Without Seeing the Process, No Improvement

Paul Batalden, M.D., dated 13 November 1990, reproduced in W. Edwards Deming’s The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, 2nd ed. (MIT Press, 2000; first published 1994 by MIT Center for Advanced Educational Services), pp. 29-30, within Chapter 2 (“The Heavy Losses”). Deming credits Batalden inline at the end of the catwalk sentence: “The first step in any organization is to draw a flow diagram to show how each component depends on others. Then everyone may understand what his job is… Anyone needs to see the process as a catwalk, a flow diagram.” Batalden is a pediatrician known for applying Deming’s systems thinking to healthcare quality improvement.

The claim is elemental: visibility is the precondition for improvement. You cannot operate on a process you cannot describe. The mechanical fix Batalden offers, which Deming adopted and taught, is the flow diagram: every input, step, handoff, and output on one page. In the surrounding chapter, “the process” spans departments and suppliers, so the fuller reading is that until people can see the connected sequence, they cannot improve it.

Without that picture, what Deming calls suboptimization sets in. Each component is judged on its own performance, and a step that runs faster or cheaper in isolation can still degrade the whole. Sales hits quota by promising deliveries operations cannot ship. Procurement saves money on a part assembly later has to rework. The component looks fine; the system performs worse. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints and Ackoff’s systems work both rest on the same precondition Deming sets out: you only know which step is the bottleneck once the sequence is drawn, and you can only reason about how parts interact once those interactions are visible.