A Systems Thinking approach to deliver 

Innovation and Quality

I've analyzed more than 30 organizations and 300 processes to understand how they respond to the need for ever increasing innovation and quality in their products/services and we benchmarked the results of those approaches.  By mapping the innovation scores against the quality scores for those organizations we see patterns and trends in how some organizations systematically improve their capability.  One of the most striking themes is that high scoring organizations tend to use a Systems Thinking approach and do not differentiate between innovation and quality. 

“Systems thinking is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences, engineering and management”. (Peter Senge , The Fifth Discipline)

Systems Thinking is a holistic way of dealing with complexity, uncertainty, risk and opportunity and has been applied over the past few decades to understand a wide range of systems.   We found that organizations that exploit this approach apply some key best practices.

Organizations that use a Systems Thinking approach to deliver innovation and quality tend to:

•   Decide what to do (and why) by first capturing and understanding what is really important to their customers.  They use tools/methods already well known, i.e., Kano, QFD, but they rely mostly on actual conversations with their key customers.  While this may sound obvious and easy we have found this to be one of the most significant gaps between organizations that use a Systems Thinking approach and those that do not.

•   Bring their solutions to life by planning, designing and commercializing new products and services using a fact-based, problem-solving methodology such as Six Sigma DMAIC or DFSS.  Using such approaches to drive quality improvement is well understood, but applying the same structured logic toward driving innovation may seem strange.  High scoring organizations tend to think of solving a problem as being similar to grasping a new opportunity. To them the similarity between improving quality and generating innovation is clear.  Bell Labs realized this years ago as they used same approach to quality improvement as they did to assess innovation opportunities. (Juran Institute’s ‘Quality IMPRO 99’, “Innovation and Quality at Bell Labs”, Bill Robinson)

•   Make sure their solutions work for their customers by setting stretch goals and clear measures toward meeting those expectations. They establish long-term performance goals for customer-valued quality and innovation and regularly measure and assess performance against those key areas.

•   Decide what's next by  building a scoreboard for all to see their progress  and constantly optimize ways of communicating with customers.