How do we fix quality?

Fixing quality, as a practice and profession, is a single job with two parts: theory and practice.

The first part, theory, requires knowledge of variation. More specifically, it requires knowledge of the two types of variation—common causes of routine variation and assignable causes of exceptional variation. Without this knowledge, efforts of improvement become a function of chance instead of analysis. The consequences of this are dire. Rather than improve quality, problems continue to rear their ugly heads. Rather than reduce costs, they continue to increase.

The second part, practice, puts the theory of variation to work. It requires the ability to build and interpret the only tool capable of making sense of variation, the process behavior chart (control chart). As the locomotive of continual improvement, the process behavior chart facilitates a way of thinking guided by the knowledge of variation. It is the only tool capable of turning data into insights and those insights into actions that result in quantifiable change.