It’s easy to internalize a problem.
When the customer pressures us because they see a quality issue, it’s easy to turn to the capabilities of our formula and the production equipment and processes used to manufacture it and ask if they need to be improved.
We can control that part. We know that part. Anything outside of our own expertise becomes more difficult to find out.
And so the external possibilites come second.
What about downstream issues? Does the customer need to be educated more thoroughly about what to expect and how to use our product?
What about upstream issues? Could something have changed in the supply that we are receiving?
It’s easy to externalize a problem.
When a customer pressures us because they see a quality issue, it’s easy to point at their techniques or to an errant technician or to a bad batch of raw materials.
Then it’s someone else’s responsibility to consider before we need to make changes in our own procedures.
What about what we are doing?
Which is easier for you personally?
Which is easier for your organization or portion of an organization?
The first line in the post stuck in my head after a team meeting about a recurrent issue, but when I began to write about it I realized that it wasn’t necessarily true. It was easy for our small team to internalize a problem and try to fix it based on our own knowledge and capabilities, but it might be easier for a different group of people to externalize the problem. And they might be right to do so, although I couldn’t figure out a way to word it that didn’t sound negative to my ears. The particular problem we were discussing was definitely being influenced by a supplier, which was a possibility we had not previously discussed, and the solution was a mix between changes they made and changes we made.
