Exiting away from the Prevailing Style of Management

In a 2017 Deming Institute Podcast, Doug Hall, the founder and CEO of Eureka! Ranch, made the case for helping leadership learn and apply the theory and teachings of Dr. W.E. Deming not through endless lectures about "the system", but by helping them get started with "easy on-ramps" to help them achieve quick wins and overcome feelings of being overwhelmed or stuck and not knowing where or how to begin. In my early experiences teaching and coaching leadership and their teams about Dr. Deming's management theory, as well as those of his contemporaries, I encountered this frequently: It can be a lot to take in all at once, and with the pressure on to do something, ANYTHING, it seems like it's not sufficiently action-oriented. If we want to gain insight into how to lead with a Deming perspective, what can we do now to build and capitalize on momentum?

Doug's metaphor suggests that prospects who are dissatisfied with the way things are going in their business need to pull on to the Deming knowledge superhighway, away from the "prevailing style of management". As a thought experiment, I propose an alternative perspective: Let's invert the metaphor and look for exits away from the prevailing style of management to help us stop counterproductive behaviours with the aim to begin positive changes in their place.

Below, I've assembled a preliminary list of suggested exits from my reading of The New Economics (in particular the 11th chapter written by Kelly Allan in the new 3rd edition), Out of the Crisis, and through conversations with other more learned practitioners like Dr. Bill Bellows. I've tried to keep this succinct: It's a start to provoke the curiosity to learn about what to do next.

Exits from the Prevailing Style of Management 

1. First and foremost, stop the pursuit of "best-practices" or other examples and short-cuts to solve your problems. There is no substitute for knowledge: Learn new theory to understand why you can't buy solutions from others and jam them into your organization's system and expect them to work.
2. Stop the fostering or promotion of destructive win/lose competition between people, teams, and departments. Seek instead to learn why this destroys cooperation and renders team-building exercises and employee appreciation days moot.
3. Stop rating and ranking people for performance. Begin critically appraising the performance of your system's processes, instead.
4. Stop using carrots and sticks (extrinsic motivation and activation) to manipulate or control people's behaviour. This includes bonuses, perks, commissions, pay-for-performance, performance improvement plans (PIPs), and similar tactics. Seek to understand why and work to improve your system's processes, instead.
5. Stop depending on quotas or other arbitrary numerical goals to manage and motivate people, including yourself. Seek to understand how quotas and numerical goals serve to skew the system and encourage faking or hiding of numbers. Improve your processes, instead.
6. Stop reacting to fluctuations in metrics and asking subordinates to explain each up-and-down datapoint. Begin learning about the common and special causes of variation within a system and how to "see" them with the aid of process behaviour charts. Ask to see data over time and in context. Plan experiments to remove special causes.
7. Stop demanding zero defects and/or depending on a QA department to improve the quality of your products or services at the end of the line. Begin focusing all efforts on improving quality first by improving your system's processes, including those that govern procurement. Hint: The lowest cost is almost always a poor strategy.
8. Stop management by local optimization of different teams and departments. Begin learning to manage the parts in concert with each other for the optimization of the whole. Break down silos and barriers that contribute to fiefdoms and seek to promote win/win cooperation. As Russell Ackoff said many times, a system is not the sum of its parts, but the product of their interactions.
9. Stop managing by visible figures on a dashboard or Excel spreadsheet alone: Seek to understand why the most critical figures on which your business depends are unknown and unknowable, and what to do instead.
10. Stop demanding across-the-board cuts to budgets to "spread the pain equally". Seek knowledge on why 20% can be no big deal for one department or team, but devastating for another, and how the performance of the whole becomes distorted as a result.

A significant step forward in understanding Dr. Deming's philosophy and theory on management is in his emphasis on stopping practices and behaviours that distract everyone from working together, for the aim of the organization. The ten "exits" I've listed above are nowhere near exhaustive, and should be approached with some caution. Don't expect things to improve just by stopping something. You need to learn why and what to do next.

So beginneth the journey.