Edwards W. Deming, a Ph.D. Statistician and creator of the US Census is considered by most (alongside Juran) to be the father of the Total Quality Management movement here in the US circa 1981, when Deming was hired as a consultant to the Ford Motor Company after executives watched the NBC Whitepaper, "If Japan Can Why Can't We?" Deming’s theory was that manufacturing could draw a sample each hour from production, measure the critical dimensions of that product and predict the quality output within +/- 3 standard deviations off the average which would capture 99.7% of the variation. Reflecting on Deming's legacy
Within this theory was a sub-concept of special and common cause variation. Common cause variation addresses the variation that is inherent in the production system and special cause variation addresses the variation that is not and can be traced back to a single source. If special cause is observed then it is fixed immediately but if common cause is discovered then the system must be changed. It is this changing of the system that gave rise to another concept referred to as continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement basically means small scale, day-to-day, incremental improvements on the way the work gets done. If a company is making continuous improvement then the company, for all intents and purposes, cannot have any standard operating procedures, by definition. The system was not just how the work flowed through the production cycle, but how all the other department inter-related or interfaced with production. The Red Bead Experiment
It was Deming’s belief that variation came from 5 sources: Machines, Methods, Materials, Manpower, and the Environment. Each one of these variables has variation that must be reduced which in turn will reduce the overall variation in the system. In the past, management blamed the worker if there was variation in the product, but Deming says that 94% of the variation comes from the system, not from the worker and that management has been confusing special cause variation with common cause variation.
In order for his TQM methodology to work, Deming created 14 Points by which he believed management should live. One of these points is “Drive out Fear.” What are workers afraid of? Losing their jobs.
I recall a line in the movie, A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson when being questioned on the witness stand stated, “You can’t handle the truth.” to watch the scene
Being hired as a consultant affords one a unique opportunity of looking at a company from a unique perspective where the worker (at all levels) will confide in you what they will not talk about to other employees, especially their supervisors. On one such occasion, Quality Manager told me a story where he had rejected a lot of production because it was out-of-spec. The Plant Manager called him on his phone and told him (on a Friday afternoon) that if he wanted to keep his job, he better release the quarantined production as the customer was expecting on-time delivery.
From one company to another, I would hear the same stories that the worker (at all levels) was to some degree fearful of losing their jobs if they told management the truth.
A Pogo cartoon (by Walt Kelly) said it best, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”
1 comment:
Deming should be considered a national treasure. One of our problems is trying to reinvent the wheel when we had so many people before us that had the answers. We would rather react to symptoms than get to causes of problems, our greatest mistake as a nation and within companies. Same to be said about the "fear" factor. It is a politician's number one tool. Many companies use it as well. When those of us employees or citizens fall for this trick, we are playing their game based on their changing rules and have lost all power to improve.
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