Red Beads

Watching the Master playing the Red Bead Game live!

During the recent IHI Middle East Forum in Doha, Dr. Don Berwick, Co-founder,President Emeritus and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, demonstrated to us the famous Red Bead Game, used by Dr.W. Edward Deming in his famous seminars in the late 90's to teach how management should support workers to identify system problems and errors (the red beads), respect their knowledge and skills, and work as a team to improve, rather than blaming them using old management theories and biases.
The moment when Dr. Berwick was on the stage playing the game with a group of attendees was almost magical, delivered in a humorous yet classy way, bringing moments we didn't have the chance to live back from the days of the father of total quality management, Dr. Deming.
According to Dr. Berwick , the originsl games was lengthier, but he demonstrated a shorter version to give us a taste of it. Another interesting confession made by Dr. Berwick is that when first attended the famous 4-day seminar by Dr. Deming as physician back in 1986, he flew back home on the second day frustrated and convinced by the teachings of Dr. Deming, he thought it didn't make sense to him at the beginning. Then at a moment of reflection and uncertainty, he decided to fly back and continue the rest of the seminar, of which he is very proud of.
Some of the main lessons from the Red Bead Experience are:
1- There will be always variation and errors in every process.We must understand variation in data to draw the right conclusions.
2- Staff or workers can only achieve what the system allows them to. There is no point of rewarding or punishing them based on randomness of a system.
3- To fix a problem or improve quality, look at the system instead of the staff. The management has the authority to change it.

Below is a clip of the original Red Bead Experiment run by Dr. Deming. Enjoy!