| ||
The other day I came across a gravestone. On it were the commemorative words "Jacob Walker, In America a faithful slave, in England a faithful servant. Died 1841". It seems, following a little research, that slavery was banned in England since the Mansfield judgement in 1772 that decreed, "as soon as any slave sets foot upon English territory, he becomes free." Slavery was not banned in America at that time and so when Jacob Walker was shipped across the Atlantic along with his mistresses other possessions in the 1830's he, according to the law of the land, had to be set free. Nonetheless, what was the degree of freedom he actually had? He was a stranger in a strange land with no money and no means of sustaining himself. His choices were 'be a faithful servant' or 'starve'! So what has this to do with quality or business standards? Quite a lot really. Standards exist to ensure the right quality of product or service we should reasonable expect. This will lead to a decent quality of life. In order to facilitate quality products and standards we sometimes develop procedures and routines to make the process flow better. The same thing happened from 1772. A judge decreed that once a slave set foot in England he became free. During the next fifty years a series of laws were enacted to ban trading in slaves both in the UK and the empire. These laws equate to the manuals and procedures we work with in our professional lives. It would seem however, regardless of the laws procedures and regulations, that poor old Jacob Walker was tied to the same person in England that he was in America. Effectively, nothing had changed for him at all. The fact that the general population referred to him as a former slave instead of an actual slave made no difference at all to his quality of life. The parallel for the quality profession is that it makes very little difference what you do with the paperwork if the end result does not change! One can revise specifications, targets, procedures and all the rest of them but if the actual product or service remains unchanged then nothing has really happened has it? This is a real quandary for the quality professional. There are so many forces at play and all too often resources are expended in saying the right thing or creating the right records, regardless of their actual impact on quality or service. Continual saying and writing the right thing makes slaves of us all. Meantime the quality of life remains meaningfully, unchanged, but somewhat degraded. Let us hope that whether during quality audit or quality management that all actions are undertaken so as to achieve real impact on quality and not just a slavish impression of it. END |
 |
 |
 |
