Appreciation for a System

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Systems Thinking for Civil Servants

By John Hunter / June 21, 2022 / 0 Comments

In this guest post, John Hunter reviews the Systems Thinking for Civil Servants resource from the UK Government Office for Science and connects it to the Deming philosophy.

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Transforming Resident Assessment with Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge

By John Hunter / May 23, 2022 / 1 Comment

In this guest post John Hunter reviews “Transforming Resident Assessment: An Analysis Using Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge” and discusses how evaluations often lead to bad data.

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Russ Ackoff Lecture on the Age of Systems

By John Hunter / May 12, 2022 / 0 Comments

This Russ Ackoff lecture, from the late 1970s, focuses on the age of systems. The nearly 2-hour lecture spans the development of science and scientific thinking while exploring topics such as philosophy, psychology, our ways of thinking, religion, history, physics, linguistics, and more.

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A white piece of paper crumpled with a paper airplane to the right, indicating one is transformed into the other.

Deming on Management: Innovation

By John Hunter / April 8, 2022 / 0 Comments

This guest post by John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog, is part of our Deming on Management series that aims to provide resources to help those transforming their management system to one based on Deming’s management ideas.

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Using a Deming Lens to Investigate and Solve Managerial Challenges

By Guest Post / March 7, 2022 / 1 Comment

In most organizations, managers’ challenges range from doing more with less to motivating employees. This is causing managers to report “burnout” on a massive scale. To solve such challenges effectively, means identifying their underlying causes which, the authors find, are seldom addressed.

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Understanding Data and Appreciating the Implications for the System

By John Hunter / January 31, 2022 / 0 Comments

Guest post by John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Working with data is something that doesn’t come naturally to many people. But it is important to develop your understanding of data to manage well within an organization, applying the Deming management system. In this post, I take a look at how understanding data is important with […]

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Seeking Creative Solutions Using an Appreciation for Systems

By John Hunter / January 6, 2022 / 0 Comments

Guest post by John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Want to reduce wildfires and drought? Leave it to beavers. A dry California creek bed looked like a wildfire risk. Then the beavers went to work. “It went from dry grassland… to totally re-vegetated, trees popping up, willows, wetland plants of all types, different meandering stream channels […]

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Lean Blog Podcast with Balaji Reddie, Founder of the Deming Forum of India

By John Hunter / October 20, 2021 / 0 Comments

Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Lean Blog Interview with Balaji Reddie, Founder of the Deming Forum of India.  “So when I told him about profound knowledge, and when we started all of that, the next day he was eyes and ears, and it was, it was really mind-bending. […]

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Can “Appreciation for a System” Support the Taming of COVID?

By Guest Post / October 12, 2021 / 0 Comments

An appreciation for a system is one of the four interrelated components that form Dr. Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. In his guest post, Drake University Professor, Dr. Doug Stilwell, explores how adopting a systems-thinking approach can help in our efforts to eradicate COVID-19.

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Managers Must Understand that Blaming Employees Doesn’t Help

By John Hunter / October 5, 2021 / 0 Comments

Guest post by John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Often when problems occur, we seek to figure out who is to blame for the problem. This is not an effective management strategy as Dr. Deming made clear, and I have discussed before: Attributing Fault to the Person Without Considering the System, Distorting the System, Distorting the […]

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