More sense of proportion

Quality management is first and foremost risk management. We want to prevent bad products or services from coming onto the market and thus damaging customers and, ultimately, companies and institutions as a tit-for-tat response. That is why we live today in a culture of avoidance and responsibility. Risks should be avoided, and preferably eliminated altogether. Starting with Six Sigma, quality management is driven to the point of faultlessness and then even hyped up as a panacea for increasing corporate success (1). But is this approach at all realistic or perhaps even counterproductive?

QM - a "totalitarian" system?

Grateful consumers of quality management measures are the management floors of companies and institutions, which are exposed to a flood of liability lawsuits. With increased quality controls, they are trying to master the litigation risk and the associated litigation and compensation costs. However, the hammer of causal liability is looming ever heavier. Even if it can be proven that all operational processes were carried out with care, it is sufficient to prove that an injury had its origin on a specific company site,

Capital error in QM

to hold the incriminated company liable. Fearing lawsuits, expensive D&O (Directors and Officers) insurance policies are taken out, and attempts are made to develop quality control into a totalitarian system, with responsibility for this being delegated to lower management levels. This is a capital mistake, since compliance is demonstrably reduced as a result, as studies show (2).

The CEO of a large service company once showed me his file collection full of Standard Operating Procedures. Behind his back, well over 1,000 detailed operating procedures resulted in several file-lines, each three meters long. He himself admitted to mastering only half a dozen of these SOPs. Employees have a keen sense of who is participating and who is opting out. When quality management degenerates into lip service, the overall yield drops. Top management must always be present in the QM circle.

Quality communication - global

Unfortunately, numerous measures to improve quality have far too little effect - because they do not get through. The sheer mass is literally overwhelming, overwhelming for those who are supposed to carry them out. This reduces the chances of optimally adapting production and quality management processes. The gap between rapid change and adaptation time frustrates the executive bodies of quality management (Figure 1).

In the "overkill" of ever-changing requirements, the planning specifications of QM hardly get through properly anymore: Since quality management is generally communicated as a "top-down approach 

Plan specifications percolate

(2), a good part of the measures seep away halfway, whereby the fact that products are now produced on one side of the world and transported across seven oceans to the consumer does not make the task any easier. Global trade flows lead to the highest demands on safety communication. What the information culture in quality and safety communication should look like:

• Comprehensive, rapid and open flow of information
• Quick decisions
• Feedback
• Encourage self-initiative
• Promote cooperative behaviour
• Do not overload the cart

It is true that there are repeated declarations of quality awareness in the factories. Fatally, they are reminiscent of the propaganda posters on the factories in the former Eastern Bloc countries. The reality, however, is still far from ideal. Once again, a gap is to blame for this, namely the gap between one's own demands and the available means.

The homo economicus wants the eierlegende Wollmilchsau: He wants to reduce costs and raise quality standards at the same time. But this is only possible if the greatest efficiency is applied, and this is where companies and institutions still make very serious mistakes.

When resources are lacking, the first thing that helps is a reduction to the essentials. This approach is obvious and makes economic sense. Where the damage, if it occurs, is minor, random sampling is usually sufficient in quality management instead of an extensive and labor-intensive full inspection. In times of eternally scarce

Less is more

means it is important to set the right priorities. Then less becomes more: QM must be oriented towards the Pareto optimum. Only about one fifth of all processes are really match-critical. This leaves enormous room for simplification.

The money and time that are freed up as a result can be put to better use. Production and product platforms in particular help to save money by concentrating resources. It is not for nothing that industry has been moving away from industrial conglomerates and concentrating companies on core competencies since the 1990s. Decentralized networking does make sense, but only if communication between the units remains open. Economic encapsulation leads to a bunker mentality that distracts from the common goal, namely the survival of the company as a whole.

Quality management imposed from above will fail grandiosely time and again, because lower levels comply with the requirements de jure, but do not fill them with life. The culprits of this "reform backlog" are frustrating and sometimes overloaded regulations, which are then also imposed unilaterally from above. If the requirements only come in the form of dictates, and if the dictators are then not even present during the implementation, even miserable failure is pre-programmed.

About intrapreneurship to quality goals

If the employees of a company or an institute are to become quality pioneers, they need their own guidelines oriented to reasonable lines of action. And they should ideally help to develop these themselves. This is the only way to guarantee that they identify with the task. Ideally, the entrepreneur will then be faced with a whole army of intrapreneurs who adopt the goals of their employer as their own. The American management schools speak of "empowerment ". Such an approach has a long-term focus, as it vitalizes companies/institutions throughout (5). It presupposes an entirely non-technocratic view of human beings. It is characterized by trust in the potential of the individual. This speaks through

Confidence in the potential of the individual

This is not an obstacle to effective teamwork. But where there is room for personal development and personal responsibility, and even a certain tolerance for mistakes, a learning culture is created from which the teams and subsequently the entire company benefit. Access to the necessary resources and an open approach to information are a matter of course. Only in this way can trust be created as the basis for genuine cooperation (6).

The involvement of all those involved in quality improvement brings numerous advantages. Those who are not process victims but process masters are much more motivated to go through the eternal rounds of the quality circulus and acquire them in a way that is free of contradictions. Innovative thinking along with the daily work is encouraged. This also makes it easier to achieve the goals of a continuous improvement process (CIP).

This approach is also one of the most important foundations of the psychological contract between employer and employee (7), which in turn is one of the best prerequisites for better performance through higher job satisfaction. Driving motivational factors for most employees in developed economies are the openness of management to new ideas and the possibility to influence decisions in their field of work, i.e. ultimately co-determination possibilities.

Now all employees are already working very hard on the best of all operating worlds. It therefore makes no sense to impose QC systems on all areas of work as a kind of additional burden. What the Greeks call pleonexia, the tendency to want more and more, an insatiability of will, is out of place here. In QC there is a temptation to force everything and everyone into a descriptive-prescriptive corset. Many of the ISO instructions seem unintentionally comical in this respect (chart 2).

The human being falls by the wayside in the true sense of the word, is pressed into a linear instead of a complex networked model of thinking. He then often secretly defends himself with contempt and repression in order to preserve his own ego. These are dangerous mechanisms for quality management, since the risk of completely unexpected and then uncontrollable errors increases.

All together for the benefit of the customer

A multidisciplinary approach, on the other hand, promises more success. It would make complexity manageable. Complexity does not mean chaos. I once worked in a company that had over 100 000 item master data. A company with over 100,000 customer touch points seems unmanageable. But yet, the company was very successful. For one thing, many products had a production platform as their base. The same was true for distribution. But the decisive factor was the employees. Since there were more than 60,000 of them, everyone was able to contribute his or her individual skills. This made the complexity more manageable.

At the same time, despite all the quality controls, a forgiving culture prevailed, because it was clear to everyone that with over 100,000 products, not everything could always run smoothly. But every mistake made led to information. Information that was in turn used for improvements

QM of the future is participative

could be made available. It was important to collect and analyse this information from the processes (as it were a template for the continuous improvement process) and then to make it available to quality management again.

Conclusion

The QM of the future must therefore be participatory. In addition to the auditors and clients as well as the executing QM managers and employees, customers/patients as well as suppliers up to regulators and investors also belong on board. Since the input provided is valuable expert knowledge from a wide variety of perspectives, this involvement should already take place during the planning of the QM measures (2).

Companies and institutions can learn especially much from customers and competitors. So what's wrong with an informal exchange? No one is obliged to reveal company secrets right away. The exchanged information also facilitates the work of quality management. QM is a boat with a lot of different passengers. In order for such a loaded boat to navigate well through sometimes stormy seas, it needs the ability to think non-linearly. Quality management is a complex system that can only be controlled in a network (8). This has less to do with chaos theory than with integrative interdisciplinary thinking. To achieve this, QC must be streamlined on the one hand and expanded into a networked system on the other. Unfortunately, current QC tools are integral only in their approach, but unilateral in their prescriptions and not at all designed for unforeseen changes. As a result, they fail all too often, and sometimes grandiosely. Yet it would often take very little for the wheels of the QM machine to mesh really well.