Building a culture of quality within your organisation is not a solo endeavour; it requires a collective commitment from every individual involved. Each person must demonstrate their own technical excellence, leadership, and engineering capability. When individuals embody these qualities, they set a standard that others are likely to emulate. The more people in your organisation adopt this mindset, the quicker it becomes the norm.
Reflecting on this, I often think about the Boeing story, which serves as a cautionary tale. For years, Boeing was synonymous with engineering excellence and technical leadership. Their mantra, “if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going,” epitomised their commitment to quality. They were the gold standard in the aviation industry, known for their superior build quality and safety.
However, everything changed when Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas. The shift in leadership brought a new focus—revenue extraction rather than value creation. Over the next 15 to 20 years, this change decimated Boeing’s culture of quality. Employees began to express concerns about safety, with some even joking about having a “death wish” when flying on their planes. This is not the sentiment you want from the engineers responsible for building life-critical products.
So, why does this matter in the context of software development? Much of the software we use has a significant impact on our quality of life and the world around us. We want these products to be developed within a culture that prioritises quality, integrity, and value—not one that cuts corners for the sake of profit.
To create exceptional products, we must focus on what truly matters. Agile frameworks are often touted as the solution to our problems, but they can also become part of the issue. These frameworks are merely tools; it’s the culture within our organisation that determines how effectively we use them. A hammer can drive a nail or be used to cause harm—it’s all about how we choose to wield it.
Consider the Volkswagen scandal, where an engineer manipulated code to produce false emissions results. This decision stemmed from a lack of a quality-driven culture. If your organisation fosters a culture of quality, such unethical choices are far less likely to occur.
Our focus should be on cultivating a culture of engineering excellence and technical leadership. This involves building a deep understanding of the principles that underpin our work and applying empirical learnings to our unique contexts. Every organisation is different, and with the right knowledge, we can make informed decisions that lead to better outcomes.
This is where Naked Agility can assist you and your organisation. While we cannot do the work for you, we can guide you in understanding the theories and practices that apply to your situation. Together, we can identify what constitutes good engineering decisions versus poor ones.
In conclusion, let’s commit to building a culture of quality and technical excellence within our organisations. By doing so, we can ensure that the products we create are not only exceptional but also safe and reliable. It’s time to prioritise quality over profit and foster an environment where integrity and excellence thrive.
Building a culture of quality within your organization is absolutely not something that you can do on your own. It’s not something that any individual can do. Each individual within the context of your organization needs to be able to demonstrate their own technical excellence, their technical leadership, their engineering capability. If they demonstrate their own, other people around them will see a way of behaving that hopefully they want to copy. The more people in your organization behave that way, the quicker other people in your organization will see that as the way to behave.
I was trying to think of an example there of it being true, and I really keep coming back to the opposite being true. And that’s the Boeing story. If you’ve been following the Boeing story really for many years, the Boeing story’s been going on. When Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas, Boeing’s focus was on engineering excellence, technical leadership, and they built that mantra of “if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.” Their planes were the best; they were the best build qualities; they were the least likely to fall out of the sky. They were the standard for quality in the entire aviation industry.
Then they had that culture of engineering excellence and technical leadership, and then they moved. They bought McDonnell Douglas, and through some weird happenings, which I don’t fully understand, McDonnell Douglas came out on top of being in charge. McDonnell Douglas’s leadership and their focus was on revenue extraction. That was their focus. “We’re not here to build value; we’re here to extract money for our shareholders and for ourselves.” That’s what we’re here for.
Over the next 20 years, I think it’s been 20 years; I might be a little bit out there, 15 to 20 years, they’ve decimated that culture, that culture of quality inside of Boeing completely and utterly destroyed it. So much so that you might have seen videos of Boeing employees saying, “Yes, I’d fly in this plane, but yeah, I’ve got a death wish.” Right? That’s not what you want if you’re going to be flying in a plane. The culture you want within the context of the engineers that are building it, so why would you want it within the context of the software that you’re purchasing, the software that you’re using?
How much of the software that we use is actually life-critical or actually has a substantive impact on our quality of life, on the world around us? We want those products to be built within the context of a culture of quality, of delivering the right thing, of doing the right thing, and providing us with value—not “let’s cut all the corners we possibly can to deliver more revenue to our shareholders.”
If you want to build amazing products rather than mediocre or even dangerous products, we need to focus on the things that really matter. Agile people talk about agile frameworks all the time and how agile frameworks were the solution, and agile frameworks are now the problem. None of those things are true. Agile frameworks are just tools that we use. It’s the culture within our organization that leverages those tools in a positive or negative way. A hammer is just a tool, but you can use it to hit a nail, or you can use it to smack somebody around the head. Which one is going to add value, and which one’s going to land you in jail?
Building those cultures of quality can you—what world of culture of quality did a Volkswagen engineer write code that determined whether a car was in a test condition and faked the results? Right? They changed the way the engine operated in order to get the results they wanted, and the engine operated differently on the road. What world of quality does anybody in your organization make that sort of decision? No world of quality. If you have a culture of quality, you’re not going to have people make that decision.
That’s what we need to focus on. We need to focus on building a culture of engineering excellence, the technical leadership to set that direction and go in that direction. We need to build within our organization the knowledge and understanding of the theories behind the reasons things work the way they work and how we can then apply our empirical learnings within our context. Every organization is different, with the knowledge of those theories to then extrapolate what’s the next best decision that we can make.
This is something that Naked Agility can help you and your organization do. We cannot do it for you, but we can be there to help you understand the theories and practices, how they apply within your context, and what are good engineering decisions and what are bad engineering decisions. So build engineering excellence and technical leadership within your organization.
