Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design

In organizations with lack of quality culture and limited management commitment to quality improvement, a traditional top-down approach for designing ISO 9000 quality management systems may prove difficult. An alternative design approach may be to think of the organization as being in constant turbulence, and design the quality management system to take advantage the unpredictability of the situation. A story of fifteen years of designing quality management systems is used to discuss design issues, focusing on the theory of complex adaptive systems in terms of how quality management people might combine a mixture or myopic attention to the behaviour of the nearest manager while also maintaining a long-term vision towards the goals of the international quality standards and excellence models.