"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing"
About this Quote
Deming’s line carries the cool severity of a lab protocol: curiosity isn’t enough; method is everything. The punch is in the quiet insult. If you’re not learning, it’s not because the world is stingy with answers, it’s because you’re being sloppy about what you’re asking it to reveal. That’s classic Deming - a scientist who made his name not by romanticizing “innovation,” but by engineering the conditions under which real improvement can happen.
The specific intent is corrective. He’s warning against the managerial habit of substituting activity for inquiry: measuring what’s easy, demanding quick fixes, mistaking data collection for understanding. “The right question” isn’t trivia; it’s an act of design. It frames the experiment, selects the signal from the noise, and determines whether results will be actionable or just cosmetically impressive.
The subtext is also moral. Bad questions waste people. They turn workers into targets (“Who messed up?”) instead of partners in diagnosis (“What in the system made this error likely?”). Deming’s broader project - quality control, systems thinking, the idea that most failures are process failures - depends on shifting blame into structure. Ask poorly, and you’ll “discover” exactly what you expected: scapegoats, comforting stories, dashboards that flatter leadership.
Context matters: Deming rose in a century intoxicated with production, then humbled by complexity. Postwar industry taught him that precision in inquiry beats brute-force effort. Discovery, in his view, isn’t a lightning strike. It’s what happens when the question is sharp enough to cut.
The specific intent is corrective. He’s warning against the managerial habit of substituting activity for inquiry: measuring what’s easy, demanding quick fixes, mistaking data collection for understanding. “The right question” isn’t trivia; it’s an act of design. It frames the experiment, selects the signal from the noise, and determines whether results will be actionable or just cosmetically impressive.
The subtext is also moral. Bad questions waste people. They turn workers into targets (“Who messed up?”) instead of partners in diagnosis (“What in the system made this error likely?”). Deming’s broader project - quality control, systems thinking, the idea that most failures are process failures - depends on shifting blame into structure. Ask poorly, and you’ll “discover” exactly what you expected: scapegoats, comforting stories, dashboards that flatter leadership.
Context matters: Deming rose in a century intoxicated with production, then humbled by complexity. Postwar industry taught him that precision in inquiry beats brute-force effort. Discovery, in his view, isn’t a lightning strike. It’s what happens when the question is sharp enough to cut.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Edwards Deming
Add to List
