1. 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
3. 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 approach
Regardless 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
Promotingorder
Conformance quadrant
Procedures•
Testing•
Inspection•
Statistical process•
control
Assessment quadrant
Process mapping•
Baldrige program•
High-level assessments•
Promotingchange
Orderly change quadrant
Six Sigma•
TRIZ•
Benchmarking•
Transplanting quadrant
Brainstorming•
Synectics•
Cultural radiation•
4. 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 perception
We 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.
5. 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 dilemma
When 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 GROW
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6. 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 in
There 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
References
1. 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.
