Five-minute Deming: "Common sense"

In many organizations, the phrase “use common sense” sounds perfectly reasonable. A mistake happens, a customer complains, or a process fails, and the instinctive response is to remind people to slow down and think.But this familiar management reflex can quietly prevent improvement. When leaders rely on “common sense” explanations, they often focus on the individual closest to the problem instead of the system that produced it.W. Edwards Deming warned that this habit does more than miss the cause—it can keep organizations trapped in the very patterns they are trying to fix.Why “common sense” fails in managementMost managers have experienced the moment when something goes wrong. A customer receives the wrong order, an appointment is missed, or a deadline slips by.The explanation appears obvious: someone made a mistake. Our instinct is to correct the person involved—remind them to be careful, encourage better judgment, or send a note to the team about paying closer attention.These responses feel practical because work is done by people. But Deming argued that most recurring problems do not originate with individual effort or attention.They are produced by the way work is designed—the methods, priorities, handoffs, and pressures that shape everyday decisions. When leaders overlook that reality, the same cycle repeats: correct the person, see temporary improvement, and then watch the problem return.A small service company illustrates how easily this pattern develops—and what changes when a leader begins looking at the system instead.A scheduling problem that kept returningMaria owns a home services company that schedules technicians for repairs and installations across her city.Over several months, customer complaints began to increase. Appointments were occasionally missed, technicians sometimes arrived without the right parts, and a few customers reported waiting all day for a visit that never appeared on the schedule.One afternoon a customer called after waiting five hours for a technician who never arrived. Maria reviewed the call recording and quickly discovered the problem: the job had been placed into the wrong time slot.It looked like a simple scheduling error.Later that day she spoke with her operations supervisor, David.“This one should have been obvious,” Maria said. “People just need to slow down and use some common sense when they’re entering these jobs.”David agreed the mistake appeared straightforward, and the team reminded dispatchers to double-check their entries. For a short time the complaints seemed to ease.But two weeks later another scheduling problem surfaced. Then another.While reviewing scheduling logs, David noticed something unusual. The same type of error appeared across different dispatchers and across different shifts. It did not look like one employee being careless.The team began examining the scheduling process itself. Service requests arrived through phone calls, website forms, and callbacks from technicians in the field.The information customers provided varied widely, and dispatchers often had to guess which technician should handle a job. At the same time they were expected to answer calls quickly while entering appointments into the system.During busy periods dispatchers were juggling two demands at once: respond to customers immediately and figure out incomplete job details. The errors appeared most often when call volume spiked and dispatchers rushed to keep up.Deming described this common management reaction in The New Economics: “Common sense [mistakenly] tells us to speak to the operator about it when a customer reports something wrong with a product or with a service. ‘We have spoken to the operator about it; it won’t happen again.’”Common sense [mistakenly] tells us to speak to the operator about it when a customer reports something wrong with a product or with a service. ‘We have spoken to the operator about it; it won’t happen again.’— W. Edwards DemingMaria realized her earlier response had followed exactly that pattern. She corrected the person closest to the problem while leaving the process unchanged.The team redesigned the scheduling system. They standardized intake questions so dispatchers received consistent information, clarified which technician handled each type of job, and adjusted call targets so dispatchers were not forced to rush scheduling decisions.Within weeks the number of scheduling problems began to fall—not because employees suddenly became more attentive, but because the system guiding their work had improved.As Deming wrote: “Action taken today may only produce more mistakes tomorrow. It may be important to work on the process that produced the fault, not on him that delivered it.”Action taken today may only produce more mistakes tomorrow. It may be important to work on the process that produced the fault, not on him that delivered it.— W. Edwards DemingWhy leaders blame people ...