Five years ago, in one of my first posts for this blog, I argued that all the definitions of Quality that have been proposed in the literature mean effectively the same thing. Whether you talk about "conformance to requirements," or "fitness for use," or "excellence in goods and services," I argued that fundamentally you are talking about getting what you want out of those goods or services. So I proposed the umbrella-definition, "Quality means getting what you want."1 And at a workaday level, I still think that's fair.
But it turns out there were reasons behind the fight over a definition, reasons besides academic posturing. Robert Cole explains in his Managing Quality Fads (a book that I discussed two weeks ago) that American businesses saw a profound shift during the late 1970's and early 1980's in the understanding of Quality, and the different definitions served as banners or rallying cries for the contending models. So while they may all mean (more or less) the same thing today, they meant very different things in the past. Thus it can be useful to understand what these definitions meant at the time, and what the parties were fighting over.
Old model
Because we know how things turned out in the end, some commentators have blamed American managers for failing to adopt Japanese Quality methods faster than they did.2 But Cole explains clearly that such a view is profoundly unhistorical. It is simply not true to allege that American managers were stupid (most of them clearly were not) or that they were ignorant about Quality. What is true is that they understood a great deal about Quality according to a framework that Cole calls "the old model"—but this framework proved unsuccessful in head-to-head competition with the "new model" practiced by many Japanese companies. So before they could learn the new model, they had to carry out two preliminary tasks first: they had to understand that there are more than one way to think about Quality; and then they had to unlearn much of what they already knew.3
What was this "old model"? It was a way of thinking about manufacturing processes that had been responsible for a string of remarkable successes, starting with the industrialization of the American economy, and culminating—within the living memory of many managers still working in the 1970's and 1980's—with unconditional victory in World War Two as the "arsenal of democracy." And the basic principles behind the model are plausible:
Economic success comes from the division of labor, where everyone can focus on doing his own work as well as possible. This means that engineers should design products, managers should make decisions, and workers should do what they are told. Anything else means inefficiency and poor performance.
Cole's table of "quality-hostile
assumptions"4 (Click to expand.)- For most jobs, there's pretty much just one way to do them. Once you've figured out what that procedure is, and have implemented it, there's nothing more to do. Once a procedure is defined and in place, the only way to make it less expensive is to pay your workers less. (If your workers are unionized, that means moving overseas to a cheaper country.)5
- These two facts—the division of labor, and the one-and-only way to do most jobs—mean that once an engineer has finished creating a design, most of the important decisions have already been made. At that point, the only degree of variability remaining is in how strictly the design is implemented, and in how carefully the procedure is followed. Stick to the design, and you'll have a good product; deviate, and you won't.
- Products have to be "good enough," which means there is a "quality floor" beneath which they must not be allowed to sink. But no customer is going to pay for a gold-plated shovel, so it is foolish to throw money after a chimerical quest for perfection.6
- We know what customers want. We've seen time and again that they want products they don't already have. So if we make the products—and history shows that we are fantastically productive at making things!—customers will buy them.
There's more, of course. And I have included a summary of what Cole calls "quality-hostile assumptions" in the inset picture above. But it is important to understand that these assumptions were not stupid! In the event, they were indeed overturned by the new model of Quality. But each of the principles I listed has a superficial plausibility to it. And the overall model had been so successful in recent history that it looked like madness to question it.7
New model
The new model of Quality reversed many of the assumptions of the old model. In some ways this is unsurprising, because it grew out of a historical situation that was nearly the opposite of the confident, successful American experience. Japan, after all, lost the Second World War, and her industrial plant had been largely reduced to rubble by American bombers. Japanese management responded to this catastrophe by mobilizing all Japanese—and in particular all employees—to support a collective effort to rebuild and regrow. In the face of a national calamity, everyone was asked to contribute, in any way they could.8
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| Cole's table comparing the old and new quality models.13 (Click to expand.) |
Early consequences are that industrial processes are never permanently fixed. They are always subject to improvement.10 Also, individual employees are not locked into a single role forever: all employees are assumed to be learners and potential problem-solvers.11
And then feedback effects begin to appear. Improved methods mean less rework. But less rework means less cost, so high-quality manufacturing processes can be cheaper than low-quality ones—in direct contradiction to the expectations of the old model.12
The old model argued that continual improvement would run aground on the law of diminishing returns: it would take ever more cost and effort to make ever smaller improvements in anything. But the new model understood that there are always many targets for improvement. You can make this aspect of the job a little better, and then turn around to improve a different one. Briefly, you can make improvement continual by regularly picking new things to improve.14
What's more, it turns out that customers are willing to pay more for products that work better and last longer! So an emphasis on superior product quality entails greater market share as well as lower costs. In other words, increased product quality drives improved corporate profitability. And an overall focus on customer satisfaction provides an effective framework to organize all these other efforts.15
What about the definitions?
With this background, it is easier to see the competing definitions of Quality as slogans or ideological commitments to one model or the other.
The most obvious of these is Philip Crosby's definition: Quality is conformance to requirements.16 This definition is foundational to the old model. Remember, in that model the engineer designs the product and makes all the important decisions; once the design is complete, the best outcome is produced by conforming exactly to the design and the process ... in other words, to the requirements. Nothing more is needed in order to achieve Quality, and nothing more is wanted.
ISO 9000:2015 agrees with Crosby, in definition 3.6.2: "degree to which a set of inherent characteristics (3.10.1) of an object (3.6.1) fulfils requirements (3.6.4)."
The other pole is represented by Joseph Juran's definition: Quality is fitness for use. "Use" is what the customer does with the product or service, and "fitness" just means that it works. So Juran's definition means, in effect, that Quality is whatever the customer says it is. This is an extreme statement of the new model that Quality depends on customer satisfaction.
W. Edwards Deming and the American Society for Quality try to bridge the gap between the models. Deming calls out both sides by saying, "Good quality means a predictable degree of uniformity and dependability [old model] with a quality standard suited to the customer [new model]." The ASQ, for their part, define that, "Quality denotes an excellence in goods and services, especially to the degree they conform to requirements [old model] and satisfy customers [new model]."
In any event, the battles are over. For the time being, the new model of Quality has won the day. So we can afford the generous conviction that everyone who talks about Quality probably means more or less the same thing. But I think it can be valuable to understand how we got where we are.
Gosh, in all this discussion I never explained my own position. In case it's not obvious from everything else I have written here for the last five years, I throw my support firmly behind the new model. There have been too many cases where a company or an organization worked out a detailed plan, executed it flawlessly, and the results were just no good for anyone. (*cough* Edsel! *cough*) So I think that Quality ultimately has to mean goodness—and that for something to be good, it must (among other things) be good for someone in particular.17 Therefore I take the side of the customer in this debate between models.
At a theoretical level, I'm fond of the simplicity of the "innocuous truism" formulated by Robert Pirsig: "Quality is what you like."18 You can probably see the influence of Pirsig in my own definition at the top of this essay.
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1 More exactly, I went on to explain, "Whether you are talking with your manager or your auditor or a technician on the line, if there's a question about the relevance of this or that element of the system just ask, 'Are we getting what we want? Do we need this element in order to make sure we continue to get what we want?' If yes, the element belongs in your QMS .... If no, not."
2 See, for example, this famous satirical pseudo-advertisement.
3 In fact, Cole argues statistically that workers with deep backgrounds in traditional quality control functions were mostly passed over when companies began to create Vice President of Quality positions in the 1980's and 1990's. It was easier for their companies to "learn" new methods by promoting new men than it was for the employees themselves. "[The] overwhelming majority of the 174 vice presidents for quality did not have a career in quality prior to assuming their vice presidential role.... [Of] the Fortune 500 quality leaders surveyed, only 9% had quality responsibilities in their third previous job." Robert E. Cole, Managing Quality Fads: How American Business Learned to Play the Quality Game (New York, Oxford: Oxfor University Press, 1999), p. 44.
4 Ibid., p. 76.
5 Ibid., p. 50.
6 Ibid., p. 47.
7 Ibid., p. 48.
8 "Various authors have noted that Japanese companies tend to magnify even small challenges as a strategy to mobilize all employees on behalf of aggressive new corporatewide goals .... [One] can suggest that large growth-oriented Japanese manufacturing firms throughout most of the post-World War II period have been characterized by a weakness orientation, which is designed to reveal problems in current performance to a broad range of employees. By contrast, comparable American firms throughout much of the postwar period were characterized more by a strength orientation." Ibid., p. 55.
9 Ibid., p. 30.
10 Ibid., p. 31.
11 Ibid., p. 30.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 26.
14 Ibid., pp. 77-78.
15 Ibid., pp. 29-30.
16 References for this and the following definitions are given in this blog post.
17 Cf., for example, William Blake, Jerusalem, plate 55, lines 60-63: "He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars, | General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, & flatterer: | For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organised Particulars, | And not in generalising Demonstrations of the Rational Power."
18 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1974, 1999), p. 232.
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