I Have Done My Best
"What had Deming done? Exactly what he said in the five words with which he always concluded his seminars.
'I have done my best.'"
Walton, Mary. The Deming Management Method. (p. 249)
Best efforts not sufficient.
By everyone doing his best. (Wrong)
This is the answer that came forth in a meeting of management of a company in response to my question: "And how do you go about it to improve quality and productivity?"
Best efforts are essential. Unfortunately, best efforts, people charging this way and that way without guidance of principles, can do a lot of damage. Think of the chaos that would come if everyone did his best, not knowing what to do.
Deming, Dr. W.E. Out of the Crisis. (p. 18)
There is no substitute for knowledge. Hard work and best efforts will by themselves not produce quality nor a market. We shall soon come to suggestions for the missing ingredient, profound knowledge.
Deming, Dr. W.E. as quoted by Orsini, Dr. Joyce. The Essential Deming. (p. 11)
THERE ARE MANY PHRASES for which Dr. Deming is well-known from his writing, lectures, and seminars that have come to epitomize his inimitable style of dismantling the absurdities we’ve been conditioned to hold as articles of faith. So it is with one that appears quite often in The New Economics and Out of the Crisis, which is also known as Deming’s Theorem #2: We are being ruined by best efforts.
At first this seems so dissonant as to cause an immediate reaction among the uninitiated. How could hard work and best efforts, which we have been taught since childhood as an aim of good citizenship, be detrimental and ruinous? It’s common sense, is it not? Deming would retort:
They are our ruination. So, if all the faulty practices have come from common sense, we must beware of common sense… Best efforts are too often mere tampering, making things worse.
Dr. Deming as quoted by Neave, Dr. Henry. The Deming Dimension. (p. 256)
And:
It is interesting to note that the prevailing system of management has been created by best efforts, without the knowledge that we shall learn in later chapters. [The System of Profound Knowledge]
We pause here to ask what is the effect of
Hard work?
Best efforts?
Answer: We thus only dig deeper the pit that we are in. Hard work and best efforts will not by themselves dig us out of the pit. In fact, it is only by illumination of outside knowledge that we may observe that we are in a pit.
Deming, Dr. W.E. The New Economics, 3rd ed. (pp. 17-18)
As a society, we’ve become content and complacent to affix a smiley-face emoji on the results of our poor practices and thinking everywhere, shrugging criticism off with office kitchen poster bromides like “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!” and “What can you do?” or “It could always be worse!”
We can do better, and we have an obligation to do so: Ignorance is no longer an excuse, we’ve known better ways for too long. So, what holds us back from assuming the challenge of trying? It could be ourselves and our perceptions of risking a venture into the unknown.
In his 1961 paper, Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms, Daniel Ellsberg posited a thought experiment, known as the Ellsberg Paradox, using two urns filled with marbles to demonstrate how we can sometimes disadvantage ourselves by biasing to a known quantity over an unknown one, even when there’s no rational reason to do so.
In the first urn Ellsberg places 100 marbles in a 50/50 distribution of red to black; in the second urn he places an unknown distribution, which could be anywhere from one red to 99 black, or the inverse. He then asks you to make a bet:
1A: Get $1 for every red marble you draw from the first urn, $0 otherwise.
2A: Get $1 for every black marble you draw from the first urn, $0 otherwise.
1B: Get $1 for every red marble you draw from the second urn, $0 otherwise.
2B: Get $1 for every black marble you draw from the second urn, $0 otherwise.
Pause here and consider: Which bet would you take? Why?
In his paper, Ellsberg observes that participants who’ve taken his bets quickly bias toward either 1A or 1B and away from 2A or 2B because they could not attach a quantifiable probability to the outcome. In other words, they fell into holding the old folkloric wisdom of a bird in hand being worth two in the bush. This is what some in the systems thinking community would call a “groove” or ingrained pattern of thought. Getting out of a groove requires diligent effort because it feels extremely uncomfortable to change - at least until a new “groove” in our thinking is formed to replace it.
Changing our thinking about our thinking isn’t something that happens overnight - our own beliefs and motivations need to shift, first. This comes from quiet contemplation and review of our own “best efforts” and the consequences that they have brought about. This is the “pit” Dr. Deming wants us to stop digging and exit.
Reflection Questions
What are your reasons for undertaking a transformation of your thinking? Whose theories and philosophies have had the most impact? What is your aim? What do you expect your transformation to accomplish? What does “success” look like? Is there a destination or waypoint you have in mind?
How have you considered “best efforts” of the individual in the past? As a measure of their worth or capability? Or of the system they are within? Why? What changed your thinking?