Most performance problems are produced by the system rather than by the people in it, so blaming individuals leaves the cause untouched.
Deming's red bead experiment made the point unanswerable: workers were rated, ranked and fired over variation produced entirely by the beads in the box. He later revised the ratio to 94/6.
In practice
- A warehouse with a persistent picking error rate replaces the two worst pickers and the rate is unchanged, because the labels are ambiguous.
- A school with poor results in one subject changes the teacher three times before anyone examines the timetable slot.
- Standing
- Deming later revised the ratio upward; the point is the ordering, not the number.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- How organisations behave when nobody is steering