Things You Can Stop Doing To Improve
Getting Started by Stopping
Things you can merely STOP doing.
1. You can STOP tampering… When you ask for the reason why the results were better or worse last week, you are unintentionally encouraging people to give you a specific reason… [that] assumes it was the special cause of the results. If you accept that and go no further, you could be overlooking serious common-cause influences on results…
2. You can STOP managing by visible numbers alone. Spreadsheets are NOT a proxy for what’s really going on in the organization (including spreadsheets of results). Instead of relying on visible numbers on spreadsheets, learn about what is causing the numbers to be what they are…
3. You can STOP asking people to provide their best efforts… If you want to bring out the best efforts in your workers, help them to be successful in improving quality, instead of by exhorting them to work harder, or by trying to motivate them with posters and pep rallies…
4. You can STOP fostering internal competition between people and departments. Instead, focus on fostering intense cooperation to improve quality… Forcing people and departments to compete for prizes or recognition will destroy teamwork and cooperation.
5. You can STOP being seduced by “best practices”. Best practices are seductive because when we see an organization that is winning with products or services, our natural child-like reaction is to want to copy what that organization is doing.
6. You can STOP focusing on costs. Note the emphasis on reducing costs overall, which may mean increasing cost(s) somewhere else in the system— at least temporarily… Instead, you want to focus on the causes of costs.
7. You can STOP conducting performance appraisals and replace them with conversations that focus on improving the processes that people use to perform their work. As Deming pointed out in Chapter 2, about 94% of the results of any process or system are the result of the process and the system in which people work… So, about 94% of the time you want to focus on inputs, throughputs, and outputs of your processes and systems, not on placing blame.
- Allan, Kelly et. al. Chapter 11 of The New Economics, 3rd. ed. by Dr. W.E. Deming. (pp.169-176)
ASTUTE readers of this newsletter have probably noticed how I footnote many excerpts and quotes from the 3rd Edition of Deming’s 1993 management theory classic, The New Economics. This edition was posthumously published in 2018, to coincide with the 25th Anniversary Fall Conference of The Deming Institute that was held at the Westdrift Manhattan Beach hotel in Manhattan Beach, California from October 5th and 6th.
What sets this edition apart from the prior two is not just minor typesetting and formatting changes, but the addition of an entirely new, eleventh chapter of material at the end of the book entitled Why Deming?… Why Now More Than Ever! Written collaboratively by Kelly Allan, Chair of The W. Edwards Deming Institute Advisory Council, Kevin Cahill (Dr. Deming’s grandson and Executive Director of The Deming Institute), Dr. Bill Bellows (then-Deputy-Director of The Deming Institute), Dr. Edward M. Baker (author of The Symphony of Profound Knowledge), Dr. Joyce Orsini (Dr. Deming’s PhD. student and author of The Essential Deming), and Richard R. Steele (Trustee of The Deming Institute and Founder and Chairman of Peaker Services, Inc.), it is chock-full of interesting and illustrative stories and examples aimed at getting new Deming management method thinkers and practitioners started on the right foot.
Often, when learning a new philosophy or way of thinking, we’re directed to begin taking up new behaviours and habits to build “muscle memory” around the core practices so that we begin to instinctively use them. Certainly, Deming advises many things we need to start doing as leaders, however, he wasn’t without advice about what we need to stop doing in order to improve. In this unique eleventh chapter, Kelly Allan and his co-writers enumerate seven things we can accordingly stop to get started with applying Deming thinking in our organizations. There’s much more to each than what I’ve quoted above, of course, which should whet your appetite to get a copy of the book to read yourself.
However, as a reader of this newsletter you’re in a bit of luck as these directives are also interwoven into many of the topics we’ve explored over the past 40 posts. You’ll note there is some repetition and recursion which is inevitable when learning and exploring Deming’s theory and philosophy of management as it is itself a system of interdependent parts:
Stopping tampering is a theme we’ve explored in the posts on Variation, The Parable of the Red Beads, Lessons of the Funnel, Obstacles 5-8, and Aim of the System.
Stopping managing by visible figures alone was touched on in The Deadly Diseases, Managing the Unknown and Unknowable, The Parts Wouldn’t Fit, and The Parable of the Red Beads.
Stopping asking people for best efforts was a central theme to The Lessons of the Funnel, and Extrinsic Motivation.
Stopping fostering internal competition was discussed in Competition, Cooperation, Leadership, Management by Objective, Knowledge of Psychology, and Lessons of the Funnel.
Stopping being seduced by “best practices” was discussed in Theory of Knowledge.
Stopping focusing on costs was examined in Competition, Cooperation.
Stopping performance appraisals was covered in Rewarding the Weatherman, Operational Definitions, Drive Out Fear, Variation in People, and The Parable of the Red Beads.
Example of Learning the Deming Management Method by Doing: John A. Dues
John A. Dues is the Chief Learning Officer of United Schools Network, a non-profit charter management organization that supports public charter schools in Columbus, Ohio, and an accomplished education systems leader who came to my attention through a number of mutual connections we share on LinkedIn. After first being exposed to Deming’s philosophy in 2018, and not being terribly impressed, he had a sudden epiphany in March 2020 that set his personal and professional transformation in motion, which you can read about in his Spring 2021 e-book Rethinking Improvement and in his many blog posts on the School Performance Institute blog.
I’ve been impressed with John’s frank writing style and openness with what he’s learning and how he’s applying it - by leading. His is very much a Deming-style transformation, discontinuous but always evolving and iterating and taking in new information and inspiration. I strongly recommend picking up a copy of his free e-book and following his journey on the School Performance Institute blog, even if you’re not in the education field — the lessons are broadly applicable and provide a taste of what it is like to implement Deming’s theory in a specific domain.