Identity, Habits, and the Anti-Entropy Architecture of Quality Systems

The natural drift in operational systems

Bio

Most quality professionals have experienced this moment. A process improvement initiative is completed. Procedures are updated, the team is trained, and for a period of time everything works exactly as intended. The process runs smoothly, and the problem appears to be solved. Then, gradually, small changes begin to appear.

An inspection step is skipped because production is behind schedule. A quick adjustment is made to keep the line moving. A deviation is contained rather than investigated because the issue seems manageable. None of these decisions appear significant on their own. Each one seems reasonable in the moment.

But over time a pattern begins to emerge. The system slowly drifts back to behave as it had before the improvement effort began. Quality professionals encounter this type of drift often enough that it can start to feel inevitable. From a systems perspective, it may be.

In physical systems, the tendency toward disorder is described as entropy. Systems naturally move toward states that require less energy to maintain. Maintaining structure requires continuous effort.

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Comments

Nice Analysis

I think this article sums the major causes of the problem well. Deming used to warn about some of this. In manual labor (e.g., repetitive production or assembly-line work), those habits become ingrained, and the work becomes stable. When you have workers whose performance is in statistical control, it's very difficult to re-train them on a new system; it mighr be better to move them to another job, switching in new people who can be trained and become statistically stable using the new method.

A prime example often used when discussing this problem is the QWERTY keyboard. The design was seen as a mechanism to slow typists down. Earlier, more ergonomic and efficient designs caused early typewriter keys to jam as the typists' speed increased. Now, however, many people have learned to use the QWERTY standard, and probably would face a very steep learning curve if they wanted to try a more efficient design.

Ford's "Quality is Job 1" might not be the best example, here...it was adopted in the late '70s as a PR attempt to try to show that they cared about Quality, so they could slow the market share erosion they faced at the time. Bill Cosby was the face of that PR push...I worked at Ford at the time, and remember the excitement when he came to shoot some commercials. However, nothing changed; Ford management at the time didn't know what Quality was, they didn't know what to change. The workers knew it.

The processes remained the same until Deming came to Ford in the early '80s and managers began to learn. What happened then was a complete paradigm shift...away from rework to prevention, from reliance on inspection to listening to the VOP, from inventory to lean.