Understanding Variation
Post by Bill Bellows, Deputy Director, The Deming Institute. As noted in my June 26th post, “It Depends…”, when asked in February 1990 about the trend towards reducing the number of levels of management in organizations, Dr. Deming answered, in his usual Socratic fashion: “Why have more levels than you need?” Now, consider what Socratic questions might […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). Dave Nave found an interesting forward from a set of 1985 standards on Control Charts. It describes how those standards were created as part of the World War II war effort, with Dr. Deming on the committee. Subsequently the standards were transfer […]
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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 (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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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is a wonderful book about how to create systems that work. At the core the Checklist Manifesto is about determining the critical process conditions and creating a system to assure that the those process items are properly handled. […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Using data to understand the system and validate our theories and successful improvements is an important part managing well. In some cases it is fairly easy to understand and collect data that provides a clear and accurate measure of what we care about. But […]
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By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). A recent Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation article on the finding that: 90 Cents of Every “Pay-for-Performance” Dollar are Paid for Luck. I agree that mainly we award senior executives huge pay based on luck and the […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. This is a very interesting interview with W. Edwards Deming by Bill Scherkenbach (recording in February 1984, during this time Bill Scherkenbach worked at Ford and Deming was consulting with Ford). In this post I continue to explore this powerful video; it is part two of: Bill Scherkenbach’s Interview […]
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By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. The video shows a recorded webinar for the Healthcare Value Network by Mark Graban and Mike Stoecklein. In the video they explore the real lessons of Dr. Deming’s famous red bead factory demonstration and the principle of understanding and managing variation. Mark mentions how Bill Boller, with Hewlett-Packard, created […]
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Guest post by Bill Bellows (originally written as a comment about the question of how Dr. Deming viewed Six Sigma Quality). While Dr. Deming was known for his appreciation of continuous improvement, he was also know for encouraging us to think of variation and improvement from a systems perspective. As such, I do not believe […]
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