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.

We’ve so far seen how today’s practise of “quality” has become reductionist in the extreme – treating quality as an objective “thing“, that resides in “things”, and which inevitably follows from improving each part of the overall whole.

But we’ve also seen how quality is better understood as an emergent property of relationships and how this is consistent with the Japanese origins of today’s quality movement.

The challenge is how to now redress the balance.

And at this point, the aerospace sector stands out for lots of reasons.

More familiar notions of “quality” are obviously incredibly important here – testing, precision, safety, reliability and so on are absolutely fundamental when building aircraft.

But equally, with the sheer size and complexity of the supply chains needed to do this – combined with the specialisation of individual suppliers and the longevity of typical relationships and programme lifecycles – relational dynamics become far harder to disregard.

And, indeed, to its credit, the aerospace sector in the UK recognised this.

Enter SCRIA, Professor Richard Lamming, and the “Relationship Evaluation Tool”

The SCRIA programme (Supply Chain Relationships in Aerospace), launched by the SBAC (Society of British Aerospace Companies) in the late 1990s, is one of the best (and regrettably only) examples of a Western industry experiencing a major epiphany about the relational vacuum in modern quality systems.

Openly admitting that the industry’s traditional way of dealing with suppliers was fundamentally toxic – and recognising that the purely mechanical aspects of Lean were then physically impossible to achieve – SBAC’s launch of SCRIA was famously described as an attempt to “get away from old-style poker playing”, i.e. where:

• Primes (like BAE Systems or Rolls-Royce) squeezed smaller Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers on price.
• Suppliers hid their true margins, hoarded their problems, and played their cards close to their chest to survive.
• Confrontation, blame, and legal gridlock were the defaults when parts were late or defective

To overcome this adversarial, zero-sum power dynamic – without relying on vague, soft-skill platitudes – the SBAC did two significant things.

Firstly, it established a formal SCRIA Code of Practice; secondly, it partnered with Professor Richard Lamming and his team at the University of Bath to create academic, practical framework tools – most notably the Relationship Evaluation Tool (RET).

The RET focused on the relationship itself and aimed to make it measurable by encouraging buyers and suppliers to sit in the same room and confront tough questions. Questions like “What is the true power balance here?”, “Are we sharing risk, or just passing it down?”, and “Do we actually trust each other’s data, or are we double-checking everything out of paranoia?”.

Taken together, and whether SBAC realised it or not, the Code of Practice and the RET therefore effectively attempted to institutionalise the two ba (場) dimensions – Originating Ba (building empathy and trust) and Dialoguing Ba (sharing mental models and opening up communication).

In other words, relationship quality was understood as a primary contributor to performance – not merely an outcome of capability and performance – because SBAC had recognised that quality could not be understood solely through the quality of the parts.

The relational aspects of quality were back on the table.

The only problem was that recognition was not enough, as what happened next demonstrated.

And that was the development of SC21, followed by – more recently – Aero Excellence.

Now, both SC21 and Aero Excellence contain some brilliant material, but over the years, two factors have combined to see relationships recede from attention:

• There has been inexorable expansion and emphasis on the internal capability side of “quality” – no doubt reflecting in part all the general tendencies I discussed in the previous section – to the point where capability development increasingly became synonymous with quality itself.
• The RET and its successors, the RMM and RelEx, all made workshops the vehicle for relationship engagement, i.e. the evaluations were undertaken in preparation for roundtables, and this required a. clout that suppliers often lacked for engaging their customers, and b. resource commitments that few organisations were willing and able to make

And herein lies the real story.

Capability improvement as the assumed locus of quality proved far easier to scale than relationship development as the actual locus of quality.

After all, capability can be assessed, benchmarked, audited and certified relatively easily; meaningful relationship engagement and development is harder to standardise, harder to govern and harder to ramp-up.

As a result, relationship engagement remained relatively peripheral within SC21. It only became a formal requirement at the silver award level – which only a tiny proportion of organisations sought to achieve (even bronze awards were relatively few) – and so traditional relationship management largely took over, primarily based on contracts and KPIs (a trend that has deepened within Aero Excellence).

“Relationships” either became equated with the mechanics of the relationship – the interfaces, reporting structures, and so on – or they became seen as the “fluffy” interpersonal dimension of interactions between organisations: nice-to-have, but mostly inessential.

In all cases, they remained typically to be handled face-to-face and one-to-one by specific representatives.

And so supply chains became once again just the sums of their parts, and quality became an assumed outcome of the traditional reductionist approach – improve leadership, people, operations, customers and suppliers, and quality and performance will surely follow.

But we’ve already seen that it doesn’t – that it can’t – and that, to return to our analogy from Part 1, it’s like trying to win a match of football by improving the precise awareness of where the off-side line is.

So the question from aerospace – and more generally – is this: how do you sustain awareness of relationships without reducing them to another process?

Relationships: the Next Frontier of Quality

The first step remains to actively recognise that relationships are not merely another aspect of quality to be managed alongside audits, standards, KPIs and continuous improvement programmes.

Rather, they are the environment within which all of these things either succeed or fail; they are what underpin quality – where quality emerges (or doesn’t) and through which quality is perceived and appreciated.

But we’ve seen that this recognition isn’t enough. Recognition needs to be supported by practical, effective and affordable ways for operationalising a true focus on relationships.

And that means moving beyond traditional approaches to relationship management.

The challenge is not that organisations don’t know relationships matter. Most do.

The challenge is that relationships are typically only engaged with directly when something goes wrong, when resources permit, or within a small number of strategically important accounts and suppliers.

Beyond that, relationships are largely reduced to contracts, KPIs, reporting structures, governance mechanisms and periodic reviews, and useful though these may be, they are ultimately proxies: they tell us little about how relationships are actually functioning in practice, how priorities are being interpreted, where assumptions differ, where risks are emerging, where expectations are becoming unrealistic, or where value is quietly being created, lost or blocked.

If quality is genuinely to evolve, then relationships themselves need to become visible:

• Not merely the mechanics of relationships, but how they are experienced.
• Not merely whether communication has occurred, but whether understanding has been achieved.
• Not merely whether processes exist, but whether they are helping people navigate the realities they face.

This is where a relationship-centred and value-led approach becomes essential.

Rather than assuming that quality emerges automatically from improving capability, the focus shifts towards understanding the conditions within which capability is applied.

Rather than relying solely on retrospective measures, attention broadens to include perceptions, priorities, assumptions, constraints, risks and trade-offs.

Rather than treating value as something predefined and static, organisations maintain shared clarity about what matters and how that is changing.

And rather than seeing collaboration as something that follows from capability, collaboration becomes a natural consequence of shared visibility, understanding and discernment.

In other words, because today’s challenges are increasingly relational, then the future of quality must be relational too.

In practice, this means creating ways for organisations, teams and individuals to surface their experience, contribute their perspective, understand how others see the same situation, and collectively identify where outcomes are being helped or hindered.

We have become very good at measuring what quality leaves behind, and we can and should keep doing this. Nobody is saying we should abandon standards, measurement, audits or process control.

But we need to now recognise and focus on where quality comes from – relationships – and so the urgent question is how quickly organisations can implement practical ways of understanding, strengthening and scaling relationships.

This is precisely the question that our Value Management approach answers.

Rather than treating relationships as something peripheral to performance, they are made visible, understandable and actionable at scale, helping organisations maintain shared clarity about what matters, where value is being created or lost, and how relationships are shaping outcomes in practice.

We call this “Structured Relational Development & Improvement” (SRDI).

So if you share my conviction that this is how quality needs to evolve – through the lens of relationships and value – why not pilot this approach for yourself?