Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge with John Willis

A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Dr. Deming – after all, what is there to know – watch out for seven data points in a row above or beyond the average and do something – and that’s it! Except it’s not! 🙂

Over the years, Dr. Deming pulled together universal wisdom into a comprehensive theory of management called the System of Profound Knowledge. It uses four lenses to give us a clear picture of how we should proceed in our transformation:

1. Theory of knowledge (or how do we know what we know) – Don’t take things for granted. Ask yourself why your actions will produce the expected results and how you can test that.

2. Theory of variation (or how to measure what we know) – Don’t treat all events equally. Recognize if an event is just a common variation or a special case worth pursuing further.

3. Theory of psychology (or how to understand human behavior) – Humans are precious sources of ideas and agency, but they also come with biases and motivation. They are not machines, and we cannot treat them like machines.

4. Appreciation of system and System Thinking (or how do we understand the interconnectedness of the components inside the system) – Organizations are sophisticated organisms that generate value through complex interactions among various components. Don’t optimize particular components of a process in isolation. Instead, optimize the process as a whole.

These concepts are universal, and although they originated in the manufacturing industry, they are perfectly applicable to modern DevOps culture.

What is OpenAI, Really? – Gergely Orosz shares his view on OpenAI happenings.

Devops and Dr Deming’s 14 Points – In this 5-minute ignite talk, John Willis maps Dr. Deming’s 14 points for management to DevOps culture.

Intro to Large Language Models – Andrej Karpathy gives an excellent introduction to LLMs and where this field is headed.

Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer – Dan Heller shares ten principles that will make every engineer a true professional.

This book is a fantastic biography of Dr. William Edwards Deming. Through many known and less-known stories, John describes what kind of a person Dr. Deming was, how he collaborated with other important figures of that time, and how he came to the System of Profound Knowledge.