Do not tamper

Last updated on March 4, 2021

You feel the need to intervene whenever there is a negative change in whatever you are interested in. This knee jerk reaction ignores the distinction between a fluctuation and a real change. Often it leads to unintended consequences like the bullwhip effect.

In Out of the Crisis, Deming describes two types of mistakes while assessing a variation: (1) ascribing it to a special cause when in fact the cause belongs to the system (common cause), (2) ascribing it to the system when in fact the cause was special.

With no understanding of Systems we will tend to treat everything as a special cause and do something to fix a problem that really wasn’t a problem.

Understand the variance of the system and do not tamper if the variation is within bounds.

Don’t just do something, sit there. Wu wei.

References: http://podcast.deming.org/deming-lens-46-the-art-of-tampering

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Funnel Experiment

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Funnel Experiment

Setup: drop balls through a funnel, hit target

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