While the research domain associated with quality is continually evolving, an emerging consensus on the field’s principles include such concepts as:

Continuous improvement and learning: Refers to both incremental and breakthrough improvement, and applies to both the individual and organization. Improvement and learning can be directed toward better products and services, toward better processes and toward being more responsive, adaptive and efficient.

Ethics and responsibility: Quality organizations and individuals see themselves as part of a larger whole, which must be respected. Leadership includes influencing other organizations, private and public, to support the causes in which it believes, such as improved education, resources conservation, community service or crime reduction.

External focus: Students, customers, readers, patients, clients or citizens are primary recipients of a product or service. It is those recipients upon which we must focus. As Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of an organization lies outside itself.” A focus on external stakeholders can influence an organization’s success by increasing this group’s satisfaction and loyalty.

Fact-based decisions: Improvement within organizations requires information that supports evaluation and decision-making. Trends, projections, cause-and-effect, etc., may not be evident without analysis.

Fast response: Focusing on timeliness tends to reduce process steps and costs within an organization. Quality products and services introduce convenience to, and remove delays from, our lives. Time improvements often drive improvements in overall organization, cost, quality and productivity.

Involvement of people: No matter the endeavor, quality improvement relies on individuals and teams. Organizations depend on the knowledge, skills, innovation and motivation of their employees. Their contributions must be integrated and aligned with the organization’s strategy.

Long-range view of the future: Ideas, products, services, processes and relationships suffer when long-term consistency of purpose is sacrificed to expediency. New opportunities, changing expectations and evolving stakeholder requirements must be considered by the organization. Short-term plans, strategies and resources allocations need to reflect long-term influences.

Prevention orientation: In medicine, law, government and business the search for quality relies upon the idea that problems can be prevented. It is virtually always less costly to prevent a problem than to correct it “downstream.” Accordingly, organizations need to emphasize opportunities for interventions “upstream.”

Results orientation: Balanced and integrated results that pay attention to all stakeholders are the hallmark of a quality enterprise. Results also offer a way to communicate short- and long-term priorities, to monitor performance and to marshal support for improvement.

Systems approach: The most important problems of a business, an enterprise and society are systemic, deeply rooted and have multiple causes. Coherence of understanding requires a systems view. All elements of that system must be aligned in the same direction to achieve true breakthroughs in quality.

Waste reduction: Time and materials are wasted extravagantly in many fields. Reducing waste can improve quality and increase the abundance of time and materials in an organization.

Visionary leadership: Leaders must live the vision and values of their organizations, set high standards, and honorably serve all of their constituencies.