Kim Swanson: 0:03

Welcome to AASHTO Resource Q&A. We're taking time to discuss construction materials, testing and inspection with people in the know. From exploring testing problems and solutions to laboratory best practices and quality management, we're covering topics important to you.

Brian Johnson: 0:20

Welcome to AASHTO Resource Q&A. I'm Brian Johnson.

Kim Swanson: 0:23

And I'm Kim Swanson, and we are here to talk about everyone's favorite subject the corrective action process.

Brian Johnson: 0:31

Who doesn't like owning up to their mistakes? People love doing it, and not only do you get to own up to it, you get to have a painful, exhaustive investigation of the thing that was screwed up. But the good news is it leads to continual improvement.

Kim Swanson: 0:51

It does and I was obviously joking. I know this is not everyone's favorite subject, but I think it could be. I think this should be people's not. They should not have the negative connotations with the corrective action process because, as you said, it really does help the organization to be better and personally be better. So I think it's, I think it's good all the way around and I think we have something today that might help people love this a little bit more.

Brian Johnson: 1:19

Yeah, we do, and this we're going to talk about. What I'm going to let you say it.

Kim Swanson: 3:39

one of the presentations had this and they talked about this and I was like that is awesome. So they did not. They did not refer to it as the four eyes of the corrective action process, but I'm leaning into this because I think it is hilarious and memorable. I think that's and those are things that are useful. It's memorable and pretty funny.

Brian Johnson: 4:00

It is, as a glasses wearing human. Is that? What is that? What triggered this? Four eyes of corrective action?

Kim Swanson: 4:10

Yeah, yeah, I just it was. It was just a happy accident. I mean it could have been, you know, the four F's of, or G's of it, or depending on the words, but they were all keywords of eyes and I'm like let's just lean into it, let's lean into the four eyes of everything.

Brian Johnson: 4:28

I love it so much I like it too, and it's funny because how these things evolve is interesting to me.

Brian Johnson: 4:35

Occasionally, I do like reading some of these books or listening to them in audio form, but, uh, every once in a while I'll hear about this, this either like a business book, or a quality book, or some kind of self-improvement book that catches my interest, or at least the summary of it, or there'll be some hype about it, and then I'll read it, or or listen to it, depending on how I consume it, and then I'll find out it's just stuff I already knew or what would be considered to be common sense.

Brian Johnson: 5:11

There's one that really irritates me that somebody was pushing hard for me to read and all it boiled down to was if you don't want to forget stuff, you should write it down, and I'm like that's a Post-it note, that's not a book, like I don't need to read a book to then give me all of these explanations about times when people wrote things down and did them. Like that's great, and I cannot believe somebody is is making money off that, but they, they did, and so maybe one day, kim, you will be the uh, some sort of quality guru because of the four eyes of corrective action and I will I'll always pronounce it the four eyes instead of the four eyes?

Kim Swanson: 6:04

yeah, no, I think I think it's funnier it's funnier.

Kim Swanson: 6:07

It's funnier that way and I think we had a little bit of this conversation when we were talking about goal setting. In that episode we talked about goal setting, of how you didn't like forced acronyms and things like that. But I will say sometimes it does help. It may not help you, but it may help other people just to hear the same stuff they know in a different way, just to consume it in a different way. And so, while you may be familiar with the four I's of the corrective action process, seeing them this way or hearing about them this way may help you remember them so you don't have to write them down.

Kim Swanson: 6:43

It could be, you know so I mean, I think there's some people that it does help just hearing the same information just in a different way, and then where it maybe didn't click before. So I'm all about how many different ways can I say the same thing to my detriment, I think. But that that is one of them. So let's get into the four I's of the corrective action process.

Brian Johnson: 7:08

Okay, Okay, All right. Number one ice cream. I always find that when I'm in a bad mood because I did something wrong, ice cream helps. So that's obviously the first eye of the four eyes.

Kim Swanson: 7:24

No, I'm going to say no, that is not the first eye. The first eye is immediate action. You need to do something right away to put a band-aid on the problem, so to speak.

Brian Johnson: 7:35

That is true and basically in terms of our industry, the materials testing industry, let's say you had a piece of equipment that was delivering faulty results, your immediate action might be to take it out of service. Stop what you're doing, take it out of service, put the other one in service and keep rolling, or just pause all work until you figure out what's going on. At that point you really haven't done much of a root cause analysis. You've just stopped the bleeding right or put a bandaid on it cause analysis.

Brian Johnson: 8:13

You've just stopped the bleeding right or put a bandaid on it. Unfortunately, that first eye is where a lot of people stop and if you think about that, we're only 25% into this journey of corrective action and some people have already they've declared themselves that they're already.

Kim Swanson: 8:30

Well, we don't want to be a cyclops. We need more than one eye for this process. So the next eye, after you've done the immediate action again, the bandage on the bleeding it is identify the root cause of a problem. That is easier said than done sometimes, isn't it, brian?

Brian Johnson: 8:55

It is because sometimes it's not just one thing and we have tried to change the way we talk about root cause a little bit at Ashto Resource and this kind of evolved over the last couple of years where we had always been giving these presentations about root cause analysis and corrective action and we'd always focus on this root cause and then Tracy had gone to some conference and she came back and we'd always focus on this root cause and then tracy had gone to some conference and she came back and she said you know, we talked too much about root cause, we should talk more about causal factors. And I said you know what? You're right, because I can't even tell you how many times I've taken corrective action and I and I'm like the one thing I will say to people is no matter what you ask me, why is this? It's never one thing. Why did you do that? It's never one reason.

Brian Johnson: 9:42

It's a bunch of reasons that we did this, or it's a bunch of things that went wrong or it's a bunch of whatever it is. So if you really think more about all of those causal factors that played into it, you may identify one root cause, like at the very top of that, but you might identify a bunch of little things that you have to take care of and there are different mechanisms for evaluating that. I know some people like the fishbone diagram as a way to lay all that out and kind of explore all the potential causes, and you can do that. You can do it whatever way works for you really. But you do have to have to think beyond the oh it's broken, I fixed it, we're good to go, let's keep rolling. Think about what might be the larger root cause of those problems.

Kim Swanson: 10:32

Yeah, and that leads right into the third eye of the corrective action process, and that's implementing a solution that corrects the root cause as to prevent its reoccurrence, and I emphasize prevent, because that is really what the root cause analysis is right Like you need. What can you do differently to prevent this from happening in the future?

Brian Johnson: 10:55

Yeah, and that takes you way beyond immediate action If you start thinking about making sure that you're preventing it from happening again and I do I do find this to be a really when you have a big problem, it's hard to get this right and you're not always going to get this right, but you endeavor to do it and that's part of your process. So one issue that that comes up from time to time for us is is issues with timeliness on the accreditation program and I there. There's so many factors involved in that that it's very hard to prevent it from recurring and even if things are working really well, invariably something changes that foils our plan of correcting it for the long run. But you know, you just keep, you keep trying and you keep going after that, trying to prevent recurrence of a problem.

Kim Swanson: 11:53

Yeah, I think that's really the whole reason of the corrective action process is to prevent it from going any further. But that was only the third eye. The fourth eye in this process is improving the processes in place within an organization so that the problems do not recur Again. The recurring is a recurring theme here.

Brian Johnson: 12:15

Yeah, so it's not just taking the action, you also have to change what you're doing. One way that's good to do that is to write it down. So one thing we do so I was just talking about this, right Writing it down it helps right.

Brian Johnson: 12:36

So I could see why that person made so much money off that book about writing it down. The way we write things down is through our QMS. So we have a quality management system that has policies and procedures and if we are making a change to one of our processes, we want to make sure that those QMS documents are up to date. If we have policy that's outward facing to our customers, we want to update that as well. You have to know where all these things are so that you can update them properly. If there's communication you have to have with customers or with staff or with other interested parties, you would do that as well as part of that change to your process.

Kim Swanson: 13:13

So can you dive into the difference for me and for us, about the difference between implementing a solution that corrects the root cause and prevents its reoccurrence versus improving the processes in place within an organization so that the problems do not reoccur? What's really the big difference between the third and fourth eye in this process?

Brian Johnson: 13:37

Boy, that's a really good question. I think that what you're doing in the third eye is still you're still focused on your resolution of that problem right, resolution of that problem. But I think that fourth eye takes you to let's retool, like, let's look at the larger picture here and think about any process improvements that we could make, not just to prevent recurrence but to just really kind of move on from that entirely and just change the you're changing your path forward so that it really should not happen again. So while you're still changing your process, it's like one step further in that process. Does that make sense? Yeah, I might take a corrective action, but I don't necessarily change my processes and update my QMS to reflect what that issue was. This is like a more wholesale change. Is that what you're thinking?

Kim Swanson: 14:50

about or were you?

Brian Johnson: 14:51

thinking about some other angle to it.

Kim Swanson: 14:53

No. So what I'm hearing is that the implementing a solution that corrects the root cause is still talking about that one instance that triggered this root cause the corrective action process. So it's still the third eye is still thinking about the trigger of this process, where the fourth eye is thinking of potential ways that this could be impacting other processes that did not necessarily trigger it. But it is more of a holistic approach about it. Is that what you said?

Brian Johnson: 15:24

Yeah, that is a big part of it. I think that you touched on the one part of the tendrils that kind of come out from that solution and how that impacts your overall quality management and kind of get into. When you start revising any of those quality documents, those things become more apparent to you. So then you're thinking beyond just the resolution of that issue and you're thinking about your whole system. So that's what makes sense to me about that fourth eye. But there's really, you know, when people talk about corrective action, that last part that they talk about is usually the monitoring activities, and those monitoring activities could be part of that fourth eye too. So if you change, okay, like I can give you an example. Let's say we've this is like a long time since this came up, but okay, our accreditation process, we have a peer review system way, way back when we probably didn't have a peer review system, right. So it was like, okay, you make these changes, update the directory. If there's a problem, we'll find out about it later.

Kim Swanson: 16:42

Yeah.

Brian Johnson: 16:42

Not a big deal, but no, it is a big deal. So one way you can ensure that you don't have those problems or you have a better chance of ensuring I'm never going to say 100% on anything, because humans do make mistakes is implement this peer review process so that that reduces your risk of error. But you wouldn't, let's say I was just looking at the error. That started the whole conversation. I might say, oh well, you know, for that situation we probably should have looked at that, or maybe that person should have looked at it again. But then you start looking at like, okay, well, let's look at all of the things we're doing and should those have that? So like, look at us now. We've got peer review for assessments, assessment reports. We've got peer review for assessments, assessment reports. We've got peer review for accreditation files. We have measures in place. Okay, let's look at the corrective action form.

Brian Johnson: 17:44

Tracy worked on the corrective action form. She's like oh, I should have a peer take a look at it. So she sends it to me and I say I'm not reliable. Let's ask Kim a look at it. So she sends it to me and I say I'm not reliable, let's ask Kim to look at it too, because not only do we want it, we want to make sure that it makes sense to me and it's accurate. We also want to make sure it makes sense to other people. So let's get another peer involved. So I think we've really figured out a way to work together in our organization and rely on our peers to make uh, to, to double check us and to think about things that we might not be thinking about when we look at it not just editing but, uh, different audiences that we're trying to reach, um. So I think we've kind of changed our process and it's really affected the entire organization and how we do things. There's very little that I will put out there without having somebody review it first. Even these episodes, we mostly review them.

Brian Johnson: 18:41

I wouldn't say I always listen to them before they go out there, but most of them we do look at them or the guests will listen to it to make sure that they feel that they're comfortable with it, so that that kind of uh process change had really uh permeated the entire organization over the years yeah, and I definitely listened to these uh episodes before I review them, because you have to, because I edited them.

Kim Swanson: 19:09

Yes but yeah, so so I think we covered most of the four. I think we covered this in pretty decent detail.

Kim Swanson: 19:50

But again, as I mentioned before, this topic was talked about not the four I's but the corrective action process in that one. But again, as I mentioned before, this topic was talked about not before ICE, but the corrective action process and root cause analysis was talked about at the 2024 and, I'm sure, the 2023 at some point. We talk about this at every technical exchange and, as we are gearing up for the 2025, at the time of this recording, I wanted to make sure everyone knew that the 2025 AASHTO Resource Technical Exchange is coming up March 17th through the 20th in Bellevue, washington. So I just wanted to make sure everyone is aware of that, and you can find more information at aashtoresourceorg. Slash events.

Brian Johnson: 20:31

Sounds good, and I was just curious. You know, since we're talking about four eyes, one thing that is not in the in the four eyes is a word that is a synonym for regret. I looked up all the synonyms for regret that I could think about and I don't see any eyes in there, because you should not have any regrets about taking corrective action or owning up to your mistakes and facing them head on so you can avoid them in the future. So keep that in mind. It's a great process. I do occasionally when I'm working on corrective actions. I do get irritated because I find that some of the complaints we get are unjustified, but I do not let that irritation last for long. That is part of my grieving process when I'm dealing with taking corrective actions, but it's over very short, and I never regret what we've learned from the corrective action process, and I hope you don't either.

Kim Swanson: 21:35

Yeah, it's not the five eyes, it's the four eyes, so irritation is not in there. Well, it's a valid feeling.

Brian Johnson: 21:43

It is a valid feeling. It's a valid feeling.

Kim Swanson: 21:46

It's okay. You can be irritated. However, know that good things will come out of it.

Brian Johnson: 21:50

That's right. Yeah, just don't let that take over.

Kim Swanson: 21:54

Well, thanks, Brian, for taking time to talk about this with us today.

Brian Johnson: 21:58

Thanks for bringing it up and being the thought leader. Another thing I hate that term the thought leader as it comes to the four eyes of corrective action.

Kim Swanson: 22:12

Yes, thanks for listening to AASHTO Resource Q&A. If you'd like to be a guest or just submit a question, send us an email at podcast at AASHTOresourceorg, or call Brian at 240-436-4820. For other news and related content, check out AASHTO Resources social media accounts or go to AASHTOResourceorg.