Deming's law
“You can’t measure it” doesn’t mean you can’t manage it.
There is a frequent misquote of this Law: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
The actual quote from Edwards Deming: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—a costly myth.”
The most dangerous part is that people see the word “manage” and assume it must be a quote about managing the performance of people.
It’s not. It’s about process.
Thus, many leaders make two errors: thinking they must manage only through measurements, and thinking they must manage people only through measurements.
Neither of those are so.
In practice:
More software engineering leaders need to know about the Red Bead Experiment.
The principle is simple: people cannot perform better than the system around them allows for.
As demonstrated through W. Edwards Deming’s famous experiment, it shows that individual performance is largely determined by the system and processes people work within.
The Red Bead Experiment reveals itself constantly in engineering organizations:
- Developers writing bugs because the testing system doesn’t catch them early
- Teams missing deadlines because estimation processes are fundamentally flawed
- Engineers producing low-quality code because code review processes are inadequate
- Teams having communication issues because information systems are broken
- Individual contributors struggling because onboarding processes are poor
When performance problems occur, the instinct is often to blame individuals - to assume they’re not trying hard enough or lack skills. The Red Bead Experiment reminds us that most performance issues are systemic.
Instead of asking “Why did this person fail?” the better question is “What about our system made failure likely?”
This is why the best engineering leaders focus more on improving processes, tools, and systems than on managing individual performance.
For more details, read:
W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, MIT Press, 1993 (3rd ed. 2018).
W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986.