Teaching About Radical Quality

There are two broad areas of adult learning that apply to learning about radical quality. One area deals with transforming how people think about quality, sometimes referred to as “turning on the lightbulb.” This is learning about radical quality as a cognitive system, involving critical thinking, discovery, and revelation about the processes that comprise radical quality – assessment, preventing, and creating change. Quality is about cognition.

The second area concerns learning and teaching the methods of radical quality – how to conduct assessments, how to strengthen controls that prevent undesired changes, how to diagnose deviations and conduct root cause analysis, how to study and improve a work process, and how to implement approaches to innovation, such as brainwriting, synergistic exercises, and the use of TRIZ.

The quality discipline is about how we think (cognition) and the actions we take relative to creating or preventing change, which Alfred North Whitehead referred to as the art of progress.

Transforming How People Think About Quality

Quality professionals are often challenged to help managers and employees embrace an understanding of quality that is more about management principles, systems theory, and the broad concept of performance excellence that goes far beyond simply teaching someone how to use a specific quality tool. So, how do quality managers help people “turn the light bulb on” when it comes to embracing quality principles?

This type of education that transforms how people think about quality and their understanding of their own organization, requires critical reflection, defined as “a critique of the presuppositions on which our beliefs have been built.” (1)

Whether we are aware of it or not, each person develops a set of meaning perspectives and takes actions every day based on these perspectives. Meaning perspectives are described by Jack Mezirow as high order theories, propositions, and beliefs. They are the ways that an individual interprets experiences and serve as the criteria for making value judgments. These meaning perspectives are acquired through cultural assimilation, but may be intentionally learned. (2)

While meaning perspectives are learned in childhood, they are also strongly influenced by early experiences in the work setting and by the beliefs and behaviors of the first supervisors and co-workers that a person encounters. We learn to fit in with the cultural expectations of the organization we work in. Over time, meaning perspectives reduce our anxiety by allowing us to dismiss experiences or ideas that are unfamiliar or discomforting.

The idea of meaning perspectives is the basis of the comfortable and routine way of perceiving the world that we refer to when we say that we need to get “out of the box” when seeking creative ideas, described as “psychological inertia” by Geinrich Altshuller, in the context of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, or TRIZ, used by many quality professionals.(3)

Reflective Learning

Learning often requires new interpretations and new comparisons that will either reinforce our comfortable meaning perspectives or create new ways of seeing the world. Reflective learning is a way of describing “activities in which individuals engage to explore their experiences in order to lead to new understandings.”(4) One of the earliest concepts of reflecting learning was advanced by John Dewey, who referred to it as “assessing the grounds of one’s beliefs.”(5)  This is not about training people about how to use a specific method, but setting the stage for people to discover and embrace a new way of understanding what is actually going on around them in the world.

What is often needed in order for people to see the workplace experience in a new way is a reflective learning process that results in what the Brazilian educator, Paulo Friere, called perspective transformation, which is what we often mean by the expression that the light bulb comes on.(6) It is the ah-ha moment in which we see that which may be familiar from a whole new perspective.

So, the challenge for the quality professional is to design and implement settings and experiences for reflective learning that result in perspective transformation about quality.

There are many examples of quality philosophies that seek to generate perspective transformation that can be introduced through a reflective learning experience.  While Dr. W. Edwards Deming devotedly taught the Control Chart methods developed by his mentor, Walter Shewhart, the higher educational message he offered was the concept he called “profound knowledge,” which was a way to understand the world based on an understanding of how deeply variation influences everything around us and how we must manage organizations accordingly.(7) Similarly, Philip Crosby’s concept that “quality is free” is much more than a short lesson about workplace economics, but offers a perspective transformation about the hierarchy of the competing areas of quality, cost, and schedule in an organization.(8) Speaking as a former Judge in the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program, the Baldrige Criteria can be challenging to grasp because they include a variety of embedded meaning perspectives that create a different world view that requires some reflective learning to appreciate.

Designing a reflective practice activity with the intention to create perspective transformation also challenges the quality manager to address the issue of reification in the workplace. Reification is the false belief that the circumstances around us which have been created by people cannot be changed by people.(9) Alfred North Whitehead referred to this as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” thinking that our workplace and social systems are concrete and cannot be changed.(10)  Many quality managers already know that reification can run deep in an organization, and that this false belief that an organization cannot change, and that change should not even be attempted, is the cause of many quality problems. 

Methods for Reflective Learning

Reflective learning is not at all like a training class, where people learn how to construct a control chart or develop an audit plan. There are at least seven proven methods of reflective learning that quality managers can employ in the workplace to achieve a perspective transformation about quality. These are (a) Group discussions around structured questions; (b) the use of Organization – Domain Metaphor Analysis; (c) Discussion of Critical Incidents; (d) Case Study Discussions; (e) Art Exercises; (f) Force Field Analysis; and (g) engagement in authentic Root Cause Analysis.

Group Discussion Around Structured Questions:

This approach is based on the theory and extensive practice of Myles Horton, who noted that the best way to help change perspective is not to tell people the answers to their problems, but to get people together and to start talking.(11) This approach may be uncomfortable for some people because they are not accustomed to listening to other people and only know how to talk. The leader brings people together in a group, in a comfortable setting, and guides the group through a structured series of questions. The topic can be about a specific article that everyone in the group has been asked to read. It can be about the results of an environmental scanning exercise (SWOT analysis) from a strategic planning session, or an opportunity for a group to review the feedback from a customer survey or an employee survey. The goal is to encourage the participants to think critically and to share their thoughts openly.

Use of Metaphor Analysis

This use of organization-domain metaphor analysis brings a group of people from a common organization, with a common set of experiences, together to examine their organization from the perspective of a metaphor. David Deshler has suggested asking groups to think about their organization if were a machine, a family, a Monopoly Game, or the military.(12) This writer has had success in a variety of work settings with the use of sports as a metaphor to stimulate reflective learning. Manufacturing organizations often relate well to a conversation about how the factory is similar to a football game. Office groups can relate to a fast paced team sport like basketball. Individuals with similar functions who are spread out widely across a company, like purchasing managers and public relations managers can reflect on their organization as if it were a game of golf. In each of these cases, employees are encouraged to discuss the organization from the perspective of the metaphor, leading to very interesting revelations that will challenge perspectives.

Discussion of Critical Incidents

Stephen Brookfield has advanced the practice of using real world circumstances in a setting among peer learners to examine their assumptions about many facets of life. (13) In the workplace, co-workers can be assembled to review information about a critical incident. This could be the loss of an important customer, a quality failure in production, a sentinel event in a health care setting, an industrial accident, or an environmental mishap. A facilitator asks the participants to identify the operating assumptions that were in place that enable things to go amiss. The purpose is not to identify who is at fault, but to understand what people thought should be happening; what they thought was actually happening; and whether anyone recognized that a problem was developing.

Case Studies

Most readers who have participated in a graduate seminar in management recognize the case study as a popular method for reflective learning. Everyone who will participate in the discussion reads the same case study and a facilitator guides the discussion to bring out important points about meaning perspectives and meaning transformations. The Harvard Business Review provides many excellent articles that can be used as case studies, along with numerous examples published in graduate level textbooks on Operations Management. Likewise, Deming, Juran, and Crosby all included interesting examples in their major works that can be used as case studies in a workshop. The goal of the case study is not to show how ignorant another organization was, but to stimulate discussion about the assumptions being made in that organization and how close those assumptions are to the participants’ organization when it comes to issues pertaining to quality.

Art Exercises

Leah Burns has provided many examples of how art can serve as a vehicle for dialogue and exploration regarding dominant meaning perspectives in a community that are also effective in a work setting. (14)

A basic exercise that can generate a surprising level of critical examination regarding the nature of an organization is to ask a group of supervisors or team leaders, or the staff in a quality department, to work in small groups of four or five people, with each group working independently on an easel to draw a picture that interprets their organization. Then, each small group is asked to share their drawing with the larger group and to explain why they described the organization in the manner that they decided on. This process can bring out the unstated beliefs that are shared in an organization that may not be at all consistent with the organization’s stated policies and practices. My favorite example is a group of supervisors who drew their work group as a line of ants marching toward a far off mountain, while a cloud labeled as “management” rained down upon them. This drawing crystalized the unspoken shared perspectives in the workplace and led to more open discussion about the trust and communication between upper management and team leaders.

Force Field Analysis

The field of systems thinking was significantly influenced by the German social scientist, Kurt Lewin, who invented the method known as Force Field Analysis.(15) As a form of reflective learning, Force Field Analysis compels people to look at the organization from a broader systems perspective by identifying a specific objective to be accomplished (or a change to be made), identifying the internal and external forces that will support the change and the internal and external forces that will resist the change. This process helps people reflect on how their status quo is maintained by a balance of forces known as homeostasis. To create change, the participants must identify actions to upset the balance through some combination of strengthening the supporting forces and weakening the resisting forces. The process of this discussion can result in significant perspective transformation.

Root Cause Analysis

As a methodology, root cause analysis has its origins in the Nuclear Navy with the insistent expectation for questioning everything that was the hallmark of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s leadership style.(16) Most root cause analysis methodologies were developed by engineers and officers engaged in designing and deploying propulsion units and fuel for nuclear submarines. These methods later came to be embraced at nuclear power generation stations and in all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle before becoming embraced by the manufacturing and health care sectors. Regardless of the specific method employed – questioning to the void, event and cause factor analysis, barrier analysis, fault tree analysis, and other options – the objective is to stimulate critical thinking about the work setting. The criticism of some root cause analysis is that in only goes as far as identifying what Kepner and Tregoe identified as the “immediate cause” and does not move on to “thinking beyond the fix.”(17) Dean Gano, one of the earliest teachers of root cause analysis who came out of the nuclear setting, has expressed the concern that some root cause methods are only being taken to a point where blame can be assigned.(18) If the root cause analysis discussion has not gone deep enough to shed light on beliefs and practices (meaning perspectives) that are creating systemic problems in the organization, it may not have gone deep enough to provide reflective learning.

Perspectives on Teaching Quality Methods

There are some key concepts from the adult education body of knowledge that are useful to any quality professional engaged in any form of teaching. These concepts can help us design effective learning experiences, engage participants in learning that will be retained, verify that learning has occurred, and be aware of how an emerging understanding of quality methods and concepts actually changes the way that people think and perceive the world around them.  There are four key concepts we should consider.

Be Learner Centered

Often, when we are asked to teach, we jump in and plan how to teach what we are interested in and what we know. Instead, it is important to understand what the learner needs to learn and focus our efforts on that. Adult learners have a low tolerance for any educational activity that does not get to the point and help them learn what they want and need to know.  Of course sometimes the learner does not know what they do not know, so the designer of a learning activity must consider how to introduce their students to ideas that the students do not know even exist.

So, as Steven Covey would say, begin with the end in mind. (19) Define what the learner should know and be able to do at the end of the class, demonstration, or workshop. Tell the participants at the beginning what it is they are going to learn by the end. When you define learning outcomes, you are setting the expectation for where the learner is going and gaining their buy-in in participating in the process.

Stick to the plan. Nothing is worse than sitting in a workshop while a teacher wanders off the subject and starts talking about his favorite topic or expressing her opinion about anything that is not relevant to the learning outcomes.

One way to remain learner-centered is to use the “What, Why, How” model for designing your teaching activity. Start by telling participants what they are going to be learning. Then provide a brief reason as to why it is important for them to understand this subject and know how to apply it. This provides motivation to listen up and be engaged. Then, involve them in an activity that shows them how it is done and that draws them into actively participating in the learning experience.

Avoid the trap of trying to teach participants everything they might possibly need to know about quality methods and philosophies. Most laymen do not need to know how to create a statistical process control chart, but they need to understand the difference between common causes and special causes of variation and how these charts may reveal the nature of variation in a process.

For example, as part of the orientation process for new employees, training could include an overview of the work process using a flow chart, specific instructions on inspections and other quality-related measures that safeguard product or process quality, with specific illustrations of what happens if these actions are omitted or done poorly. This explains what needs to be done and why it is important. Then follow up with specific information on how the specific tasks are done.

For work teams, it would be appropriate to provide training in the concept of process improvement (what), the competitive advantage and cost savings and job security that come from process improvement (why), and methods for data collection, flow charting, the use of cause-and-effect diagrams, and other basic quality tools (how).

Create Experiences

Adults do not always learn a lot from lectures and “death by power point”, but teachers often think that is what people expect. Some adults do learn best by reading orlistening, but many learn best by doing. For example, nothing is more powerful for helping people understand the importance of variation in a stable repeatable process than the bead box experiment that Dr. Deming used. Similarly, a demonstration with a quincunx, as Dr. Juran used to conduct, goes a long way to helping people understand the theory of the distribution of samples into bell shape curves, bi-modal distributions, and other concepts that are vital to understanding variation.

Tell people what they are going to learn, give them the reason why they should learn this, and then teach them how by engaging them in action. If you are teaching auditing, engage people in creating an audit checklist. If you are teaching root cause analysis, involve them in a case study where they can practice event and causal factor analysis and barrier analysis. If you are teaching basic quality improvement methods, give participants real situations to flow chart and develop cause and effect diagrams. If you are teaching creative problem solving, involve people in brainwriting, developing mind maps, and using the TRIZ methodology. If you are teaching quality management, let people analyze their organization using the Baldrige Criteria or participate in a discussion regarding how the organization compares to the current ISO 9001 criteria.

Back this up by providing articles, written handouts, or online references that enable participants to reinforce their experience with written references. There are hundreds of excellent reference materials available on the ASQ web site and the nist.gov web site for the Baldrige Program.

Test For Understanding

One of the most common mistakes we make when we serve as educators is to ask people if they understand what we just told them. In almost every case, people will answer in the affirmative, even if they have no clue what you just said. Asking for people to simply confirm their understanding will lead to the mistaken assumption on your part that learning has actually taken place, which can undermine all of your subsequent efforts to build on an understanding that does not really exist.

Rather than ask for confirmation, build in a test for understanding at each step along the way. A test for understanding can take many forms. It could be as simple as asking someone to repeat back what they heard. Instructors can test for understanding by using case studies and break-out sessions to practice concepts. If you use break- out sessions you must visit each break-out group to monitor activities or requires each break-out group to report back on their work. In some cases it is effective and efficient to divide participants into pairs and have them check each other to see if they have learned the necessary information. Direct observation of someone performing a task is an even stronger test for understanding. In some cases, a written test or examination is the best way to ensure someone has learned how to perform a task. In  other cases, a written essay that requires students to explain, illustrate, or compare and contrast ideas and methods is highly effective.  Just as we can have a graded approach to quality, where the degree of control and assurance increases as the risks associate with the situation escalate, consider having a graded approach to testing for understanding as the risk associated with failing to comprehend a topic increase. The more critical the knowledge, the greater the rigor should be in the test for understanding.

In essence, the test for understanding provides evidence that the learning has occurred. When you teach, there are learning objectives that you want to achieve, and these should be evaluated by testing for understanding. If your learner cannot demonstrate understanding, then you need to re-teach. Allowing someone to do a job when they cannot demonstrate understanding is just begging for major quality failures that will have costly consequences in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction, legal, and safety concerns.

When testing for understanding, it is important to recognize that there may be levels of sophistication in what you are expecting people to learn. In a workshop on quality at a workplace, it may suffice to ask individuals to construct a flow chart of their work process and identify the types of data being collected to control and improve quality. In a graduate course on quality, it might be appropriate to ask a student to compare and contrast the model for the “diagnostic and remedial journeys” put forward by Dr. Joseph Juran with the Six Sigma model for improvement.

For example, your organization may decide it needs to engage employees in using root cause analysis and you are charged with providing training to accomplish this. You review several resources and confirm that there are a variety of methods that can be used, such as questioning to the void, event and causal factor analysis, and barrier analysis. (20) So, you prepare a presentation on methods you think will be most effective for your organizational setting and you design some case studies for break-out sessions to use to practice applying these methods. You explain what root cause analysis is, how it benefits the organization, and then you show people how it can be done with several methods. The case studies allow people to have direct experience with using different methods. As each break-out group presents their work to the total class, you are able to listen to their feedback and test for understanding.

Understanding Praxis

Praxis is a term used by adult educators to describe how the things we learn influence how we perceive the world around us, and how our perceptions of the world influence what and how we learn. (21)  Dr. Deming referred to his teachings about variation as “profound knowledge” because the realization of the influence of variation in all of the processes occurring around us will reshape how we perceive the world. (22) While Philip Crosby’s statement that “quality is free” may sound like a slogan to some people, it actually can redefine how people perceive the world in terms of the high cost of poor quality and the cost effectiveness of doing something right the first time, and every time. (23) Our understanding of quality shapes how we perceive the world.

This is why many quality professionals are so passionate about their work. It is not simply about the application of a group of tools and methods, but involves a way of thinking and a way of perceiving the world around us. The meaning perspectives in the quality discipline provide a comprehensive approach for how we think about change that has its foundations in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Therefore, when we serve as teachers, we are introducing people to a transformative process in which their view of the world may be shifted. We may be challenging underlying assumptions about how the world operates and disrupting the status quo by providing people with knowledge that empowers them to shape the workplace and the world around them. There is a strong relationship between quality and education when it comes to performance excellence. Organizations that skimp on developing procedures and providing training risk becoming “tribal cultures” where knowledge is not managed by the organization, resulting in costly problems with quality and safety. (24)

From the perspective of root causes of quality problems, investment in procedures and training are critical safeguards in every organizational setting. Only management can be blamed for poor results if employees do not know how to perform a job but are allowed to do so anyway. Once trained, employees are accountable for performing their jobs correctly unless the organization puts some obstacle in the way. The quality practitioner must be engaged in evaluating the sufficiency of these educational practices and be engaged as an active educator. In many cases, the training and procedures function is too important to be relegated to the Human Resources area, where it is a sub-function, but should be placed under the direction of the Quality Assurance manager.

(1) Mezirow, Jack. Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Altshuller, G.S. Creativity as an Exact Science. Gordon and Breach, 1984.

(4) Boud, D., Keogh, R., and Walker, D. (eds) Reflection: Turning Experiences into Learning. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.

(5) Dewey, John. How We Think. New York: Prometheus Books, 1991.

(6) Freire, Paulo. The Politics of Education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1985.

(7) Deming, W. Edwards. Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position. Boston: MIT Press, 1982.

(8) Crosby, Philip B., Quality Is Free. New York: New American Library, 1979.

(9) Freire.

(10) Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Macmillan Co., 1929.

(11) Horton, Myles. The Myles Horton Reader. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

(12) Deshler, David. in Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990.

(13) Brookfield, Stephen. Developing Critical Thinkers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987.

(14) Burns, Leah. in Wild Fire: Art as Activism. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2006.

(15) Lewin, Kurt. Field Theory in Social Sciences. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951.

(16) Rickover, Hyman. Education and Freedom. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1959.

(17) Kepner, Charles, and Tregoe, Benjamin. The New Rational Manager. Princeton: Princeton Research Press. 1997.

(18) Gano, Dean. Apollo Root Cause Analysis. Richland: Apollonian Productions, 2007.

(19) Steven R. Covey. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Fireside Books, New York, 1989.

(20) John R. Dew. “In Search of the Root Cause.” Quality Progress, March 1991.

(21) Paulo Friere. The Politics of Education. Bergin & Garvey Publishers, South Hadley, MA., 1985.

(22) W. Edwards Deming. Out of the Crisis. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1982.

(23) Philip B. Crosby. Quality Without Tears. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1984.

(24) John R. Dew. “Tribal Quest.” Quality Progress, December 2011.

(25) Peter Jarvis. Professional Education. Croom Helm Publishers. London: 1983.