Axiom 7: Protect the Standard

I once got a very irritated phone call from the vice president responsible for operations on one of the programs I was working on. One of my inspectors was holding up the manufacturing line, and the vice president wanted to know what I was going to do about it.

The problem was, I wasn’t at that location. I was a couple of hours away, so there wasn’t much I could do over the phone. I got in the car and drove over there to see what was actually going on.

I knew the inspector involved, and that mattered. He wasn’t someone I had concerns about. In fact, he was one of my best inspectors. He knew his business, he was conscientious, and he was dedicated to doing the job right.

When I got there, I went out into the manufacturing area, found him, said hello, and asked how things were going. He immediately started telling me about the disagreement he was having with the manufacturing folks.

The issue involved a particular type of fastener installation. Manufacturing had completed the installation and presented it for inspection, but my inspector rejected it because there wasn’t a cotter pin installed. As far as he was concerned, the requirement was clear: that type of installation was supposed to have a cotter pin.

Manufacturing disagreed, and neither side was giving in. By the time the problem got to me, the disagreement had stopped work for about a day and a half.

Now, I’m a show-me type of guy.

I didn’t want to decide the issue based on who was the most certain or who was the most irritated. I didn’t want to automatically side with manufacturing because production was being held up, and I didn’t want to automatically side with my inspector because I knew he was good at his job.

I wanted to see the requirement.

So I asked him to go get the process specification and the engineering and show me how the requirement traced. He went and got both, and we started with the specification.

He was right. The specification clearly required the cotter pin. If that specification applied to the installation in front of us, there really wasn’t much left to argue about.

But there was still another question.

I asked him to show me where that specification was called out on the engineering for this particular installation.

He started looking through the engineering. Then he kept looking. Eventually, it became clear why he couldn’t find the reference.

It wasn’t there.

The engineer had specifically chosen not to require the cotter pin for that installation. Because of that, the process specification containing the cotter-pin requirement had not been invoked by the engineering.

That changed everything.

The specification was valid. The requirement in the specification was valid. My inspector’s knowledge of the normal installation was valid. But none of those things made that requirement applicable to the hardware sitting in front of us.

For that particular installation, the engineering was the controlling requirement. And when we went back and looked at what the engineering actually required, manufacturing had built it correctly.

My inspector had spent a day and a half holding up manufacturing while trying very hard to do exactly what we expected him to do: protect the product and make sure the work met the requirements.

The problem wasn’t that he didn’t care about the standard. The problem was that he was protecting the wrong one.

He had inspected that type of installation enough times that he knew what it was supposed to look like. The cotter pin had become part of his mental picture of a correct installation. He knew the specification, he knew the normal process, and he knew what he expected to see when manufacturing presented the work to him.

Experience had made him a very good inspector. In this case, experience had also created an assumption.

Once we traced the requirement all the way back to the engineering, the disagreement disappeared. There wasn’t a judgment call left to make. Manufacturing wasn’t asking us to waive a requirement or look the other way so they could keep the line moving. The installation met the requirement that actually governed the work.

It was a good learning experience for that inspector. He never had that kind of problem again.

It was also a lesson that stayed with me.

There are times when protecting a standard means being willing to stop the work. Pressure from a schedule, a customer, a manager, or even a vice president doesn’t make a requirement disappear. If the requirement says something has to be done a certain way, then that’s the standard we have to protect.

But protecting the standard also means doing the work to understand what the standard actually requires. Those two ideas have to live together.

It’s easy to confuse a standard with a habit, particularly when we’ve been doing something successfully for a long time. We know what normally works. We know what something is supposed to look like. Eventually, we can become so familiar with the answer that we stop checking the question.

That doesn’t happen only on manufacturing floors.

We carry mental specifications around with us every day. We develop ideas about how work should be done, what success should look like, what we’re capable of doing, and what has to happen before we can move forward. Some of those ideas come from experience, and experience is valuable.

But circumstances change. Sometimes the approach that worked for years no longer fits the situation in front of us. Sometimes a limitation appears that wasn’t there before. Sometimes the resources change. Sometimes the goal stays exactly the same while the way we reach it has to change completely.

That’s when it’s worth going back to the equivalent of the engineering and asking a simple question:

What is actually required here?

Not what did I do last time. Not what do I normally expect to see. Not what have I become accustomed to doing.

What does this situation actually require?

That distinction matters because protecting the standard doesn’t mean protecting every method we’ve ever used to meet it. Methods can change. Tools can change. Circumstances can change. Sometimes they have to.

The standard is what tells us what still matters when they do.

Axiom 7: Protect the Standard.

Before you defend the standard, make sure you know what the standard actually is.

Still Moving.