Quality Circles were conceived in Japan in 1962 as a forum for discussing ways to improve quality of products. Typically, 8-10 employees including the Supervisor from the same workshop doing similar work join together as a group with clear objectives to improve quality, productivity and safety.

Team norms like listening to each other and feeling comfortable even in the face of disagreements and taking their decisions by consensus are adhered to. The major deliverable of the leader is not to dominate the group neither do they want to control but focus on how to get the job done. A Quality Circle will not tire until a solution is found. Where possible the employees will implement the solutions themselves. Clearly, they aim at giving a chance to employees to use their own wisdom and creativity in order to fulfil their self-esteem and motivational needs.

Management and employees world over have come up with more or less the same initiatives to improve organisational performance and the needed sense of business ownership by employees. Quality circles call for problem identification, solving and analysis from the employees who experience the problem. There is value in training Quality Circle members to equip them with these skills. Akin to Quality Circles is what is known as Intellectual webs/Spider webs. The main role of these webs is to tackle problems by making use of self-organising networks. These may be configured when problems become more complex and less well defined, such that no one person or group of people from the same department may know exactly what the full dimensions are and where key issues may ultimately reside. Typically, a spider web aims at bringing people together quickly to solve a particular problem then disbands just as quickly once the job is done.

The power of these spider webs is their interconnectedness which is so great that even with a modest number of collaborating professionals (8-10) a spider web can leverage knowledge capabilities by hundreds of times. The number of between 8-10 professionals was coincidentally used for quality circles.

Closer home, the popularity of these knowledge networks is mostly used in the developmental sector. Most international organisations and non-governmental organisations use and understand these networks to leverage professional intellect. Although these spider webs are generally very unique in their purpose, patterns and relationships, there is no single best way to manage them. International organisations using them leverage on technology to bring together highly diverse and geographically dispersed talents to work on a single assignment. These mostly become operational when calls for proposals with a wider geographical coverage are flighted. The same approach may be used in any organisation to harness diversity. The network mostly operates under a Supervisor whose responsibility is coordinating various activities and keeping the group focused on its objectives. Employees participating from the various Departments or geographical locations are free to use their wisdom and creativity. The Supervisor encourages team spirit and maintains a cohesive culture among the different participants. This structural arrangement resonates strongly with the original concept of quality circles although such networks may have other objectives as well. What most international organisations do is mostly to ensure success of a bid by leveraging on professional intellect through motivational measures. Spider webs used in this manner go beyond the current practice of managing the human intellect. Spider webs become the glue that joins together highly dispersed delivery centres by leveraging the critical knowledge base. Usually   when such bid is won, it does not end there. The same intellect that worked on the bid comes together again but maybe this time narrowed to a regional level to implement that project. Team members with different skills and experts come together for the implementation of the project. Once the project life comes to an end usually after a minimum of two years or a maximum period of five years, the team then disbands.

However, since no organisational form is a panacea, many different forms often coexist successfully in the same organisation. As an example, one team may be working on pain points while another team maybe working on improving service or product quality. What has been observed is that the proper use of each network helps organisations to harness and leverage its skills as well as deploying intellect for a different purpose.

Although quality circles as originally perceived in Japan have been modified and changed over the period, its central tenets have been infused in the more current networks where professionals are brought together for a purpose. The focus of such initiatives has become technology leverage, pain points in the face of tough competition and seamless service delivery.

It is my view; quality circles will continue to evolve but will still serve the same purpose to businesses. It is important to highlight that employee-initiated groups tend to have an informal approach, high interaction and are more solution focused than management-initiated groups. It is therefore important to encourage Quality Circles and allow employees to configure them, define their purpose and where possible allow them to implement the outcomes.

Emmanuel Jinda is the Managing Consultant of PROSERVE Consulting Group, a leading supplier of Professional Human Resources and Management services locally, regionally and internationally. He can be contacted at Tel: 263 773004143 or 263 242 772778 or visit our website at www.proservehr.com