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Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren't nice places to work

283 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

endominus 4y ago
>(I exclude Eastern or specifically Japanese companies from the statement above because I don’t know enough about them to comment; Deming’s influence is largest in Japan. Perhaps they’re operationally rigorous, wonderful places to work? I don’t know enough to say, but I intend to find out.) Now that would be interesting - as far as I know, the Japanese government has issues keeping companies from being literally murderously exploitative. There's even a term for death by overwork in Japanese; karoshi. Of course, not having first-have knowledge, I don't know if that's an accurate view of the situation there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gwern 4y ago
  But does it have anything to do with Deming? Korea, for example, is as bad, and maybe worse given their alcohol culture; they just don't get any cutesy terms like 'karoshi'. Or consider this recent followup about a famous American bonsai master who learned in Japan, and learned such brutal lessons from his master that he's driven away all would-be American apprentices: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/the-beautiful-brutal-world-of-bonsai https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/the-beautiful-... Are we going to blame bonsai on Deming now?
  - nyanpasu64 4y ago
    I hope to someday create a world where people are valued for the love they can bring to those around them, and not beaten or psychologically abused (like this story or my upbringing) for failing to bring enough value to those in power. I'm not doing well enough to create safe living conditions for myself, let alone those I care about.
    - dxdm 4y ago
      Awareness is an important step. If you haven't found them already, maybe there are groups of people who are (or were) in similar situations that can lend some support. It's always better to not go the hard walks alone.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I'm not an expert, but as far as I understand, it's not that the management of Japanese corporations forces their employees explicitly, quashing their protests, in the style of labor vs capital struggle in Europe in 19th century. Instead it's more about peer pressure and self-representation. It's more like fashion among teenagers: they try their hardest to look cool, fashionable, and trendy, even though nobody (and not their parents or teachers in particular) enforce it. But they badly want to look cool, and feel bad if they don't, and their peers look down on them. The same way employees just don't leave before their boss leaves, not because their boss orders them to, but because they'd feel silly and rude if they did so, and their peers might sneer at them. Of course the management does use this to their benefit, and does cultivate these views, again, without outwardly forcing anyone's hand, or even being hypocrites. The management just behaves the same towards their own bosses.
  - soared 4y ago
    This is true to some degree but it’s extended out beyond that. Many apartments for young workers have effectively non-existent kitchens, fridges, etc. It’s common to leave work “late”, eat on the way home, then wake up “early” and eat on the way to work. This is cultural but is a cause and affect of the work culture.
  - psychoslave 4y ago
    >Instead it's more about peer pressure and self-representation. It's more like fashion among teenagers: they try their hardest to look cool, fashionable, and trendy, even though nobody (and not their parents or teachers in particular) enforce it. I’m not sure I understand you here. How can peer pressure be stated as "nobody enforce it"?
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Nobody formally enforces it, there's no written rule in the company. Bosses do not order their reports to show up before the official hours, or leave past them.
hprotagonist 4y ago
this is no paradox, it’s merely that if you, “in the words of Martin Buber, replace the ‘I, Thou’ relationship with the ‘I, It’ relationship, you relegate persons to the status of things”, and that’s alienation and it’s bad. “I don't know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible. But the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions.” Your rules and procedures have escape hatches and loopholes because the world is more complicated and person-ful than they are. Or you have rules that will be used as weapons.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  Who are you quoting? (Martin Buber, or someone quoting Martin Buber?)
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    martin luther king jr’s “letter from a burmingham jail” and later, jean-luc picard.
    - ezekiel68 4y ago
      Hmm, was it a speech-to-text error that insterted Buber's name in your comment? At any rate, know that it is possible to edit your comment to reflect the correct name and avoid the misunderatanding.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        It's not an error. The name is correct. For an explanation see [1], which reproduces the Martin Luther King quote this way: > “To use the words of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes and ‘I-it’ relationship for an ‘I-thou’ relationship, and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful.” https://iamthou.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/martin-bubers-influence-on-mlk-jr/ https://iamthou.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/martin-bubers-influ...
dotcoma 4y ago
Amazon, for example?
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  Amazon, is the example given in the first few paragraphs.
  - dotcoma 4y ago
    I did not read the article, as I imagine you can imagine…
    - ezekiel68 4y ago
      I imagine we didn't need to imagine.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Amazon is the new Microsoft. Microsoft was once something that a manager at a consulting firm I worked with held up as exemplaries in software. Yes, the release-beta-to-the-market windows bluescreens etc. Amazon seems to be similarly deified by software management these days, but... why? Amazon the commercial website frankly sucks. The product information is bad (compare something like computer parts with something like NewEgg). The reviews are suspect, the search results gamed. AWS has so many warts and fake not-down even in the core of EC2 / S3 / etc, and itself a TERRIBLE console and not-great API, things that minimal investment should fix but never have. The fact is that software management is still management and they don't get software. They only respect management, which actually is "successful in market cap" not necessarily the impossible to measure actual good management.
    - DanielHB 4y ago
      they were there first, that is why they were successful To be fair they were there with e-commerce and cloud services so many years ahead the competition it is understandable to some extent why their products have so many warts. Competitors could see things that didn't work well in amazon products and improve where it was obvious They have a moat around their products, in retail they have the user-base and in AWS they have the developer-base (devs who know how to set up things in AWS). These things take a long time to erode away as competition increases no matter how good the competition product is
nborwankar 4y ago
“I continue to wonder at the kind of person who names their business philosophy ‘profound’.” This indicates a misreading of what “profound” applies to. IMHO Deming meant his was a system of gaining deep ie profound knowledge about a process. He did not, IMHO, call his system profound or his philosophy profound.
linguae 4y ago
One of the things I’ve thought about for quite some time is whether there are any companies, particularly in the software industry, that follow Deming’s philosophy on performance evaluation. In his book Out of the Crisis, Deming recommends against the type of performance reviews that are commonplace in corporate America. This (https://deming.org/dr-deming-called-for-the-elimination-of-the-annual-performance-appraisal/ https://deming.org/dr-deming-called-for-the-elimination-of-t...) is a link summarizing his views.
- kqr 4y ago
  I used to work for one that followed 11 of the 14 points and had none of the seven diseases -- then it got merged with another company, management was replaced, and the joint venture follows... one out of the 14, and has the five most serious diseases. If you find another with double digit points, let me know!
  - em-bee 4y ago
    anyone looking for a summary of the points and diseases, they are laid out on his website: https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ https://deming.org/explore/seven-deadly-diseases/ https://deming.org/explore/seven-deadly-diseases/
- lincpa 4y ago
  [dead]
numbsafari 4y ago
If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. As awful as this sounds, it’s no different than operating a piece of machinery above its capacity, or without adequate maintenance, because doing so improves some short term measure. If you can absorb the cost of doing so, then you might happily burn through lots of machines and that might be acceptable. But people aren’t machines, and you will either find yourself having retention issues, hiring issues, or like Amazon, literally running out of people willing to work for you even as they literally kill their employees. The most important thing I take from my reading of Deming, is that there comes a point when you have to put the charts aside and deal with people. If you push people over and over and over, eventually they’re going to snap. Even if they don’t, can you live with yourself at the end of the day? You also have to consider more factors than just P&L. If you push sales people to the point they start breaking the law, or you push machinery and operators to the point of a massive oil spill, you could jeopardize the whole business, or worse. You need to know where the limits are, and that only comes from understanding the people, and the process, beyond just the charts. Classic map v territory stuff.
- Retric 4y ago
  Some companies must treat their employees well in order to maximize profits, and others are better off doing the opposite. It’s more a question of the overall market than ‘core values’ or other such BS. Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. Other employees aren’t nearly as lucky.
  - dataangel 4y ago
    Was going to say they're clearly not thinking about monopolies and oligopolies. Oil spills are the classic example, deepwater horizon didn't kill BP.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Monopolies compete with workers outside of their industry/location. People working on oil rigs take serious risks, but they also make a lot of money relative to their skill set because otherwise they couldn’t get anyone to do the job.
xyzzy123 4y ago
Fundamentally I do think "operational rigour" is separable from "being a nice place for humans to work". But I don't think any discussion on this kind of thing is complete without understanding the power relationships involved. In particular, who sets targets and what role do workers have in that process? It's not "operational rigour" that e.g forces drivers to piss in bottles on their routes. It's a power imbalance between the people who must meet targets and the people who set the targets.
- atoav 4y ago
  Exactly. I have worked on highly efficient work sites where everything and everybody was working like a well oiled machine with enough brakes so everybody could do their best job and short enough hours it could be done ad infinitum. And then I have seen places where unsuprising basic human necessities like "a person has to pee" or "someone is sick" endanger the whole operation. Sorry but either you want your process to be resilient and reliable OR you want a pile of burning garbage held together by duct tape that is constantly on the edge of collapse for the price of some miniscule savings that are gone when one such collapse happens.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  I think maybe you're misunderstanding Deming. Consider his claim about operational rigor in the context of these guiding principles: https://www.mindtools.com/azyjjsx/demings-14-point-philosophy https://www.mindtools.com/azyjjsx/demings-14-point-philosoph...
derbOac 4y ago
The problem — or one of the problems rather — is that these kinds of models assume the thing you're measuring is a static thing, and a property of, say, an individual, rather than something that's changeable, or that the thing to be measured is a potential, and the property of a system. So for example, there's a fundamental, basic assumption that if you rank people, you are establishing measurements of those persons, that they are objects with fixed properties. Another possibility, though, is that your rankings are measurements of your own perception, individually or collectively as some group, and to the extent they are not, they are reflective of the effects of the organizational system. The truth on average is probably somewhere in between, or more precisely, it probably varies from individual to individual and organization to organization. But the paradigm that is being described assumes that the evaluators are omniscient, unbiased entities measuring properties of some fixed, unchanging objects. There's still more issues about the power dynamic that enables this assumption. The problem is that everyone pretends as if it's the first case, when in fact it might very well be the second. Or rather, the problem is that we always pretend it's the first case, except in situations where we feel compelled to be honest about the situation due to friends being involved, or some leverage that's hanging over the situation, or something similar. The erroneous assumptions are held because they maintain the power dynamic — it's a model of how organizational elements are measured precisely because that model, however flawed, forms the basis for accrual of resources and control to those doing the evaluating. I guess I mention this because I think the premise of the piece is a little off. It's not just that "operationally rigorous companies are hellish places to work" because they're unfriendly, it's that their models of the world are wrong, and they're often not as operationally rigorous as they could be.
- regularfry 4y ago
  > these kinds of models assume the thing you're measuring is a static thing No > a property of, say, an individual Also no > there's a fundamental, basic assumption that if you rank people, you are establishing measurements of those persons Deming says that's bad > Another possibility, though, is that your rankings are measurements of your own perception That's built-in > But the paradigm that is being described assumes that the evaluators are omniscient, unbiased entities measuring properties of some fixed, unchanging objects Exactly not > their models of the world are wrong, and they're often not as operationally rigorous as they could be. Yes, they've misinterpreted what Deming was saying. Seems to be a common affliction.
88913527 4y ago
Operationally lax companies aren't a panacea either. Constantly answering 2AM pages because you can't reliably ship working software wears people down. Am I understanding what is meant by operational rigor correctly? Life is easier when you eat your vegetables than eating cake everyday. It's not exciting to practice rigor but it's better than the alternative. You can have processes and reasons for doing things a particular way, and still be nice to your colleagues -- these are not mutually exclusive concepts. I doubt the real reason these places mentioned aren't great places to work is primarily due to operations.
- dclowd9901 4y ago
  It’s almost like the best thing is somewhere in the middle. What a surprise.
  - regularfry 4y ago
    No, "somewhere in the middle" is the wrong lesson to take. They're on different axes. You can have an operationally rigorous, pleasant place to work. You can have an operationally terrible, awful place to work. You can have somewhere that's mediocre at both. The false belief in a dichotomy is exactly the problem.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Isn't the point of the article that 'operational rigour' implies a certain, significant, degree of unpleasantness?
      - regularfry 4y ago
        Not really. It's the point that one might take from the title alone, but the article doesn't substantiate it. > And from anecdotal evidence I also know that Western companies with sufficient operational rigour tend to be rather … unpleasant places to work. “Is that not the price of excellence?” a friend said, after I told him of this conundrum. “What, you expect such operational excellence to come for free?” > An obvious point in retrospect; It's not an obvious point at all, and the author doesn't try to back it up. The point the article makes is that: 1. Deming himself didn't hold the two in opposition; and 2. It's unclear from any evidence that they need to be, in practice.
Tcepsa 4y ago
Perhaps it is my ignorance about the data-driven aspects of Deming's work, but it does not seem particularly paradoxical to me that one might achieve success in business by monitoring and measuring the heck out of things and then reacting accordingly. The trick, I suspect, is in knowing what "reacting accordingly" truly looks like for a given set of numbers. In particular, it sounds like he tried to be highly mindful of what was actually human controlled vs. what was due to a system. Deming's red bead demonstration [0] is an excellent example of how managers conflate the two; in it, he has a group of employees who are required to rigorously follow a strict procedure that is statistically going to have a particular rate of defects, and then proceeds to judge the employees by the defects that occurred during their execution of the procedure. That's an example of how you can do a great job of capturing the numbers and still fail to react accordingly. If your employees are being operationally rigorous and your defect rate is unacceptably high, no amount of reward or punishment to your employees will improve your defect rate (at least, not without inducing them to corrupt their operational rigor, which is presumed to be a defect in its own right). Rather, it is your operations themselves--the system--that must be adjusted! It seems to me somewhat analogous to what we are seeing with Agile software development and the methodologies and metrics that have sprung up around it; the fundamental ideas seem sound, but their interpretation and implementation (the system put in place by which developers are expected to "do Agile") in many organizations has not managed to retain enough of the original spirit to convey the corresponding benefits. [0] https://deming.org/lessons-from-the-red-bead-experiment-with-dr-deming/ https://deming.org/lessons-from-the-red-bead-experiment-with...
- xarope 4y ago
  I think it comes down to Deming really being a master of his trade. It reminds me of Bruce Lee's quote: “Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”.
  - lincpa 4y ago
    [dead]
Animats 4y ago
This is a misunderstanding of Deming. It's about how to organize highly repetitive tasks, such as assembly line production, to get consistent quality. Some of it is about managing people, but most of it is about managing process variability. Read up on the Toyota production system [1] and statistical process control.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control
- reaperman 4y ago
  > most of it is about managing process variability. Yes, and this specific article acknowledged that and stated that this is a niche reflection "about [how Deming's] work goes far beyond the data tools and statistical methods of Statistical Process Control (SPC) he helped introduce to the practice of business — and in many cases, seem in direct opposition to those ideas." As in, this is the thesis statement of the article. Some notes in the article: > Editors Note: This is an investigative note, and only nominally part of the Becoming Data Driven in Business series. A fair warning — this essay is not intended to be as useful as prior essays in the series. The author also notes this article will be incongruent with the prior articles in the Deming series of articles. The "official" list of articles in the series don't even list this article: -3) You Aren't Learning if You Don't Close the Loops — An article about the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, sometimes called the ‘Shewhart cycle’ or ‘Deming cycle’. -2) Process Improvement is Trickier Than You Think — The organisational and political dynamics you’ll face when you attempt to due process improvement. -1) The Disaffected PhD Skunksworks: A Story About Process Improvement — What it's actually like to due process improvement when the organisational dynamics work against you. 1) Goodhart’s Law Isn’t As Useful As You Might Think — Goodhart’s Law says “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” It turns out that the field of Statistical Process Control have long developed methods for protecting against this effect. We look at those ideas, and then examine a particular instantiation of the approach in the context of the Amazon Weekly Business Review. 2) How to Become Data Driven — What does SPC have to say about becoming data driven? The central idea it uses is deceptively simple: in order to become data driven, SPC practitioners argue, you need to understand variation. We talk about why that is. 3) Operational Excellence is the Pursuit of Knowledge — Knowledge is defined as ‘theories or models that allow you to predict better’. It turns out that the mindset necessary for operational rigour stems from the pursuit of ‘knowledge’. The beginning of ‘knowledge’, in their view, is a deep understanding of variation. This piece covers the practical implications of this mindset. 4) There is No Truth in Business, Only ‘Knowledge’ — We look at some of the more philosophical implications of pursuing ‘knowledge’ over truth, particularly in business. As it turns out, assuming that there are no stable truths in business is a pretty good hack. (Idiosyncratic numbering intentional, negative numbers are the "pre-series" to the series. This article itself was published 20 days after the "final" article of the series."
gumby 4y ago
I think a focus on operational rigour also makes companies fragile. You need some flexibility in the system, and also some amount of "waste" (overprovisioning) to respond to circumstances (threats of opportunities) outside your control.
analog31 4y ago
My impression of Deming was that he was all for measuring and optimizing processes but not for using the same methods on people. From what I've read, operationally rigorous management of people originated on the cotton plantations.
rqtwteye 4y ago
My first job was at the world leader in chainsaws. They were operationally rigorous but also a great place to work. It’s actually very nice when things work as they should.
killjoywashere 4y ago
Japanese manufacturers are somewhat famous for driving workers, including engineers and managers to suicide. Conversely, Costco, clearly a data-driven org, focuses at least partly on employee happiness. Measure what matters.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  My understanding of In-N-Out Burger, a family business, is that they pay the employees adequately and they receive decent benefits. Morale and camaraderie is notably high, and the restaurants can afford to employ at least two dozen people who just crank that kitchen in high gear all day and night. That, along with tasty food, is why I always preferred to patronize them above other dismal fast-food offerings.
throwaway892238 4y ago
The more I read of Deming, the more I got the picture that Deming just wanted businesses to be run holistically. But - this is the critical part - the employees need to not be morons. They need to be smart enough to understand how the business works, how to do their jobs well, and how their jobs relate to other people's jobs, and whatever the business is producing or servicing. Everybody from the janitor to the CEO needs to not be a moron. And obviously that's hard, because most people are not super smart, and we get dumber in groups, and businesses are groups of people.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > But - this is the critical part - the employees need to not be morons. If that's the critical part, then why did Deming spend so much of his life trying to explain things in short, pithy ways to management? Hint: it's not just because they're the ones who'd pay for consultants.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  My understanding is that a big part of not having performance reviews etc is essentially that you're trying to get away from this problem. "Those efforts that focus on improving the attentiveness, carefulness, speed, etc., of individual workers — without changing the systems, processes, and methods — constitute a low-yield strategy with negligible short-term results" If your buisness can be severely impacted if one guy didnt get enough sleep/is dumb, it's not the guy's fault. Make a system so someone else checks the work, or provide him with better information with which to make a decision, or any number of other potential improvements which dont rely on a specific person
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  One of the grocery stores I go to recently added a low clearance warning bar to the entrance of their parking garage. Fine. The problem is, they added it so it hangs at the same level as the convex safety mirror that allows a driver heading in to see a driver heading out. So now the majority of the mirror cannot be seen or just reflects the warning bar. "What moron hung this at the same height", I thought. "I oughtta complain to that moron's boss". Because the manager is the one who's going to get the complaint, they need to be the one who is actively, clearly focused on the customer needs and the total quality of the product.
quickthrower2 4y ago
To make a bad place to work you need two things: 1. Lot's of processes, measurements and so on that are: 2. Based on flawed thinking. That is it! It is a common recipe. Make an OKR about something that doesn't make a good OKR, and you have 3 months of guaranteed misery as people figure out how they get what needs to be done, while keeping the number happy. Another example is implementing some process like "Agile" and then finding the stream of work you want to complete has to be paused for 4 days because "sprints", so you context switch to something else because "shift left".
- deelly 4y ago
  > Based on flawed thinking. Please define "flawed".
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    The flawed thinking, I can sum up as a worldview, something like this. "Unlike all other businesses in the world, we have solved the people management and measurement problem with our perfect system that organizes and scores your work, and the system is a mantra, to be repeated by all employees, and they must follow it, and we won't listen to anything to the contrary even from people highly experienced in their field"
    - deelly 4y ago
      So, in simple words, when business decided that he knows better then employees how employees should work, how measure employees work, and don't want to listen to any complains, and force this view to employees? To some degree you just defined absolutely any business on the planet. Upd: wtf with random downvotes, I`m feeling like I`m on a reddit.
kesor 4y ago
This is not a story of Japan, this is a story of Japanese "Deming" (Toyoya's) culture brought into a USA factory. And you can clearly see that upping the quality and operational rigor actually made the employees much happier and definitely not more miserable. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
kesor 4y ago
Tell me how you measure me, and I will show you how I will behave.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I would need compensation information as well.
chwa982 4y ago
[flagged]
- supriyo-biswas 4y ago
  Please stop spamming on every thread. Also, you can ask for advice through Ask HN threads.
regularfry 4y ago
I think the explanation is quite simple. The bits of Deming that is easy to boil down into a course you can systematise delivery of and charge through the nose for verification are exactly the bits that look most Taylorist. And when you're selling into a business environment where most management believes in Taylorism, that both makes it easy to sell and easy to buy into selectively. What you end up with is bias confirmation: the existing managers think they're buying a system that lets them do what they were already doing more effectively (because what they were doing didn't work very well), and there's enough group-think in the peer group that nobody notices their entire philosophy is being challenged.
red_admiral 4y ago
Since we're bringing up rating and grading, and I'm totally not slacking off when I'm supposed to be preparing a class - Teachers distinguish roughly between formative and summative assessment. Summative assessment is the kind of thing that goes on your transcript and measures your performance looking back ("Inspection is after the fact, after the parts are produced.") It does have value, but its value is not directly in improving the process or the student's learning. Formative assessment on the other hand, although it might use measurements or grades, doesn't feed these into metrics or transcripts, and definitely not into bonuses or penalties. Any numbers produced by a formative process are not outputs, but inputs to a conversation that ideally looks at more than just the numbers. That's what you want to improve the process that produces the parts (or the learning) in the first place. It sounds to me like some of the examples in the page, such as the student who was sent to remedial training after receiving two test scores below average in a row, are a kind of cargo-cult Deming process: you might have measurements and control charts but you're not actually using them the way they were intended. This is also, by the way, why I am extremely skeptical to say the least of any attempts to "use technology to make education more data-driven". It's not that the idea couldn't possibly work, but I have yet to see what I'd consider a good implementation.
_a_a_a_ 4y ago
I'm currently working for an operationally shit organisation (and it's not a small place all in all). The team I'm in get nothing written down, it's all verbal, when misunderstandings happen (which is often) days or weeks can be lost, we don't have the tools we need, we don't get any training which we are supposed to pick up magically people are working excessive hours without overtime pay, resignations are happening and mine will follow. If enough people resign the workload on the boss (who is the proximal cause of this, although clearly the rot goes much higher up) will probably cause him to resign. And then the organisation will have an IT system that nobody knows how to use and it will be catastrophic. This situation is horrible for us. People are crying out for documentation and process. I'll spend some time reading this article more carefully, try to work out whether sweet spot is.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  Documentation starts with you. When you experience the feeling "why wasn't this written down?", that is your signal to document it. Don't make it rigorous, rigorous documentation is mostly waste. One of the more useful forms of documentation, especially for the cost, is notes coming out of a meeting. Keep a bulleted list of topics discussed in every meeting, when there are disagreements (eg in technical approaches) record who argued each position. It can help to have the notes visible during the meeting to get people to clarify their points. Record what everyone says they will do as an outcome to the meeting. Send the notes out afterwards. Edit to add: double check when you're writing down a commitment from someone. "Josh, I've got you down to defrag the hard drives in staging, is that right?"
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    When you experience the feeling "why wasn't this written down?", that is your signal to document it. It would be the case, were there (even informal) processes for writing documentation. But since there is no documentation the process is that there isn't any experienced people have to humiliate themselves and ask the local gatekeeper about procedures that should have been written down a long time back. No documentation is the sign of a terminally messed up workplace. Run as fast as you can.
boredumb 4y ago
Yes! But! There is a sweet spot where providing some level of rigor is a way for people to autonomously move in the right direction without anyone having to micro-manage (which I feel is less nice to work), the key is allowing room for autonomy - and also remembering that everyone you work with/for/etc are people with entire lives going on outside of work.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> “What, you expect such operational excellence to come for free?” What I find amazing, is companies that have operational rigor, are unpleasant work environments, yet regularly produce awful products.
bena 4y ago
Rigor is good as long as it contains Slack. Slack should be built into the system, it should be part of the rigor. Because rigorous systems aren't brittle, they are resilient. And you only get resilience when you are able to adapt to the unexpected. If your plan only works if everything goes right, you don't have a plan, you have a wish.
rossdavidh 4y ago
So, I worked for about a decade in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, where we used SPC and mentioned Deming a lot. There were some not nice places to work, and they mostly were the ones that used Deming's ideas the least. The system that Deming was counseling companies to replace, was one where you measure results only at the end of the line, and punish/incentivize based on the end result, assuming that the problem is due to the workers, not the system. It doesn't mean that Deming's ideas are infallible, but that's what he was advocating against. If the author had an actual point about Deming's ideas, he never got to it in this essay anyway. It's reasonably well written, but I kept waiting for the part where he finishes his introduction and gets on to his point (to justify the title), and it never happened. I guess that's the "more soon" we are promised at the end?
- koomi 4y ago
  Yeah I had the same reaction. Interesting title but didn't really get there. Could be "Seeing like a State" applied to business.
vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago
[dead]
aranchelk 4y ago
The first thing that comes to mind regarding Deming’s philosophy and how it actually relates to quality of life working with software is the idea that when screw-ups happen, don’t blame the individual, investigate and improve the process. Companies I’ve worked for have all been somewhere on a blame-no-blame spectrum, all have required analysis of incidents, virtually none have been willing to prioritize process improvement when causes have been identified. FYI: I’m drawing from the section of The New Economics when Deming talks about the paper mill.
michael1999 4y ago
It seems that many firms have an extractive relationship with their employees, and adding a Deming loop to that makes them hellish. The US auto companies had a famously difficult time adopting the Toyota Way. Many cultures have this, but the current in the USA runs especially deep.

283 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

>(I exclude Eastern or specifically Japanese companies from the statement above because I don’t know enough about them to comment; Deming’s influence is largest in Japan. Perhaps they’re operationally rigorous, wonderful places to work? I don’t know enough to say, but I intend to find out.) Now that would be interesting - as far as I know, the Japanese government has issues keeping companies from being literally murderously exploitative. There's even a term for death by overwork in Japanese; karoshi. Of course, not having first-have knowledge, I don't know if that's an accurate view of the situation there.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gwern 4y ago
But does it have anything to do with Deming? Korea, for example, is as bad, and maybe worse given their alcohol culture; they just don't get any cutesy terms like 'karoshi'. Or consider this recent followup about a famous American bonsai master who learned in Japan, and learned such brutal lessons from his master that he's driven away all would-be American apprentices: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/the-beautiful-brutal-world-of-bonsai https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/the-beautiful-... Are we going to blame bonsai on Deming now?
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  I hope to someday create a world where people are valued for the love they can bring to those around them, and not beaten or psychologically abused (like this story or my upbringing) for failing to bring enough value to those in power. I'm not doing well enough to create safe living conditions for myself, let alone those I care about.
  - dxdm 4y ago
    Awareness is an important step. If you haven't found them already, maybe there are groups of people who are (or were) in similar situations that can lend some support. It's always better to not go the hard walks alone.
nine_k 4y ago
I'm not an expert, but as far as I understand, it's not that the management of Japanese corporations forces their employees explicitly, quashing their protests, in the style of labor vs capital struggle in Europe in 19th century. Instead it's more about peer pressure and self-representation. It's more like fashion among teenagers: they try their hardest to look cool, fashionable, and trendy, even though nobody (and not their parents or teachers in particular) enforce it. But they badly want to look cool, and feel bad if they don't, and their peers look down on them. The same way employees just don't leave before their boss leaves, not because their boss orders them to, but because they'd feel silly and rude if they did so, and their peers might sneer at them. Of course the management does use this to their benefit, and does cultivate these views, again, without outwardly forcing anyone's hand, or even being hypocrites. The management just behaves the same towards their own bosses.
- soared 4y ago
  This is true to some degree but it’s extended out beyond that. Many apartments for young workers have effectively non-existent kitchens, fridges, etc. It’s common to leave work “late”, eat on the way home, then wake up “early” and eat on the way to work. This is cultural but is a cause and affect of the work culture.
- psychoslave 4y ago
  >Instead it's more about peer pressure and self-representation. It's more like fashion among teenagers: they try their hardest to look cool, fashionable, and trendy, even though nobody (and not their parents or teachers in particular) enforce it. I’m not sure I understand you here. How can peer pressure be stated as "nobody enforce it"?
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Nobody formally enforces it, there's no written rule in the company. Bosses do not order their reports to show up before the official hours, or leave past them.

hprotagonist 4y ago

this is no paradox, it’s merely that if you, “in the words of Martin Buber, replace the ‘I, Thou’ relationship with the ‘I, It’ relationship, you relegate persons to the status of things”, and that’s alienation and it’s bad. “I don't know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible. But the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions.” Your rules and procedures have escape hatches and loopholes because the world is more complicated and person-ful than they are. Or you have rules that will be used as weapons.

wizzwizz4 4y ago
Who are you quoting? (Martin Buber, or someone quoting Martin Buber?)
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  martin luther king jr’s “letter from a burmingham jail” and later, jean-luc picard.
  - ezekiel68 4y ago
    Hmm, was it a speech-to-text error that insterted Buber's name in your comment? At any rate, know that it is possible to edit your comment to reflect the correct name and avoid the misunderatanding.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      It's not an error. The name is correct. For an explanation see [1], which reproduces the Martin Luther King quote this way: > “To use the words of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes and ‘I-it’ relationship for an ‘I-thou’ relationship, and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful.” https://iamthou.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/martin-bubers-influence-on-mlk-jr/ https://iamthou.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/martin-bubers-influ...

dotcoma 4y ago

Amazon, for example?

Mistletoe 4y ago
Amazon, is the example given in the first few paragraphs.
- dotcoma 4y ago
  I did not read the article, as I imagine you can imagine…
  - ezekiel68 4y ago
    I imagine we didn't need to imagine.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Amazon is the new Microsoft. Microsoft was once something that a manager at a consulting firm I worked with held up as exemplaries in software. Yes, the release-beta-to-the-market windows bluescreens etc. Amazon seems to be similarly deified by software management these days, but... why? Amazon the commercial website frankly sucks. The product information is bad (compare something like computer parts with something like NewEgg). The reviews are suspect, the search results gamed. AWS has so many warts and fake not-down even in the core of EC2 / S3 / etc, and itself a TERRIBLE console and not-great API, things that minimal investment should fix but never have. The fact is that software management is still management and they don't get software. They only respect management, which actually is "successful in market cap" not necessarily the impossible to measure actual good management.
  - DanielHB 4y ago
    they were there first, that is why they were successful To be fair they were there with e-commerce and cloud services so many years ahead the competition it is understandable to some extent why their products have so many warts. Competitors could see things that didn't work well in amazon products and improve where it was obvious They have a moat around their products, in retail they have the user-base and in AWS they have the developer-base (devs who know how to set up things in AWS). These things take a long time to erode away as competition increases no matter how good the competition product is

nborwankar 4y ago

“I continue to wonder at the kind of person who names their business philosophy ‘profound’.” This indicates a misreading of what “profound” applies to. IMHO Deming meant his was a system of gaining deep ie profound knowledge about a process. He did not, IMHO, call his system profound or his philosophy profound.

linguae 4y ago

One of the things I’ve thought about for quite some time is whether there are any companies, particularly in the software industry, that follow Deming’s philosophy on performance evaluation. In his book Out of the Crisis, Deming recommends against the type of performance reviews that are commonplace in corporate America. This (https://deming.org/dr-deming-called-for-the-elimination-of-the-annual-performance-appraisal/ https://deming.org/dr-deming-called-for-the-elimination-of-t...) is a link summarizing his views.

kqr 4y ago
I used to work for one that followed 11 of the 14 points and had none of the seven diseases -- then it got merged with another company, management was replaced, and the joint venture follows... one out of the 14, and has the five most serious diseases. If you find another with double digit points, let me know!
- em-bee 4y ago
  anyone looking for a summary of the points and diseases, they are laid out on his website: https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ https://deming.org/explore/seven-deadly-diseases/ https://deming.org/explore/seven-deadly-diseases/
lincpa 4y ago
[dead]

numbsafari 4y ago

If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. As awful as this sounds, it’s no different than operating a piece of machinery above its capacity, or without adequate maintenance, because doing so improves some short term measure. If you can absorb the cost of doing so, then you might happily burn through lots of machines and that might be acceptable. But people aren’t machines, and you will either find yourself having retention issues, hiring issues, or like Amazon, literally running out of people willing to work for you even as they literally kill their employees. The most important thing I take from my reading of Deming, is that there comes a point when you have to put the charts aside and deal with people. If you push people over and over and over, eventually they’re going to snap. Even if they don’t, can you live with yourself at the end of the day? You also have to consider more factors than just P&L. If you push sales people to the point they start breaking the law, or you push machinery and operators to the point of a massive oil spill, you could jeopardize the whole business, or worse. You need to know where the limits are, and that only comes from understanding the people, and the process, beyond just the charts. Classic map v territory stuff.

Retric 4y ago
Some companies must treat their employees well in order to maximize profits, and others are better off doing the opposite. It’s more a question of the overall market than ‘core values’ or other such BS. Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. Other employees aren’t nearly as lucky.
- dataangel 4y ago
  Was going to say they're clearly not thinking about monopolies and oligopolies. Oil spills are the classic example, deepwater horizon didn't kill BP.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Monopolies compete with workers outside of their industry/location. People working on oil rigs take serious risks, but they also make a lot of money relative to their skill set because otherwise they couldn’t get anyone to do the job.

xyzzy123 4y ago

Fundamentally I do think "operational rigour" is separable from "being a nice place for humans to work". But I don't think any discussion on this kind of thing is complete without understanding the power relationships involved. In particular, who sets targets and what role do workers have in that process? It's not "operational rigour" that e.g forces drivers to piss in bottles on their routes. It's a power imbalance between the people who must meet targets and the people who set the targets.

atoav 4y ago
Exactly. I have worked on highly efficient work sites where everything and everybody was working like a well oiled machine with enough brakes so everybody could do their best job and short enough hours it could be done ad infinitum. And then I have seen places where unsuprising basic human necessities like "a person has to pee" or "someone is sick" endanger the whole operation. Sorry but either you want your process to be resilient and reliable OR you want a pile of burning garbage held together by duct tape that is constantly on the edge of collapse for the price of some miniscule savings that are gone when one such collapse happens.
drewcoo 4y ago
I think maybe you're misunderstanding Deming. Consider his claim about operational rigor in the context of these guiding principles: https://www.mindtools.com/azyjjsx/demings-14-point-philosophy https://www.mindtools.com/azyjjsx/demings-14-point-philosoph...

derbOac 4y ago

The problem — or one of the problems rather — is that these kinds of models assume the thing you're measuring is a static thing, and a property of, say, an individual, rather than something that's changeable, or that the thing to be measured is a potential, and the property of a system. So for example, there's a fundamental, basic assumption that if you rank people, you are establishing measurements of those persons, that they are objects with fixed properties. Another possibility, though, is that your rankings are measurements of your own perception, individually or collectively as some group, and to the extent they are not, they are reflective of the effects of the organizational system. The truth on average is probably somewhere in between, or more precisely, it probably varies from individual to individual and organization to organization. But the paradigm that is being described assumes that the evaluators are omniscient, unbiased entities measuring properties of some fixed, unchanging objects. There's still more issues about the power dynamic that enables this assumption. The problem is that everyone pretends as if it's the first case, when in fact it might very well be the second. Or rather, the problem is that we always pretend it's the first case, except in situations where we feel compelled to be honest about the situation due to friends being involved, or some leverage that's hanging over the situation, or something similar. The erroneous assumptions are held because they maintain the power dynamic — it's a model of how organizational elements are measured precisely because that model, however flawed, forms the basis for accrual of resources and control to those doing the evaluating. I guess I mention this because I think the premise of the piece is a little off. It's not just that "operationally rigorous companies are hellish places to work" because they're unfriendly, it's that their models of the world are wrong, and they're often not as operationally rigorous as they could be.

regularfry 4y ago
> these kinds of models assume the thing you're measuring is a static thing No > a property of, say, an individual Also no > there's a fundamental, basic assumption that if you rank people, you are establishing measurements of those persons Deming says that's bad > Another possibility, though, is that your rankings are measurements of your own perception That's built-in > But the paradigm that is being described assumes that the evaluators are omniscient, unbiased entities measuring properties of some fixed, unchanging objects Exactly not > their models of the world are wrong, and they're often not as operationally rigorous as they could be. Yes, they've misinterpreted what Deming was saying. Seems to be a common affliction.

88913527 4y ago

Operationally lax companies aren't a panacea either. Constantly answering 2AM pages because you can't reliably ship working software wears people down. Am I understanding what is meant by operational rigor correctly? Life is easier when you eat your vegetables than eating cake everyday. It's not exciting to practice rigor but it's better than the alternative. You can have processes and reasons for doing things a particular way, and still be nice to your colleagues -- these are not mutually exclusive concepts. I doubt the real reason these places mentioned aren't great places to work is primarily due to operations.

dclowd9901 4y ago
It’s almost like the best thing is somewhere in the middle. What a surprise.
- regularfry 4y ago
  No, "somewhere in the middle" is the wrong lesson to take. They're on different axes. You can have an operationally rigorous, pleasant place to work. You can have an operationally terrible, awful place to work. You can have somewhere that's mediocre at both. The false belief in a dichotomy is exactly the problem.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Isn't the point of the article that 'operational rigour' implies a certain, significant, degree of unpleasantness?
    - regularfry 4y ago
      Not really. It's the point that one might take from the title alone, but the article doesn't substantiate it. > And from anecdotal evidence I also know that Western companies with sufficient operational rigour tend to be rather … unpleasant places to work. “Is that not the price of excellence?” a friend said, after I told him of this conundrum. “What, you expect such operational excellence to come for free?” > An obvious point in retrospect; It's not an obvious point at all, and the author doesn't try to back it up. The point the article makes is that: 1. Deming himself didn't hold the two in opposition; and 2. It's unclear from any evidence that they need to be, in practice.

Tcepsa 4y ago

Perhaps it is my ignorance about the data-driven aspects of Deming's work, but it does not seem particularly paradoxical to me that one might achieve success in business by monitoring and measuring the heck out of things and then reacting accordingly. The trick, I suspect, is in knowing what "reacting accordingly" truly looks like for a given set of numbers. In particular, it sounds like he tried to be highly mindful of what was actually human controlled vs. what was due to a system. Deming's red bead demonstration [0] is an excellent example of how managers conflate the two; in it, he has a group of employees who are required to rigorously follow a strict procedure that is statistically going to have a particular rate of defects, and then proceeds to judge the employees by the defects that occurred during their execution of the procedure. That's an example of how you can do a great job of capturing the numbers and still fail to react accordingly. If your employees are being operationally rigorous and your defect rate is unacceptably high, no amount of reward or punishment to your employees will improve your defect rate (at least, not without inducing them to corrupt their operational rigor, which is presumed to be a defect in its own right). Rather, it is your operations themselves--the system--that must be adjusted! It seems to me somewhat analogous to what we are seeing with Agile software development and the methodologies and metrics that have sprung up around it; the fundamental ideas seem sound, but their interpretation and implementation (the system put in place by which developers are expected to "do Agile") in many organizations has not managed to retain enough of the original spirit to convey the corresponding benefits. [0] https://deming.org/lessons-from-the-red-bead-experiment-with-dr-deming/ https://deming.org/lessons-from-the-red-bead-experiment-with...

xarope 4y ago
I think it comes down to Deming really being a master of his trade. It reminds me of Bruce Lee's quote: “Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”.
- lincpa 4y ago
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Animats 4y ago

This is a misunderstanding of Deming. It's about how to organize highly repetitive tasks, such as assembly line production, to get consistent quality. Some of it is about managing people, but most of it is about managing process variability. Read up on the Toyota production system [1] and statistical process control.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control

reaperman 4y ago
> most of it is about managing process variability. Yes, and this specific article acknowledged that and stated that this is a niche reflection "about [how Deming's] work goes far beyond the data tools and statistical methods of Statistical Process Control (SPC) he helped introduce to the practice of business — and in many cases, seem in direct opposition to those ideas." As in, this is the thesis statement of the article. Some notes in the article: > Editors Note: This is an investigative note, and only nominally part of the Becoming Data Driven in Business series. A fair warning — this essay is not intended to be as useful as prior essays in the series. The author also notes this article will be incongruent with the prior articles in the Deming series of articles. The "official" list of articles in the series don't even list this article: -3) You Aren't Learning if You Don't Close the Loops — An article about the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, sometimes called the ‘Shewhart cycle’ or ‘Deming cycle’. -2) Process Improvement is Trickier Than You Think — The organisational and political dynamics you’ll face when you attempt to due process improvement. -1) The Disaffected PhD Skunksworks: A Story About Process Improvement — What it's actually like to due process improvement when the organisational dynamics work against you. 1) Goodhart’s Law Isn’t As Useful As You Might Think — Goodhart’s Law says “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” It turns out that the field of Statistical Process Control have long developed methods for protecting against this effect. We look at those ideas, and then examine a particular instantiation of the approach in the context of the Amazon Weekly Business Review. 2) How to Become Data Driven — What does SPC have to say about becoming data driven? The central idea it uses is deceptively simple: in order to become data driven, SPC practitioners argue, you need to understand variation. We talk about why that is. 3) Operational Excellence is the Pursuit of Knowledge — Knowledge is defined as ‘theories or models that allow you to predict better’. It turns out that the mindset necessary for operational rigour stems from the pursuit of ‘knowledge’. The beginning of ‘knowledge’, in their view, is a deep understanding of variation. This piece covers the practical implications of this mindset. 4) There is No Truth in Business, Only ‘Knowledge’ — We look at some of the more philosophical implications of pursuing ‘knowledge’ over truth, particularly in business. As it turns out, assuming that there are no stable truths in business is a pretty good hack. (Idiosyncratic numbering intentional, negative numbers are the "pre-series" to the series. This article itself was published 20 days after the "final" article of the series."

gumby 4y ago

I think a focus on operational rigour also makes companies fragile. You need some flexibility in the system, and also some amount of "waste" (overprovisioning) to respond to circumstances (threats of opportunities) outside your control.

analog31 4y ago

My impression of Deming was that he was all for measuring and optimizing processes but not for using the same methods on people. From what I've read, operationally rigorous management of people originated on the cotton plantations.

rqtwteye 4y ago

My first job was at the world leader in chainsaws. They were operationally rigorous but also a great place to work. It’s actually very nice when things work as they should.

killjoywashere 4y ago

Japanese manufacturers are somewhat famous for driving workers, including engineers and managers to suicide. Conversely, Costco, clearly a data-driven org, focuses at least partly on employee happiness. Measure what matters.

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
My understanding of In-N-Out Burger, a family business, is that they pay the employees adequately and they receive decent benefits. Morale and camaraderie is notably high, and the restaurants can afford to employ at least two dozen people who just crank that kitchen in high gear all day and night. That, along with tasty food, is why I always preferred to patronize them above other dismal fast-food offerings.

throwaway892238 4y ago

The more I read of Deming, the more I got the picture that Deming just wanted businesses to be run holistically. But - this is the critical part - the employees need to not be morons. They need to be smart enough to understand how the business works, how to do their jobs well, and how their jobs relate to other people's jobs, and whatever the business is producing or servicing. Everybody from the janitor to the CEO needs to not be a moron. And obviously that's hard, because most people are not super smart, and we get dumber in groups, and businesses are groups of people.

drewcoo 4y ago
> But - this is the critical part - the employees need to not be morons. If that's the critical part, then why did Deming spend so much of his life trying to explain things in short, pithy ways to management? Hint: it's not just because they're the ones who'd pay for consultants.
RugnirViking 4y ago
My understanding is that a big part of not having performance reviews etc is essentially that you're trying to get away from this problem. "Those efforts that focus on improving the attentiveness, carefulness, speed, etc., of individual workers — without changing the systems, processes, and methods — constitute a low-yield strategy with negligible short-term results" If your buisness can be severely impacted if one guy didnt get enough sleep/is dumb, it's not the guy's fault. Make a system so someone else checks the work, or provide him with better information with which to make a decision, or any number of other potential improvements which dont rely on a specific person
kevinmchugh 4y ago
One of the grocery stores I go to recently added a low clearance warning bar to the entrance of their parking garage. Fine. The problem is, they added it so it hangs at the same level as the convex safety mirror that allows a driver heading in to see a driver heading out. So now the majority of the mirror cannot be seen or just reflects the warning bar. "What moron hung this at the same height", I thought. "I oughtta complain to that moron's boss". Because the manager is the one who's going to get the complaint, they need to be the one who is actively, clearly focused on the customer needs and the total quality of the product.

quickthrower2 4y ago

To make a bad place to work you need two things: 1. Lot's of processes, measurements and so on that are: 2. Based on flawed thinking. That is it! It is a common recipe. Make an OKR about something that doesn't make a good OKR, and you have 3 months of guaranteed misery as people figure out how they get what needs to be done, while keeping the number happy. Another example is implementing some process like "Agile" and then finding the stream of work you want to complete has to be paused for 4 days because "sprints", so you context switch to something else because "shift left".

deelly 4y ago
> Based on flawed thinking. Please define "flawed".
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The flawed thinking, I can sum up as a worldview, something like this. "Unlike all other businesses in the world, we have solved the people management and measurement problem with our perfect system that organizes and scores your work, and the system is a mantra, to be repeated by all employees, and they must follow it, and we won't listen to anything to the contrary even from people highly experienced in their field"
  - deelly 4y ago
    So, in simple words, when business decided that he knows better then employees how employees should work, how measure employees work, and don't want to listen to any complains, and force this view to employees? To some degree you just defined absolutely any business on the planet. Upd: wtf with random downvotes, I`m feeling like I`m on a reddit.

kesor 4y ago

This is not a story of Japan, this is a story of Japanese "Deming" (Toyoya's) culture brought into a USA factory. And you can clearly see that upping the quality and operational rigor actually made the employees much happier and definitely not more miserable. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

kesor 4y ago

Tell me how you measure me, and I will show you how I will behave.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
I would need compensation information as well.

chwa982 4y ago

[flagged]

supriyo-biswas 4y ago
Please stop spamming on every thread. Also, you can ask for advice through Ask HN threads.

regularfry 4y ago

I think the explanation is quite simple. The bits of Deming that is easy to boil down into a course you can systematise delivery of and charge through the nose for verification are exactly the bits that look most Taylorist. And when you're selling into a business environment where most management believes in Taylorism, that both makes it easy to sell and easy to buy into selectively. What you end up with is bias confirmation: the existing managers think they're buying a system that lets them do what they were already doing more effectively (because what they were doing didn't work very well), and there's enough group-think in the peer group that nobody notices their entire philosophy is being challenged.

red_admiral 4y ago

Since we're bringing up rating and grading, and I'm totally not slacking off when I'm supposed to be preparing a class - Teachers distinguish roughly between formative and summative assessment. Summative assessment is the kind of thing that goes on your transcript and measures your performance looking back ("Inspection is after the fact, after the parts are produced.") It does have value, but its value is not directly in improving the process or the student's learning. Formative assessment on the other hand, although it might use measurements or grades, doesn't feed these into metrics or transcripts, and definitely not into bonuses or penalties. Any numbers produced by a formative process are not outputs, but inputs to a conversation that ideally looks at more than just the numbers. That's what you want to improve the process that produces the parts (or the learning) in the first place. It sounds to me like some of the examples in the page, such as the student who was sent to remedial training after receiving two test scores below average in a row, are a kind of cargo-cult Deming process: you might have measurements and control charts but you're not actually using them the way they were intended. This is also, by the way, why I am extremely skeptical to say the least of any attempts to "use technology to make education more data-driven". It's not that the idea couldn't possibly work, but I have yet to see what I'd consider a good implementation.

_a_a_a_ 4y ago

I'm currently working for an operationally shit organisation (and it's not a small place all in all). The team I'm in get nothing written down, it's all verbal, when misunderstandings happen (which is often) days or weeks can be lost, we don't have the tools we need, we don't get any training which we are supposed to pick up magically people are working excessive hours without overtime pay, resignations are happening and mine will follow. If enough people resign the workload on the boss (who is the proximal cause of this, although clearly the rot goes much higher up) will probably cause him to resign. And then the organisation will have an IT system that nobody knows how to use and it will be catastrophic. This situation is horrible for us. People are crying out for documentation and process. I'll spend some time reading this article more carefully, try to work out whether sweet spot is.

kevinmchugh 4y ago
Documentation starts with you. When you experience the feeling "why wasn't this written down?", that is your signal to document it. Don't make it rigorous, rigorous documentation is mostly waste. One of the more useful forms of documentation, especially for the cost, is notes coming out of a meeting. Keep a bulleted list of topics discussed in every meeting, when there are disagreements (eg in technical approaches) record who argued each position. It can help to have the notes visible during the meeting to get people to clarify their points. Record what everyone says they will do as an outcome to the meeting. Send the notes out afterwards. Edit to add: double check when you're writing down a commitment from someone. "Josh, I've got you down to defrag the hard drives in staging, is that right?"
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  When you experience the feeling "why wasn't this written down?", that is your signal to document it. It would be the case, were there (even informal) processes for writing documentation. But since there is no documentation the process is that there isn't any experienced people have to humiliate themselves and ask the local gatekeeper about procedures that should have been written down a long time back. No documentation is the sign of a terminally messed up workplace. Run as fast as you can.

boredumb 4y ago

Yes! But! There is a sweet spot where providing some level of rigor is a way for people to autonomously move in the right direction without anyone having to micro-manage (which I feel is less nice to work), the key is allowing room for autonomy - and also remembering that everyone you work with/for/etc are people with entire lives going on outside of work.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> “What, you expect such operational excellence to come for free?” What I find amazing, is companies that have operational rigor, are unpleasant work environments, yet regularly produce awful products.

bena 4y ago

Rigor is good as long as it contains Slack. Slack should be built into the system, it should be part of the rigor. Because rigorous systems aren't brittle, they are resilient. And you only get resilience when you are able to adapt to the unexpected. If your plan only works if everything goes right, you don't have a plan, you have a wish.

rossdavidh 4y ago

So, I worked for about a decade in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, where we used SPC and mentioned Deming a lot. There were some not nice places to work, and they mostly were the ones that used Deming's ideas the least. The system that Deming was counseling companies to replace, was one where you measure results only at the end of the line, and punish/incentivize based on the end result, assuming that the problem is due to the workers, not the system. It doesn't mean that Deming's ideas are infallible, but that's what he was advocating against. If the author had an actual point about Deming's ideas, he never got to it in this essay anyway. It's reasonably well written, but I kept waiting for the part where he finishes his introduction and gets on to his point (to justify the title), and it never happened. I guess that's the "more soon" we are promised at the end?

koomi 4y ago
Yeah I had the same reaction. Interesting title but didn't really get there. Could be "Seeing like a State" applied to business.

vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago

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aranchelk 4y ago

The first thing that comes to mind regarding Deming’s philosophy and how it actually relates to quality of life working with software is the idea that when screw-ups happen, don’t blame the individual, investigate and improve the process. Companies I’ve worked for have all been somewhere on a blame-no-blame spectrum, all have required analysis of incidents, virtually none have been willing to prioritize process improvement when causes have been identified. FYI: I’m drawing from the section of The New Economics when Deming talks about the paper mill.

michael1999 4y ago

It seems that many firms have an extractive relationship with their employees, and adding a Deming loop to that makes them hellish. The US auto companies had a famously difficult time adopting the Toyota Way. Many cultures have this, but the current in the USA runs especially deep.