As a young engineer on the Ford Explorer line, Shawn Herbig chased a strange complaint. Drivers said their radios were changing stations on their own. Dealers swapped the units, and every one passed the bench test. The cause: in cold-weather states, drivers wearing thick winter gloves were hitting two of the small buttons at once. Nothing was wrong with the radio, and to the customer, it was still broken.
That moment started a career. Shawn founded IQS Research more than 25 years ago and his team runs the Kentucky Association of Manufacturers Wage and Workforce Study. He and Trevor get into why perception isn’t reality but still changes behavior, what people outside manufacturing get wrong about what’s behind the door, and why child care is underreported in workforce data.
What does it mean to be a good consumer of data? Shawn’s answer: confirming data deserves the same scrutiny as contradicting data. You never run a study to confirm a hypothesis. You run it to test one. For plant leadership and manufacturing workforce development, that’s curiosity applied to the numbers.
Shawn and Trevor share the stage at the Kentucky Industry Conference this week.
IQS Research 👉 iqsresearch.com
Bluegrass Bitters 👉 bluegrassbitters.net
Frequency Matters, by Kristin Mackey and Shawn Herbig 👉 amazon.com/dp/1504332938
Shawn on LinkedIn 👉 linkedin.com/in/shawnherbig
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Connect with Trevor:
LinkedIn 👉 linkedin.com/in/trevorblondeel
Website 👉 manufacturinggreatness.com
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