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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