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Comment by masklinn

2 years ago

> It just took 25 years to finally happen.

"Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off, as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it falls off a cliff.

It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to come off of Boeing. Lion Air 610 crashed on October 29, 2018, the MDD merger was on August 1, 1997.

And that crash was the first major externally visible symptom[0], the decisions which led to it happened years earlier (2014-2015).

[0] unless you count the dreamliner's joke of a rollout, which probably should have been the warning shot that things were getting unwell

25 comments

masklinn

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hliyan  2 years ago

I call this "quality momentum". A leader can come in, look at whatever "engine" that drives quality, decide it's not essential, remove it entirely, and coast on the momentum of previous quality practices for years before entropy sets in. But by this time, the board and shareholders have already rewarded the leader for "eliminating waste".

  • atoav  2 years ago

    You can really get more efficient by cutting fat — until the next winter comes when it is needed. In a simpler society, leaders that proposed something like that once they were at least thrown out of the village. Today they get a golden parachute and are sent off to the next host to bleed dry.

  • data_maan  2 years ago

    Funny isn't it?

    I work in AI, where it's always about the learning signal, and how much that is delayed.

    Humans (boards) really also suck at learning if the signal (crashes) is delayed (due to quality momentum)

ctrw  2 years ago

I disagree it happened instantly, it's just that Boeing didn't make any new planes for 20 years that made it to the sky. Even the Max was a redesign of an existing design.

  • acdha  2 years ago

    That sounds like inertia to me: they had a ton of institutional knowledge and practice around mature designs, which kept things from going too badly when the financial engineers first started – and since nothing fell from the sky, clearly that meant they had earned those bonuses and should go further!

  • DiggyJohnson  2 years ago

    What’s funny is I know from personal experience that many of the folks inside Boeing at the junior to mid levels (and up, selectively) were also aware of the major culture issue well before the accidents.

    This is where I started my career.

raiyu  2 years ago

That description you have of quality inertia certainly seems applicable to other areas of life as well.

I’m certainly seeing a few troubling issues brewing but don’t see as many people as myself taking them as serious warning signs.

But when the collapse happens it’s rapid because the entire foundation has rotted away.

It keeps happening because that’s what the system rewards, short sightedness, and is also why founder led companies have more success, because they are able to execute in years not quarters.

GCA10  2 years ago

Ironically, Boeing's stock price was at about $140 at the start of 2014 -- and rose pretty steadily to a peak of $422 in March 2019.

So in addition to pushing out whatever sorts of financial results that Wall Street wanted, Boeing's perhaps questionable approach to quality was not registering with its financial overlords. This happened in spite of the Al-Jazeera investigative piece of 2014, a $2.5 billion penalty paid in 2021 in connection with the 787 crashes, etc. Not to mention steady coverage of problems in the Seattle Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.

Boeing's stock is still above $100 now, which suggests that it's got a strong enough monopoly/duopoly position that investors do not regard quality issues as being all that detrimental to the "investment thesis."

Brrr!

hammock  2 years ago

Where can I read more about quality inertia , find other case studies, etc?