The Illusion of Quality

We have to be careful because to many Paraducers the illusion of quality has exactly the same benefit as real quality, increased sales, but without the attending increase in costs.

Have you been here? The lights dim. The room gets quiet. The projector comes on. The music builds as artsy images fade in and out of each other in swirls of color and sound that must have been produced by the best in Hollywood. Then, the dialog:

"Leveraging enhanced virtual practicalities, MagnaMoneyBoom Corporation presents the pathway to realized solution space resourcing..."

Next stop: unconsciousness.

If you work for a company with more than ten people and a sales department, you have seen this presentation. It's about a new market opportunity, or a company split, or merger, or benefits program, or whatever. The company spent $20,000 and six months on this presentation, and the suits just loved it. Unfortunately, it contained no information you had not heard in the break room by the espresso machine. Or no information at all. So you slept.

This example is one of a million where the package wrapping is lovely, but the box is empty. And this is analogous to many situations we see in real life, where reality does not match the hype. For my first example, take television. There I go again.

Take books and presentations for example. The advantage of technology is that just about anyone can create a good looking presentation. The problem is that just about anyone can create a good looking presentation without substance. This lends false credibility to the result because it used to be that presentations for the best products looked the best, but that is not so any more. The example above is the easiest to grasp. With the purchase of Microsoft Powerpoint, a child can create a presentation rivaling the best New York ad agency output of the 1970's.

However, it seems we have forgotten the purpose of the presentation: to convey useful information. The Paraducers making these presentations apparently have too much time on their hands. They concentrate on the music and glitz without a care for the meat of what's being communicated. Perhaps they sense the lack of depth and compensate with animation.

Presentation is being substituted for substance. Producers must reject this vacant media.

A large cloud of smoke enhancing the illusion of quality is "wealth of features," loading the product with features that a customer wants, but which may not work well or be in harmony with the whole. Paraducers love this. In the 1980's I purchased an expensive engineering program from a large software vendor. They were the best on the PC at the time. About every six months there was an update, and some of the features we suggested made it into the production versions. However, not many of the bug fixes did. With each release we received a long list of new features, some of which did not work, crashed our machines and corrupted our files.

I had a customer years ago who would call me every time a customer called him. "Hank! Can we add a demystifier to the discombobulator?" Sure, I told him. "Then do it!" After ten years of this, the layers of discombobulators, demystifiers, preturboretrofitters, reverse osmotifiers, and other gadgets reached Rube Goldberg proportions. Every feature any customer had requested was in the product, but no one knew how to use the product as a whole. Is this quality? Not hardly. That company was sold and eventually shut down.

The moral is that wealth of features is not equivalent to quality. Quality is each feature working well and not overlapping the functional space of other features. Quality is the exercise of restraint so that unnecessary features are not added to a product.

A tragic side effect of the illusion of quality is the self delusion of quality, where a company cannot admit that it needs to improve. The delusion is usually propagated by a Paraducer CEO or other high-up who consistently tells management that the company is the best in the world, even though the market says otherwise. Some employees believe the lie, others closer to the customer do not, but no one dares utter the truth. Customers who point out the facts are spurned. Thus the delusion propagates on a wave of tacit fear.

Subjectively, not statistically, quality to me as a consumer involves numerous measures. If a company falls down in any one of these areas, this customer's perception of product quality suffers as a result:

• product performance
• service
• problem resolution
• courtesy
• responsiveness
• attention to detail
• fixing the product when flaws are found
• common sense
• understanding the product
• admitting failures and preventing recurrence
• answering the phone

Most companies start out strong in one or two areas but paddle hard to keep up in the others, denying the weakness. This is dangerous. Employees and customers look at a company's strengths first, and only find out about the weaknesses when there is a problem. This perpetuates the illusion of quality.

A huge illusion was exposed in the 2000 presidential election. Thank you Gore and Bush, and your attorneys. What a horror it was to learn that 19,000 ballots in Palm Beach County, Florida were mismarked or unreadable. What a horror until we learned that there were thousands of similarly useless ballots cast in the last election! And the one before.

You see, the illusion of quality extends to every corner of our society, from technology to politics. And you stylus disadvantaged voters thought that your vote counted! Now we find that the machine generated vote counts are typically in error by a few percent. That's many thousands of votes per election, perhaps millions nationwide.

I heard a news interview with a Florida county election official who stated that ten machine recounts of ballots would likely produce seven different totals. Let's say you measure the length of your kitchen ten times and you get seven different readings. What do you conclude? Something is terribly wrong with your kitchen or measurement gear! If we can measure our kitchen repeatably, why can't we design a voting system such that the vote count has the same repeatability?

Now we are all wondering whether the societal slackers who refuse to vote are actually correct: "Voting is a waste of time because my vote does not count." Beyond the actual accuracy of the counts (which matters only in close races), we are now learning that the outcome can be skewed with the proper application of legal elbow grease. The illusion of quality, fairness, equality, and honesty has been destroyed with respect to our electoral system and the Paraducer news media. Who says Bush didn't win the popular vote, since millions of ballots were not counted in other states? Why doesn't our system count all the countable votes? What kind of quality is that?

Regarding improperly cast votes, I used the punch card ballots for many years in another state. There is absolutely nothing wrong with them in the hands of a competent adult. Throughout the polling place, all I heard was the pop! pop! pop! of votes being cast. There is a great sense of patriotism and civic fulfillment when you run the stylus through the card and feel the rush of tactile feedback. But the designers of a reasonable voting system did not take into account the painful preponderance of stupidity on the part of thousands of voters who cannot follow simple instructions. That's no illusion, but it is a different problem.

What can you do to stop this plague? As a customer of business, when you detect empty quality promises, it is your responsibility to make the company pay for their mistakes. Hammer them with complaints and requests for help. Call their support lines. Write letters to the MBAs in sales. Let them know that the Emperor is quite naked, and that the pale cellulite is hanging badly. They won't listen unless their profit margin gets smaller.

As a Producer, you must fight the wind of illusory quality at your own company. When one of your products is manufactured incorrectly and shipped to a subsequently angry customer, you must take it personally and let management know your disgust. Even though you may be treated by management as a nameless, faceless droid, your name is on that product. When you hear support people in the break room talking of blowing off a certain customer, let them have it! Official quality systems do not prevent a support tech from feeding a load of horse hockey to a customer, but you can. When management races a product into production without proper testing, document the problems and put them in the hot seat, tactfully. You must fight the illusion of quality by penalizing the Paraducers and rewarding the Producers.