This story seems to exemplify the erratic excess of fame, but the truth is, it was actually a brilliant example of quality control.
Van Halen was one of the first bands to travel with massive, complex stage productions. They had specific electrical load requirements, weight limits for the stage rigging, safety protocols to avoid injury, etc. They needed a way to know that the promoter had carefully read their 53-page technical blueprint that detailed their requirements.
The "no brown M&Ms" clause was deliberately buried deep within this technical tome. If they walked backstage and saw brown M&Ms, it meant the promoter had missed a simple request. So what else was overlooked? The correct weight capacity of the stage girders?
Finding a brown M&M was a mandatory trigger to immediately stop, line-check, and re-verify every aspect of the complex, safety-critical production setup. The candy was a quality assurance shortcut.
Figure 1: Van Halen’s “no brown M&Ms” request was a check of the promoter's focus on quality
Finding Chocolate in the Factory
This rock-and-roll anecdote translates directly to the shop floor of any industrial manufacturing facility. In industrial quality control, the "brown M&M" represents any small and obvious indicator of systemic failure. Maybe you notice a messy workspace—not that big a deal by itself. But maybe it indicates a failure to follow proper procedure or a training gap that might have a knock-on effect that results in someone skipping a vital check on a product.
I saw this in action first-hand when on a guided tour of one of our facilities. When shown a picture-perfect production line of boards, all of which had gone through extensive environmental testing, I noticed one of them had a slightly misaligned label. Joking with the guide, I said I hope they fix what I thought was a trivial issue of a sticker being slightly out of place.
"Oh no, that card will be pulled and sent back through all the testing," I was told.
The sticker was a brown M&M – if the sticker is out of place, what else might be? There is no room for poor quality in aerospace applications, not when a mission, or even lives, may be at stake. By making the trivial "brown M&M" checks easy to see and instantly linked to some action, you can create a powerful early warning system. This is of course just part of ensuring quality in an organization, but it does align well with the important culture of everyone having a quality mindset.
This is not always easy, as the processes, checks, training, etc., that members of a quality team advocate can be seen as unnecessary barriers or delays to making progress.
While rapid innovation is good, the “move fast and break things” philosophy popularized by modern tech companies is generally not appropriate for aerospace applications. If you don’t have time to do it right once, you certainly don’t have time to do it twice.
Quality departments obviously play a key role in developing culture by providing expert knowledge, direction, training, leading audits, and so forth, but it’s really everyone’s job. Everyone can learn from each other’s experience, and everyone should feel comfortable about suggesting improvements or reporting mistakes without fear of punishment. This ‘just culture’ focuses on improving systems, not blaming individuals. This can be extended across multiple sites, where quality teams can meet regularly to learn from each other.
Figure 2: A just culture is one where everyone can suggest improvements or flag mistakes without fear to help improve processes
Curtiss-Wright works hard to have a good quality culture. We don’t put on amazing shows, but we do need to deliver products that meet or exceed environmental, accessibility, export/import regulations, industry standards, and customer requirements. Instilling a culture where people speak up when they see a misaligned sticker is just one part of this goal.
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Stephen Willis
Product Marketing Manager
Stephen Willis is the aerospace test and measurement Product Marketing Manager at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering, a Masters in Philosophy for research in mathematical models and their market application for risk assessment, and a PG Dip in marketing and management. His current research interests include data acquisition, recording, and control systems and their applications in enabling a cost-effective route to gather large amounts of data. In particular, applications of interest include flight test, crash-protected recording, and structural/usage monitoring programs. He is the author of several academic papers and magazine articles.