“Safety is a great analogy for understanding quality. Everything safety is about relates to the absolutes of quality management.”
Mr. Crosby goes on to explain how safety and quality have the same basic structures of laying out a system and managing it such as to make things happen properly.
For years I have recognized the similarities of safety management and quality management. But, for the first time, the idea struck me that perhaps the functions are not only similar; they could well be identical in purpose, philosophy, principle, and mission.
To test this idea, I retrieved Mr. Crosby’s classic book, Quality Is Free, from my bookshelf and thumbed through it in search of a definition of “quality management” as perceived by the author. I found it on page 19:
“Quality management is a systematic way of guaranteeing that organized activities happen the way they are planned. It is a management discipline concerned with preventing problems from occurring by creating the attitudes and controls that make prevention possible."
Bingo! Substitute the word safety for quality in the above quote and you have a “quality” definition of safety management which is totally compatible with the error-free performance philosophy of the National Safety Management Society. Mr. Crosby goes on to state that “it is necessary to determine the status of quality throughout the company. Quality measurements for each area of activity must be established where they don’t exist and reviewed where they do.” He emphasizes the importance of including measurement systems for non-manufacturing entities such as accounting, data processing, engineering, finance, marketing, and purchasing. Has been the NSMS doctrine for the past twenty-five years in advocating a search for and correction of performance errors (accidents) throughout the organization?
It is amazing how a handful of “quality gurus” such as Dr. Deming, Dr. Juran, and Philip Crosby have managed to capture the attention, imagination, and willing cooperation of business and industry leaders throughout the world in such a relatively short period of time. Their message is not new. Nor is their approach and suggested solutions. We’ve been preaching that sermon for a quarter of a century. Perhaps we have failed to target the proper audience. Could it be we are preaching to the choir? And then perhaps our message gets garbled because of the misguided, misunderstood and emotionally loaded connotations concerning the word safety itself.
This seems to be an enigma wrapped in a riddle. But, it should not discourage us. I feel strongly that the task forces now being organized will help us solve the puzzle and that we will soon be able to unleash our full potential. Without a fresh approach I’m afraid our message will continue its captivity in a vacuum.
In the meanwhile, I am asking our NSMS members to think about how we might market a most important and logical extension to the modern day quality management gurus’ programs of prevention. I am thinking along the terms of what the traditional safety professional calls “Accident Investigation.”
In reviewing the recent work done on quality management, there seems to be a void in the literature concerning a systematic investigative method to discover basic causes of accidents,
or should the term be performance errors, or downgrading incidents, or management oversights. (The word accident seems to have the same problem as the word safety.)
Our members, Bird, Petersen, Pope, et al., have written extensively on the subject yet we as a
Society have fallen short of the Board Room in the enrollment of advocates. So, let’s start over again. Let us begin with a definition we can all agree upon; one which treats unsafe acts and/or unsafe conditions as the symptoms they really are. Try this on for size.
________ investigation is: A systematic inquiry into the basic facts surrounding or affecting a/ an _________ with the overall objective of discovering all causative factors so that our system of management might be altered or adjusted to insure the prevention of like occurrences.
Should we seek an alliance with the quality movement? Should we forge ahead with techniques to promote our philosophy? Should we seek new and more effective audiences? Or, should we remain static and read all about our investigation principles in some future best selling quality management book?
[Charles W. Ezell, from the May, 1991 issue of the Communiqué, published by the National Safety Management Society.]
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