According to W.E. Deming:
With the storehouse of skills and knowledge contained in its millions of unemployed, and with the even more appalling underuse, misuse, and abuse of skills and knowledge in the army of employed people in all ranks in all industries, the United States may be today the most underdeveloped nation in the world. (Out of the Crisis, p. 6).
Deming published those words in 1982. I don’t think his observation is any less accurate today.
The “crisis” that Deming was trying to call us out of was a crisis of management. He did not advocate improvement in management. Decades of competitive complacency got us into our crisis and Deming understood that incrementalism could not deliver us. Deming called for a purposeful, radical transformation of management that he acknowledged would take decades.
Deming believed that part of the problem is how we measure the performance of management:
Failure of management to plan for the future and to forsee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine time, all of which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment. Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement or product and service for the future, not quarterly dividends. (p. ix).
Our current economic crisis shows that the transformation Deming called for is at best incomplete. We are still not very good at planning for the future and forseeing problems, and the root is still an overemphasis on short-term financial gain instead of long-term growth through excellence of product and service.
Drastic changes are required. The first step in the transformation is to learn how to change.. (p. x)
I don’t know about where you live, but my state is being devastated by our economic malaise. It is bad enough that we did not plan for the future and forsee our problems, but what is most alarming to me is that we are failing to learn how to change.
In this era of overwhelming and instantaneous information and knowledge, have we actually reached the end of our ability to learn how to change? Ironically, the explosion and availability of knowledge has in many ways increased rather than decreased the complexity and corresponding uncertainty of the challenges we face.
I personally believe that we are living in the age of the end of understanding.
Related Posts:
Positively Unable And Unwilling To Learn
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I had to come back to this post. This is one of a plethora of Deming-related posts I’ve seen since the Toyota story started running. This one, however, calls not for a return to Deming but instead calls us to complete his intended work. Great.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
February 15th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
That’s how I see it, David. We wanted instant pudding, and that never has worked. Thanks! Bret
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This post and your questions of your final paragraphs inspired my series on the ‘Age of the Black Box’ – http://brucelynnblog.wordpress.com/?s=black+box. Actually, ‘the ability to learn how to change’ is our only hope.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
March 15th, 2011 at 8:40 am
Thanks, Bruce. Concur that if we might be losing our ability to learn how to learn. Thanks! Bret
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