By William Toth, PhD, Senior Advisor at Acato Information Management

The Arc of Quality Evolution

The quality movement’s origins trace back to the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), where the transformation from craftwork to mechanized production created new challenges in consistency and standardization. In 1911, Frederick Taylor published his seminal work “The Principles of Scientific Management,” crystallizing ideas about systematic efficiency that had been developing for decades. While controversial, Taylor’s work established the foundation for treating management as a science rather than an art.

The narrative took a fascinating turn in the 1920s and 1930s with the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric’s Chicago plant. These studies, led by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, revolutionized our understanding of worker productivity. Their findings, published in “Management and the Worker” (1939), revealed that social dynamics and human psychology played crucial roles in productivity—directly challenging Taylor’s mechanical approach. The Tavistock Institute, founded in 1946, built upon these insights through their groundbreaking research into coal mining operations, introducing the concept of socio-technical systems in their 1951 publication “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal Getting.”

The post-war era (1950s-1970s) marked the true quality revolution. Though published later than practiced, W. Edwards Deming’s “Out of the Crisis” (1982) captured his influential work in Japan beginning in 1950. Joseph Juran’s “Quality Control Handbook” (1951) became the profession’s bible, while Philip Crosby’s “Quality is Free” (1979) challenged the assumption that quality improvements necessarily increased costs.

The 1980s and 1990s saw quality thinking evolve into comprehensive management systems. Kaoru Ishikawa’s “What is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way” (1985) helped spread TQM principles globally. Bill Smith at Motorola developed Six Sigma in 1986, documented in Mikel Harry’s “Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy” (2000). Meanwhile, James Womack’s “The Machine That Changed the World” (1990) introduced Western audiences to Toyota’s Lean principles, building on Taiichi Ohno’s earlier work.

The digital revolution brought new challenges and responses. The Agile Manifesto of 2001 represented a watershed moment, followed by influential works like Gene Kim’s “The Phoenix Project” (2013) introducing DevOps principles. Dean Leffingwell’s SAFe framework, first published in 2011, attempted to scale these agile principles to enterprise level.

The Persistence of Quality Regression

Today’s quality challenges, exemplified by Boeing’s recent crises, reveal a troubling pattern in corporate America. Despite decades of quality evolution and countless case studies of failure’s consequences, organizations continue to sacrifice long-term quality for short-term gains. Boeing’s story is particularly poignant—a company that once set industry standards for engineering excellence now finds itself struggling with basic quality issues. The 737 MAX crisis, door plug incident, and Dreamliner rollout problems didn’t emerge from a lack of knowledge about quality practices, but from a gradual erosion of quality culture in favor of financial metrics.

Quality’s New Frontiers: Security and Safety

Quality’s domain has expanded far beyond manufacturing tolerances and process controls. In our interconnected world, quality has become inseparable from security and safety. Each cyber breach represents a quality failure—a gap in our defensive systems that might have been prevented through rigorous quality practices. The stakes are arguably higher than ever; poor quality in cybersecurity doesn’t just mean customer dissatisfaction—it can lead to compromised national security, stolen identities, or disrupted critical infrastructure.

Physical security and safety systems face similar challenges. From access control systems to emergency response protocols, quality must be built into every layer of our defensive architecture. The principles that Deming and Juran taught about prevention over inspection apply just as critically to security as they did to manufacturing—perhaps more so, as security breaches, unlike product defects, can’t simply be recalled or replaced.

Our Role as Quality Practitioners

As inheritors of this rich quality tradition, we bear a special responsibility. We must serve as both historians and innovators, understanding how past quality principles apply to emerging challenges while developing new approaches for unprecedented problems. Our role extends beyond implementing methodologies—we must be advocates for quality culture, demonstrating how investment in quality prevents costly failures and protects against emerging threats.

Looking Forward

The quality renaissance we envision isn’t just about rediscovering past wisdom—it’s about adapting time-tested principles to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Each quality crisis reminds us that the fundamental principles our predecessors established remain relevant, even as their application evolves. As quality practitioners, we must ensure that these lessons aren’t just learned but remembered, building organizational cultures that resist the temptation to compromise quality for expedience.