Thinking and Actions for Improvement

While the early 20th century saw many people contributing ideas and methods that would prevent unwanted change from disrupting processes and systems, others were exploring the thinking and actions that would enable the improvement of existing processes.

The challenge for the concept and methods of improvement was to move from random acts of improvement to creating organized and systematic approaches to improvement.  One of the primary contributors in this arena was Alex Osborn, whose work has had a profound impact on many quality professionals.

Osborn studied the evolution and efficacy of suggestion systems as an early method for identifying potential improvements in organizations.  According to Osborn, the first organized suggestion system was established in the 1889s at the William Denny shipyards in Scotland.(1)

Today, we often overlook the impact that the Great War of 1914 – 1918 had on European and American industry.  In the United States, companies followed a model developed in Great Britain and actively encouraged the creation of employee Works Councils and cooperated with labor unions in thousands of factories to improve work processes as part of a popular movement referred to as Workplace Democracy.(2)  This included the wide use of suggestion systems.  Osborn identified “the first full-fledged suggestion system” as being installed by the U.S. Navy in 1918.(3)

In the post-war era, concurrent with Shewhart’s examination of variation, Osborn began to examine how people create ideas and how the generation of ideas for suggestion systems could be enhanced.  As part of his analysis, he also identified reasons that people in organizations did not bring forward the ideas that they had.   To some degree, Osborn’s recommendations were connected to the new infantry methods that had evolved during the war.

As the stalemate created by trench warfare continued on and on during the Great War, the French and the Germans developed a new concept in organizing front-line soldiers.  Instead of sending massive waves of identically  equipped soldiers “over the top” to be mowed down by machine guns, they organized small squads of soldiers equipped with a mix of weaponry – rifles, flame-throwers, and small machine-guns – that would “storm” an enemy trench line at a specific point.

Thinking about this approach, Osborn invented what he called brainstorming in 1939.  He later described the process as “using the brain to storm a creative problem – and to do so in commando fashion, with each stormer audaciously attacking the same objective.” (4)

The Second World War created a renewed interest both in the topic of quality control and the need for establishing organized and systematic approaches to improving work processes so that more amounts of reliable war material could be produced.   Based on their experience some twenty years earlier, the federal government established a War Production Board that fostered union and management collaborations and championed the re-introduction of suggestion systems.(5)   Osborn noted that the U.S. Army created a suggestion system that yielded over 20,000 new ideas in 18 months, saving over $43 million, at a time when a million dollars was a lot of money.

The War Production Board also recruited numerous academics and experts in manufacturing to teach thousands of workshops on controlling and improving quality in war production settings.  This included quality experts like Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Joseph Juran.  Osborn’s contribution was to offer brainstorming as a group process that could be used to generate ideas for improvement.  The overall impact of these combined efforts was huge in terms of increased productivity of war materials.(6) 

In the post-war era, General Douglas McArthur initiated many efforts to rebuild Japan’s economy and to re-order their society along more democratic lines.  One effort included sending American experts to teach quality control and quality improvement methods to help improve Japanese industry.  This generated significant interaction between American and Japanese quality leaders such as Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, Dr. Joseph Juran, and Dr. W. Edwards Deming.  The Japanese embraced these ideas and methods and significantly expanded this body of knowledge.  When a national award for quality was established in Japan, it was named the Deming Prize.  Both Ishikawa and Juran devoted significant efforts over many years to organize and publish works on quality control and quality improvement that provided practitioners with a wide range of ideas and methods. Both men contributed greatly to our understanding of quality improvement methods and the social dynamics of making improvements within an organization.   

However, as it had after in the years immediately following the Great War, America industry in the years after the Second World War, returned to struggles between labor and management, with renewed emphasis on control over people instead of working with employees to control and improve processes.  Statistical process control, which was widely taught in the 1940’s, disappeared from the business school curriculum.  The quality of American manufacturing faltered, except in some companies that supported military and aerospace applications, which is where Phillip Crosby began to work as a quality control inspector.(7 )  To keep the understanding of quality alive, a small group of quality experts banded together after the war to establish the American Society for Quality Control.

While most American companies drifted away from efforts to engage employees in organized efforts to study and improve the quality of work processes, the Japanese focused on education and encouraging their employees in this area in what would become known as Quality Circles.  The tool kits for quality circles combined concepts that were mostly developed in the West from industrial engineering, statistical methods, and Osborn’s approach to brainstorming.

Systematic Improvement

Dr. Joseph Juran made many contributions to the quality body of knowledge and field of practice, including the development of the “pareto principle” and he served as the grandfather of the Quality Circle movement in Japan.  In the 1960’s, Juran also defined the core concepts that moved improvement from being a sporadic approach to an organized systematic approach to thinking and acting in organizations, which he articulated in his book, Managerial Breakthrough.(8)

In this work, Juran observed that improvement required two journeys – a diagnostic journey (in which a process is analyzed) – and a remedial journey (in which improvements are implemented).  Despite the insights that the diagnostic journey may yield, Ideas for improvement often languish, Juran noted, because of many conditions in organizations that resist change.  These conditions ae often anchored in competing belief systems in an organization’s thinking.

Juran advocated for the formal establishment of management councils to champion the diagnosis of work process and to oversee the implementation of improvements as part of a continuous process.  He called for organizations to establish a formal Quality Plan, similar to an organization’s financial planning.(9)  Phillip Crosby echoed the concept of a quality council in organizations to build quality improvement into an organization’s structure, and both men devoted years to teaching organizations how to do this.  In order for quality improvement to become systematic in an organization, there must be a permanent structure that drives assessment as a sine qua non.  Improvement cannot be sustained on an ad hoc basis.  It must be embedded in the organization in a fundamental, radical sense.

The Boiling Point

Things reached a boiling point for the quality discipline in the 1980’s when it became apparent that Japanese companies (and some European companies) were crushing their American competition by producing higher quality products at lower costs, thereby dominating markets in steel, automotive, electronics, and other major industries. 

America then “re-discovered” Deming’s work in a documentary produced by NBC called “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”  George Washington University quickly began offering four-day seminars with photo-copied handouts of Deming’s notes.  Juran had recently established an Institute that hosted major conferences where hundreds of companies shared the results of their quality improvement efforts based on his writings and a comprehensive videotaped training program.  The Crosby Quality College in Winter Park, Florida, was soon packed full of participants, as well.  Conference attendance and membership in the American Society for Quality Control exploded, along with groups such as the Quality and Productivity Management Association, the Association for Quality and Participation, and the work at the American Productivity Center in Houston, TX.  Conferences, consultants, articles, and books proliferated and many companies were struggling to find their way forward amid competition among competing advocates devoted to different “gurus.”

Numerous contributors who had been working diligently for decades also stepped into the spotlight, such as Dr. Taguchi, Dr. Imai, Dr. Kendo, and Dr. Figenbaum.  Systematic approaches to organizational benchmarking and intense coordinated events to drive improvement (kaizen) received important attention.

Many corporations rushed to establish their own in-house brand of quality improvement, often separate from their established quality control organizations.  This led to many similar efforts to brand and market companies’ approaches to quality improvement, with one of the most successful becoming known as Six Sigma, which came out of Motorola.

When quality improvement reached this boiling point, the concepts began to spill over from manufacturing into other areas.  A hotbed of academic and industry experts in east Tennessee, for example, established several major consulting firms and Deming’s work inspired a fresh look at quality in education, centered around assessment.(10 )

Military contractors organized their own national conferences and rallied around the description of Total Quality Management (TQM) in 1989 as their approach to quality control and improvement.   As a framework for conceptualizing the quality field, TQM took root in many countries and remains a popular framework for describing the quality field.

The American Society for Quality Control broadened their scope by becoming the American Society for Quality and established new divisions in education and health care, while almost every branch of manufacturing had an industry-specific division within the Society that hosted conferences, newsletters, and other standards and publications.

Improvement Methods

Any approach to quality improvement begins with some form of assessment that identifies the need for improvement.   This assessment could be from customer complaints, high scrap rates, expensive re-work, delays in meeting schedules, wasted materials, audits, and other forms of evaluation.  The great quality gurus taught methods for improvement and encouraged organizations to not just engage in random acts of improvement, but to use their assessment processes to systematically identify areas for improvement and a structured approach to making improvements.

Dr. Joseph Juran proposed that quality improvement be seen as involving two journeys – a diagnostic journey and a remedial journey.(11)  This offers a logical way to organize the various methodologies that are frequently brought to bear on improving a process or system.

Diagnostic analysis of a work process is generally best performed in a team setting – involving everyone who is engaged in the process.  This group effort enables all of the relevant information and points of view to be brought together in one place and at one time.  Of course it can be difficult to organize a team to diagnose and improve a process in an autocratic work setting where people may exercise self-censorship to avoid upsetting management.

There are a variety of diagnostic methods that come from many sources and academic disciplines.  Flow Charting the work process has been advocated by Deming, Juran, and Crosby as one of the most basic and important steps in diagnosing a process.  It requires everyone involved in the process to participate in fully and thoroughly defining the process work flow, and then allows the team to examine the flow for re-work, bottlenecks, areas where there may be incorrect communication between work groups, and areas where data should be collected.(12)

Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa developed a variety of logic diagrams commonly referred to as Fishbone Diagrams.(13)  One of these diagrams enables a team to identify the areas of causes that will influence the outcomes or effects in a work process, known as a cause enumeration diagram.  Ishikawa proposed that causal areas such as equipment, procedures, materials, and manpower be used as common categories, but teams can add the environment, or any other category they wish.  The process classification diagram combines the benefits of the flow chart and the cause and effect diagram by constructing a flow chart and identifying causal factors that impact outcomes at each step in the work process.

The Quality Circle movement introduced many forms of basic data collection and analysis for work groups to use in understanding and improving their work processes.(14)  This includes collecting count data, organizing data into histograms, the use of data matrixes, and the use of scatter diagrams and organizing data into Pareto charts.  Data for analysis can come from inspection of work processes, interviews with customers, surveys, and audits.

Statistical analysis, through the understanding and use of control charts, process capability studies, the study of processes and specifications, frequency distributions, and experimental design, is a fundamental tool for quality improvement.(15)  These methods are among the major contributions of Dr. Shewhart, Dr. Deming, and Dr. Taguchi.  However, as Dr. Deming noted in his lectures, the design and implementation of a quality control program or an improvement project using statistical methods should only be done under the direction of someone with at least a Master of Science degree in Statistics.  A certificate as a Six Sigma Black Belt does not equate with a graduate degree in statistics from an accredited university.

As important as the diagnostic methodologies may be, it is also important to be able to deploy remedial methods, as well.  Once you know what needs to be improved, finding and implementing the best actions can be tricky.

Alex Osborn’s approach to brainstorming may be very useful in finding the best action to take.  The use of Nominal Group Technique may also be very important, or the combination of brainstorming and NGT in a process such as brain-writing.

Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Analysis may be an important methodology to use in assessing how to implement an improvement by understanding the forces in the system that will support the change and those forces that will resist the change.(16)  The change agent must plan how to weaken the resisting forces and strengthen the supporting forces.

In some cases, the necessary action for making an improvement is obvious, based on what the data has revealed.  In other cases, it may require the use of some of the tools covered in the section on innovation on this web site, such as TRIZ.

And, in most cases, effective implementation of an improvement will benefit from the creation of an Action Plan that describes who will take what action and when they will take it, with a time for follow-up built into the plan to make sure it has been accomplished and that the improvements are working. 

Quality as Cultural Radiation

What this section has illustrated is the evolution of the thinking and understanding of concepts and methodologies that expanded from a relatively small group of people (such as Deming, Juran, Crosby, Ishikawa, the founders of the American Society for Quality Control in 1946, and the early members of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers) into a global phenomenon.

The evolution of ideas over time and distance is a historical process that the British historian, Arnold Toynbee, described as “cultural radiation.” (17)  Toynbee used the development of the coin to illustrate how cultural radiation functions.  A few thousand years ago, someone in the general vicinity of the Indus River came up with the idea of creating a metal coin as an instrument to facilitate trade and store wealth in valuable metals.  The idea caught on and slowly radiated out in all directions.  Kingdoms in Mesopotamia began imprinting images on their coins.  People in China put holes in the middle of their coins in order to carry them on string.  This process of cultural radiation (the adaptation of a desirable change that results in what we consider to be progress, if we go back to Whitehead) is universal in human history.  Paper, silk, gunpowder and porcelain were all developed in China and radiated out around the world.  Likewise, a numerical system that originated in the Arab world has become almost universal across all societies.  Cultural radiation certainly applies to the evolution of the cognitive processes we know as quality improvement.  Today, this cognitive system we know as “quality” exists in various conditions all around the world.  However, not all organizations embrace this cognitive system in its radical (root) sense.

Resistance is Not Futile

While the observations that Dr. Juran offered concerning the diagnostic journey have been widely embraced and rebranded as approaches such as Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, far less has been said about the issues that he identified related to resistance to change.  Indeed, many quality practitioners who have led, championed, and taught quality improvement concepts and methods have encountered the moment when improvement runs into a wall of resistance.  Many have been cautioned that they were going from preaching to meddling.

Juran tapped into a completely different set of academic fields in his work on overcoming resistance to change, noting how he was inspired by the work of the anthropologist, Margaret Mead.   In a dinner conversation at a Juran Conference banquet, Dr. Juran stated to this author that he thought his writing on the topic of overcoming resistance to change was probably the best thing he wrote.

Juran opened up the opportunity for quality practitioners to explore the issues of organizational culture, group dynamics, autonomous work groups, socio-technical redesign, and teambuilding as part of our body of knowledge.  This included bringing in the work of social scientists, such as Kurt Lewin, with his understanding of systems theory, and the use of force field analysis to organize change.(18)  It led to the recognition of systems theory as a cornerstone of the criteria for the Baldrige program.

Likewise, many of the “Deadly Diseases” that Dr. Deming identified in his writings fall within this broad area of cultural norms –based on belief systems - within organizations. (19)  One must dig deeply to understand what the actual belief system in an organization really is in order to appreciate the root causes of behaviors that resist conformance to requirements, improvements, and innovation in organizations.  For more often than not, a radical commitment to quality as the sine qua non is not what is embraced.  We will explore the competing belief systems in other sections of this web site.

Dr. Juran’s work reinforces the understanding that the quality discipline is rooted in Whitehead’s notions of change and that we must create and nurture systems of thinking to assess our organizations, control undesired changes, improve our processes and systems, and in some cases, re-invent them entirely.

(1) Alex Osborn. Applied Imagination. Scribners, 1953.

(2) John Robert Dew. Empowerment and Democracy in the Workplace. Quorum Books, 1997.

(3) Osborn.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Dorethea deSchweinitz. Labor and Management in a Common Enterprise. Harvard University Press, 1949.

(6) Osborn.

(7) Philip Crosby. Quality Is Free. Mentor Books, 1979.

(8)   Joseph Juran. Managerial Breakthrough. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Trudy Banta et. al.  Assessment in Practice. Jossey-Bass, 1996.

(11) Juran.

(12) Joseph Juran and Frank Gryna. Quality Planning and Analysis. McGraw-Hill, 1970.

(13) Kaoru Ishikawa. Guide to Quality Control.  Asian Productivity Center, 1974.

(14) Ibid.

(15) Western Electric. Statistical Quality Control Handbook. Western Electric, 1956.

(16) Kurt Lewin. Field Theory In Social Science. Harper and Row, 1951.

(17) Arnold Toynbee. A Study of History. Oxford University Press, 1946.

(18) Lewin.

(19) W. Edwards Deming. Out of the Crisis. MIT Press, 1982.