At a QI conference last year a well-known speaker displayed a slide with a photograph of W. Edwards Deming (the ‘father of quality improvement’) with the caption – “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
I can’t find that Dr. Deming ever said that,….what he did write was – “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, a costly myth.”
Dr. Deming is 100% correct,….we ‘manage’ all sorts of things we don’t measure (and quite effectively at times). All us parents out there know that for certain,…..chefs and great athletes live that,.…..above all, accomplished artists (esp. poets) thrive on the unmeasured!
Dr. Deming wrote – “Hard work will not ensure quality. Best efforts will not ensure quality, and neither will gadgets, computers or investments in machinery. A necessary ingredient for improvement of quality is the application of profound knowledge. There is no substitute for knowledge. Knowledge we have in abundance. We must learn to use it.”
There is a whole lot in that statement from the pioneer who wrote the book on QI and walked the walk,….more on that in future AoWs.
Pseudodoxia means false, erroneous beliefs,……a brief, prescient 1945 JAMA Revisited editorial that rings oh-so-true today.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32720995/
A concise summary of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine report re: home births (which perfectly loops back to the 75 year-old pseudodoxia editorial).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32826023/
Joe Kaempf, MD
District VIII Member Extraordinaire
Portland, OR
Volume 12, Number 36