Smarter About Systems, Every Day
A Short Side-Quest About Space Exploration Through a Deming Lens
THE AIM for this post is to take you on a short side-quest from our regularly-scheduled review of the New Management Competencies and share with you some Deming-aligned thoughts and observations inspired by a recent video I saw over the weekend by Destin Sandlin, who you might know better as the personality behind the wildly-successful educational YouTube channel, Smarter Every Day.
Destin usually explores topics related to explaining how things work with science and run the gamut from from physics phenomena and engineering to how the human body works, the natural world and space exploration. This video, however, is a “wrapper” where he goes meta, breaking the fourth wall to explain the thinking behind a presentation he made to the American Astronautical Society as part of their 2023 von Braun Space Exploration Symposium about the NASA Artemis space program for returning humans to the moon.
While the talk itself is compelling, especially its message for confronting hard truths about the mission (see the part where he asks uncomfortable questions around cryogenic refuelling in orbit…), I was pulling out a number of epiphanies and observations as I listened to Destin that resonated with some of Dr. Deming’s views I thought worth sharing.
Look at the Mission Differently
Destin’s talk is an appeal to the people in the room who are responsible for the Artemis program to rethink and simplify their approach to the mission, drawing on the experiences of the Apollo teams of the past for inspiration. This resonated with me as I think it is exactly what Dr. Deming is appealing for us to do as well: see the world with different eyes, rethink your approach with new theory and outside knowledge.
Toward the end of his talk, Destin returns to his appeal with a simple call to action I think especially applicable when you take on the responsibility for learning to lead with a Deming view:
Profound Knowledge Comes from Outside the System
Early in the video, Destin breaks the fourth wall to talk to us directly about the aim of his talk which is quintessentially Deming:
With most talky talks that I do I like to provide an external perspective to the organization or the company that's asked me to come in and speak. In this case, all the people in front of me are the most important industry leaders in aerospace. I thought about what it would look like to take a third-party perspective view of Artemis…
But the more I started digging into Artemis, the more I realized there might be some issues in how people communicate about it. There’s some architecture problems that people are unwilling to talk about these days because of how they got there politically.
And you know what? I just want to go and say the thing nobody is saying.
Source: Smarter Every Day 293 - 00:01:30
This aligns with the approach Deming took with his own philosophy on the transformation of management:
Question in a seminar: Please elaborate on your statement that profound knowledge comes from outside the system. Aren’t the people in the system the only ones that know what is happening and why?
Answer: The people that work in any organization know what they are doing, but they will not by themselves learn a better way. Their best efforts and hard work do not provide an outside view of the organization.
Again, a system can not understand itself. One may learn a lot about ice [the prevailing style of management], yet know very little about water [required outside knowledge of what to do, instead].
The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 69)
Rhetoric and Persuasion
In The New Economics, Deming explains his view of a leader being someone who possesses knowledge, personality, and persuasive power. He or she will possess a theory about what to do but this isn’t enough: they must also be able to convince enough people in power to effect it. Destin similarly explains how he saw his talk as an exercise in rhetoric to persuade and encourage the audience to think critically and differently about the Artemis program:
Deming once spitballed that you would need to persuade about as many as people as the square-root of total headcount to change an organization — your mileage and experience will probably vary. Destin may have met this threshold in the room, as he was certainly persuasive. Delivery of tough news may be “easy” for an uninvested third party because they won’t suffer the consequences at work, but you win more converts with humility and humour than just hammering people with the facts. While Dr. Deming got away with brow-beating top-management in his day, this probably won’t work for you or me in similar circumstances, which brings us to how Destin approached this problem…
A Focus on Quality over Quantity
During his talk, Destin goes a bit “meta” and shares with his audience how he “engineers” his YouTube explainer videos in a way that is very Deming-aligned. It begins with him clearly understanding the aim and constancy of purpose for his production company and the videos it would produce and how they would help people to learn complex things in a fun way:
This meshes really well with Dr. Deming’s guidance on a system having a definable aim and aligning everything toward it, along with his definition of quality and appeal for joy in learning and doing, which Destin has in abundance:
What is quality? A product or service possesses quality if it helps somebody and enjoys a good and sustainable market. (The New Economics, 3rd ed., p. 2)
We have been destroying our people, from toddlers on through university, and on the job. We must preserve the power of intrinsic motivation, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, joy in learning, that people are born with…
There will be joy in work, joy in learning. Anyone that enjoys his work is a pleasure to work with. Everyone will win; no losers. (Ibid, p. 83, 85)
He then goes on to share his video production method for how he blends the complexity of the topic with his own lighthearted personality so as to bring the audience along with him rather than slamming them with hard stuff all at once - this is how he gauges the quality of his product: how well can he take people through a complex topic so that the audience has fun, comes away with learning something new, and doesn’t get overwhelmed?
This is also how he has designed his talk, aligning that peak in the complexity with the discomfort he’s going to create by delivering some hard truths. Speaking of which…
Systems Require Negative Feedbacks
Destin’s aim for this talk was to provide an educated outsider’s perspective into the problems he perceived with Artemis program’s chosen architecture and subsequent orbits which he diagnosed as a consequence of the program’s culture that was regulating people’s behaviour away from open discussion and criticism. To explain this to his audience of mainly engineers, he used a novel metaphor: a PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) control loop:
In simple terms, this is a device that’s used in applications where you want to add some auto-pilot magic to adjust a system to maintain a given variable like temperature, speed, or position through a continually self-correcting feedback loop. You may already have a good guess where this is going…
Destin explains that if we only have positive feedback going through the PID the system will become unstable, chaotic and “things explode”:
Ergo, if we avoid critical feedbacks in our organizations and opt to just agree all the time, we’ll similarly have an unstable system that will become chaotic and “explode”. This is highly reminiscent of Rule #4 of Deming’s Funnel Experiment that demonstrates how a system becomes unstable when all attempts at correction are abandoned in favour of reacting only the most recent event. However, Destin is driving home a more important point that Deming also well-understood about the effects of fear on the stability of an organization, and probably most vital for Artemis program management to understand: “Wherever there is fear, there will be wrong figures.” In my line of work we call this “harmonious disequilibrium” - you might call it “keeping the waters calm” or “avoiding conflict at all costs”.
For Deming, fear was so central to the sustenance of the prevailing style of management he was challenging that it needed to be the main preoccupation of managers and leaders everywhere to drive it out, as he urged in Point #8 of his 14 Points. Fear is like gravity in an organization, blanketing everything to varying degrees, regulating people’s behaviour that work against the interests of teamwork and the mission because they don’t want to risk their reputation or careers if they’re wrong or speak “out of turn”. This is something that you don’t want in a program where candor can literally save lives.
As for the wrong figures Destin wants to draw everyone’s attention to, jump to 00:29:02 where he asks how many rockets it is going to take to refuel a lander in low-earth orbit - a direct consequence of the chosen architecture that wasn’t challenged because people were afraid to speak up. Note the awkward silence in the room…
The Playbook: What Made Apollo Successful?
Having delivered the hard truth about what he was seeing in the Artemis program architecture and culture, and true to his video production method, Destin delivers some hope for turning things around in the form of a 53 year old “playbook”, NASA SP-287: What Made Apollo a Success? Within are eight articles written by some of the leaders and engineers behind the Apollo program’s six successful lunar landing missions, detailing how they approached everything from planning and systems design (simplify! build-in redundancies!) to risk management (balance the scale of the missions to ensure significant gains without overstretching!) to how they got things done with productive meetings that were mostly fear-free:
As Destin puts it to his audience: this playbook is the key, the shoulders of the giants they get to stand on to understand how to make the next mission a success from those who did it before. It’s pretty wild to think about this connection between Apollo and Artemis and how what was written in 1970 can still have reverberations in 2023.
For me, the obvious parallel is the one-two punch of Dr. Deming’s two books, Out of the Crisis and The New Economics which are a distillation of his decades of learning and experience that provide us with a similar playbook for transforming how we lead and manage organizations toward a systems view. The hard work and lessons that helped turn the economic fortunes of an entire nation around are available for our benefit, decades after they were written down. As Destin observes: All we have to do is read it.
Concluding Thoughts & Reflection Questions
This was a fun side-quest post to write and I hope it leaves you as inspired as I was when I first watched Destin’s video. My aim with this newsletter is to demonstrate the timeless applicability of Dr. Deming’s theory and that it’s not always about management but a way of understanding our world by, as Destin says, looking at the mission differently.
What are your thoughts on how Destin approached his talk to the American Aeronautical Society? His diagnosis of the problems with the Artemis program that are rooted in a culture of fear? His suggestion for learning from the What Made Apollo a Success? playbook? What parallels have you seen in your own organization? What remedies have been undertaken?
Think about Destin’s observation that a system requires positive and negative feedbacks otherwise it will become unstable and chaotic, and the parallel with Dr. Deming’s Rule #4 of the Funnel Experiment. What examples have you seen or experienced? What were the effects?
I had just read this article before starting a training session by our CMM programmer in our factory, and I was thinking about it the whole time as he was frustratedly explaining to me how people are hiding problems and don't want to accept or give negative feedback, because of fear. So much time could be saved and so much better parts could be made if people weren't scared to tell the truth. And people are scared because the management use fear tactics and power dynamics to make people do things.
Will do. I think I still need your help in getting accepted by Substack......anytime this week will work. Let me know what works for you. You can also let me know what you think of my coaching question regarding interdependencies.