Re: Where is the Evidence?

[Rip Stauffer <ripstaur@vabch.com>]

This is a great question, one which might open the door to expansion of
Deming's work.

I certainly don't have enough data to calculate any set average, such as
90 percent. Neither did I know him, so I never got a chance to ask him.
I do know that this is one of his assertions with which I have had to
struggle in my tenure as a Department of the Navy quality specialist. We
in the Military are great for assigning responsibility and
accountability. In our cuurent leadership courses, we have a slide that
contains a quote from Admiral Rickover: "If responsibility is rightfully
yours, no evasion, or ignorance, no passing of blame, can shift the
burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who
is responsible when something goes wrong, then you never really had
anyone responsible.” 

You can imagine what successful leaders, brought up in the above
paradigm, think of "Competition, Cooperation and the Individual" and
"Competition Doesn't Work--Cooperation Does." I have had intelligent,
successful, decorated officers ask me privately, following the
discussion of the Red Bead, "So, what's the REAL secret--how do you
actually GET 50 white beads?" They were absolutely convinced that a
motivated individual can accomplish the impossible with enough hard
work. 

They believe their success is mostly (if not solely) the result of their
ability and hard work. Anyone not as successful as they are must not
have as much talent or must have been a slacker at some point. It is
difficult (not necessarily impossible) to get some of them to understand
what role the system has played in their success or lack thereof.

This leads me to Frank's great question. Frank said his "concern was
that, in the eyes of the JUSE counselors, perhaps as much as 50% was
caused by FPL individuals who were not properly trained or who didn't
understand the specs." Are they saying that this is the fault of the
people in the system? Maybe it is, maybe they were just untrainable. Who
hired them? Why didn't they understand the specs? Were the specs poorly
written, or were the people just not trained to understand that set of
criteria and tests, and make that set of decisions. Perhaps they had
been promoted into positions for which they were unqualified based on
performance evaluations they received while doing other, different work
for which they had been eminently qualified.

Even if we had all the evidence available, we would not be able to
calculate an actual percentage. Deming demonstrated that pretty well. If
you want to believe that people are responsible for fifty percent of the
variation, that's OK. That's about 49-50 percent less than most believe.

I don't really think Dr. Deming was wrong; he may have been a little too
conservative in his estimate, maybe. I have seen a lot of
cause-and-effect diagrams where the "people" bone was just one of 4 or
5, and most of the problems or effects listed on the people bone could
be attributed to one of the others. This is not to say that people don't
have talents and abilities that predispose them to greatness or success
or obscurity or infamy; but timing, the environment, opportunities
afforded or denied can make the all the difference in the amount of
potential actually realized in the end.

Someone from an air command once told me that 90 percent of all aircraft
crashes "had been shown, in investigations, to be directly attributable
to human error--pilot error." OK, I can buy that. Pilots have their
hands on the stick, they are in control. 

I guess my question is: what caused the pilot error?

Rip Stauffer
Naval Leader Training Unit
ripstaur@vabch.com
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