Theme 2019: 100 Years of Quality, the CQI Centenary
The 2019 centenary was a rare chance to look up from the work and notice how far the profession has travelled in a hundred years.
Centenaries are useful precisely because they are arbitrary. They give a profession permission to stop, look back and ask the questions it normally has no time for. The CQI's 2019 theme used the occasion well.
A century, briefly
The shape of the journey is worth holding in mind.
- ▸The 1920s gave us statistical process control and the first serious mathematics of variation.
- ▸The 1950s exported those ideas to a rebuilding Japan and watched them transform global manufacturing.
- ▸The 1980s formalised them into Six Sigma and the first generation of international standards.
- ▸The 2000s globalised assurance through ISO 9001 and an expanding network of certification bodies.
- ▸The 2020s are folding all of that heritage into AI, sustainability and resilience.
What a century teaches
The fundamentals do not move
Variation, root cause, calibration, evidence. The vocabulary updates. The substance does not.
Tools change faster than mindsets
Every generation of quality tooling has been hailed as the end of human judgement. None has been. The judgement just gets pointed at harder problems.
The profession is a long game
Few people enter quality for the spotlight. Almost everyone who stays does so because the work compounds, slowly and quietly, into systems that outlast careers.
Looking forward from the anniversary
The 2019 theme was unusual in being explicitly historical, but its message was forward-looking. A profession that knows its own story is harder to dismiss, harder to dilute and better placed to choose its own next chapter. Seven years on, that confidence has aged into something close to a strategic asset.
