Is sustainability the new total quality management?

Some have described sustainability as the mother of invention but, quality falls by the wayside when management focuses solely on cost

The quality movement can at times aggravate the silo-ing that my concept of the triple bottom line has sometimes promoted, at least when poorly understood.

Consider the International Standards Organization. It launched its first quality standard, ISO 9000, in 1987, focusing on the management of quality in business. Later, in 1996, it came up with its family of environmental quality standards, starting with ISO 14001. And most recently we have ISO 26000, released in 2010 and designed to bring social responsibility into the fold.

But there is no overarching framework that pulls all of this together. As a consequence, the TQM approach can potentially stifle innovation at a time when we need disruptive solutions to drive the necessary system change.

A research shows that sustainability is a mother lode of organizational and technological innovations that yield both bottom-line and top-line returns. Becoming environment-friendly lowers costs because companies end up reducing the inputs they use. In addition, the process generates additional revenues from better products or enables companies to create new businesses. In fact, because those are the goals of corporate innovation, we find that smart companies now treat sustainability as innovation's new frontier.

On the sustainability side, we often forget the intense evolutionary curve that the quality movement raced up in the 1980s as new standards and expectations triggered immense changes in business. So the fact that TQM does not yet fully embrace sustainability today does not rule out a powerful convergence in the future.

Looking back at the quality revolution, there are strong parallels with where we find ourselves today. Early on, a few businesses decided to view "quality as an opportunity rather than a cost, and their investment in TQM paid off handsomely". To make this happen, leaders had to think completely out of the box.

Rather than simply posting an inspector at the end of an assembly line," Kust and Walker recall, "Toyota, Motorola, General Electric and others integrated quality considerations earlier in their assembly lines and into processes that preceded manufacturing, such as product design and R&D. Next, those companies pushed quality considerations even further upstream by working with suppliers to develop quality standards for the materials flowing into their organisations."

Later, TQM leaders took another step, expanding quality management beyond products into behaviours. They asked how their people could collaborate more effectively to ensure high quality outcomes, every time. And this brought them to the question of zero

The term "zero defects" (ZD) was coined by Philip Crosby, who came up with a 14-step quality improvement process. This enjoyed considerable popularity through the 1960s and 1970s. A central concept was the need to "vaccinate" business leaders against what he saw as the poor quality virus, to prevent a willingness to accept "close enough" outcomes.

The roots of the zero defects movement can be traced back to the Martin Marietta Corporation, later Lockheed Martin. Years later, Crosby recalled that when the Martin Marietta embraced zero defects, employees welcomed the programme "with open arms. Everywhere it was presented, the defect rates dropped, morale improved, and there was a feeling of accomplishment. Ideas for preventing problems emerged by the batch."

Unfortunately, the zero defects approach soon hit a wall, both at Martin Marietta and elsewhere. As Crosby put it a couple of decades later, "much of the enthusiasm and activity dropped off after a year or so when it became clear in most companies that the management had feet of clay. They still wanted to deliver materials that didn't meet the requirements if that was what it took to comply with the schedule and cost obligations."

The result was that "many thought leaders came to think of the ZD approach as 'an infantile, motivation-oriented, impractical program'." The Japanese, however, thought differently – embracing much of the thinking and evolving their kaizen philosophy, focusing on "continuous improvement" and "change for the better".

Among the hostiles, interestingly, was the Godfather of Total Quality Management, W Edwards Deming – often credited with sparking the Japanese kaizen revolution. He pushed back, promoting the concept of acceptable defects, arguing that the pursuit of zero could lead to an immense waste of time, effort and money.

So, I discover, zero comes with its own heavy baggage in the world of Total Quality Management, but as the convergence accelerates between Total Quality Management and sustainability, we will see zero back in the spotlight. Our challenge, once again, will be to avoid past mistakes while, inevitably, making the interesting, necessary mistakes of the future.

Article Credits: The Guardian