# 036 Quality is owning mistakes and improving

Small incident, big concept

I was woken up this morning due to loud sound from the TV in the guest room of my house. When pointed out the guest immediately goes on the defense saying that some channels inherently have high levels of sound volume for a given speaker level set. Well this exactly is the issue I have come across whenever we point out a non conformance during the course of an audit of Quality Systems to ISO 9001 in any organization. I have noticed this to be the general pattern of reaction of people. Instead what is required is to first accept the existence of the problem, calmly analyse the root cause and try to take action so that it does not get repeated. This is what is called Corrective Action as per the definition in ISO 9000.

In the instance described, life will become a lot easier and comfortable for all concerned if only the Guest had paused a few seconds to reflect on the issue and responded. People somehow are reluctant to see the issue and admit to the mistake committed rather than reply in haste. Now, it is a well-known fact that base sound levels of different TV Channels ARE different and so is it not prudent to reduce the volume before changing the channels. Even if it is not known, is it not better to admit that one did not notice or know the fact that different channels’ base levels of audio are different? This will not only save unnecessary arguments but also enrich the person.

It is therefore important that for taking Corrective Action, first one needs to see the situation objectively. Next analyse the cause which gave rise to the undesirable situation. In many cases zeroing on the root cause is not easy. There could be more than one possible for scenarios. It could be people, material method, time, place, resource, equipment and environment. It is like finding out which bacteria or virus caused the “illness”. Even when the cause is known it may not be easy to find a solution that will work effectively in all situations. What worked in one organization may not work well in another company.  Or even within a company it could not produce desired results if it were in different geographical location. Even within the given location it may produce poor results with different persons. If finding out root cause is difficult arriving at the correct remedial action could be more difficult. Therefore for a complex problem an elaborate root cause analysis (RCA) based on an appropriate and sound Statistical Quality Control (SQC) technique need to be deployed. This presupposes a rudimentary, if not an expert, knowledge of SQC.

After the RCA is done a well-considered action needs to be taken so the issue is solved once for all and does not get repeated.

Often time action taken even after a thorough RCA may not have permanently solved the issue. So as a last step it is important to revisit the situation and review whether it has been effective. Otherwise the whole process needs to be gone through again starting from RCA.