By: Davis Balestracci
01/29/2014
I remember all too well the “quality circles will solve everything” craze during the 1980s, which died a miserable death. During this time I was exposed to Joseph Juran’s wisdom about quality circles from his outstanding Juran on Quality Improvement video series from the 1970s. He was adamant: They must be separate from an organization’s formal quality improvement efforts and used only to solve everyday, localized, frontline problems—the 80 percent of the processes causing 20 percent of the problems.
For quality circles to be effective, they must be built into a mature, overall organizational improvement process that is actively working on the majority of problems, those 80 percent that are caused by only 20 percent of the processes.
A hot topic at the moment, especially in healthcare, is rapid cycle PDSA (plan-do-study-act). In many cases, I’m seeing it presented as a “Go on... just do it!” process for everyman to test good ideas in his routine work as a way to work around sluggish management.
The rallying cry is: “What can we do now? By next week? By Tuesday? By tomorrow?”