When actions speak louder than ISOs

Citation

Peters, J. (2002), "When actions speak louder than ISOs", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2002.26706aab.002

When actions speak louder than ISOs

A few years ago when I was working in business education, one of my part-time students was a manager at a Housing Action Trust in London, England. The idea of a housing action trust is to take government money and spend it on regeneration of unpleasant social housing, largely equipping the residents themselves to manage their living environments for the better. My student Yvette was quality manager.

We sat in her small office and looked at the tower blocks across the road in East London, one of the most dilapidated inner city areas in the Western world. It was a task, and an environment, far removed from my usual quality management milieu in the luxuriant offices of the well-heeled. The enormity of the task ahead of her and the Trust struck me as overwhelming. Where on earth would you start?

It was my very question. Typically, I could expect an answer that they started with a mission statement, a plan, a communications strategy, a newsletter for the residents to tell them about the principles of quality.

Yvette described the beginning of her quality improvement intervention like this. "One of our engineers was talking to some of the residents. They said that one of the bad things was that the grass area between the tower blocks was all overgrown; there was garbage in the grass; it was dirty and dangerous for their kids to play in. So that was where we started. We just cut the grass."

It was an action. It was easy, obvious, tangible. It improved quality.

Customers do not see training schemes or meetings, or ISO 9000 documentation, or plans – they see behaviours and outputs and outcomes. Successful TQ initiatives start somewhere – or they do not get to be successful. Unsuccessful ones get "analysis paralysis". Understanding comes through action, not before it.

John Peters