Quality And The Concept of Zero Error

In the real world of the Economy, there is a word for maximum effort and maximum commitment, it is simply called Quality. Quality is a multi-million $ industry, through trainings and seminars, throughout the world. Once a company signs up for Quality trainings, it starts at the higher management staff first, and then the same management passes it on to the next level down, and so forth, all the way down the pyramid, until everyone is trained and sensitive to measuring their own error, posting it publicly in and clearly visible to everyone in the company.

These measures are taken in the larger corporations, where everybody’s errors do add up to unreasonable financial and market losses. In today’s technological environment, with the extremely fast expansion of the web, error can have dramatic effects, as newer modernly organized organizations can use this technology to become quickly market leaders and leave the traditional providers behind.

One of the key concepts of quality, as taught in the business world is the Zero Error concept. Just like our “ideal integrated body”, zero error doesn’t mean you have to be there, but you have to commit yourself to try your best to get there, otherwise someone will beat you to it, trying harder than you are. In the real world of the Economy, Error has to actually be a measured concept. Otherwise, how could one improve one’s quality? There are 2 areas where our community “error” is unacceptable: The choice of a wrong imaging system is one of them.

The other is the fact that our gurus sensitivities doesn’t allow the most efficient use of information technology (through a federated web forum and web information resource center, instead of individual communities not talking to each other); think about it, every similar question (same medical condition for ex.) that is asked by 4 different students (or MD or general public) in four different schools will get one answer from his/her school, instead of the answers of all schools.

A truly web-integrated profession such as Biomechanics offer a wonderful illustration of communication beyond schools divisions, with their over 30,000 members: Suppliers, schools, Ph.D.s, students, general public, MDs, etc. can find all kinds of answers. You bet it has boosted their whole profession to a scale that could not be achieved without co-operation of all institutions! By the way, discussion groups and professional forums are a major component of the Internet and contributed to its expansion long before web pages and browsers were even invented.

But this is another subject isn’t it? And it looks like we are just going to have to wait a generation or two, before the imprint of our elders lack of perspective finally fades away. For reference it happened just like that with the Alexander Technique (One of the root components of Ida’s work), whose schools were very divided for a few generations before they created an integrated Federation, instead of fighting over who has got the best version of the teaching.

This is very serious: how much community leaders impose both their qualities and their flaws. However, we do not have to make the same technological choices. In this case “alternative” is a figure of speech: our founder was of the scientific world after all. Some options can, I am convinced, bring all of us closer to that original spirit, instead of encouraging non-conclusive, non-productive, and egocentric studies, absolutely non-exploitable by scientific standards, and from then by the whole world, which will keep ignoring us just as long and just as much as we ignore it.