The six challenges of the modern quality manager

1. Let knowledge flourish

The modern quality manager knows that knowledge is everywhere in the organization. Information in the world is growing exponentially and one manager simply cannot know everything. It is up to you as a quality manager to make the most of all the knowledge present within an organization.

‘The classic manager used to always be the one who knew more; who possessed information that other people in the execution did not have’, says ‘de-manager’ Thom Verheggen. ‘But ICT solves that “information asymmetry”; the manager is no longer omniscient. With the overload of information, that just doesn't work anymore. Leverage the knowledge present in the organization! Indeed, even ISO 9001:2015 encourages you to ‘ensure that knowledge (...) is not lost because information is not captured and/or shared’.

As a quality manager, you facilitate and optimize internal communication. Thus, you ensure that knowledge in the heads of employees is not lost, but actively shared and secured. Because whoever shares knowledge in an organization, multiplies the chance of survival in uncertain times.

2. Delivering quality in uncertainty

The world has become more uncertain; it is a true VUCA world. According to Seats2Meet founder Ronald van den Hoff, we are even living ‘in our own industrial revolution’ today. Van den Hoff: “The industrial revolution took us from an agrarian society to an industrialized society. Now we are moving from that industrialized society to Society 3.0. We are now in that transition phase from one society to another”.

This is, according to Van Den Hoff, partly due to the information explosion that the internet has brought us (see also the previous point). As the world becomes more complex, the risks also increase. The context in which your organization finds itself is becoming more uncertain and changeable, and that requires a different way of dealing with that uncertainty. Whereas classic risk management focuses on preventing risks, in today's changing times that approach no longer works.

Risk management expert Martin van Staveren says that organizations benefit much more from flexibility and agility. ‘Effectively dealing with risks does not require even more procedures and supervision. Instead, organizations should have the formal agreement to be flexible’, Martin van Staveren says. ‘Allow uncertainty instead of ruling it out completely.’

How do you keep the balance between flexibility (which can veer toward fragility) and robustness (which can veer toward rigidity)? Simple, with structure.

3. A structure without hierarchy

Did you know that the most flexible organizations are also the most structured organizations? That may sound strange, but a clear division of roles gives the flexibility needed for growth. A solid foundation, however, needs to be in place.

That solid foundation is not the classic 'rake' with accompanying hierarchy, but is based on someone's knowledge and skills. What is someone good at, what do they need people for, and on what basis are decisions made? Properly organizing this division of roles is a challenge for many organizations.

The classic way to ensure a good division of roles is through the RASCI model. This model makes it clear at a glance who is responsible for what, so that everyone involved knows what the others bring to the table. With a modern twist on the RASCI model, that division of roles is also ready for the future!

4. From recording to mirroring

By nature, quality management is the field that records, describes, and documents a lot. In itself, there is nothing wrong with that: everyone agrees that clearly recorded agreements help an organization move forward. The art of the modern quality manager is to do this in a more appealing way than deciding to clearly capture processes or working methods and everyone's role in them (see point 3).

Capturing this not only provides guidance and stability, but also serves as a mirror you can hold up to yourself as an organization (‘how are we doing things now?’) in order to keep improving continuously. And to justify yourself to an auditor. Although that is not quite the intention.

5. Back to the purpose of quality management

By examining all these descriptions, procedures, and rules, you go back to the purpose of the quality management system and the accompanying certificate on the wall. Philosopher, journalist, and author of management books, Ben Kuiken, writes in his latest book, ‘First Aid in case of New Organizing’, that many organizations need to go back to their intention: good care, good education, a good product, and a close relationship with the customer.

‘The intent of organizations is always about quality. About meeting customer demands and expectations, because that is what we want to achieve’, said Ben Kuiken. According to him, organizations need to organize work based on their original intention.

Ben Kuiken: ‘That means that people can make their own autonomous decisions, that we put the 'shop floor' at the center with more trust, more transparency and less control.’ As a quality manager, you can play a major role in this, taking a critical look at your current management system: what is actually the purpose of that?

6. From control to sounding board

Good quality management goes through the entire PDCA cycle. In quality management, and in ISO 9001 as well, internal audits and continuous improvement are in the last two places by default: ‘check’ and ‘act’. Unfortunately, in many organizations this still gets stuck in checking off lists and verifying that everything is still as we had imagined it.

Quality guru W. Edwards Deming, the ‘inventor’ of the PDCA cycle, seems to have once said that it should actually be called the PDSA cycle, where the S stands for Study. Rather than checking for results, studying and learning are central to the well-known quality cycle.

This is also central to Lean, the method (or business philosophy?) of process management that is gaining popularity among quality managers. Lean is the philosophy of minimizing waste in an organization and focusing on thinking in terms of processes. Here, the emphasis is not on checking rules, but on discovering an organization's potential for improvement.

So, internal audits are not so much there to check whether things are going as they should (ticking off lists), but to identify opportunities and improvements. From control to sounding board.

The future of the modern quality manager

The revision of ISO standards shows that quality or environmental management is more than a department or a function. It is a way of thinking that engages everyone in an organization: it is the guarantee of a successful organization. This ensures that the challenges described here are fun challenges. It is the route to success, both for you as a quality manager and for your organization.