“Ruined by ‘Best Efforts’”
When W. Edwards Deming famously said, “We are being ruined by ‘best efforts,’” he was conveying the idea that simply striving to improve—even with laudable effort—can actually have the opposite outcome. How can this be? How could good intentions and diligent work ever possibly sabotage us? Well, they do all the time.
From antiquity to the late 19th century, bloodletting was the most common medical practice performed by doctors. So even as little as 120 years ago, a good physician working faithfully towards curing a patient, would actually do more harm than good with these efforts. No matter how carefully and diligently he worked or how much he desired improvement, he was in fact not helping, but hastening the demise of his patient.
Today, we hold onto some business, management, or improvement ideas that are as false and destructive as bloodletting. We’re taught them in our schools; we’re rewarded by our bosses when we use them; they’re canonized as “common sense.” When problems arise, we diligently employ these approaches—and they always do more harm than good.
Here’s a great example of how “best efforts” applied toward a supposedly true idea can actually harm improvement. The idea is often held that quality is achieved when part or product characteristics comply with their allowable tolerances. Like football goalposts, the prevailing wisdom is that as long as the part characteristic lands somewhere within the goalposts—even if it bounces off the post and barely goes in—then it is a quality part. (In reality, a customer’s experience of quality comes when the part characteristic hits an ideal, single target value—the imaginary line down the center of the goalposts. The further the process or part deviates from this ideal target, the more the quality of the process or part degrades, even when it’s still within the allowable tolerance!) So when a company exerts its “best efforts” towards getting parts to land within the goalposts, they actually start to see overall improvement worsen! Rework and other labor costs go up, cycle times get longer, variation increases, product performance degrades, margins erode, etc. All this in spite of the “best,” hardest, most diligent, and most aggressive work. (You can read the right way to approach this in my blog posting, Quality Beliefs Determine Improvement Behavior.) Example after example can be given of similar “best efforts” accelerating a company’s demise.
Deming also said, “It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.” That is the key: first knowing what, in truth, actually works and then applying diligent effort towards that end. Just over a century ago, knowledge of how disease spreads forever changed the medical world. True understanding quickly ended the teaching and practice of bloodletting.
The way to improve a business is to seek out the truly better way, to question prevailing wisdom and “common sense.” The better way, the true principles, the superior concept—may not seem appropriate or right or popular. Yet truth is truth and stands above opinion. Our task is to first seek out the truth, and then put in the hard work to achieve greatness!
Tags: best efforts, bloodletting, Deming, hard work, truth
