Deming Philosophy
By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. In this presentation Dan Jones discusses what we (with an understanding of Deming’s ideas) can see as an aspect of the Deming chain reaction: Focusing on quality and then time the consequence is that we lower costs. Rather than focusing initially on costs as […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. David Langford’s presentation at our 2015 annual conference was titled: Education – Implementation Intentions and Automatization. David included a clip from one of my favorite shows, Utopia (called Dreamland in USA) with a vivid example of a performance appraisal experience. David also discusses the problems created by using extrinsic […]
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By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. In The Improvement Guide, the authors add 3 questions to the PDSA cycle: What are we trying to accomplish? How will we know that a change is an improvement? What change can we make that will result in improvement? As I stated in my previous […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. Listen to the Deming Institute Podcast with Tim Higgins, Quality Engineer for NASA and President of the In2:InThinking Network (download podcast). Also see our recent post on Tim’s presentation at our last annual conference: Curiosity, Learning, Knowledge, and Improvement with Tim Higgins. When I read The New Economics lightbulbs […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. We have a tendency to focus on special causes even when poor results are due to common causes within the system. To improve results that are due to the system trying to determine the specific problem with any bad result and fix that problem is an inefficient strategy. But […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Cliff and Jane Norman (Profound Knowledge Products, Inc.) presented a session at our 2016 annual conference titled: Applying Deming’s Philosophy and Theory to Create the Foundation for a Learning Organization. Cliff, quoting Brian Joiner in the presentation: It takes one kind of brains to […]
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Guest post by Mark Graban About ten years ago, somebody sent me a PDF file of Dr. Deming’s “Some Notes on Management in a Hospital.” I felt like somebody had shared a bootleg tape of my favorite band, as I wasn’t sure the article had ever been formally published anywhere. Since I wasn’t sure if […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Eric Budd’s presentation at the 2016 Annual Deming Institute Conference: An Exercise in Operational Definition. The exercise Eric uses in the presentation shows how much variation can show up in data – just from how the data is collected. And in this […]
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“While many in the business world associate the word ‘theory’ with something purely academic or abstract, nothing could be further from the truth. Theories that explain causality are among the most important and practical tools business leaders can have.” – Clayton Christensen
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By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. – Daniel J. Boorstin After you decide that Deming’s ideas seem valuable you must act to adopt new methods in order to benefit from what you have learned. This takes many […]
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