Dr. Deming: Don't Leave Organizational Transformation on the Factory Floor. It's Everybody's Job

Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job. — Dr. W. Edwards Deming's 14th point for management

Management guru Dr. W. Edwards Deming concluded his 14 points for management with a seemingly straightforward mandate: It's everybody’s responsibility to accomplish an organizational transformation, with no exceptions.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, podcast hosts Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer continue their exploration of Deming’s 14 management points, focusing on his final mandate.

Saleh describes Deming’s 14th point as “an easy concept to grasp” compared with some of his other points. That said, Saleh observed that many companies don’t follow it.

The podcast hosts delve into details of why a successful organizational transformation cannot be handed off to a certain title or delegated to a specific department. Among their discussion points:

• The mistaken characterization of lean as a factory strategy when “it’s really an enterprise operating system,” Saleh says. The problem created by this characterization is that other departments believe lean doesn’t apply to them, or, if they do believe it applies, production is the place to start and other departments will catch up later. Not factored in is that other departments’ problems or challenges affect the production floor.
• The hiring of an outside lean specialist to “do” team-based continuous improvement for the organization and be responsible for a lean transformation’s success or failure. Saleh and Dyer delve into how this runs completely counter to Deming’s 14th point—while also noting the potential benefit of an external lean guide or mentor.
• The importance of decision flow. “Just like operations has material flow, functions have decision flow, and if you don’t map those decision flows, you end up managing escalations,” Saleh says.
• The different types of lean practitioners and what they bring to an organization. Examples include practitioners who are strong in the technical aspects of a lean transformation and others whose strength is challenging the status quo.

Ultimately, Deming’s message is a simple one. “Everybody in the organization needs to be part of the transformation. That includes sales, marketing, finance, human resources, everyone has to be engaged,” Dyer says. “It also means every layer of the organization has to be completely involved, from the CEO all the way through to the people who are working on the production system making things happen, and everyone in between.”