Conducting an ACORN test on my mission statement

Here is my first draft at a mission statement developed after reviewing my SWOT and doing a quick brainstorming exercise asking myself some what, why and how questions:

The mission of my blog is to encourage a thoughtful life as a quality professional. I want to ask and explore questions related to building a quality culture and utilizing system thinking to spark a dialogue with my peers. I am to become a leader in quality both internal to my own company and externally to the wider profession.

The ACORN test is a check on a mission or project charter goal to determine if it well defined. I am drawing from The Quality Toolbox, but this is a tool you can find all over the internet.

	Question	Thoughts
A	Accomplishment. Does the goal describe results rather than behaviors?	The goal here is to write. Secondary to that I want to spark a dialogue and also be invited to conferences and other speaking opportunities. The mission statement as is could use some tightening here.
C	Control. Does the team’s actions determine whether not the goal is accomplished? If the way the mission is articulated primarily depends on others outside the team, consider rewriting it.	I am a team of one. Everything within my mission statement is in my own power. I can write, and publish and share. Publicizing my posts is within my control.
O	Only Objective. If this and only this was accomplished would it be enough? O is sometimes also phrased as “Overall Objective” — Make sure that the mission truly captures the organization’s reason for being. Avoid writing a mission that is simply a subgoal of that overall purpose.	My only goal is thinking aloud. I am not trying to sell anything, nor am I concerned about finding a job (I work in pharmaceutical quality in Boston, getting a new job involves going to Kendall square and waving a resume around)
R	Reconciliation. Will accomplishing this goal prevent another group within the organization from accomplishing its goal? Does anyone else have this goal? Various units should be working in harmony to achieve the overall organization mission.	As an individual, I do not need to worry about other groups. However it is important for my mission statement for this blog not to interfere or conflict with any of my other goals. This mission statement is aligned to my personal and professional goals. In fact it helps further several of them.
N	Numbers. Can this goal be measured?	Blogging has several measurements built in – views, visitors, likes, shares and comments. I can also measure other things like invitations to speaking opportunities, questions directed to me, and others.

An overall mission statement must pass all give parts of the ACORN test in order to be well defined. In my case I pass but need some tightening in accomplishment.

Conference Speaking

Conference proposals are a different writing beast than articles or columns or papers. Don’t be coy. Don’t give us a promise. Tell us the problems and what we will learn.
Johanna Rothman “Writing Advice for Conference Proposals”

Good advice from Johanna Rothman on conference proposal writing.

Giving back to the profession, sharing best practices and lessons is an important part of being an ethical practioner, and also a great way to build your career. Preparing and speaking at a conference is also a great way to build connections with the material and to stretch in order to build expertise.

In 2019 I’m speaking at 4 conferences:

ASQ Lean and Six Sigma Conference “Training as Part of Lean Change Management” in March
ASQ BOSCON “Knowledge management & effective change management” in April
ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement “Knowledge Enables Change” in May
2019 Northeast Lean Conference in October

In addition, I tend to speak at a variety of internal events and provide a ton of training.

I hope to run into some of you at these events next year.

Environment, Health and Safety and the compliance domain

Benefits of Written Rules:
Capture important learnings and assumptions
Establish a standardized, organized and reproducible, method of conducting work safely
Ensure effective transfer of knowledge to new members of the group
Require disciplined thinking to formally document thus reducing errors in processes
Create a framework for delegation of decision-making
Demonstrate the organizations commitment to safety
Chet Brandon “Tried and True: Written Procedures are a Foundation of EHS Success“

I don’t think there is a quality person who would read that list and not nod knowingly. Reading the excellent article quoted above reminded me that we all probably do EHS, Quality and compliance in general all wrong.

Yes, Health & Safety is about the employee; Quality is about the product (and legal is about following the law and finance does something about money) but what when you look at the tools we pretty much have a common tool-box. Root cause analysis, procedures, risk management, system thinking.

What is truly different is the question we ask:

Quality asks about the customer
Health and Safety asks about the employee
Environment asks about, well, the environment

I find it fascinating that it became environment, health and safety and most companies, as again, the question asked is rather different. In companies where care of the environment is separate (such as the energy industry) you will definitely see it as a separate entity.

I have only been at one company that was on the path of looking at quality, environment, health and safety were all similar disciplines and united them under a chief compliance officer (who was also head of legal). My current company is still struggling along the path of uniting standards and tools.

There is definitely a lot of different domain knowledge between the three, the same way quality is different between industries. However the commonalities that unite us are many and ones we should spend more time exploring.

2018 in review – year 1

I started this blog 8 months ago as a way to think aloud about items that were interesting to me and causing me to think about my profession.

The five most popular posts tell me that at least some folks who read this blog do so because they too are interested in similar topics:

Looking back at my SWOT, I can see that it was a very useful tool for charting where this blog would take me. Change, risk, data, quality culture, knowledge management. All the items I spent time thinking about are there. I hope folks go as much use out of my thinking aloud as I did.

In the next few weeks I’ll be trying to utilize a few quality tools to lay out my goals for both this blog and my other professional endeavors in 2019.

As you wrap up 2018 and look forward to 2019, what quality matters are important to you?

Industry specific knowledge

How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and industries contribute to the diffusion of that knowledge? Here we measure the industry-, occupation-, and location-specific knowledge carried by workers from one establishment to the next, using a dataset summarizing the individual work history for an entire country. We study pioneer firms—firms operating in an industry that was not present in a region—because the success of pioneers is the basic unit of regional economic diversification. We find that the growth and survival of pioneers increase significantly when their first hires are workers with experience in a related industry and with work experience in the same location, but not with past experience in a related occupation. We compare these results with new firms that are not pioneers and find that industry-specific knowledge is significantly more important for pioneer than for nonpioneer firms. To address endogeneity we use Bartik instruments, which leverage national fluctuations in the demand for an activity as shocks for local labor supply. The instrumental variable estimates support the finding that industry-specific knowledge is a predictor of the survival and growth of pioneer firms. These findings expand our understanding of the micromechanisms underlying regional economic diversification.
C. Jara-Figueroa, Bogang Jun, Edward L. Glaeser, and Cesar A. Hidalgo. “The role of industry-specific, occupation-specific, and location-specific knowledge in the growth and survival of new firms” PNAS December 11, 2018 115 (50) 12646-12653; published ahead of print December 10, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800475115

Interesting academic paper on industry domain knowledge that has ramifications on the pharmaceutical industry, including the quality domain.