Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

>Even in manufacturing, the application of statistical process control was never entrusted to the workers, but became a department of its own, with bureaucracy, OKRs, and elaborate software

That is wrong thinking. While you can go overboard with bureaucracy, the line worker doesn't have the the background (or time) to evaluate statistics. You need an expert in statistics at times to see if what looks like a pattern really is. Mean while the line worker needs to spend their time on what they are good at.

Trust the line worker is important, it just isn't a shortcut to people who really know specialized domains.

View on HN

Deming’s idea is that each line worker is responsible 1) for understanding and minimizing variation in their specific area of work, and 2) for speaking up when they have ideas on how to do that better.

It is management’s job to protect their ability to do that, and integrate the information from workers to make decisions about what to change next.

You don't need expertise in statistics to draw control charts. You might need that expertise to teach people to draw control charts, but not to draw them.

Line workers are the reflexes of the organisation. They can react to trouble before the central nervous system (management) is even aware that something has happened.

Deming taught statistical methods that regular workers could learn and use, mostly based on simple tables and pencil-and-paper graphing. It predates the computer age. And you can go far with those methods, or just a spreadsheet.

Fancy statistics get you in trouble anyway. If the effects are too weak to see in a graph, chances are there are more important things to work on.

The line worker has a canny instinct for the right answer long before the statistics are significant though.

Kinda what Gladwell talks about in Blink

Sometimes, but a few times those instincts are very very wrong. Blink is interesting, be sure to read the criticism though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink:_The_Power_of_Thinking_W... - it isn't clear that the book is correct.

In my experience, the line worker's instincts are to be trusted but verified. If we blindly follow every crisis from the line we'd quickly find ourselves in a pit. These crises need to be backed up with context and a sense of criticality as there are finite resources to work through problems, and solving one person's immediate problem on the line may have a crushing impact elsewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com