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I imagine it was a carnival of carnivorous and carnal delight. The good folks at the WHO made an honest mistake. After all, the Western education system stresses analytical, deterministic thinking. In this case, it led to this line of reasoning:

1. Malaria is bad in Borneo.

2. Malaria is carried by mosquitoes.

3. DDT kills mosquitoes.

4. Therefore, we should use DDT to kill the mosquitoes in Borneo.

Cats killing rats and therefore keeping typhus at manageable levels is what Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, calls a balancing feedback loop. However, when the cat population was out of balance, the natural order of things oscillated, creating what she describes as an overshoot of a reinforcing feed-back loop.

If the WHO had embraced non-deterministic thinking, they would have taken a much wider view of the problem. The opposite of analytic thinking is systems thinking (a.k.a. appreciation of a system): the ability to see how one thing is part of a larger, connected system. Someone who approached the ecosystem as a system might have thought along these lines:

1. Malaria is bad in Borneo.

2. Malaria is carried by mosquitoes.

3. DDT kills mosquitoes . . . but what else could it kill?

4. What else would spraying DDT on the inside of longhouses affect?

5. Do we have enough information to make an overall decision?

6. We should hold back until we can be reasonably sure we’re going to make things better and not worse for the people of Borneo.

The WHO focused only on the immediate problem and failed to consider how one “solution” might trigger a chain reaction. They failed to see the whole system. This is exactly what I meant earlier about Profound Knowledge: profound change requires Profound Knowledge, and one of the tenets of Profound Knowledge is systems thinking, an ability to see the situation in its greater context.

Determinism and analytical thinking break down a problem into tiny pieces, whereas non-determinism and systems thinking look at a problem’s bigger picture.

Analytical thinkers say, “Mission accomplished. Now, let’s go home.”

Systems thinkers say, “What were the results? Now, let’s make it even

better.”

This was bleeding-edge thinking when a sixteen-year-old’s train rolled into Laramie, Wyoming. “The Professor” was going to college.

The Professor Becomes the Student

Ed, as he would come to introduce himself, was used to shouldering a heavy load. He expected things to be no different at the University of Wyoming. In fact, he decided to major in electrical engineering. Electricity at the time was still at the forefront of technological progress, so this was like majoring in artificial intelligence or quantum computing today.

As he studied electrical engineering over the next four years, he supported himself by working as a janitor, shoveling snow, and cutting ice. He also cut railroad ties and worked at a dry cleaner. At some point, he was a soda jerk serving up malted milkshakes. On top of working and studying, he also sang in a church choir and played the piccolo in the university’s marching band. This blue-collar work ethic as well as his continued pursuit of service and the arts were a recurring pattern throughout his life. Ed was self-sufficient yet always found time to help those in need.

Ed graduated in four years but stayed for a fifth to study mathematics before enrolling at the University of Colorado for a master’s in physics and mathematics. After he graduated with his master’s in 1924, one of his instructors encouraged him to continue with his studies, perhaps at Yale. He moved to New Haven, where, three years later, he would earn his PhD in mathematical physics, the basis of probabilities and statistics and the backbone of non-deterministic thinking.

The 1920s were an exciting time for scientific discovery. The year Ed received his PhD, the fifth Solvay Conference on Physics was held. The subject was electrons and photons. In attendance were some of the most famous names in science to this day, including Marie Curie, Edwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg. The conference spawned an explosion in scientific thought and discovery based on non-determinism.

Non-determinism played a crucial role in shaping Deming’s worldview and began to lay the foundations for his System of Profound Knowledge. For one, it taught him that long-established and long-held beliefs weren’t necessarily true; the entire structure of the physical world was being rethought and reexamined.

Second, it showed him that the underpinnings of our very existence are random. That idea of randomness would be born out through his fascination with statistics, which in turn would inform his understanding of variation (the second element in the System of Profound Knowledge).

Third, it taught him to look beyond black-and-white cause and effect. It forced him to look at problems as multifaceted, complex systems, where changing one factor might have far-reaching, and unintended, consequences. This was the beginnings of his understanding of the fourth element of Profound Knowledge: Systems Thinking.

But before we go forward, we need to rewind briefly. During the two summers bracketing Yale’s academic calendar, Ed Deming—a university faculty member with a bachelor’s in engineering, a master’s in physics and was working on a PhD—supported himself and his wife (he’d married a schoolteacher, Agnes, in 1923), as ever, by working.

Then, Ed took an internship in a Chicago sweatshop: Hawthorne Works.

Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge - How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future - Part 1 - Chapter 2: The Jungle in Paradise

All that remains of one of the greatest industrial sites in US history is a stone tower at the corner of Cicero Avenue and Cermak Road just outside Chicago. Few realize its “story is nothing less than the story of the rise and fall of urban industrial America in the twentieth century.”

In the early 1900s, Hawthorne Works was a large factory complex of the Western Electric Company, producing large quantities of telephone equipment. But it was also the Silicon Valley of its time, a hub of innovation, the home of cutting-edge technology, and the object of national fascination. Hawthorne Works played a crucial role in the history of manufacturing as well as in Deming’s own development, shaping the foundation of his ideas that would, decades later, change the world.

Hawthorne Works

Hard work was a fact of life in Rose Cihlar’s immigrant family. Although she was born in Chicago in 1903, her parents were born in Bohemia (before the region became part of the Czech Republic) and immigrated to the US shortly before the turn of the century. They settled down in the Czech-Slovak immigrant community outside Chicago in Hawthorne (now swallowed up by the township of Cicero).

We don’t know when Rose began working, but we do know that in 1919 (making her sixteen years old at the time) Rose Cihlar worked as an assembly line inspector at a nearby factory. Just down the road sat Chicago’s famous meatpacking district, the subject of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published thirteen years prior, which exposed the harsh working conditions and unsanitary environment of such sweatshops.

Hawthorne Works encompassed one hundred buildings and stretched over two hundred acres. It contained over five million square feet of workspace and was known as the Electrical Capital of America. By the time Rose worked there, Hawthorne had become the center of the next great technological advancement: the telephone.

While the discovery of electricity a hundred years earlier was seen as magical, the invention of telephony was seen as close to miraculous. Sure, lightbulbs were an upgrade from candles, but a telephone . . . well, there had never been anything like it. Before the telephone, if a beloved aunt went to live with family out West, you may not ever see or hear from her again; it wasn’t called the Wild West for nothing. You could write letters, but that was it. And it could take months for the letters to travel back and forth, or they might just get lost along the way.

The telephone, on the other hand, made it possible to pick up a device and hear your aunt’s voice instantly. You could have a conversation as if she were sitting across the table from you sharing a pot of coffee. It may seem trivial to us today, but it was nearly unimaginable for the average person at the time. Today, the city of Seattle stands for tech and coffee. Wall Street stands for finance. LA means movies. In the early 1900s, Pittsburgh as well as Gary, Indiana, stood for steel. Detroit was “Motor City.” And Hawthorne, Illinois, meant telephones. In many ways, Hawthorne looked like a company town, like those of Henry Ford’s car factories or Milton Hershey’s chocolate factory. In the modern era, Phillips Petroleum had Bartlesville, Oklahoma. When I worked as a programmer at Exxon in Houston in the eighties, the company seriously considered turning Conroe, Texas, into a company town. All workers who weren’t physically needed at the pipelines and plants would be relocated to Conroe, complete with housing developments and planned communities. Hawthorne had its own power plant, hospital, fire department, trolley line, etc.

Unlike the typical factory town, where every aspect of the workers’ lives was controlled by the company, at Hawthorne Works everything inside the factory belonged to Western Electric, the manufacturing division of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), but everything outside the factory was privately owned, privately financed, and privately organized. The employees even had their own sports teams, allowing Hawthorne Works to sponsor them. More importantly for Rose Cihlar, employees created their own savings and loans clubs to lend money to their peers to build their own homes and buy their own cars, allowing them to build personal wealth. No doubt this played an important role in Rose’s ability to later send her son, Gene Cernan, to Purdue. Gene would go on to become commander of the final Apollo mission to the moon.

In the typical company town, employees didn’t have power over their own lives and future. Workers were more or less dependent family members of a massive family business. A few patriarchs at the top dictated the lives of everyone else.

The difference at Hawthorne arose from Western Electric’s approach to its workers, an approach that was considered revolutionary at the time. Workers got not only vacations but paid vacations, not to mention retirement planning and company pensions. In many ways, the company treated its workers more like partners than peasants. It was a beautiful social experiment. And it worked.

According to one source, Year after year, Hawthorne’s workers turned out an endless stream of complex communications apparatus, engineered by the sharpest minds in the field and assembled by skilled craftsmen. . . . In its time, Hawthorne Works exemplified the “virtuous circle”: a win-win proposition whereby corporate success forged a bond of loyalty with its employees.

There was a sense of community and identity. Employees didn’t merely work on assembly lines. They built the telephones that connected the nation. The factory existed for a decade before the first successful transcontinental phone call was made between San Francisco and New York in 1915. The workers of Hawthorne understood the significance of the work that came out of their factory—and they were a part of it. And so too was W. Edwards Deming.

Deming experienced this esprit de corps firsthand while he interned at Hawthorne Works during the summers of 1925 and 1926. Though he wouldn’t fully appreciate it until after he left, the factory was a testing ground for his Theory of Knowledge (one of the four elements of his System of Profound Knowledge) and was led by the creator behind the Theory of Variation. Crucially, his time at Hawthorne gave Ed an appreciation for how human psychology affected a system.

The entire operation at Hawthorne was a masterwork of systems thinking. Without his internship at Hawthorne, who knows how different history would have been? Decades later, he would find the same kind of relationship between Japanese companies and their workers. There was a profound sense of pride. The workers at Toyota weren’t making just rivets and welds but the cars their neighbors drove. Products went out into the world representing Japan and helping to rebuild the nation. Japanese workers believed they were doing something that mattered.

Hawthorne was the seedbed for Deming’s understanding of Profound Knowledge.

The Makings of Modern American Management

Previous to Hawthorne, management styles were largely predicated on Tay-

lorism and Fordism. By the time Deming came to Hawthorne, both Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford had left an indelible imprint on how to manage workers. Ford’s genius wasn’t the automobile (that had already been invented) but rather the efficient assembly line. He spent countless hours creating production systems and then endlessly improving them. When he first began to make cars, it took a bevy of specialized craftsmen half a day. When he opened his new factory in 1913, it took only ninety minutes to create a Model T. The drawback for workers was that Ford saw them as inconvenient cogs in the machine. He sought to standardize operations to the point that a worker could be as interchangeable as any other piece of the system. Where Ford’s approach was driven by practical matters, Taylor’s approach was more scientific in nature, giving rise to the term “scientific management.”

In layperson’s terms, where Ford treated people like cogs in a machine, Taylor approached workers as if they were machines themselves—machines that could be optimized for maximum efficiency, given the right physical and psychological conditions.

Fordism and Taylorism were the mainstays of American management throughout the twentieth century. But at Hawthorne, Fordism and Taylorism found their first challengers. Beyond being an impressive industrial site, Hawthorne Works became a lab of sorts. “The Works’ bustling shops provided the perfect setting for testing new manufacturing methods, and company officials gladly served up employees as subjects for groundbreaking studies.”

That is, the workers became lab rats. Psychologist Elton Mayo conducted a social experiment at Hawthorne Works from 1924 to 1927 to prove the importance of people on productivity—not machines.

His social experiment measured the change in workers’ output at different levels of lighting. He found that any change in lighting increased employee productivity. However, he later discovered that the rise in output came from workers knowing they were being closely watched, not from how much light they had available. This discovery was dubbed the Hawthorne Effect, the act of subjects changing their behavior in response to being observed.

Two additional studies, the relay-assembly tests and the bank-wiring tests, followed Mayo’s illumination tests. Altogether, the studies assumed the label “Hawthorne experiments” and became the basis for the school of human relations. Deming referred to Ford and Taylor’s influence as “living in prison under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management.”

Today, we have shifted into the Knowledge Economy, where the most prized skills are innovation and creativity—the antithesis of Ford’s approach to management and a fundamentally different perspective than Taylor’s. And yet, the effects of Fordism and Taylorism can still be seen everywhere. To be blunt, this perspective is based on the idea that workers don’t want to work. That given the opportunity, they will shirk as much as possible and be as lazy as they can. There’s an assumption of underlying antagonism between “them” (the workers) and “us” (the managers).

In the middle of Mayo’s Hawthorne Effect studies, Ed rolled into town. He spent months researching electrical transistors. And that time left a lasting mark on Ed, ultimately leading to one of his four elements of Profound Knowledge, that of human psychology and motivation. His future views on management would stand in direct opposition to the methods of Ford and Taylor, providing an alternative to the standard way business “had always been done” in that time.