What This Course Covers
~ 3 min reading
12 Days to Deming is a free, interactive course on Dr W. Edwards Deming’s management philosophy, adapted for the web from Henry Neave’s original active-learning course. It’s built around doing rather than just reading: activities and reflections are woven through the material as you go, rather than saved for the end, and two substantial projects give you a chance to put what you’ve learned into practice before the course is over.
Who this course is for
- Managers and leaders looking to improve organisational performance through Deming’s approach to systems and leadership.
- Quality professionals who want a thorough grounding in Deming’s philosophy, not just the tools that are often associated with it.
- Students studying management, operations, or quality improvement.
- Anyone curious about systems thinking and continuous improvement, whether or not “quality” is part of your job title.
- Self-learners and study groups of two to twelve people — the course is designed to work either way; see Self-study or group-learning for Neave’s own guidance on running it with others.
No prior knowledge of Deming’s work is assumed anywhere in the course.
Course structure
The course is organised into 12 “days” of learning, each designed as a full day’s study — six to eight hours, though you can split a day however suits you:
- Day 1 — The Overture: an introduction to Deming, why his teaching still matters, and how the course works.
- Days 2–3 — Foundation concepts: the Red Beads Experiment, control charts, and understanding variation through the Funnel Experiment.
- Days 4–5 — The First Project: the Joiner Triangle and Deming’s 14 Points, put into practice.
- Days 6–9 — Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge, explored through true stories, obstacles to improvement, and its four interrelated parts.
- Days 10–11 — The Second Project: the climax of the course, applying the System of Profound Knowledge in depth.
- Day 12 — Bringing it all together, and making it happen back in your own organisation.
Each day combines reading with embedded activities and interactive exercises, plus — where Neave’s original source material provides it — his own timing guidance for how long to spend on each section.
Key topics covered
- The System of Profound Knowledge — Deming’s four interrelated areas of knowledge.
- Variation — understanding and managing variation in processes, via the Red Beads and Funnel experiments.
- Theory of knowledge — how we learn, predict, and improve.
- Psychology — understanding human behaviour and motivation in organisations.
- Quality management — moving beyond inspection to prevention.
- Leadership — management’s role in transformation.
For the story of why and how this web edition was built, see About this Edition.