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The Knowledge System Podcast

The Knowledge System Podcast

Di: Michael Carr
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A proposito di questo titolo

 The Knowledge System Podcast explores how leaders can use systems thinking to create lasting organizational improvement. It translates the ideas of W. Edwards Deming and other thought-leaders into practical strategies for building smarter, more effective systems.

posts.knowledgesystem.comMichael Carr Economia Gestione e leadership Management
Episodi
  • Five-minute Deming: Innovation

    Five-minute Deming: Innovation
    Feb 25 2026
    Most leaders say they want more innovation. They ask for ideas, listen closely to customers, and push teams to ship faster. Yet the breakthroughs they’re hoping for rarely arrive. What shows up instead is a steady stream of incremental features—busy, responsive, and oddly unsatisfying.W. Edwards Deming challenged a deeply held assumption behind this pattern: that customers will tell you what to build next. He argued that this belief doesn’t make organizations more innovative. It quietly removes one of management’s most important responsibilities.When customer-driven becomes customer-designedBeing “customer‑driven” sounds unquestionably right. Leaders want to respect customers, respond quickly, and avoid building things nobody asked for. Over time, this mindset becomes embedded in roadmaps, prioritization rituals, and product reviews. Requests are collected, ranked, and delivered with discipline.Deming warned that something subtle is lost in this approach. Customers are experts in their own frustration, but they are not responsible for inventing your future. That work belongs to leadership—using theory, prediction, and learning.Innovation, in Deming’s view, is not a burst of inspiration or a lucky insight. It is management work. And like any other responsibility, it either gets designed and managed—or it slowly degrades into noise.A team that listened—and still missed itBrightwave Software sold workflow tools to mid‑sized operations teams. Internally, the company appeared to be doing everything right. Sprints were predictable. Support tickets were trending down. Feature requests were delivered faster than ever.Still, growth had started to flatten.Alex, the CEO, struggled to reconcile the dashboards with the results. Renewal rates were softening, but no one could explain why. The metrics were green. Customer satisfaction scores were stable. On paper, execution looked strong.“Everything looks healthy,” Alex said during one leadership meeting. “But renewals are flattening, and I can’t connect the dots.”Maria, the head of product, explained the team’s approach. Customer requests drove the roadmap. The most common asks were reviewed quarterly and prioritized carefully.“We’re doing exactly what customers ask for,” she said. “If something were wrong, we’d see it in the data.”That logic felt sound. It was also incomplete.As the leadership team talked, another possibility emerged. What if customers weren’t articulating their next problem because they couldn’t? What if the friction wasn’t tied to any single feature, but to how fragmented the overall experience had become as customers scaled?Instead of gathering more requests, the team articulated a theory. They believed customers were struggling with cognitive load—too many options, too many configuration paths, too much effort to keep work flowing smoothly.They designed a small experiment. One cohort of customers received a simplified, opinionated workflow that removed choices instead of adding them. The team predicted adoption would improve for new users and stall for experienced ones.The results surprised them. New users adopted the workflow quickly. More unexpectedly, experienced users did as well. Reducing choice reduced friction and freed up attention.The breakthrough didn’t come from asking customers what to build. It came from leadership taking responsibility for learning.Deming put it bluntly: “Does the customer invent new product or service? The customer generates nothing.” His point was not to dismiss customers, but to prevent leaders from outsourcing their job.Does the customer invent new product or service? The customer generates nothing.— W. Edwards DemingWhere good intentions quietly derail innovationMost organizations do not struggle with innovation because they ignore customers. They struggle because they confuse listening with leading.When roadmaps are treated as collections of requests, innovation becomes reactive by default. Teams ship faster, but learning slows down. Output increases while insight declines. Over time, the organization becomes very good at responding to yesterday’s problems.We often reinforce this pattern unintentionally. Requests, votes, benchmarks, and competitor features feel objective. They feel safe. They give leaders something concrete to point to when decisions are questioned.Deming put it plainly: “Experience without theory teaches nothing.” Without a clear prediction about how the system will behave, organizations accumulate activity rather than knowledge—and motion gets mistaken for progress.The result is frustration. Teams feel busy but ineffective. Leaders ask for more innovation while maintaining systems that quietly prevent it.Experience without theory teaches nothing.— W. Edwards DemingActionable TakeawaysThere is a more disciplined path forward, and it begins by reclaiming innovation as management work.* Separate customer input from ...
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    7 min
  • Five-minute Deming: Copying competitors

    Five-minute Deming: Copying competitors
    Feb 18 2026
    When pressure rises, leaders look sideways. A competitor simplifies an offer, tightens pricing, or adopts a new tool—and suddenly it feels irresponsible not to follow. After all, they’ve already tested it. The market seems to respond. What’s the harm in borrowing what works?W. Edwards Deming warned that this instinct is more dangerous than it looks. Copying competitors feels like learning, but it isn’t. It replaces understanding with imitation—and over time, it quietly erodes the capabilities that create lasting advantage.Looking sideways feels sensibleCompetitive awareness is often praised as strategic discipline. Leaders are taught to benchmark, compare, and react. When growth slows or margins tighten, this behavior intensifies. Decisions increasingly begin with familiar questions: What are they offering? How are they pricing? What tools are they using?Deming didn’t argue that leaders should ignore the outside world. He argued something more subtle—and more demanding: examples without theory don’t teach improvement. When you copy a result without understanding the system that produced it, you’re not learning. You’re guessing.The temptation to guess is strongest when results are hard to observe directly. Success is shaped by hidden conditions: workflow design, skills, decision rights, feedback loops, and constraints. Those don’t appear in a competitor’s marketing or pricing sheet. What does appear are surface features—offers, promises, and positioning—and those are the easiest things to imitate.A familiar storyAlex ran a mid-sized professional services firm with smart people, loyal clients, and a solid reputation. For years, growth had been steady. Then sales began to slow. Deals dragged. Clients hesitated.At the same time, a competitor started winning work with a clean, packaged offering. Fixed scope. Fixed price. Confident messaging. Prospects mentioned it repeatedly.“Everyone keeps bringing them up,” Alex said in a leadership meeting. “Clients say, ‘They make it simpler.’ We’re losing deals we used to win.”The pressure to respond was immediate.“They’re just repackaging what everyone else does,” Morgan replied. “We could roll this out in a month.”“If clients want simple, let’s give them simple,” Alex agreed. “Same structure. Same price points. We can’t afford to look complicated.”The firm moved fast—new packages, new website copy, new proposal templates. From the outside, they looked competitive again.Inside, things unraveled.“Delivery’s struggling,” Morgan said a few weeks later. “The teams keep escalating scope questions. The package assumes things we don’t actually control.”“But that’s how they sell it,” Alex replied, gesturing toward the competitor’s brochure on the table.“Yes—but we don’t know how they deliver it.”Deming warned about this exact trap: copying the visible example while ignoring the invisible system. The firm had copied the promise, not the capability. The packaging assumed standardized work, predictable inputs, and stable handoffs—none of which the firm had invested in.Projects began running over. Staff felt squeezed between rigid promises and messy reality. Clients noticed the growing gap between what was sold and what actually showed up.“We fixed the sales problem,” Alex finally admitted, “and created a delivery problem.”That pause mattered. Instead of doubling down—tightening enforcement, blaming teams, or discounting harder—Alex asked a different question: What theory are we operating under? What did they believe actually created value for clients? And what system was required to deliver that value reliably?The firm began studying its own work. Where projects slowed. Where rework came from. Which clients benefited most, and why. They ran small tests before changing external promises—clarifying scope boundaries, simplifying internal handoffs, and making client responsibilities explicit.“The competitor’s package wasn’t wrong,” Morgan observed. “It just wasn’t ours.”Over time, the firm rebuilt its offering around outcomes it could actually deliver. Sales stabilized—not because the firm looked like everyone else, but because its promises finally matched its system.Where leaders go wrongMost leaders don’t copy competitors out of laziness. They do it out of urgency. Comparison feels like action. It provides cover. If everyone is moving in the same direction, the risk feels shared and defensible.The trouble is that copying shifts attention away from the system that produces results. It encourages leaders to manage appearances instead of capability. Organizations become skilled at changing what they say—new offers, new pricing, new tools—while leaving how work actually gets done largely untouched.Deming captured this dynamic with a sharp observation: “What would some people do without their competitors?” When competitors become the primary reference ...
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    8 min
  • Five-minute Deming: Blaming the worker

    Five-minute Deming: Blaming the worker
    Feb 11 2026
    When leaders hear that most problems belong to the system, it can sound like an accusation—or worse, an invitation to lower standards. So nobody’s lazy? Nobody incompetent? That reaction is understandable. It’s also costly. The real question isn’t whether individuals ever contribute to problems. It’s whether leaders are aiming their time and energy at the place where improvement actually lives. Today we’ll explore why blaming workers feels decisive, why it so often misses the mark, and how a clearer way of thinking leads to better results.Why blaming the worker feels obviousW. Edwards Deming never asked leaders to take anything on faith. He asked them to study evidence. Yet his ideas are frequently dismissed as naïve because they seem to collide with lived experience. Leaders have seen missed deadlines, chronic rework, and visible disengagement. They’ve had hard conversations. They’ve replaced people—and sometimes things really did improve.So when Deming says that most problems belong to the system, it can sound like an absolutist claim that denies reality. It isn’t. What Deming challenged was a habit of mind: explaining outcomes by pointing at people instead of understanding the conditions that shape their work. When the same problems repeat across teams and across individuals, he argued, we are not observing human failure. We are observing a system doing exactly what it was built—and allowed—to do.To see how this misunderstanding plays out, consider a familiar manufacturing setting.Reconsidering where problems come fromMidwest Components manufactures precision parts for heavy equipment. Late orders have become routine. Scrap rates swing from week to week. Supervisors are worn down by constant firefighting.At the center of it are two leaders. Jack, the plant manager, came up through operations. He prides himself on knowing the floor and holding people accountable. Maria, the operations director, was brought in to stabilize performance and reduce chronic volatility.Jack is blunt about his frustration. “Look,” he says, “I don’t buy this idea that it’s all the system. I’ve been here twenty years. I know when someone just doesn’t care.”Maria doesn’t dispute that people matter. “I’m not saying people don’t matter,” she says. “I’m asking a different question. If we swap operators between lines and the problems stay with the line, what are we really seeing?”They review six months of data together. Late orders spike predictably at month end when schedules compress. Scrap jumps whenever a specific alloy lot is introduced. Training records show three operators rushed onto a new machine with minimal setup instruction.Jack pushes back. “So what,” he asks, “nobody’s accountable?”Maria draws a distinction. Accountability isn’t the same as blame. The patterns they’re seeing don’t belong to one person. They belong to how work is planned, supplied, and taught.This is the pivot Deming insisted on. In Out of the Crisis, he wrote, “The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or in service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to management.”That statement isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a diagnostic one.The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or in service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to management.— W. Edwards DemingMaria reframes the discussion in plain language. “First,” she says, “are things running the way they usually do? If they are, blaming the worker for random ups and downs doesn’t fix anything. Second, if something truly unusual happened—something you don’t normally see—then we treat it as a special cause and deal with it directly.”They chart downtime and defects. Most of what they see sits inside predictable limits. One incident stands out clearly: a machine was deliberately bypassed after a safety interlock failed.Jack agrees immediately. “That one’s on the person,” he says.Maria agrees too. “Yes,” she says. “And because it’s clearly unusual, we can handle it firmly and directly—without pretending it explains everything else that’s been happening.”Deming was explicit about this balance. “I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system (responsibility of management) 6% special.”That six percent matters. It includes negligence, misconduct, and genuine inability. But treating ninety-four percent as if it were six is expensive.I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up ...
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    8 min
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