Deming Devotional #7: By What Method?
Everyone Has Goals - But How Can They Be Achieved?
Goals, aims, hopes. How could there be life without aims and hopes? Everyone has aims, hopes, plans. But a goal that lies beyond the means of accomplishment will lead to discouragement, frustration, demoralization. In other words, there must be a method to achieve an aim. By what method?
When a company holds an individual accountable for a goal, it must provide him the resources for accomplishment. A company has aims, their statement of constancy of purpose.
- Dr. W. Edwards Deming. The New Economics (2nd Ed, p. 41, 3rd Ed, p. 29)
A numerical goal outside the control limits cannot be accomplished without changing the system. A numerical goal accomplishes nothing. What counts is by what method. Three words. If you can accomplish a goal without a method, then why weren’t you doing it last year? There’s only one possible answer: you were goofing off.
- Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Joyce Orsini. The Essential Deming (PB): Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality (p. 54). McGraw Hill LLC. Kindle Edition.
THE AIM for this post is to continue in our series of distilled and curated wisdom from the good Dr. Deming. Today we contemplate one of his most disarming managerial questions that he would ask executives who expounded on all their aims, hopes, and plans: by what method will you accomplish them?
Dr. Joyce Orsini notes in her book, The Essential Deming, that Deming would observe most leaders had no idea how they were going to improve their operations beyond wishful thinking. They had no methods that could be put to the test because, as he famously would say, they know not what to do. In contrast, he had much to offer them: a new theory of management beyond ‘common-sense’, a means to understand variation in the daily figures and when to act, how to rethink the organization as a system, and the value of cooperation over adversarial competition.
We hear every day in the news about organizations trying to reinvent themselves with “digital transformations”, or political leadership who tell us that they will promise to right things with a seemingly simple solution, but the details on how it will be done, by what method, are scant.
Recently, a mayoral hopeful here in Toronto promised to refund fares to passengers who had to wait 15m or longer. It’s catchy, and presses a button for people who rely on unreliable streetcars and buses and have had to re-arrange their lives to arrive early at a stop just so they’ll get to work or an appointment on time. However, the candidate didn’t offer how he would process those refunds, how he would identify real vs. bogus claims. He didn’t even have data to show how many rides were late and by how much so we can’t make a judgement about whether the current transit system can be improved to the point that delays of 15m or more can be reduced and at what cost.
In another case, much political capital and ink has been spent here in Canada about our inability to build enough housing to meet demand, with the government making claims they would “invest” to help build 3M+ homes by 2030, or about an average of 500k per year at the time the promise was made. No methods were offered to achieve this goal, nor real data analyzed in a way to assess the reality of whether it could be achieved by the present system. So I created a visualization based on a process behaviour chart to make the reality plain: without some miraculous change in the system of new home construction (which extends beyond the job site), this won’t happen. It is well-beyond our current capabilities.
Thus, like the executives Deming would admonish, our leadership have aims, hopes, and plans, but no methods to accomplish them beyond wishful thinking.
By What Method?
As with all prior Devotionals, I provide a method to use them to begin to shift your thinking about your thinking on what matters most to manage:
Begin by reading the passages carefully — Deming is famous for densely packing meaning into a few choice words. Read them aloud, if you can. Jot down thoughts and reactions as they occur.
What phrases or words strike you most? What reactions did they provoke? Why?
Do you agree with Deming’s cheeky comment about goofing off? How do you think that would resonate with leadership in your organization? Would they agree?
In what ways do we think it’s ‘common sense’ about how a goal will be achieved? How is this ‘wisdom’ challenged? How often do we know whether a numerical target is even achievable? What effect do unattainable goals have on morale? What could we do instead?
You will probably come up with more questions and examples when you think about the passage and your own experiences and observations. Now share these passages with a friend or colleague and get their thoughts. Where do you agree or disagree? What will you do with your knowledge?
Dear Christopher,
Excellent post demonstrating a simple way to visualize both the current state and the declared goal using a Shewhart control chart.
Thank you for this post. The control chart is very good, but as Dr. Deming stated back in the 1980s (interview with Ford), it takes time to learn and understand the systems. Dr. Deming also mentions a need for common sense and creativity. It is one thing to “mass produce housing”, but a totally different story when you take into account proper places of employment, public transit, and government amenities that the average person needs.