Unstable Systems
Stable vs. Unstable Systems: What the Red Beads Can Teach Us
When W. Edwards Deming introduced the red bead experiment to his management seminars, he was not simply demonstrating how beads get drawn from a paddle. He was exposing something far more consequential: most managers do not know what kind of system they are managing. They do not know whether the variation they see is the normal voice of the process or a signal that something has genuinely changed. Without that knowledge, every decision they make is, at best, a guess.