I will start this off by saying that if you aren’t familiar with Dr. Deming’s Red Bead Experiment, please watch the abbreviated version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckBfbvOXDvU
I’ve been a participant in the Red Bead Experiment quite a few times over the last five years or so. I’ve been a Willing Worker, an Observer, I’ve done Quality Control and recorded results, and, more recently, I’ve been the dread Foreman. I’ve experienced it with coworkers, at meetups, and with company leadership. As most who have experienced this experiment, I’ve had many observations and insights emerge, sometimes long after the experiment is over.
The first time I was involved in the experiment, it seemed pretty obvious that “management by results” meant reacting to the inevitable Red Beads. I was a Willing Worker. I was excited and it seemed easy enough – I could do this job. The experiment beat me down within minutes – excitement quickly faded to that feeling in your gut of having let someone (or yourself) down. Logically, I knew that the difference between success and failure was a function of probability and luck, but inside, the scolded child in me rose up. It wasn’t just me either – the culture of the White Beads Company degraded, even to the point of snitching on coworkers for “not following the rules”, irrational pride over low Red Bead counts, the “best” Willing Worker’s impromptu “coaching” of other workers, and an emerging class system of “bad” workers vs “good” workers. Our once-jovial and pleasant Willing Workers quickly descended into a competitive, backstabbing, miserable bunch.
On future experiments, the subtle consequences of incentives began to emerge. As the Foreman, I once forgot to mention that all holes in the paddle must be filled. On Day 3, a clever Engineering Manager filled only 3 holes in the paddle with White Beads, effectively getting no Red Beads at all. This one was insidious. I fired that worker immediately (to his amusement), but thought about what he did long afterward. Under threat of punishment for a measure he had no agency over, he chose to control one of the only things he could – his exposure to failure. Instead of risking failure, he simply chose to produce less. Afterwards, I began to notice that this happens in real companies more often than we can imagine and is a major contributor to the waste of lost potential in our organizations.
After another experiment, I listened to a very experienced Foreman explain how he decided to fix the system by removing the Red Beads as they were picked up in the paddle. He continued to plot the control chart accordingly until all red beads were gone. At the time, I thought this was way cool (though presumably time consuming) and it took me until much later to realize what this really equated to. The Red Beads were coming from the Supplier, so, in the next shipment, you’d be back at square one and you’d have to remove them all over again. The system wasn’t “fixed” at all. Removing the beads in this manner, without thinking about how they got there in the first place, amounted to transactional busywork.
For years, I was certain that the point of the Red Bead Experiment was to help people understand that they have to fix the issues in their system first (ie get rid of the Red Beads). However, after further thought, I’ve come to some different conclusions. Namely, that:
The Red Beads were never the problem at all.
The Red Beads didn’t represent issues that had to be fixed – instead, they represented a tradeoff that had been made. The actual problem may be management’s unwillingness to accept the consequences of making that tradeoff.
The leadership at the White Beads company decided that it was worth it to buy a supply riddled with Red Beads, likely because the pricing was attractive. There may be very valid business reasons to make a tradeoff like this – sometimes a company just doesn’t have the capital. This kind of tradeoff may even be key to the business model itself – buy absolute junk at a really low price and then turn it into something amazing. The difference in the Red Beads experiment is that leadership was completely ignoring the tradeoff that they had chosen. And worse yet, they were managing like that tradeoff hadn’t been made at all and blaming the Willing Workers for it.
Remember our Foreman who removed the Red Beads from the paddle and discarded them instead of returning them to the container? That could be a valid approach to this tradeoff. However, we have now created in industry to remove Red Beads. Tradeoffs that result in friction to the business also have the tendency to create internal industries to prevent that friction from turning into a fire. There’s already evidence of this at the White Bead Company – Quality Control is focused on counting Red Beads. They’re not making sure that the White Beads are good quality, low in variation, or that they’re what the customer actually needed in the first place. If they chose to remove the beads, that activity would be part of this industry as well.
Industries will always pop up to manage the consequences of the tradeoffs you’re making – industries can be roles or duties. They can be the “fixers”, the Ray Donovans among us, who go around dealing with the fallout. The trouble with industries is that they tend to be myopic, highly focused in their devotion to covering up the consequences of the tradeoff. These industries also tend to grow and solidify. And because they rely on the existence of the tradeoffs in order to exist themselves, they can wind up being dedicated to maintaining those tradeoffs.
Tradeoffs are part of our everyday life and work. Back in February, I witnessed the consequences of a tradeoff at my own workplace. Nearly 6 months earlier, a decision had been made to trade off longer-term risk for the short-term cost and time savings in development. The only problem? That decision was filed under a heap of other tradeoffs that were promptly forgotten by everyone. In the end, our entire system went down for thousands of users. And even worse, a separate (but related) tradeoff caused the issue to be very difficult and inconvenient to fix. When tradeoffs are made unconsciously, their consequences will eventually surface and wreak havoc – the time will come when they make themselves visible, even when the most industrious and clever group is dedicated to holding them at bay.
As I continue with the Deming Study Group, some of my goals are to find ways to make tradeoffs visible to the organization as a whole and to uncover the friction that has been quietly but consistently invading our organizations. And perhaps most importantly, to help leadership make conscious decisions about the tradeoffs they’re choosing and to accept what those decisions mean for all of our Willing Workers.
Shifting Lean 