The "Miseducation" of Quality

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of attending a rollicking, dynamic talk by Dr. Yvonne Simmons Howze about the roots of Quality. Maybe "rollicking" isn't the first word you think of to describe that topic; but for this talk—"The Miseducation of Quality"—it's hard to think of a better. Dr. Howze's energy was infectious, and she covered so much material with such élan that it was like drinking from a fire hose. I'll try to give you one or two of the main points, but there's a lot more where this came from.

Her fundamental point is simple. Too often we are miseducated to think of Quality as a collection of gimmicks and tricks to improve operational or organizational performance. You can find whole libraries on problem-solving, statistical methods, risk mitigation, and the rest. And of course these things are important. But Howze sees through, or past, all this busy-ness. She recognizes that the foundation for the whole structure is the pursuit of personal excellence. If you try to do Quality work without building on personal excellence, you will crash and burn. Several times during the talk, she reminded us of the importance of self-assessment, to understand what you truly bring to the table.

Her next step was to talk about the main threats that undermine Quality. But the critical threats that she identified are not external effects—not even "human error." They are internal events, internal to the workplace and even internal to the individual human soul:

• incivility
• burnout
• poor communication
• lack of engagement

Any one of these can destroy your Quality focus. Any one of them can make you stop caring—and, as we have discussed before, caring is the key to Quality.

But notice also that cultivating personal excellence can defend you against all four of these threats.

• If you know that you bring value to the table, you will feel confident enough that you won't be rude to others. And if someone is rude to you, you can weather it because you know it says a lot more about them than it does about you.
• If you know that you bring value to the table, you'll feel less anxiety or stress about your contributions. And you will feel confident enough to take a weekend off when you need it.
• If you really know what value you contribute, you'll be able to explain it to others. Slow down, speak from the heart, and it will come out clearly.
• And if you know your own value, you cannot help but understand how it fits into the big picture. As caring is the key to Quality, so it is impossible to be excellent and disengaged at the same time.

Dr. Howze provided a lot more information about these threats, including a battery of statistics about their frequency and their effects. Check out her published material for more of the details. And then she began to talk about solutions. Of course in a sense the solution to all of them is to cultivate personal excellence, but fortunately she broke that advice down into more manageable pieces.

To begin, she reminded us—one more time—how important self-assessment is. And she referenced a number of self-assessment tools from her website: some complex, others very simple. Then, she identified what she calls the "Five C's." These are qualities to strive for in daily work, qualities that support the journey towards excellence:

• curiosity
• creativity
• courage
• civility
• communication

Dr. Howze explained what each of these looks like in practice, and gave us examples from her own experience. Step by step, she showed us how each of these qualities helped to drain the four big threats out of the room, so that people working together can focus on doing their best. I don't have room to tell her stories here—she really did cover a lot of ground!—and in any even they are hers to tell. But many of us must have similar stories of our own, and in any event the point was well made.

An engaging talk. A dynamic speaker. And a foundation of personal excellence. Who could ask for anything more?