Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs – January 2021

Welcome to January 2021 edition of the IX^th volume of Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.

We ended the year 2020 on the subject of Future of Quality. The intention was to use that as the gateway for the 2021 theme – Future of… as the basis for Creating and Maintaining Sustained Success – for the IX^th volume of our Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.

The primary objective of each monthly episode in this ‘Future of….’ is intended to be pinned around this quote by Thomas Alva Edison – “Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you’re working on.”

To put this intention into actual practice, the plan is to pick up a topic a month, relevant to the field of quality management and then explore other relevant articles and blogs related to that topic.

Presented here under is an overview of possible sources for these types of topics:

From the playlists on TED.com:

The history of the future – A look back on how we looked forward over the decades.

What direction is the future headed? – Explore what may be in store for our collective future and how we can plan for the unpredictable, together.

What does the future look like?  – Visions of the future of everything from cars to the internet to the human species.

From the themes, presented by the leading consulting or industry organizations or journals –

Is your organization prepared for the future? – McKinsey’s Organizing for the Future blog series can help organizations thrive in the years ahead.

Future of Work –  As automation changes the world of work, governments, businesses, and members of the workforce can take action and adapt.

The Future of Production | McKinsey and the World Economic Forum  – The McKinsey-WEF knowledge collaboration on the future of production and the fourth Industrial Revolutions seeks to shape advanced manufacturing through “lighthouse” factories.

The Future of Climate Risk | McKinsey and the World Economic Forum – The McKinsey-WEF knowledge collaboration on the future of climate risk focuses on natural capital and biodiversity as well as the sustainability of airlines.

Future shocks: 17 technology predictions for 2025 | World Economic …

New Nature Economy Report II: The Future Of Nature And Business …

Articles like –

The Future of the Past? Santosh Desai in City City Bang Bang, India, TOI

Or the predictions like –

Twenty for ‘20: the questions that will shape the next decade by EY Global

For the present episode, the lay the corner stone of our theme –

We will now turn to our regular sections:

We now watch ASQ TV, wherein we refresh our viewpoints about our 2021 theme –

• The State of the Quality Profession – In this episode, a new ASQ research initiative gives us a current global state of quality: ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement attendees talk about the quality profession today, and what the future holds | Become reacquainted with control charts. | And, a Quality Progress character makes his first TV appearance.

To learn more about control charts and find a template, visit http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/data-collection-analysis-tools/overview/control-chart.html

• New Roles for Quality Professionals – Peter-Elias Alouche, CEO of dqdt Inc., discusses how quality professionals can improve productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability by expanding their skill-sets to include new professional roles.

We have taken up one article from Jim L. Smith’s Jim’s Gems this month, which was /is and will remain to be relevant for all quality professionals –

People, like businesses, need to be creative or stagnate – There have been numerous articles and books written on this topic. Two books pushing ‘out of box thinking’ were written by James M. Higgins. “101 Creative Problem-Solving Techniques” focuses on new ideas for businesses and “Escape from the Maze” describes Higgins’ nine steps to personal creativity. …..Aside from tools and techniques designed to stimulate creativity the following are six human conditions, which can allow creativity and ultimately innovation to flourish.

1. Solitude. The sense of spending time to focus on your thoughts and ideas.
2. Inactivity. Planned inactivity as a break in the busy routine.
3. Daydream. Focusing on out of box thinking for the purpose of stimulating (innovating) thinking.
4. Gullibility. The willingness to suspend your personal beliefs and accept what comes from inside without insisting on rationality or logic.
5. Alertness and discipline. A twist to the Thomas Edison success quote could be “creativity is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration”.
6. Mental replay. Allowing yourself to revisit past creative efforts and resolution of past traumatic conflicts.

We add one more regular feature to our Quality Blog festival – ‘From the Editor (of Quality Magazine) – by Darryl Sealand

The Wave as a Metaphor – One of the most powerful images from nature has also become a powerful metaphor—the wave. Waves are relentless. The water crashes on the beach, ebbs back toward the ocean, only to be followed by another wave of crashing water. It never stops……Waves can be powerful. People caught in one are taught to relax and ride the wave to safety. The most powerful ships attempting to ride against and past a wave will—at the least—find themselves making no forward progress.

I look forward to your views / comments / inputs to further enrich the theme of Future of… as the basis for Creating and Maintaining Sustained Success.

Note: The images depicted here above are through courtesy of respective websites who have the copyrights for the respective images.