Science Quote by W. Edwards Deming

Exactness in time is a mirage. Clocks disagree, measurements carry error, and real processes fluctuate. Saying something happened at a precise instant is less a fact than a convention. W. Edwards Deming used this idea to challenge managers who treat punctuality as an absolute rather than a property of systems with natural variation. The practical move is not to cling to an exact second but to create an operational definition: a window, a tolerance, a shared method for determining whether a delivery, start, or response meets the need.

Deming devoted his career to teaching the difference between common-cause variation, which is built into a stable system, and special-cause variation, which signals something unusual. Demanding that every event land on a needle-thin mark confuses the two and invites tampering. Push a team to correct every micro-deviation and you amplify noise, like adjusting a funnel after each drop so that it misses farther next time. What looks like discipline becomes chaos.

The more useful question is how well the system performs within agreed limits that matter to customers. If a train or a software release arrives within a defined window, reliability improves more than from punishing people who are a few seconds off. Good management sets clear operational definitions (whose clock, what threshold, how measured), designs capacity and buffers to absorb variation, and evaluates performance as a distribution, not a single point. Service level agreements, time bands, and control charts are expressions of this philosophy.

There is also a human dimension. Making fear of being late the dominant signal leads to gaming, corner cutting, and eroded trust. Defining and managing for a reasonable on-time window invites learning and stability. Precision has its place, but effectiveness comes from aligning tolerances with purpose, then improving the process so that outcomes cluster comfortably inside them. Manage the system, not the second.