Background:
Edwards Deming was a change agent of a unique sort (read more about him here: https://deming.org/deming-the-man/ ). Though an American, just after World War II, he worked in Japan, teaching process improvement techniques. These operational and managerial principles integrated well with prevailing Japanese philosophies and disciplines, vaulting Japanese manufacturing (particularly its automobile industry, I.e. “the Toyota Way”) to a world-leading position.
Because of his success, he was called back to the US in the 1980s to try to teach the Americans how to catch-up to their Japanese counterparts. His system and other imitations are identified by various names, such as Total Quality Management, Lean Business, or Continuous Improvement, but regardless of the name, one guiding principle is a focus on quality service through efficiency. Efficiency refers to doing more with less and cutting out waste. Waste can refer to wasted time, wasted money, wasted resources, or others (see 7 mudas (wastes) https://asq.org/quality-resources/lean or watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N89JJ991pE)
While there are many business concepts that have arisen from Deming’s work, one tool for managing process improvement is the Deming Cycle or Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle. This four-step process helps to organize a problem-solving endeavor, treating it like a scientific experiment. In this way, innovation is systematized.
The four steps of the PDCA Cycle will be explained:
Plan- research the problem. Sometimes, we tend to jump right to solutions, but Deming encourages us to learn more about the problem before we act. There are numerous techniques that can be applied to analyze the problem. Many of them focus on discovering the “root cause”, rather than correcting surface flaws with soft bandages that are just going to break again because we have not fixed the heart of the problem. Examples include asking 5 Why’s to get deeper into the cause and effect. With some idea of the underlying cause of the problem, you can then develop a plan to intervene to address it. It is helpful to think ahead to determine a metric of success that will be able to tell you whether the plan is working once you enact it.
Do- take action to intervene. In this step, you actualize the plan. Testing your plan is the way to attempt to make it better so that you can return to the original task.
Check- measure to see whether the intervention action is helping, worsening, or having no impact on the problem. Hopefully, you planned ahead in the namesake “plan” stage to know what metric you were going to use, because it may be too late after you acted to measure. Some things cannot be undone. Also, without a metric for success, you have no baseline to which to compare your effort, leaving you unable to determine whether you have improved (i.e., whether the intervention worked), in some cases.
Act- you act based on the results of the check. If the measure shows that your plan is helping, you act to do more of it. If the measure shows that your plan is worsening the situation, then you need to stop acting in that way and find a new course of action.
You may be asking, “Why is there a fifth step in a 4-step process?” The process repeats itself in a continuous manner, which is why it is called a “cycle”. The change agent returns to the planning stage to determine how to scale-up, scale-down, or reverse course, based on the results of the quality check. Even if something showed to be working, change agents seeking continuous improvement repeat the cycle over and over as part daily work in the search for operational excellence. P-D-C-A -> P-D-C-A -> P-D-C-A-etc.
