Deming's 14-Point Philosophy
Deming's 14 points are a set of management principles aimed at ending fear-driven, inspection-driven, short-term management in favour of building quality into the process from the start.
Reach for this when…
- Quality problems keep surfacing at final inspection, after the cost is already spent.
- Staff hide problems because performance reviews punish anyone who reports them.
- Leadership rewards short-term numbers over the long-term causes behind them.
How to run it
- Set one constant purpose for the organisation and stick with it past the next quarter.
- Stop inspecting quality in at the end; build it into the process instead.
- Break down the walls between departments that never talk to each other.
- Drive out fear so people report problems instead of hiding them.
- Replace slogans and quotas with actual training and system improvement.
A worked example
Situation. Youssef El Amrani ran Amrani Auto Components, an auto-parts factory outside Casablanca, Morocco, where the quality team caught defects only at final inspection, after the parts were already built.
Applied. He picked two of Deming's points to start with: ending inspection-only quality, and driving out fear on the line so operators would flag a bad batch mid-run instead of hiding it.
Result. Defect catches moved from the end of the line to the middle of it, and rework hours fell because problems were caught while they were still cheap to fix.
The catch
Fourteen points is a lot to hold at once, and organisations often cherry-pick the comfortable ones, like training, while skipping the hard ones, like driving out fear, which means confronting how management actually behaves. Some points, such as abolishing annual performance ratings, are hard to sell to any HR department built around them.
If you keep the fear and just add the training, you've bought a slogan, not the philosophy.
Origin: W. Edwards Deming