The Three Pillars of Quality
~ David Straker ~
This article first appeared Quality World, the journal of the Chartered Quality Institute
How do businesses work? What is the role of the quality profession in this?
These have been questions that have challenged many of us in different ways over
much of our working life. Unlike most other professions, those of us with
‘quality’ in our job title have changed direction and scope many different
times. This article describes a simple model of how businesses work and the
changing role of the quality profession within this.
The picture above shows the simple model of business that is used, and how
understanding of our external business environment and internal capabilities and
desires lead to changes in our business system for creating and delivering
changing value that enables us to sustain and grow our businesses. This system
is discussed in further detail below, along with consideration of the impact on
the quality profession.
The Three Pillars
Understanding
The first stage of any business is understanding, including understanding
what is needed and how to satisfy these needs. A sound understanding will lead
to sound decisions, whereas decisions based on assumptions and guesswork will
lead to surprises and fire fighting which is not a winning strategy.
Understanding needs (and attendant expectations) is not merely about
customers but all the players in the game. It means knowing who they are, what
value they bring, and what they want to take out of the pot in return for
continued patronage. Stakeholder needs are met by a complex system involving
many other stakeholders. Just as traditional quality uses tools like Cpk,
the classic measure of manufacturing capability, so we need to understand how
the entire delivery engine works.
Understanding includes present and future needs and capabilities, with a
consideration of external forces such as competition and legislation.
Imagination, based on knowledge, is an important factor here: when customers
change their goals and competitors change strategy, we still want to stay ahead
of the game.
Real-world understanding includes understanding where incomplete knowledge
exists. When this is openly accepted, associated risks can be identified and
actively managed. Much of the work involved in business is about managing
surprises. Quality should include reducing surprises by highlighting realities
in time to prepare for possibilities. With an improved understanding, we can
make decisions that will lead to better chances of staying in business. This
means balancing stakeholder value needs with current and future capabilities of
both internal and external systems. It means saying no and focusing resources to
retain key stakeholders and increase targeted value flows (such as more
lucrative customers and growing markets).
Improvement
Decisions are, in one sense, promises. They commit resources to the
achievement of objectives. They are investing value now to achieve value later.
Most business decisions at a strategic level lead to necessary changes in the
business system to achieve new business goals. Serious business improvement is
undertaken to meet explicit or implicit promises of strategic decisions.
Improvements in practice have not always been successful in helping to meet
promises. A classic failure has been to target improvements off the business
line. Practicing in safe areas is one thing, but as Wallace Andrews said: ‘You
can learn all you want about Freud, but sooner or later you have to go out with
the girls.’
Understanding is the foundation of improvement. Attempting to improve systems
with intuition and pseudo-brainstorming can be a dangerous game. Systems are
interconnected wholes: changing one element can have a significant impact on
other, often distant, parts of the system. Improvement without true
understanding is easy. You shift the work somewhere else, but improperly fixing
one problem just causes another to pop up somewhere else.
As well as working on meeting today’s promises, improvements can target the
longer-term. In Competing for the Future, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
highlighted how competencies can take years to develop and that tomorrow’s
competitions are already being won or lost in improvements we are making today.
Assurance
When needs and capabilities are understood and the system improved, all we
need to do is make sure that it actually works. Ideally, there would be no need
for assurance, but it is part of the system where specifications are important.
The previous stages ensured that definitions of what was to be done were optimal
and clear - this stage is about making sure things happen on time, every time.
Basis for survival
The three pillars fit together to form the basis for survival of all
businesses and organisations. The job of the quality professional is to
understand, improve and assure the operation of the whole business system within
which he or she works, as below.
Assurance: the quality of keeping promises
The modern concept of quality started on the manufacturing line, where
quality professionals worked to ensure that products met given specifications.
This is the domain of quality control and assurance, in which we are the clear
masters of documented systems and audited processes. The quality of assurance
is, at its most fundamental, about meeting stated or implied promises (for
example, as defined in product specifications). This quality is about sameness
and consistency.
Improvement: the quality of creating capability to keep promises
Improvement has gradually merged into quality, and with the dawning of the
TQM era1, quality professionals became involved in the improvement of the broad
business system. Improvement requires new levels of knowledge and skill, such as
an understanding of the way to design processes and business systems. Products
are designed by people with professional qualifications in the subject. The
design of processes and broader organisational systems deserves equal
discipline. Improvement is the quality of change. Initially about changing
processes, it has evolved into changing organisational systems. It requires
analysis, innovation, and serious interpersonal skills. If QA means keeping
promises, then quality improvement involves building a system capable of doing
so.
Understanding: the quality of making the right promises
The final domain that requires our attention is that of understanding.
Understanding is both the philosopher’s stone and the critical challenge for
quality in the new millennium, as Deming suggested in his emphasis of the need
for ‘profound knowledge’. Quality of information, quality of understanding and
quality of decisions are as critical as the quality of products and services
that flow from them. We must not only understand machines and processes but
people and complex systems. Only then can we make the right promises and ensure
that we keep them. Understanding requires a constant quest for deeper knowledge
and alternative meaning. It is not an end in itself, but it requires patience
and passion to keep on digging and refining, as the knowledge gained today may
not be of value until some time later. Learning is a lifetime’s occupation, so
you might as well enjoy it. Understanding is the underpinning that enables both
improvement and assurance. The domain of the quality professional is
significant, and just as business systems are interlocked, so are these areas
necessary to ensure we make wise promises and then keep them. If quality
assurance and improvement are about keeping promises, then understanding is
about ensuring that the right promises are made.
Large and small pillars
Not everyone in the profession does or should work at the business level, but
everyone needs to work at the three levels of assurance, improvement and
understanding. For example, even within a limited domain such as the quality of
electronic resistors, there are needs to understand materials, improve processes
and assure deliveries. An understanding of the broader context into which your
work fits is also increasingly important.
Because quality covers all areas of the business, it is not reasonable for
everyone in the profession to be expected to understand everything. As the
domain grows, there is room for both generalists and specialists, as in the
medical profession, where GPs are able to deal with common conditions and are
also able to diagnose and refer unusual cases to specialists.
The work continues
This article is in some ways radical and some ways not. For some this will be
heresy, yet in other organisations much of this will be going on already, even
though the quality job may be defined in different terms. The primary objective
here has been to highlight what already exists, to make implicit knowledge
explicit, and to suggest a future. The work goes on. There is much to do and we
are the only people who can do it. Below are three suggestions for our
profession’s next steps.
Understand people
TQM catapulted many quality professionals into the company limelight,
simultaneously failing to cushion the blow as they hit the hard ground of
‘limited success’. To be sure, management commitment was and is a key reason for
failure, but we cannot throw the first stone: we have also failed to create and
assure that commitment. A lack of understanding of people and psychology is
probably our biggest weakness as a profession. We understand the problems of the
organisation, yet we fail to communicate and persuade. A deeper understanding of
psychology may be a small step for us, but it could lead to giant leaps for our
companies.
Improve processes
Processes are not as well-understood as they should be. They are still often
designed on the back of the proverbial fag-packet. The user-unfriendliness of
documentation systems is legendary. Even in our best companies, process scores
in business excellence applications tend not to be the highest. We must improve
the design and management of all sorts of processes, including the complex
management and support processes that do not easily succumb to procedural
techniques used with manual manufacturing processes.
Assure the quality professional
For a profession in which there is little academic education, professional
certification is woefully inadequate. Many professionals have no professional
qualification and no professional affiliation. They may be wonderful at their
jobs, but we just don’t know! Not exactly a quality situation. When employers
recruit quality professionals and look at the ones they already employ, they
should have confidence in what they are getting - they have every right to look
to the national institute to provide that assurance.
Those professionals should be the most valuable people in every company,
where their daily job is no less than ensuring that the whole company survives
and thrives well into the new millennium.
References
1 TQM actually started in 1951, with the publication of Armand Feigenbaum’s
Total Quality Control
A brief bibliography for new understanding
Those who would change the world must first understand it. This is a very
short reading list in some topics of interest, many of which influenced the
ideas in this paper. You will not find any books on statistics or traditional
quality tools here: these are a given and assumed to already have a place in
your library. These books are intended to help you push the envelope of your
understanding.
Change
Peggy Holman and Tom Devane (eds), The Change Handbook, Berrett-Koehler, 1999
- a marvellous set of summaries of all the major big-systems change
methodologies, all by the original proponents
Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (3rd Edition),
Free Press, 1983 - the original work on how ideas spread through groups of
people. This is where the term ‘early adopter’ came from
Chaos and complexity
John L. Casti, Complexification, Abacus, 1994 - a good ‘popular
science’ book that covers the various areas of complexity, catastrophe,
emergence
Shona L. Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Competing on the Edge,
Harvard Business School Press, 1998 - a very practical application of chaos
principles to business strategy
Customers
Paco Underhill, Why we buy, Touchstone, 1999 - a finely-observed book,
nominally on how people shop in retail environments, but really about how to
see what is really happening
Frederick F. Reichheld, The Loyalty Effect, Harvard Business School
Press, 1996 - a view of the whole system of loyalty, including customer,
employee and shareholder loyalty
Decision-making
Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgement and Decision-making, McGraw
Hill, 1993 - a concise set of descriptions of most of the patterns of (largely
dysfunctional) behaviour we use when making decisions
Gary Klein, Sources of Power, MIT Press, 1999 - the result of a long
study of rapid life-and-death decisions made under pressure, such as with fire
fighters, where ‘intuition’ is a major tool
Negotiation
Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes, Business Books, 1981 -
the original and still the best book on collaborative negotiation
G. Richard Shell, Bargaining for Advantage, Penguin books, 1999 - the
best of the modern books from the director of the ‘Wharton executive negotiation
workshop’
Patterns
IF Price and Ray Shaw, Shifting the Patterns, Management books 2000,
1998 - a serious look at patterns in organisations
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University
Press, 1979 - this describes the development of the pattern language for
buildings through penetrating observation of what really does and does not work
in practice
Systems
John Sterman, Business Dynamics, McGraw-Hill, 2000 - the definitive
work on systems thinking, causal loops and modelling. Big but readable and
essential
Russell Ackoff, Recreating the Corporation, Oxford University Press,
1999 - the latest from the old master. Includes many of his principles about
systems along with applications in organisation design
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