"But, Davis, I'm still confused how to DO Deming."
Davis Balestracci
Improvement Consultant / Public Speaker / Author of Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results
(This is Part 9 of a series reflecting on the 30th anniversary of W. Edwards Deming's death. The links to the other 8 parts are at the end of this article)
What part of “All of them!” don't you understand?
["this world" = "bolt-on" 'quality' (projects), "another one" = "built-in" 'improvement' (transforming everyday work)]
(My article "Have I Unintentionally Evolved into a 'Qualicrat'?"contains more explanation of "bolt-on" versus "built-in")
My series of reflections on the 30th anniversary of W. Edwards Deming’s death has tried to “name” and reflect on the 30-year ongoing state of denial about the glacial pace and disappointing track record of Dr. Deming’s philosophy and quality improvement (especially in healthcare). ?This quote from a blog post by John Atkinson (“The Myth of the Learning Organization” – Remember Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline fad from the 1990s?) nails the unintended consequences of its success through its failure. It is every bit as applicable to what happened to organizational improvement:
"I saw local successes, plenty of them in fact. I saw the energy and enthusiasm you release when you set people free to learn about their work, change it and improve it. I thought that here, working at this level, might be found an answer to the negativity and organizational melancholy that sets in when people are faced by a slow and suffocating bureaucracy.
"This never happened. The local highs that arose from success came and went as part of the rhythm and ritual of organizational life. The practices got subsumed into the bureaucracy and turned back into parodies of what they were meant to be."
"Joy in paycheck" will always trump "Joy in work!"
I came across a healthcare academic's reflections on the reality of changing a human system after a rather dramatic improvement had disappeared. It was another tired variation on the famous line from Casablanca, “I am shocked…SHOCKED!" (and they were genuinely shocked) -- they did everything the academic literature on "change" said to do! ?
I was hardly shocked and could only smile.
“Any theory is correct in its own world, but the problem is that the theory may not make contact with this world." – W. Edwards Deming
The ongoing myth of “bolt-on” ‘quality’
Atkinson's thoughts also shed light on the historical (and current) tendency of quality improvement to take a “victim” posture:
“[I]t’s all the fault of someone else, someone faceless and intangible.
“To conclude that would be to miss something that is happening every day, before your very eyes. Each day people turn up at work, in sub-optimal offices and workplaces, not designed that way, but simply how they have grown to be with each iteration of the company’s progress. They work within a bureaucracy of process and procedure, designed in response to past events to ensure a brighter, safer future yet in reality limiting and constraining every individual’s capacity for creativity and humanity.
“As they do so they find that today is not just the same as yesterday. A new problem needs to be solved, a subtle change in market conditions asks a new question of us. Nothing major most days, but nonetheless, a small conundrum to be overcome to keep the organisation working.
“And each and every day people learn a way to get past the limitations of their processes and working conditions to get their job done. The organisation is continually learning, every single minute of every single day. It is learning how to continue to be itself.” (My emphasis).
This atmosphere is rife with “cracks,” through which seep deadly, toxic “demotivators” to anchor such a climate in place.
Today’s unprecedented relentless stress of “bigger… better… faster… more… now!” is causing people to redouble these survival efforts. This stresses cultural cracks and provides abundant nutrients for lurking demotivators to thrive and further contribute to routine daily confusion, conflict, complexity, and chaos.
Improvement will always be needed because most organizations continually react to default to their current designs
"If we are unhappy with the behavior of people on our team or in our organization, we need to take a closer look at the system and structure they're working in. If they behave like bureaucrats, they're likely working in a bureaucracy. If they're not customer focused, they're probably using systems and working in structure that wasn't designed to serve the servers and/or customers. If they're not innovative, they're likely working in a controlled and inflexible organization. If they resist change, they're probably not working in a learning organization that values growth and development. If they're not good team players, they're likely working in an organization designed for individual performance. Good performers, in a poorly designed structure, will take on the shape of the structure" – Jim Clemmer
True transformation is about a MINDSET, not a tool set ("You can learn the lot in 15 minutes" -- Deming): a mindset that finally moves on from the mistaken belief that you can "bolt on" 'built-in improvement,' e.g. cherry-picked Deming
Leveraging the "All of them!" synergy of the 14 Points and SoPK takes a quantum leap in an improvement practitioner's mindset to go from “bolt-on” 'quality' to “built-in” 'improvement'
If you peruse my LinkedIn articles, I do my best to explain how my 30 years of PDSA cycles developed my theory to approaching Deming transformation -- applying SoPK's "Theory of knowledge" ("How do I know what I know?"). I hope this series of Deming reflections has also demonstrated the fluid interface between the other three elements of the SoPK and need for their vital interplay: “systemness,” “psychology,” with “variation” as the catalyst.
I've listened to 30 years of tired arguments why "it won't work" from people -- including The Deming Institute -- who won't even give me the courtesy of hearing out what they no doubt perceive as the "method to Balestracci's madness." They just know it won't work! -- because "I wouldn't do it that way!" (Great theory!) And when I ask, "So, what's the theory behind what you do? What data have you recently plotted over time?", I usually get blank stares and angry redoubled arguments why my synthesis "won't work"... as they rush off to do yet another (tired) red bead experiment demonstration. And I've lived in the naive belief that I could find an executive with the backbone -- i.e., "crazy enough" -- to give it a try.
For the brave souls who have made it this far, just start here
Ask yourself, “What do I need to STOP doing, START doing, and CONTINUE doing?” (Note that it’s a QBQ!):
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Ask them, "So what do you need to STOP doing, START doing, and CONTINUE doing?", then, "How can I support you in that?"
Take this assessment (with colleagues?) to gauge your organizational demotivator climate.
If you can become aware of these and take actions to minimize their effects, you will have created a cultural quid-pro-quo that is pure gold.
Ask yourself, How can I create awareness among leaders about the lurking power of dealing with demotivators to engage them?
(I’ll admit, it's a risky undertaking; but, as I hope to show you in Part 10, it is a risk worth taking.)
I can hear the chorus: "Where is the time for these BUSY people going to come from?" Trust me. It's there. In fact it’s more than you ever realized.? But, you will have to create it... and you are surrounded by opportunity (two links in previous sentence)! Meanwhile...
Part 10 will conclude these reflections with a challenge: a most difficult final lesson on how to DO Deming
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Chapters 1 to 4 of my book Data Sanity (10 chapters, 400 pages) teach a robust, results-oriented leadership philosophy designed to catalyze transformation to a culture of excellence
Read Rip Stauffer's review, published in Quality Digest
For UK readers who want a hard copy, it is available?on Amazon UK
An ebook version is available through the publisher
It's not only for healthcare –?education, government, service industries, and manufacturing can all benefit as well.
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Other posts in this series reflecting the 30th anniversary of Dr. Deming's death:
Part 6: Fighting the "Disgustingly Normal" Daily Battles of Confusion, Conflict, Complexity, and Chaos
What seems to me to be wanting is knowledge and application of organizational governance by those that ought to, and do, establish it. My opinion is, is that even if senior leadership leads the way, the question of government must be addressed. With the CEO’s requisite leading the way there may well be a much more functional executive system, true. But what about the representative system? Individuals and groups of individuals by work role, union or non, etc. How do the many representive roles, if they are established at all, marry to the executive system? Ought the representative system define policy and the executive system execute? Or should the executive system continue to both define policy and execute? Should a more democratic system be established? Or retain autocratic systems while vainly expecting worker engagement?? It’s increasingly less surprising to me that transformation doesn’t get any further than the local government of mid-level management. And what about an authentic appeals system that provides for a just culture? How can senior leadership uncynically expect anyone to speak up without fairness? Is MBA curriculum wanting? Is senior leaders’ cognitive level often insufficient?
Business Transformation | Operational Excellence | Technology
1 年The most senior leaders have matured in a world of functional experts. Operations is the responsibility of operations. Finance is responsible for finance. HR is responsible for HR. Improvement is the responsibility of the Improvement function. CEOs have to decide where to focus, most choose Sales and/or Marketing. Few select people and process development.
Management / Quality Consultant “The measure of quality, no matter what the definition of quality may be is a variable.” (Shewhart, 1931)
1 年If Dr. Deming had to boil down his message to a few words he said understanding variation would do it. What the author here calls having Data Sanity. I’ve come to realize you need help and you need to plot dots to really begin understanding variation enough to improve processes. I was fortunate that Davis did help me. Data Sanity the textbook helped too. Executives and managers are obsessed with costs. They don’t work on causes-the place causes come from. One place I worked was a textile factory that made balls or skeins of yarn. Just as you cannot stand in the same river twice (it varies with time) no two dye lots of yarn match identically. For this reason, the knitters will seek out the same lot number on enough yarn to knit their projects. Unbelievably, rather than do the right thing and throw away the excess labels from a batch of yarn, the plant manager saved the old labels and put them on later batches, thus rendering lot numbers and dates of manufacture completely compromised! The result was about 150 handwritten (yes handwritten) quality complaint letters per month! Devastating! The worst ones would show a wedding gift, maybe a bed spread that looked alright until the grandma put it on the bed and light hit it!
EXCELLING IN THE TOOLS, RESPECTING THE JOURNEY: Lean | Six Sigma | Operational Excellence | Continuous Improvement | Facilitation | Training & Coaching | Process & Data Analysis |
1 年As I see more and more failures of Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, SPC, and whatever else people want to label it, I believe the ultimate root cause comes down to one thing Wanting to delegate change without owning it. Leaders who take on change as a personal obligation are not guaranteed of success, but refusal to do so DOES seem to come with a guarantee.