The Untold Co$t of Poor Quality

IF QUALITY IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF EVERYTHING WE DO, WHY DO CATASTROPHIC FAILURES KEEP HAPPENING ON A GLOBAL SCALE AGAIN AND AGAIN?

Take a moment to think over just a few of the headline-grabbing stories of pain from the past few decades such as the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the USA; inadequate food labelling which resulted in the death of a British girl in 2016; the 2007/8 Global Financial crisis; Volkswagen’s 2015 diesel emissions disaster; Ford’s fiery SUV’s in South Africa during 2015; the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan; the 1984 cyanide gas tragedy in Bhopal, India; the 2008 baby milk disaster in China; the 2008 deadly Listeriosis outbreak in Canada; the 2009 crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris; the 2009 destruction of the turbine hall at Sayano- Shushenskaya Hydro power plant in Russia; the deadly explosion in 2014 at the Soma coal mine in Turkey; the collapse, in 1995, of the Sampoong shopping centre in South Korea; the 2017 Grenfell tower blaze in London; poorly manufactured medicines at Glaxo Smith Klein’s Cidra plant in Puerto Rico during 1998 and 2009; load-shedding in South Africa in 2008 to 2020; and many more. Many similar stories go untold.

Connecting all these dots reveals the fault lines in our systems, structures and how some of the people appointed in positions of leadership and power in Society, Government and Industry have failed to uphold the required standard of quality. This also reveals serious strategic deficiencies and gaps, ambiguities, dilemmas, confusion, contradictions, conundrums, chaos, the odds, risks and perils that exist in the overall environment in which the field of Quality finds itself, and in which Quality professionals have to operate; why and how we can all step in to help improve the situation for the benefit of all.