process thinking

Series of wooden gears in a horizontal line, each held by a person's fingers.

Why Did the Management System Allow the Failure?

By John Hunter / August 8, 2022 / 0 Comments

In this guest post, John Hunter explores the questions management should ask when there’s a failure or problem, rather than blaming an individual.

Read More

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 […]

Read More
Plan-Do-Study-Act

Quick Tips for Using the PDSA Improvement Cycle

By John Hunter / July 23, 2021 / 1 Comment

Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. The Plan Do Study Act improvement cycle is a valuable method to maximize learning and catalyze improvement. See our Deming on Management: PDSA cycle resource page for many more details than are covered here. Here I will just provide four ideas to keep […]

Read More

The “Small Jumps” of Change

By Guest Post / January 12, 2021 / 6 Comments

Guest post by Doug Stilwell, Drake University. There are indeed many reasons change efforts fail. But we can avoid one of those reasons by taking “small jumps;” breaking down important change/improvement efforts into manageable and measurable steps so that the daunting size and complexity of initiatives are not the cause of failure.

Read More

Make Time to Improve

By Matthew Moss / May 18, 2020 / 0 Comments

Are you responsible for how a part of your organization prioritizes what must be done? If so, you must find a way to devote time to improvement.

Read More

Rethinking Statistics for Quality Control with George Box

By Matthew Moss / December 17, 2018 / 0 Comments

George Box shared a presentation on Rethinking Statistics for Quality Control at our 2008 Deming Institute Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.

Read More

Kevin Murphy’s Presentation: Application and Lessons of Deming’s Perspective on Leadership

By John Hunter / March 16, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Kevin Murphy’s presentation at the 14th In2:InThinking Annual Forum Weekend Conference: Application and Lessons of Deming’s Perspective on Leadership: [Vimeo plays the video automatically – which is obviously an extremely bad Ux practice. Even using their code to disable autoplay of the video doesn’t […]

Read More

Software Code Reviews from a Deming Perspective

By John Hunter / February 20, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Software code review is the practice of reviewing the software code written by colleagues on your software development team. Like many practices the form it takes can vary quite a bit. W. Edwards Deming stated in Out of the Crisis: Cease dependence on inspection to […]

Read More

What are We Trying to Accomplish?

By John Hunter / February 16, 2017 / 0 Comments

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 […]

Read More

Educate New Managers on Their New Responsibilities

By John Hunter / January 26, 2017 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Far too often, companies promote employees into management positions and expect them to fulfill the obligations of their new position without helping prepare them to meet their new responsibilities. People who excelled at doing their non-supervisory job often have little education or experience to succeed […]

Read More
Scroll to Top