Space Odyssey
July 25th, 2008 Posted in Rants
I am generally pessimistic about the ability of Western audiences to understand Deming’s message but I am sometimes heartened when I encounter artistic works of one form or another, that demonstrate at some level, an understanding of the principles underlying Deming’s theoretical vision. When this happens, I think to myself that this way of seeing and understanding must be more accessible than I thought.
Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic realization of Arthur C.Clarks science fiction novel affected me greatly. Both are clearly treatises on human knowing. Man, the toolmaker, extends the reach of his reductive mind to it’s useful limits, and is then driven over the brink of those limits into a new way of knowing.
In these speculative stories, the transformation was portrayed as traumatic and even somewhat apocalyptic. W. E. Deming’s vision of statistical thinking paralleled this transformational idea, though he envisioned a gentler and more systematic odyssey.
