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The idea for this book originated when a group of facilitators in my company, well down the road of quality improvement, asked me to teach them new tools to use with their quality teams. They were stuck in a rut of using just a few familiar standards: brainstorming, multivoting, and fishbone and Pareto diagrams. They had limited knowledge of the wide selection of methods and techniques that can be used in quality improvement. I became frustrated by how few of the available tools could be taught in a training session, so I decided to create a reference that they could use to locate and learn new tools on their own. After asking “What tools exist?” the facilitators asked “When do we use them?” They knew more tools than they commonly used, but they did not know how to choose and apply the tools at the appropriate times during the process of quality improvement. So woven throughout the handbook was guidance on fitting the tools into the quality improvement process. Groups just getting started with quality improvement also used the handbook. It gave them more confidence with the basic tools and the quality improvement process they had just learned. It also provided a way for them to continue learning just-in-time, as they encountered a need for new methods. Team members, facilitators, and team leaders all had copies of the Toolbox on their shelves and referred to it between or during meetings. The first published edition of The Quality Toolbox in 1994 was an expansion of that original handbook: a comprehensive reference to the most commonly used methods and techniques for quality improvement, including many that were less commonly used, plus a half dozen that I had created and were not available elsewhere. Tools were included for generating, organizing, and evaluating ideas, analyzing processes, determining root causes, planning, and basic data-handling and statistics. By the time the second edition was published, the value of other tools, especially statistical ones, had become more widely acknowledged. Thanks to Six Sigma, statistical tools such as hypothesis testing, regression analysis, and design of experiments, which had always been powerful tools for understanding and improving processes, were used more regularly within quality improvement projects. A variety of previously lesserknown nonstatistical tools were also taught by Six Sigma, lean, and other methodologies that had become widespread. The second edition also added some tools from other fields, such as the social sciences, that had recently been adopted into quality improvement. Some of the tools—for example, design of experiments and benchmarking—are too complex to be learned from the description in the book, but an overview was provided so the reader would know when a tool was appropriate, or even essential, to the improvement process and would be encouraged to use it, with expert assistance. The second edition included examples from a wider range of applications, such as education and healthcare, and detailed case studies from Baldrige Award winners. A new chapter put the tools into two contexts: the historical evolution of quality improvement and the quality management systems within which the tools are used. The ten years between the first and second editions coincided with an explosion in the use of computers. The second edition recognized the computer as a valuable assistant to remove drudgery from many of the tools’ procedures. However, it was critical for users to know the tool well enough to set up the computer’s task and to understand and act on the results the computer provided, and the book gave the reader that knowledge. Also, icons had become familiar for navigating computers, so I included icons with each tool description to help the reader know what kind of tool it was and where it was used within the improvement process. It has been almost twenty years since the second edition. The many thousands of readers who have come to depend on The Quality Toolbox as a standard reference on their bookshelf deserve a new edition that reflects the changes in quality practice during that time. In this third edition, the content has been brought up to date while retaining the features that have made it so useful.