A New Lens with Balaji Reddie (Part 4)

What if better management starts with seeing connections that were there all along? In this conversation, Balaji Reddie and Andrew Stotz unpack one of the most powerful and overlooked ideas in management: that everything is connected.

Drawing on Dr. W. Edwards Deming's systems thinking, he explains why the problems we face today were set in motion long before we noticed them, and why the solutions are rarely where we think to look.    Along the way, a cup of coffee becomes a window into five years of invisible effort, hydrogen and oxygen defy everything we'd expect, and a classroom game reveals that cooperation isn't a soft ideal — it might just be human nature.

Whether you run a team of two or a global organization, this episode will quietly shift the way you read a situation, ask a question, or respond to a problem. TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Balaji Reddie, an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. The topic for today is connectedness, which will help you see things you normally would not see. Balaji, how are you?

0:00:30.7 Balaji Reddie: I'm good, I'm fine.

0:00:32.5 Andrew Stotz: Nice to connect with you.

0:00:34.1 Balaji Reddie: Yes, same here.

0:00:35.3 Andrew Stotz: Connectedness day.

0:00:36.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, connectedness, absolutely. Yeah, we chose this term very carefully, right?

0:00:42.6 Andrew Stotz: I suspect you have, given your precision.

[laughter]

0:00:47.4 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, to see things that you normally would not see, let me attribute this to Henry Neave, who said that he heard Deming say this during his last three or four seminars in England, right? In Britain rather. Yeah, I think it was mostly in England. And he said, when he heard him say that, he said, "I am not here to teach you anything new. I'm here to make you see things that you normally would not see." And I would like to just expand on that and say when you see things differently, obviously, you observe, you record different things. And when you record different things, you ask different questions. When you ask different questions, you get different answers. And when you get different answers, you draw different conclusions. When you draw different conclusions, you take different decisions. And when you take different decision