The quality profession has been evolving since the Industrial Revolution. I’ve lived part of this journey since the 1970s and have experienced its effect. ASQ and other organizations have continually pushed the envelope in creating training and certifications in the skill sets we’ve developed over the decades. These initiatives have facilitated an improvement in overall defect levels combined with a steady decline in organizational risk. Unfortunately, the positive trends appear to have flattened during the last decade.

As the timeline below depicts, we’ve successfully matured by creating conformance and performance tools. In my experience, however, we’ve never had a unified mandate to evolve beyond conformance to business excellence. Regrettably, we’ve reached a virtual event horizon that could be correlated with the Covid-19 pandemic.

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