Episodes

  • Five-minute Deming: "Common sense"

    Five-minute Deming: "Common sense"
    Mar 25 2026
    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 ...
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    7 mins
  • Five-minute Deming: Annual performance reviews

    Five-minute Deming: Annual performance reviews
    Mar 18 2026
    Most organizations rely on annual performance reviews to evaluate contribution, allocate rewards, and create accountability. The logic feels straightforward: measure results, rate people, and recognize the strongest performers. For decades, this ritual has been treated as a basic tool of management.But what if the very practice meant to improve performance quietly prevents real improvement from happening?W. Edwards Deming believed annual performance reviews were not merely ineffective. He argued they were one of the most damaging management practices in modern organizations because they direct leadership attention toward judging individuals instead of improving the system that produces results.To understand why, we have to rethink what actually creates performance in the first place.Why Deming challenged performance appraisalsLeaders want to understand how well their organizations are performing. That instinct is healthy; good leadership requires visibility into results and a clear understanding of where improvement is needed.Annual performance reviews promise a structured way to do this. They compress a year of work into scores, ratings, and rankings that guide compensation, promotion, and recognition.But Deming argued that this approach misunderstands how organizations actually produce results. He wrote: “Basically, what is wrong is that the performance appraisal or merit rating focuses on the end product, at the end of the stream, not on leadership to help people.”Basically, what is wrong is that the performance appraisal or merit rating focuses on the end product, at the end of the stream, not on leadership to help people.— W. Edwards DemingIn other words, reviews judge outcomes after the work is finished rather than improving the conditions that produce those outcomes in the first place. This difference—between judging results and improving the system that creates them—sits at the heart of Deming’s philosophy of management.To see how this dynamic unfolds in practice, consider the experience of a school district wrestling with teacher evaluations.A school district confronts the problemIn the Brookfield School District, evaluation season arrived every spring with predictable tension.Teachers prepared documentation of their work while principals conducted classroom observations. District administrators compared performance scores across schools, and those numbers shaped pay increases, promotions, and professional reputations.Marcus Lee, principal of Brookfield Middle School, had participated in the process for years, and each cycle followed the same pattern. Teachers worried about their scores, principals debated ratings, and district leaders reviewed charts comparing one school to another.Yet the classrooms themselves seemed to change very little.During a district leadership meeting, Marcus raised the concern with Superintendent Elena Ramirez.“We keep having the same conversations,” he explained. “We review the ratings, we talk about who did well and who didn’t. But the classrooms themselves aren’t improving much.”Ramirez understood the frustration, but she also saw the system as necessary.“The reviews help us identify our strongest teachers,” she said. “Without them, how do we know who is performing well?”Marcus paused before answering.“That’s the problem,” he replied. “We think the scores explain performance. But most of the time they reflect the conditions teachers are working in.”He pointed to several examples. Some teachers had consistent collaboration time with colleagues, while others rarely had time to work together. Some classrooms included far more complex student needs, and others had significantly more curriculum support.The more Marcus studied the situation, the more he saw a pattern emerging.As evaluation season approached, teachers became cautious. Collaboration slowed, and fewer people experimented with new lesson ideas because trying something new carried personal risk when results were judged individually.The system was doing exactly what it was designed to do: judge individuals.But something else was happening as well. Teachers began protecting their own standing rather than sharing openly, and leaders spent hours debating scores instead of studying the conditions shaping learning—curriculum support, scheduling, classroom composition, and collaboration time.Slowly, the conversation shifted away from improving teaching and toward explaining ratings.Deming warned about this dynamic decades ago: “Merit rating rewards people that do well in the system. It does not reward attempts to improve the system.”Merit rating rewards people that do well in the system.It does not reward attempts to improve the system.— W. Edwards DemingThat comment stayed with Ramirez after the meeting. If the ratings were not revealing true performance, what should leadership be studying instead?The answer emerged as district leaders began examining the system ...
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    8 mins
  • Five-minute Deming: Putting out fires

    Five-minute Deming: Putting out fires
    Mar 11 2026
    Many organizations run on urgency. Something breaks. A customer complains. A deadline slips. Leaders jump in to fix the problem. The system is restored, the crisis passes, and everyone moves on to the next issue. It feels productive. It feels responsible. Sometimes it even feels heroic.But constant firefighting can hide a deeper truth: restoring a system after a problem occurs is not the same as improving it. W. Edwards Deming warned that many organizations stay trapped in cycles of reaction because leaders confuse solving problems with improving the system that creates them.The trap of solving today’s problemsLeaders are trained to respond quickly when problems appear. A delivery runs late. A customer complains. A system breaks. Responsible managers step in, solve the issue, and get operations back on track. In the moment, this feels like effective leadership.But Deming argued that reacting to problems is often only temporary relief. When the same kinds of problems appear again and again, the issue is rarely a single mistake or a careless employee. More often, the system itself is producing the outcomes we see.This is one of the hardest ideas for managers to accept. When an organization is busy and customers need help, stepping back to study the system can feel like the wrong response. Yet without understanding how the system works, leaders may spend years solving the same problems over and over.A small service company illustrates how this cycle unfolds—and how a different way of thinking can finally break it.A business that lived in constant emergenciesCarlos owned a growing neighborhood HVAC service company. Business was strong. Phones rang throughout the day. Trucks were constantly on the road. From the outside, the company looked successful. Inside the office, however, each afternoon felt chaotic.Technicians called needing parts. Customers demanded urgent visits. Jobs ran longer than expected and the carefully planned schedule began to unravel. Dispatchers scrambled to rearrange appointments while Carlos jumped in to solve problems as quickly as they appeared.“Move that install to tomorrow,” he told the dispatcher one afternoon. “Send Mike over to Mrs. Jenkins. I’ll call the supplier and see if we can rush that part.”The day would stabilize. Customers were helped. Emergencies were handled. But the next day looked almost exactly the same. By midweek the technicians were exhausted, dispatchers were frustrated, and Carlos felt like he spent every day racing from one crisis to the next.Eventually he began to notice something important. The emergencies were not random. They followed patterns.Jobs were scheduled too tightly. Some technicians were handling complex repairs before they had enough experience. Parts needed for common repairs were not always available when technicians arrived at a job. None of these problems were unusual events. They were built into the way the system operated.Deming described this distinction clearly in Out of the Crisis: “Putting out fires is not improvement of the process. This only puts the process back to where it should have been in the first place.”Putting out fires is not improvement of the process. This only puts the process back to where it should have been in the first place.— W. Edwards DemingCarlos slowly realized something uncomfortable. His daily heroics were not improving the business. They were simply restoring the system to where it had been before the latest disruption.At the next team meeting he made an unexpected announcement.“We’re not fixing today’s schedule,” he told the group. “We’re studying how our schedule works.”The team began mapping a typical service day. They looked at travel times between neighborhoods. They tracked which types of jobs commonly ran long. They identified repairs that frequently required parts technicians did not carry.Gradually they began changing the system. Service appointments were spaced differently. New technicians received more structured training. Trucks were stocked with the parts most commonly needed for repairs.And over time something surprising happened. The emergencies began to fade. Carlos realized that his technicians had never been the problem.As Deming often reminded leaders: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”A bad system will beat a good person every time.— W. Edwards DemingOnce the system improved, the daily firefighting that once dominated the company began to disappear.Why leaders keep fighting the same firesMost managers recognize the exhaustion that comes from constant firefighting. Yet many organizations remain trapped in that pattern for years.Part of the reason is psychological. Solving problems feels productive. When a leader steps in and rescues a situation, the result is immediate and visible. Customers are satisfied. The crisis ends. The day is saved.System improvement is different. It requires stepping back. Studying patterns. Slowing down ...
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    7 mins
  • Five-minute Deming: "Me" vs. "We" thinking

    Five-minute Deming: "Me" vs. "We" thinking
    Mar 4 2026
    Most organizations assume the path to better performance is straightforward: Motivate individuals. Reward top performers. Rank employees. Offer incentives for beating targets. At first glance, the logic seems sound. If individuals push harder, the organization should perform better.But many leaders eventually discover an unintended consequence. Systems designed to reward individuals often create internal competition that quietly weakens the organization itself. People begin protecting their own results. Information flows more slowly. Cooperation becomes optional instead of natural.W. Edwards Deming warned leaders about this dynamic decades ago. He argued that organizations are not collections of independent performers—they are systems. As Deming explained, “A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system.”A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system.— W. Edwards DemingWhen leaders forget that truth, incentives can pull people apart instead of bringing them together. The shift from “Me” thinking to “We” thinking is often the difference between an organization that struggles internally and one that improves steadily over time.A retail store that learned the differenceKaren owned a small clothing boutique on a busy downtown street. Her store had loyal customers and a hardworking team of associates. Like many business owners, Karen believed motivation was the key to growth. To encourage stronger sales, she introduced commissions and a monthly leaderboard recognizing the store’s top sellers.At first, the results looked promising. Sales increased slightly. Associates competed enthusiastically. The leaderboard created excitement on the sales floor.But slowly, subtle problems began appearing. Customers sometimes waited longer for help even when several employees were nearby. Associates quietly argued about who greeted a shopper first. Employees hesitated to assist customers who were already speaking with another associate.One evening after closing, Karen sat down with her store manager, Miguel.“I thought commissions would motivate everyone,” Karen said. “But lately the store feels tense.”Miguel nodded. “I’ve noticed it too,” he replied. “Everyone’s watching their own numbers. If someone else starts helping a customer, the rest of the team just stays back.”Karen began reviewing the previous three months of store data. Sales had increased slightly. But other indicators were moving in the wrong direction. Returns were rising. Customers were buying fewer items per visit. A few online reviews mentioned inconsistent service.Karen leaned back in her chair. “Maybe we’ve built a system where everyone is competing inside the same store,” she said.Miguel shrugged. “That’s how retail usually works.”Karen paused for a moment. “Maybe that’s the problem.”The moment the system became visibleDeming warned leaders about systems that reward individual competition. “The merit rating nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, and nourishes rivalry and politics,” he wrote.The merit rating nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, and nourishes rivalry and politics.— W. Edwards DemingKaren suddenly saw her commission system differently. The leaderboard rewarded individual wins—even when those wins hurt the customer experience or the team. In other words, the system encouraged employees to think “Me” instead of “We”.Rather than reacting quickly, Karen decided to try a small experiment. First, she removed the leaderboard ranking associates against one another. Second, she replaced individual commissions with a shared store bonus tied to overall performance and customer satisfaction. Finally, she changed the question she asked during team meetings. Instead of asking who made the most sales, she began asking something different: “How well did we serve customers together?”Within weeks, Miguel noticed subtle changes across the store. Associates stepped in to help each other without hesitation. Customers were greeted faster. Product knowledge began flowing more freely between employees. The tension that had crept into the store started to fade.And the results followed. Average purchase size increased. Customer reviews improved. Repeat customers returned more often. Sales rose—not because individuals competed harder, but because the system itself worked better.Where managers often get misledWhen results decline, many of us instinctively focus on individuals. We assume people need more motivation, clearer goals, or stronger incentives.But Deming taught that most performance differences come from the system people work within. When we create systems that reward individual victories, people naturally begin protecting their ...
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    6 mins
  • Five-minute Deming: Innovation

    Five-minute Deming: Innovation
    Feb 25 2026
    Most leaders say they want more innovation. They ask for ideas, listen closely to customers, and push teams to ship faster. Yet the breakthroughs they’re hoping for rarely arrive. What shows up instead is a steady stream of incremental features—busy, responsive, and oddly unsatisfying.W. Edwards Deming challenged a deeply held assumption behind this pattern: that customers will tell you what to build next. He argued that this belief doesn’t make organizations more innovative. It quietly removes one of management’s most important responsibilities.When customer-driven becomes customer-designedBeing “customer‑driven” sounds unquestionably right. Leaders want to respect customers, respond quickly, and avoid building things nobody asked for. Over time, this mindset becomes embedded in roadmaps, prioritization rituals, and product reviews. Requests are collected, ranked, and delivered with discipline.Deming warned that something subtle is lost in this approach. Customers are experts in their own frustration, but they are not responsible for inventing your future. That work belongs to leadership—using theory, prediction, and learning.Innovation, in Deming’s view, is not a burst of inspiration or a lucky insight. It is management work. And like any other responsibility, it either gets designed and managed—or it slowly degrades into noise.A team that listened—and still missed itBrightwave Software sold workflow tools to mid‑sized operations teams. Internally, the company appeared to be doing everything right. Sprints were predictable. Support tickets were trending down. Feature requests were delivered faster than ever.Still, growth had started to flatten.Alex, the CEO, struggled to reconcile the dashboards with the results. Renewal rates were softening, but no one could explain why. The metrics were green. Customer satisfaction scores were stable. On paper, execution looked strong.“Everything looks healthy,” Alex said during one leadership meeting. “But renewals are flattening, and I can’t connect the dots.”Maria, the head of product, explained the team’s approach. Customer requests drove the roadmap. The most common asks were reviewed quarterly and prioritized carefully.“We’re doing exactly what customers ask for,” she said. “If something were wrong, we’d see it in the data.”That logic felt sound. It was also incomplete.As the leadership team talked, another possibility emerged. What if customers weren’t articulating their next problem because they couldn’t? What if the friction wasn’t tied to any single feature, but to how fragmented the overall experience had become as customers scaled?Instead of gathering more requests, the team articulated a theory. They believed customers were struggling with cognitive load—too many options, too many configuration paths, too much effort to keep work flowing smoothly.They designed a small experiment. One cohort of customers received a simplified, opinionated workflow that removed choices instead of adding them. The team predicted adoption would improve for new users and stall for experienced ones.The results surprised them. New users adopted the workflow quickly. More unexpectedly, experienced users did as well. Reducing choice reduced friction and freed up attention.The breakthrough didn’t come from asking customers what to build. It came from leadership taking responsibility for learning.Deming put it bluntly: “Does the customer invent new product or service? The customer generates nothing.” His point was not to dismiss customers, but to prevent leaders from outsourcing their job.Does the customer invent new product or service?The customer generates nothing.— W. Edwards DemingWhere good intentions quietly derail innovationMost organizations do not struggle with innovation because they ignore customers. They struggle because they confuse listening with leading.When roadmaps are treated as collections of requests, innovation becomes reactive by default. Teams ship faster, but learning slows down. Output increases while insight declines. Over time, the organization becomes very good at responding to yesterday’s problems.We often reinforce this pattern unintentionally. Requests, votes, benchmarks, and competitor features feel objective. They feel safe. They give leaders something concrete to point to when decisions are questioned.Deming put it plainly: “Experience without theory teaches nothing.” Without a clear prediction about how the system will behave, organizations accumulate activity rather than knowledge—and motion gets mistaken for progress.The result is frustration. Teams feel busy but ineffective. Leaders ask for more innovation while maintaining systems that quietly prevent it.Experience without theory teaches nothing.— W. Edwards DemingActionable TakeawaysThere is a more disciplined path forward, and it begins by reclaiming innovation as management work.* Separate customer input from ...
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    7 mins
  • Five-minute Deming: Copying competitors

    Five-minute Deming: Copying competitors
    Feb 18 2026
    When pressure rises, leaders look sideways. A competitor simplifies an offer, tightens pricing, or adopts a new tool—and suddenly it feels irresponsible not to follow. After all, they’ve already tested it. The market seems to respond. What’s the harm in borrowing what works?W. Edwards Deming warned that this instinct is more dangerous than it looks. Copying competitors feels like learning, but it isn’t. It replaces understanding with imitation—and over time, it quietly erodes the capabilities that create lasting advantage.Looking sideways feels sensibleCompetitive awareness is often praised as strategic discipline. Leaders are taught to benchmark, compare, and react. When growth slows or margins tighten, this behavior intensifies. Decisions increasingly begin with familiar questions: What are they offering? How are they pricing? What tools are they using?Deming didn’t argue that leaders should ignore the outside world. He argued something more subtle—and more demanding: examples without theory don’t teach improvement. When you copy a result without understanding the system that produced it, you’re not learning. You’re guessing.The temptation to guess is strongest when results are hard to observe directly. Success is shaped by hidden conditions: workflow design, skills, decision rights, feedback loops, and constraints. Those don’t appear in a competitor’s marketing or pricing sheet. What does appear are surface features—offers, promises, and positioning—and those are the easiest things to imitate.A familiar storyAlex ran a mid-sized professional services firm with smart people, loyal clients, and a solid reputation. For years, growth had been steady. Then sales began to slow. Deals dragged. Clients hesitated.At the same time, a competitor started winning work with a clean, packaged offering. Fixed scope. Fixed price. Confident messaging. Prospects mentioned it repeatedly.“Everyone keeps bringing them up,” Alex said in a leadership meeting. “Clients say, ‘They make it simpler.’ We’re losing deals we used to win.”The pressure to respond was immediate.“They’re just repackaging what everyone else does,” Morgan replied. “We could roll this out in a month.”“If clients want simple, let’s give them simple,” Alex agreed. “Same structure. Same price points. We can’t afford to look complicated.”The firm moved fast—new packages, new website copy, new proposal templates. From the outside, they looked competitive again.Inside, things unraveled.“Delivery’s struggling,” Morgan said a few weeks later. “The teams keep escalating scope questions. The package assumes things we don’t actually control.”“But that’s how they sell it,” Alex replied, gesturing toward the competitor’s brochure on the table.“Yes—but we don’t know how they deliver it.”Deming warned about this exact trap: copying the visible example while ignoring the invisible system. The firm had copied the promise, not the capability. The packaging assumed standardized work, predictable inputs, and stable handoffs—none of which the firm had invested in.Projects began running over. Staff felt squeezed between rigid promises and messy reality. Clients noticed the growing gap between what was sold and what actually showed up.“We fixed the sales problem,” Alex finally admitted, “and created a delivery problem.”That pause mattered. Instead of doubling down—tightening enforcement, blaming teams, or discounting harder—Alex asked a different question: What theory are we operating under? What did they believe actually created value for clients? And what system was required to deliver that value reliably?The firm began studying its own work. Where projects slowed. Where rework came from. Which clients benefited most, and why. They ran small tests before changing external promises—clarifying scope boundaries, simplifying internal handoffs, and making client responsibilities explicit.“The competitor’s package wasn’t wrong,” Morgan observed. “It just wasn’t ours.”Over time, the firm rebuilt its offering around outcomes it could actually deliver. Sales stabilized—not because the firm looked like everyone else, but because its promises finally matched its system.Where leaders go wrongMost leaders don’t copy competitors out of laziness. They do it out of urgency. Comparison feels like action. It provides cover. If everyone is moving in the same direction, the risk feels shared and defensible.The trouble is that copying shifts attention away from the system that produces results. It encourages leaders to manage appearances instead of capability. Organizations become skilled at changing what they say—new offers, new pricing, new tools—while leaving how work actually gets done largely untouched.Deming captured this dynamic with a sharp observation: “What would some people do without their competitors?” When competitors become the primary reference ...
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    8 mins
  • Five-minute Deming: Blaming the worker

    Five-minute Deming: Blaming the worker
    Feb 11 2026
    When leaders hear that most problems belong to the system, it can sound like an accusation—or worse, an invitation to lower standards. So nobody’s lazy? Nobody incompetent? That reaction is understandable. It’s also costly. The real question isn’t whether individuals ever contribute to problems. It’s whether leaders are aiming their time and energy at the place where improvement actually lives. Today we’ll explore why blaming workers feels decisive, why it so often misses the mark, and how a clearer way of thinking leads to better results.Why blaming the worker feels obviousW. Edwards Deming never asked leaders to take anything on faith. He asked them to study evidence. Yet his ideas are frequently dismissed as naïve because they seem to collide with lived experience. Leaders have seen missed deadlines, chronic rework, and visible disengagement. They’ve had hard conversations. They’ve replaced people—and sometimes things really did improve.So when Deming says that most problems belong to the system, it can sound like an absolutist claim that denies reality. It isn’t. What Deming challenged was a habit of mind: explaining outcomes by pointing at people instead of understanding the conditions that shape their work. When the same problems repeat across teams and across individuals, he argued, we are not observing human failure. We are observing a system doing exactly what it was built—and allowed—to do.To see how this misunderstanding plays out, consider a familiar manufacturing setting.Reconsidering where problems come fromMidwest Components manufactures precision parts for heavy equipment. Late orders have become routine. Scrap rates swing from week to week. Supervisors are worn down by constant firefighting.At the center of it are two leaders. Jack, the plant manager, came up through operations. He prides himself on knowing the floor and holding people accountable. Maria, the operations director, was brought in to stabilize performance and reduce chronic volatility.Jack is blunt about his frustration. “Look,” he says, “I don’t buy this idea that it’s all the system. I’ve been here twenty years. I know when someone just doesn’t care.”Maria doesn’t dispute that people matter. “I’m not saying people don’t matter,” she says. “I’m asking a different question. If we swap operators between lines and the problems stay with the line, what are we really seeing?”They review six months of data together. Late orders spike predictably at month end when schedules compress. Scrap jumps whenever a specific alloy lot is introduced. Training records show three operators rushed onto a new machine with minimal setup instruction.Jack pushes back. “So what,” he asks, “nobody’s accountable?”Maria draws a distinction. Accountability isn’t the same as blame. The patterns they’re seeing don’t belong to one person. They belong to how work is planned, supplied, and taught.This is the pivot Deming insisted on. In Out of the Crisis, he wrote, “The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or in service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to management.”That statement isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a diagnostic one.The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or in service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to management.— W. Edwards DemingMaria reframes the discussion in plain language. “First,” she says, “are things running the way they usually do? If they are, blaming the worker for random ups and downs doesn’t fix anything. Second, if something truly unusual happened—something you don’t normally see—then we treat it as a special cause and deal with it directly.”They chart downtime and defects. Most of what they see sits inside predictable limits. One incident stands out clearly: a machine was deliberately bypassed after a safety interlock failed.Jack agrees immediately. “That one’s on the person,” he says.Maria agrees too. “Yes,” she says. “And because it’s clearly unusual, we can handle it firmly and directly—without pretending it explains everything else that’s been happening.”Deming was explicit about this balance. “I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system (responsibility of management) 6% special.”That six percent matters. It includes negligence, misconduct, and genuine inability. But treating ninety-four percent as if it were six is expensive.I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up ...
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    8 mins
  • Five-minute Deming: Pay vs. performance

    Five-minute Deming: Pay vs. performance
    Feb 4 2026
    Most leaders believe pay is the lever that keeps people accountable. Tie raises to individual performance, and people will work harder. Untie them, and standards will slip. That belief feels especially strong in operations where timing matters—where a late start cascades into lost output, overtime, and frustration. But what if the very tools meant to enforce accountability are quietly making the system worse?W. Edwards Deming spent much of his career challenging a deeply held management assumption: that individual performance can be measured, ranked, and rewarded in a way that reliably improves results. His critique was not philosophical. It was grounded in how real work actually happens.Deming was blunt about the damage caused by this assumption. He wrote that “evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review” is a management disease—one that builds fear and undermines cooperation instead of improving results.A deadly disease: evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review— W. Edwards DemingIn most organizations, especially those that operate in shifts, results are produced by systems—by schedules, handoffs, training, equipment readiness, and staffing decisions. When leaders focus compensation on judging individuals instead of improving systems, fear replaces learning, and supervisors become referees instead of leaders.This tension is often dismissed as a white‑collar concern. But the opposite is true. The more tightly coupled the work, the less individual performance explains outcomes—and the more management decisions shape results.That reality plays out clearly at Sunrise Acres, a large egg farm running multiple barns across three shifts.When measurement isn’t enoughSunrise Acres depends on precision. Every shift change affects feeding schedules, sanitation routines, and downstream quality. When crews start late, the consequences ripple through the day.Miguel, the operations manager, is exhausted by the problem. “We track everything,” he says. “Names. Minutes late. Warnings. We even tie raises to attendance—and it still doesn’t stick.”Late starts keep happening.Sarah, the farm’s general manager, doesn’t argue with him. “What if the problem isn’t the people?” she asks. “What if it’s the way the day starts?”Together, they walk the process from parking lot to first task. The issues surface quickly. The time clock is deep inside the barn. Protective equipment is stored in multiple locations. New hires aren’t clear on relief coverage. Buses arrive with built‑in variability. And supervisors are stretched thin at shift change.No one would blame a single hen for a flock problem. Seeing the system end to end makes it clear that punctuality has been treated like a character trait, even though the system makes being on time unnecessarily hard.They make practical changes: moving the clock closer to the entrance, pre‑staging PPE kits, adding a short overlap for handoffs, and using visual start‑time cues. A bilingual lead helps direct arrivals. Attendance improves almost immediately.One employee, Rosa, is still late. Instead of issuing another warning, Miguel follows Sarah’s lead and starts a conversation. Rosa explains that her childcare opens at the same time her shift begins. A small schedule adjustment and cross‑training resolve the issue completely.What becomes clear is that most lateness was common‑cause—built into the system. A few cases required individual action, but only after the system barriers were removed.When raises come due, Miguel hesitates. “So… no merit scores?”Sarah is explicit. Base pay is set by role and market. Raises come through skill blocks—what people are trained and qualified to do. Any shared upside is tied to farm‑level performance. Attendance expectations remain firm, and willful noncompliance is addressed directly. What they abandon is the fiction that a yearly rating caused punctuality.Deming warned that “evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review” builds fear and rivalry while demolishing teamwork. He also cautioned that it is “unfair, as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be caused totally by the system that they work in.” At Sunrise Acres, supervisors stop keeping secret tallies and start removing barriers in the work. Training accelerates. Turnover slows. Late starts drop—and so do the hidden costs that came with them.[Performance-based pay] is unfair, as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be caused totally by the system that they work in.— W. Edwards DemingWhere managers go wrongMost leaders don’t rely on merit pay because they enjoy ranking people. They do it because it feels like control—especially when schedules slip or output falters.Deming warned that this instinct leads managers to confuse numbers with knowledge. When results vary, rating people feels decisive, even when the variation comes from the ...
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    9 mins