Now I won’t kid you. This is not an easy watch. Deming, for all his qualities, is clearly not a fabulous orator. In this short presentation he outlines some of his views on motivation in the workplace. He describes his belief about the existence of intrinsic human motivation. It isn’t clear whether he believes it can be created, but it is clear that he believes it can be destroyed. I particularly enjoy his reference to top management as “forces of destruction”. I think we have all at some time or other seen how that works

Anyway, as I say, stick with it. It’s worth five minutes of any quality management professional’s time

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Deming on intrinsic motivation

Thanks to John Hunter at Curious Cat for finding this

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Video overview of PDSA (PDCA) cycle

This article reprises the themes raised by my earlier post Deming’s inconvenient truth, and makes an attempt to draw some additional sense from the apparent paradox. For this article I have Hilary Burrage to offer some credit to, for posing a question on the LinkedIn forum that got some pennies dropping

Let’s start the story at the beginning. Sometime in 2005 I was on my way back home on a Thai Air flight from Jakarta to Heathrow, via Bangkok. In Bangkok I was joined by a casually dressed, youngish Englishman. One look told me he had some money because his clothes and shoes looked expensive, as was his seat on the plane. After a while we got talking. I told him what I did, he told me what he did. Turned out he was a professional gambler living in Thailand. I was immediately captivated by the glamour of his chosen profession, he seemed keen to talk and while away the hours, I was keen to listen. So in the intervening 12 hours or so I got a pretty good insight into the life of a professional gambler

Well, surprise surprise, it’s not all glamour and it’s not all luck. That was lesson number one and two. The man was a statistician by education, a former mathematics teacher of all things, who had turned a knowledge of statistics to his advantage in the arena of sports betting. The trick to making a profit in the longer term was, apparently, to have an ability to identify when the bookies have got the odds wrong. That’s when you place your bets. They don’t all come off, but the odds start slanting your way as opposed to the way of the bookie. Being able to identify when the odds were wrong involved a working knowledge of statistics, and a better knowledge of the event than the bookie appeared to have, and that usually involved some very painstaking research. He was based in Thailand because the bookies in South East Asia get the odds wrong more often than they do elsewhere. Makes sense

So what were his strategies? Well, here are some that I can remember:

* Bet with a clear head. If you have a favourite team, leave it alone
* Avoid accumulator bets. With each accumulated event, the odds lurch further the way of the bookie
* Do your research. Pick, say, ten football teams a year and study them continually. Find out which games they tend to win, which they lose, which players appear to be key, injury situations etc. This will all give you a clear advantage over the lazier bookies
* Stick to sports you like and understand. You’ll have to study hard, but it will be easier for you if you happen to enjoy the game
* Steer clear of boxing

There were a few others, but that gives a feel for it

Very interesting, (you may say) but what’s this all got to do with Deming? This is (supposed to be) a quality improvement blog, is it not?

Well there is a point to this tale, and here it is

Remember in the earlier post, Deming’s inconvenient truth, I suggested that Deming taught that management decisions should wherever possible be based on hard facts and evidence? But also that a lot of management information is both unknown and unknowable? Well that summarises in a nutshell that business is one big lottery. There are no certainties, and for every success there is a failure. If all management information was knowable there would be a scientific formula to remove all elements of risk from the decision making process. But it isn’t and there isn’t. That is a lot like the world of professional gambling. All bets carry an inherent risk, and professional gamblers accept risk and occasional failure as an unavoidable fact of life. HOWEVER the most successful gamblers use as much Management Information as they can get their hands on to slant the odds their way

That, I propose, is probably as close to an absolute definition of “Management Information”, its uses and limitations, that you’re ever likely to get

As definitions go, it is a bit on the long side. Sorry

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Making sense of Deming

Quality gurus come and go, and we all have our favourites.

Some shine brightly for a while, but are very much “of their time” (remember Tom Peters anyone?), others have managed to maintain a longer shelf-life (we’re thinking of Philip Crosby and Joseph Juran). Maybe the key to it is the substance of the work. There is one guru, however, who occupies a position of incomparable status in the quality field, a visionary whose work speaks to people at all levels, from statisticians, to technicians, to academics, to human resource professionals, through to hard-nosed commercial bods. Over the course of almost 4 decades W Edwards Deming produced a body of work that has truly stood the test of time, losing little of its relevance along the way, notwithstanding the incredible changes that we have seen in society and world markets in that time

Over the course of the next couple of weeks I’ll be trying to use the insight and work of Deming to try to develop a deeper understanding of ISO 9001 and, particularly, the 8 principles of quality management. We have a view that these principles, as published in the official text (ISO 9000 series), are introduced and described in quite a trite and unhelpful way, leading to poor management systems application. So we’re trying to do something about it by attempting to put some substantial flesh on those bare bones

Starting with …Leadership
“The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not to find failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure, to help people do a better job and with less effort”

W E Deming, Out of Crisis

Defining and making sense of “leadership” can be a bit like trying to nail a jelly to a wall. Can we establish any parameters that are helpful in any practical way? Well, in the above quote, Deming is advocating that the various tiers of leader use their authority, and the resources at their disposal, to make life easier and better for the poor souls doing the work. Now hang on a minute, that can’t be right can it? How many of us have thought our boss considerably more likely to do just the opposite?

Deming did. In his publication “Quality, productivity and competitive position” he describes the incredible but universal paradox of leadership, that is:

“Most acts of supervision in management … instead of providing help to people, accomplish just the opposite”

It was Deming’s view that the most constructive application
of leadership would be “ … to help people do a better job and with less effort”. This is highly significant, as it has implications beyond the attitude and commitment of “leaders” because for that to happen leaders not only need to support the system, but the system needs to be designed to support its leaders. It is much more than a question of having your heart in the right place. For “quality” to be truly embedded into both process and system, barriers often need to be removed

While leaders themselves can often sanction the removal of significant barriers, the poor old workers can only build in “work-arounds”. This is obviously unsatisfactory, but nonetheless commonplace, as a fall back position in the absence of the preferred option. We could therefore conclude that a system that is pock marked with such “work-arounds” is likely to be suffering from poor leadership. A tell tale symptom, maybe

For things to work properly top-to-bottom, with leaders living up to Deming’s ideal, a number of things need to be true and effectively implemented, such as:

There needs to be a common understanding of the nature of work, what is important, the nature of the system and the role of leadership in it

There needs to be transparency across and within the system to enable problems and barriers to be readily identifiable, and therefore removable

There needs to be open and effective communication in all directions, top-down, bottom-up and laterally

There needs to be a decent level of mutual trust.

Transparency can be a double edged sword. The workforce needs to be comfortable that transparency will not be used against it, whilst leaders need to be comfortable that upward communication channels will not be abused and manipulated for matters of self-interest

Critically Deming notes:

“One important characteristic of a leader is that he will forgive a mistake – there will be mistakes”

If we look hard enough, we can see that there has been an attempt to integrate these principles into section 5 of ISO 9001 – but it is clumsy. Perhaps it is the way standards have to be written or maybe it is a consequence of letting a load of engineers loose on the text, but the over-use of the “shall” word does little to encourage a clear and practical understanding of the key principles and the subtleties of the function. Remember, not all management information is either known or knowable, so the lack of elasticity implicit with the heavy use of the “shall” word may well be at odds with the realities of leadership

In ISO 9001 we see that “management commitment” is important (clause 5.1) and that part of it includes the provision of resources. We see an attempt to put a framework around the use of performance information by leaders via “management review”, (clause 5.6). In principle this is consistent with Deming’s view, but again we have to ask ourselves how often the auditor is happy to see a tatty set of minutes with little productive output, without really examining the integrity and, dare we say it, the value, of the process?

Could it be that few auditors really understand the nature of that beast? If we’re honest we have to acknowledge that few 3^rd party auditors have “risen” to the role of auditor following a successful career in management, so we
have to question their first hand knowledge and consequently their competence in assessing the discipline. It is a little ironic that such care is taken, especially with the advent of ISO 17021, to ensure that only auditors with the appropriate sector and technical competence are allocated to particular clients, whilst there is no apparent problem with the same people auditing management processes of which they have little experience or practical understanding (with heavy emphasis on the word practical … and understanding for that matter)

Moving on, we might note that Deming did not see the promotion of quality through slogans to be in any way a good thing – in fact he was dead against it. So this presents somewhat of an anomaly when we consider the requirement in ISO 9001 for a visible and communicated quality policy (clause 5.3). In an earlier post we’ve asked the question “does it (the Policy) really matter?”, but we could even interpret Deming as going a step farther so as to declare things of that nature counter productive. What is perhaps clear is that we should not see the Quality Policy document as the be all and end all of top management commitment. The very practical and value adding leadership activities examined in the earlier part of this article should be seen as infinitely more important, if a little more difficult to jab with a finger, declaring  “NON-CONFORMANCE!”

So what is the solution? What can we do to encourage a more balanced approach to quality and intelligent solutions? Maybe it’s time for a bit of WED in the lead auditor training programs. The application of the technical standard would be so much better if the fundamental points of understanding were established first

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Deming on leadership

“Running a company on visible figures alone”

Now do you see where we’re going with this? Yes, a lot of you may have been thinking that Mr D was a fully paid up member of the “you can only manage what you can measure” club. Factual Approach to Decision Making and all that. Not at all. Deming actually believed that a lot of important management information is not only unknown, but also unknowable. More a case of:

“Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured, matters”

Oh, right. So his message is basically that we should use data but at the same time try to avoid disappearing up our own backsides in search of that which can’t be found? Well, yes, sort of. This, if we agree that he has a point, does create a bit of an inconvenient truth. That is, we can’t actually plan to control everything, and that some actions by necessity will need to be inherently reactive. Learn Sigma developed that point further in the excellent article Leadership Cult of the Black Swan. So the cautionary word is that we need to be careful not to expect our data collection and analysis to tell us everything and not necessarily to see every unexpected occurrence as a failure in our management information system. Also the fact that “not everything that can be measured matters” is unequivocally true. We’ve referenced the piece on the Active/Inactive Banana a couple of times already recently, but it does demonstrate the point very well indeed

So was Deming a man of contradictions then? No, not at all. He was a statistician by trade and passion, and encouraged the use of hard data wherever this was possible, as he regularly observed that a failure to generate and act on reliable data was a common management failure. He just realised that in some areas you can’t always get it, and in other areas it served little or no practical purpose. He basically encouraged an intelligent, common sense approach to management information. Now that’s a visionary!

So anyway, to bring this to some sort of conclusion, we need to appreciate that familiar old standards like the “8 Principles of Quality Management” are general rules rather than laws. There will be exceptions and there will be times when we need to apply principles other than the aforementioned 8 in order to get our results. Breaking the “rules” occasionally is not necessarily bad practice, and this approach is 100% consistent with Deming’s philosophy

But you try telling that to your certification body auditor ….

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Deming’s inconvenient truth

Well let’s consider what he had to say about the role of management in general. It was his firm view that, if nothing else, management should seek to find ways of making life easier for the workforce, to provide resources and to remove the barriers to good work in a very practical and active way. Now let’s be grown up just for a moment.

Does a policy statement, signed or unsigned, really have much of a bearing on the quality of day to day work? Is it a reliable sign of commitment under any circumstances? Is it feasible that an uncommitted MD could muster a signature on a bit of paper? Is the signature even required by ISO 9001? I can’t help but think that this would be something Deming would find hard to get excited about. If anything he may even have viewed the whole idea of a visible policy statement as a counter-productive instrument, a smokescreen – he was after all dead against work place slogans. He did, of course, have very strong views on management commitment in general, but never a man to beat around the bush, he is more likely to have brushed these cosmetic distractions to one side and gone straight for the jugular. This is how he summarised the role of leaders in “Out of Crisis”:

“The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not to find failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure, to help people do a better job and with less effort”

If Deming was an ISO 9001 assessor he would have asked the tough questions. “So tell me, what have you done lately to help your workers? Have you put your money where your mouth is? Do you have a clue what it’s like out there or even how you could help your workers?” Signed policy statement or not, that’s the line of enquiry that is really going to get the uncommitted management team squirming. Problem is, it’s a tough path to go down. So do we focus on the trivia of a signature because it’s such a soft target?

Moving on, Deming had quite interesting and perhaps surprising views on Management Information Systems. It is a commonly-held but incorrect view that he was a firm exponent of the philosophy “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. It is worth noting that number five on his list of “Seven Deadly Diseases of Western Management” was:

“Running a company with visible figures alone”

It was his assertion that a lot of important management information is either unknown or even unknowable, and we can waste a
lot of time chasing the unattainable goal of a 100% “Factual Approach to Decision Making”.

However, to put this in proper context, Deming did support the practice of data collection & analysis in general, especially where it had the practical outcome of reducing the risk in the decision making process. But to reduce the risk of a wrong decision, he would argue, is as much as we can ever do.

If we could somehow systematically reduce the risk in decision making down to zero, there would be no failures. But we can’t, so therefore there are. Bringing all this back to ISO 9001, it means assessors need to have a practical approach to data analysis and management review. Not all data collection has a worthwhile outcome, so sometimes, in some areas, it’s OK to stop.

And also, as not all managementinformation is knowable, ultimately there will always be a judgement call, but a wrong decision does not necessarily mean there is a systematic weakness in the management review process (although clearly if the same mistake is made repeatedly we may have justifiable doubts). Ultimately we need to understand the complexity, subtleties and dynamics of these high level management processes, before we can really understand how to interpret section 5 in a value-adding way – and that includes recognising its limits

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Management responsibility – A Deming’s eye view

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Deming on Performance Appraisal

Anyway, like it or not, the performance of a system is affected by the behaviour of the people in it. They are affected in turn by several factors, their health and well-being, their state of mind, their competence and, last but not least, their motivation. This somewhat inconvenient situation is nevertheless recognised within ISO 9000. Involvement of People is listed as one of the 8 underpinning principles of quality management. Only problem is, the auditable standard does not devote much effort towards defining any required system attributes that are likely to promote the principle, save perhaps for a bit of training (clause 6.2.2). It stands as a principle more or less absent of requirements

The main reason for the omission, we suspect, is that the subject is HAAAAARD. It’s tough. The concept of motivation is supported only by a load of theories. Not laws or rules, just theories. None are proven and not all are necessarily consistent with one another. So may we suggest that ISO 9001 takes the convenient option of side-stepping the issue for the time being? Let’s face it, many of us do the same. How often do we see adverts for “self-motivated individuals”. What should that tell us about the job? Don’t expect excitement? Don’t expect any thanks, recognition or encouragement? Maybe it should set the alarm bells well and truly ringing as we could often read between the lines “Sucker required for god-awful job”

Deming, however, believed people do actually carry an inherent motivation. So maybe this concept of a “self-motivated individual” is no fallacy, after all. He believed each of us holds a desire to do a good job and we take pride in doing so. If true, that’s has to be a good thing, hasn’t it? Because, as leaders and managers, it gets us off to a bit of a flying start

But hang on a moment, we need to be careful. “Inherent” does not mean “unconditional” or “indestructible”. Motivation can be destroyed. It is destroyed – all the time. How often have we seen first day enthusiasm systematically crushed and replaced by seasoned cynicism and apathy? And here’s the rub. Who always gets the blame for this loss of motivation? Yes, the poor old worker

Good old blame. The management tool of choice for the terminally inept, as easy as credit and as versatile as a Swiss Army Knife. We know all about that one

All this takes us to lesson number one. Whatever theory of motivation we subscribe to, it is underpinned by a fundamental law
People get pissed off

This links nicely back to an earlier post relating to the role of leaders in amongst all this malarkey. A key role of a leader, according to Deming, is to continually seek ways to make it easier for people to do a good job – remove the barriers. This post on Curious Cat refers to Deming’s views on this matter and calls on managers not to motivate but to “Stop De-Motivating Employees”

In other words, people are already inherently motivated – all we as leaders can do is f*** it up … but sadly f*** it up we usually do

In a very early post we highlighted the practice in a US Army Garrison of rewarding staff for making improvement suggestions. Deming was not one for that sort of thing at all. He deemed that to be extrinsic motivation, and you only need extrinsic motivation if you have failed to build intrinsic motivation into the job. He saw extrinsic motivators like that as a work-around and an indicator of a deeper, more under-lying, system malaise

Anyway, to summarise, we can perhaps take a useful and practical lesson from this great imponderable. That is, if the subject of motivation is so big and complex so as to freak us out, could we come at it from another, perhaps easier, angle, and focus on the identification and removal of demotivators?

Worth thinking about

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Deming on involvement of people

In the 1990s, Deming distilled the essence of his approach into 4 inter-dependent components that he called “a system of profound knowledge”. Together these represent the key disciplines that describe how organisations work and how to manage them more successfully. The components are:

1. Systems thinking – optimising how businesses processes operate from end-to-end working together and with suppliers and for the benefit of customers, and ultimately for the benefit of their customers (in the context of a business to business transactional relationship)

2. Understanding variation – using statistics to gain new insights into business performance and to drive improvements in a sustainable way

3. Psychology – understanding what makes people tick, how to empower them and how to remove the constraints of their ideas and enthusiasms

4. Knowledge – the importance of learning, operational definitions and how rational predictions can be made by managers about future performance

source www.deming.org

In this exert we can see how powerfully and succinctly Deming captures the essence of a system and summarises its set of critical inter-dependent attributes. The inference is clear that in order for a system to function anywhere near to its fullest potential, it needs to develop capabilities across all four components

Now if we try to map some of this management gold onto ISO 9001 requirements (or vice versa) we can soon see that our attempt will be met with limited success. Whereas there has been a fairly visible and half-decent attempt to integrate the first two components into the standard, we will struggle to defend an argument that numbers 3 and 4 are embedded in any useful way (or in the case of number 3, at all). Let’s go through them in turn

Systems thinking – optimising how businesses processes operate from end-to-end working together and with suppliers and for the benefit of customers, and ultimately for the benefit of their customers (in the context of a business to business transactional relationship)

The Systems Approach to Management is indeed one of our 8 principles of quality management. Our 8 great truths that are meant to provide a back-drop of intent to underpin the use of the technical standard. Within the clauses of ISO 9001 there is heavy use of the word “system”, particularly among the general requirements of section 4. However the principle of “systems thinking” weakens as we progress through the standard. Clauses sit in relative isolation from one another, and the implementation of the system is left at the school gates, so to speak. That is, we get a bit of the theory in section 4, but as soon as we proceed into practicalities of the operational real world (section 7), it may as well have been in “Section Pluto”. The threads are not cohesive, allowing for significant failings in both understanding and implementation at operational level. The structure of ISO 9001 does not help, and it is a real shame that ISO 9001:2008 does not appear ready to follow the successful lead of ISO 14001 and structure its requirements in a  PDCA sequence. The reason why? We can only wonder. Maybe 2016 …

Understanding variation – using statistics to gain new insights into business performance and to drive improvements in a sustainable way

Hmmm, some good here, and some bad. There can be little argument that ISO 9001 makes an attempt to emphasise the discipline of management by facts and analysis in a number of key areas. We have mandatory requirements for product measurement (8.2.4), process measurement (8.2.3), internal audit (8.2.2) measurement of customer satisfaction (8.2.1) analysis of data (8.4) and management review (5.6). This is good, both in terms of discipline and in terms of the potential value to the organisation if they happen to develop an effective information management system around those data collection and decision making processes. The primary weakness is how well ISO 9001 (and indeed ISO 9004) deals with the second part of the component (i.e. understanding). Turning all this effort in counting and measuring things into meaningful management information and positive, proactive decisions is the key, and it is still far too easy to miss the whole point and get wrapped up in a very literal, cosmetic and low value approach of management by numbers

Psychology – understanding what makes people tick, how to empower them and how to remove the constraints of their ideas and enthusiasms

Now we’re skating on far, far thinner ice. Whilst there has almost been a tentative acceptance offered that this component is important (involvement of people is another of our 8 quality management principles), frankly ZERO attempt has been made to tackle this knotty topic within the published standard. You can search for this as long as you like, it isn’t there. What does this tell us? Was Deming wrong? Is it an oversight? Or is it like asking the review panel to write and perform a full length ballet? People are important system components. Ignoring them won’t make them go away. This, we argue, is a MAJOR weakness and, again, a weakness that is nowhere near as weak in ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. People are our greatest asset? Again, more questions of the review panel. Lessons have been learned and incorporated into other management standards, why not ISO 9001?

Knowledge – the importance
of learning, operational definitions and how rational predictions can be made by managers about future performance

OK, again we can make a case that clauses 8.4 and 5.6 (analysis of data and management review) tip toe in the right direction, but Deming’s component was looking for a bit more. Nah, a lot more. What we REALLY REALLY want to see is the management of information in context of organisational learning. For an idea of where that might lead, check out our earlier post. This too, like component 3, is poorly applied within the standard, if it is at all. At the time of writing we could argue this is light years off the ISO 9001 radar

So where does that leave us? Well, right back where we started. We can say that ISO 9001 ain’t all bad. It can encourage a number of approaches that gets us off the blocks, so to speak, but we would be quite wrong if we were to think that it takes us too far on our ultimate quest for excellence. It has strengths, but it also has weaknesses and omissions, so in order for us to use it to best effect, we need to know how far it takes us, where it leaves us, and what we need to do to get to that next stop. In this post we’ve identified that parallel strategies that deal effectively with the psychological complexities of human motivation need to be considered, as well as the principles of wider “knowledge management”

As we said, people are important, ignoring them won’t make them go away…

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Deming on systems thinking

“You know what the difference is between a scientist and an engineer? Engineers hate surprises”

Think about that. It’s actually quite true. Engineers love control (maybe that’s why they are not famed for their people skills), all this PDCA, everything in its place and a place for everything, continually improving things by reducing the degree of variation in specification and performance, all of that. But what’s an engineer’s natural reaction to the unexpected or, god forbid, a failure? Now we’re not saying that this discipline (engineering) is without great merit, because it clearly does have great merit, but is it a typically innovative discipline? Whenever we think about true innovators we tend to think of an inquisitive outlook, a curious type that revels in the unexpected, one that likes surprises and accepts failures as a key milestone on the voyage of discovery.  What’s more there is some research that suggests that this our more natural state, and an outlook that has put our species where it is

Sometimes the lines can be blurred and confusion can reign with regard to what constitutes innovation. Does it necessarily suggest the creation of something new? Or can it include just making something we already have, better? Problem is, everyone like to think of themselves as “innovative” and that can lead to some very broad definitions (just like “healthy eating”, “sensible drinking” or “ideal weight”), but let’s think about the concept of failure for a moment. In order to achieve step changes, we actually need them, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If that’s your outlook, then you’re a true SCIENTIST, and an innovator, my friend

For Deming’s view on innovation, check out this post from Curious Cat

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Why engineers are not natural innovators