Since I talk about Dr. Deming a lot, I thought I’d take a little survey and gauge your exposure to Dr. W. Edwards Deming:
I was exposed to Dr. Deming and his ideas before I learned about Lean. I was still in college and had only worked part-time jobs, but it all made such sense. Dr. Deming has been a huge influence on me and I find myself thinking back to lessons far more often than Shingo and Ohno (no offense meant to them).
But I’m not sure how widespread the exposure to Dr. Deming is. People in healthcare, generally, have heard of Dr. Deming and PDCA/PSDA, but you often don’t see evidence of that mindset actually being in place.
What say you about Dr. Deming? Does your organization follow his teachings? Do you try to personally?
Here is a related article:
“What Deming Taught Toyota“
About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I first learned about him when I began facilitating improvement teams at a furniture manufacturing company back in ’92. Right away I embraced his ideas – it all made so much sense: PDCA as well as his philosophy. With my background as a counselor I truly liked his compassion for frontline staff and their experiences. His 14 points were very hard to disagree with. Yes, he’s been a huge influence on me over the years, so much to a point that when a subsequent company I worked for went “Jack Welch” I engaged them in ongoing dialogue of Deming vs. Welch. I eventually left.
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Mark,
I have read a fair amount on Dr. Deming but voted that he is a big influence because his work influenced all of the progressive quality and productivity movements since then. Many people are heavily influenced by Dr. Deming even if they don’t realize it today.
Thanks,
Chris
Christian Paulsen recently posted..5 Reasons for 5S
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I heard from dr Deming a few years ago, but there was no trigger to eleborate more on his work. I work for a Dutch consultancy and we do a lot of surveys about business intelligence (BI) and the relation to project success. A year ago one of the biggest findings in the BI survey point directly to the PDCA circle in order to be succesfull with business intelligence. Since then I started reading more and more about dr. Deming, his PDCA cycle and procesmanagement. It’s very exciting that such a simple circle can have such a huge impact on organizational performance. One of the findings of the survey is that a few companies are fully PDCA proof (about 10%), in other words, they execute all the steps in de PDCA cycle seriously and consequently. So, there is still a lot of work to do. Especially in Healthcare, we see that all hospitals and mental institutions embrace the PDCA on paper, but they do not practise.
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