Abstract - Quest for Global Competitiveness - Universidad de Puerto ...

The governance of our businesses, schools, and all the other organizations we encounter andparticipate in every day of our lives is, almost universally, the responsibility of people who do notunderstand (or do not accept) the work of Drs. Shewhart and Deming. The result has beenincalculable financial and social loss of which most people are completely unaware.Squandered improvement opportunities, lowered morale, institutionalized selfishness, confusionand resentment, lower quality product, longer hours, increased expense, lower productivity –these are just a portion of the legacy of accepted management practice. How could it beotherwise, in the absence of profound knowledge?Yet this wisdom has been readily available for many decades. Why has it not yet become theconventional wisdom? There are many contributing factors, including the aforementionedparadigm paralysis. Consider who, within an organization, has the power to change the way thatorganization is run; consider also that those same people are fully confident that they earnedthat power based on their own merits, thanks to the system of performance review thatrecognized their greatness and propelled them past their lesser colleagues – yet anotherinstance of the fundamental attribution error in action. How difficult will it be for those people justto change their own paradigms?The Semmelweis effect is a metaphor for the reflexive rejection of new knowledge thatcontradicts established and accepted paradigms. It is named for Ignaz Semmelweis, aHungarian doctor who suggested in the 1840s (based on observations he made in an obstetricclinic in Vienna) that mortality rates could be reduced by 90% if doctors washed their hands in achlorine solution before treating patients. His hand-washing suggestion was ridiculed andrejected by his contemporaries, who believed that the human body was filled with four basicsubstances, called the four humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood), which were inbalance when a person was healthy; and all diseases and disabilities resulted from an excess ordeficit of one or more of these four humors. Their confidence in this illusion remained unshakeneven decades later, when Louis Pasteur provided a theoretical foundation (the germ theory ofdisease) for the practice of hand-washing. In fact, most of a century passed between the timeDr. Semmelweis made his observations and the time when doctors began washing their handsregularly as a matter of course. Countless people suffered needlessly in the interim, butthankfully that is in the past.Almost a century has passed since Dr. Shewhart made his observations. Isn’t it time we beganwashing our hands of the illusions of the past?30