What does Total Quality Management mean? After a day of facilitators, slides, videos, and exercises, I certainly don't know. But then, as Korzybski points out, there is no guarantee that any particular term has a real referent.
The first exercise was to break into groups of five or six (there were about 25 victims on hand) and put down on a flip-chart board our `expectations' of the course - I always try to tell the truth, and said all I expected was to waste two days and be mildly annoyed. That was at the beginning - by the end of the day I was very nearly ill, and could not eat supper on the way home as I usually do.
Like the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, Total Quality Management is neither total (nothing is total in the sense used here, as an absolute), quality (not properly a adjective but a noun not qualifiable by `total'), nor management (but a con game). The motives for considering such concepts, of course, are laudable - to enable an organization to do whatever it is that it is supposed to do cheaper and faster and with less error. And the facilitators, who seem to really believe in this system, are uniformly polite and patient with the heathen. But I see little hope that this collection of logorrhetic retreads of well-worn ideas will be anything more than another psychobabble fad.
The presentation is something in the nature of a secular religion - that is, non-spiritual ideas presented with all the trappings of TV evangelism. The most notable aspect of this is that, unlike rational systems, it is admitted up front that this one will only work if you believe in it. Rational systems like physics or FORTRAN or a bowling ball dropped off the Leaning Tower of Pisa work just the same quite independently of anyone's belief or disbelief.
Another aspect of the presentation was amusing in a self-referential way - there was a video on the elements of paradigm theory. Now paradigm theory, like Robert Anton Wilson's reality tunnels (but not as much fun), explains how your expectations color your observations, so that it is easier to perceive data that fit whatever theory you have already developed than it is to see data that don't fit the theory. As if to demonstrate this, whenever I asked one of the facilitators a question that didn't have a TQM answer, they would continue to talk as if they hadn't heard me!
One question I asked, for example, was about the implications of the TQM idea that there is something wrong with resistance to new ideas. It is, in my opinion, this very resistance that separates the worthwhile ideas from the much larger number of useless suggestions. Another was about the notion (the second of the holy Five Essentials) that satisfaction of the `customer' (the customer, in TQM jargon, seems to be anyone who expects something from you) is more important than `self-gratification' (apparently what most of us would call "the satisfaction of a job well done" or "delight in a new discovery") - it is my impression that most of the major advances in human understanding and invention were driven more by the individual's delight in his efforts than by the desire to "satisfy a customer".
The course is mandatory only for supervisory personnel - but everyone is scheduled into it without consultation and the one engineer I know of that refused to go got a lot of grief from her branch head. Perhaps I should have refused, but although the thing is as great an offense to the rational mind as I expected, I had to see it for myself. If management insisted that I sacrifice a dove to Apollo before the next test or reduce the data by means of a Tarot deck, I suppose I would try it - once. It would be more fun than TQM and surely would be gotten through quicker!
The second day of the TQM course opened with a video of the Disney operation in Orlando. A poor example, in my opinion - the `customer' is asking have his children misled and bamboozled; and even worse, contrary to the promise that implementation of TQM at Langley would lead to less authoritarian management and greater employee autonomy, the Disney system seems to be almost totalitarian.
Next was a talk by Robert Swain of senior management, a very good speaker - but everything he said was common sense, with very little TQM jargon. His vision of management was not much different from what we seemed to be doing anyway! And it would not have taken up more than a few pages of the enormous TQM manual, which, we were told, cost $61 each. These were supplied by 3M, the last of four purveyors of this sort of psychobabble tried. I shudder to think how bad the first three must have been.
The more I look at this manual, the more offensive it seems. All I can see is that some of the common sense of Swain's talk was dressed up in an endless variety of useless verbiage and then illustrated with totally inappropriate examples about running a luxury hotel or a package delivery service. The verbiage, which consists of perfectly good English words arbitrarily jargonized into semantic rubble (with an occasional pointless acronym thrown in), is then iconized into mantras and passed out on credit-card-size plastic which we are apparently supposed to carry about like Tibetan prayer wheels. It is an abuse of language, and the all-initial-caps sentences are an abuse of typography.
Why didn't they just use the common sense they already had and fill out the manual with illustrative scenarios taken from real research-center operations? Why bring the psychobabble gurus into it at all?
The general concensus seems to be that I am a useful employee and always try to do whatever is asked as best I can. I have always received superior or better performance appraisals. And we often say at the wind-tunnel - not altogether in jest - "where else could we have so much fun and get paid for it". It never bothered me to tell my superior what I thought. I can't even recall ever having any difficulty with management except for one assistant branch head who though my attire was less than elegant. I told him that where some people are tone-deaf and some are color-blind, I am totally lacking in any sense of fashion and so always dress as simply as possible to avoid looking ridiculous. The same guy once told me to take my hands out of my pockets and I just looked at him. But while I admit I know nothing about fashion, I do know something about language. I was reading before kindergarden and have read good and bad, fiction and non-fiction, literary and technical. This TQM manual is so bad it makes me ill even to skim through it. And I know why it is bad: a minimum of content has been dressed up in psychobabble by the con men of the so-called `human potential movement' so that they could resell it. It has the footprints of Werner Erhard and his ilk all over it. If this is what is needed to sell improved performance to the TV generation, so be it - but I am too old to learn to babble this jargon. If my work is found to be less than satisfactory, well, I am eligible to retire year after next, though I had rather intended to stay at least until the end of the millenium.
I have gone on at some length trying to explain how it is that a system that seems to appeal to so many very smart people just gives me a severe case of mental indigestion. Is there really something there, and I can't see it? Or am I just allergic in some sense to the manner of presentation? I am apparently one of a very few people, for example, who is allergic to raw egg white, a condition I'm told is mysterious because eggwhite is among the simplest of proteins, and most allergies are caused by more complex compounds.
But the fact that all the best people believe some theory to be correct or some system of belief to be useful does not mean that it is so. This year is the 300th anniversary of the Salem Massachusetts witch panic, in the course of which 5 people were hanged, and one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead guilty or not guilty. All the best people in Salem believed in witchcraft, to the extent that they would torture and kill those who did not! Giles Corey refused to plead specifically because he did not believe that the word "witchcraft" had any real referent or that it was possible in any useful or harmful way to be a "witch". To put it in terms of paradigm theory, his paradigm about the nature of reality did not allow him to accept any of the evidence about spells and familiars and possession and pacts with the devil. My indigestion with TQM is probably caused by the pressure - we are scheduled into this course without consultation and then strongly urged to use the jargon in our everyday activities - to accept something in which I can see no value. Giles Corey is said to have died crying "More weight! More weight!" as the stones were put on him - I can only say that to me the arguments in favor of TQM have about as much weight as the arguments in favor of the existence of witchcraft. Or to put it in TQM jargon, this customer is not satisfied at all, though I must admit that his expectations have been met!
Cuyler Brooks, August 15, 1992