Quality and Relationships: Time For A (VAR) Review?

• Part 1: An Analogy and How Quality Has Become a “Thing”
• Part 2: Why Relationships Matter More Than Ever and How They Went Missing
• Part 3: The Lesson from Aerospace and the Future of Quality

“Quality” in its current expression isn’t working. Investment in capability development, new technology, and the development and attainment of standards and awards continues to increase in attempts to secure outcomes. But organisations are struggling to be resilient and adaptable, supply chains are more brittle than ever, and outcomes are increasingly threatened and compromised.

In this series, we will explore how this is because “quality” has become reduced to a focus on “things”, and – in the process – become treated as a “thing” itself. We will look at why quality is better understood as an emergent property of the relationships between people, systems and organisations.

And we will see how putting those relationships back at the heart of quality is not only closer to the original Japanese concepts that inspired today’s quality movement, but also equips it with what it needs to respond effectively to today’s challenges.

I’m not particularly into football – or “soccer”, for our American friends – but with the World Cup upon us, football is very much in the spotlight at the moment.

And it’s probably only a matter of time before that spotlight focuses on VAR (Video Assistant Referee) – the technology used to review and adjudicate elements of play.

VAR always seems to end-up being a talking point, but one thing I’ve never heard anyone say is that VAR will ever move from being the assistant referee to being the referee.

At a time when we hear a lot about how technology, automation and AI are replacing human roles – and when VAR can do many things that a human referee can’t – that seems significant, so why is it the case?

Because everyone instinctively understands that football is about more than the aspects of the game that VAR can see and decide on.

First, football is a human activity – played, watched, judged and experienced by humans – and every aspect of it depends upon connections: between player and ball, players and team-mates, players and managers, referees and players, teams and supporters, and ultimately between the game itself and the people who care about it.

Second, football is more than a collection of isolated incidents. A foul matters because of what led to it and what follows it. An advantage only exists in relation to the wider flow of play. A yellow card may make perfect sense when viewed in the context of a match, but seem excessive or insufficient when viewed as a single incident in isolation.

Football is therefore fundamentally relational: it is shaped by relationships (the connections) between people, and it derives much of its meaning from the relationships between events within it.

VAR excels at examining specific “events”. It can determine to the nearest centimetre whether a player was offside, whether the ball crossed the line, or whether contact took place inside or outside the penalty area.

But it has no understanding of the meaning of those “events” within the wider context of the game.

Human referees, by contrast, are constantly interpreting how these “events” relate to one another. They “read” how the game is unfolding, sense where tensions are building, judge when advantage should be played, discern when intervention will help or hinder, and decide how the laws should be applied in context.

And that is why their authority is generally accepted: because it goes beyond technical correctness alone into the “relational” dimension – into insight, trust, credibility and context.

So if we began reducing football to the aspects of it that VAR is capable of seeing, measuring and adjudicating, the “heart” or “essence” of the game would be lost.

But this “reduction” in focus, scope and understanding I’ve described in terms of football and VAR is exactly what’s happened in the world of quality – not because it focuses on wrong things, but because it increasingly treats those things as the whole.

The quality movement has ended up seeing quality reduced to a “thing” that can be measured.

Quality Has Become a “Thing” We Can Measure

What comes to mind when you hear the word “quality” in a business context?

Most people will think in terms of precision, rigour, repeatability, efficiency, reliability, compliance, and the elimination of defects, variations and issues.

In service of these goals, they will then think of standards and audits, health and safety, specifications and testing, regulatory requirements and certifications, and a relentless drive towards perfection.

They will also be familiar with KPIs like OTIF (on time in full) and PPM (issues affecting parts per million), with general and industry-specific ISO standards, and – more recently – measures of environmental impact in terms of emissions, carbon neutrality, and so on.

Taken together, everything I’ve mentioned is now what people think of in terms of “quality” – perhaps especially in a manufacturing context, but more widely, too.

But note how all of this is about tangibles, about specific aspects of operations and outputs, and about control.

And note how the assumption is that what emerges from the detail of all the component parts is an overall establishment of quality, i.e. if each input is measured, if each process is analysed and measured, and if each output is tested and measured, “quality” has been achieved.

In other words, we have become exceptionally good at measuring “around” quality, but – in the process – quality has become associated with “things” that can be measured.

It has itself become seen as a “thing” – an objective and linear output of its inputs.

And yet we already know that quality means more than this.

We Already Know Quality Means More Than This

At this point, we need to recognise and celebrate that “quality” of this kind has achieved extraordinary things in efficiency, reliability, consistency, safety and cost-effectiveness.

When I get on an aeroplane, I want every part of its engine to have been tested exhaustively.

And when I buy a mass-market consumer good that used to cost a fortune, I not only want to know it has been well made and will last; I welcome the fact that every effort has been made to streamline its production cost and that those savings have benefited me.

But I equally know that the concept of “quality” has a much wider meaning for me.

Note that my question in the previous section was:

“What comes to mind when you hear the word “quality” in a business context?”

Now remove the “in a business context” and ask the question again:

“What comes to mind when you hear the word “quality”?”

You may well retain some of your previous list – and that’s absolutely correct; these are part of “quality”.

But you’ll perhaps reflect how you naturally speak about the “quality” of relationships, the “quality” of leaders, or even the “quality” of sportsmen.

You will be familiar with how we often say that people possess “qualities” and that our perceptions of “quality” typically extend beyond things like “99.9% reliability” into subjective areas like brand, prestige, heritage and tradition.

If you’re of a more literary persuasion, you might go to “The quality of mercy is not strain’d. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.“

And the key insight here is that this is “quality” well beyond tangible properties, well beyond “things”, and well beyond simple, linear input-output dynamics.

We all know that “quality” means more than what it seems to have mostly become in a business context.

And our football and VAR analogy helps to illustrate that it’s the relational dimension of quality that has gone missing in action.

The Missing Relational Dimension of Quality

In our analogy, we saw that there are two aspects to this relational dimension – relationships (connections) between people, and relationships between “events”.

And just as these constitute the “heart” and “meaning” of football, the same is true for quality.

In terms of the human dimension – the relationships between people – it brings trust, communication, understanding, cooperation, and so on into scope.

In terms of “events” – or, moving beyond the football analogy, the relationships between parts within wider systems – it involves context, perceptions, patterns, dependencies, and emergence.

Both are fundamental in shaping what “quality” means and how it is achieved.

Emergence is especially important here.

It’s the term used to describe the appearance of behaviours, perceptions, outcomes and properties that arise through interactions between people, systems and events, but which cannot be fully understood or predicted by examining those parts in isolation.

Emergence is what drives change and innovation; it’s the fundamental dynamic that underpins today’s turbulent commercial environment; and it’s why optimising individual components does not automatically optimise the whole.

To briefly return to football as an illustration, it’s why a football team can contain the best players in every position – trained and conditioned to the max – and still not win.

As we will see next time, this all has profound implications for quality.