In every aspect of business (and life), problem solving is a given requirement. And quality assurance — whether it’s products and services, marketing campaigns, idea development or even medical treatment — is based on problem solving.

To ensure quality in what we do, there are specific, quantitative methods like Six Sigma, which are now reaching beyond manufacturing floors to other functional areas of business. Quality standards like ISO 9000 are now being sought even by creative companies. In each of these methodologies or standards, quality control is focused on problem solving that is continuous and pervasive. Most importantly, they drive to be effective.

It’s that last element — effectiveness — that concerns me. Solving a problem requires finding the root cause. Without finding the root cause of problems you most likely will be treating symptoms. Quality control tools seek to get to the root cause of problems so they won’t have to be solved repeatedly. Or create ultimate failure.

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The Markets Institute

You might note that I haven’t posted for a while. While I would like to say that I’ve been busy at the Winter Olympics, the truth is I’ve been heads-down on the launch of a new non-profit, non-partisan research unit, The Markets Institute.

The idea for the Institute came from the incredible amount of data continually collected by Moddition. While we focus on clients, to do what we do, we literally have to track virtually every industry, every sector, from their ideas to the final sales of their products and services.

With all that incoming information and analysis that goes into extracting useful understanding, there was a great deal of value that could come from looking at the big picture, rather than just at solutions for a specific client.

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After my father passed in February following a very full, very accomplished 88 years, I had the less-than-pleasant opportunity to sift through his personal possessions. Amongst a multitude of books, printouts and miscellanea of his hobbies were some very old-school tools of design. Mechanical pencils and a large round cast iron sharpener, French curve templates, guides and so on. All from his days designing everything from trade show displays to R&D labs to battleships.

My father was an innovator. He subscribed to no particular codified “body of knowledge” but his results were inspiring. The majority of his great work preceded ubiquitous CAD/CAM installations. As a testament to what simply “got done” without technology, he had designed and built an enormous miniature model city for use in a military flight simulator, long before the existence of a computer that could render scenic imagery in real time. Quite literally he designed a system where a video camera “flew over” a terrestrial model while the video was piped to a CRT in the simulator’s cockpit.

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