Get insights from “The World of W. Edwards Deming” by Cecelia S. Kilian

Cecelia S. Kilian was W. Edwards Deming‘s long-term secretary. She created this book which contains her memories, and many curated documents from Deming. I read this book with the Profound Deming Book Club and it made me think about why I am interested in Deming. The details of Deming’s life are interesting, however I am interested in him because I want the same things he did. I want companies to be successful businesses by continually improving the quality of their products and services. 

The most interesting chapters in the book are Deming’s notes on what he taught Japanese management in 1950 at lectures which he was invited to give by the Japanese Union of Science and Engineering. The book includes notes on his lecture at Mt. Hakone. If I understand the history of the idea I understand the idea more deeply. I found it fascinating to read in the notes of lectures from nearly 75 years ago many ideas that are used today. These points are taken from the chapters about Deming’s 1950 lectures :

• Building quality into a product: “You can not inspect quality into a product”. ”You must build in quality” [1]
• The use of control charts to analyse processes, as is done in many industries today. [1]
• User testing, which he describes as consumer research.” Consumer research is communication between the manufacturer and users and potential users” of the product or service”. [3]
• The plan-do-study-act cycle. Today the plan-do-study-act cycle describes a software development team’s iterations[4] and “the Toyota Production System .. embodies the learning cycle of ” the plan-do-study-act cycle [5].
• New product development with the plan-do-study-act cycle. To begin the development “of a product on a pilot scale and to build up its production on a sound economic basis, only as fast as market conditions indicate, re-designing the product from time to time in the light of consumer needs and reactions”. Today, we would probably describe that form of new product development as ‘lean startup’.[6]

• Viewing product development as a system. He uses a flow diagram to describe production as a system, showing how  “improvement of quality envelopes the entire production line”[7]. The only key change I would make to the diagram to make it relevant to software development is to have data as input instead of raw materials.
• A non-blame culture. We should not blame an individual for a fault because the fault is probably common to the system. Fixing these common causes of faults is an important way to improve quality.[8]
• Quality attributes, which Deming called quality-characteristics. [9]

It is worth considering how engineering, including testing, would have been different without these lectures. Would the Toyota Production System have been the same? And if Toyota was not the same, would we have had lean and agile?

Another useful chapter in the book is an appreciation of Deming’s “friend, mentor and colleague” Walter A. Shewhart. [10]

The book also includes moving recollections of family life, childhood memories,  Deming’s sheet music, a description of being introduced to the Emperor of Japan, and accounts of his meetings with the Toyoda and Ishikawa families.

If you are interested in Deming as a person this book is for you because it enables you to get to know Deming as a human being. If you would like to learn from his notes on what he taught in Japan in 1950 you will find this book useful because it has some chapters which describe the lectures he gave in Japan.

References

[1] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Kilian (1992, p70)

[2] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Kilian (1992, p63)

[3] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Kilian (1992, p67)

[4] Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland (2015, p36)

[5] The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker (2004, p263)

[6] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Kilian (1992, p69)

[7] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Deming (1992, p24)

[8] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Deming (1992, p80)

[9] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Deming (1992, p62)

[10] The World of W. Edwards Deming by Cecelia S. Deming (1992, p87)