Science Quote by W. Edwards Deming

Deming’s line lands like a lab result you can’t argue with: fear doesn’t just make workplaces miserable, it makes the data lie. The brilliance is in the word “figures.” He’s not talking about vague feelings or morale posters; he’s indicting the supposedly hard stuff - counts, targets, KPIs, defect rates, forecasts. When fear enters a system, measurement stops being a mirror and becomes a weapon, and people respond the way humans always do under threat: they manage impressions, not reality.

The intent is managerial, but the subtext is moral. Deming is warning leaders that intimidation is a form of epistemic sabotage. If jobs, status, or bonuses hinge on numbers, the numbers will be curated. Errors get hidden, bad news gets delayed, definitions get massaged, and “improvement” becomes a theatrical performance aimed upward. Fear creates a market for convenient statistics, and every layer of hierarchy becomes both buyer and seller.

Context matters: Deming’s career sits at the intersection of wartime production, postwar industrial rebuilding, and the rise of quality management. His broader argument was that most outcomes are determined by systems, not individual heroics. Fear flips that logic: it pushes blame down onto individuals, incentivizing them to protect themselves rather than surface systemic problems.

It’s also a quiet rebuke to modern performance culture. Organizations love “data-driven” language, but Deming reminds us that data is socially produced. If psychological safety is absent, the spreadsheet becomes propaganda.