Deming Red Beads

Deming's Red Bead Management Experiment - in Augmented Reality
Professor Deming’s Red Bead Experiment is a classic exercise in management. This app expands on the limitations of the traditional experiment, by using Augmented Reality (AR). No special equipment is required, other than a suitable mobile phone.

This app avoids the need for actual beads and containers, allowing the exercise to be carried out anywhere, at any time. The Augmented Reality in the app, in real time, models hundreds of 3D beads, each with elasticity, friction, gravity, as well as collisions with each of its neighbors and the vessel walls. The user is able to interact with the virtual beads, via the phone.

The fun and novelty of AR makes the app a wonderful business lunch discussion piece, particularly in discussing the future potential of AR.

The app includes powerful, built-in, one touch, multiuser networking. This allows a remote meeting of a group of people to carry out the Red Bead Experiment, at simultaneous locations across a company, or across the world. This is the ideal non contact, distance learning.

Professor Deming’s Red Bead experiment aims to illustrate the effects of bad management.

Most workers want to do their best but are limited by the system. Poor managers focus on production targets. In the Red Bead Experiment, the target is to produce a maximum number of white beads. Workers are blamed or rewarded, despite their having no control over the results they produce. The app shows that there will always be workers that appear to be performing better than others but the ranking of workers will vary from period to period.

Users sample beads from a bowl using a paddle. The data for each sample, for each user, is shown in a table. The table allows comparison of users’ performance and their progress. A control chart is generated automatically for the red bead data. The control chart is used to show that all workers are operating within the limitations of the system.

Professor Deming suggested that over 90% of variation is caused by the system and is beyond the reach of workers. The primary way to improve, is to change the system. The approach to improvement, is shown with interactive 3D training, using games and interactive exercises in Q-Skills3D app.

The Red Bead experiment shows how knowledge of variation is essential for good management.
Professor Deming described these issues in his “14 points”:
10 Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce.
11 Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
12 Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual rating or merit system.

Professor Deming's Red Bead Experiment is an ideal Augmented Reality training application. Augmented Reality brings the classic Professor Deming's Red Beads experiment to everyone's pocket.

In partnership with The Deming Institute.