I cannot recall any place where Deming said that executives and managers
were to 'blame'. I can think of many instances where he talked of their
roles and responsibilities in bringing about transformation. My sense of
one of the core aspects of his message was no fear - no blame (drive out
fear).
The no blame message was one of the difficult one we wrestled with in our
years of working to apply Deming's thinking in a UK Civil Service
Bureaucracy. Not only because people did a lot of scapegoating and blaming
at all levels (and ultimately we were answerable to politicians! - let the
reader understand) but because we all had a tendency to blame ourself.
Today I have been reading a stimulating book 'Seeing Systems' by ? Oshry.
and the whole top, middle, bottom relationships system is wonderfully
articulated in their. The key to 'breaking out of the dance' as he would
say seems to be linked to our ability to seperate blame and responsibility
- yes executives and managers are responsible and are in unique positions
to transform the whole system. Everyone can improve process - but
executives and managers have a perspective on the whole system which
should support that happening - they can develop processes to build shared
vision and clarity of purpose, they can put people together who can map
the system and work with stakeholders to identify and diagnose the issues
and priorities, they can make information and data available to support
strategic decision making.... but if they are not doing any of that I bet
they are not too blame - jst part of the system!!!
Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net
--Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>