POINTS 7–14
~ 11 min reading + activities
Point 7. Institute leadership of people
Adopt and institute leadership aimed at helping people to do a better job. The responsibility of managers and supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. Improvement of quality will automatically improve productivity. Management must ensure that immediate action is taken on reports of inherited defects, maintenance requirements, poor tools, fuzzy operational definitions [operational definitions will be studied on Day 11], and other conditions detrimental to quality.
Rather than my attempting to contrive introductory comments in this case, it will be far more useful for you to turn to DemDim page 335 and read through the list of “Attributes of a Leader” which Dr Deming used in his four-day seminars around 1990. (Don’t focus your attention on the technology—simply Dr Deming’s own handwriting and a typewriter!—but on the wisdom.) That list provides many clear links with the Joiner Triangle.
There is considerably more on Day 12 concerning Deming’s specific guidance on leadership. However, you should find DemDim page 335 more than ample in the current context or, if you’re particularly interested in this topic, you might like to read the whole chapter (DemDim Chapter 25 pages 333–339).
Particularly with reference to All One Team, my friend Dave Kerr wrote to me as follows: “A point which always comes out very clearly to me is that, in order for a group of people to behave as a system, there has to be active leadership that focuses the group to align their behaviours around a commonly-understood purpose. In my experience within corporate land, this kind of leadership is largely missing—with just a few notable exceptions.”
(See Appendix page 24.)
Obsession With Quality
All One Team
Scientific Approach
Point 8. Drive out fear
Encourage effective two-way communication and other means to drive out fear throughout the organisation so that everybody may work effectively and more productively for the company.
The three-word heading to this Point is one that everybody who has heard or read it seems to easily remember. Perhaps that is because it is one of the bluntest expressions imaginable of how the Deming philosophy is diametrically opposite to what is going on in many organisations. Do you produce your best work when you are in a state of fear? If so, I feel genuinely sorry for you. You might produce your fastest work—but your best work?
Much of both management and government strategy seems based on driving fear in rather than out. Certainly, for many years, British governments have made excessive use of targets, league tables, threats, “weeding out bad teachers”, etc. Do these drive fear in or out? What is the effect?
In Point 12 we shall find Dr Deming talking of the value of “pride of workmanship” and indeed “joy in work” (recently seen in Attribute 3 on DemDim page 335). Presumably the only way that they could be compatible with fear is in the case of a confirmed masochist.
(See Appendix page 24.)
Obsession With Quality
All One Team
Scientific Approach
Point 9. Break down barriers
Break down barriers between departments and staff areas. People in different areas, such as Research, Design, Sales, Administration, and Production, must work in teams to tackle problems that may be encountered with products or service.
As a considerable change of source, here is a short extract from the soundtrack of a video made in 1984 for the UK Government’s Department of Trade and Industry in support of a National Quality Campaign. The video was called The Case of the Short-Sighted Boss. An electrical goods manufacturing company was not doing very well. In a dream, the Managing Director engaged Sherlock Holmes as a management consultant!
Holmes was speaking to the Sales Director, Peter Marks.
Marks: Just get the goods out of the factory gates—that’s what I always say.
Holmes: Do you indeed? (Beckoning Marks over to the window, and watching a large truck leaving the factory:) Come here. Is that what you mean?
M: Yes.
H: So what’s in this lorry coming in?
M: That one’s bringing back faulty goods that are under our guarantees.
H: And how much does that cost the company?
M: I don’t know. It’s not my Department.
(See Appendix page 25.)
Obsession With Quality
All One Team
Scientific Approach
Point 10. Eliminate exhortations
Eliminate the use of slogans, posters, and exhortations for the workforce, demanding Zero Defects and new levels of productivity without providing methods. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships; the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system, and thus lie beyond the power of the workforce.
This Point in particular needs reading beyond the first few words—including to the very end of the first sentence! Dr Deming was pretty scornful of mere “slogans” and “exhortations” as ways to improve quality. But, of course, not all “posters” are bad. E.g., on Out of the Crisis page 59 [pages 68–69] he writes:
“Posters that explain to everyone on the job what the management is doing month by month to (for example) purchase better quality of incoming materials from fewer suppliers, better maintenance, or to provide better training, or statistical aids and better supervision to improve quality and productivity, not by working harder but by working smarter, would be a totally different story: they would boost morale.”
A little later he says, with obvious regret: “I have not yet seen any such posters.”
If something so shallow as alluded to in this Point could have any positive effect, I can only conclude that the management environment must be pretty feeble. If something so feeble really could motivate, the organisation’s employees’ motivation must be at rock-bottom—and whose fault is that?
(See Appendix page 25.)
Obsession With Quality
All One Team
Scientific Approach
Point 11. Eliminate arbitrary numerical targets
Eliminate work standards that prescribe quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for people in management. Substitute aids and helpful leadership in order to achieve continual improvement of quality and productivity.
Here we have the topic that used to be regarded as probably the most controversial of all of the 14 Points (other than Point 12 if that is incorrectly regarded as being primarily about performance appraisal). Nowadays, repeated failures of the “target culture” have raised some awareness of the truth in what Deming was getting at so long ago. Yet managers and governments still love targets. They are easy to set, and then those who set them can sit back and wait for the results to arrive—as they will (or will appear to) if the threats and promises are sufficiently impressive. But at what cost?
An obvious trouble then is that it is the number which becomes the aim—as opposed to (a) quality being the aim and (b) the number (amongst many others) being an indicator of a possibly rather questionable aspect of “quality”. What is the consequence? Using some of Dr Deming’s own words: fudging figures, creative accounting, suboptimisation. Remember also from Point 8 (in my comments on Appendix page 24 relating to the Scientific Approach): “Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures”.
Resources are channelled into reaching that number, irrespective of the harm caused elsewhere. Methods of measuring or counting are changed. Definitions are changed. “Punctual” is revised from being 5 minutes late to being 10 minutes late (DemDim page 113). The definition of an “unemployed person” (or whatever term is used for those who contribute to the monthly figures) changes maybe three times a year (DemDim page 111). With crime figures, certain types of offences are surreptitiously dropped from the count (I refer ahead here to Day 6 pages 25–26).
(See Appendix page 26.)
Obsession With Quality
All One Team
Scientific Approach
Point 12. Permit pride of workmanship
Remove the barriers that rob hourly workers, and people in management, of their right to pride of workmanship. This implies, inter alia, abolition of the annual merit rating (appraisal of performance) and of Management by Objective. Again, the responsibility of managers, supervisors, foremen must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
This Point is unusual in that people have largely ignored its main focus and argued instead about a subsidiary (but nonetheless very important) aspect. The main focus is the value and mutual benefit of “pride of workmanship”. The subsidiary aspect (which Deming introduces as “inter alia”—“amongst other things”, indeed amongst many other things)—is performance appraisal. I believe it was at least partly due to this, i.e. lack of attention paid to the Point’s main issue, that in 1988 he began to talk of something very closely related but with those short and considerably more impactful words: “joy in work” (to be discussed on Day 8).
The matter of performance appraisal itself is the subject of the third of the Deadly Diseases, so I strongly suggest we leave that topic until then and instead concentrate here on the essential and main Point: pride of workmanship.
(See Appendix page 26.)
Obsession With Quality
All One Team
Scientific Approach
Point 13. Encourage education
Institute a vigorous programme of education, and encourage self-improvement for everyone. What an organisation needs is not just good people; it needs people that are improving with education. Advances in competitive position will have their roots in knowledge.
The well-known Japanese teacher, Kaoru Ishikawa, is often quoted (e.g. near the end of the Preface to his book: Introduction to Quality Control) in such words as “QC starts and ends with education”. (It should be noted that the Japanese interpretation of the term “Quality Control” (QC) is much broader than ours.) I would expand Ishikawa’s statement to something like: “QC is generated by education and generates yet more education”.
In the very useful Volume 21 of The Deming Library: “A Theory of a System for Managers and Educators”, Dr Deming asks:
“What do we mean by quality in education?”
Sharpening the point of his question, he enquires more specifically:
“Do we mean the ability to think, or to pass tests?”
On the same theme, in The Deming of America he states categorically:
“Our education is failing. We just don’t educate people, youngsters. We grade them, but don’t educate them, don’t teach them to think.”
Whereas training (Point 6) is specific, finite in scope, education’s domain is (or needs to be) unbounded, unlimited, infinite. One of Deming’s big complaints about familiar so-called education “systems” is that, because of their concentration on passing examinations which are usually more on the lines of regurgitation of information (memory, not thought) rather than understanding (knowledge), the result is destruction of creativity and innovation. In fact, are not our supposed “education” systems more truthfully training for the skill of passing examinations? Instead, Deming is virtually defining “education” as “teaching to think”.
Point 13 implies far more than might be noticed at first glance.
(See Appendix pages 26–27.)
Obsession With Quality
All One Team
Scientific Approach
Point 14. Top management commitment and action
Clearly define top management’s permanent commitment to ever-improving quality and productivity, and their obligation to implement all of these principles. Indeed, it is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to—i.e. what they must do. Create a structure in top management that will push every day on the preceding 13 Points, and take action in order to accomplish the transformation. Support is not enough: action is required.
“Top management commitment” has unfortunately become something of a cliché—you can hear it, almost robot-like, from just about all teachers of just about all approaches to what they call “quality”. But most other approaches do not really require people in management to change significantly, if at all: they just need to “support” whatever is going on. However, as you will have realised by now (and we saw it in Point 2), Dr Deming was talking about transformation of management—and he meant it! So what chance does his priceless teaching have of getting anywhere in an organisation without Point 14?
(See Appendix page 27.)