If you need to change your organization, to make it more efficient and effective, 1 advise you to first get acquainted with the thinking of W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) and Russell Ackoff (1919-2009). I had the very good fortune to learn directly from both of these theorists who have contributed so much to our most advanced understanding of change leadership. During 1990-'93, Deming invited me to meet with him regularly to discuss leadership and change. Ackoff and I worked together for more than 20 years at workshops and on change projects. After World War II, Deming's teaching helped Japanese industry produce high-quality products and drive waste out of the system. In the 1980s, Ford improved quality by using his methods which evolved into the Six Sigma approach that has made American products more competitive. Although both thinkers came from technical backgrounds--Deming from statistics, Ackoff from architecture and operations research--both combined technical and psychological factors in their systems thinking. Both emphasized the importance of the human side. Although you can apply Deming's philosophy to any managerial challenge, his teachings about quality improvement, with emphasis on reducing variation, are mainly useful for designing processes for manufacturing products so they fit specifications, less so to organizing technical service and knowledge work. For example, Florida Power and Light applied the Deming principles to technical service and became the first non-Japanese company to win the Deming Prize. But after a few years, it had to backtrack and undo many of the prize-winning processes. I learned the reason from an FPL service technician who was made by the Deming experts to follow strict repair processes. Previously, service technicians had kept notebooks for different ways of dealing with service problems in different parts of Florida, such as large urban buildings, suburban houses and swampy rural areas. Once required to follow the quality processes and get rid of variation, they put their notebooks in their lockers. The result was to lower productivity and increase cost. A new CEO ended the program. What Would Deming Think? I learned about the FPL story after Deming's death, so I don't know how he would have responded to it. In one of our conversations, I did question the applicability of statistical process control to the knowledge work I was observing in my consulting, but Deming did not comment. In his nineties, he was interested in clarifying his theories, not revising them. However, he always emphasized that if errors were made in production, management should find out if they were symptoms of a faulty system rather than, as so often happened, immediately blaming the worker. Furthermore, because he believed that employees worked best when their intrinsic motivation was engaged, when they most enjoyed their work, he would have had to recognize that the quality processes were dampening the motivation of the FPL service techs. Social vs. Mechanical/Organic Systems Ackoff's theories helped me to understand how to design organizations with the built-in variability and interactivity of knowledge work. Ackoff described organizations where professionals produce new ideas and solutions for customers as social systems, contrasting them to mechanical and organic systems. He defined a system as a collection of interacting parts with a purpose. Each part should be evaluated according to how well it furthers the system's purpose, and the system itself can be evaluated according to how well it fits larger systems. Ackoff liked to give the example of trying to build a car with the best parts in the world, collected from different makes. Of course, you would have a pile of junk, since the parts were not designed to fit together. He would then point out that people in companies typically try to make their departments--engineering, finance, research, HR, marketing, design--the best in the world rather than the best in terms of strengthening their company's organizational system. …