Deming's 14 Points and Vaccine Distribution (Part 1)

Clare Crawford-Mason was desperately seeking an economist. Actually, economists were plentiful during the winter of 1980. But she was producing a television documentary about why American companies were losing market share to Japanese companies, and needed someone who could tell stories that would engage the audience. Sadly, the economists she contacted didn’t seem to have any stories, and the trial interviews she conducted with them “were about as exciting as watching paint dry” (Walton, 1986).

Then she was told about a statistician in Washington, D.C. who, it was said, had helped the Japanese rebuild their economy after World War II. He seemed to be little known in America* but Crawford-Mason discovered that not only was W. Edwards Deming revered in Japan but in 1951 the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers had established the “Deming prize,” an award considered to be the “Nobel prize of quality management,” in honor of his fundamental contributions toward establishing statistical quality improvement methods in Japan.

NBC aired the documentary “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” on June 24, 1980. At the beginning of the program, Deming asked, “What can we do to work smarter, not harder?” He argued that the high quality of Japanese products could be replicated in America if the statistical methods that he had promoted in Japan were used. “In statistical control you have a reproducible product hour after hour, day after day. And see how comforting that is to management: they now know what they can produce, they know what their costs are going to be.”

And he told stories. He told stories about his work in Japan. He told stories about asking managers what proportion of problems arise from their production workers. “The answer: all of it. That is absolutely wrong!” And he told stories about how he had worked with people at Nashua Corporation on improving process quality. The CEO at Nashua told how Deming’s methods had improved quality and saved the company millions of dollars. In one area alone, said a company representative, “we are currently saving $30,000 per month” from implementing a few simple statistical methods. Working smarter, not harder.

The next day, Deming’s telephone rang, and rang, and rang. CEOs from around the country were calling to ask him to teach their companies the statistical methods he had taught in Japan and at Nashua Corporation.

Deming had long worked as a statistical consultant; now, at age 79, he had a new career as the “prophet of quality.” From 1980 until his death in 1993, thousands of people attended his four-day seminars. Even more read his books Out of the Crisis and The New Economics (Deming, 1986, 1994). Walton (1986) wrote: “He was on the road constantly, not only in the United States but abroad. He made trips regularly to London, South Africa, and New Zealand, where he had clients…. One day [his secretary] heard from him in four states. He called as many as three or four times a day, sometimes dictating portions of his book from an airport telephone booth.”

It’s the System, not the Workers

The key to Deming’s method is found in his Fourteen Points for Management (Deming, 1986) and, later, in his System for Profound Knowledge (Deming, 1994). As he had argued during “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”, managers are wrong when they ascribe the preponderance of quality deficiencies to individual workers. These are systems problems, and can only be addressed by changing the system.

As an example, Deming told of a factory that made men’s shoes, where 10% of workers’ time was being devoted to re-threading the sole-sewing machines and adjusting the tension. Exhortations to “do better” accomplished nothing; no matter how hard people tried, they spent 10% of their time re-threading the machines. Only after the factory switched to a higher quality of thread, which didn’t break as much, did the time spent on re-threading decrease. The problem was not with the workers, but with the thread—the system.

Part of Deming’s insight was that quality improvement methods did not apply only to manufacturing, but to any system. His talks were filled with examples of improving quality in service industries, medicine, and education. I was privileged to meet him when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, during one of his trips to work with city officials in Madison on improving the quality of city services. Police chief David Couper (2017) later wrote about these visits, and about applying Deming’s ideas to the Madison police department. I’ve written elsewhere about how Deming’s insights can be applied to educational evaluation and to measuring crime.

Could Deming’s insights provide guidance for the greatest public health crisis of our time? Part 2 explores some of the Fourteen Points, and how they might be applied to the challenge of distributing COVID vaccines.

Copyright (c) 2021 Sharon L. Lohr

Footnotes

*Deming was actually very well known in the statistical community, but not more widely. He had been working on quality improvement methods at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau since the late 1920s, and had advised the Secretary of War on statistical methods during World War II. While at the Census Bureau, he developed statistical methods for sampling that are still used today, and wrote one of the first books describing the theory of survey sampling (Deming, 1950).

References

Austenfeld, Robert B., Jr. (2001). W. Edwards Deming: The story of a remarkable person. Research Society of Commerce and Economics, 42, 49-102.

Couper, David C. (2017). Arrested Development: A Veteran Police Chief Sounds Off About Protest, Racism, Corruption and the Seven Steps Necessary to Improve Our Nation’s Police, 2nd ed. Blue Mounds, WI: New Journey Press.

Crawford-Mason, Clare (1992). The discovery of the prophet of quality. SPC INK, The Newsletter from Statistical Process Controls Inc, Knoxville TN.

Deming, W. Edwards (1950). Some Theory of Sampling. New York: Dover.

Deming, W. Edwards (1986). Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Deming, W. Edwards (1994). The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Deming, W. Edwards (2013). The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality. Edited by Joyce Orsini. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Deming, W. Edwards, Crawford-Mason, Clare, & Dobyns, Lloyd (1993). The Deming Video Library. Washington, DC: CC-M Productions.

Walton, Mary (1986). The Deming Management Method. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.