Are you more concerned about the quality of your business or are you concentrating more on getting deeper into the business of quality?
—Mikel J. Harry
For a long time, businesses worldwide have been leveraging best practices, principles, and methodologies to improve their performance. An overview of the evolution of quality to support organizational excellence and culture transformation is presented in Figure I.1. The diagram provides timelines when certain methodologies and best practices first gained acceptance within different industries. With new knowledge and applications, some of these methodologies have evolved over time to keep pace with unprecedented change and still remain relevant to the industry, while others have either been phased out or used less frequently.
Figure I.1 Evolution of quality to support organizational excellence and cultural transformation.
Over the years, many industries have created regulatory standards specific to their own industry. All organizations within that industry are required to comply with them to ensure that the basic quality of the product and/or service received by the consumer is standard across different organizations. Unfortunately, meeting and complying with these standards does not provide an organization a competitive edge to differentiate themselves in the market place. Therefore, forward thinking organizations undertake competitive benchmarking and explore other best practices and methodologies to improve their business performance. With so many different methodologies, models, approaches, and standards available to choose from, it has become extremely challenging for both senior executive leaders and business excellence practitioners to select the ones that are most appropriate for getting the results that they need.
Further, the literature informs that 70% of transformation programs and 54% of process improvement projects fail. The fear of failure ties our hands against taking calculated risks and moving forward at the pace required for a business to turn around and survive. Eighty-seven percent of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1955 are no longer on the same list today. Some went bankrupt, some merged and some fell from grace. Many lost their way or failed to keep up with the times, and faded away. The average lifespan of a company listed on the S&P 500 has decreased from sixty-seven years in the 1920s to fifteen years today. Overall, 40% of the S&P companies that exist today won’t exist in the next ten years.
The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail.
To change and improve yourself is giving yourself a second chance. To be forced by others to change, is like being discarded. Those who refuse to learn and improve, will definitely one day become redundant and not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard and expensive way.
To avoid becoming a statistic, it becomes important to address some fundamental questions: What are the criteria for selecting an appropriate methodology and to decide when one methodology should be considered over the other? What are the similarities and differences between the characteristics of different change types? Can one methodology handle all the different types of change that organizations desire? How do you manage different types of change? What behavioral attributes are required from leaders? There are many more. If these questions are not thought through before or during a change journey, the organization can be driven along the wrong path, which leads to frustration and anxiety in teams, thereby causing low employee morale and trust in the excellence journey.
Practitioners have realized that no methodology is self-sufficient to deliver the best results by itself (even though some claim to be all encompassing) and each has its own pros and cons. While some are good at addressing efficiency and effectiveness issues, others are good at managing behavioral change in an organization. Also, since most methodologies complement each other, practitioners have started to combine principles and best practices from various methodologies to create frameworks that are customized to meet the needs of that organization.
In the 26 chapters of the book, you will be privy to a few customized models and frameworks that were instrumental in transforming Hospital Heal in Canada (the name has been changed to protect the hospital’s identity). These models and frameworks combine best practices and principles from Malcolm Baldrige, Shingo, Balanced Scorecard, Lean, Six Sigma, accreditation, change management, patient and family-centered care, the Competing Values Framework, the LEADS framework, and the project management body of knowledge. Section F focuses on the leadership trait of courage and the types of courage that leaders demonstrate in an organizational journey of transformation.
The approach and the strategies explained across the six parts of this book will guide senior leaders and practitioners who wish to fast-track their organization on a path to excellence and cultural transformation on the twenty-six elements that are critical for establishing a robust foundation in a transformational journey, along with an additional set of twenty-two management system elements required to create and sustain a culture of quality across the organization. The frameworks shared in this book improve the richness of the best practice models available to implement change that engages the frontline to increase overall performance and to deliver on an organization’s strategic plan.