What is the Broken Quality Initiative?

The Broken Quality Initiative is a response to industries’ pervasive lack of knowledge regarding variation and the only tool capable of making sense of its relentless influence: the process behavior chart (control chart). 

This lack of knowledge is reflected in the often haphazard, disorganized, and chaotic methods that individuals, teams, and organizations use to improve quality and reduce costs. Rather than work to understand and eliminate the sources of variation that make processes erratic and unpredictable, inordinate amounts of time and attention are dedicated to gut feelings and guess work. While this sentiment is often accompanied by good intentions and hard work, the lack of theory to guide actions reliably digs the hole deeper. It reliably distracts and undermines organizations from producing products of world-class quality.  

Since the seminal work of the mid-1920s by the physicist Walter Shewhart at Bell Telephone Laboratories, a method and tool capable of making sense of variation has been at our fingertips. This method, Statistical Process Control (SPC), and this tool, the process behavior chart (control chart), have kept industry busy improving quality and reducing costs for more than 100 years. It is due time that we put Shewhart’s method and tool to work. It is due time that individuals, teams, and organizations learn to turn data into insights and insights into actions that result in change using process behavior charts.