Managing Change: Creating a Learning Organization Focused on Quality – Albert (2005)

With my background in total quality in the healthcare field, I really liked this article.

This article presents a case study for applying learning organization concepts to improve practices and performance. The goal was transformation of a medical instruments company from a production mentality to one that systematically embraces quality as a pervasive process to manage.

How does one begin a change process focused on becoming a learning organization? In the study they presented the change as a focus on continual improvement in quality rather than on becoming a learning organization. This change message would be much easier to communicate and more readily received by the rank and file members.

Executives, managers and key staff must have opportunity to dialogue in order to explore the mental models existing regarding organizational issues. What are they? Are they valid? Will they enhance or impede the change process? How should they change? How do we change them?

The five dominant mental models are
●Status quo – quality is not important in our organization
●Quality Control – quality is the process of inspecting and catching mistakes
●Customer service – quality is listening to and solving customer problems
●Process improvement – quality is using tools to understand and eliminate
unacceptable variations in our process
●Total quality – all of us collaborate, optimizing our common purpose

After the Consultant’s initial interviews and data collection, the CEO set up task forces, which generated conversation about the issues. Then a company wide data-gathering, focused on employee perceptions, was done to ascertain past mental models and actions that had shaped the current quality system.

From the results, it became obvious that non-technical issues such as organizational structure, culture and human resources are important factors to consider when managing quality.

Key factors in this change process success:
Top management support
Clear roles assigned to the Consultant (facilitating the process) and management (facilitating discussions)