The man most often identified as the father of total quality management, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, took offense at the assumed parentage. "The term is counterproductive," said Dr. Deming. "My work is about a transformation in management and about the profound knowledge needed for the transformation. Total quality stops people from thinking." "Neither total quality nor total quality management describes what this approach is all about," says Dr. Edward Baker, director of Ford's corporate quality office. "It's about improving the total behavior of organizations, about developing the capability of a system to do what its members actually want it to do -- anywhere in life."

Without a unifying conceptual framework, the quality movement in the U.S. risks being fragmented into isolated initiatives and slogans. The voice of the customer, fix the process, competitive benchmarking, continuous improvement, policy deployment, leadership -- the more we hear, the less we understand.

"Trying to put together the alphabet soup of SPC, JIT, QIP, and QFD can be confusing without a unifying theme," says Analog Devices CEO Ray Stata.

For many, it doesn't add up to much more than management's latest flavor of the month that must be endured until the next fad comes along. Even those firms where there has been significant commitment to quality management for several years are encountering slowing rates of improvement. "We've picked all the low-hanging fruit," as one Detroit executive put it. "Now, the difficult changes are left."

The "difficult changes" are unlikely without a coherent picture of where we are trying to take our organizations through the quality management process. The best of our international competitors are not fragmenting, they are steadily advancing an approach to improving quality, productivity, and profitability.

The roots of the quality movement lie in assumptions about people, organizations, and management that have one unifying theme: to make continual learning a way of life, especially improving the performance of the organization as a total system. This can only be achieved by breaking with the traditional authoritarian, command and control hierarchy where the top thinks and the local acts, to merge thinking and acting at all levels.

The evolution of learning organizations can be understood as a series of waves. What most managers think of as quality management focuses on improving tangible work processes. This is the first wave. In the first wave, the primary focus of change was frontline workers. Management's job was to champion continual improvement, remove impediments (like quality control experts and unnecessary bureaucracy) that disempowered local personnel, and support new practices like quality training and competitive bench-marking that drive process improvement.

In the second wave, the focus shifts from improving work process to improving how we work -- fostering ways of thinking and interacting, conductive continual learning about the dynamic, complex, conflictual issues that determine system-wide performance. The primary focus of change is management.

These two waves will gradually merge into a third, in which learning becomes institutionalized as a way of life for managers and workers alike.

We are still in the first wave. American industry is, with a few exceptions, primarily operating in the first wave. "Despite all our improvements, the basic behavior of our managers, especially our senior managers, hasn't really changed much," laments the head of a major corporation's quality office.

By contrast, the second wave is well under way in Japan, driven by their seven new tools for management, as distinct from their traditional seven quality tools that drove the first wave. The challenge today, as American companies endeavor to master the basic tools and philosophy of quality management, is not to be caught short-sighted with mechanical "quality programs." If we fail to grasp the deeper messages of the quality movement, we will one day awaken to discover ourselves chasing a receding target.

1. Shared Vision. There is no substitute for organizational resolve, conviction, commitment, and clarity of intent. They create the need for learning and the collective will to learn. Without shared vision, significant learning occurs only when there are crises, and the learning ends when the crises end.

2. Personal Mastery. Shared vision comes from personal visions. Collective commitment to learning comes from individual commitment to learning. An organization that is continually learning how to create its future must be made up of individuals who are continually learning how to create more of what truly matters to them in their own lives.

3. Mental Models. We often become frozen in inaccurate and disempowering views of reality because we lack the capability to see our assumptions, and to continually challenge and improve those assumptions. This requires fostering managerial skills in balancing inquiry and advocacy.

4. Team Learning. Ultimately, the learning that matters is the learning of groups of people who need one another to act (the real meaning of team). The only problem is that we've lost the ability to talk with one another. Most of the time we are limited to discussion, which comes from the same roots as percussion and concussion and literally means to heave one's views at the other. What is needed also is dialogue, which comes from the Greek dia logos and literally means when a group of people talk with one another such that the meaning (logos) moves through (dia) them.

5. System Thinking. It's not just how we learn, but what we learn. The most important learning in contemporary organizations concerns gaining shared insight into complexity and how we can shape change. But early in life we are taught to break apart problems. The resulting fragmentation leaves us unable to see the consequences of our own actions, creating an illusion that we're victims of forces outside our control and that the only type of learning that is possible is learning to react more quickly. Systems thinking is about understanding wholes, not parts, and learning how our actions shape our reality.

• Empowering people toward personal mastery empowers the organization, but only if individuals are deeply aligned around a common sense of purpose and shared vision.

• Shared vision will energize and sustain an organization through thick and thin, but only if people think systemically. Once people are able to see how their actions shape their reality, they begin to understand how alternative actions could create a different reality.

• Individual skills in reflection and inquiry mean little if they cannot be practiced when groups of people confront controversial issues.

• Systems thinking will become the province of a small set of system experts unless it is tied to an organization-wide commitment to improving mental models, and even then nothing much will change without shared visions.

• A commitment to seeing the larger system only matters when there is a commitment to the long term. In the short run, everyone can just fix their piece. Only with a long-term view can executives see that optimizing the parts, one at a time, can lead to sub-optimizing the whole.