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This article somehow came across my Facebook feed.

A Tour of Silicon Valley and Shenzhen Reveals: “PDCA Is the Cause of Japan’s Malaise”

Are You Suffering from an “Inability to Decide”?
http://gendai.ismedia.jp/articles/-/55957

The condition this article calls an “inability to decide” is also known as “MBA syndrome” or “PDCA syndrome.”

MBA syndrome and PDCA syndrome have the same root cause: people chase only the terminology without understanding the essence of what PDCA and MBA programs teach. I think a typical characteristic is misunderstanding what “Plan” means.

The Plan in PDCA (actually PDSA 1) does not mean writing a business plan in Excel. It means proposing a small change to the current process, implementing it on a small scale, checking or studying the result, and, if the result is better, applying it to the whole process (Act). In today’s terms, it is a method similar to A/B testing, but somehow it has turned into something entirely different, hasn’t it? MBA programs do not teach you to spend enormous amounts of time drawing up plans at a desk either, do they? A company would collapse if it did that—especially a startup.

Well, in that sense, this article also misunderstands the meaning of PDCA and is afflicted by the same condition…. 2

 

Footnotes

  1. Plan, Do, Study, Act
  2. In a similar case, it has been pointed out that at one company, running cycles under what was called the MI movement became an end in itself, and misconduct known as “challenges” consequently became rampant. This observation was made by @sakichan on my Facebook page. In addition, @jj1bdx commented, “I have a feeling the same thing is happening with Scrum in agile development at large Japanese companies. The Planning is too big.”

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