The laser. Touch-tone telephones. Cellular telephones. Communications satellites. Radio astronomy. The first binary digital computer. The transistor. The C programming language. The UNIX operating system, which serves not only as the core of the laptop I’m using to write this blog post, but also the webserver where this blog is being hosted.  All of these inventions came from Bell Laboratories. There have been eight Nobel prizes awarded to work performed at Bell Labs.

Remember W. Edwards Deming from the Ferengi Management essay? His mentor was a guy named Walter Shewhart, who was instrumental at Bell Labs from 1925 until he retired in 1956. Here’s what his boss had to say:

“Dr. Shewhart prepared a little memorandum only about a page in length. About a third of that page was given over to a simple diagram which we would all recognize today as a control chart. That diagram, and the short text which preceded and followed it, set forth all of the essential principles and considerations which are involved in what we know today as process quality control.”

Deming called it the ‘Shewhart Cycle.’ Today we know it as PDCA, and it looks like this.

PLAN: Establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the expected output (the target or goals). By establishing output expectations, the completeness and accuracy of the specification is also a part of the targeted improvement. When possible, start on a small scale to test possible effects.

DO: Implement the plan, execute the process, make the product. Collect data for analysis in the following CHECK and ACT steps.

CHECK: Study the actual results and compare them to the expected results and document the differences. Look for differences in implementation from the PLAN and look for the appropriateness and completeness of the PLAN to enable the execution that’s happening next.

ACT: If the CHECK shows that the PLAN that was implemented in DO is an improvement to the prior standard, then that becomes the new standard for how the organization should ACT. If the CHECK shows that the PLAN that was implemented in DO is not an improvement, then the existing standard will remain in place. In either case, if the CHECK showed something different than expected, then there is some more research to be done, and that research will help you create a new PLAN.

This is a fundamental process for successful iterative change.

We’re Star Trek fans, so whether we realize it not this process seems very familiar to us, and it should. The PDCA/Shewhart Cycle is derived from a larger concept that’s responsible for more than just the cool technology from Bell Labs that I listed earlier. You’ve probably figured out the name of it already, but here you go:

It’s called the scientific method.

The scientific method is about 500 years old. The PDCA cycle is about sixty years old. The reason we keep using both of them is because they work.

I know that this essay has been pretty dry, but I need to show you something about a fundamental way that the PDCA cycle works in practice. It’s really important, and I promise that I’ll cover this and we’ll be done.

One of the most common complaints about STARFLEET is that we’re not really embracing the future. I know, because it’s one of my common complaints. The problem is even worse than that. In a lot of ways, we’re moving backward because we’re not iterating our processes. We’re not getting better.

A good example from my experience on the STARFLEET Communique: We tend to think in terms of getting the CQ done, not in terms of making the CQ better. We’ve been asking for articles for the CQ the same way we have for years. These processes haven’t changed. If you compare a recent CQ to a CQ from years ago, you’ll notice that it seems that our design and layout has gone backward. We have not established a standard, and then responsibly iterated to a higher standard.

Another good example is announcements: They’re simple E-mail messages in ASCII text. There’s no formatting, there’s nothing bold or italic. There are no images. No matter the content, the design and the formatting of these announcements have been the same for the past twenty years. I don’t think anyone has put a lot of effort into raising the standards and embracing a process to do so. But another common complaint is that STARFLEET doesn’t communicate enough to the membership. Sounds like a product that could really use a process and iterative cycle, doesn’t it?

It means not having to do everything all at once. We keep trying to do things the hard way, where we start from nearly-zero on everything STARFLEET does. We need to steer away from drastic change. Trying to make absolutely everything fantastic all at once is a recipe for disaster. Use the process. Make it a little better every time. Keep making it better. It’s the core of kaizen.

This process is one way to make that happen. You can use it all over the place, even at the chapter level. Chapter documents, event planning, recruiting… There are a lot of great reasons for why the philosophy of the PDCA cycle has been embraced over several different industries and disciplines.

That’s all for now. I hope I’ve given you something to think about!