What I LEARNED FROM A MAN STANDING IN THE RIVER WAVING A STICK AT THE FISH

By Merit Smith
Vice President
Director, Health Care Practice

You might recall that I’m writing a three-part series of articles about Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s concept of “scientific management.” The last edition of the Nolan Newsletter had an article about “variation.” This article is about the other key part of what Dr. Deming meant when he said, “Practice scientific management: Use experiments.”

As a boy, I remember my father standing in a river in eastern Oregon, waving a stick at fish. After a while he would come back to camp with a nice mess of trout, and we’d have a fine lunch. I was so young that I thought you caught fish by waving a stick! Only later, after he was gone, did I realize my father was a master fly fisherman. And I learned too that there is a lot more to catching the wily native trout than simply waving a stick.

For my father, fly fishing was an art, science and ritual of craft and control. If you see the movie “A River Runs Though It,” you’ll get an idea of how serious fly fishing was in the Smith family. My father fished in the summer, but he thought about fishing all year. He read about it. He had books about bugs. He had a little box that we kept his fly tying materials in. And he received fly tying catalogs in the mail.

My father worked hard to teach me to fly fish. This process nearly ended an otherwise great father-son relationship. “If you stand too close to the creek you will fall in.” I did. “Be careful about what’s behind you so you don’t snag your fly on the brush.” Future archeologists will find hundreds of abandoned fish hooks along Oregon creeks. The most memorable thing I learned when fly fishing is a painful, but effective, technique of using a pair of pliers to extract a fish hook.

The key to my father’s mastery was his method. He never knew of Dr. Deming, but they both practiced Deming’s second principle of scientific management. He experimented.

When we went to fish the Cycan Marsh in late June, my father’s plan was to use the black midge. Based on his experience, the black midge had a good chance of being successful. When we arrived at the creek, he quietly walked up to it and sat down and watched the water and bugs for a few minutes. Here and there, fish were jumping for black bugs. So he fished his plan. A dozen casts in each little pool. Each cast a thing of beauty. If he caught something, great; if not, he moved on to the next pool. After five pools he stopped and thought about what was happening. He had fished five pools but hadn’t caught anything. There were black bugs on the water and fish were jumping, but not at his fly.

He went down to water level to see exactly what fly the fish are jumping at. After a close look at the river, he decided to try a smaller version of the black midge. In the next hour he caught a fish from four of the five pools. And we had a fine lunch.

When Dr. Deming talked about experiments, he talked in terms my father would understand: Plan – Do – Check – Act. My dad had a plan based on his experience and actual data. He did the plan, but it didn’t work like he thought. So he checked his results and changed what he was doing. Then he acted in full confidence that his experiment would produce good fishing and a fine lunch.

Plan – Do – Check – Act. It sounds so simple when we hear it in business school or a seminar. In reality, executives find that their managers don’t understand this simple idea. In American business there is tremendous pressure to do the big thing and make the big move, such as new product launches, new processes and procedures, and my personal favorite disaster-inwaiting — the large system conversion.

About 25 years ago, I was assigned to a direct marketing firm owned by a life insurance company. I learned under a master direct marketer, Dick Leahy. Every mailing was seen as an experiment, with the results carefully recorded. If we had an idea we would try it on a few thousand offerings and record the result. Does a white paper and white envelope yield better results than a white paper and blue envelope? Let’s see. If the result was better than the basic mailing, we mail it again with twice the quantity. Do it again. Again. Double up. Let’s use it as the base mailing next month. It was a great environment that was all about experimenting and learning. Our competitors never understood why our response rates were so impressive. It was an environment that Dr. Deming or my dad would have understood.

Encourage your managers and supervisors to try things. Is there a different way to do that? Could we try that on some of them? What happened? Show me your data, please. I want to understand what you learned. If you have a manager that tries something that is outrageously stupid, encourage the trying, see if they learn something. Deal with the stupid part later. If they are learning, they will understand the stupid part on their own.