Tampering
Overcontrol, Overadjustment
Tampering is the term Deming applied to the human tendency to overreact to undesired performance. It can be thought of as overcontrol or overadjustment, as meddling and pestering people in what otherwise could be a smooth-running process.
The cultural imperative to tamper is captured by the often-heard statement, "Don't just stand there; do something." Yet that action rule can do harm rather than good. It produces many of the problems that occur in most organizations and in our own lives. The theories that underlie tampering have been confirmed by simulation and experiment to be excellent predictors of the resulting patterns of undesired performance and loss.
Better results might be produced by knowing when to follow the rule, "Don't just do something; stand there." This can be a difficult rule to follow for those of us who see ourselves as problem solvers, as people of action. It is especially hard when pressure is applied to meet objectives, to make the numbers. Deming’s theory of variation and the dynamic behaviour of the system inform us that there are times when not acting is the most productive policy.
- Edward Martin Baker. The Symphony of Profound Knowledge: W. Edwards Deming’s Score for Leading, Performing, and Living in Concert . iUniverse. Kindle Edition.
THE AIM of today’s post is to introduce another operational definition of a potentially-misunderstood term in Dr. Deming’s lexicon which he used to characterize much of the prevailing, Western-style of management: Tampering. As a concept, he mentions it only once in his first book on transforming management, Out of the Crisis, later refining his thinking and mentioning it close to a dozen times in his last book, The New Economics.
In this blog, we’ve discussed tampering several times with respect to the Parable of the Red Beads, Variation, Lessons of the Funnel, Best Efforts, and Obstacles (to transformation) 5-8, among others. In these posts, I’ve used the term much as Deming did to indicate an unwarranted intervention into a system or process in reaction to a visible, downstream fault or phenomena. Nevertheless, we should have an operational definition for this term as it can be quite charged if tossed around casually and come across as a direct challenge to someone’s status or competence. We need to recall Deming’s philosophy here that we’re to be coaches and to help people escape poor habits and practices without shame or judgement - though they may well have these moments to themselves.
How Did Dr. Deming Define Tampering?
Deming principally viewed tampering as intervening in a stable system or process as if it were unstable. This was caused by practicing Management by Results and thus making Mistake #1 (of 2), as he describes in these passages captured by Dr. Joyce Orsini in her book, The Essential Deming:
Management by results. Take immediate action on any fault, mistake, defect, complaint, delay, accident, breakdown. Take immediate action, do something. Action on the last data point.
Wrong. A great temptation but it's wrong. What we need to do is work on the process that produced that fault, defect, and complaint. Sure, take care of the complaint of a customer. Clear it away, never mind the cost of it. Take care of the customer, certainly. What's wrong? Management by results is not the way to get good results; it is the way to get worse results. Work on causes, not on results. This kind of management is tampering.
In the case of Management by Results, it is better to understand and improve the system. (p. 52)
6. There are two mistakes in attempts to improve a process, both costly:
Mistake 1. To treat as a special cause any outcome, any fault, complaint, mistake, break-down, accident, shortage, when actually it came from common causes. (Tampering.)
Mistake 2. To attribute to common causes any outcome, any fault, complaint, mistake, breakdown, accident, shortage, when actually it came from a special cause.
(p. 77)
This will most often occur when we direct best-efforts to improve or fix a process without understanding what state it is in prior to our intervention.
How Else Can We Define Tampering?
Recall this passage from The New Economics where Dr. Deming is describes the operational definition for management action:
A point outside the control limits is a signal (an operational definition for action) of special cause (called by Dr. Shewhart an assignable cause) which indicates the need for action— try to identify the special cause, and if it can recur, eliminate it. If all the points fall within the control limits for a long period, assume that the variation is random, common cause only, no special cause present.
- Deming, Dr. W.E. The New Economics, 3rd ed. (pp. 120-121)
This suggests an obvious corollary we can use: Acting on a point within the control limits is an operational definition of tampering, as I illustrate on a Process Behaviour Chart of post views for this blog below. If I chose to try to explain or act on any point besides #3, I would be tampering, unless the data point belongs to a set that meets the criteria for a weak signal, eg. eight consecutive data points above or below the mean, or three out of four data points closer to the same limit than the mean.
Incidentally, when I investigated causes for #3, I discovered that the post in question was posted to the r/management subreddit on Reddit:
Of course, this has a necessary precondition that we know what state our system is in so as to know whether we’re seeing signals or noise in our downstream results. Thus, it is almost always better to heed Dr. Baker’s advice to “Don’t just do something; stand there!” and observe the system first by collecting data about how it is performing and analyzing it for signals of common vs. special causes of variation.
Where Do We See Tampering
Unfortunately, as Dr. Baker points out, there is a cultural imperative that directs us to intervene in a system as a measure of our competence as a manager. However, as the Lessons of the Funnel teach us, our unguided reactions to outcomes or results can serve to exacerbate the situation with wider and wilder fluctuations, which we often meet with more interventions causing more instability. And all with the best of intentions.
Some examples of tampering I’ve noticed include
“Bug Hunt” days in software organizations where a team just works on defects for a day or two in the belief that this will catch them up; because causes are not worked on, the relief lasts no more than a day or two before the defects pile up again, some ironically caused by the Bug Hunt itself.
Hit-and-Run Micromanagement. This is a term I picked up from Joel Spolsky’s 2008 software organization management book, More Joel on Software, which he describes as a frenetic activity of interrupting individual team members with your guidance, then disappearing to interrupt another, and another, and so on. The problem with this style is “that you don’t stick around long enough to see why your decisions are not working or to correct course”. This later metastasizes into the Deadly Disease of “Mobility of Management” later in the manager’s career.
Introducing an agile transformation for only the software development teams under the belief that this is where the problem lies.
Management by hovering around and checking up on people.
Work-from-Home mandates.
Government mandates for large corporations to downsize as part of debt restructuring, eg. General Motors.
Government mandates to regulate competition "into” the market among moribund, lousy competitors, eg. how the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission controls the major telecoms, encouraging the worst of management practices to remain within the regulator’s rules.
Linear cause-and-effect thinking, or confusion of coincidence with cause-and-effect, such as lockdowns, mandates, travel restrictions, or other government reactions to account for the behaviour of a virus, which carries on regardless, and for unknown and unknowable costs to society.
How Do We Avoid Tampering?
In a word: Counter-intuition. In many instances, the solution to the problems that are caused by tampering are attributable to common sense thinking in our culture, or as Deming might characterize it, “folkloric”. Whenever we think that a solution appears obvious to us, we need to stop and question how we know that and what assumptions we’re making about how the underlying systems work. In these circumstances I have frequently found that solutions lie in the direction no one else is looking, either because of cultural or political imperatives or norms, and this is almost always upstream of the symptoms or phenomena.
Reflection Questions
What examples of tampering, as we’ve explored and defined above, have you observed in your organization, community, or society as a whole? What cultural imperatives do you believe are at work here? What is the driving force behind them? What happened as a result of each intervention or act of tampering? Where did they begin? How could they be changed, if at all? What could be done instead? Why is counterintuitive thinking only appreciated in retrospect?