Once upon a time a very wise man called W. Edwards Deming, or Dr. Deming, wrote:

our system of make-and-inspect, which if applied to making toast would be expressed: “You burn, I’ll scrape.”

His point was of course that we in our organisations are far too used to tolerating results that aren’t up to the standards. What tends to happen then is finger-pointing, scapegoating and most of all trying to fix the symptoms.

So the cure then is, unsurprisingly, to get to the bottom of things and make sure we have systems in place that address the root cause(s) so that we don’t have to keep scraping the burned toast. While it sounds obvious, there’s very little evidence of this actually happening even to this day.

This podcast is about giants like Deming. We look at organisational effectiveness from different perspectives, call BS when its due and hopefully give you, the listener, some actionable advice in the process. Welcome, hopefully you enjoy!