Remember my previous article on the quality pyramid where the very top element emphasizes the concept of “process?” One of the most powerful points to get across in any quality improvement effort is that your current processes are perfectly designed to get the results they are already getting. Most of us are familiar with the fact that 85 percent of the problems in any organization are due to bad processes (and Deming, toward the end of his life, thought it was closer to 97%).

Don’t believe me? Here is the absolute best paragraph I have ever seen to explain it. This is from Jim Clemmer’s seminal book Firing on All Cylinders, published in 1992 (Business One Irwin) and still worth a read or listening to on CD:

 …