The Red Bead Experiment

The Red Bead Experiment

Dr. Deming’s Red Bead Experiment illustrated the importance of many management principles and principles of process improvement. Deming’s 14 points, the principles by which he practiced quality management, are clearly proven effective through this experiment.

The Red Bead Experiment first illustrated that the poor performance of selecting the red beads was due to the system and not the worker. Rigid and precise procedures are not sufficient enough to produce the desired quality of the system. When the workers followed the given procedure on each work day, the variation in the numbers of red beads selected by each worker was entirely due to the procedure followed by the workers to collect the beads. Even though this process was considered to be stable, the variation was due to common cause only, if you want to improve the performance, management must improve the system. In order for management to improve the system, top management must own the system and allow and want change (McNeese, 2010).

The workers in the Red Bead Experiment work within a system in which they have little or no control. Since, the system and process itself determined the worker’s performance; under no circumstances could the workers make themselves perform any better. Rewarding or punishing the workers had no effect on the outcome of their performance. Extrinsic motivation was not effective in this experiment; fear is not the answer. Quality is achieved when the workers are happy with their work and are motivated with intrinsic motivation rather than rewards and punishments (Peterson, 1999).

On the second day, management implemented a STAR program, in which the workers were told to stop, think, act, and review each time before they performed the procedure of selecting the beads. Management thought that implementing this program would increase the performance of the workers, while decreasing the number of selected red beads. The worker’s performance was not...