Quality goes beyond the purview of the quality professional. Quality, it has been said, is everybody’s business, but too many outside this discipline see it as something dry, bland, and boring—and perhaps for good reason.

For example, one of the authors of this article had the painful, all-too-familiar experience of annual quality training, in this case by enduring someone reading PowerPoint slides out loud in an officious monotone. Quality was a check-the-box exercise. Yuck!

Here is how people in a software company (where the other author worked) described quality: “When the quality people talk to us, it seems very boring, monotonous, overly methodical, and number-driven. We don’t even understand what they say. Who wants to hear that? We get pushed by our managers to attend.”

Too many quality efforts are experienced—and received—this way. The result? Resistance. Frustration. Apathy. And the cost to the organization? Quality suffers, employees suffer, and customers suffer.

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