Épisodes

  • 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.”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 DemingThat statement isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a diagnostic one.Maria 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 min
  • 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 min
  • Five-minute Deming: Awards & public recognition

    Five-minute Deming: Awards & public recognition
    Jan 28 2026
    Public recognition is one of the most familiar tools leaders use to motivate people. It feels generous. It feels human. It feels like an easy way to say, “This matters here.”But recognition is never just a moment of appreciation. It is a signal that lingers. Over time, it teaches people what the organization truly values, what kind of work is safest to pursue, and what quietly carries risk.In interdependent work—where outcomes are shaped by systems, not individuals—that lesson compounds. Recognition keeps teaching long after the applause fades.Recognition is a system choiceMost leaders don’t design awards because they enjoy competition. They do it to build energy, reinforce values, and show that effort is noticed. Public recognition feels like a low-cost, low-risk way to encourage performance.What often goes unexamined is how recognition behaves inside a system. When awards are scarce and visible, they begin to function like ranking—even when leaders explicitly reject that intent. People adapt quickly. They gravitate toward work that gets attention. They protect credit. They deprioritize work that is essential but less visible, such as mentoring, prevention, and improving methods.W. Edwards Deming urged leaders to look past intentions and examine effects. His concern was not appreciation itself, but the habit of confusing outcomes with merit in environments where outcomes are shaped largely by the system. When leaders reward results without studying the conditions that produced them, they unintentionally teach people to manage visibility instead of improving the work.To see how this dynamic unfolds—and how it can be redirected—consider what happened inside one professional services firm.When recognition becomes rankingBrightline Advisory is a mid-sized professional services firm whose work depends on collaboration, shared methods, and careful coordination across teams. After a demanding year marked by heavy workload and rising attrition, leadership introduced a monthly public recognition program called Bright Star. Each month, one individual would be publicly celebrated for strong performance.At first, the program landed exactly as intended. People appreciated the acknowledgment. Leaders felt they were reinforcing the right behaviors. Over time, however, the meaning of the recognition began to change—not because anyone altered the rules, but because the system itself was teaching a lesson. Sarah, who led one of the delivery groups, noticed the shift before it showed up in reports or metrics. She brought her concerns to Tom, a managing partner.“At first people seemed energized,” she said. “But after a while, something shifted—and not in a good way.”She wasn’t describing morale problems. She was describing how work was unfolding. Knowledge sharing slowed. Junior consultants hesitated to ask for help. Conversations about who would present results grew tense. Work that attracted attention felt safer than work that prevented future problems.Tom kept returning to intent. “We weren’t trying to rank anyone,” he said. “We just wanted to acknowledge great work.”“I know,” Sarah replied. “That’s what makes this tricky. It lifted up a few—and it changed what everyone else feels they have to do to be seen.”Nothing in Bright Star instructed people to compete. But recognition was scarce and highly visible. In an interdependent system, that combination quietly invites comparison. People adjust their behavior to the signal, not the slogan.Deming warned leaders about this pattern. “Abolish ranking and the merit system,” he wrote. In its place, he urged leaders to “manage the whole company as a system.” What follows from ranking is not better performance, but predictable distortion.Abolish ranking and the merit system.Manage the whole company as a system.— W. Edwards DemingAs months passed, leaders began to see what Sarah had been describing. Certain projects drew disproportionate attention. Riskier work was avoided. Helping another team felt like a tradeoff against personal visibility.The conversation changed when leadership stopped debating whether Bright Star was motivating and asked a different question: What is this recognition teaching people to do? That question slowed things down. Instead of choosing winners more carefully, leaders began studying variation—project mix, timing, staffing, and handoffs. They began to see that Bright Star rewarded outcomes without improving the system that produced those outcomes.Only then did the solution emerge. The monthly award was retired. In its place, teams began sharing what they were learning: improvements to methods, prevention practices, and collaboration. Recognition shifted away from status and toward understanding how good work was produced.Over time, the effects became visible. Knowledge moved more freely. Cooperation increased. Results stabilized—not through competition or heroics, but through better ...
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    8 min
  • Five-minute Deming: The Deming chain reaction

    Five-minute Deming: The Deming chain reaction
    Jan 21 2026
    Most leaders feel pressure in the same places. Costs creep up. Capacity feels tight. Customers wait longer than they should. Staff are busy, sometimes exhausted, and still the results don’t seem to move. The natural response is familiar. Push productivity. Raise targets. Add oversight. Ask people to move faster. It feels responsible. It looks like leadership.And yet, very often, it quietly makes things worse.W. Edwards Deming offered a different way to think about improvement—one that runs counter to that instinct. In Out of the Crisis, he described what he called the chain reaction: a cause‑and‑effect sequence that begins not with cost or productivity, but with quality. Deming was clear that this was not a motivational idea. It was an explanation of how systems actually improve.If you improve quality, Deming said, “The result is a chain reaction—lower costs, better competitive position, happier people on the job, jobs, and more jobs.” Each outcome depends on the one before it. Miss the starting point, and the rest of the chain never really takes hold.The result [of improving quality] is a chain reaction—lower costs, better competitive position, happier people on the job, jobs, and more jobs.— W. Edwards DemingThe logic behind the chainAt first glance, Deming’s chain reaction looks almost too simple: improve quality, and good things follow. But Deming was not offering encouragement or aspiration. He was offering a way of thinking that depends on sequence. The chain reaction works only when its links unfold in the right order.It starts with quality. When quality improves, costs come down—not because someone demanded savings, but because waste leaves the system. Deming described the mechanism plainly: “Improvement of quality transfers waste of man‑hours and of machine‑time into the manufacture of good product and better service.” In practice, this shows up as less rework, fewer mistakes, and fewer delays and snags. Time that was once spent fixing problems is freed to do useful work.Improvement of quality transfers waste of man‑hours and of machine‑time into the manufacture of good product and better service.— W. Edwards DemingAs that waste leaves, capacity returns. Only then does productivity improve—not because people are working harder, but because the system is able to work as intended. Over time, better quality and lower total cost translate into better value. Trust strengthens. Performance stabilizes. The organization can stay viable—or, in mission‑driven settings, continue to serve. Jobs become easier to protect, and growth becomes possible.The meaning of qualityIn many organizations, the word quality is narrowed to outputs, results, or compliance measures. Deming’s meaning was broader and explicitly managerial. He tied quality to meeting the needs of the customer, present and future, and placed responsibility squarely with leadership. Quality, in Deming’s sense, is not about effort. It is about how the work itself is designed.Operationally, quality shows up as reliability. The work arrives ready. Prerequisites are clear and present. Information is complete. Handoffs do not require rescue. The process is capable of producing a good result without looping back on itself. When those conditions are not met, the system creates rework—and that rework is where cost and capacity quietly disappear.Watching the chain reaction at workRiverview Health System’s specialty clinic had an eight-week wait for new appointments. Pressure was mounting. Access needed to improve, but headcount was frozen. Maria, the clinic operations director, saw the same pattern week after week. The clinic was full. The staff were busy. And the backlog wasn’t moving.“Everyone is working flat out,” she said during a Monday review. “But the waiting list isn’t changing.”Instead of asking people to work harder, Maria asked a different question: where is the system creating rework? She and the medical director agreed to look more closely.“Let’s stop guessing,” he said. “Let’s count how often work comes back.”For two days, the team tracked repeat work. They categorized callbacks, delays, and corrections tied to referral defects, missing prerequisites, authorization issues, unclear orders, and documentation rework. When they reviewed the results, the answer was unmistakable.“Nearly a third of our calls aren’t new demand,” Maria said quietly. “They’re cleanup.”That made the starting point clear. Quality had to be addressed at the entry point. They focused on new rheumatology referrals. The core problem wasn’t clinical judgment. It was incomplete information. Intake staff chased labs. Nurses re-triaged. Visits ran late because prerequisites were missing.“If we fixed this upstream,” the medical director observed, “the whole day would change.”The team redesigned the referral process. Required fields were clarified. Prerequisites were explicit. If ...
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    8 min
  • Five-minute Deming: Drive out fear

    Five-minute Deming: Drive out fear
    Jan 14 2026
    Fear is expensive.It doesn’t appear on financial statements, but it shows up everywhere else—late reporting, hidden problems, padded numbers, quiet compliance, and people doing just enough to stay out of trouble. W. Edwards Deming captured the effect in a single line: “Fear invites wrong figures.” When fear is present, organizations don’t see reality clearly, because reality feels unsafe to report.Many leaders treat fear as a cultural or interpersonal issue. Deming did not. In Out of the Crisis, he was explicit: “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.” He described fear as a management problem—created, reinforced, and sustained by the way the system is designed. Until fear is addressed at the system level, improvement efforts may stall, no matter how capable or well‑intentioned the people involved may be.Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.— W. Edwards DemingFear is rational—and systemicPeople don’t hide problems because they lack integrity. They hide problems because the system has taught them what happens when they speak up. Fear is rational. When the cost of surfacing a problem is higher than the cost of hiding it, people adapt. They delay. They soften the message. They adjust the numbers. Over time, the organization becomes exactly as honest as the system allows it to be.This is why Deming warned that many of the most important figures managers need are unknown or unknowable. When fear governs behavior, the data itself becomes unreliable—not because people are dishonest, but because honesty feels dangerous.A familiar patternConsider an organization running behind schedule. Elena, a frontline operator, notices a subtle change in how a process is behaving. Nothing dramatic. Output is still within spec. But something feels off. Stopping the process might turn out to be unnecessary—and attract criticism. Letting it run might result in scrap or rework later. Either way, the risk feels personal.“If I stop it and nothing’s wrong, I’ll get blamed,” she thinks. “If I don’t stop it and it fails, I’ll get blamed worse.” So the process keeps running.Hours later, failure occurs. Scrap spikes. Downtime stretches longer than it would have if the issue had been addressed earlier. Later, James, a senior leader, asks why no one spoke up sooner.“Why didn’t we hear about this earlier?” he asks. The answer is predictable: people have been burned before.This isn’t a failure of motivation or training. It’s a predictable outcome of the system: people do what keeps them safe. Deming warned that fear suppresses information long before it shows up as failure, because people learn to survive within the system they are given.What changes when fear is removedNow imagine a different response.James changes the way he responds when problems surface. Instead of asking who made the wrong call, James asks what signals were present and how the system made responding risky.“Where did the first signal show up,” James asks, “and what did we make risky about acting on it?” They make it explicit, then demonstrate through their actions, that surfacing problems early will not be punished.The next time a similar signal appears, the process stops sooner. The issue is confirmed. Downtime is brief. Loss is limited. Nothing changed about the equipment. Nothing changed about the people. What changed was the risk calculation in their heads.When the system punished early signals, those signals disappeared. When the system protected early signals, learning sped up. As Deming cautioned, without trust, people cannot work together to improve the system, no matter how skilled they are.Fear as a competitive issueThis is where fear stops being a cultural concern and becomes a strategic one. Organizations that surface problems early learn faster than organizations that hide them. Over time, speed of learning—not size, not technology, not even experience—becomes the real competitive advantage.Teams that operate without fear adapt faster, recover sooner, and avoid repeating the same mistakes. That advantage compounds quietly but relentlessly, because competitors can copy tools and processes, but they struggle to copy systems that consistently tell the truth.Here’s how you can eliminate fearDriving out fear does not require grand programs or slogans. It requires consistent management behavior, especially in moments when problems surface.* Establish a non‑punitive escalation rule.Make it explicit that surfacing a problem early will never be punished. Write it down. Repeat it often. Most importantly, enforce it through your reactions when bad news appears.* Change the first question leaders ask.Replace “Who did this?” with “What in the system made this likely?” The first sentence out of a leader’s mouth teaches everyone what is safe.* Use a simple learning review after problems occur.After any defect, delay, or ...
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    7 min
  • Five-minute Deming: The danger of sub-optimization

    Five-minute Deming: The danger of sub-optimization
    Jan 7 2026
    Every organization—whether a small consultancy or a global enterprise—is a web of interdependent parts. Yet most are managed as if each department, team, or individual were a separate machine to be tuned in isolation. Targets are set, bonuses awarded, and dashboards celebrated—all without asking how those local victories affect the system as a whole. W. Edwards Deming warned that this “sub-optimization” is one of management’s most costly blind spots: the parts can perform beautifully while the enterprise itself underperforms. To see what this looks like in practice—and how to escape it—consider the story of a professional services firm that learned the hard way that optimizing individual parts can quietly destroy the whole.When every team wins—and the company losesAt a growing professional services firm—busy, modern, and full of smart people—something didn’t add up. Each department was celebrating its own success. Operations had reduced delivery time by 25 percent, and the sales team had exceeded its revenue targets. On paper, things looked great. Yet, customers were increasingly dissatisfied. Complaints about rushed projects, inconsistent service, and miscommunication were rising. Internally, tension brewed between departments.The operations manager, Marcus, pointed to his metrics. “We’ve hit every efficiency target,” he said. The client services lead, Lila, countered that customer satisfaction was slipping. The sales director, Tom, defended his team: “Our job is to bring in business. Maybe operations needs to adjust.” Each spoke with conviction, each confident they were doing their job well.But as Deming explained, the performance of any part or person in an organization can only be understood in terms of its contribution to the system’s overall aim. In other words, when departments pursue their own metrics without understanding how their work affects the rest of the organization, they may be “winning” locally while the company loses as a whole.Deming warned that “Left to themselves, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centers, and thus destroy the system.” He defined a system as “a network of interdependent components that work together to accomplish the aim of the system.” Each part of an organization—sales, operations, finance, customer support—relies on the others. Success requires harmony, not competition.Left to themselves, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centers, and thus destroy the system.— W. Edwards DemingSeeing the process to improve itAt the firm, the realization came slowly. The leadership team began to map how work actually flowed from one department to another. Sales commitments became project delivery constraints. Delivery schedules shaped customer satisfaction. Customer feedback influenced sales renewals. For the first time, everyone could see that their work didn’t exist in isolation. Deming once noted, “If people do not see the process, they cannot improve it.”If people do not see the process, they cannot improve it. — W. Edwards DemingOnce the team visualized their interdependencies, conversations shifted from blame to curiosity. They began asking, “What is the aim of our entire system?” rather than “How can my team hit its number?” Together, they agreed that the true aim was not merely to increase short-term output or revenue, but to deliver reliable, high-quality service that built long-term relationships.Transforming through cooperationWith this shared aim, they adjusted their incentives and measures. Sales began setting expectations based on delivery capacity, not just closing speed. Operations shifted from rushing projects to focusing on consistency and quality. Client services joined early in the process to anticipate customer needs before issues arose.Six months later, the firm’s revenue per client had grown by nearly twenty percent, but the deeper transformation was cultural. Complaints dropped sharply. Referrals increased. Employees reported less frustration and more pride in their work. As Marcus put it, “We didn’t work harder—we just stopped working against each other.”Managing the system, not the peopleDeming famously said, “A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.” Systems do not improve through pressure or exhortation, but through understanding and design. When leaders focus only on optimizing subsystems—each department, team, or metric—they unintentionally sub-optimize the whole. True improvement requires managing interdependence, not independence.The lesson is timeless and universal: when a business, school, or agency learns to see itself as one system with a shared aim, performance improves naturally. The parts no longer compete; they collaborate. And the result is not just better numbers, but greater stability, learning, and joy in work.Actionable Takeaways* Draw the system. Create a simple flow diagram showing how...
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    5 min
  • Five-minute Deming: Why improve if everything's great?

    Five-minute Deming: Why improve if everything's great?
    Jan 1 2026
    On paper, the year looked exceptional. Demand was strong. The numbers were up and to the right. Everyone was happy. Inside the organization, the mood was confident, even relaxed. From the outside, it looked like success.That is exactly the moment W. Edwards Deming warned leaders about.He once observed, “It is easy to manage a business in an expanding market, and easy to suppose that economic conditions can only grow better and better.” His point was not that success is a problem, but that success can quietly disguise weakness.It is easy to manage a business in an expanding market, and easy to suppose that economic conditions can only grow better and better.— W. Edwards DemingA very good yearTo see what Deming meant, consider a nonprofit serving families through food assistance and job‑readiness programs. It had been a banner year. A new corporate partnership boosted funding. A positive media story brought in volunteers. Enrollment climbed. The board was pleased. Staff morale was high.At a routine leadership meeting, the updates sounded exactly like you would expect in a good year.Marcus, who oversaw operations, went first. “We’re serving more families than ever,” he said. “The handoffs are smoother, the wait is shorter, and volunteers are showing up.”Elena, the executive director, added the development update. “Donors are leaning in,” she said. “We’re ahead of plan, and the support feels steady—for now.”All of it was true. And yet Elena felt a quiet tension she couldn’t shake. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t urgency. It was a question that didn’t quite fit the celebratory tone of the room: Are we improving… or are we just busy?Deming would have recognized that moment instantly. When conditions are favorable, results can improve even if the underlying system stays weak. A strong economy, a generous donor cycle, or a surge of goodwill can lift outcomes without strengthening capability at all.The tailwind trapStrong results tell leaders what has happened. They do not explain why it happened, or whether it will happen again. In an expanding environment, ordinary management can look exceptional. Leaders can easily mistake momentum for capability and luck for skill. The danger is not celebrating success—it is assuming success proves the system is sound.Deming warned that decline rarely announces itself. It arrives like dusk, so gradually that people don’t notice it happening. One day the numbers soften. Then variation increases. Then firefighting becomes normal. By the time leaders recognize the pattern, the room to maneuver has largely disappeared.Elena sensed that risk, even though nothing appeared broken. Instead of asking for bigger goals or tighter targets, she asked a different kind of question. “If things got tighter next year,” she said, “if funding dipped or demand spiked, what would we wish we’d strengthened while we still had room to breathe?”The room went quiet—not because the question was threatening, but because it was unfamiliar. Marcus answered first. “Cross-training,” he said after a pause. “Right now, a few people are holding too many threads.”That one sentence revealed more about the system than any dashboard had. When performance depends heavily on a handful of individuals, results can look excellent right up until someone gets sick, leaves, or burns out. At that point, the organization discovers it has not built a system; it has built a reliance.Elena heard it clearly. This wasn’t a staffing issue. It was a design issue.From outcomes to capabilityDeming taught that an organization doing well is in the best position—and has the greatest obligation—to improve. When survival pressure is low, leaders have something rare: the capacity to learn.In a crisis, organizations default to urgency. Controls tighten. Pressure increases. Short‑term output becomes the priority. Sometimes that response is unavoidable. But Deming warned that improvement driven by pressure usually optimizes for speed, not learning, and leaves the system weaker in the long run. Good times create a different opportunity. They allow leaders to shift attention away from celebrating outcomes and toward strengthening capability.A company that is doing well is in an excellent position to improve management, product, and service, and moreover has the greatest obligation to improve. A company that is on the rocks can only think of survival short-term.— W. Edwards DemingUp to this point, Elena and Marcus had been talking about results. The question now was how to see the system underneath those results. Elena wanted to know whether the organization understood what actually made the work hold together—and whether it could keep holding together when conditions shifted.A small experimentRather than launching a major initiative, Elena proposed a modest experiment. For several weeks, the team would track a few measures of capability—not outcomes. They chose three: the...
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    6 min
  • Five-minute Deming: Annual growth targets

    Five-minute Deming: Annual growth targets
    Dec 26 2025
    Every December, leadership teams gather around spreadsheets and planning decks, and one thing slowly crowds out all the others: next year’s growth target. Ten percent. Twenty. “Double in two years.” The number starts to feel powerful, almost magical—as if declaring it clearly enough, and repeating it often enough, will somehow bend the organization into making it true.But saying a number out loud does not change the future. A number can only describe what already happened. If an organization wants different results next year, it has to change what produces results in the first place. It has to change the system.W. Edwards Deming gave us a simple place to start: “A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system.” Growth targets can be energizing, but without an aim they become detached from purpose, values, and tradeoffs. Deming paired that idea with an equally blunt warning: “A numerical goal accomplishes nothing. Only the method is important, not the goal.” Deming was not opposed to bold goals; he was opposed to pretending that boldness alone could change outcomes.Healthy end‑of‑year planning holds both truths at once. The aim sets direction. The method creates learning. Together, they turn ambition into something workable.A numerical goal accomplishes nothing.Only the method is important, not the goal. By what method?— W. Edwards DemingA year-end planning meetingConsider a professional services firm, meeting to set its plan for the upcoming year. The work is demanding, the clients are impatient, and the pace has been relentless. Maya, the managing partner, carries pressure from every direction—revenue expectations, client satisfaction, and the quiet responsibility of not burning out her best people.Jordan runs operations. He sees the firm not as departments, but as a flow: leads turn into proposals, proposals turn into delivery, delivery shapes the client experience, and that experience determines renewals and referrals. In Deming’s terms, Jordan is paying attention to the system.On the screen is a single slide: “GROWTH TARGET +25%.”The instinct is immediate. Translate the number into activity. More marketing. More outbound. More urgency. More everything. That reflex is common—and risky.Deming described this trap with a word that sounds theatrical but proves painfully accurate: internal goals without a method are “a burlesque.” In other words, planning turns into performance. People look busy. Pressure goes up. Very little actually improves.The meeting shifts when Jordan asks a question most teams never slow down long enough to consider: Is twenty‑five percent within what our system can deliver—without breaking quality or burning people out?That question doesn’t lower ambition. It rescues ambition from fantasy.Turning the target into an aimRather than debating the number, Jordan changes the conversation. The team stops arguing about outcomes and starts clarifying purpose. Jordan sketches how revenue actually happens—from first contact to repeat work—and asks where the system could be changed deliberately. This is the essence of system leadership: improving capability instead of demanding better results from existing capability.The growth slide is rewritten. They replace the solitary percentage with an aim statement that speaks to purpose rather than outcomes: “Improve the reliability of the client experience, while building a system of work our people can sustain.” This is not wordsmithing. It is design. An aim makes tradeoffs visible before the year begins. It tells people what “better” means. And it prevents revenue—important as it is—from becoming the thing people optimize at the expense of everything else.A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system.— W. Edwards DemingWith the aim clear, the next step is practical. Jordan pulls up the last eighteen months of data—lead flow, close rate, delivery time, rework. Not to judge people. Not to explain every fluctuation. But to understand what the system currently makes likely.Deming was blunt about this: “If you have a stable system, then there is no use to specify a goal. You will get whatever the system will deliver. A goal beyond the capability of the system will not be reached.” If the system is stable, effort alone will not change outcomes. Only changes to the system will.A goal beyond the capability of the system will not be reached.— W. Edwards DemingThat’s why Jordan’s conclusion lands so clearly: The system is doing exactly what it has been built to do. If the firm wants a different result, it needs a different method. Ambition doesn’t disappear—it simply moves from wishing harder to building a better system. The growth target becomes a forecast—a best prediction given current capability—and a signal of whether the system is improving.Replacing pressure with learningMany organizations respond to ambitious targets by launching a long list...
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    8 min