Improvement in any organization is difficult enough, but if you don’t know about these counterintuitive truths, you stand to make things worse.

I had long searched for a way to be able to improve service organizations the same way that W. Edwards Deming did for manufacturing. No approach was giving the breakthrough performance that Deming had achieved in Japan. There were some successes, but nothing was breakthrough.

Sitting on an airplane to Budapest a few years ago, I read Freedom from Command and Control, by John Seddon (Productivity Press, 2005). I wasn’t very hopeful as I took my seat on the plane. A book written by an occupational psychologist formed visions of “balloon-kicking” and group hugs to improve culture and therefore performance. What I found instead was the Vanguard Method, a technique that would change my view on performance improvement.

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