The Narrative Fallacy in Quality Management: When Fiction Becomes Strategy
Root cause analysis is only as reliable as the human interpreting the data. The narrative fallacy systematically derails 8D investigations,…
The Psychology of Quality
404 articles
False Consensus in Quality Management: How the Abilene Paradox Derails IATF 16949 and AS9100 Programmes
Unanimous approval of quality initiatives often masks private, organisation-wide doubt. Here is how to detect the Abilene Paradox and engineer…
Overconfidence in Quality Systems: How Unwarranted Certainty Creates Escaping Defects
Experienced inspectors and engineers who trust their intuition over objective measurement are a primary source of escaped defects. Here is…
Phantom Trends and Process Tampering: Stopping the Clustering Illusion
Human cognition systematically perceives meaningful trends in random manufacturing data. Here is how to build structural defences that stop unnecessary…
Efficiency Without Proportionality: When Faster Processes Produce More Total Defects
Rate-based quality metrics hide a structural trap: as throughput rises, improving defect percentages can still increase the absolute number of…
Requisite Variety: Why Your Quality System Misses Defects It Cannot See
W. Ross Ashby's cybernetic principle explains why twelve green KPIs cannot control a process with four hundred variables — and…
Pareto Analysis in Quality Management: Prioritising the Vital Few Defects
Most quality teams count every defect but fail to prioritise them. Applying Pareto analysis by cost of quality shifts resources…
The Lindy Effect in Quality Management: Why Proven Practices Outlast Methodology Fads
The quality frameworks most likely to survive the next crisis are the ones that have already survived the last five.…
The Quality Pre-Mortem: Forcing Systemic Failure Analysis Before Launch
Standard risk tools like FMEA systematically miss interaction failures. The pre-mortem is a structured 90-minute exercise that exploits prospective hindsight…
Training Investment and Quality Output: The Reciprocity Principle
Cut operator training to save costs and the production floor will return the favour. The principle of reciprocity explains why…