SV: Hillside Yellers?

[Øgland, Petter <petter.ogland@skatteetaten.no>]

Vic Forte suggests the way to gain followers of Deming is by helping a person to discover the amazing nature of Dr Deming's ideas when applied to real life.

I've noticed that Stephen Prevette seems to eat, sleep and talk SPC on a 24/7 basis, but, like those who spoke of the UK railway system,  Stephen seems to have modelled the Deming philosophy through the lense of seeing every system as a kind of model railway system, thus understanding the issues of stability and improvement from the point of view of improving punctuality rather than the usual TQM approach of reducing defects.

Very few people I meet seem to understand Deming in this manner, even though Deming himself talks about the Japanese railway system in his books.

Is the problem with the Deming philosophy that most Demingites didn't really understand the Deming philosophy, and got confused by focusing too much on the psychological issues (Kohn etc) rather than on the engineering disciplin of understanding and improving the organization as a ("railway") system?

Petter