Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design Petter Øgland, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo UKSS Conference, Sep

Background and motivation Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) seems to be an interesting framework for thinking about design of quality management systems (QMS) in turbulent organizations

Observation/question CAS has been used efficiently for creating distributed control systems to be used in artificial intelligence and robotics (Brooks, 1989, 2002; Kelly, 1994) In organization theory, CAS appears to be dominantly used for criticising “command and control” (Stacey et al, 2000) or motivating BPR (Beckford, 2002), not for prescribing distributed control designs (QMS design) How to use CAS for designing a QMS in a politically turbulent organization?

Hypothesis Rather than trying to explicitly design a QMS, perhaps it would be better to “grow” a QMS by “seeding” frameworks for self- control among various teams in the organization and then nurture and cultivate the frameworks

Arguing CAS as not unreasonable strategy for QMS design Some researchers argue that CAS and the mathematics of chaos and complexity breaks with earlier concepts of command and control (Stacey et al, 2000; Beckford, 2002; Dooley, 1995) Simon (1996, chapter 7) argues against this in saying that CAS is a ”conservative extension” of earlier modes systems thinking As ISO 9000 was originally developed for conventional systems thinking (Hoyle, 2006), Simon leads us to believe that CAS might be an equally suitable systems approach as any

Design for empirical research (action research) An “artificial intelligence” approach towards a CAS based QMS design was developed in one organization (quality control of meteorological data) A QMS is designed in another organization (NTAX), applying the same CAS approach now on a socio-technical system rather than just a technical system

CAS design principle for QMS System Environment System General systems thinking (GST) Complex adaptive systems thinking (CAS) You & I

DNMI QMS topology Quality Manager / Computer Programmer System monitoring SYNOP Weekly and monthly climate statistics AWS HIRLAM (weather forecast data) SONDE (weather balloon data) Airport weather data AANDERAA

NTAX QMS topology Quality Manager / Action Researcher COBOL software control CobiT audits Development life cycle quality assurance EFQM assessments ISO 9001/9004 assessments Controlling the revision of standards and methods Documentation control Control of ITIL implementations audit

A personal assessment of the organization (system) Management: A QMS is needed to satisfy external stakeholders, to manage and to improve, BUT it is often strategically better to hide faults than admit and improve Workers: All others should follow standards, but personally I would like be flexibility and improvise => People in quality management may easily end up as scapegoats

NTAX QMS performance Rapid improvements Sudden collapse (political mistake) Redefined as action research Beginning from scratch

What went wrong? Audits and measurements generated tension and conflict (as expected and as needed) In order to test methods before implementing and improving the quality unit, it seemed reasonable to apply “own medicine” (second- order cybernetics) Surprise (to me): quality personnel and auditors at NTAX revolted against being subject to own methods

Should the revolt have been anticipated? Survey investigation and interview with 30 ISO 9000 experts at national quality conference: Would you, as an ISO 9000 consultant, apply ISO 9000 on your own organization?

Why did the internal conflict within the quality department matter? The quality department was organized under the projects department The head of the projects department world view: Deliver projects on time within cost (quality = “good enough”) In 2005 a new quality manager was appointed, but in 2008 he gave up quality management to rather devote his time to projects management (to feel appreciated)

Insights for improved CAS design The CAS approach might be very efficient (as the first years indicated) doing assessments of the organization against ISO 9000, EFQM, CMM, ITIL, BSC, CobiT etc As the CAS design places the quality manager (action researcher) in the role of ”environment” for making the ”system” grow quality awareness, it is necessary to have full protection Protection comes from myopic attention to the people above (”your boss is your most important customer”)

Conclusion: Top-down engineering + bottom-up evolution Top Management Administration Processes & Customers environment system ISO 9001 A. Focus on (1) goals of organization and (2) goals of immediate superior B. Work as “environment” for the “system” to develop strategies