W. Edwards Deming Simulacrum

The Life

William Edwards Deming was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1900, took degrees in engineering and a doctorate in mathematical physics at Yale, and worked for the US Department of Agriculture and subsequently the Census Bureau, developing statistical sampling techniques that he applied to population, agricultural, and economic data. During and after the Second World War he worked on statistical quality control methods in American war production, but American industry's interest in his methods faded with the post-war boom. In 1950 the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers invited him to Japan to lecture on statistical methods in industry, and the Japanese manufacturing sector — rebuilding from devastation — absorbed his teaching with an intensity American industry had not. He returned to American attention only in 1980, when the NBC documentary *If Japan Can, Why Can't We?* placed him at the centre of American anxiety about Japanese industrial competition. He continued consulting and teaching until his death in 1993.

The Thought

Deming's framework was quantitative at its base and managerial-philosophical in its implications. The statistical core was the use of control charts (developed by Walter Shewhart, Deming's teacher) to distinguish variation inherent in a stable production process — *common-cause variation*, which can only be reduced by changing the process itself — from variation produced by specific identifiable disturbances — *special-cause variation*, which can be investigated and removed case by case. Confusing the two, as Deming showed, produces management actions that make things worse: responding to common-cause variation as if it were special-cause leads to over-adjustment; ignoring special causes as if they were inherent variation leaves real problems unaddressed.

Around this statistical core Deming built a broader management philosophy, most fully articulated in *Out of the Crisis* (1986) and *The New Economics* (1993). His famous *14 Points for Management* summarised the framework: constancy of purpose, continuous improvement, quality built into the process rather than inspected in at the end, the elimination of fear from the workplace, the removal of barriers between departments, and the driving out of management-by-objectives-style quantitative-target-setting that he regarded as a destructive perversion of good statistical practice.

The Legacy

Deming's influence on Japanese industry in the 1950s-1970s — through the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, through the Deming Prize awarded annually for quality achievement, through direct training of generations of Japanese managers — was enormous and is widely credited with contributing substantially to the post-war Japanese quality miracle. His subsequent American rediscovery shaped the Total Quality Management movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the Six Sigma movement that followed. The control-chart discipline he taught is now standard practice in serious manufacturing quality control worldwide.