By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.
Andrew McKeon spoke at the annual Deming Institute conference this year on: Disruptive Sustainability and Deming.
Quality Digest interviewed Andrew in webcast above. Andrew uses the 4 elements of Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge to look at climate change in the webcast and also his article: Deming, Profound Knowledge, and Global Sustainability
From the Quality Digest article, Profound Knowledge in Complex Systems: A Business Case:
According to McKeon, atmospheric CO2 levels are way out of the normal variation limits relative to the last 2 million years. “And that has a lot of implications for how the planet is going to look, so knowledge of variation becomes very important,” he says. The SPC tie-in becomes clearer as the interview continues, “For me it wasn’t Deming to climate change; it was climate change to Deming,” says McKeon. “And seeing that graph and understanding about variation really brought it home for me. His knowledge and his way of framing things were very important for this.”
Related: Brian Joiner Podcast on Management, Sustainability and the Health Care System – 2013 Annual Deming Conference Recap: Homecoming At Purdue – Climate Change and Management by Andrew McKeon and Gipsy Ranney – Clayton Christensen on Innovation and Macro Economics