Deming’s 14 Points of Management

Deming’s 14 Points of Management

I’m a Deming fan, and sad that I never got to meet him or attend any of his lectures.

W. E. Deming is possibly most well known for his “PDCA” (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, which is actually the Shewhart Cycle (who was Deming’s mentor at Bell Labs). Deming actually altered it to PDSA, substituting “Check” for “Study” because “check” implied an inspection, rather than an opportunity for studying the system. He also created his “System of Profound Knowledge”, and in his 1982 book “Out Of The Crisis”, defined his “14 Points of Management”, which were the basis for his work in driving the success of Japanese manufacturing in the 1950s and helped post-World War II Japan rebuild its devastated economy.

Deming taught the secrets of productivity through industrial statistics (Statistical Process Control), and was so successful in doing so that Japan’s coveted annual award for productivity is called “The Deming Prize”. It was his work with Japan that enabled Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota to completely outclass their American counterparts – and they did it with the help of an American – W. E. Deming.

One of the most powerful foundations of Deming’s teachings is that he deeply understood the psychology of work. Coming from a poor farming family in Powell, Wyoming, he understood what it meant to work hard for the food on your table, a perspective that some in the managerial classes at the time, especially those from more privileged backgrounds, couldn’t always appreciate (see John Willis’ book “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” to dive deeper into the story and character of Deming).

As with his System of Profound Knowledge which includes understanding knowledge, system thinking, variation, and psychology, Deming’s 14 points demonstrate his deep understanding of the sociotechnical nature of work. Deming didn’t use the term “psychological safety” (because it wasn’t yet in common use in 1982) but it’s clear, as you can see in point 8: “Drive out fear”, that he recognised the concept and how critical it is for the success of an organisation.

These 14 points of management were written in 1982, as you can probably tell from some of the language, but are just as relevant, if not even more so, today. I’ve listed them below as they’re written in Out Of The Crisis, and added my own bullet-point clarifications for putting them into practice.

Deming’s 14 Points of Management:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

• Create a core mission for your organisation, and plan for the long-term. 
• Resist short-term solutions that may cause long-term pain.
• Consider the different layers of your strategy: ensure that you’re always innovating and improving, but don’t let innovation get in the way of operational excellence.
• Build in practices and systems that facilitate continuous improvement.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

• Aim to understand and meet the needs of your customers, service users and citizens. 
• Build organisational resilience, and create the conditions necessary to adapt to a changing world.
• Set high-quality standards and commit to constantly improving them. 

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

• “Inspection is too late: the quality, good or bad, is already in the product.” – build systems that allow you to address quality as early in the process as possible, such as the Andon Cord.
• By focussing on quality over speed, you’ll actually end up going faster anyway.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

• Quality depends on consistency and standardisation. If your inputs are variable, your outputs will be too.
• Your suppliers should be partners, and just as invested in quality as you are.
• Consider the total cost of ownership and processing, not just the cost of supply.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

• Implement practices such as Statistical Process Control (SPC) to visualise and constantly improve quality and outcomes.
• Practice retrospectives, After Action Reviews, debriefs, and other ways to reflect and learn from work.

6. Institute training on the job.

• Training and learning should be part of work, not additional to it. 
• Empower people to train and learn from each other. 
• Build systems and resources for learning and storing knowledge.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

• Managers should serve the people doing the work. Give people what they need and get out of their way.
• Get close to the work, so that you can best understand it. (​​Genchi Genbutsu)
• Coach and mentor people, don’t manage them: “You manage things; you lead people.” (credit: Grace Hopper)

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

• Foster psychological safety.
• “Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures.” – Deming understood how important it is for people to be able to be honest about the work they do and any mistakes they make.
• If we foster psychological safety, we can close the gap between Work As Imagined and Work As Done.
• Listen to people when they suggest new ways of doing things or ways to improve. The people closest to the work often understand best how to improve the work.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

• Create team charters and team APIs to help improve understanding and collaboration between teams. 
• Ensure teams are cross-functional and rarely need to go outside the team for assistance or decision making for something that is their responsibility to deliver. 
• Consider SLLLAM teams: Self-organising, Lean, Long-Lived, Autonomous, Multidisciplinary. 

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the workforce.

• “Zero Defects”, “Right first time” and other absolute targets set people up for failure and incentivise hiding defects and mistakes.
• Avoid ambiguous objectives and statements such as “be the market leader”. 
• Set clear expectations and goals, and praise people for their work in achieving them (and attempting to achieve them).

11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.

• “Quotas are incompatible with continuous improvement.” Quotas can become a base threshold, rather than a high target.
• Quotas and targets for parts of the system (the organisation) can result in local optimisation that harms the system as a whole. For example, reducing patient waiting times in one part of a hospital can result in patients arriving in wards that aren’t ready for them.
• Track outcomes and quality over time and incentivise continuous improvement of the entire system.

11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

• Any numerical objective can and will create unintended perverse incentives. Examples include: A target for closing service desk calls results in dissatisfied customers who don’t feel their issue was addressed fully. A target for increasing the number of sales closed results in many low-value customers instead of fewer high-value customers.

12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

• People want to be proud of their accomplishments. Enable people to see the outcomes of their work, rather than just their part in the process. 
• Provide people with ownership and autonomy over their work. 

12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

• Get rid of annual performance reviews and grading. Conversations about performance should be frequent and constructive.
• Avoid “rank and yank” (the practice of ranking everyone on a team by performance and sacking the lowest 10%) – everyone on a team can be high performing.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

• There is no such thing as a “job for life” nowadays – people need and want to improve and evolve their skills through their career. When thinking about training and development, focus on people’s careers rather than just their jobs.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

• Every activity and every job is part of a process. Work to understand that process as well as the wider sociotechnical system.
• Everyone has a part to play in success, and everyone should feel safe and empowered to speak up with ideas and suggestions for improvement.
• Every single person in an organisation has value, and should be recognised for it.

From Deming, W. Edwards. 1982. Out of The Crisis (MIT Press) (pp. 23-24)

Deming’s philosophy and teachings have withstood the test of time, and offer valuable lessons for contemporary leaders and organisations. The essence of his 14 Points of Management lies in the intersection of human psychology and technical expertise, emphasising the importance of continuous improvement, teamwork, and leadership, and of course, psychological safety. 

Psychological Safety at Work

Harvard professor Claudia Goldin has become the third woman in history to be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Elinor Ostrom, for her work on governing the commons, and Esther Duflo, for her work in applying the RCT approach to alleviating global poverty, were the previous winners.

Goldin’s studies on women in the workplace span over 200 years of data, and include findings such as:

• The current gender pay gap is largely due to disparities in pay within the same occupation: when women and men hold the same job, men still tend to be paid more.
• Childbirth and motherhood significantly impact women’s careers, even when mothers transition back to full-time roles.
• The “power of the pill” – the contraceptive pill gave women more control over their lives and careers.
• Overt gender bias still persists: blind auditions in symphony orchestras, where the musician’s identity is concealed, led to more women being hired.

Goldin’s historic perspective on economics research and feminism, in her most recent paper “Why Women Won”, published this month, also highlights a splintering of feminism since the 1970s, where some opposed certain women’s rights due to concerns over unintended consequences of equality. She states, “The modern version of the anti-feminist movement remains a potent force and has joined with those opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and transgender rights.”

Indeed, Goldin’s own experiences in economics and academia reflect the challenges many women still face in the workplace. Despite these challenges, her groundbreaking research and her recent Nobel win spotlight the continued importance of addressing the systemic issues faced by women at work.

Thanks to Terry Brown for sharing this: Why kindness at work pays off. This is a lovely article by Andrew Swinand and highlights a few core points to remember; which also happen to align completely with fostering an environment of psychological safety:

• Practice self-care
• Do your job
• Reach out with intention
• Recognise and acknowledge people
• Be conscientious with your feedback

I’m not a human factors expert, but our workshops and training sessions often enter the world of human factors in order to discuss and describe the causes of failure (and success too). Andrew Doran shared with me this great example of how seemingly innocuous decisions about carpet design choice can result in real-world impacts on safety!

Finally, thanks so much to Kevin Somerton for sharing this with me: the Rugby Union Daily podcast where  Matt Dawson speaks with Michael Lynagh about Australian rugby. Michael tells a story that illustrates perfectly how creating an environment where sports people are afraid to make mistakes actually lowers performance: it’s only through embracing the risk of failure that we can achieve great results. It’s also a good example of a coach learning from their mistakes in leadership, self-reflecting, and correcting them. Listen from about 44 minutes in if you want to get straight to it!

This week’s poem:

Center Of The Universe, by Hannah Emerson

Please try to go
to hell frequently
because you will
find the light there

yes yes — please
try to kiss the ideas
that you find there
yes yes — please

try to get that
it is the center
of the universe
yes yes — please

try to help yourself
by kissing the hot hot
hot life that is born
there yes yes — please

try to yell in hell
yes yes — please
try to free yourself
by pouring yourself

into the gutter all
guttural guttural yell
yes yes yes — please
try to get that you

become the being
that you came there
to be yes yes — please
try to go to the great

great great fire that you
created because you
become the light
that the fire makes

inside of you
yes yes — please
try to kiss yourself
for going there

yes yes — please
get that you are
reborn there
yes yes — please

begin your day



Hannah Emerson is a non-speaking autistic poet, and this can be found in her extraordinary collection The Kissing of Kissing. Discovered in the amazing newsletter “The Marginalian“.