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I imagine it was a carnival of carnivorous and carnal delight. The good folks at the WHO made an honest mistake. After all, the Western education system stresses analytical, deterministic thinking. In this case, it led to this line of reasoning: |
1. Malaria is bad in Borneo. |
2. Malaria is carried by mosquitoes. |
3. DDT kills mosquitoes. |
4. Therefore, we should use DDT to kill the mosquitoes in Borneo. |
Cats killing rats and therefore keeping typhus at manageable levels is what Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, calls a balancing feedback loop. However, when the cat population was out of balance, the natural order of things oscillated, creating what she describes as an overshoot of a reinforcing feed-back loop. |
If the WHO had embraced non-deterministic thinking, they would have taken a much wider view of the problem. The opposite of analytic thinking is systems thinking (a.k.a. appreciation of a system): the ability to see how one thing is part of a larger, connected system. Someone who approached the ecosystem as a system mi... |
1. Malaria is bad in Borneo. |
2. Malaria is carried by mosquitoes. |
3. DDT kills mosquitoes . . . but what else could it kill? |
4. What else would spraying DDT on the inside of longhouses affect? |
5. Do we have enough information to make an overall decision? |
6. We should hold back until we can be reasonably sure we’re going to make things better and not worse for the people of Borneo. |
The WHO focused only on the immediate problem and failed to consider how one “solution” might trigger a chain reaction. They failed to see the whole system. This is exactly what I meant earlier about Profound Knowledge: profound change requires Profound Knowledge, and one of the tenets of Profound Knowledge is systems ... |
Determinism and analytical thinking break down a problem into tiny pieces, whereas non-determinism and systems thinking look at a problem’s bigger picture. |
Analytical thinkers say, “Mission accomplished. Now, let’s go home.” |
Systems thinkers say, “What were the results? Now, let’s make it even |
better.” |
This was bleeding-edge thinking when a sixteen-year-old’s train rolled into Laramie, Wyoming. “The Professor” was going to college. |
The Professor Becomes the Student |
Ed, as he would come to introduce himself, was used to shouldering a heavy load. He expected things to be no different at the University of Wyoming. In fact, he decided to major in electrical engineering. Electricity at the time was still at the forefront of technological progress, so this was like majoring in artifici... |
As he studied electrical engineering over the next four years, he supported himself by working as a janitor, shoveling snow, and cutting ice. He also cut railroad ties and worked at a dry cleaner. At some point, he was a soda jerk serving up malted milkshakes. On top of working and studying, he also sang in a church ch... |
Ed graduated in four years but stayed for a fifth to study mathematics before enrolling at the University of Colorado for a master’s in physics and mathematics. After he graduated with his master’s in 1924, one of his instructors encouraged him to continue with his studies, perhaps at Yale. He moved to New Haven, where... |
The 1920s were an exciting time for scientific discovery. The year Ed received his PhD, the fifth Solvay Conference on Physics was held. The subject was electrons and photons. In attendance were some of the most famous names in science to this day, including Marie Curie, Edwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, ... |
Non-determinism played a crucial role in shaping Deming’s worldview and began to lay the foundations for his System of Profound Knowledge. For one, it taught him that long-established and long-held beliefs weren’t necessarily true; the entire structure of the physical world was being rethought and reexamined. |
Second, it showed him that the underpinnings of our very existence are random. That idea of randomness would be born out through his fascination with statistics, which in turn would inform his understanding of variation (the second element in the System of Profound Knowledge). |
Third, it taught him to look beyond black-and-white cause and effect. It forced him to look at problems as multifaceted, complex systems, where changing one factor might have far-reaching, and unintended, consequences. This was the beginnings of his understanding of the fourth element of Profound Knowledge: Systems Thi... |
But before we go forward, we need to rewind briefly. During the two summers bracketing Yale’s academic calendar, Ed Deming—a university faculty member with a bachelor’s in engineering, a master’s in physics and was working on a PhD—supported himself and his wife (he’d married a schoolteacher, Agnes, in 1923), as ever, ... |
Then, Ed took an internship in a Chicago sweatshop: Hawthorne Works. |
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 2: The Jungle in Paradise |
All that remains of one of the greatest industrial sites in US history is a stone tower at the corner of Cicero Avenue and Cermak Road just outside Chicago. Few realize its “story is nothing less than the story of the rise and fall of urban industrial America in the twentieth century.” |
In the early 1900s, Hawthorne Works was a large factory complex of the Western Electric Company, producing large quantities of telephone equipment. But it was also the Silicon Valley of its time, a hub of innovation, the home of cutting-edge technology, and the object of national fascination. Hawthorne Works played a c... |
Hawthorne Works |
Hard work was a fact of life in Rose Cihlar’s immigrant family. Although she was born in Chicago in 1903, her parents were born in Bohemia (before the region became part of the Czech Republic) and immigrated to the US shortly before the turn of the century. They settled down in the Czech-Slovak immigrant community outs... |
We don’t know when Rose began working, but we do know that in 1919 (making her sixteen years old at the time) Rose Cihlar worked as an assembly line inspector at a nearby factory. Just down the road sat Chicago’s famous meatpacking district, the subject of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published thirteen years prior, wh... |
Hawthorne Works encompassed one hundred buildings and stretched over two hundred acres. It contained over five million square feet of workspace and was known as the Electrical Capital of America. By the time Rose worked there, Hawthorne had become the center of the next great technological advancement: the telephone. |
While the discovery of electricity a hundred years earlier was seen as magical, the invention of telephony was seen as close to miraculous. Sure, lightbulbs were an upgrade from candles, but a telephone . . . well, there had never been anything like it. Before the telephone, if a beloved aunt went to live with family o... |
The telephone, on the other hand, made it possible to pick up a device and hear your aunt’s voice instantly. You could have a conversation as if she were sitting across the table from you sharing a pot of coffee. It may seem trivial to us today, but it was nearly unimaginable for the average person at the time. Today, ... |
Unlike the typical factory town, where every aspect of the workers’ lives was controlled by the company, at Hawthorne Works everything inside the factory belonged to Western Electric, the manufacturing division of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), but everything outside the factory was privately owned, privately f... |
In the typical company town, employees didn’t have power over their own lives and future. Workers were more or less dependent family members of a massive family business. A few patriarchs at the top dictated the lives of everyone else. |
The difference at Hawthorne arose from Western Electric’s approach to its workers, an approach that was considered revolutionary at the time. Workers got not only vacations but paid vacations, not to mention retirement planning and company pensions. In many ways, the company treated its workers more like partners than ... |
According to one source, Year after year, Hawthorne’s workers turned out an endless stream of complex communications apparatus, engineered by the sharpest minds in the field and assembled by skilled craftsmen. . . . In its time, Hawthorne Works exemplified the “virtuous circle”: a win-win proposition whereby corporate ... |
There was a sense of community and identity. Employees didn’t merely work on assembly lines. They built the telephones that connected the nation. The factory existed for a decade before the first successful transcontinental phone call was made between San Francisco and New York in 1915. The workers of Hawthorne underst... |
Deming experienced this esprit de corps firsthand while he interned at Hawthorne Works during the summers of 1925 and 1926. Though he wouldn’t fully appreciate it until after he left, the factory was a testing ground for his Theory of Knowledge (one of the four elements of his System of Profound Knowledge) and was led ... |
The entire operation at Hawthorne was a masterwork of systems thinking. Without his internship at Hawthorne, who knows how different history would have been? Decades later, he would find the same kind of relationship between Japanese companies and their workers. There was a profound sense of pride. The workers at Toyot... |
Hawthorne was the seedbed for Deming’s understanding of Profound Knowledge. |
The Makings of Modern American Management |
Previous to Hawthorne, management styles were largely predicated on Tay- |
lorism and Fordism. By the time Deming came to Hawthorne, both Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford had left an indelible imprint on how to manage workers. Ford’s genius wasn’t the automobile (that had already been invented) but rather the efficient assembly line. He spent countless hours creating production systems ... |
In layperson’s terms, where Ford treated people like cogs in a machine, Taylor approached workers as if they were machines themselves—machines that could be optimized for maximum efficiency, given the right physical and psychological conditions. |
Fordism and Taylorism were the mainstays of American management throughout the twentieth century. But at Hawthorne, Fordism and Taylorism found their first challengers. Beyond being an impressive industrial site, Hawthorne Works became a lab of sorts. “The Works’ bustling shops provided the perfect setting for testing ... |
That is, the workers became lab rats. Psychologist Elton Mayo conducted a social experiment at Hawthorne Works from 1924 to 1927 to prove the importance of people on productivity—not machines. |
His social experiment measured the change in workers’ output at different levels of lighting. He found that any change in lighting increased employee productivity. However, he later discovered that the rise in output came from workers knowing they were being closely watched, not from how much light they had available. ... |
Two additional studies, the relay-assembly tests and the bank-wiring tests, followed Mayo’s illumination tests. Altogether, the studies assumed the label “Hawthorne experiments” and became the basis for the school of human relations. Deming referred to Ford and Taylor’s influence as “living in prison under the tyranny ... |
Today, we have shifted into the Knowledge Economy, where the most prized skills are innovation and creativity—the antithesis of Ford’s approach to management and a fundamentally different perspective than Taylor’s. And yet, the effects of Fordism and Taylorism can still be seen everywhere. To be blunt, this perspective... |
In the middle of Mayo’s Hawthorne Effect studies, Ed rolled into town. He spent months researching electrical transistors. And that time left a lasting mark on Ed, ultimately leading to one of his four elements of Profound Knowledge, that of human psychology and motivation. His future views on management would stand in... |
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