Happy 123rd Birthday, Dr. Deming!
Thoughts On His Legacy and How to Carry it Forward
THE AIM for this post is to mark the occasion of Dr. Deming’s 123rd birthday (October 14th) and to share some brief thoughts about the legacy he left to us thirty years ago, and how we can carry it forward.
The Deming Institute Scholarships Fundraiser
Coinciding with Dr. Deming’s birthday, his eponymous non-profit organization is raising funds for scholarships for students to attend in-person seminars or subscriptions for their self-paced DemingNEXT learning platform. They have set a goal for $15K with all donations matched dollar-for-dollar by The Deming Institute Board of Trustees. Learn more by visiting the fundraising page here.
It is worth reminding new readers that The Deming Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was established shortly before Dr. Deming’s passing with the aim of ensuring the continuation of his teachings into the future. It is led by his grandson, Keven Cahill, and is entirely supported by donations.
What Remains to be Done?
For most of North America, the Deming revolution began shortly after the NBC White Paper documentary in the summer of 1980 and subsequent publication of Out of the Crisis and the many seminars he taught to amplify his teachings, and concluded with the publication of The New Economics and his passing in December of 1993, leaving an enormous wake that has reverberated through the succeeding decades, with numerous transformations and inspirations of many. In John Willis’ book, Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge, we find insights into how much of an influence he has had on people on the leading edge of software development, while in John Dues’ book, Win-Win, we learn how his philosophy is being applied to improve a small network of charter schools in Ohio. A quick hop over to The Deming Institute’s YouTube channel will reveal many others who have adopted the Deming management method to bring about improvements in how they live and work, inspiring countless other transformations large and small.
With all this apparent activity we might ask whether we’re making progress to affecting the total transformation of management that Dr. Deming was hoping to achieve in his lifetime, and what remains to be done? In fact, as Ed Baker relates in the Coda to his book, The Symphony of Profound Knowledge, a participant to one of Deming’s seminars asked whether they would ever see the transformation in their lifetime. Deming answered in his usual witty style, “Well, you don’t have much longer than that.”
What makes it difficult is not knowing there’s a problem and redoubling your efforts instead of climbing out of the proverbial hole you’re digging for yourself. As Peter Scholtes’ 7th Theorem advises, 95% of changes made by management today make no improvement because they’re aimed in the wrong direction, ie. they change what people do on the shop floor or in the team rooms, but leave the system of management that caused the problems untouched.
In The New Economics, Deming uses the following table to draw our attention to where the “big gains” are that we’re leaving on the table in favour of showing a quick hit with a unique process change or two:
To contextualize this for contemporary managers who oversee software development teams and departments, if you adopted agile frameworks like Scrum or SAFe in the hopes of improving your bottom line, you’re only achieving 3% gains. It’s not that agile practices are bad, it’s that you’re trying to fix a management problem through the team room. Incidentally, this is also why almost all “agile transformations” either fail to live up to their expectations or face-plant, but that’s a story for another day.
So, to return to our question of what remains to be done, the answer lies in the 97% that is going unnoticed just about everywhere: the assumptions and actions in the prevailing system of management such as reward and merit schemes, purchasing decisions, targets, quotas, slogans, and much more that we’ve covered in previous newsletters.
Low-Trust Environment
In his 2016 HBR essay, The Management Thinker We Should Never Have Forgotten, Joshua Macht theorizes that the reason Deming’s theory of management hasn’t reached more leaders is because it’s far too easy to reach for a faulty practice in times of stress and pressure, consequences be damned:
It may be cliché to say that technology is changing our businesses today at a rapid pace, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And with this change comes a world of uncertainty and anxiety where predictable performance for any business seems more and more like Deming’s red bead experiment: random. The results can be devastating to a business. The worker no longer trusts that they won’t be a replaced by a machine. The investor no longer trusts that they will get a return on capital. The manager no longer trusts that they will have employment for life after more than a bad quarter or two.
With so much of our trust eroding, management is left with little else to hold on to, and so they grasp the false hope of blunt instruments like forced rankings and quarterly forecasting — no matter how illusory it all may be.
Of course, as said above, this just delays improvement while making things worse in the meantime, with the consequences arriving later…
Rx? Study, Learn, Teach Others
So, as we look forward to celebrating the 123rd anniversary of Dr. Deming’s birthday, what can we do to help his message reach more people? I advise taking inspiration from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. In the preamble it states:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
In other words, make the abstract concepts real by putting Deming’s theory into action, first by yourself, then with the help of others. How? Easy: After you finish a paragraph or chapter of The New Economics or any books inspired by Deming, or read a Digestible Deming post, or complete a learning unit in DemingNEXT, apply the Teach-to-Learn method that Eric Budd uses to build his student’s mastery in IQI Academies, and try to explain what you have just learned to a colleague, manager, friend, or family member. As your mastery increases, run small PDSA experiments, and carry the learning forward by helping others to do the same. Make the case for adopting the “new” philosophy through cooperation and teamwork.
Reflection Questions
Why do you think the Deming philosophy has gone largely unheeded? What could you do to ensure it becomes more widely shared and adopted? Who would you engage with first? On what basis? How confident are you in your own appreciation for what Dr. Deming was trying to communicate through his teachings? What will you do next?
Thank you for the excellent insights on Dr. Deming's 123rd birthday.
For almost two decades I have been trying to use Deming's ideas in my various workplaces. As you mention, the transformation has to begin with yourself and then try to model and teach to others.
Currently, I'm in a Business Architect role at a university. I became attracted to business architecture because I believe it supports one leg of the System of Profound Knowledge (SOPK), an Appreciation for a System.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_architecture
As to why there has been not really been widespread adoption of the SOPK in the U.S. in particular, I believe the ideas run opposite of our insular, individualistic, Not Invented Here (NIH), hero culture which produces more quick flashes that die out quickly. It is the long slow work to improve the system that we seem to have little appetite for. At our peril, we have neglected working on our systems.