Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren't nice places to work

Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. Other employees aren’t nearly as lucky.

source?

I would go further and say: if your process cannot tolerate the things you should expect when working with humans (e.g. someone needing to go to the toilet, someone staying home sick), it is just a badly designed process.

As you said the cost of overreaching will show somewhere else. Maybe not immediately, but it will. And if you are unlucky it will show up with a literal bang and blood on your hands.

So what? Catastrophic, disastrous failure has long since been priced in. Remember the Exxon Valdez, one of the worst environmental disasters in history? Almost completely forgotten and to my knowledge no person was held accountable other than the captain who had to pay a 50.000$ fine.

As long as C-level execs can drive a company to the ground with completely no personal repercussions, why should they not do anything to maximize their ROI (=their bonus payments)?

And then I have seen places where unsuprising basic human necessities like "a person has to pee" or "someone is sick" endanger the whole operation.

Sorry but either you want your process to be resilient and reliable OR you want a pile of burning garbage held together by duct tape that is constantly on the edge of collapse for the price of some miniscule savings that are gone when one such collapse happens.

Consider his claim about operational rigor in the context of these guiding principles:

https://www.mindtools.com/azyjjsx/demings-14-point-philosoph...

Yes, and this specific article acknowledged that and stated that this is a niche reflection "about [how Deming's] work goes far beyond the data tools and statistical methods of Statistical Process Control (SPC) he helped introduce to the practice of business — and in many cases, seem in direct opposition to those ideas." As in, this is the thesis statement of the article. Some notes in the article:

> Editors Note: This is an investigative note, and only nominally part of the Becoming Data Driven in Business series. A fair warning — this essay is not intended to be as useful as prior essays in the series.

The author also notes this article will be incongruent with the prior articles in the Deming series of articles. The "official" list of articles in the series don't even list this article:

-3) You Aren't Learning if You Don't Close the Loops — An article about the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, sometimes called the ‘Shewhart cycle’ or ‘Deming cycle’.

-2) Process Improvement is Trickier Than You Think — The organisational and political dynamics you’ll face when you attempt to due process improvement.

-1) The Disaffected PhD Skunksworks: A Story About Process Improvement — What it's actually like to due process improvement when the organisational dynamics work against you.

1) Goodhart’s Law Isn’t As Useful As You Might Think — Goodhart’s Law says “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” It turns out that the field of Statistical Process Control have long developed methods for protecting against this effect. We look at those ideas, and then examine a particular instantiation of the approach in the context of the Amazon Weekly Business Review.

2) How to Become Data Driven — What does SPC have to say about becoming data driven? The central idea it uses is deceptively simple: in order to become data driven, SPC practitioners argue, you need to understand variation. We talk about why that is.

3) Operational Excellence is the Pursuit of Knowledge — Knowledge is defined as ‘theories or models that allow you to predict better’. It turns out that the mindset necessary for operational rigour stems from the pursuit of ‘knowledge’. The beginning of ‘knowledge’, in their view, is a deep understanding of variation. This piece covers the practical implications of this mindset.

4) There is No Truth in Business, Only ‘Knowledge’ — We look at some of the more philosophical implications of pursuing ‘knowledge’ over truth, particularly in business. As it turns out, assuming that there are no stable truths in business is a pretty good hack.

(Idiosyncratic numbering intentional, negative numbers are the "pre-series" to the series. This article itself was published 20 days after the "final" article of the series."

No. Deming was concerned with human factors, too. Because they are intimately tied to quality efforts. And that means all humans as agents of continuous improvement, not just as drones in the system.

https://www.mindtools.com/azyjjsx/demings-14-point-philosoph...

If you find another with double digit points, let me know!

One of the more useful forms of documentation, especially for the cost, is notes coming out of a meeting. Keep a bulleted list of topics discussed in every meeting, when there are disagreements (eg in technical approaches) record who argued each position. It can help to have the notes visible during the meeting to get people to clarify their points. Record what everyone says they will do as an outcome to the meeting. Send the notes out afterwards.

Edit to add: double check when you're writing down a commitment from someone. "Josh, I've got you down to defrag the hard drives in staging, is that right?"

I gather (from personal and other's experience) that most managers who are "data driven" just want to see data that matches what they are already planning to do. If you present data that is contrary, it's never fully acknowledged or engaged with. Similarly, thinking about systems and incentives is harder than just telling people what to do and expecting it to be done because you said so.

If that's the critical part, then why did Deming spend so much of his life trying to explain things in short, pithy ways to management?

Hint: it's not just because they're the ones who'd pay for consultants.

"Those efforts that focus on improving the attentiveness, carefulness, speed, etc., of individual workers — without changing the systems, processes, and methods — constitute a low-yield strategy with negligible short-term results"

If your buisness can be severely impacted if one guy didnt get enough sleep/is dumb, it's not the guy's fault. Make a system so someone else checks the work, or provide him with better information with which to make a decision, or any number of other potential improvements which dont rely on a specific person

"What moron hung this at the same height", I thought. "I oughtta complain to that moron's boss". Because the manager is the one who's going to get the complaint, they need to be the one who is actively, clearly focused on the customer needs and the total quality of the product.

That was the impression I got of the Agile Manifesto when I read it back in '99 or so - boy did that ever get misinterpreted.

Instead it's more about peer pressure and self-representation. It's more like fashion among teenagers: they try their hardest to look cool, fashionable, and trendy, even though nobody (and not their parents or teachers in particular) enforce it. But they badly want to look cool, and feel bad if they don't, and their peers look down on them.

The same way employees just don't leave before their boss leaves, not because their boss orders them to, but because they'd feel silly and rude if they did so, and their peers might sneer at them.

Of course the management does use this to their benefit, and does cultivate these views, again, without outwardly forcing anyone's hand, or even being hypocrites. The management just behaves the same towards their own bosses.

Please define "flawed".

No

> a property of, say, an individual

Also no

> there's a fundamental, basic assumption that if you rank people, you are establishing measurements of those persons

Deming says that's bad

> Another possibility, though, is that your rankings are measurements of your own perception

That's built-in

> But the paradigm that is being described assumes that the evaluators are omniscient, unbiased entities measuring properties of some fixed, unchanging objects

Exactly not

> their models of the world are wrong, and they're often not as operationally rigorous as they could be.

Yes, they've misinterpreted what Deming was saying. Seems to be a common affliction.