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 his views onto ISO 9001 requirements (or vice versa) we can soon see that our attempt are going to 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)
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