process thinking

You Burn, I’ll Scrape

By Matthew Moss / July 20, 2015 / 0 Comments

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 […]

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The History and Evolution of the PDSA Cycle

By John Hunter / May 28, 2015 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. Ron Moen and Clifford Norman wrote a very interesting article on the history of the PDSA cycle: Clearing up myths about the Deming cycle and seeing how it keeps evolving. It is not enough to determine that a change resulted in improvement during a […]

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The Importance of Working with Suppliers Over the Long Term

By John Hunter / May 18, 2015 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. Point 4 in W. Edwards Deming’s 14 points for management Even […]

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To Achieve Success Focus on Improving the System Not On Individual Performance

By John Hunter / April 23, 2015 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004). A company could put a top man at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together. W. Edwards Deming in his last interview: ‘Management Today Does Not Know What Its Job […]

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Quality Beginnings: Deming and Madison, Wisconsin

By Guest Post / March 20, 2015 / 3 Comments

This post in an excerpt from The Quality Leadership Workbook for Police by Chief David Couper and Captain Sabine Lobitz. While the intense focus on quality movement in the 1980s did not become the dominant way to run an organization like many of us thought it would, it still became one of society’s major influences. […]

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Cooperating with Competitors

By John Hunter / February 23, 2015 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. W. Edwards Deming included this example of businesses cooperating with competitors in The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education: My automobile, sitting in front of my house, would not start. I called Bill at the Exxon station not far away. When the man from […]

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How to Start Applying Deming’s Ideas on Management

By John Hunter / January 20, 2015 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. There are many different ways to start applying W. Edwards Deming’s ideas on management. There isn’t a cookbook on what should be done first. This is helpful in that you can avoid trying things that would be very difficult given the current state of your management system. However, it […]

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On the Use of Theory

By John Hunter / December 3, 2014 / 0 Comments

By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com. On the Use of Theory is an article W. Edwards Deming published in 1956. It is one of many of his papers we have posted on our web site. Though 58 years old the ideas in the article are very useful today and yet many organizations still have not […]

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One-Piece-Flow Projects Create the Best Conditions for True Creativity

By Guest Post / November 20, 2014 / 0 Comments

Guest post by Michael Ballé (repost from his Gemba Coach column on Lean.org) Dear Gemba Coach, For product development you need creative (maybe even chaotic) people. Are those people suited to follow such a structured method as lean? Like trying to achieve one-piece-flow in product development? Thank you. What an interesting question! As a writer […]

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The System Will Produce What It’s Capable of Producing

By Guest Post / October 13, 2014 / 1 Comment

Which brings us to response time targets. Putting aside the arguments that numerical targets are arbitrary and prone to causing dysfunctional behaviour*, a critical further point is that targets do not provide a method. Neither do they provide additional capacity for achieving the improvements sought. Therefore, setting an arbitrary numerical target for response times (or anything else), simply does not change anything about those systems conditions that dictate predictable levels of performance. The system will produce what it’s capable of producing, whether the target is there or not.

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