SV: Hillside Yellers?

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

Rip Stauffer made an excellent comment on my question as to whether Deming's philosophy or the 'Deming Revolution' was mainly an epistemological revolution.  Rip points to Tukey, Shewhart, Deming, Box and Wheeler, and says that these philosophers see the world differently than most people do.

Most social researcher, medical researchers, educational researchers etc that I've met, say that they don't really understand too much statistics, but they're applying the statistical methods according to the books and are thus consequently making correct scientific experiments and producing new knowledge.

Perhaps the scientfic community is in need of a 'Deming Revolution' just as much as management community.  In previous discussions on the DEN, I've gotten the impression that whether one thinks of the world as a process (Buddhism, Zen, mystisism, or traditionalism in general) or a collection of things (modern "scientific" society), it makes a tremendous impact on one's values and actions.

My impression of Deming is that he perhaps understood Shewharts industrial quality control the way his fellow Wyoming farmers understood things, i.e. that the world is not a thing but a process.  Life is a river, or a dance, or a symphony.  It is not a list of things.

If I look at my CV and my salery in order to compare it with somebody elses CV and salery, that is a different way of thinking than "prepare for winter, follow the seasons" and other types of knowledge needed for surviving as a Wyoming farmer.  Perhaps Deming saw some of this traditional way of thinking in Shewhart's philosophy, and saw how industral management looked like unexperiences farmers that would never survive in Wyoming at the beginning of the 20th century.

I wonder if the best way of understanding the 'Deming Revolution' may be through reading Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson and similar process thinkers.  What do others think?

Petter