Control reduces variation but also reduces information.
— W. Edwards Deming
Past practices for engineering leaders.
Sampler
Three past practices worth starting with.
All practices
A good model enables you to be wrong faster.
— George E. P. Box
Without a theory, experience has no meaning.
— W. Edwards Deming
Systems drift when long-term consequences remain abstract.
— Albert O. Hirschman
Organizations adapt faster to pressure than to insight.
— Geoffrey Vickers
Control reduces variance at the expense of adaptability.
— W. Edwards Deming
Every standard carries an implicit theory of failure.
— Erik Hollnagel
Control reduces variation but also reduces information.
— W. Edwards Deming
Judgment improves when leaders decide what must remain uncertain.
— Frank H. Knight
What looks like a violation is often the only way the work gets done.
— Sidney Dekker
A system is never the sum of its parts; it is the product of their interactions.
— Russell L. Ackoff
Expert judgment requires accepting that some uncertainty is irreducible.
— Frank H. Knight
Every increase in efficiency increases vulnerability.
— Dietrich Dörner
Safety is not a component, but an emergent property of the system.
— Nancy Leveson
Every act of measurement disturbs the system being measured.
— Donella H. Meadows
Organizations often learn the wrong lessons from failure.
— Amy C. Edmondson
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
— John Gall
Organizations optimize what can be audited, not what matters.
— Jerry Z. Muller
The greatest source of error is the belief that one is not biased.
— Daniel Kahneman
Failures are rarely caused by isolated errors but by the unexpected interaction of multiple factors.
— James Reason
High reliability is not the absence of errors, but the presence of capabilities that detect and contain them.
— Karl E. Weick
Design is the art of arranging constraints.
— Charles Eames
A decision is a commitment to action under uncertainty.
— Howard Raiffa
The most dangerous failures are those that appear rational at the time.
— Barry Turner