Written by DES MOINES – Iowa state government is in the early stages of a quiet evolution. It is a quest for a new way of doing business under the banner of a native son’s brainchild called “Total Quality Management.”
Among its ardent fans are three-term Gov. Terry Branstad and most of state government’s top echelon. Hoping to win broad favor with rank-and-file workers, they’ve given the idea a new name – “Total Quality Government” – so that it “doesn’t look like a labor-management thing,” said Branstad administrative assistant David Roederer.
Not everyone is as sold on the concept as Branstad and his closest aides, but many believe a top-to-bottom change in the way the state does business is the best and perhaps only way to give better service.
Key to the process is getting state employees to view everyone – from the person in line at the driver’s license station to the person behind bars – as a customer who deserves quick, effective service. The end result is supposed to be a leaner organization that is easier on taxpayers’ wallets.
Ironically, the Total Quality Management movement owes part of its largely unnoticed surge in Iowa’s public sector to the very type of turmoil it is designed to prevent.
The state’s financial free-fall and rock-bottom employee morale in 1991 and early this year heightened the need for the more-effective, less expensive government that Total Quality Management principles are expected to usher in. Yet, that same unrest has provided much-needed cover to give the concept time to take root, grow and flourish in an environment where taxpayer expectations and political expediency can be withering.
“It’s not a Big Bang kind of thing that’s going to change our lifestyle in five minutes,” said Mark Steinberg, executive director of the Iowa Quality Coalition who was instrumental in getting Branstad hooked on the long-term benefits of the TQM concept. “It is really a process that never ends.”
And the search for new and different approaches extends beyond the slowly unfolding Total Quality Government.
Departments are taking advantage of cutting-edge, “user friendly” technology, squeezing out layers of middle management, chopping away duplicative paperwork, experimenting with the team-decision concept and even using volunteer help to get the job done.
The 14-point Total Quality Management philosophy was born almost five decades ago by Sioux City native W. Edwards Deming.
His system, geared toward private companies, recommends radical new definitions of success.
Constant improvement in products and service should be the top priority.
he said.
Deming argued that focusing simply on making money led companies to cut comers and cheat on quality, leading to short-term profits and long-term failure.
By focusing on staying in business and creating new jobs through innovation and research, he surmised, a company could achieve its original goal of making money.
Some of the other points Deming recommended to the private sector:
- Adopt the new philosophy. Americans from the assembly line to the corporate board room need a new “religion” in which mistakes and negative attitudes are unacceptable.
- End the practice of awarding business on price tag alone.
- Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service. Management, Deming said, is obligated to always look for ways to reduce waste and give more quality to customers.
- Institute training. Too often, he said, employees seem to learn their jobs from a co-worker who was never trained properly or have to follow instructions that didn’t make sense.
- Drive out fear. Companies lose staggering amounts of money because employees are afraid to ask questions or take a position even when they don’t understand their assignments or know right from wrong. Deming said. Better quality and productivity depend on employees who feel secure.
- Break down barriers between staff areas. Departments, he said, often compete against each other or worse, have conflicting goals.
- Eliminate numerical quotas. Quotas usually guarantee higher cost and inefficiency because they take numbers into account instead of quality or production methods, he said. Workers will meet quotas at any cost, just to keep their own jobs without regard for the damage to the entire company.
- Remove barriers to pride-in-workmanship. Workers are eager to do a good job and are upset when they can’t. Deming said. He argued that misguided supervisors, defective materials and faulty equipment too often stand between workers and quality performance.
“We’re really talking about common sense,” explained Steinberg, the quality coalition leader. “You want to have your workers do the best decision-making they can with the task before them. You don’t want the boss interfering with their work if they know their work better than the boss does.”
But Deming didn’t find a receptive audience for his ideas in America, where, at the time, the economy was riding high in the wake of a world war that had leveled most of Europe and Asia. He ended up in Japan, where a grateful nation was so inspired that the government named its highest citizen award after him.
Branstad’s relationship with the concept dates back to a twist of fate during his first days as governor in early 1983.
Steinberg, a quality consultant based at Iowa Valley Community College in Marshalltown, was working with a local firm whose chairman happened to be Branstad’s campaign treasurer. One of the company’s big customers was putting new quality control standards in place, and training was lacking.
“The governor was concerned about the fact people needed this and we didn’t seem to have the capacity,” Steinberg recalled.
With the help of two state grants, the Iowa Quality Coalition got its start.
About the same time, Branstad was getting a better appreciation for Total Quality Management during trade missions to Japan.
“He began to see that one of the things the Japanese did know about was when he talked about Deming,” Steinberg said. “Deming being an Iowan sparked interest.”
Deming’s principles might have played a role in Branstad’s 1986 restructuring of a sprawling state government, but it wasn’t until 1990 that TQM was introduced by name around the executive branch.
Even then, not everyone was convinced.
Ron McCoy, a Sioux City businessman who was then president of the Iowa Quality Coalition, wanted a commitment that the governor would sit through the entire training session for executives.
McCoy argued with Allan Thoms, who was then Branstad’s administrative assistant and now directs the Department of Economic Development, about how much time Branstad could afford to invest.
“Ron wouldn’t back down, so the governor actually spent more than a half day in that training session,” Steinberg said. “He was up in the front row, taking more notes than anyone else, and some of his chief aides were kind of pacing in back, like, ‘Come on, we’ve got work to do. Let’s get going.'”
Not long after that, Branstad and some of his agency directors went on a retreat, where they heard from Ted Gaebler and David Osborne, authors of the book “Reinventing Government.”
“I never had a sense the governor, at that time, was terribly involved in fostering more effective government and changing the culture, although to some extent he was letting things happen. And things were happening,” Gaebler said. “As a bureaucrat, all I’d look for is that opening. If I knew I wasn’t going to get killed, then I’d go ahead and do it.”
But Branstad was interested in stepping up the Total Quality Government campaign. He appointed a Department of Management planner and trainer named Steve Wall to lead the planning, testing and integration of TQM approaches throughout government.
Gaebler and Osborne argue against pointing a finger of blame at the politicians or state workers for ineffective government.
“Some things trace back to the Legislature, but most do not. Most of our purchasing policies and procedures and the way government pays bills and the things that irritate customers are not legislatively mandated,” Gaebler said. “The Legislature does not mandate that we irritate customers, that we have long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The problem is that the system doesn’t reward any change.”
Gaebler also lays some blame at the feet of the media, which he says “never forgives folks for making a mistake,” and at taxpayers who expect public employees to be infallable.
As a result, the bureaucrats Gaebler describes as “good people trapped in a bad system” often are imprisoned in a conspiracy of silence when they find themselves with an ineffective or obsolete program on their hands.
“They think, ‘Gee, if I make waves, I’m going to get my head handed to me, so why don’t I just sit on my butt and not do anything?’ So people get paid for longevity, not for creativity, ownership, effectiveness or new ideas,” Gaebler said.
“If we could start rewarding creativity and change,” he said, “you’d be astonished at the amount of energy you’d turn loose.”
This was part of a multi-part series about making government more effective done by Eric Woolson of the Waterloo Courier in October 1992.
Download the original article from the Waterloo Courier at https://www.leansixsigmaforgood.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/TQM_State_Iowa_Waterloo_Courier_10041992.pdf
To learn more about the State of Iowa’s improvement program, visit https://dom.iowa.gov/state-government/lean-enterprise/training