By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.
our system of make-and-inspect, which if applied to making toast would be expressed: “You burn, I’ll scrape.”
Joe Sensennbrer quoting Dr. Deming in his article, Quality Comes to City Hall
This wonderful quote highlights Dr. Deming’s ability to use humor and create a simple visual to drive home a point.
We can all easily see burning toast and then scraping it to reach the desired state isn’t a very sensible process. But in our organizations how often do we tolerate systems that produce substandard results instead of fixing the process? How often do we blame the people for not scraping the toast well enough instead of having a management system that fixes the process to not burn the toast in the first place?
Related: Process Thinking at Patagonia – The consumer is the most important point on the production-line – Cease Dependence on Inspection – previous post on the Quality Comes to City Hall article