" In my experience, the white space has always been where the action is. I have had the largest impact by acting upon the boundaries between components of a system, and have generally been able to do so (in part) by reinforcing the system aim."
Managing the white space means bridging the gap between organizational strategy and individual performance. In Dr. Deming's world, it means concentrating on the flow of products, paper, and information between departments, rather than simply on the activities within departments. For it is at the interface points, or the handoff points, that most of the action and the screw-ups occur.
Extending the Deming philosophy means coming to grips with the fact that many managers don't understand their business. They may understand their products and services, and even understand their customers and competition, but they don't fully understand, at any sufficient level of detail, how their products get developed, made and sold, marketed and distributed. In other words, they have a fundamentally flawed view of their organizations.
When Dr. Deming asked managers to draw a picture of their business, they would usually draw the typical organization chart, with its tiers of boxes and labels, showing the power relationships inherent in a series of functions. What is often missing as three key pieces: (1) the customers (2) a picture of the products and services provided to customers and (3) the sense of the flow of work. Because it doesn't show what they do, who they do it for, or how they do it, it is useless as a picture of the business.
In a small organization, this is usually not a problem in that everybody knows each other and the various functions. As time passes and things become more complex, and as the environment changes and technology becomes more complex, the managers view becomes a liability and instead of a vision, they develop 'organizational cataracts.' In other words, when managers see themselves and others vertically and functionally, they tend to manage vertically and functionally, and not as part of a whole system.
Subordinate managers begin to see others as enemies, rather than as partners. Silos are built around departments and suboptimization begins to occur. One of Dr. Deming's great contributions was the ability to visualize (using his organization as a system flowchart) the organization as an adaptive system, or a processing system, with the control mechanism (leadership) that interprets and reacts to the internal and external feedback in order to keep the whole system in balance with the external environment. It is this intelligent use of feedback that is at the heart of what has become known as the Learning Organization.
To extend the teachings of Dr. Deming, we need to spend less time on control charts and statistics and more time on understanding what it means to become a Learning Organization.
Frank Voehl (FVoehl@aol.com)