Are Quality circles just big suggestion boxes, or are they the engine that drives engagement?

After the Second World War the economies of almost every nation on this planet were in ruins with the exception of one, that of the USA. This had been reinforced by the supply of goods to the UK, China and Russia during the war. Immediately post war this supply continued under the Marshall Plan while each nation began the long process of rebuilding their damaged industries and infrastructure to the point where they could once again function independently.

This period was one of unprecedented growth for the US economy as they supplied the world with the materials and expertise that could only be produced by an economy itself undamaged by war.

It was unfortunate that during this period one of the less obvious exports was the industrial and business practices that the World believed were responsible for this American dream.
When the American economic model is the only intact model on the planet it is difficult to believe that it is not an example worth following, so nearly everybody did.

Not so the Japanese.

The Japanese ploughed their own furrow, developing their own business practices from scratch based on what they instinctively felt was right.

Thus was born Kaizen, a process initiated by a few business’s in Japan after the end of the Second World War and now spread all over the world. Kaizen centres around the involvement of the workforce. Getting from the workforce their own ideas about how to improve their own process. They do this in Quality circles that meet regularly to involve the whole workforce in the business of process improvement.

When the Japanese economy started to catch up to those of the West it seemed prudent for Western Industries to try to discover what it was that the Japanese were doing that was allowing this to happen. So industry, particularly the Auto industry, send their spies to Japan to try to discover what was going on.

These spies found a radically different system of production that in most cases was about responding to the demands of the customer while in the West production tended to be driven by a search for efficiency through volume, mass production, on the basis that this produced a cheaper product, regardless of whether there was a demand or not. The Western approach often resulted in large stores of finished product that then had to be heavily discounted in order to sell them.

The West were therefore keen to adopt the working practice of the East because as far as the West were concerned the difference in production methods was the reason for the success of Japanese industry.

Not so.

The Japanese approach is not about the mechanistic differences between the production methods of East and West. It is about the different working philosophy in the East that allowed those methods to develop.

What people in the West believe about quality circles is that they are a type of suggestion box. Their purpose is to collect ideas from the workforce and use those ideas to improve the process.
Because suggestion boxes had been tried, and failed, in the West these quality circles were not felt to be as significant as the physical difference in working practices.

What these spies failed to understand is that the Japanese working practices that they saw as being so valuable, were nothing without the engagement of the workforce who, being engaged, had themselves suggested the changes that had created the new working practices.

The physical differences between Western and Eastern working practices address only the superficial aspect of Kaizen and Quality circles.

The most important part of the Japanese ethic has not been captured in the literature so it is difficult to appreciate how much it is even understood by the Japanese.
This may explain their difficulty explaining the power of what they do to anyone else.

When suggestions are collected from the workforce there are three things that can happen.
The first is the way that suggestions from the workforce are treated in the West.

They are ignored.

This is very dispiriting and the workforce soon learn not to offer their suggestions to management because they know this will happen.

The other two things are the way that ideas are responded to in Japan, not because they understand the power of what they do, but because when someone gives something freely in the belief that it will help, the Japanese feel that the offer is worthy of respect and will therefore give feedback to the originator who is told one of two things. Either yes we are going to use your idea, thank you. Or, No we are not going to use your idea but here is the reason why not.

Both of these responses tell the originator that he is being valued, that someone is listening, that his idea is being respected.

Whether the answer is yes or no is not important, what is important is the way that this feedback makes the individual feel. Getting this feedback changes the way that the workforce feel about what they do. They are making a contribution that is always acknowledged and it is that acknowledgement that lets them feel proud of what they do. They are able to make a difference and they can see the result of their own discretionary effort.

The way they feel about what they do is what in the West is called engagement.

It is ironic that engagement is being seen in the West as an increasingly unachievable dream, while in the East they create the conditions to allow it to happen every single working day, but do not understand enough about what they are doing to explain it to their counterparts in the West.