Obstacles 5-8
A Cruel Hoax
5. Obsolescence in schools. …Students in schools of business in America are taught that there is a profession of management; that they are ready to step into top jobs. This is a cruel hoax. Most students have had no experience in production or in sales. To work on the factory floor with pay equal to half what he hoped to get upon receipt of the M.B.A., just to get experience, is a horrible thought to an M.B.A., not the American way of life. As a consequence, he struggles on, unaware of his limitations, or unable to face the need to fill in the gaps. The results are obvious.
6. Poor teaching of statistical methods in industry. Awakening to the need for quality, and with no idea what quality means nor how to achieve it, American management have resorted to mass assemblies for crash courses in statistical methods, employing hacks for teachers, being unable to discriminate between competence and ignorance. The result is that hundreds of people are learning what is wrong… Analysis of variance, t-test, confidence intervals, and other statistical techniques taught in the books, however interesting, are inappropriate because they provide no basis for prediction and because they bury the information contained in the order of production. Most if not all computer packages for analysis of data, as they are called, provide flagrant examples of inefficiency.
7. Use of Military Standard 105D and other tables for acceptance. Many thousands of dollars worth of product changes hands hourly, lots subjected to acceptance or rejection, depending on tests of samples, drawn from the lots… If used for quality audit of final product as it goes out the door, they guarantee that some customers will get defective product. The day of such plans is finished… Incredibly, courses and books in statistical methods still devote time and pages to acceptance sampling.
8. “Our quality control department takes care of all our problems of quality.” Every company has a quality control department. Unfortunately, quality control departments have taken the job of quality away from the people that can contribute most to quality—management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers… Unfortunately, the function of quality assurance in many companies is too often to provide hindsight, to keep the management informed about the amount of defective product produced week by week, or comparisons month by month on levels of quality, costs of warranty, etc.
- Deming, W. Edwards. Out of the Crisis (MIT Press) (pp. 130-134).
THE AIM of today’s post is to continue our investigation into the next four obstacles Dr. Deming describes in Out of the Crisis. Some will be familiar, one will be a bit obscure to our eyes, today.
We begin with obsolescence in schools and the “cruel hoax” Dr. Deming purports is played upon MBAs leading them to believe most of management is about finances and requires little to no direct experience with how the daily work is done. I know several MBAs whom I do not think would differ much with this assessment, almost all of whom aren’t using their expensive tutelage as they’d expected. Deming was highly critical, and I think we should be as well, of business schools that seek to perpetuate the prevailing style of management:
Schools of business teach how business is conducted at present. In other words, they teach the perpetuation of our decline. A school of business has obligation to prepare students to lead the transformation, to halt our decline and turn it upward. The ought to teach the theory of a system and the theory of profound knowledge for transformation. They ought to teach the damage, unmeasurable, that comes from:
The evils of short-term thinking
Ranking people, teams, plants, divisions, with reward at the top, punishment at the bottom
The evils of the merit system
The losses from management by results, tampering
Demoralization and losses from incentive pay and from pay for performance (for the simple reason that performance cannot be measured)The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 99)
We touched on an aspect of the poor teaching of statistical methods in industry when we examined Enumerative Versus Analytic Studies, and learned how Dr. Deming long-observed the mis-application of statistical methods intended for understanding counts and distributions to problems of prediction. This error in judgment persists even today, with the knowledge of variation in system processes and how to visualize it almost forgotten and unknown. In his book, The Deming Dimension, Dr. Henry Neave concurs: “[Enumerative statistical methods] at most say something about what we already have. To imply they are useful for prediction and planning for improvement is deceptive and misleading.”
Use of Military Standard 105D and other tables for acceptance will seem, at first, a bit anachronistic: Relying on tables to approve or reject lots of a product based on samples? Is that still a thing? What Dr. Deming is protesting with this obstacle is the idea that there can be an acceptable level of defects in our products and services that cannot be avoided. Of course, this was anathema to his theory for improving quality by improving management, where the aim is set higher to find the contributing causes for defects in the system and to address them, one by one. Note, however, that merely focusing on defects alone can be deceiving. It is possible to make a defect-free product or service nobody wants:
“Our quality control department takes care of all our problems of quality.” is an obstacle we see to this day, with tail-end QA departments and sign-offs in many industries, especially software and systems development, even those that purport to be “agile”. At the time of his writing, Dr. Deming was concerned most with the delegation of quality through mass-inspection instead of being a core management responsibility of continual improvement (recall his admonition: Quality is made in the boardroom).
Dr. Neave provides a simple exercise to demonstrate the fallibility of inspection by eyeball that involves reading and inspecting a 17 word sentence for defects, represented by the letter “F”. Give yourself 15-20 seconds to read the sentence below, counting the “Fs” you find by eye:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF MANY YEARS.
Dr. Neave provides the following debrief:
The answer is 6 Fs…
I often use this example in seminars, and I reckon that there is only about a 25% success rate. So, if you got it wrong, feel no shame — be sure you’re in the majority! Answers usually range from 3 to 7, with the occasional 2 to 8.
- Neave, Dr. Henry. The Deming Dimension. (pp. 300-305)
Neave’s exercise reminds me of two relevant examples: First, the long-held open source software maxim of “many eyes make shallow bugs”, a promise that defects in software could be eliminated if enough minds were thrown at it. Experience has shown that techniques for catching bugs in situ is more effective than brute force.
Second, a request from a publisher of a book I backed on KickStarter for all backers to help find typos and grammatical mistakes before sending the manuscript for printing. Result? After receiving the final PDF of the document that will be bound and printed there remain many typos and grammar mistakes…!
Reflection Questions
In thinking about the above obstacles, what examples of each come to mind from your own observations? How many “Fs” are you and your teams hunting for in your own work, right now? What steps could you take to improve your processes to be less reliant on “mass inspection” of knowledge work? How could the application of analytic statistical studies help? Share Dr. Neave’s exercise with a colleague or friend: How many defects did they find? What insights can you glean from your different perspectives? What sources of variation could affect results?
What has been your experience as an MBA? Do Dr. Deming’s observations still hold, or have things changed? How are MBAs regarded in your organization? Are they learning new theory, or perpetuating the past? Is there any real urgency to transform, or just reform?
To what extent is the notion of “unavoidable” or “inescapable” levels of defects present in your own thinking with respect to your own organization’s work? What assumptions informs this mindset?
How are you improving your knowledge of the difference between enumerative and analytic studies? How many instances of mis-application of statistical methods and procedures have you identified that could be remedied with better teaching? What could you do to improve the quality of analysis?