By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.
Bill Bellows serves on the board of trustees for The W. Edwards Deming Institute. He has been writing articles for the
Lean Management Journal for several years that discuss how to apply Deming’s ideas (and related management improvement ideas) in organizations.
Those articles include:
And, so it goes, when we relentlessly focus our attention on one of many causes as the singular cause and miss the system. This is an easy recipe for blaming an individual within a system (be it the pilot after an airplane crash, the conductor after a train crash, or the captain after a ship sinks) rather than a greater open system of causes. Dr Deming proposed an appreciation of his System of Profound Knowledge as a means to shift our narrow viewpoints from the last straw to boundary-less systems of contributions.
Business as unusual: shift from big problems to great opportunities
In a determined shift from black or white data to continuum data, a serious problem was solved and I was exposed to the important differences between continuum data and black or white data. Awareness of this difference and the advantages of these modes of thinking, as well as data collection efforts, with strong parallels to a focus on things gone wrong and things going well, is a cornerstone for business as unusual.
This is one of the big problems with how dashboards are often used. If something is not flagged as bad now then it is ignored. But often by using in-process measures to stay on top of systems and adjust before things go bad (or to work on continual improvement) will result in much better performance. People involved in a process need to know much more than ok or not-ok in order to manage and improve systems.
Come Together and Mind the Choice
When building a handful of transmissions, for R&D needs, perhaps it is more economically viable to mind the parts, due to an added expense of minding gaps. As volume grows and the system expands to include customers, minding gaps may be the preferred path to profitability. In closing, there is a time and place for minding parts and a time and place for minding gaps.
Related: Reflections from Dr. Deming on a Foundation for Leading (Bill presentation at our 2014 annual conference) – How Did We Do on the Test? (Bill speaking at our conference) – Using Deming’s Management Methods to Enhance the Application of Taguchi’s Ideas (Deming podcast with Bill Bellows)