alt Hacker News>Even in manufacturing, the application of statistical process control was never entrusted to the workers, but became a department of its own, with bureaucracy, OKRs, and elaborate software
That is wrong thinking. While you can go overboard with bureaucracy, the line worker doesn't have the the background (or time) to evaluate statistics. You need an expert in statistics at times to see if what looks like a pattern really is. Mean while the line worker needs to spend their time on what they are good at.
Trust the line worker is important, it just isn't a shortcut to people who really know specialized domains.
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You don't need expertise in statistics to draw control charts. You might need that expertise to teach people to draw control charts, but not to draw them.
Line workers are the reflexes of the organisation. They can react to trouble before the central nervous system (management) is even aware that something has happened.
The line worker has a canny instinct for the right answer long before the statistics are significant though.
Kinda what Gladwell talks about in Blink
Deming’s idea is that each line worker is responsible 1) for understanding and minimizing variation in their specific area of work, and 2) for speaking up when they have ideas on how to do that better.
It is management’s job to protect their ability to do that, and integrate the information from workers to make decisions about what to change next.