ED - Rediscovering a WWII Statistician& Why We Need His Ideas to Survive the Digital Age
Preface
Ten years ago, I decided to write a book about William Edwards Deming. There were already twenty-five books about him at the time, but all of them were biographies. While researching Dr. Deming, I found some interesting stories that weren't directly about him. The stories are mostly based on his experiences and those around him, but most of these are in only a few of the books about him. Those books focus on his linear biography, methods, and ideas. To fully understand Dr. Deming's ideas about management, you need to know about the experiences that led him to develop them. His innovations have helped many organizations, including Apple, Amazon, the Obama reelection team, and US Homeland Security’s Operation Warp Speed. To write a complete biography of Dr. Deming, you need to cover his life's experiences in detail. Even today, many Americans do not know who he was, even though his work has had a significant impact on everyone.
I had just finished co-authoring The DevOps Handbook by the end of 2015 and although it contained a lot of Deming-inspired content, we never mentioned him. I fixed this mistake a few years later in another book I co-authored with Gene Kim called Beyond the Phoenix Project. I stepped up my research on Dr. Deming in preparation for Beyond. I wanted to write a book about him different from what had already been published. My goal was a book that told his story, rather than just being yet another biography.
I looked to Micheal Lewis’s and Bill Bryson's books for inspiration on how I wanted to structure my book. I like how Micheal Lewis writes stories, and Bryson tells narratives that teach you more than the title's subject. As I attempted to tell two parallel narratives—that of Deming’s life experiences as well as the development of his ideas—I wanted to use the writing style of the two brilliant authors. The surface story of my book defines Dr. Deming's human experience, while the underlying story illustrates how his life directly relates to his profound ideas. Let's use Micheal Lewis' book Moneyball as an example, in which the book purports to tell a story about the discovery of statistics and baseball, but the underlying story is that of the real-life character of baseball manager Billy Bean. I began to ask myself what if I wrote a book about William Edwards Deming? The protagonist would be Dr. Deming set against the backdrop of his discovery, Profound Knowledge. I would also add some Bryson-like tidbits of historical significance along the way—for example, a short history of tools and the history of quality.
One of the things you quickly learn about Dr. Deming is that, although he is not well known by the general public, the few people who know a lot about him talk about him in an almost cult-like fashion. I found a group of people who agreed with me that the more you know about the man, the more you want to know. I kept learning about him and eventually realized that his life journey led him to the concept he called Profound Knowledge. This is documented in his last book, published when he was ninety-three years old, the same year he died. The book was called The New Economics, and it explains the System of Profound Knowledge.
This alone is a fascinating story. Dr. Deming decided to write this capstone at ninety years old. He had learned a lot about human behavior in the twentieth century and put it all into his final theory. People who only know casually about Dr. Deming usually don't realize that he helped rebuild Japan after World War II when he was fifty years old. He also had an exciting career before going to Japan. When he was eighty, he started doing his best work; when he was ninety, he wrote his final book. If you have a distinguished career for sixty years and then at eighty you do your best work, then at ninety, you write your magnum opus? That's amazing. Many people ask me if it's arrogant to call his system profound, but it shows how determined Dr. Deming was to help others learn.
After the pandemic began in 2019, I realized that I had a great opportunity. Before the pandemic, I used to travel about two hundred thousand miles a year. But when all my travel vanished, I realized I was getting about fifty hours of wasted travel time back each month. So now was the time to do something with that time. Even though I had a lot of Deming notes and an outline of the book I wanted to write, I realized that I needed to reflect on my journey with Dr. Deming before I could begin. I attended a DevOps Days conference in 2011, and my good friend and mentor, Ben Rockwood, ran an open discussion session on Eliyahu Goldratt. Goldratt is the author of The Goal and The Theory of Constraints. At the time, I was starting to work on the DevOps Handbook. Some of the ideas in the handbook were also inspired by Goldratt, but he wasn't mentioned. I was reasonably familiar with Goldratt's work when I attended Ben's session. Gene Kim had asked me to review an early copy of his best-seller, The Phoenix Project. Gene recommended that I read The Goal before reading his book. After reading it, I also read Goldratt's Critical Chain, It's Not Luck, and Necessary But Not Sufficient. Let’s just say, I was all in on Goldratt. Ben suggested that many of Goldratt's ideas originated with someone called Deming. At the time, I did not know who Dr. Deming was but felt uncomfortable thinking that this new guy might shake my ideas about Goldratt. Ben challenged me to look at Dr. Deming's famous 14 Points. I found it easy to do because I just googled it. I realized that almost everything Dr. Deming was saying was the foundation for lean software, agile, and DevOps. It was even more amazing to know he wrote his 14 Points when he was eighty, ten years before those movements began.
It can be challenging to understand Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge at first. It is important to remember that Dr. Deming did not suffer fools and chose his words carefully. As he once said, "There was only one person in Japan with profound knowledge." There are two ways to interpret this statement. The first way is that he was the only person who knew how to help Japan rebuild. The second way is that a universal set of components make a set of profound principles that were yet to be codified into a single practice. I suggest that Dr. Deming meant the second way.
When you understand Dr. Deming's journey, you see how his experiences led him to his final writings on Profound Knowledge. It’s a complex system to learn made up of four parts. There’s the story of how he graduated with a degree in mathematical physics in the 1920s, a time when people were learning about a new kind of physics called quantum physics. He meets a mentor who helps him learn about the scientific method and understand the world better in his early career. This is done through the prism of a philosophy called Pragmatism. He called this the Theory of Knowledge. During World War II, he used his ideas on quality to help win the war, then used them to help Japan rebuild its economy after the war. In the 1980s, these same ideas became the basis for the American quality revolution. In his System of Profound Knowledge, he refers to these practices as the Theory of Variation. His life experiences and humanistic view of the world eventually led him to the Theory of Psychology as a third lens in his System of Profound Knowledge. In conclusion, some would call his Appreciation of Systems the fourth and final lens of his System of Profound Knowledge, but I feel it's more like a fourth discipline that combines all four. Rightfully this is based on what's called systems thinking.
Before writing a book, the writer should have a clear vision of what they want the reader to experience. I had an ambitious goal for my book. I wanted Ben Rockwood and my mother-in-law, Dixie, to enjoy it. Dixie doesn't have any IT experience, but she likes to read and learn. To achieve the Dixie effect, I added several stories about Dr. Deming of interest to her. Deming interned in a town outside of Chicago while he was in college, and down the street from where he lived, Al Capone owned a few speakeasy bars. I explain how a famous movie about a high-profile fashion editor might have benefited from Dr. Deming's wife in an entertaining story. My mother was a real-life Rosie the Riveter during World War II, using some of Dr. Deming's quality teachings. There is a story about a man who lived a real-life World War II resilience story that will blow your mind. I even include an aviation accident to help Dixie understand the complicated concept of systems thinking.
I knew writing Ed's story the way I wanted would be difficult. My closest friends were harshly critical of the first draft. As Steven King once said, you write the first draft for yourself and the second draft for your audience. I suggest you write the first draft for yourself, the second draft for your friends, and then make changes that will make it better so that other people will enjoy it. I hope you will enjoy the story I told and the book I wrote.
John “Botchagalupe” Willis
Auburn, Alabama
May 2022
