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The Knowledge System Podcast

The Knowledge System Podcast

De : Michael Carr
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 The Knowledge System Podcast explores how leaders can use systems thinking to create lasting organizational improvement. It translates the ideas of W. Edwards Deming and other thought-leaders into practical strategies for building smarter, more effective systems.

posts.knowledgesystem.comMichael Carr Economie Management Management et direction
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    • 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 min
    • 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 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
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