Category Archives: Deconstructing Deming

Deconstructing Deming III – Cease reliance on inspection

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3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.

W Edwards Deming Point 3 of Deming’s 14 Points. This at least cannot be controversial. For me it goes to the heart of Deming’s thinking.

The point is that every defective item produced (or defective service delivered) has taken cash from the pockets of customers or shareholders. They should be more angry. One day they will be. Inputs have been purchased with their cash, their resources have been deployed to transform the inputs and they will get nothing back in return. They will even face the costs of disposing of the scrap, especially if it is environmentally noxious.

That you have an efficient system for segregating non-conforming from conforming is unimpressive. That you spend even more of other people’s money reworking the product ought to be a matter of shame. Lean Six Sigma practitioners often talk of the hidden factory where the rework takes place. A factory hidden out of embarrassment. The costs remain whether you recognise them or not. Segregation is still more problematic in service industries.

The insight is not unique to Deming. This is a common theme in Lean, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints and other approaches to operational excellence. However, Deming elucidated the profound statistical truths that belie the superficial effectiveness of inspection.

Inspection is inefficient

When I used to work in the railway industry I was once asked to look at what percentage of signalling scheme designs needed to be rechecked to defend against the danger of a logical error creeping through. The problem requires a simple application of Bayes’ theorem. I was rather taken aback at the result. There were only two strategies that made sense: recheck everything or recheck nothing. I didn’t at that point realise that this is a standard statistical result in inspection theory. For a wide class of real world situations, where the objective is to segregate non-conforming from conforming, the only sensible sampling schemes are 100% or 0%.

Where the inspection technique is destructive, such as a weld strength test, there really is only one option.

Inspection is ineffective

All inspection methods are imperfect. There will be false-positives and false-negatives. You will spend some money scrapping product you could have sold for cash. Some defective product will escape onto the market. Can you think of any examples in your own experience? Further, some of the conforming product will be only marginally conforming. It won’t delight the customer.

So build quality into the product

… and the process for producing the product (or delivering the service). Deming was a champion of the engineering philosophy of Genechi Taguchi who put forward a three-stage approach for achieving, what he called, off-line quality control.

  1. System design – in developing a product (or process) concept think about how variation in inputs and environment will affect performance. Choose concepts that are robust against sources of variation that are difficult or costly to control.
  2. Parameter design – choose product dimensions and process settings that minimise the sensitivity of performance to variation.
  3. Tolerance design – work out the residual sources of variation to which performance remains sensitive. Develop control plans for measuring, managing and continually reducing such variation.

Is there now no need to measure?

Conventional inspection aimed at approving or condemning a completed batch of output. The only thing of interest was the product and whether it conformed. Action would be taken on the batch. Deming called the application of statistics to such problems an enumerative study.

But the thing managers really need to know about is future outcomes and how they will be influenced by present decisions. There is no way of sampling the future. So sampling of the past has to go beyond mere characterisation and quantification of the outcomes. You are stuck with those and will have to take the consequences one way or another. Sampling (of the past) has to aim principally at understanding the causes of those historic outcomes. Only that enables managers to take a view on whether those causes will persist in the future, in what way they might change and how they might be adjusted. This is what Deming called an analytic study.

Essential to the ability to project data into the future is the recognition of common and special causes of variation. Only when managers are confident in thinking and speaking in those terms will their organisations have a sound basis for action. Then it becomes apparent that the results of inspection represent the occult interaction of inherent variation with threshold effects. Inspection obscures the distinction between common and special causes. It seduces the unwary into misguided action that exacerbates quality problems and reputational damage. It obscures the sad truth that, as Terry Weight put it, a disappointment is not necessarily a surprise.

The programme

  1. Drive out sensitivity to variation at the design stage.
  2. Routinely measure the inputs whose variation threatens product performance.
  3. Measure product performance too. Your bounded rationality may have led you to get (2) wrong.
  4. No need to measure every unit. We are trying to understand the cause system not segregate items.
  5. Plot data on a process behaviour chart.
  6. Stabilise the system.
  7. Establish capability.
  8. Keep on measuring to maintain stability and improve capability.

Some people think they have absorbed Deming’s thinking, mastered it even. Yet the test is the extent to which they are able to analyse problems in terms of common and special causes of variation. Is that the language that their organisation uses to communicate exceptions and business performance, and to share analytics, plans, successes and failures?

There has always been some distaste for Deming’s thinking among those who consider it cold, statistically driven and paralysed by data. But the data are only a means to getting beyond the emotional reaction to those two impostors: triumph and disaster. The language of common and special causes is a profound tool for building engagement, fostering communication and sharing understanding. Above that, it is the only sound approach to business measurement.

Deconstructing Deming II – Adopt the new philosophy

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2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

W Edwards Deming Point 2 of Deming’s 14 Points. This is how Deming described the new philosophy in Out of the Crisis (1983).

We can no longer tolerate commonly accepted levels of mistakes, defects, material not suited for the job, people on the job that do not know what the job is and are afraid to ask, handling damage, antiquated methods of training on the job, inadequate and ineffective supervision, management not rooted in the company, job hopping in management, buses and trains late or even cancelled because a driver failed to show up. Filth and vandalism raise the cost of living and, as any psychologist can aver, lead to slovenly work and to dissatisfaction with life and with the workplace.

It’s sometimes easy to forget how materially shabby life was in the 1970s and early 1980s. Deming certainly summed up the way many people felt. Yet the 1980s and beyond brought a stream of high quality, low cost consumer goods. Just think of motor cars and cameras. It is easy to feel that the “new philosophy” is now entrenched. But there remain vast areas of unsatisfactory customer service. I recently had some exchanges with David Gaster about problems he was having with an HP computer. Anyone in the UK who has tried to get BT Sport working knows the meaning of frustration.

Kano modelAround a decade ago, W. Chan Kim promoted what he described as the Blue Ocean strategy. This turned out to be largely a repackaging of Noriaki Kano’s Attractive Quality Creation (AQC). Broadly, a business aspires to free itself of competitive pressures by developing novel products, value streams and market sectors. This represents an ambition to locate a business on the “exciter” curve of the Kano model. One of the lessons of the Kano model is that customers on the “exciter” curve are not so bothered about reliability. It’s just great to have the stuff. It is easy to see how, in 21st century tech industries surfing the blue ocean, service is not a priority. Product development reigns. Time to market may be critical.

File:Lemon.jpgThe Kano model equally makes it clear that the customer of a product or service on the “expected” curve is intolerant of quality lapses. Performance is taken for granted and defects represent sensible pain. They are remembered and shared among sympathetic peers. This is what Kim referred to as the red ocean where sellers compete in mature markets for share by driving down costs. Kim saw this as a world of inevitable diminishing returns where corporations face the perpetual threat of extinction through failing price competitiveness. Aspirations to improving quality are inhibited by managers’ fear that they operate in a market for lemons, where such improvements are not rewarded in price or volume advantage.

Steven Denning has criticised views like Kim’s, emphasising that customer value and quality are important even in the red ocean. Denning criticises corporations, as did Deming, for preferring to cut costs rather than invest in innovation. Where there is surplus workforce, layoff is almost always preferred over redeployment in novel value creating activities. Of course, that is what we would expect from Daniel Ellsberg’s theory of ambiguity aversion.

Ultimately, innovation may not be the red ocean corporation’s comparative advantage. It may well be best for everybody that skilled people are released from the red ocean corporation so that they can resource the blue ocean corporation. It requires superb management of intangible assets for a corporation even to attempt to redeploy its own resource from growing systematic productivity to new product launch. The red ocean is not a hopeless place to be. There is always opportunity for product differentiation. When I worked in the automotive constant velocity joint business in the early 1990s we were all compelled to recite every morning “There is no such thing as a commodity product”.

Yet the reality is that there are not only two colours of ocean. Once a product is launched into the blue ocean, as Kano predicted, it starts the steady drift down the spectrum towards the red. Quality and cost become increasingly important. To a great extent, competitiveness in the, say, green ocean will depend critically on decisions made in the ultra-violet of product development.

In the present day, many gains in quality have been made. The low hanging fruit have gone. Competitive advantage is still to be had in improving quality as a strategy for reducing costs while capturing customer prestige. There is no such thing as a commodity product. Even the infra-red ocean of commodities presents opportunities to the astute. Deming’s message that understanding of variation is central to embedding quality in design and redesign, and in incremental improvement of production, remains a potent means to capture market. An opportunity that remains to be exploited by most businesses.

The doubt then arises as to why the market has not forced indefinite quality improvement on mature products to the extent that Deming advocated and envisioned. Deming certainly believed that the market itself was not enough. He believed that change would come from some movement of national renewal in the US that would then spread globally. Unfortunately no such movement has reached a critical mass and I fear that it is unlikely in the future. We must look to conventional market economics.

One economic analysis would be that the fear of a market for lemons acts as a disincentive to seek quality. However, liberal economists such as William L Anderson have emphasised the extent to which lemon markets provide opportunities for entrepreneurs. Fear of a lemon market betrays a lack of confidence in branding, marketing and reputation management. There are always business opportunities for people who pick an established market and find an excellent way to supply it. Put your sticker on the lemon and work at building reputation. The automotive industry in the 1980s and 1990s is an example of how the market forces of global over-capacity drove quality improvement and cost reduction. Deming’s insights into understanding variation provide the means. All stragglers kick themselves that they failed to take up opportunities that were there for the taking but ultimately grabbed by others.

Future blogs

There are three further things that Deming referred to under this heading that I want to blog about at a later time:

  • Leadership;
  • Government regulation and competition law;
  • Cost of Poor Quality (CoPQ) v. Taguchi loss function.

Deconstructing Deming I – Constancy of Purpose

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File:W. Edwards Deming.gifMy 20 December 2013 post on W Edwards Deming attracted quite a lot of interest. The response inspired me to take a detailed look at his ideas 20 years on, starting with his 14 Points.

Deming’s 14 Points for Management are his best remembered takeaway. Deming put them forward as representative of the principles adopted by Japanese industry in its rise from 1950 to the prestigious position it held in manufacturing at the beginning of the 1980s.

Point 1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

In his 1983 elaboration of the point in Out of the Crisis, Deming explained what he meant. Managing a business was not only about exploiting existing products and processes to generate a stream of profits. It was also about re-inventing those products and processes, innovating and developing to retain and capture market. Deming was fearful that management focused too much on short term profits from existing products and services, and that an effort of leadership was needed to reorient attention and resource towards design and development. The “improvement” that Deming was referring to is that through design and redesign, not simply the incremental improvement of existing value streams. Critically, Deming saw design and redesign as a key business process that should itself be the target of incremental continual improvement. Design and re-design was not an ad hoc project initiated by some rare, once in a generation sea-change in the market or motivated by a startling idea from an employee. It was a routine and “constant” part of the business of a business.

Some of Deming’s latter day followers sometimes deprecate the radical redesign of processes in approaches such as Business Process Re-engineering, and instead promote the incremental improvement of existing processes by those who work in them. That is exactly the approach that Deming was warning against in Point 1.

It is worth recalling the economic and geographic climate within which Deming put forwards this principle. During the early 1980s, the US and Western Europe suffered a significant recession, their populations beset with the dual evils of unemployment and inflation. The economic insecurities were aggravated by social unrest in the West and the intensification of the Cold War.

In 1980 Robert Hayes and William Abernathy, academics at the Harvard Business School, attacked US management in their seminal paper Managing our Way to Economic Decline. They found that fewer and fewer executives were from engineering and operations backgrounds, but increasingly from law and finance. Such managers had little understanding, they said, of the mechanics of the businesses they ran or the markets in which they competed. That in turn led executives to tend to pursue short term profits from existing value streams. These were easy to measure and predict on the visible accounts. However, managers were allegedly ill placed to make informed decisions as to the new products or services that would determine future profits. The uncertainties of such decisions were unknown and unknowable other than to a discipline specialist. Franklin Fisher characterised matters in this way (1989, “Games economists play: a noncooperative view” Rand Journal of Economics 20, 113):

Bright young theorists tend to think of every problem in game theoretic terms, including problems that are easier to think of in other forms.

This all appeared in contrast to Japanese manufacturing industry and in particular Toyota. By 1980, Japanese manufactured goods had come increasingly to dominate global markets. Japanese success was perceived as the (Lawrence Freedman, 2013, Strategy: A History, p531):

… triumph of a focussed, patient, coherent, consensual culture, a reflection of dedicated operational efficiency, or else a combination of the two.

Certainly in my own automotive industry days, my employer had come to see its most successful products literally as commodities. They belatedly realised that, while they had been treating them as a mere income stream, admittedly spent largely on unsuccessful attempts to develop radical new products, Japanese competitors had been filing dozens of patents each year making incremental improvement to design and function, and threatening the company’s core revenues.

But did Deming choose the right target and, in any event, does the exhortation remain cogent? It feels in 2014 as though we all have much more appetite for innovation, invention and product design than we had in 1983. Blogs extol virtues of and strategies for entrepreneurship. Slogans proliferate such as “Fail early, fail fast, fail often”. It is not clear from this web activity whether innovation is being backed by capital. However, the very rate of technological change in society suggests that capital is backing novelty rather than simply engaging in the rent seeking that Hayes and Abernathy feared.

In 2007 Hayes reflected on his 1980 work. He felt that his views had become mainstream and uncontroversial, and been largely adopted in corporations. However, information and globalisation had created a new set of essentials to be addressed and to become part of the general competencies of a manager (“Managing Our Way… A Retrospective by Robert H. Hayes” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007, 138-149).

I remain unpersuaded that there has been such a broadening in the skill set of managers. The game theorists, data scientists and economists seem to remain in the ascendancy. Whatever change of mind in attitudes to design has taken place, it has happened against a background where CEOs still hop industries. There are other explanations for lack of innovation. Daniel Ellsberg’s principle of ambiguity aversion predicts that quantifiable risks that are apparent from visible accounts will tend to be preferred over ambiguous returns on future inventions, even by subject matter experts. Prevailing comparative advantages may point some corporations away from research. Further, capital flows were particularly difficult in the early 1980s recession. Liberalisation of markets and the rolling back of the state in the 1980s led to more efficient allocation of capital and coincided with a palpable increase in the volume, variety and quality of available consumer goods in the West. There is no guarantee against a failure of strategy. My automotive employer hadn’t missed the importance of new product development but they made a strategic mistake in allocating resources.

Further, psychologist Daniel Kahneman found evidence for a balancing undue optimism about future business, referring to “entrepreneurial delusions” and “competition neglect”, two aspects of What you see is all there is. (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011, Chapter 24).

In Notes from Toyota-Land: An American Engineer in Japan (2005), Robert Perrucci and Darius Mehri criticised Toyota’s approach to business. Ironically, Mehri contended that Toyota performed weakly in innovation and encouraged narrow professional skills. It turned out that Japanese management didn’t prevent a collapse in the economy lasting from 1991 to the present. Toyota itself went on to suffer serious reputational damage (Robert E. Cole “What Really Happened to Toyota?” MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2011)

So Deming and others were right to draw attention to Western under performance in product design. However, I suspect that the adoption of a more design led culture is largely due to macroeconomic forces rather than exhortations.

There is still much to learn, however, in balancing the opportunities apparent from visible accounts with the uncertainties of imagined future income streams.

I think there remains an important message, perhaps a Point 1 for the 21st Century.

There’s a problem bigger than the one you’re working on. Don’t ignore it!

It was 20 years ago today …

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W._Edwards_Deming[1]Today, 20 December 2013, marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of W Edwards Deming. Deming was a hugely influential figure in management science, in Japan during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, then internationally from the early 1980s until his death. His memory persists in a continuing debate about his thinking among a small and aging sector of the operational excellence community, and in a broader reputation as a “management guru”, one of the writers who from the 1980s onwards championed and popularised the causes of employee engagement and business growth through customer satisfaction.

Deming’s training had been in mathematics and physics but in his professional life he first developed into a statistician, largely because of the influence of Walter Shewhart, an early mentor. It was fundamental to Deming’s beliefs that an organisation could only be managed effectively with widespread business measurement and trenchant statistical criticism of data. In that way he anticipated writers of a later generation such as Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb.

Since Deming’s death the operational excellence landscape has become more densely populated. In particular, lean operations and Six Sigma have variously been seen as competitors for Deming’s approach, as successors, usurpers, as complementary, as development, or as tools or tool sets to be deployed within Deming’s business strategy. In many ways, the pragmatic development of lean and Six Sigma have exposed the discursive, anecdotal and sometimes gnomic way Deming liked to communicate. In his book Out of the Crisis: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position (1982) minor points are expanded over whole chapters while major ideas are finessed in a few words. Having elevated the importance of measurement and a proper system for responding to data he goes on to observe that the most important numbers are unknown and unknowable. I fear that this has often been an obstacle to managers finding the hard science in Deming.

For me, the core of Deming’s thinking remains this. There is only one game in town, the continual improvement of the alignment between the voice of the process and the voice of the customer. That improvement is achieved by the diligent use of process behaviour charts. Pursuit of that aim will collaterally reduce organisational costs.

Deming pursued the idea further. He asked what kind of organisation could most effectively exploit process behaviour charts. He sought philosophical justifications for successful heuristics. It is here that his writing became more difficult to accept for many people. In his last book, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, he trespassed on broader issues usually reserved to politics and social science, areas in which he was poorly qualified to contribute. The problem with Deming’s later work is that where it is new, it is not economics, and where it is economics, it is not new. It is this part of his writing that has tended to attract a few persistent followers. What is sad about Deming’s continued following is the lack of challenge. Every seminal thinker’s works are subject to repeated criticism, re-evaluation and development. Not simply development by accumulation but development by revision, deletion and synthesis. It is here that Deming’s memory is badly served. At the top of the page is a link to Deming’s Wikipedia entry. It is disturbing that everything is stated as though a settled and triumphant truth, a treatment that contrasts with the fact that his work is now largely ignored in mainstream management. Managers have found in lean and Six Sigma systems they could implement, even if only partially. In Deming they have not.

What Deming deserves, now that a generation, a global telecommunications system and a world wide web separate us from him, is a robust criticism and challenge of his work. The statistical thinking at the heart is profound. For me, the question of what sort of organisation is best placed to exploit that thinking remains open. Now is the time for the re-evaluation because I believe that out of it we can join in reaching new levels of operational excellence.