System One: A total quality management system

Risk (or opportunity) based Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) is a compelling total quality management system.

In addition to being a logically compelling framework, PDCA is found in the ISO standard. I advocate not re-inventing the wheel but applying a PDCA framework comprehensively, as intended. This quality assurance system should oversee your management and governance standard operating rhythm. Importantly, you can build this system intentionally to seek continuous improvement, not only a static outcome. If you do that, you tap into one of the most powerful forces in the universe: iterative improvement (= compound interest).

This chapter is the core of my approach to building and renovating organisations. I advocate creating a total quality management and governance operating rhythm and marching to its continuous improvement beat daily, weekly, monthly, and for every reporting cycle. This enables you to manage the total quality management system and liberate your leaders and people to pursue the mission. If the total quality management system is substantially focused (i.e. not a tick-box exercise) towards achieving the mission while continuously improving, then it is not an overhead. It is just the business of doing business superlatively.

This approach inevitably creates a culture of continuous improvement. Therefore, My other motto is: Be better today than yesterday and be better still tomorrow. I like to quote Einstein in this context (illustration above) because continuous improvement is similar to compound interest in that today's progress builds on yesterday's already improved foundation, and so forth. Daily improvements are usually minor and nearly risk-free. They can easily be reversed if necessary. Improvements can (and should) also be like step-ups or jumps, i.e., innovation or invention. I like to imagine very wide steps, as in the Parthenon in Athens: you take many steps forward (increments) and then a step up. Both are required to take you to your intended destination, your mission. Along the route, you may be required to take steps back or down to overcome obstacles. That's all part of the process.

Anecdote: The Vitality shuffle.

Decades ago, when I started thinking deeply about the things I write about in this book, I was surprised to note how we did not progress linearly in improving our capabilities to achieve the mission. These "Parthenon steps" back and around obstacles frustrated me, and I designed a new dance step called the Vitality shuffle. It goes like this: two steps forward, one back; one step forward, two back; three steps forward". While improving complex people, processes and technology environments, the Vitality shuffle is the default progressive movement.

You may prefer to think of this as progressive agility.

This idea of a quality business that pursues continuous improvement or innovation rests on good corporate habits. I return to this idea below.

What problem does a total quality management system solve?

Modern businesses, particularly those publicly traded, have extensive governance and assurance systems. Many have implemented standard operating procedures (processes, systems). Very few deliberately connect these elements either at all or seamlessly.

The result of separating the three management systems is that the QA, management, governance, and audit systems risk becoming overhead (expensive and slow) and often ineffective (formal, staid tick-box exercises). If each system expects continuous improvement and is aware of and responsive to the other two, then an effective total quality and continuous improvement culture must ensue.

When connected to your mission, a total quality management system (quality assurance, management rhythm, and internal and external audit) ensures meeting the quality standard and drives continuous improvement. Ultimately, this allows you to fulfil your ever-changing mission with the lowest possible effort.

Let's delve into the power of good corporate habits aimed at quality and continuous improvement connected to the mission.

This book summary of Atomic Habits was produced for me by chat.openai.com on 13 May 2023:

"Atomic Habits by James Clear is a practical guide to building good and breaking bad habits. The key ideas in the book include:

Habits are the building blocks of our lives. We can achieve significant results by developing small, consistent habits over time.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change: Clear presents a framework for creating and breaking habits. The four laws are: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.

The power of identity: Clear argues that we need to shift our identity to make lasting changes to our habits. We need to see ourselves as the type of person who engages in the behaviour we want to adopt.

The importance of small wins: By focusing on small wins, we can build momentum and create positive feedback loops that make it easier to continue our habits.

The role of the environment: Our environment plays a crucial role in shaping our habits. By designing our environment to support our desired behaviours, we can make it easier to stick to our habits.

The danger of bad habits: Clear explores the harmful effects of bad habits and provides strategies for breaking them.

Atomic Habits is a comprehensive guide to building better habits to help us achieve our goals and live happier, more fulfilling lives."

As an operator, I have intuitively sought to build organisational habits, i.e., adopted a standard operating rhythm. This allowed me to sleep at night when I started running large, fast-moving, mission-critical business units. All Clear's elements: laws (obvious, attractive, accessible and satisfying) and the focus on identity, small wins, environment, and the danger of bad habits, ring true for me also in a business context.

Often, the crux of a good partnership between the three systems in this chapter lies in agreed definitions of standards and SLAs. A complex people, processes and technology environment will always produce errors. The question is: What is an acceptable error rate per process type? Furthermore, knowing the standard being audited is essential, particularly if minimum and aspirational standards have been set. None of these systems should expect a different outcome from the other three. Often, operators are embarrassed by errors. Counter-intuitively, I embrace them: they are part and parcel of a business with a significant mission. To err is human; to err continually and beyond the tolerance level is unacceptable.

Element 1: A quality assurance system with a stamp of approval.

Could you introduce an accredited quality assurance system?

I won't introduce the basics of a sound quality assurance system because I'd like to focus on the 10X ideas. However, I will use ISO 9001:2015 as a reference standard to ensure context. The principles of this standard are customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, process approach, improvement, evidence-based decision-making, and relationship management.

I find it illustrative to compare this list of seven items with my list of eight systems. They map well. This illustrates another key point. Strategic operators don't get too hung up on theory. They tend to do what works while experimenting. And, often, operators will have different explanations for the reality they see. For instance, I hope you can adopt a different list from mine. I may include a knowledge system as a critical component of my prescription because I come from an insurance and wellness background. Insurance products are constituted by description. The same goes for wellness programs. So, I may overvalue this element.

The latest ISO standard is less prescriptive than its predecessor, combining a process approach with risk-based thinking and employing the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. The new standard also emphasises ownership, i.e. the idea that a quality system should be the organisation's own, not an imported ill-fitting or bureaucratic overlay. I like and work well with all these principles.

I also like Six Sigma (the statistical evaluation method to eliminate defects in products and services, to defects-per-million opportunities to make mistakes as a measurement standard). It creates one standard across the organisation and aligns with modern, high consumer expectations.

Here are my 10X ideas for implementing and maintaining a quality system.

Quality assessments should be part of doing, i.e., merge 'Do-Check wherever possible at the lowest (i.e. task) level.

Quality is both an attitude and an organisational culture, a way of working, being proud of and vouching for your and the business' output.

You can integrate quality into the workflow wherever possible.

Let the next step in any process check the earlier one. Some of my favourite examples come from the restaurant business. (This is because restaurants are complex businesses - they manufacture food in real-time, then serve that food - at the right temperature - to the customer who consumes it there and then; this is a big ask! I have some experience, having started and run a restaurant with a partner while still a law clerk.) Good waiting staff check the quality of the plating, ensuring that the food is warm when they collect it from the kitchen. This approach needs no extra effort; they learn the standard and take ownership of the product. This makes them better at their jobs and well-placed to curate the customer experience.

The 10X idea here is to think carefully about the steps in any process to ensure you achieve this natural (and gentle, human-centric) quality workflow. In the content system chapter, I introduced the COPE principle (create once and publish everywhere). This is an excellent example where different parts of the organisation should collaborate to deliver better quality at no extra cost. Here, the COPE standard should be a high, external one. When creating content this way, one must adopt a workflow approach. Say R&D describes the product; operations enhance the document to explain how the product will be serviced; and then marketing will add the spin, ensuring it is ready for external consumption. This approach creates the natural checks and balances that inevitably lead to excellence. Marketing will provide elegant and precise language, and operations will be interested in accuracy, checking that marketing produces only the correct amount of spin.

Self-evaluation leads to insight.

One way of ensuring that quality becomes a way of working is to have your people self-evaluate their output referencing the organisation's quality standard. This creates an awareness in each employee and a sense of ownership that cannot be achieved with a tick-box mentality.

Peer-to-peer conversations are powerful.

Another idea is to introduce peer review. Allow peers to do random checks on output. This approach creates a conversation around the work product and the standard through a more profound and safer engagement than is possible between a doer and a checker. It also creates Check-Do capacity.

These ideas are illustrated here:

Quality is both art and science.

It takes smart work to achieve consistency in a complex organisation. Therefore, quality is a deliberately scientific system, not an intuitive one. This should be clear from my emphasis on ISO and the formal Lean Six Sigma method.

Quality can be defined as consistently reaching a pre-determined standard. Consistency (not the standard itself) is often more complex. Imagine a target on a bow and arrow range. If your aim is off, but your shots group correctly, you adjust your aim by your margin of error, and the problem is instantly solved. If, instead, your arrows pierce all over the target or miss, you must work through all the possible things you're doing wrong. You may be doing more than one thing wrong and inconsistently. This inconsistency is the problem faced by each organisation that routinely achieves lousy quality.

It would be best to express your brand when you communicate, service, and speak to your stakeholders, including clients. When it comes to this art, I'm a big fan of elegance, warmth, and humour (if appropriate) or "lightness" (appropriate informality), but you must reflect your business' brand and values.

These two elements, the art and science of quality, combine to produce excellence, which always contains an essence of emotion. Product and service excellence is a profoundly human standard; it communicates care.

Anecdote: Screw up occasionally; to err is human.

The fact that product and service "excellence" is a human (i.e., inherently flawed) standard is good news and a lesson I learned at Pinnacle. Organisations do not have to be perfect. If you deliver a product of a consistently high standard but screw up occasionally, your organisation appears human. And as clients or customers, we like humans. All you need to add to the mix is humility and a good recovery. This combination of trying your best and expressing the business values but failing sometimes and executing brilliant rescues builds fantastic brands.

You will find the science in the formal quality system you adopt (and adapt) for your organisation. Please take it seriously and ensure your people can implement and run it. This is an excellent opportunity for lifelong learning for your leadership team and their people (cf. the learning organisation system).

Done simply and innovatively, quality is not overhead, saves money and builds your brand.

It should be clear from these 10X ideas that a quality culture is not expensive. Instead, it saves money in rework and product or service recovery and is a brand builder. This is true for all brands associated with the business: the employer, product (or service) and corporate brands. Furthermore, it should be easy to calculate the ROI of the formal aspects of the system - the QA division's expense but, for most organisations, these are sunk costs because they cannot operate without some form of QA.

Anecdote: Integration is free.

In Strive, the guiding coalition was shocked, in the most pleasant sense, by how easily we could integrate quality into each process, each division. We had great fun using ultramodern tools that made these extra steps fun. For example, we introduced QR codes to confirm the attendance of key meetings or compliance with key activities (like management meetings or training). Once set up, they required no effort nor additional paperwork to prove compliance to the ISO auditors. We seamlessly integrated all three systems that comprise the total quality management system – quality assurance, leadership rhythm, and (internal and external) audit. Then, we used maximum automation because of our digital transformation program, giving the auditors access to the system. All the evidence was there, so they interviewed people only because their audit standard called for interviews. At Strive, we passed with commendations only in record time.

The outcome of a sound quality system has always been a saving in total operating expenses for me.

Quality belongs in every organisation and every division.

Many organisations make the mistake of thinking that quality belongs in the manufacturing, servicing or operating divisions. In my experience, finance and people (human capital) divisions are usually resistant to being ISO accredited, but there is no reason to leave them out of the equation. In any event, standards like ISO don't accredit divisions but whole organisations.

Feedback loops are sacrosanct and should be close to the action or appropriately spaced.

Achieving quality outcomes relies on taking feedback seriously. It matters where you place the feedback event, how you manage the information it provides, and how you recover from negative feedback.

Anecdote: Listening but not.

We have all received that call from an outsourced agency checking on our experience but not taking the feedback seriously. Or, if they appear to take it seriously, we will never hear from that company again. Or we receive a call from them saying that their principal will call (a favourite of motor dealerships in South Africa where the franchisor conducts the quality assessments on the franchisee's service event) and, if you thought the service satisfactory, you should remember to rate them a 10. These approaches lack integrity and cannot lead to excellence. This is even if they produce some short-term wins (in the sense that the pre-call may result in fixing a service or product defect). Quality is a mindset, part of the culture. It is neither a game you try to beat nor a tick-box exercise.

From an organisational design perspective, I place feedback management in the hands of a referee, not a player. Incidentally, I do the same with the data or measurement system to ensure its integrity. This implies that these two divisions should report to your overall head of operations or CEO.

Timing is of the essence and should be thought about carefully and experimented with. Do you wait too long before asking for feedback? People might not recall the service. Is your feedback loop too close to the event? For instance, you might achieve a recency bias when measuring the quality of an account management relationship. You're trying to get a sense of the lasting quality of a relationship, the latest interaction.

If you're measuring a service outcome and there were steps to be performed after the call or visit, it doesn't make sense to measure that interaction before the promised fulfilment time elapsed.

"Did we resolve your query or issue first-time?"; "On a scale of 1 to 5 (or to 10), how difficult was it to have your issue resolved?"

I work only with these two questions. Everything else is commentary. However, detailed feedback may be needed for root cause analysis and continuous improvement.

Build quality into each process.

Most manufacturing organisations tend to get the quality right, or they'd go out of business. The same cannot be said for insurers or other financial services organisations. Similarly, where adopted, there is consensus that the production, service, and operations units must adopt a quality standard and processes. But what about sales, marketing, finance, product development (innovation) and HR processes? My solution for these processes is to get feedback from their internal clients and make that feedback count. I discuss how to do that in the measurement system. I also encourage measuring these activities more directly, i.e., not only through feedback but also by measuring the input quality of the primary activity.

Quality should also, naturally, be built into knowledge worker roles. I think peer review works well here. Also, create a culture where collaborators review each other's work as part of the collaboration process, providing constant feedback, gently and naturally, while they produce. Make quality a conversation.

A formal quality system is at the heart of the three elements, acting as a check on the second (management and governance operating rhythm) and as a trusted partner of the third (internal and external audit).

Next, we look at the second element, the standard operating rhythm.

Element 2: Leadership operating rhythm - management and governance.

A standard operating rhythm of management and governance is a set of operating habits for executives and non-executives.

Here's an illustration of the concept of your business' standard operating rhythm:

How regularly do your teams meet? What do they talk about? Do your people think well together? Do your leaders solve problems well together? Who watches your people, and how do the watchers inspire them towards the mission? And who watches the watchers?

One of the most powerful ideas in business architecture is how congruently you can build your leadership system and express that visually and on one page. You start with your purpose and vision, state your mission, list your goals for the period, apply these to every division in your business (as applicable) and then note how they rhythmically work every day to achieve that mission while staying true to the values. What meetings do they have to attend, and what engagements do they need to keep to fulfil that singular mission for that period? Almost all formal businesses do this for the governance element (the next section). Very few businesses design this for the operating rhythm. Yet, it is at the operational level that goals are met or missed. What a mistake then, to be clear about the former and to leave the latter to be managed by each division as they please. The divisions can only sometimes do the job, but each will do it their way, losing the deeply collaborative, integrated value.

Instead, set up the proper standard operating rhythm per division or forum, maximising momentum (the speed of change and meeting goals towards the mission) and cadence (the effort put in to achieve the change and the goals towards the mission). I default to weekly for all forums, and, particularly in renovation efforts, my cadence (and momentum) standard is almost always faster than the incumbents' pre-existing cadence. I do this because if you meet every month, you will likely follow up on action items monthly. You will tend to chase down action items weekly if you meet weekly. Now you're running at four times the pace. It is better to take the action items digitally and make them available online. I always tend towards this agile and nimble approach, effectively working in real-time. You will still have punctuated check-ins when operating in real-time, but tasks and engagement will be naturally integrated and done when needed.

I have some examples of my preferences here.

Front-line team meetings should be short, standing (if appropriate) and held daily.

You may note that this looks like Agile, and you'd be correct. That's precisely what emboldened me. This is Agile for business operations, so I use agile (or nimble) as an adjective.

Interestingly, a standard operating rhythm will have almost the same agenda items regardless of level (level matters, obviously, but the discussion type or category is nearly always the same). This is a fractal (and 10X) idea. Everyone should be concerned with the following:

• Targets and SLAs from crucial performance areas - throughput and quality (they roll up to achieving the mission).
• Issues, risks and opportunities (they threaten or expand the mission).
• Solution designs (they build or improve your product or service towards your mission).
• Resources (they enable the mission).
• Client and stakeholder feedback (satisfied clients grow or shrink the mission).
• People's happiness is measured as engagement (we can only ever achieve business missions with our people).

This agenda is quickly turned into a standard format, with ad-hoc additions and variations as needed, allowing for predictable preparation, optimal readiness, and the shortest possible meetings, dealing only with relevant substantive matters.

A thin-layer management system.

Manage change, solutions and performance through a thinly layered, substance-focused standard operating rhythm.

Through this (non-bureaucratic) framework, you can ensure that your people have an opportunity to think well together and to align, design, perform and build towards your ever-changing mission.

If you shift the focus away from governance towards value-add and solutions, a few things change in your culture. Hierarchy means less, contribution more. Boring meetings become exciting engagements to look forward to.

Anecdote: At Panda, we had to tread carefully with this idea that management meetings should debate, engage and find solutions. Face being an essential element of Chinese culture, disagreeing with the boss is never well received. The language barrier further curtailed our real-time engagement ability: speaking (and reading - e-mails, mainly) through interpreters, even with simultaneous interpretation, proved a significant barrier.

We may classify these management meetings into:

R&D or design forums emphasise innovation, invention, and continuous improvement. If you make it a habit in your business to look for product, service or solution improvements, you will produce those results.

Cultivate the habit and the organisational skill to design and solve together. Governance is overrated (or, better, assumed). Doing creates value.

Almost all businesses experience bottlenecks, often in the software development area. Prioritisation forums improve judgment over time and align your people towards the most essential elements of the mission. I would suggest not shying away from the inevitable conflict. Put the conflict in the open as gently as possible and encourage everyone to bring data towards resolution. People must play the ball and not the person.

Excellence (functional maturity) forums focus on the operational performance per key functional area. A great opportunity exists to deliberately apply Coopetition (collaboration and competition) principles to excellence forums. From the Wikipedia entry:

"Coopetition?or?co-opetition?(sometimes spelled?"coopertition"?or?"co-opertition") is a?neologism?coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a?portmanteau?of cooperation and competition. Basic principles of co-opetitive structures have been described in?game theory, a scientific field that received more attention with the book?Theory of Games and Economic Behavior?in 1944 and the works of?John Forbes Nash?on?non-cooperative games. Coopetition occurs both at inter-organisational or intra-organizational levels."

Management (operational performance) forums: I advocate a weekly cadence. Management forums include executive and management committees.

Anecdote: Japanese total quality management and its influence vs. the decline of the West.

I'm safely ensconced in my plush red first-class seat. My passport is in for a visa application, and I have to go to Beijing, so I have no choice but to go by train; Chinese airlines accept no other form of identification. I tell my impatient self that this five-six-hour trip to cover 1300 kilometres is similar to the door-to-door travel time of a flight, with the absence of security checks and the accompanying herd mentality a bonus. Also, there is no waiting in the lounge with its jostling, bad smells and sad buffets.

The pull-off from Hongqiao station, next to the airport, is smooth, the acceleration gentle and constant. There is a speedometer at the front of the carriage, a novelty. But this is, after all, a sleek, long-nosed, gleamingly white, high-speed modern marvel, and I commit to enjoying the ride unironically. Recorded announcements play in Beijing-accented Mandarin with round sounds. A silent and peaceful trip seemingly out of the question, I put on my noise-cancelling headphones. The stops announced were Nanjing, Bengbu, Xuzhou, Jinan, Tianjin and Beijing South. Then I try to work, but my thoughts follow my gaze off the screen out the window.

The converging railway lines and concrete barriers out of the station make way for the medium-rise sprawl of Shanghai's north-western suburbs, which continue for twenty minutes before, in turn, making way for greenery as we head North-East: forests, bridges and streams blur by. The clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails and the bumping and releasing of the carriages are anachronisms that they haven't wholly engineered out of the experience. Or perhaps it is the driver; the speed isn't constant, fluctuating with the terrain.

I'm in my head with the monkey chatter of my mission here in Panda-land. The dread of daily petty politics mingles with our profound problems and the excitement of significant opportunities. I play through the scenes and rehearse the coming attractions.

I reflect on the scale of the departure hall and look forward to seeing the statement architecture of the Beijing South Station.

So far, the experience is different from our trip on the Shinkansen between Tokyo and Kyoto, both cultures Eastern yet worlds apart. I also reflect on how the East has an ability, with newness, to leapfrog the West. What do I prefer?

My recent trip from Darien to Grand Central in New York City on Amtrak is a data point. It was a slow, outdated-yet-not-nostalgic affair, the rude New York taxi driver, after, underscoring the nostalgia. Earlier that week, I arrived at LaGuardia and waited for more than an hour in a hot, crowded hall, part of a people snake being herded towards clearing entry by a rude customs official. (In Hong Kong, I had swiped a card to walk through a turnstile!) And then I noticed that I had come to hate the New York subway and vowed never to use it again. It felt militarised, grunts in fatigues with automatic rifles and service booths protected by armoured glass. In this post-9/11 version of my hitherto favourite city, everything was dirty again after the no-broken-windows years of Rudi Giuliani.

This contrasts sharply with the discipline, cleanliness and social cohesion revealed by the Chinese and Japanese public transport systems…

Governance system.

Formal governance (boards and committees) sits atop this thin-on-governance, high-on-function management system.

Everyone uses these governance structures, many de facto regulated, so that I will stay here. I will only point out that if the other rhythms work, you can spend your board and committee time evaluating (applauding) execution and tweaking your vision and mission, safe in the knowledge that (low value) supervision is unnecessary.

Element 3: Audit system.

Your audit system should rely on your quality assurance, leadership and governance systems.

Governance at the audit level is usually enforced through the country and international governance systems, and I am neither an expert nor an enthusiast of governance.

The key to achieving congruence is to think through the interrelationships. Here are a few examples:

Internal audit and, e.g. ISO auditors should audit the QA division to be able to rely on QA findings.

The auditors should audit by the management system standards, not according to an absolute or imposed standard.

There tends to be good collaboration between internal and external auditors from the same profession (they tend to be CAs). They need to understand management and quality assurance systems better. That is why I chose the Tom Peters quote for this chapter. One must be or become proud of acceptable failure rates to improve and remain lean and nimble, achieving significant missions. The pursuit of perfection is the enemy of progress (this quote is ascribed to Winston Churchill). You can reach (human-centred) excellence without aiming for perfection. There is a difference. Please get to know it.

Anecdote: Fighting with the auditors.

At Pinnacle, I had a long-standing fight with the head of internal audit because the division took specific examples of manual errors and noted them as evidence of non-compliance with process standards. I took our QA division's results and showed them they would always find errors because our manual processes have a known error rate. Effectively, they were measuring us against a standard of perfection. They could not share their statistical method with us (probably because they did not use one). They noted a breach if they found any error using a too-small sample, not necessarily randomly generated, but targeted. I never backed off this fight and eventually prevailed, at least to the extent that the audit committee chair acknowledged that different standards were applied.

Total quality connects to the other seven systems.

Your total quality management system maps back to (employs or services) the other seven systems that you need to build to execute strategically.

Concerning design:

Products and services designed to solve pains, needs or gains are your raison d'etre: you need them to have a mission. Ensuring they are of high quality and sold, delivered or serviced as intended is not negotiable. Carefully designed intuitive-to-use products and services tend to be of a consistently high standard.

Regarding content:

Congruent product, service and solution content should be correct and at the tips of everyone's fingers.

About people:

You can only execute through people, and people do business with other people, so there will always be a war for talent – win it by creating quality products and engaged working conditions where people bring their personalities and creativity to work and spend their time in flow. Great people working with aligned incentives in learning organisations that do things systematically and as naturally as possible tend to be happy people who are more likely to deliver consistently excellent results.

Only learning organisations can adapt to all feedback continually.

Divisions in complex organisations make execution complex and can quickly work against each other, and only rational business architecture (including lean processes) can avoid this; politics are inevitable wherever people congregate – minimise it through a total quality management system.

A consistent communication system ensures the integrity of knowledge communicated when that knowledge is needed. This removes clutter and contradiction and, therefore, conflict. Sharing accurately and well (reflecting your organisational brand) with all your stakeholders leads to clarity, especially about expectations.

Only clean, accurate and readily available data and measurements lead to actionable insights, whether towards better quality, loved products or a successful mission.

As you can see, these eight ideas belong together. I will stress this point in my treatment with each subsequent system, pointing out the congruence.

As a segue, a word on stacking systems: I like working at the meta-level, always preferring to solve problems permanently and sustainably rather than episodically. I often talk about 'solving the problem' and 'solving the problem' (the ambiguity is deliberate fun). I'm interested in the second one, finding and working on the root cause. This ability to stack systems (chunking up?) is essential to cultivate if you're thinking in systems. It is well illustrated in this chapter. Three separate systems (I., formal quality assurance on top of ii. your standard leadership rhythms, watched over by iii. internal and external auditors) comprise a total quality management environment.

As you've come to expect, I'm also sure there is more than one way of analysing the topic. This classification has always worked for me, cheaply and well, producing a peace dividend of additional organisational energy to deploy towards innovation and growth.

Master list: Total management system checklist

Here is my interpretation of the maturity levels you can expect if you evaluate your organisation's management system. There is always a level below 101, which I don't deal with. The level below 101 needs a systematic approach (whether formal or informal).

101 (know level): You have selected a quality management framework from the available options. Attention to detail is essential - a fundamental quality system is worlds apart from a world-class system. You manage your business. Your business is governed, and the auditors provide assurance.

Bachelors (play level): You have implemented a quality assurance system as part of the total quality management system, as described here, but the three systems need to be made aware of, connected to, or integrated.

Masters (work level): You have integrated these three systems.

PhD (solve): Your total quality management system is subject to continuous improvement. You always manage towards your north star (vision, mission), congruent with your values, client-centric, people-centric, lean, and nimble.

10X: Your business operates (very nearly) on autopilot, and you can sleep at night or invest the additional energy in a bolder vision and bigger mission. You use the ideas in this chapter and have come up with your own.

Protips for total quality management.

Some bonus ideas follow.

Could you make continuous improvement standards aspirational and exempt them from your governance and assurance systems? This creates a safe space to stretch your aspirations. You must do this explicitly to avoid criticism from auditors.

Make it fun! All these elements (well, except governance and assurance) should be supportive fun of the severe kind. In my experience, punitive anything is not fun and should be reserved for extreme behaviour, not well-intentioned one-off failures.

We now understand that a total quality management system contains three integrated sub-systems: a formalised quality management system, a leadership framework and a system of audits.

Next, we look at the design of products, services and solutions to help you with your clients' pains, needs or gains.