Category Archives: Data

Quality is a Journey to Excellence – Improving the System

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Curiouscat

Quality is a Journey to Excellence is a 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the third section of a the seminar on improving the system. Deming has this pithy way of putting a lot of the problems along those lines and what he says is: “Lets play American industry and we’ll make toast. I’ll burn and you scrape.” These links provide more details on ideas he … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Systems thinking, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

In Praise of Data-Driven Management (AKA “Why You Should be Skeptical of HiPPO’s”)

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Curiouscat

Guest post by Justin Hunter, originally published 18 August 2009. Jeff Fry recently linked to a fantastic webcast in Controlled Experiments To Test For Bugs In Our Mental Models. I would highly recommend it to anyone without any reservations. Ron Kohavi, of Microsoft Research does a superb job of using interesting real-world examples to explain the benefits of conducting small experiments with web site content and the advantages of making data-driven decisions. I firmly believe that the power of applied … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Design of Experiments, IT, Management, Psychology, Quality tools, Software Development, Statistics | Tagged , , , ,

Remembering Brian Joiner

Posted on October 16, 2023 by John Hunter

I knew Brian Joiner as a child growing up in Madison, Wisconsin. He and my father worked together and our families spent time together. As I grew I interacted with Brian in my professional life and that relationship made my life better. We often saw things similarly. We could see things that we thought should improved and liked to focus on actually making improvements. Doing that is quite a bit more difficult than just pointing out all the problems that … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Interview of Bill Hunter: Statistical Variability and Interactions

Posted on July 25, 2022 by John Hunter

Interview of Bill Hunter on Statistical Variability and Interactions by Peter Scholtes, 1986: In this interview Bill Hunter describes how results are made up of the impact and interactions of many variables. Many of those variables we don’t know about or account for. What we normally do is try to figure out the most important variables for processes and then experiment with those variables to find the best options given what we are trying to achieve. Often the description of … Continue reading →

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Interview of Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes on Better Management Practices

Posted on October 26, 2021 by John Hunter

Interview with Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes (listen to the interview) on a Public Affair, National Public Radio about improving management practices in the USA. The interview is over 30 years old now but the better management ideas are as true today as they were then. Sadly we have not improved management practices based on these ideas very much. There have been improvements in how many organizations are managed but those improvements are so slow that fundamental problems … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Process improvement, Public Sector, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Factfulness – The Importance of Critical Thinking

Posted on June 4, 2019 by John Hunter

Factfulness by Hans Roling (of TED talks and Gapminder charts fame) is an exceptionally good book. It provides great insight into how to think more effectively and how to understand the reality of the world we live in (versus the large distortions so common in most people’s view of the world). Today the people living in rich countries around the North Atlantic, who represent 11 percent of the world population, make up 60 percent of the Level 4* consumer market. … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Data, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

My Willing Worker Award

Posted on January 22, 2019 by John Hunter

Here is an image of the employee of the quarter award I received from Bill Scherkenbach. I have received other awards and I don’t think those awards were given with any more understanding of the contributions to results due to the management systems in those cases than was shown when giving me this award. Even knowing how little impact I could make on the results I was still happy to receive this award: psychology is not always (often? ever?) sensible. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , ,

Poorly Stratified Data Leads to Mistakes in Analysis

Posted on April 18, 2018 by John Hunter

Stratification can help provide insight into the nature of the real world situation. Determining what is a sensible conclusion to draw and what is not is aided by an understanding of statistics and expert knowledge of the situation the data is drawn from. Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t Expect Short Quotes to Tell the Whole Story

Posted on July 25, 2017 by John Hunter

When people try to use a short quote as an accurate encapsulation of a management concept they will often be disappointed. It is obvious that Dr. Deming believed that organizations failed to use data effectively to improve. He proposed that organizations needed to change and use data effectively in order to thrive over the long term. He believed that greatly increasing the use of data in decision making would be useful. He also believed there were specific problems with how … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, quote, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Importance of Critical Thinking and Challenging Assumptions

Posted on July 12, 2017 by John Hunter

There are many factors that are important to effectively practice the management improvement ideas that I have discussed in this blog for over a decade. One of the most important is a culture that encourages critical thinking as well as challenging claims, decisions and assumptions. I discussed this idea some in: Customers Are Often Irrational. There is a difference between saying people wish to have their desires met and people act in the manner to maximize the benefits they wish … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Process improvement, Psychology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Technological Innovation and Management

Posted on June 7, 2017 by John Hunter

Technological innovation brings great opportunity for improving results and our quality of life. But transforming potential benefits into real results comes with many challenges. ASQ has asked their Influential Voices to explore the idea of the fourth industrial revolution: “this new era is founded on the practical use of technological innovations like artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT).” For many years GMs huge investment in robotics in the 1980s ($billions) has been an example of … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Innovation, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

All Data is Wrong, Some is Useful

Posted on September 22, 2015 by John Hunter

From my first blog post on this blog – Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data we often fail to explore whether changes in the numbers (which we call results) are representative of the “true results” of the system or if the data is misleading. Data is meant to provide us insight into a more complex reality. We need to understand the limitations when we look at “results” and understand data isn’t really the results but a representation we … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Transforming a Management System – A Case Study From the Madison Wisconsin Police Department

Posted on March 10, 2015 by John Hunter

This post in an excerpt from The Quality Leadership Workbook for Police by Chief David Couper and Captain Sabine Lobitz (buy via Amazon). Transformational Steps A Case Study Madison, Wisconsin (1981-1993) Step 1: Educate and inform everyone in the organization about the vision, the goals, and Quality Leadership. This step must be passionately led by the top leader. Begin discussion with top management team and train them. Discuss and ask employees; get feedback from them. Share feedback with the chief … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Deming, Management, Respect, Statistics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Out of Touch Executives Damage Companies: Go to the Gemba

Posted on August 20, 2014 by John Hunter

When your customer service organization is universally recognized as horrible adding sales requirements to customer service representatives jobs is a really bad practice. Sadly it isn’t at all surprising to learn of management doing just that at our largest companies. Within a system where cash and corruption buys freedom from market forces (see below for more details) such practices can continue. Such customer hostile practices shouldn’t continue. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue. And even though the company’s cash has … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Management, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

George Box Webcast on Statistical Design in Quality Improvement

Posted on June 11, 2014 by John Hunter

George Box lecture on Statistical Design in Quality Improvement at the Second International Tampere Conference in Statistics, University of Tampere, Finland (1987). Early on he shows a graph showing the problems with American cars steady over a 10 years period. Then he overlays the results for Japanese cars which show a steady and significant decline of the same period. Those who didn’t get to see presentations before power point also get a chance to see old school, hand drawn, overhead … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Innovation, Management, Process improvement, Psychology, Quality tools, Science, Statistics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Taking Risks Based on Evidence

Posted on November 14, 2013 by John Hunter

My opinion has long been that football teams are too scared to take an action that is smart but opens the coach to criticism. So instead of attempting to make it on 4th down (if you don’t understand American football, just skip this post) they punt because that is the decision that is accepted as reasonable. So instead of doing what is wise they do what avoids criticism. Fear drives them to take the less advantageous action. Now I have … Continue reading →

Posted in Competition, Creativity, Data, Innovation, Management, Psychology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments