Illusory Superiority in Quality Management: Why Every Plant Rates Itself Above Average
Cognitive bias systematically distorts internal audits, self-assessments, and management reviews. Here is how to engineer your QMS to counteract it.
The Psychology of Quality
397 articles
The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Quality Management
Why organisations keep pouring money into failing quality systems, and the structural governance needed to stop backing the wrong process.
Perverse Incentives in Quality Management: How Metrics Create the Problems They Should Solve
Why quality KPIs backfire, the five-stage anatomy of a distorted metric, and the specific design principles that stop operators and…
Chesterton’s Fence in Quality Systems: Removing Process Controls You Don’t Understand
Why lean transformations and cycle-time reductions frequently trigger dormant defects. A practical framework for evaluating legacy process controls before eliminating…
Defeating the Representativeness Heuristic in Root Cause Analysis
Why experienced quality teams consistently misdiagnose defects by chasing the obvious suspect, and the structured methods that force investigators to…
Goodhart’s Law in Quality Management: When KPIs Replace the Excellence They Measure
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Here is how metric corruption destroys IATF…
Visual Management as a Quality Control: From Wall Decoration to Process Guarantee
Most plants confuse visual management with putting charts on walls. The real mechanism is an engineered information environment that makes…
The Streetlight Effect in Quality Investigations
Why 8D teams keep finding root causes in the data they already have, and how to push investigations into the…
Why More Inspection Makes Quality Worse: The Observer Problem in Quality Management
When you increase measurement intensity, you change operator and inspector behaviour — often in ways that degrade the very quality…
Survivorship Bias in Quality Management: Learning from the Failures You Ignored
Quality systems that study only their successes learn exactly the wrong lessons. A practical framework for finding the data your…