Fear Invites Wrong Figures

From W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, 2nd ed. (MIT Press, 2000), page 94 (Chapter 4, “A System of Profound Knowledge”). The line sits inside the argument Deming made throughout his late career and codified as Point 8 of his “14 Points for Management”: “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.”

In a fear-based organization, presenting only good news upward is rational self-protection. Subordinates filter what flows up to keep their jobs, and leadership ends up deciding on figures that have been laundered for political safety.

Amy Edmondson’s 1999 study of 51 work teams at a manufacturing company defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, such as admitting a mistake or raising a concern. When Google studied 180 of its own teams in Project Aristotle, psychological safety ranked first among the five dynamics of effective teams it identified. Deming reached the same place a generation earlier from the statistical-quality angle: the climate in which people feel safe to raise problems is the climate in which leadership receives honest figures.