QP • www.qualityprogress.com1

Quality professionals must cultivate success in their ‘organizational gardens’

Quality professionals are constantly

confronting practical questions that are always specific to the

organizations they serve: How do we grow our quality efforts?

How can I keep my organization’s approach to quality vibrant?

How do I keep the leadership focused on quality? Should we be

changing the focus of our quality program? How do I transplant

a successful quality endeavor from one part of the organization

into another?

Many quality professionals understand that the answers to

these questions require the ability to envision their organiza-

tions as living entities, existing within their understanding of

systems theory. This requires quality professionals to function

along the lines of organizational gardeners who cultivate their

organizations so they can produce beauty on many levels.

In 50 Words Or Less • Organizations can be

viewed as living enti-ties, putting quality professionals in the role of organizational gardener.

• Like a garden, an organization needs to be tended to and nurtured if it is going to prosper.

• Four basic gardening principles can help lead an organization to success.

Dig it

November 2008 • QP 29

Quality management

by John Dew

QP • www.qualityprogress.com30

How does your organization grow?There are several basic observations about the nature

of gardening and the role of a quality professional as an

organizational gardener.

Left alone, a garden will become overrun with

weeds. R. Buckminster Fuller, the noted inventor and

sage of the 20th century, offered the observation that

our world obeys the second law of thermodynamics,

which is the principle of entropy. All systems will lose

energy and organization over time. Fuller postulated

that humanity, in its constant effort to establish order

and structure, exists as an anti-entropic force.1

If we fail to pay constant attention, our organiza-

tions will quickly fall apart, so they need constant

reinforcement. As far as organizational gardeners are

concerned, there are no real plateaus or stable lev-

els of achievement. Without constant attention and

action, the quality efforts within an organization will

unravel.

Like a garden, your organization did not come into

existence randomly. It was established by people, and

it must be maintained and cultivated by people. People

will sometimes suffer from a condition known as reifi-

cation, the false belief that a system, obviously created

by people, has taken on a concrete reality of its own

and cannot be changed by people.2 This leads to a false

belief their organization is permanent.

Reification also can lead an individual to feel like he

or she has no power to affect change and is, in a sense,

a victim. Or it can result in a sense of entitlement: “This

organization owes me my job and my sense of stabil-

ity and predictability.” Reification can also result in

people refusing to take the necessary actions to save

themselves and their organizations when things begin

to decline.

Effective gardening is a balance between order and

change. As Alfred North Whitehead observed, “The art

of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to

preserve change amid order.”3 It would be suitable to

define the quality practitioner’s role as providing the

sustained application of appropriate methods and

principles to establish (or reestablish) order and cre-

ate change, which results in progress.

Gardening is all about sustainability. Terms such

as continuous improvement and sustainability keep

creeping into the quality vocabulary. That’s because,

as organizational gardeners, we recognize our orga-

nizations are living systems that, if properly nurtured,

should prosper and provide beauty for a long period of

time. We want to produce beauty in our own lifetime,

but we also want to pass on beautiful organizations

and communities to the next generation.

a basic approachRegardless of whether an individual is an organiza-

tional gardener in a manufacturing, healthcare, ser-

vice, government, education or not-for-profit setting,

the task of tending to an organization can be difficult

because it’s easy to lose sight of four basic gardening

principles:

1. Expect the seasons. Start with the premise that

everything changes and that no action you or your or-

ganization takes will ever be permanent. Your task is to

study your organization as it exists right now, to think

about how it can be improved, and then to perform the

necessary pruning, spraying, transplanting and other

actions.

Plan-do-check-act, as W. Edwards Deming sug-

gested, is a never-ending cycle, which he described

as a helix moving upward toward improvement.4 Ac-

cept entropy as the normal condition of life and that

the organization will always be in need of tending. The

thought that you can work yourself out of a job is only

true if you decide to stop nurturing and cultivating

your organization.

Organizational gardening body of knowledge / Figure 1

linear/left brain relational/right brain

pro

mo

tin

g o

rder Conformance quadrant

Procedures•

Testing•

inspection•

Statistical process • control

Assessment quadrant

Process mapping•

Baldrige program•

High-level assessments•

pro

mo

tin

g ch

ange

Orderly change quadrant

Six Sigma•

TriZ•

Benchmarking•

Transplanting quadrant

Brainstorming•

Synectics•

Cultural radiation•

November 2008 • QP 31

And while you are at it, remember it doesn’t always

rain or shine when you want. Sometimes, the world is

going to provide difficult conditions to overcome, and

we need to be prepared to respond to changes in the

economy, the actions of the competition and evolving

customer expectations.

2. It is all an interconnected ecosystem. Each

organization is a complex system of interconnected

parts that exists within an even larger ecosystem of so-

cial, economic and political conditions. The term “un-

intended consequences” is just another way of saying

we didn’t think things through from a systems perspec-

tive before we implemented change.

Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe urged manag-

ers and engineers always to ask what could go wrong

before making a decision.5 In many cases where we are

suffering from unintended consequences, we bring it

on ourselves by not listening to people with dissenting

views who we marginalize for rocking the boat. Qual-

ity professionals, as organizational gardeners, must be

keen observers of their garden—their organizational

system, its subsystems and the larger ecosystem—

always thinking about how the different parts will ex-

hibit covariation.

3. Don’t spray everything. Just because you own

a set of garden tools does not mean you are a gardener.

It is important to have a variety of tools and even more

important to know when to use them and when not to

use them. Don’t spray the herbicide on everything in

sight just because you have it.

Most quality professionals have experienced a time

when their organization went overboard with a par-

ticular tool and attempted to apply it in an uncritical

manner. This causes cynicism about quality simply re-

sponding to the fad of the month.

4. Get dirty. Organizational gardening requires a

lot of hard work and the mastery of a complex body

of knowledge (BoK). This mastery only comes through

a process known as praxis, in which we use our un-

derstanding of theory to inform our practice and use

our practical experiences to reflect on and refine our

understanding of theory.6

alter your perceptionWe sometimes get in a rut when it comes to how we

approach organizational issues and the perspective

from which we understand organizational gardening.

Research into how the mind functions suggests our

perceptions about quality and our preferences for ap-

proaches might be influenced by our brain preference,

leading us to ask whether we are left-brained or right-

brained gardeners.7

For the purposes of helping quality professionals

think about getting dirty as organizational gardeners,

it could be useful to look at quality methods simulta-

neously from two dimensions. One dimension would

organize principles and methods according to whether

they establish and promote order or whether they en-

gender change, as Whitehead might suggest. The other

dimension considers whether the principles and meth-

ods are linear and orderly (the left-brain preference) or

relational in terms of complex systems (the right-brain

preference). Figure 1 provides a matrix of the BoK

from this perspective.

The greatest challenge for the quality practitioner

as organizational gardener might be facilitating the

movement from one quadrant to another when the

needs of the organization require a change in thinking

and action. While the detailed, day-to-day digging in

the organizational dirt in the conformance quadrant is

essential, it is equally important at times to move over

to the assessment quadrant and evaluate the relative

beauty of the garden and decide what to uproot, trim

or fertilize next.

When it comes to promoting change, quality pro-

fessionals show a marked preference for working in

the orderly change quadrant.8 Remember, the orderly

introduction of change (improvement) needs to be

Quality management

Organizational gardening requires a lot of hard work and the mastery of a complex body of knowledge.

QP • www.qualityprogress.com32

balanced by the work in the conformance and assess-

ment quadrants. So where does the right-brained, rela-

tional approach to promote change fit in?

The British historian Arnold Toynbee proffered

a useful historical observation he called “cultural ra-

diation.”9 Toynbee observed the manner in which the

coin appeared in antiquity, how the concept and use

of coins slowly spread throughout the ancient world

and how this evolution and diffusion of an idea and

technology is currently studied through the existence

of the coins themselves.

Consider how the concept of cultural radiation ap-

plies to our own BoK as quality professionals. We draw

upon concepts developed from diverse disciplines,

such as statistics, industrial engineering and organiza-

tional psychology, to shape our theory and define our

practice. We have seen ideas move across oceans and

across cultures, from America to Japan and back to

America over decades.

Who among us could have foreseen that the con-

cept of root cause analysis, developed by engineers

working on submarine reactors, would become vital

to the improvement of healthcare facilities? We can

even reflect on the manner in which the modern prac-

tice of benchmarking appeared in 1872 during the

Meiji Restoration in Japan, when envoys studied best

practices in law, education, government, econom-

ics and military sciences in Europe and the United

States, and radiated over time to societies all around

the world.10

There truly is a time and a place for organizational

gardeners to look beyond the limits of their own BoK

to adopt new ideas and methods if it helps to nurture

and sustain their organizations. Other right-brain ap-

proaches to creative thinking—such as brainstorming

and the variety of approaches that make up synectics,

which seek to jolt us out of our comfortable way of

seeing things—are also effective right-brain approach-

es to promoting change.11

ethical dilemmaWhen quality professionals are dealing with macro-lev-

el quality issues in their organizations while function-

ing as organizational gardeners, there are some ethical

considerations to ponder.

When working within a system, there is no neutral-

ity. Quality practitioners cannot park themselves in a

safe, neutral part of the system. That’s because they

are part of the system. From Whitehead’s perspective,

every action we take is either going to promote greater

order or promote change.

The Italian social scientist, Antonio Gramsci, ob-

served that every action we take will impact the status

quo. According to his theory, even when we decide to

take no action, we are not being neutral, but are sup-

porting the status quo.12

We work with organizations and people, not on or-

ganizations and people. This is a fundamental ethical

concept of professional conduct.13 Quality principles

and methods help people improve their organizations

and communities. The organizational gardener might

perceive what needs to be pruned or transplanted, but

to be effective, we must function as coaches, teachers

and advisors, and not try to mandate or issue edicts to

improve quality.

Successful and sustainable implementation of qual-

ity methods, whether to enhance order or to stimulate

change, depends on helping the people who are go-

ing to implement the actions to understand how the

actions will benefit the organization and themselves.

Those who create also tend to support.

Walking the path between autocracy and democ-

racy in decision making is critical. The promotion of

order and the achievement of change both require un-

derstanding and commitment by people at all levels of

the organization. Autocratic decision making leads to

poor organizational performance because people do

not want to be treated as simply a pair of hands. Demo-

cratic decision making can likewise cause problems

if the subsystems make decisions that optimize their

own good, while allowing the organization as a whole

to suffer.14

Autocratic decision making has the benefit of speed

but the drawback of collapsing when people need to

commit to implementing a decision they did not help

create. Democratic decision making can cause organi-

zations to miss critical opportunities.

Research into participative decision making with-

in the organizational development discipline in the

1980s increased dramatically after companies began

to implement quality circles and project teams. They

ROOM TO GROWPost your thoughts about this—or any other—article using the QP web-site’s comment feature. Just log on to www.qualityprogress.com and click the “add Comments” link on any article’s page.

November 2008 • QP 33

took those actions because the quality discipline was

creating new venues for worker empowerment. As or-

ganizational gardeners, quality professionals need to

be careful not to oversell how far their organizations

are willing to go in terms of empowering employees to

make decisions. They should work to ensure employee

contributions are recognized, valued and rewarded by

the organizations.

Don’t be afraid to dig inThere is no shortage of quality practitioners

who can conduct an audit, lead a group

through a Six Sigma process improvement

routine or plot control charts, even though

these specific areas require expert skill and

knowledge. Today’s challenge goes back to

the issues that prompted Philip Crosby to es-

tablish the Quality College, that motivated Jo-

seph Juran to establish the Juran Center, and

that called Deming to teach countless work-

shops at George Washington University.

All three of these quality leaders were

trying to help everyone see quality from a

systems perspective and impart a breadth

of understanding that could enable us to

nurture and grow quality in organizations

for the betterment of society. The garden

is calling, and it won’t wait. You probably

have some organizational gardening of your

own to do. Dig in. QP

RefeRences1. R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, Bantam Books,

1969.2. alex Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford

university Press, 2007.3. alfred north Whitehead, Process and Reality, macmillan

Co., 1929.4. W. edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, mit Press, 1982.5. Charles Kepner and Benjamin tregoe, The New Rational

Manager, Princeton Research Press, 1984.6. Paulo Friere, The Politics of Education, Bergin & garvey

Publishers, 1985.7. John R. Dew, “are you a left Brain or Right Brain thinker?”

Quality Progress, Vol. 29, no. 5.8. John R. Dew, “tRiZ: a Fresh Breeze for Quality Professionals,”

Quality Progress, Vol. 39, no. 1.9. arnold toynbee, A Study in History, Oxford university, 1954.10. marcus B. Jansen, The Emergence of Meiji Japan (Cam-

bridge History of Japan), Cambridge Press, 1995.11. William J. J. gordon, Synectics: The Development of Creative

Capacity, Harper & Row, 1961.12. antonio gramcsi, “notes on education,” Prison Notebooks,

1932.13. Orlando Fals-Borda and mohammad anisur Rahman, Ac-

tion and Knowledge, apex Press, 1991.14. John R. Dew, Empowerment and Democracy in the Work-

place, Quorum Books, 1997.

Quality management`

JOHN DEW is associate vice chancellor at Troy University in Troy, AL. He teaches online courses for the University of Alabama, where he launched a continuous quality improvement program, and is the author of five books in the quality and organizational development field. Dew is an ASQ Fellow and past chair of ASQ’s Education and Training Board, Energy and Environmental Division, Education Division and

Higher Education Advisory Council. He earned a doctorate in education from the University of Tennessee.