Re: PDSA et al.

["John K. Balor" <balor1999@yahoo.com>]

Vladimir Shper makes an interesting effort to contrast Shewhart with Taylor, suggesting, among other things, that Taylor did not have "profound knowledge".  Why is it so imperative for people to contrast Shewhart and Deming with Taylor and Scientific Management?  I cannot see that Shewhart and Deming defined there work as a contrast to Taylor and his approach.  On the contrary, the target of attack for Deming were the people who managed by fear, management without numbers (i.e. operational definitions), management by numbers without understanding variation, management without understanding the concept of a 'system' etc.
   
  What was Deming's solution?  As far as I can see, Deming is shouting from almost every page of his books that we should think of management as prediction, and that we should apply the scientific method for improving organizations.  How people can quote Shewhart's specification-production-control from page 44 on SMVQC without getting his idea about hypothesis-experiment-test on page 45 is beyond me.
   
  If we read Taylor's "Principle of Scientific Managment" (1911) there can be no doubt that this is written by a man who both had profound insights on the theory of knowledge and psychology.  Judging Taylor based on "taylorist" management consultants who didn't understand his thinking is as bad as judging Deming based on "demingite" management consultants with lack of understanding of what Deming's philosophy was all about, I would say.
   
  Whether he had a deep understanding of variation or not is of course a bit more difficult to say, as essential tools for understanding variation, such as SPC, had not been invented yet.  My understanding is that Taylor understood variation, as can be seen from the way he talks about the necessity of breaks and ways of designing work so it can be carried out in the long term.
   
  The genius of Shewhart, however, is that of producing a scientific instrument that would make scientific management more precise.  If we compared Taylor with Galileo then perhaps we could compare Shewhart with the people who improved the scientific tools for post-Galileo scientists to see the heavenly objects more clearly than what was possible for Galileo.
   
  John Balor