Sunil Godbole is a freelance Consultant who completed his PGDIE from NITIE back in 1992. He has vast experience in the Quality Control domain across organizations like Godrej Appliances, QC Services, Bilcare Ltd. and Suzlon. Sunil has been doing interesting work in the past few years. He is working to establish improvement management as a business process in organizations; through program management of large initiatives, mentoring teams and training. Current clients include Dr Reddy’s Labs and Global Indian International schools. Change is what leads to improvement and managing this change or even intention to change is key to successful transformations. At GIIS there is an Excellence Team that sits in Singapore which focuses on organizational learning and change. Sunil’s task is mentoring this team – and ensuring that they come up with a framework to work towards various excellence drives and come up with solutions to their own problems. At Dr Reddy’s he is more into executive coaching for building a bandwidth of systematic problem solving.

Sunil’s area of focus in consulting is systems improvement. And he is proud of the fact that he is 

domain agnostic. He started with a great quote by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Small minds discuss people

Average minds discuss events

Great minds discuss ideas

Quality has many definitions, but one of the more popular ones is achieving what you set out to do. Yet there are other definitions which should also be looked at. Is your product or service meeting customer expectations? Have you listened to the voice of the customer? What does she really want? 90% of failures in software rollouts happen because companies have never heard the customer or tried to make attempts to understand real customer requirements. The next definition is process linked. Quality is having a consistent and predictable process. Deployment, not departments, builds quality. We need more fathers for failures – so that learning can happen. One of the dictums in quality is PDCA – Plan, Do, Check, Act.

Plan – Decide to do something, Design a method to do it

Do – Train people on the method, Execute.

Check – Effects. Side effects (Unexpected happenings of our process)

Act – Corrective and Preventive. Change the plan or change the standard, taking care of failures, multiplying successes.

Management and control are represented by the same word in Japanese. In a sense, quality cannot be managed without control. There is an evolution in quality as an organisation matures. Here are the stages. 

• Quality planning
• Quality control
• Quality assurance
• Quality Improvement
• Quality excellence

Sunil uses an interesting animal analogy for organisations. All organisations start off as rats – with great survival instincts. Quick to adapt. But can be eaten up or beaten up because of their small size. If they survive and grow, they transform into rabbits. From a human perspective, it is a very cute size. But rabbits can only survive with a specialty offering. If they survive this stage, they transform into deers. As size grows, so does the need for a stronger USP. And yes, speed is still required for survival. Very few of the deers will make the transformation to elephants. Elephants have size and strength. What you need at the elephant stage is respect for behaviour and governance. At the top of the chain is the whale,who can breathe even when water is above her head. You only grow into whales when you are in touch with technology and innovation. 

Each of these animals has a different structure to support its very different weight. A rabbit can’t be zoomed to elephant size and survive. Survival is impossible if you have grown in size, but not in structure. Only systems can lead to growth. You often hear older employees of large organisations getting nostalgic about how things were better when the company was smaller. But this nostalgia is unfounded. The company would have not been at its current size if its systems had not changed. Sunil continued using another analogy. This time about growing up. It is the connection between feet and brain that makes you walk. In walking you are continuously losing your balance and gaining it back. So growing up is the process of the head knowing what the feet are doing. 

We then moved on to Q and A.

Nikhil: There is always reluctance to change. How do we overcome it?

What starts as reluctance, ends up as resistance. We need to nip this reluctance and transform to a state of readiness. One of the things that we need to ask: How do we make reluctant people outcasts in our organisations? We need to champion the positive. The moment someone says something negative, we need to implore that same person to come up with 5 positives. 

Ignorance is like cancer. You have to do a 100% job of eradication. Even if you take it out 95%, it is bound to come back. In the mango season, we end up buying boxes of mangoes. But if we do not inspect and check every mango in the box, and we do not take out the bad one, all the mangoes will rot away. (We empathise with rotten mangoes more than bad apples in India :-))  Why can 23 good mangoes not make one 1 bad mango good? Why is good health not contagious? Nature does not work that way. We need to take efforts in order to spread the good. Knowledge has to be deliberately passed on. It does not propagate automatically. 

Governance is ensuring that there is no decay in any part of the organisation. There is no part untouched. Your responsibility does not end with sending a mail of what needed to be done. Did the recipients of the mail understand what was meant to be said? Does your design reflect reality? Can a 10 min break in a meeting o f 300 people give enough time for all of them to even make a quick trip to the 20 urinals that are available? 

The journey from Intention to Implementation is a challenging one. The two i’s (eyes) don’t see eye to eye. In every implementation there has to be a method – as the saying goes, a method even in madness. In an 1857 battle, the British army was facing an army of 300 French men and 3000 Indians. The British ordered a reinforcement of 600. 300 to take care of the French. And 300 for the Indians. The undisciplined Indians were like sardines in a can – fighting more amongst themselves than the enemy.  A lack of method always leads to a lack of buy-in. 

Hirdesh – How quickly should we fire? 

Sunil generalised his answer. What Hirdesh implies is that there was a plan and we could not achieve it. How quickly did we get the feedback that there was something bad – and how quickly did we correct it? If 10% of the bad is tolerated by 90% of the good, it means 100% are bad. Why did the plan fail? If it was the person’s intention – then definitely fire. Shivaji cut the fingers of one of his top generals when he behaved inappropriately with a lady. The message was clear – no matter how big you are, the rules remain the same. But if the problem is with competence, then train. Nothing happens in HR – it all happens on the ground. HR can only train and escalate. 

Sunil recommended that feedback should happen not annually, but on a daily basis. Quick cognizance is important. When he was handling HR – the most common complaint he heard was aadmi ka problem hai. Most of the times, it was actually an admin problem. A one to one dialog helps in understanding. He talked of a canteen congestion problem. Which led to people consuming meals outside, which led to a training program on discipline. 

Aakash: We have seen a change in services – moving from the physical classroom to online.  How to be proactive in forecasting the future?

Even today the Maharashtra SSC board cannot take an exam online for 12 lakh people. Couldn’t they have taken help from the IT bigwigs? We have to redefine the role of teacher in an online class. Move from teaching to learning. In manufacturing, we started off with craft, then moved to mass. From then on we became lean and are now going to mass customisation, and in a way back to square one. The only thing that has changed is tech. The same way in education, we started with the gurukul – and are going back to the gurukul again. 

Success is when preparation meets opportunity. Instead of forecasting, it’s the learning that matters. How can we ourselves change? How do we prepare? Can our current online courses match the old one on one designs? Can we have the same faculty spend more hours with the kids, going slower, now that the classrooms are not constrained by benches. Unfortunately, most educational institutes still refuse to acknowledge this new reality – focussing instead of keeping all their ‘permanent’ teachers occupied.

Priyanka: Can we have a system which would help us to check the teaching quality of a teacher?

We can measure quality using main and substitute characteristics. The main is when the quality is directly measurable – say the weight of a component. But sometimes what constitutes quality is not clear. What is the meaning of good? If there are 10 characteristics, can we connect measurement and judgement? Quality is then the process to develop a model for translating the Product – Service – Experience into a set of parameters. How was teacher engagement? Empathy? Map these parameters and then decide the definition of good. When measurement maps judgement, there is 100% buy-in. 

A good teacher is one who goes out of the way to seek feedback. Sunil recounted a program that he was doing in Solapur. He found something amiss – and on probing found that his Puneri Marathi was not being understood by the Solapurkars. So he had to change his language to make it simpler. And the feedback improved. On a related note, I must admit that we have also not been too perfect an audience. Sunil requested all of us to turn our videos on. But we all behaved as if we were living in a bandwidth drought zone. And this led to a one way conversation during Sunil’s PPT 🙁

Santosh: During mentoring how we can keep engaging students for periods longer than 6 months?

Mentoring is a two way process with no fixed curriculum. There are two principles in mentoring: I know nothing about what I want to teach this guy. I need to fill in gaps and take the mentee to the next level. Identify these gaps, don’t assume them. When my mentee is thirsty, I give her a glass of water, not a swimming pool. She will get drowned in that case! Implementation happens only in bite sized bits. The mentor has to be agile in understanding and changing the path of the mentee. Sunil mentors 23 people at Dr Reddy’s. They have to get something extra in every session. The mentor has to push them up a level in every session. So they have something for the mentee to look forward to in the next session.

Bhavya: What frameworks or processes can be set up in education organizations to ensure/ measure quality across locations? Bulls Eye is too small for a quality dept. How can we have a change in service process so that quality gets built in?  Documentation is important. Saves time. People need to understand your intent through the documentation. In CCD, the philosophy is uniformity of service experience. So the training is that all associates need to handle the customer the same way. Do you know what you want to do? Do we want Bulls Eye to adopt the CCD way? Or do we need to let local teams decide local responses? You have to start someplace, maybe admissions or complaints process standardisation.