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Who Should Read This
Anyone who:
- Keeps fixing the same problem every quarter and still calls it a “new issue.”
- Thinks reorganizing the org chart counts as solving a systems problem.
- Believes meetings about “alignment” are somehow the same as alignment.
- Suspects their company is playing organizational whack-a-mole but can’t explain why.
- Has noticed that today’s “solution” keeps becoming tomorrow’s “unexpected consequence.”
- Wants to stop treating symptoms and start messing with the machinery underneath.
- Is tired of people optimizing their little corner while the whole system quietly gets worse.
- Wonders why smart people keep producing dumb outcomes when working together.
- Has heard the phrase “systems thinking” and would like to know what it actually means.
- Has ever said “this shouldn’t be this complicated” and meant it.
Influenced Mental Models
Resonating Quotes
Quote
“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable. — Dr. W. Edwards Deming via The Fifth Discipline - The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
I’ve seen a lot of these interventions called out as problematic in other places, it was just interesting to see Deming lump them into one shared pile of crap.
Quote
“The relationship between a boss and subordinate is the same as the relationship between a teacher and student. The teacher sets the aims, the student responds to those aims. The teacher has the answer, the student works to get the answer. Students know when they have succeeded because the teacher tells them. By the time all children are 10 they know what it takes to get ahead in school and please the teacher—a lesson they carry forward through their careers of “pleasing bosses and failing to improve the system that serves customers.”
— Dr. W. Edwards Deming via The Fifth Discipline - The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
I think this is really describing a friction, one that I think I definitely struggled with early in my career. I’ve decided to name him Approval Seeking. In my first years out of college, I think I had this belief that my bosses had all the answers and I was very much waiting for them to tell me what to do. Later in my career, this shifted a bit to me creating my own job description so to speak, but initial attempts were very focus on Proxy Metrics or what others thought I should be doing and not what would really change the system.
To Do
- Influenced Mental Models
- Resonating Quotes
- Book in Miranda-ese
- What problem this book helped me see — explained the way I’d tell a coworker over coffee.