I just picked up on this, now not so recent, news item about the prosecution of Steven Eaton. Eaton was gaoled for falsifying data in clinical trials. His prosecution was pursuant to the Good Laboratory Practice Regulations 1999. The Regulations apply to chemical safety assessments and come to us, in the UK, from that supra-national body the OECD. Sadly I have managed to find few details other than the press reports. I have had a look at the website of the prosecuting Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency but found nothing beyond the press release. I thought about a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 but wonder whether an exemption is being claimed pursuant to section 31.

It’s a shame because it would have been an opportunity to compare and contrast with another notable recent case of industrial data fabrication, that concerning BNFL and the Kansai Electric contract. Fortunately, in that case, the HSE made public a detailed report.

In the BNFL case, technicians had fabricated measurements of the diameters of fuel pellets in nuclear fuel rods, it appears principally out of boredom at doing the actual job. The customer spotted it, BNFL didn’t. The matter caused huge reputational damage to BNFL and resulted in the shipment of nuclear fuel rods, necessarily under armed escort, being turned around mid-ocean and returned to the supplier.

For me, the important lesson of the BNFL affair is that businesses must avoid a culture where employees decide what parts of the job are important and interesting to them, what is called intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is related to a sense of cognitive ease. That sense rests, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, on an ecology of unknown and unknowable beliefs and prejudices. No doubt the technicians had encountered nothing but boringly uniform products. They took that as a signal, and felt a sense of cognitive ease in doing so, to stop measuring and conceal the fact that they had stopped.

However, nobody in the supply chain is entitled to ignore the customer’s wishes. Businesses need to foster the extrinsic motivation of the voice of the customer. That is what defines a job well done. Sometimes it will be irksome and involve a lot of measuring pellets whose dimensions look just the same as the last batch. We simply have to get over it!

The customer wanted the data collected, not simply as a sterile exercise in box-ticking, but as a basis for diligent surveillance of the manufacturing process and as a critical component of managing the risks attendant in real world nuclear industry operations. The customer showed that a proper scrutiny of the data, exactly what they had thought that BNFL would perform as part of the contract, would have exposed its inauthenticity. BNFL were embarrassed, not only by their lack of management control of their own technicians, but by the exposure of their own incapacity to scrutinise data and act on its signal message. Even if all the pellets were of perfect dimension, the customer would be legitimately appalled that so little critical attention was being paid to keeping them so.

Data that is properly scrutinised, as part of a system of objective process management and with the correct statistical tools, will readily be exposed if it is fabricated. That is part of incentivising technicians to do the job diligently. Dishonesty must not be tolerated. However, it is essential that everybody in an organisation understands the voice of the customer and understands the particular way in which they themselves add value. A scheme of goal deployment weaves the threads of the voice of the customer together with those of individual process management tactics. That is what provides an individual’s insight into how their work adds value for the customer. That is what provides the “nudge” towards honesty.