Feedback, Deming, and the Seven Deadly Diseases

I like the part about improving performance.  The word “feedback” has nothing to do with traveling through time, with focusing on the past versus the future.  You see, there is a cycle to life, the Universe, and everything.  Just look around you.  Lao Tzu understood that there pretty much isn’t anything that we can learn that cannot first be observed in nature in some form.  He looked to the natural world not just for inspiration, but for wisdom.  And he found it there, in spades.

Feedback is all about the cycle of continuous improvement.  Kaizen, as they say in Japan.  In art, Kaizen manifests itself in the form of an unrelenting, almost obsessive, desire to perfect the artistic rendering of a single subject.  Birds, for example.  I once read about a Japanese artist who spent his entire life sculpting birds…of every shape, size, color, material.  He sculpted in exquisite detail, and he was only able to do so because he was so dedicated to a cycle of continuous artistic improvement.

Our friend, Mr. Deming, capitalized on Kaizen when he took TQM to Japan.  We all know what happened there.  Unfamiliar?  How about Sony?  Or Toyota?  Honda?  Nintendo?  Simply observe the cycle in action.  

The process of delivering feedback to individuals inside and outside of the workplace has little to do with focusing on the negative aspects of the past.  If this is how misguided individuals and organizations have chosen to focus feedback, that is one thing.  The word and the process itself are something else entirely.  It is not unheard of, after all, for something to become perverted in the name of Profit.  Such is the case with feedback.

What feedback should be is a means of assessing what has occurred in an effort to improve what might occur in the future.  The obsession with the past as it pertains to business often is rooted not so much in the desire to assist in performance improvement of the individual as it is rooted in the need to control the cost of compensation.  By searching the past for the “gotcha” moments that allow for a lower performance evaluation thus lower merit increase, feedback has become more a weapon than a tool.  

Mr. Deming identified “Seven Deadly Diseases” which he believed would undermine any organization’s attempts at improvement.  In fact, he cited these diseases as sure-fire ways to drive an organization into the ground.  I find the Seven fascinating because you can see their imprint all over the current economic disaster.  I also find them fascinating because I can just imagine how counter-intuitive they must seem to those vanguards of the Old Economy who simply cannot let go of a model of leadership that, I believe, simply will not work in the years and decades to come.

I will not give up use of the word “feedback.”  I know what it means.  I know what the intent behind it is.  I know what my intent is for those I am entrusted to lead and for the organization in which I lead.  I will honor the cycles in nature and continue to search for them in my daily life.  This philosophy has served me well over the years, and I would do well not to abandon it.  And I will remember those diseases.  They will not dissuade me from doing what is right, no matter how insidiously pervasive they may be.

In case you are interested, here are Deming’s Seven Deadly Diseases:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose.
2. Emphasis on short-term profits.
3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance.
4. Mobility of management.
5. Running a company on visible figures alone.
6. Excessive medical costs.
7. Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees.