Climb With Your Feet: People, Quality, Process

Why the Real Priority Order Is People, Quality, Process, Not People, Process, Quality

Here’s the deal. I have been teaching people, process, and quality as the core Lean priority order for a long time, borrowed directly from what I learned studying Japanese manufacturing culture. I recently caught myself getting the order wrong, and correcting it matters enough that I want to walk through exactly why.

Catching My Own Mistake

The framing I originally used was people first, process second, quality third. Sitting with that order honestly, I realized it does not actually reflect what matters most in practice. Process exists specifically to support quality. It is not equally important alongside it. If a team has to work a little less efficiently in the short term to protect a genuinely quality product, protecting that quality is worth the temporary inefficiency. Refining the process itself, once quality is genuinely secured, is exactly the kind of improvement work that comes later, once a team has clearly identified and is working on its actual bottleneck.

The correct order, in my view now, is people, quality, process. Take care of your people first. Deliver a genuinely quality product second. Refine the process behind it third, once the first two are solid.

Climbing With Your Feet

There is an image that captures this well, and it comes directly from rock climbing. Watch a genuinely skilled climber, the kind documented in the film Free Solo about an ascent of El Capitan, and you will notice something specific about their technique. Handwork matters, and footwork comes first. A climbing coach will tell you directly, climb with your feet, and make sure you have a genuine foothold before you commit any further weight to it.

Applied to how an organization actually builds itself, climbing with your feet means stabilizing your people practices first. That is exactly why books built around the idea of getting the right people in place before deciding what to do next, first who, then what, put the priorities in the correct order. Build a sustainable, scalable system starting with your people, and everything built on top of that foundation actually holds.

Two Footholds Before You Climb Any Further

Here is how that translates into a genuine operating sequence. The first foothold is people, taking real care of the humans doing the work. The second foothold is quality, meaning a genuinely frictionless product that people actually want to buy or work with. Only once both of those footholds are secure should a team start climbing with process and its ability to scale.

Watch for these signs an organization has skipped a foothold and is climbing on an unstable base:

• Cost cutting or efficiency initiatives introduced before quality has genuinely been secured.
• Process refinement discussed constantly while genuine care for the people doing the work gets treated as secondary.
• A company’s public messaging about quality that does not match what customers or employees actually experience.

Why This Matters More Than a Slogan

There is a story I recall hearing about Steve Jobs observing that Japanese companies do not mention quality in their commercials, because quality is simply assumed, a given, built into the culture through the influence W. Edwards Deming had on Japanese manufacturing. Quality is not a marketing message there. It is the baseline expectation.

That distinction matters more than it might seem at first. A company that has to advertise its own quality is often signaling, whether it means to or not, that quality is not simply assumed by its own customers. The strongest possible position is one where quality never needs to be the pitch, because it has already been proven consistently enough that customers take it for granted.

That contrast becomes obvious the moment you look at how differently two real companies have handled this same principle.

What Happens When a Company Claims Quality Without Living It

I recently came across reporting suggesting that a well known fast food chain has faced real quality erosion after prioritizing cost cutting and efficiency over its own stated food standards, reportedly including a shift from fresh, whole leaf lettuce to a cheaper shredded version, smaller or lighter portions on certain menu items, thinner patties, and rising prices alongside declining value. The reporting also mentioned slower drive through times, inconsistent food preparation, and customer frustration tied to newer automated ordering technology.

I want to be honest that I have not independently verified every specific detail of that reporting myself, and I would encourage anyone interested to check the current facts directly rather than relying solely on my secondhand summary here. What I can say confidently is the underlying pattern, whether or not every detail above is precisely accurate in this particular case, is exactly what happens when a company’s actual practice drifts away from a quality message it still puts on its own signage. You cannot claim to produce a quality product and genuinely care about people while quietly cutting corners on both. Eventually the gap between the message and the reality becomes visible to everyone.

What Happens When a Company Actually Lives It

Compare that against a company whose slogan is built directly on a real operating practice rather than aspiration alone. One well known burger chain’s tagline about quality you can taste comes from a strict rule to use only fresh, never frozen ingredients. They keep only about two days of stock on hand for their products, and if it is not used within that window, it genuinely gets discarded rather than pushed out to customers past its freshness. I have seen this practice firsthand, and it reflects a company actually climbing with its feet, protecting quality even when it costs more to do so.

Why You Cannot Skip Straight to Process

None of this works if a team tries to jump straight to process optimization before genuinely securing the first two footholds. Focusing on cost cutting or efficiency prematurely, before people and quality are genuinely stable, is exactly how an organization loses its way, even while its marketing continues to say all the right things.

The theory of constraints reinforces this same order. Identify the actual bottleneck, and focus your energy there first, rather than optimizing a process broadly before you know where the real constraint sits. Refining process before quality is secured is optimizing in the wrong place, no matter how efficient it looks on paper in the short term.

Applying This to Your Own Organization

None of this requires a dramatic overhaul to start applying. It requires reordering the questions your team asks before making a decision. Is this genuinely good for our people. Will this deliver a frictionless, genuinely quality product. Only after both of those are answered honestly does the question of process efficiency belong in the conversation.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your teams build genuine stability around people and quality first, so process improvement actually strengthens a solid foundation instead of quietly papering over cracks in it.

So here is the challenge. Look at your own organization’s recent decisions and ask honestly which foothold, people or quality, got skipped in favor of a process or cost efficiency improvement made too early. That gap is exactly where your own climb has become unstable, whether or not it has become visible to your customers yet.

Jason Schroeder said it plainly: “We climb with our feet.” Secure your people and your quality first, and the process you build on top of that foundation will actually hold.

On we go.

FAQ

Why does process rank third rather than second in this corrected priority order?

Because process exists specifically to support and protect quality, rather than standing as an equally weighted priority alongside it. A team can tolerate some short term inefficiency in service of protecting genuine quality, but sacrificing quality in service of a more efficient process undermines the actual purpose process is supposed to serve in the first place.

How does the theory of constraints connect to prioritizing quality before process refinement?

The theory of constraints argues that improving anything other than the actual bottleneck rarely improves overall system performance. Refining process broadly before quality is genuinely secured risks optimizing parts of the system that were never the real constraint, while the genuine priority, protecting a quality product for the people who depend on it, goes unaddressed.

Why does the article compare two specific fast food companies to illustrate this principle?

Because the contrast between a company whose quality messaging has reportedly drifted from its actual practice and one whose slogan is built directly on a verifiable operating rule makes the underlying principle concrete rather than abstract. The specific claims about any individual company should be verified independently, but the broader pattern, that customers eventually notice when practice does not match messaging, holds regardless of the exact details in any single case.

What does “climbing with your feet” actually mean when applied to a real organization?

It means stabilizing genuine care for people and a real commitment to quality as the foundation before pursuing process efficiency or scaling. The metaphor comes directly from rock climbing, where a climber secures a solid foothold with their feet before committing further weight, rather than reaching upward with their hands before the foundation beneath them is actually stable.