How is quality broken?

Conformance to specification has come to define quality as a field and practice. Rather than aim to operate processes on-target with minimum variance—the definition of quality established by Dr. Genichi Taguchi in September 1960—quality, as reflected in ISO 9000:2015 Clause 3.5.1, is defined as the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfills requirements. While on its face this definition of quality seems sensible, after all no customer in their right mind will accept product that does not fulfill requirements, it reinforces the perspective that quality is binary. It bolsters the widely held but wrong belief that the measured characteristics of parts, products, services, processes, and systems are either good or bad, conforming or non-conforming. 

The quality landscape, as a product of this binary view, has been infected with tools, techniques, methods, and fads that are too busy mopping to turn off the water. It has been reduced to efforts that attempt to improve quality and reduce costs with no recognition or knowledge of variation and its unrepentant influence. This results in actions and efforts that reliably confuse the two types of variation and, in doing so, ensures that defects will be produced in the future and world-class quality will never be achieved. 

Quality as a field and practice is broken because it lacks an understanding of variation and the only tool capable of making sense of variation, the process behavior chart. While we will not be able to eradicate the virus of variation overnight, it is the aim of the Broken Quality Initiative to continue the immunization campaign started by Dr. Walter Shewhart in the mid-1920s at Bell Labs. It is our goal to provide industry with the knowledge and knowhow to understand variation and eliminate its influence using process behavior charts.