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Ed began his journey as a mathematical physicist right at the time Einstein’s and others’ theories about the nature of the universe were coming into vogue. This gave Ed an appreciation for the complexity of reality and was a clue that eventually put him onto one piece of Profound Knowledge, an appreciation for systems. |
In his thirties, Ed found a mentor, Dr. Walter Shewhart, who introduced him to pragmatism and a theory of knowledge. Essentially, this school of thought approached the world via the scientific method, constantly testing ideas and reevaluating hypotheses. Shewhart also grounded Deming in a theory of variation. In his wo... |
After World War II ended, Ed traveled to Japan to help with nationwide rebuilding efforts. By this time, he was well grounded in three pieces of Profound Knowledge: knowledge, variation, and systems thinking. But it was in Japan that he gained an appreciation for the final cornerstone of Profound Knowledge: a theory of... |
For instance, Toyota’s world-class approach to business—called the Toyota Way—is a beautiful fusion of Eastern and Western ideas, bringing together and bringing out the best in both. By this time, Japan was an economic juggernaut, and American businesses were eager to learn from their Eastern counterparts. In his eight... |
Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge encompasses four elements and includes fourteen points of management and seven deadly diseases of Management. |
These four elements of Profound Knowledge are: |
1. A Theory of Knowledge: How do we know what we believe we know? |
2. A Theory of Variation: How do we analyze and understand what we know? |
3. A Theory of Psychology: How do we account for human behavior? |
4. An Appreciation of Systems/Systems Thinking: Are we seeing the bigger picture? |
Armed with this lens—these four ways of seeing the world—any person or entity can achieve transformational change in any system or process. In other words, this lens is a proven way to make the world a better place. And as Deming said, these four elements are not something he made up. Rather, they are fundamental truth... |
From the balance of power in the US Capitol to NASCAR racing and globalization, the ripples of his work seem almost endless. While his story is fascinating by itself, this book isn’t strictly about his life. Rather, it’s the story of the gift he gave the world: a way of thinking that can be applied to any facet of life... |
When he stood before the collective remaining industrial base of Japan in 1950, he didn’t try to fix individual companies’ problems. He taught them principles and gave them a different way of thinking about the work they did each day. He didn’t want them to change their practices so much as he wanted to change their mi... |
It was the same with American manufacturers during World War II. It wasn’t enough that everyone pulled together to create as many war supplies as possible. The workforce and entire business had significantly changed, requiring a massive shift in how they operated day to day. The same thing happened forty years later: t... |
Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge is about learning how to bring about profound change on your own. That’s why, even three decades after his death, we’re still using his teachings as we head into the unknowns of the future. |
I’m a software developer: I can tell you horror stories about cyberterrorists in the Digital Wild West. We’ve never before faced what we are facing today, and we need help figuring out how to deal with it. I and millions of others use Ed’s methods to arrive at profound insights we otherwise would have never found on ou... |
This book chronicles not only the arc of Ed’s life but that of his thinking as well. The roots of the System of Profound Knowledge began even before he was born and reached a beautiful culmination right at the time he went to college. Had he been born a few years earlier, I’m not sure he would have been as exposed to a... |
Had he not been raised in a hardscrabble life and interned at the cutting-edge social experiment that was Hawthorne Works, I don’t know that his system would have been as humane and human centered as it came to be. |
Had he not taken a job as a mathematical physicist, he might not have had the opportunity to learn from the world’s foremost expert on variation and how it shows up in absolutely every facet of existence. |
Had he not been an expert in statistical surveys, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to travel to Japan, and especially not at the crucial moment of a devastated and demoralized country trying to rebuild its economy, looking for hope and inspiration. |
This book is truly about how the lens of Profound Knowledge was found. |
It just so happens that its discoverer was a man called Ed. |
Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge - How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future - Part 1 - Chapter 1: Humble Origins and Non-Determinism |
Deming’s Humble Beginnings |
Deming’s one childhood claim to fame was when Buffalo Bill recognized him in the crowd during a performance of “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” outside Los Angeles where “Edwards,” as his family called him, was visiting his cousins. |
The notoriously flamboyant showman knew the boy from Cody, Wyoming, by sight if not by name. Buffalo Bill was arguably the most world-famous living American at the time, having extensively toured the US and then Europe, performing before Queen Victoria herself twice. His act made him not only famous but rich. But Buffa... |
Named after his daughter, the Irma Hotel not only housed travelers but served as Bill’s headquarters, comprising two personal suites and his professional offices. His hotel was, in effect, the heart of his endeavor. When he built it, he envisaged something akin to an African city serving as a staging point for safari e... |
Shortly after the Irma opened in 1902, the Demings arrived from Sioux City, Iowa. The thirty-three-year-old father, William, had been trained as a law clerk but now sought to make his fortune on the frontier. He arranged for temporary employment with an attorney in Cody, then moved his wife and two toddling boys from t... |
Unfortunately for Buffalo Bill, the Cody-based irrigation empire failed. But in 1905, the federal government began a massive public works project via the US Reclamation Service aimed at irrigating ninety thousand acres to turn the semi-arid Bighorn Basin into fertile farms. This necessitated the construction of the Sho... |
The area around Powell was opened to homesteaders, and, in 1906, Mr. William Deming applied for and received forty acres of farmland on the edge of town. Or at least what everyone hoped would be farmland one day. In the meantime, the Demings eked out what living they could out where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Moun... |
Decades later, Ed recalled his family’s hardscrabble life. “Our house in Powell, roughly 1908 to 1912, was a tarpaper shack about the size of a freight car. . . . Electricity and indoor plumbing were out of the question. Snow blew in through the cracks in the door and in the windows.” He recollected owning a cat at the... |
The Shoshone River Dam (also known as Buffalo Bill Dam) was completed in 1910, but with or without irrigation, Deming’s father was never a successful farmer. He once remarked, “A farmer makes his money on the farm and spends it in town. An agriculturalist makes his money in town and spends it on the farm . . . . I’m an... |
ing my brother and me by the hand, prayed for food.” |
Elizabeth, his younger sister and the first baby born in Powell, later noted, “We didn’t have much, but nobody had anything.” To make ends meet, William continued to do some legal work in the area while Mrs. Pluma Deming, neé Edwards, taught piano and voice lessons on her Steinway parlor grand piano. William later bega... |
Though poor, his parents were well educated and poured their knowledge (and, perhaps, thirst for more) into their children. Edwards was raised in an atmosphere that included both left-brain and right-brain learning—his mother provided the right-brain perspective— the synthetic and creative aspects of learning . . . thr... |
Newton’s Apple and Schrödinger’s Cat Set the Stage The year before the Demings moved from the Irma to the tar shack in Powell, a theoretical physicist published four groundbreaking papers that challenged the laws of physics (and would be instrumental in framing much of the thinking in Deming’s Profound Knowledge). One ... |
Before Einstein, everyone relied on Sir Isaac Newton’s explanations of how the physical world works (e.g., for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, etc.). Einstein showed the world that physics is more like the Korean DMZ: N... |
Others quickly built on Einstein’s work throughout the 1920s, including Niels Bohr (who later worked on the Manhattan Project) and Erwin Schrödinger. But these physicists’ discoveries were just pieces of a much bigger shift: the rise of non-determinism. |
Before Einstein published his famous E=mc2, and his following Nobel prize for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, the world was seen through the lens of determinism (Newtonian Physics): “If I drop this apple, it will fall.” In simpler terms, the world operates solely on cause and effect. Take the weat... |
Non-determinism also has roots in Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: If you cross a black cow with a black cow, the offspring will probably be another black cow . . . but a gene might mutate and result in a two-headed white calf. You just can’t ever be certain. This is what physicist Max Planck (the father of quantu... |
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg took this idea of infinite variability to its extreme with the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that a quantum particle does not exist in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at the same time. |
Erwin Schrödinger gave us an easy way to understand how those two physicists saw the way the world works (the difference between deterministic thinking and non-deterministic thinking). Say you put a cat in a sealed box. Inside, there are two items. One is a can of poisonous gas. The other is a radioactive isotope givin... |
Radioactive decay can be random; no two isotopes decay at the same rate. It could decay in a minute or in a thousand years. Therefore, you’ll never know when the isotope in the box will decay, triggering the poisonous gas. According to Bohr and Heisenberg, since you can’t predict when the element will decay, you can ne... |
While this cat-in-the-box concept is funny, it illustrates how these two schools of thought differed. Determinism saw the world in black and white, cause and effect. With enough information, you could control any situation. |
Non-determinism sees the world in shades of gray. Everything has an element of randomness. Much of how the world works is unknowable. Mathematical formulas don’t always hold true; we can’t accurately predict the future. We can only speak in probabilities: “The apple will more than likely hit the ground, but we can’t sa... |
This idea of non-determinism—that reality is inherently random—would form the basis of Deming’s worldview when he began his academic career. It taught him to see the world as a series of interconnected systems, sparking the beginning of his questioning knowledge and leading to the first element of the System of Profoun... |
Missing the Forest for the Trees |
Let’s look at a real-life example of non-determinism. |
Post–World War II, the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia had a serious malaria problem. In 1952, the World Health Organization (WHO) of the newly formed United Nations sent antimalarial experts to address the situation. One of the primary carriers of malaria is mosquitoes. Over the next three years, the WHO sprayed th... |
Five years after the conference, Borneo started raining cats. Literally. |
And not just any cats. These were special cats: twenty-three rat catchers that floated down in their very own little cat parachutes from a British Royal Air Force transport plane. |
The cats’ mission: to replenish the island’s feline population. What happened to the native cats? As it turns out, DDT had killed more than mosquitoes. Later autopsies revealed that the WHO’s practices resulted in lethal amounts of DDT accumulating in cats. Without their natural predator, the rat population exploded. R... |
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