What Deming Did for Production, SpatzAI Wants to Do for Difficult Workplace Conversations

Seth Godin’s latest blog post:

TEN STEPS ON THE ROAD TO EFFICIENT (Seth’s Linkedin Post)

“Frederick Taylor taught Henry Ford how to do mass production. Deming brought quality, systems understanding and respect for the worker. And operations research brought insight.

If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce:”

Below is a summary of his 10 points and how the SpatzAI concept compares with them:

Godin’s Production 10 Principles	SpatzAI Corrective Behaviour Principle
1. Measure before you change	Record cautions, objections, stops, outcomes, response times and eventually OQ (Objective Intelligence) / time-to-resolution.
2. Map the flow	SpatzChat makes the behavioural sequence visible: Verbal Caution → Caution (app) → Objection (app) → Stop (app) → Review (Slack plugin) → resolution/escalation.
3. Identify the constraint	Find where conversations actually fail, eg: ignored cautions, defensiveness, refusal to acknowledge behaviour, implicit or explicit dogma, power imbalance.
4. Separate value from waste	Separate disagreement from the associated questionable behaviour that damages the conversation. Disagreement stays; unnecessary interpersonal friction goes.
5. Standardise the best-known method	The Spatz Charter establishes an agreed process, including what constitutes an acceptable apology and how objections are handled.
6. Reduce variation before optimising speed	Instead of every manager/team improvising conflict management differently, give everyone the same basic behavioural safeguards. One hymn book.
7. Build feedback loops, not inspection gates	Probably the strongest connection. Spatz intervenes during the conversation, rather than HR investigating weeks later after damage has occurred.
8. Optimise the system, not the parts	Don’t simply teach an individual “better communication.” Design a team system where everyone can caution, object, stop and request review.
9. Involve the people doing the work	Spatz is deliberately team-operated rather than management-operated. The participants themselves initiate correction.
10. Iterate in small cycles	Every Spatz interaction becomes another small behaviour → correction → review → learning cycle, while the Charter itself remains revisable.

The biggest parallel for me is No. 7: “Build in feedback loops, not inspection gates.”

That is almost a description of what we have been trying to do.

Traditional grievance processes is largely an inspection gate:

behaviour occurs → problem grows → complaint → manager/HR → investigation → judgement.

Spatz moves the quality-control mechanism upstream:

behaviour occurs → Caution → correction if possible → escalation only when necessary.

That connects directly with the Toyota Andon / stop-the-line analogy. In manufacturing, workers don’t wait until 10,000 defective components have been produced before reporting the problem. They have authority to signal it immediately. Spatz gives somebody experiencing questionable behaviour something analogous: put your foot down while the behavioural defect is occurring.

There is one important difference between Godin’s model and what we are building. A factory is trying to eliminate variation in its output. Human teams need enormous variation in ideas, personalities, judgements and disagreements. So Spatz cannot simply be “The Deming system for difficult conversations.”

Our more interesting proposition is:

standardise the process for managing team members’ behaviour during difficult conversations, precisely so that we don’t have to standardise the people or their thinking.

Our distinction is we separate the content from behaviour during conversations, so that we can focus on the behaviour.

We are effectively saying:

Don’t quality-control people’s ideas. Quality-control the process and behaviour by which people challenge one another’s ideas.

And this is where we think Spatz potentially extends Deming rather than merely copying him. Deming created feedback loops for production quality. Spatz is attempting to create observable feedback loops for interaction quality.

The eventual SpatzAI layer then closes the loop even further:

Agreement → questionable behaviour → objection → response → review → measurement → learning → improved agreement.

We continue to loop back to our renewed emphasis on “It’s the agreement, stupid”. Godin’s ten principles only work once the organisation has explicitly agreed on what good looks like. Without that reference standard, measurement and correction become arbitrary.

Spatz makes that usually invisible prerequisite explicit.

So the deeper comparison is:

Taylor/Deming:
How can we continuously improve the system that produces the work?

SpatzAI:
How can we continuously improve the system through which people work with, disagree with and correct one another’s behaviour?

We think that this is a substantially larger ambition than HR grievance or conflict resolution. It is an attempt to make interpersonal course correction a normal operational feedback loop rather than an exceptional HR event.