I Like The Way This Guy Thinks…

Leaf Hacker or Root Striker??

I was reviewing a DVD the other day that I checked out from our local library.  It was a BBC production titled “Unheard Prophet: W. Edwards Deming”, and it carried me back to my own personal experience with Doctor Deming when he provided his four-day seminar at Boeing.  His curmudgeonly style, especially during the presentation of the “Red Beads-White Beads” experiment, is inimitable with the effect that he created.  His mutterings contained the essence of his theories, and the one that stuck out for me that day was “There is no substitute for knowledge”.

It has always struck me as a bit of non sequitur that Doctor Deming, being a mathematician by training and considered by many to be the [perhaps "a"] father of statistical process control, would exhort so strongly against against “the numbers” that modern executives so worship.  In the video, he comments, almost as an aside, “Beware of figures, be guided by theory.”  Among my myriad notes from the four days of seminar and the three evenings of small-group discussions that I enjoyed with him, I find several repetitions of “The most important numbers are unknown and unknowable.”  And I believe that this is a side to Doctor Deming [and the many programs that have flowed forward from his teachings, some correctly, some incorrectly] that is often overlooked: his insistence on  honoring the human side of the business proposition and on deep understanding, what he characterized in his conversations as “profound knowledge”. 

Early in the video, he was expressing his traditional concern, “They were only doing their best.  They were doing their best, but without knowledge. ‘Doing our best’ without knowledge will be our downfall.   There is no substitute for knowledge.”  You see, among each and every one of his Fourteen Points, knowledge is the basis, the foundation on which to build your actions:

1. Constancy of purpose requires knowledge of the company, the environment, your competitors and your customers.
2. Adopt the new philosophyrequires us to awaken to the challenge and learn new responsibilities, something we can do only with new knowledge.
3. Cease dependence on inspection requires changes [new knowledge] to build quality in the first time.
4. End practice of business on price tag requires more knowledgethan traditional purchasing processes, knowledge to determine total costs instead of immediate price.
5. Improve constantly and foreveris practically a re-framing of consistent new knowledge as an underpinning of your company.
6. Institute training is simply distributing knowledge in new ways or to different audiences.
7. Institute leadership requires new practices which require new knowledge.
8. Drive out fear presupposes a new knowledge basis, since fear is rooted in uncertainty which is rooted in ignorance. [NB: ignorance is not the same as stupidity; ignorance is not knowing, which can be remedied; stupidity is knowing but not responding]
9. Break down barriers requires most companies to adopt completely new philosophies about the “freedom of travel” of knowledge within their company.
10. Eliminate slogans and exhortations presumes replacement of these artificial goals with true knowledge-based targets and systems.
11. Eliminate work standards and MBO by replacing it with leadership requires [as in Point 7] new practices, based on new knowledge.
12. Remove barriers for both hourly and management workers requires new systems based on new knowledge.
13. Institute education and self-improvement is essentially the embodiment of the transfer of new knowledge to new recipients.
14. Put everybody to work will require all companies to rethink its current knowledge dissemination practices to achieve fuller distribution.

Knowledge is at the root of each and every one of these points underlying his theory, and it calls to mind the often cited Thoreau adage that “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.”  Knowledge systems are at the root of every company’s operations.  Practically all of most current operational improvement programs consist in hacking at the leaves.  How many of you are striking at the root?

Without assuring the integrity and solidity of these knowledge roots, maintaining or improving any commercial enterprise becomes riskier in the long term.  Yet so many executives are content to hack at the leaves, achieving a topiary that can be sold to shareholders. Your company’s knowledge must be placed into a system, guided, as Deming would instruct, with a true theory and structured practices and processes that can be controlled.

Your company’s knowledge systems are the roots that feed all of your other operations.  Have your knowledge systems been optimized?  Have they even been objectively assessed lately? 

Don’t settle for topiary.  Become one of the truly transformational leaders, the ones that strike at the root, for lasting change.

Here’s a good way to start: Knowledge System Risk Assessment