Why do so many quality programs fall apart the moment the firefighter walks out the door?
My guest for this episode of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Chad Diggs, a quality management professional, consultant, author, and founder of DIQ (Digging Into Quality), an AI-powered quality platform built for mid-market manufacturers. Chad leads a team of quality engineers supporting first article inspection reviews for customers including Boeing, Collins Aerospace, and Honeywell.
Chad recently released his book, Below the Surface: Building Quality Systems, Not Heroes — a practitioner’s guide written as a story rather than a textbook. The narrative follows a quality manager named Christina Valles through pressures most quality leaders will recognize: shipping bad parts to hit a date, getting blamed for problems built into the system, and watching the same fires get fought again the next month.
We talk about why Chad chose a narrative format, the cost-of-poor-quality math that finally gets leadership’s attention in the story (the number was 25 percent of revenue), and the difference between investigating where a defect happened and investigating who to blame for it.
Toward the end of the conversation, I share Isao Yoshino’s story from his early Toyota days — the one where management apologized to him after he put the wrong solvent in the paint line. It is a useful contrast to how most companies still respond to that kind of mistake.
Topics covered:
- Chad’s path from a warehouse role to a 20-year quality career
- The opening scene of the book: a contaminated solvent and a VP who says, “12 percent failures? I can live with that.”
- Leaders who walk the floor productively, and leaders who walk the floor and create chaos
- Why “cost of poor quality” is such an underused argument inside companies
- What a blameless investigation actually looks like
- Psychological safety and Amy Edmondson’s work on The Fearless Organization
- Why firefighting feels like a badge of honor and why that is a problem
- Real succession planning for quality leaders
- DIQ, the platform Chad is building for mid-market manufacturers
Get the book and learn more at https://digin2quality.com
Read the full show notes and transcript at https://leanblog.org/544
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