Chad Diggs on Building Quality Systems, Not Heroes

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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