can’t share the whole picture. But if there’s that conversation to try and resolve this one, right? If there’s that conversation of quality, say, Hey, I’ve got this great project. I’ve got a six month payback period.

[00:28:56] Mike Fank: This is gonna give you, you know, you’re gonna make a ridiculous amount of money. Let’s go ahead and do this. So quality’s done what they can, they’ve put it in business terms. They’re trying to speak the language of management, right? they’ve done that and management still comes back and says, no, let’s have that conversation.

[00:29:09] Mike Fank: Maybe we have, okay, what’s going on? Why can’t we do this right now? What’s in the way? how, when can we do this? Or how do we get to a place? I like this style of question too. How do we get to a place where this can be done? leaving it open-ended. then you start getting that dialogue and then maybe your manager says, Hey, we’ve got some difficult financial things right now.

[00:29:27] Mike Fank: Give us six months. Come back and pitch it again. You’ve got a much different approach now in this scenario. and it doesn’t have to be that dire. It could just be, Hey, the company is, you’re in division A, B, C. It’s solid, it’s stable. We’re not gonna invest a ton of capital in that business right now.

[00:29:44] Mike Fank: We want to go work over in, division B or whatever it is, because we wanna grow that area. We see that right now is the time that if we don’t invest, we’re gonna lose market share. We don’t have the ability. So there’s a ton of reasons. I mean, right. Business leaders are pretty darn intelligent individuals. they typically know what they’re doing. it’s just getting that dialogue back and forth. having quality up on that. Leadership level, if that’s your C-suite or whatever it looks like is a great idea. ’cause then they can filter that information back down. they can also have a voice on an understanding of, Hey, this is our key problem right now. in this division I see this, we wanna make a change. And they’ll have that voice right at the table. but that’s not always the case and it’s not always possible. So sometimes it’s gonna be just be that back and forth of I can’t do this because, or that type of thing.

[00:30:36] Josh Santo: There’s some elements of really just closing the loop on the topic. In that case, in your example, there may be some information that can’t be shared by leadership. Totally understood, but there is a way to at least communicate. I heard you, I see the value. I agree that that is valuable. The answer is not right now, and I can’t guarantee that we’ll do it anytime soon.

[00:31:00] Josh Santo: And on the flip side, from the quality professional, it’s, it’s digging into understand a little bit better. So you, it’s not that you’re not accepting. The response, it’s, you’re seeking to better understand the response. And I like how you put that. Well, how do we get to a place in which this can be a priority and make it a collaborative, collaborative situation?

[00:31:21] Josh Santo: ’cause that type of response is gonna solicit either, here’s what we can do, which is gonna be informational to you as the quality professional. it could help them express the company’s goals better as well. I also like, to pick up on some different types of phrases and keywords. I like the help me understand type of approach.

[00:31:41] Josh Santo: Well help me understand what’s, the priority right now so that I can make sure anything that I’m doing, anything that we’re proposing is in line with this particular topic.

[00:31:51] Mike Fank: I like that. And I, I, I hit a little heavy on, on leadership in that one too, is quality has what you just said there. That’s perfect. Because quality. It definitely has that responsibility where, help me understand what’s important to the company. ’cause they may not have that visibility. Um, they might be kind of stuck where they, they don’t see all of the departments or all the metrics or all the problems. and so they might be pitching of, Hey, I can fix one small little issue. But the broader company says, Hey, that’s really, that’s not our big issue right now. So yeah, help me understand, or your wording there. Help me see what’s, what’s a bigger problem. It’s a, it’s good ’cause it’s. That’s definitely the quality side where we need to except that.

[00:32:29] Mike Fank: The answer might be no sometimes, but then go exploring for where we have gaps. ’cause we’re not gonna see the, the organization perfectly. We’re not gonna see it the way that the business leaders or financial folks see it. And that’s important,  to go, go get that information. And quality can definitely go and seek out that information.

[00:32:47] Mike Fank: So they’re, there’s that way they’re targeting projects that are more valuable, gives you a better chance of succeeding.

[00:32:53] Josh Santo: Absolutely. And these are principles that are beyond just quality and beyond just manufacturing. Honestly, no matter what career that you’re in, this is another tale as all this time. Look at that. We’ve had two in the conversation today is, really taking that ownership, approaching it from a curious perspective, really embracing curiosity.

[00:33:14] Josh Santo: That idea of, okay, well, how can we. Work together to accomplish that or help me understand. Uh, because either way you’re inviting kind of a collaborative response. You’re not putting anyone on the defensive, you’re not making people justify their positions, which leads to that defensiveness, which never goes great.

[00:33:31] Josh Santo: So in general, like this is not just a quality and leadership conversation in manufacturing. This is principles to work by. At least I’m sure live by. But like we said, not everything. Not everything applies at home.

[00:34:01] riverside_rich_nave_raw-synced-video-cfr_shop_floor, top flo_0009: We’ve talked a lot about leadership and management, and the fact is that it can be hard to be a leader. It takes more time than management sometimes. So when you think about how to be an effective leader, it’s really important to stay focused on what’s important rather than what’s urgent. We all get sucked into this firefighting mode, but leaders have to stay above that and they have to think about what’s most important.

[00:34:28] riverside_rich_nave_raw-synced-video-cfr_shop_floor, top flo_0009: There’s an. Interesting tool called an Eisenhower Graph that you may wanna look up, which actually charts urgent versus important. And I think that as leaders, that can be your guide.

[00:34:39] Josh Santo: Okay. So we’re talking about, this misperception that exists in the organization and being able to look around and, and kind of look for some signs.

[00:34:46] Josh Santo: We’ve talked so far about production and quality butting heads. We talked about a lack of visibility into the decision making process. One of the last things that you called out is that, quality activities are reactive and inspection based. Talk to us a little bit more about that situation. I.

[00:35:05] Mike Fank: Yeah, I mean, they’re We’re talking really if, if quality is really just an inspection department. and I, I won’t, I won’t name names. I’ve seen companies like this where quality is truly like they do receiving inspection. If they approve parts, they’re called out to do final inspection. that pretty much is the entire quality department. that’s a pretty good sign that there’s some limits on quality, that type of thing. And then the only time that they start getting involved is, oh, no, I had a bad part. What do I do about it? Type of thing. those areas where if, if that’s kind of what the organization picture looks like, where quality is truly just inspection, And I’ll, I’ll call it out to, you’re kind of living in the 1950s. it’s time to move forward a few decades. ’cause even by the seventies or eighties, we were definitely starting to say, Hey, should be more than inspection. but that’s, you know, that and that it, this is the normal, I, I shouldn’t be too harsh because this is the normal journey of quality. And any new. So if you start a brand new company, if you ever started today, generally right? The business is working, everything’s going fine. All of a sudden you’re like, oh shoot, we’ve got bad stuff. I have to start inspecting. Well, okay, you’re doing the same thing. Your evolution as a company is just the same historic evolution that every company has gone through. you’re kind of at an advantage because if you do that here in 2025, you have a lot more tools and knowledge available to you than you did if you tried to do this in the 1980s. it was world back then. But the evolution of quality from, you know, quality inspection, I mean into quality assurance, into total quality management, to using tools.

[00:36:32] Mike Fank: I mean, these are, each company kind of walks that same journey on their own. It just takes some time to, to learn and grow 

[00:36:41] Josh Santo: Yeah, so you know if your quality is kind of an afterthought as opposed to. Really the way that value added partner within the organization. If you’re seen as what I hear a lot from quality professionals, if you’re seen as the police, right? Or this, this entity that’s there to be punitive, right? You’re not doing this right, you’re doing this wrong, then.

[00:37:06] Josh Santo: These are all signs that you might be experiencing a reactive based approach to quality. so just to recap, if you see a lot of infighting between production and quality, as an example, if you see that quality isn’t really being represented in the decision making, or at least has no visibility into what decisions are being made and why.

[00:37:27] Josh Santo: And if you see that quality is typically treated as an after the fact. Activity, you, your organization might be suffering from this misperception of the value that quality can bring. So if that’s the signs of what a, you know, maybe a more immature approach to quality looks like. what’s this?

[00:37:49] Josh Santo: What’s, what does good quality look like?

[00:37:53] Mike Fank: This is always fun. ’cause this is where we can dream, but Right. if we look, look at, and it’s, there’s a value in this. If we look at what perfection would be. us a nice target. It’s, it’s inspiring. So what I see is if. The production team. So they’re making parts and they’re owning the quality or the compliance of the part. so that means that they will predict, or they have machines or, or systems that predict and say, oh, I know this is gonna go outta tolerance. I need to stop. And they take that initiative and they’ll stop ahead of time. or if they detect a bad part, they stop. They contain it, they address the problem. And then quality, the quality department, they simply like, you’ll, you’ll hear about this. Oh yeah, we fixed that. We fixed that yesterday. Don’t worry about it. I mean that’s kind of ex that kinda gets me exciting, when you start to see production teams. And so not just fixing the simple problems, but if you just see them digging into the root cause of, oh, last month our scrap was, I know high, you know, 5% last month. but we dug into it and we did a Pareto analysis and found out that actually all of it was this part. So we, realized that was a tooling issue, right? They do their own root cause analysis. Like it’s exciting to see that. and. Production teams completely like this is, this is not something that is quality unique.

[00:39:05] Mike Fank: We don’t need to hold on to these tools and say, oh, only quality can do a root cause analysis. No, they can do it on their own. give ’em the tools, the tips and techniques, and let ’em go, and then just, just coach ’em along. So that’s really exciting to me. another one that I see that’s exciting is when quality really is at that strategic level. When you see quality put up there, quality has a unique vision because we’re sort of the problem solvers or the, the optimizers of the system. So if we’re, we may not have a, a ton to say per se, but if we hear, the company wants to go in this strategic direction, or this is going on, That that’s information quality can have and quality can kind of inform it too. Okay. If you’re gonna go after that, hey, this process has some issues, we need to, we need to address, let’s, I’ll take this side of the strategy. You work on selling it while I work on fixing and getting us ready to do it. so I mean, those are kind of exciting things. ’cause then if you have that strategic. Ty Quality can have these very strategic initiatives of, of, okay, I’m gonna get you guys ready, we’re gonna get ready to succeed here. and then help, help push that out there. the other one is, this is kind of exciting. I dabbled a little bit, or I talked on this a little bit, was, and production teams, if they start getting involved more in like the care of their equipment, we talked about nonconformance responses, but that’s where this just everyone. everyone is involved in quality. so it doesn’t become a department anymore. You really end up having like a, a department of continual improvement. then quality has truly been this place where it’s dis, it’s dispersed where my technicians or qua or or operators will look, ah, this gauge is outta calibration.

[00:40:49] Mike Fank: I need to, I can’t use it. I need to go do something else. and they, they really own their process and they own the. To make sure that it’s good. You know, it’s kind of exciting to kind of look at those kind of things.

[00:41:00] Josh Santo: Well, I like how you started with the ideal, right? Perfection is the ideal. Well, we live in reality, but always keeping in that mind of like, in a perfect world, here’s what that looks like, and that means that’s what good quality really looks like. Now we’re not getting there, but here’s some signs. Uh, in which that, that could indicate that you’re well on your way to getting as close to realistically possible.

[00:41:22] Josh Santo: I like that you talked about that ownership where quality really is the way that we do things. Right. Specifically, you, you brought up the idea of production owning quality, performing their own root cause analysis to understand why something happens the way that it did and what they can do in order to do something about that.

[00:41:38] Josh Santo: so leveraging these tools that are typically seen as quality specific tools. Embracing it on their own side because they see the value of performing that activity. And these, like we talked about before, the system has been put together to facilitate that and really make sure that that’s how people are working together.

[00:41:56] Josh Santo: You called out the strategic level. So quality being an active part of how we decide what we’re going to pursue, what we’re gonna prioritize, what’s the impact on quality, or how can quality help us take this to the next level And just really being that strategic partner within the. Broader organization and being someone that, Hey, this is not, these are not the police.

[00:42:18] Josh Santo: These are not people who are there to tell me, no, this is a partner that’s gonna help me achieve that ideal state. And then just being able to look around and see people actively applying those typical quality tools in the way that they were meant to be used. Really showing that the culture is quality at that point, and that’s, that’s what quality looks like.

[00:42:40] Mike Fank: I’m glad you hit on that word culture too. ’cause that’s a huge one. It’s when you start seeing those really engaged employees, might even come out and say, Hey, I was try, I was working on this part yesterday, and I realized there’s a better way of doing this. Like if you start seeing those, like those are. That’s an awesome place to be in as a

[00:42:55] Josh Santo: Absolutely. Yeah, I, I spoke with. Yeah, yeah. I spoke with A-A-C-E-O of a small manufacturing, company. They had two or three sites. so, you know, not a huge company, but by no means nothing to scoff at. And they had an initiative in which. The whole goal was to increase throughput 20% within five years.

[00:43:16] Josh Santo: And the issue that they were, they were at capacity, at that time. So they were gonna have to make a lot of changes. Long story short, the majority, they were able to accomplish that goal in less than five years. And the strategy that they took was approaching their employees saying, what do we do? You tell us.

[00:43:34] Josh Santo: And it, and it started with little ideas, right? At least. I shouldn’t say little. It was perceived as a little idea. The example that, this individual gave was somebody asking for a broom so that they could keep their area a little bit more clean. And it ended up turning into a series of, because we said yes to this, then he asked for this, we said yes to that.

[00:43:53] Josh Santo: Then he asked for this, and ultimately it led to some significant improvements. But it started with just the fact that I’m listening to you. I want to hear what you have to say. I’m gonna action that. I’m gonna follow up on that. And that developed a culture that. Not only had an impact on throughput, but it had an impact on hiring and retention as well.

[00:44:11] Josh Santo: So there’s, there’s power to that idea of culture like you’re calling out. So how can one start shifting that perception? If you look around and you see that you’re exhibiting the signs of a misperception of quality, what can one do to shift that to the more good state?

[00:44:30] Mike Fank: So, I mean, this is where quality really takes ownership of, of where we’re at, right? And that’s, let’s use our tools to figure out what’s going on. The first one is just take a look at our system, the whole company. What is we, what are we looking at? What processes do we have? What’s the, get a state get, get the kind of the current state, That looks like some type of process map or whatever that looks like, figure out what are the, what’s the culture that we’ve got today? What are the reward systems that we’ve got today? and we start there. that, that gives you a baseline. It says, okay, well you are here and then you can map out and say, I want to go wherever I want to go. so the first idea is here’s where we are. There’s where I wanna go, and we now have a little bit of a roadmap. What are the steps we can take? To make it visible and, and improvements. so the, the first suggestion I would give is, find the improvements that get you the most bang for your buck and that are the most visible. So the, okay, we’re working, doing our quality inspection stuff, and maybe that’s the type of company we’ve got today where all I do is inspection. But you know what, Hey, I just went to this awesome a SQ conference and I learned how to do this stuff. a plug for a SQ there. and so then look at it and say, okay, how do I apply something of that?

[00:45:39] Mike Fank: Where can I make an improvement that’s going to make the company better? And it may not be huge, right? You may not have, you know, access to the entire company’s, process that you’re gonna make, but maybe you can help one department, get a little bit better, and, and, and it’s gonna be visible to that department.

[00:45:54] Mike Fank: Maybe that’s a department of 10 people. So you’re gonna convert those people and get them on board. that helps you start migrating the thing, the, the process from one place to the next. The other tip, and this is, this is one that I like, And I might get, I, hopefully I don’t get in too much trouble sharing.

[00:46:10] Mike Fank: This is, I, I’m kind of an opportunistic quality professional. and by that I mean I will much as a parent, does allow failures to occur. well, like I said, hopefully this doesn’t get me too much trouble, but when you allow the failure to occur, everyone’s eyes are now open because something went wrong. And so as a quality professional, that’s an opportunity to make things better. and you can. Coach the team through that. And so that gives you the ability to say, okay, how can I make this better and how can I prevent it from recurring in the future? And all of a sudden now you’ve, you’ve gone definitely as a, as a quality professional, you’ve gone from aha compliance only to, if you can coach or work through that problem, subtype of, of problem solving methodology, whatever one you like make it better and permanently make it better, then you’ve definitely added value to the organization at a much more strategic level than simply compliance based. and the sort of the secret through that is using a lot of questions. You know, Hey, what, what went wrong? How did that go wrong? Don’t, if you preach at people, if you tell them You should do this, you should do that, you’re probably gonna get stuck back in your box as a quality professional. ’cause nobody wants to be told, oh yeah, you should have done it this way.

[00:47:20] Mike Fank: You should, it just gets everyone upset with you. But if you ask, oh, hey, how should we do that? Or, what’s a better way of those? How and what questions really focus and draw people into the solution. It’ll be much more their idea and it’s gonna be much more collaborative. And let’s be fair, it’s gonna be a better solution anyway, because you probably didn’t have the, the best answer to begin with. I know quality people, we, we’ve like to think we’re really smart, but we don’t have all the answers. Yeah.

[00:47:48] Josh Santo: Well, it goes back to your point about like you’re trying to be right or are you trying to get it right? Right. yeah. I, I think that’s a great set of actionable. Steps that one can take. You started with baselining, what are we doing today? And then comparing that to where do we want to go, and then what are the gaps that exist between those and what can we do about those gaps?

[00:48:08] Josh Santo: You got a little bit into, those gaps, the things that you start to tackle. Make sure that they’re visible improvements. Make sure that either people can see it and they appreciate it, or that they actually have a pretty significant impact because you’re really trying to build some.

[00:48:23] Josh Santo: Early wins. You’re trying to establish some credibility in this initiative and you also have to do a lot of internal selling and internal marketing. And the more tangible, here’s the problem, here’s the solution, here’s the impact of what we did. It’s gonna make it easier to get that buy-in. And then, uh, I love that you are encouraging failures and it’s not so much that you’re saying, Hey, go and mess up.

[00:48:48] Josh Santo: You’re not saying go and, you know, make a bad product or you know, deviate from process. You’re not saying that. You’re saying you have to make it safe for people to fail. Right. Meaning they know that failures are a part of just learning. And ultimately when you’re relying on people to perform these actions, there is going to be a period in which people have to be trained, they have to learn, et cetera.

[00:49:13] Josh Santo: Now that makes me think of another question. ’cause a topic that comes up. With regard to failures is the idea of, uh, pookee, right? Mistake proof. So you’ve got a situation where you’re encouraging to fail, you’re making it safe to fail, but you’ve got, you know, kind of a counter philosophy of like, it should be impossible to fail.

[00:49:32] Josh Santo: How do you balance those two ideas?

[00:49:35] Mike Fank: Well, as with most leadership quality is this paradoxical state. Right. and I you, if you, if you Google like paradoxes of leadership, you’ll get a, a, a bunch of ’em. because we, we constantly have to balance these things, right. If you are in a, an area where, I don’t know, let’s, let’s pick something highly critical, some med device company. And if you get it wrong, somebody dies. Okay. that’s not, let that fail. And let’s, let’s clarify this too, right? That’s not an opportunity where I would encourage you to, to allow a failure to occur. You need to stop that at all costs, right? Because that’s just, outcome is so risky. You don’t want it to happen. The failures that you can allow are where it’s, it’s. Not going to, to completely like bankrupt a company or cause a, a, a loss of life or loss of limb, like those types of things. But if we said, I don’t know, let’s come up with a, a process owner says, Hey, I want to try rearranging my process flow. I mean, this is a pretty low stakes thing. He thinks he’s gonna get it better. You’re looking at it from the outside saying, that’s never gonna work. You’re putting that piece of equipment on the opposite side of this, and you use them constantly and I can help you do it better, but they’re stubborn and they don’t wanna listen to you.

[00:50:55] Mike Fank: It doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense to then go beat your head and say, Hey, you need to do it my way. I’m gonna help you do it better. ’cause best case scenario in that scenario, in if, if you’re gonna force them into compliance, is you’re gonna just get, malicious obedience. They’ll do it, but they’re not gonna be happy about it. So those are the, those areas where it’s a little lower stakes. same thing with like audits. If you have a lower stake audit where it’s not, you know, you’re not gonna lose your cert or you’re not gonna lose the ability to, to produce parts or whatever it’s you’re doing, those are areas where it’s okay to fail. and that’s building that type of muscle and allowing some failure is a really good thing. But. It’s always risk based. and that, you know, that term fortunately, is coming out of the ISIS standard, but we, I wanna analyze what the risk really looks like and don’t. If it’s, if it’s a high risk area yeah.

[00:51:46] Mike Fank: You’re gonna wanna safeguard and poy oak and, and protect all of that stuff as much as possible. Yep.

[00:51:52] Josh Santo: You got it. I, you know, still keeping the end in mind. What is the risk associated with this particular failure? And, you know, what comes that balance of, of like, I, I want you to understand the why. I want you to learn. But there are some elements where you just have to do it because that is the way to do it.

[00:52:10] Josh Santo: like Gary said, there’s a lot of principles, but these principles can lead to some paradox, paradoxical situations from time to time. So we talked about, you know, uh, what you can do. You can baseline the current state, future state. You can make sure to make some visible improvements. You can, uh, make it teachable, both by encouraging acceptable.

[00:52:32] Josh Santo: Failures and also through helping them reflect, learn, think through using a Socratic method of, well, how could you have done this differently as opposed to telling them what they did wrong or what they could do. Ultimately engaging them and, and helping them develop as, as an individual contributor to the team, you know, out of these improvements that can be made, what would you say quality practitioners should prioritize first?

[00:52:56] Mike Fank: Yeah. I like this ’cause I, I work with, some small businesses and I, and, and it’s important to get, if you get, you wanna get the quality fundamentals done first. and the, the first one I would give you is, is sort of a personal mantra, is make quality easy. I. Then compliance becomes second nature. it said another way, if you make quality, easy, compliance sort of happens by default, and that’s important.

[00:53:20] Mike Fank: It’s sort of this just baseline idea. if I was, if I were to braille a brand new system, I had nothing. I would start with, or two things I would only start here is I would, one, I’d wanna make sure that my continuous improvement system works and, and that. have some type of methodology, whatever we want to use.

[00:53:38] Mike Fank: If it’s PDCA, if it’s eight Ds or Six Sigma, whatever it is you like, have a system, know it really well, teach it to people and get it working really, really well. and the second thing I would have is some type of business review process, which almost if, if you’re a business and you’re in business and you want to stay in business, you probably already have that ’cause. Do you wanna make sure you’re doing better? So that having quality in that business review process, identifying what are key issues, what, what can we do to fix them, and then employ our CI system, our continual improvement system, make it better, and then we go back and review. And these two, it won’t get you to, you won’t be certified, you won’t get there, but you’ll get the basics down. Then if you wanna develop from there, it’s really easy to, ’cause if all of a sudden you said, Hey, this process is failing, and of a sudden you do root cause and you’re like, Hey, you got no, you don’t have any work instructions. Well, okay, guess what? Now? Now the next thing we want to add is a document management system. So we’re gonna build that next because we’ve realized it was a problem and the business leaders saw as a problem. Our CI system identified it. So we make it, and then down the road, another one fails. And you say, oh, okay, well we have this document system, but nobody knows what to do. Well, okay, we have no training system.

[00:54:50] Mike Fank: Nobody knows what the documents say. Well, maybe we build a training system next. So you can just, you just iterate on these two, review what happened, make it better, review what happened, make it better, and you will slowly. just build your, build out a very robust quality system just on those two principles alone.

[00:55:05] Josh Santo: I like how you started that first with, if you make quality easy, then compliance is the results. At that point, that idea of making compliant, making quality easy. Really making it simple. Making it easy. That’s, that’s, I think, such a powerful concept, but such a difficult, I mean, making something easy is difficult, right?

[00:55:29] Josh Santo: It’s very easy to make something complex, but it’s very hard to make something easy. Another paradox of sorts, if you will. How? How can you make quality easy?

[00:55:40] Mike Fank: Yeah. That’s, I’m, I’m glad you’re tying this too. ’cause this was the, this was the nature of the a SQ talk I gave was, we want to make quality, we wanna reinforce what the right behaviors look like. so we want to do this, this simplistic stuff of, of, you know, putting the right tools in front of people.

[00:55:59] Mike Fank: You make these environment, of the environment around them sort of self-reinforcing. that’s one you teach the behaviors that you want to do. and you have these, these. Behaviors and, reminders, that’s the word I’m looking for, we make it so that the right answer is kind of right in their face.

[00:56:17] Mike Fank: So, I dunno, let an example here might be somebody keeps adjusting this thing incorrectly ’cause they like how the machine feels when they do it that way. Let’s take those tools or whatever it is that they’re causing to do it, and why don’t we put it the other side of the shop just a little further away. or put it just even, you know, 10 steps away so that it’s harder to get to. simple ideas too is checklists. I know this, a lot of people get really passionate about this, but if you build, really significant checklists and, and by that, so, you can Google this afterwards. It’s this safe surgery checklist. that was the part of a result of a book called the Checklist Manifesto. where we have these, we, we do, we build these reminders in pro in the process where it’s, it’s kind of this, here’s step one to step two, step three. It’s not. Super detailed. It’s just the high level of, hey, you have to absolutely hit these key points and that’s gonna keep your patient safe.

[00:57:11] Mike Fank: If you’re a surgeon, or if you’re flying an airplane, hey, this is how you check your, your take off or land and these are the key steps you need to hit. It’s not all of your training, but it’s reminders of you better do these things because things are gonna go wrong. So these environmental cues, are really key that, that building this. over time. You know, it’s not instantaneous, but you just build this over time, and you can make it so that the right answer is kind of the default answer. So, I’m running my machine or flying a plane, or I’m doing whatever I’m doing. It’s just the, the default answer is just easy and that must be the right answer.

[00:57:46] Mike Fank: And that’s a lot of words, to try and explain it. It, it’s a fun topic.

[00:57:52] Josh Santo: I think it came through just fine. The right answer being right in front of your face, right, the right answer could be an action to take. I think there’s ways of taking this even, even further of, of just having the right information the moment that you need it. Sometimes the action that you need to take is really just a decision that needs to be made and that that’s kind of like, you know, kind of taking it from the.

[00:58:15] Josh Santo: From the shop floor, taking it to like the top floor. Are you making the right decisions? Well, you can make the right decisions if you have the right information right there in front of you, or the things that you need to consider or factor in. Just making it easy to remember what needs to be done to make sure this thing gets done right, and that is a way of making, making quality easier for folks.

[00:58:36] Mike Fank: And I beat up production pretty heavy. sorry for all of the production people. I, we, I love my production team actually. I work really well with them. I enjoy it, but it a probably a higher level example would be a little more interesting. I. Is we, you, where this checklist idea can be used is, in a business review process. We could also have a checklist

[00:58:56] Josh Santo: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:56] Mike Fank: and that would be, Hey, these are the 10 items we must hit in this business review process. So we, this, this idea works actually at every level. we wanna make things as readily available as possible so that the right answer is always the easy answer. kind of build the environment.

[00:59:10] Mike Fank: We build that up so that everyone has this, this accountability. To make sure that we’re getting the right answer. and, it all, it eventually it all rolls together. and it just becomes this giant circle. ’cause then it builds leads into your culture. And if your culture is doing the right things and you’re asking the right questions, you just become this self-reinforcing wheel. And you’re just gonna keep, you’ll keep doing it because you’ve just built this system up that’s gonna work it. And guess what? then that system will be perfectly designed to propel you into the future.

[00:59:38] Josh Santo: And you’ll be getting the results by design, right? Just back to the, to the same, same comment before.