A Story about Quality and Quantity

There are numerous articles exploring the extraordinary pressures agencies increasingly find themselves under.  I'm most interested in those with an intent to identify emergent traits or opportunities for the "agency of the future."

In a recent article of this milieu, Charles Frith looks at what transmedia and the Black Swan bring to how agencies create the ideas and the products, if you will, to meet their clients' needs.

What pleasantly surprised me about Charles Frith's article (really, NOTHING should ever surprise me about Charles at this point) was his explicit focus on quantity vs quality.  Sadly, some of his readers didn't get what he was trying to say and a couple posted comments calling for better quality control in the agency.  Exactly what Charles was arguing against.

I've recently been reading the wonderful tome on Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton and he referenced a story I found most poignant to this topic.  I posted this story in comment form to Charle's article.  As this story has informed a lot of my facilitation work, I wanted to share it here as well.  I am paraphrasing from memory.

The story is about a ceramics professor who allegedly divided his advanced class into two groups at the beginning of the term. One was to be graded SOLELY on weight. The other on the quality of a single pot of their selection.

So one group just had to surpass a certain specified volume target. The other had to determine how to best achieve as close to "perfection" as possible in one single pot.

As you may have guessed, the volume group got higher grades. This was to be expected, as they had clear and known measurement criteria - volume. What was a breakthrough was that when the professor looked at the final pieces created by the volume group, they also scored significantly higher from a quality point-of-view (ie: they made way better pots as well.)

Two things I look for in stories such as this one are the context and the intent. This was a class where everyone DESIRED to make or learn how to make great pottery - exceptional pottery, even. Had this experiment been run with random people, the results may have differed.

So both desired the same thing, but one group was given the freedom and the necessity to explore through quantity of ideas.  I find it very interesting that the second group COULD have explored through quantity but it was not expressed as a mandate and they suffered as a result.  I believe there are lessons in this for those of us who design the operations side of agencies.

It was interesting to see a comment on Charles' article saying that volume equates to low-cost crap. I believe, like Charles, that the opposite is actually the case. Before I get flamed, do understand I am no advocating that crap be the goal, rather only that people be freed (and even forced) to fail for out of this can come brilliant work of a quality unmatched by any other method (IMO).