A hospital VP I worked with once told her board the number of infections had dropped from 4 to 3. She got a small round of congratulations. The next quarter, it went to 5, and she had to explain what…
A returning guest today for episode #280 is John Dyer, president of his consulting firm, JD&A, Inc., and a contributor for IndustryWeek.com. Today, our focus is the famed "Red Bead Experiment." We'll talk about it, he'll share memories of Dr. Deming facilitating this, and we'll both share and discuss our reflections and our experiences with this, and the lessons learned.
I’ve written a lot about Dr. Deming’s famous “Red Bead Experiment.” As a follow up to my workshop at February’s Society for Health Systems Conference (we played the simulation with a group there), Mike and I promised to do a…
tl;dr: Deming’s Red Bead Experiment shows that most performance variation in healthcare comes from the system–not individual effort. Incentives, threats, and goals don’t reduce defects; leadership must redesign the system and create psychological safety for improvement. Later next month, at…
In this 2012 conversation, Mike Stoecklein reflects on nearly a decade of learning directly from Dr. W. Edwards Deming — attending and helping with the famous four-day seminars, exchanging letters, and watching Deming consult with clients. Mike also tells the…
Mike Stoecklein recalls a story secondhand. It was, he thinks, at one of the last four-day seminars W. Edwards Deming ever gave. Deming was frail by then. Someone later told Mike that when the seminar got to the Red Bead…
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be presenting a 90-minute “intensive” session at the 2025 Health Systems Process Improvement (HSPI) conference, organized by the Society for Health Systems. This year’s event will take place in Atlanta, and if you’re passionate…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #501 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Marcia Daszko, a speaker, workshop facilitator, and consultant. For more than 25 years, she has passionately been speaking, consulting,…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #441 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is John Dues, an accomplished education systems leader and improvement science scholar-practitioner with more than two decades of experience in…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #424 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Balaji Reddie, the founder of The Deming Forum of India. An engineer by trade, Balaji was exposed to W. Edwards…
tl;dr: The Red Bead Experiment demonstrates how firing “low performers” based on arbitrary targets or rankings punishes people for system-driven variation, not individual effort. Bad metrics and poor leadership can create outcomes that look discriminatory, even when intent isn’t–highlighting why…
One book about the late, great W. Edwards Deming that's been on my shelf for a while is The Deming Management Method, which was written by Mary Walton, a journalist who spent some time with Dr. Deming in the 1980s. There's a section that really made me think about Lean over the past few decades (and it might seem familiar to those who use Six Sigma or other methods).
