Enlarging a Committee

One Can Learn All There Is to Know About Ice, yet Know Very Little About Water.

IW: Quoting from your book [The New Economics (1993, MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study)], you say, "You can learn a lot about ice and know nothing about water.' What does that mean?

Dr. Deming: It means you can understand your present job and understand it very well. But what is the result of hard work and best efforts? What they do is only to dig deeper the pit that we are in. But they will not dig us out of the pit, only dig it deeper, make it more difficult to get out of. To get out of the pit we require an outside view. No chance from the inside. A system cannot understand itself. Understanding comes from outside. An outside view provides a lens for examination of our present actions, policies. Outside view is the aim of my chapter four [The New Economics] on profound knowledge. Knowledge from outside is necessary. Knowledge from outside gives us a view of what we're doing, what we might do, a road to improvement, continual improvement.

IW: Is that view provided by other people?

Dr. Deming: It's a very good idea. Knowledge will not come from a committee inside. How could a committee produce new knowledge? The view must come from the outside. A committee in a company can hardly stumble onto it. You enlarge the committee, bigger and bigger. That still doesn't do it. Enlarge the committee, make the committee everybody. Popular vote. Will popular vote provide the right answer? Maybe, by accident. How else could it? It's frightening. Popular vote does not solve our problems. Popular vote makes everybody responsible for the results. Let's work on it, do our best, within a framework. We could do that. Far better, more trustworthy, is an outside view. A new way of looking at things. It is only by that outside view that we get ahead, I believe

- Stevens, Tim. Dr. Deming: 'Management Today Does Not Know What Its Job Is' (Part 2). Industry Week, January 17, 1994. Archive.

IN THE SIXTH CHAPTER of The New Economics, Dr. Deming presents the diagram below to visually communicate the theory his System of Profound Knowledge is intended to address - a response to the questions, “How? By what method?” to the problem of reversing the declining trajectory of quality, productivity, and international trade. The line he demarcates as “Now” would be 1993, with a prediction of where our future would lie to the right. We could move the line to the right and connect the dots for the present day, now twenty-eight years later.

Perceptively, he noted that the decline isn’t something you can look around and see because of our limited abilities to perceive gradual change - it only becomes apparent later.

The change has been gradual, not visible week to week. We can only see the decline by looking back. A cat is unaware that dusk has settled upon the earth. Her pupils expand as light recedes, but she is as helpless as any of us in total darkness.

- Deming, Dr. W.E. The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 4)

Deming explains the figure, using one of his curious and at first inscrutable metaphors:

Pictorial effect of transformation. Figure 11 shows the decline that we attribute to the present style of management, and the dream of what could be once the transformation is accomplished. The route to transformation is to understand an apply profound knowledge.

It will not suffice to learn all about the present style of management. One could learn all there is to know about ice, yet know very little about water. (Contributed by Dr. Edward M. Baker.)

- Deming, Dr. W.E., The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 85)

What does Dr. Deming mean by knowledge of ice not translating into knowledge of water? Simply, that management, like water, has multiple states. The majority of our time has been spent concentrating our knowledge of one state at the expense of another to the extent that anything else seems foreign. To move from understanding one state to another requires a transformation in how we think about our thinking.

In his 2017 book, The Symphony of Profound Knowledge, Dr. Edward M. Baker who created the metaphor, clarifies this concept:

In the physical world, transformation refers to a change of state, such as ice to water or water to steam. Transformation produces qualitative differences from the previous state. Relationships that exist in one phase do not exist in other phases. For example, the behavior of a solid can’t be predicted from the behavior of a liquid. Therefore, knowledge of the behavior in one state cannot help to understand and predict behavior in another. A lesson for managers is that the knowledge, skills, and practices that worked in the past will not work as well, and may even be counterproductive, in a qualitatively different future state. Deming envisioned that his system of profound knowledge, discussed later, would provide the basis for a transformation to a new state of human behavior, relationships, and understanding.

(Kindle Edition, loc 703)

This knowledge cannot come, as Dr. Deming explained in his Industry Week interview, from within by merely “enlarging” an advisory or steering committee, by adding people who may possess deep subject matter expertise in their domains, but all adhering to an identical and insufficient theory of management. This will merely re-cycle and recirculate the same failing ideas in different guises, because:

Any system needs guidance from the outside. Again. A system can not understand itself.

An organization may require someone in the position of aid to the president to teach and facilitate profound knowledge.

We have learned that a flow diagram is helpful toward understanding a system… By understanding a system, one may be able to predict the consequences of a proposed change.

- Deming, Dr. W.E. The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 39)

Does this guidance need to come from within our industry? Do they need to be an expert in your business and how you do it? As we learned from the sixteenth obstacle to transformation Deming described in Out of the Crisis, not at all. NB: There are many more obstacles, of course - this was just a start.

16. “Anyone that comes to try to help us must understand all about our business.” All evidence points to the fallacy of this supposition. Competent men in every position, if they are doing their best, know all that there is to know about their work except how to improve it. Help toward improvement can come only from some other kind of knowledge. Help may come from outside the company, combined with knowledge already possessed by people within the company but not being utilized.

- Deming, W. Edwards. Out of the Crisis (MIT Press) (pp. 140-143). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

Obtaining Outside Help

Where can you go, then, to gain outside help? Does it always require hiring someone? Won’t that be expensive?

Perhaps: It all depends on the straits you find yourself within and the urgency you pursue your own, individual transformation, and the cost for doing nothing (which will be unknown and unknowable). It can come from merely reading and studying Deming’s theory, along with those of his contemporaries, and deciding to improve one thing, one step at a time. You could choose to take a guided course like the Institute for Quality and Innovation’s Virtual Academy or any of The Deming Institute’s offerings. You could look into engaging Doug Hall’s Eureka! Ranch to transform how you and your teams bring new innovations to market using Dr. Deming’s theories.

There are multiple paths to getting the knowledge for real improvement.

Reflection Questions

What sources of dissatisfaction are you presently grappling with in your organization?What efforts have been made previously to remedy them? Did they include assembling an internal team? Was the result a local sub-optimization that merely worked around the problem, or moved it somewhere else in the organization? Did the advisory committee ever consider the problems as rooted in the prevailing means and methods of management, or was it traced elsewhere? What biases in thinking were revealed? What could be done to take a first step toward gaining new knowledge? Where would it begin? Whose responsibility should it be?