The LinkedIn algorithm has shown me several posts lately discussing Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK). And while many of them echo familiar and valuable insights, it inspired me to share a different perspective, one that, I hope, builds on the original, not breaks from it.
What if SoPK was missing just one element, something Deming simply couldn’t see at the time? And what if that one thing could make the entire system more teachable, more scalable, and more neurologically real?
W. Edwards Deming gave us a framework that changed industries and lives. But even today, many still struggle to apply his work with the depth and consistency it deserves.
Thanks to neuroscience, we can now see the very system that underpins every belief, every variation, every act of appreciation, and every learning process. That system? The human brain.
In this article, I share what Randy Schenkat, who worked directly with Deming from 1989–1992 said to me after reviewing BTFA:
“In BTFA, you’ve detailed what Dr. Deming was looking for.”
I offer this view not as a challenge to Deming’s legacy, but as a continuation of it, through the lens of a science that simply wasn’t available back then. An evolution that lets us bring his teachings more fully to life, with clarity, compassion, and science.
👇 I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts. Especially if SoPK is part of your DNA.
Here’s the article …
“In BTFA, you’ve detailed what Dr. Deming was looking for.”
- Randy Schenkat, collaborator on SoPK with W. Edwards Deming c.’89-’92.
Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) changed the landscape of industry forever. Often presented in 4 quadrants, it includes …
- Knowledge of Variation.
- Appreciation for a system.
- Psychology.
- Theory of Knowledge.
These four elements have guided decades of management thought and transformed industries. Yet even among devoted practitioners, the full depth and effective application of SoPK can remain elusive.
Why is that?
Perhaps because something foundational has remained largely implicit, present in spirit, but unnamed in mechanism. A way of considering cause and effect that sits at the root of every quadrant of SoPK … yet has gone largely unspoken:
The human brain.
More specifically: brain function, as now made visible through neuroscience.
Let’s ‘engage the ol’ grey matter’ and ‘Think’ about it.
To understand variation, one must first have knowledge of variation – it’s right there in the quadrant’s title. This means being able to perceive patterns, predict outcomes, judge deviations and believe in the benefits of control charts and statistical values. These aren’t abstract capabilities. They are neural operations. Executed, moment by moment, by the brain. you can’t know something or believe in something if you don’t have a neural representation of that thing or concept wired in your brain.
To demonstrate appreciation for a system, one must engage in perspective-taking, pattern integration, and contextual awareness. ‘Appreciation’ isn’t a soft skill or personality trait. It’s a proxy term that describes functions of cognition.
Systems thinking incorporates ‘Thinking’ in its title for a reason – it is not just a method; it’s a mode of neural processing when considering interconnected and interdependent cycles of cause and effect.
And what of psychology? For decades, it has offered valuable insights into human behaviour despite technological restrictions surrounding neurological visibility, demanding inference from observation. As a result, i.e. without access to what the brain is actually doing, many psychological terms remain ambiguous.
Engagement. Ownership. Motivation, Dissonance, Bias. These are not constants. They are outputs of neural states, shaped by the neurological mechanism behind more ambiguous words stress, memory, emotion, and belief … We use all these words as if they hold universal meaning, but they are all, ultimately, proxies for neurons depolarising.
We have developed a degree of comfort speaking of the assumptions as if they are facts, but shy away from speaking of the biological process that underpins them … all of these proxies have the same basic biology behind them … an impulse travels along a myelinated axon, shifting the chemical mix across synapses. This is the verifiable mechanism behind the behavioural patterns we theorise about, describe loosely and often, conflict over.
Even the Theory of Knowledge, the most abstract of Deming’s four pillars, has been interpreted through philosophical and sociological frames, most famously by Nonaka and Takeuchi in their SECI model. Their theory, though elegant, treats knowledge as something that moves between people, as if it floats in organisational air.
This is a challenging assumption when considered through the biological lens, so let’s have a look at that …
The SECI model is a knowledge creation framework developed by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. It stands for:
- Socialization
- Externalization
- Combination
- Internalization
It describes how tacit knowledge (personal, hard-to-articulate know-how) and explicit knowledge (clearly codified information) interact and convert in a continuous spiral to create organizational knowledge. It’s often shown as …
The Four Modes of Knowledge Conversion:
- Socialization (Tacit → Tacit)
- Externalization (Tacit → Explicit)
- Combination (Explicit → Explicit)
- Internalization (Explicit → Tacit)
The SECI Spiral
The model is not linear, it forms a spiral of continuous knowledge creation. (See short Youtube video here). As individuals and teams cycle through these four modes, knowledge expands and evolves at individual, group, and organizational levels.
The SECI model is conceptually useful, but it abstracts knowledge into organisational flow, often overlooking that all knowledge creation is brain-based. SECI doesn’t account for:
- Neural learning mechanisms (e.g. pattern recognition, prediction error)
- Emotion and attention in knowledge acquisition
- How belief systems and issues of self-concept shape what people will or won’t internalize (i.e. imprint into their own brain via neurogenesis)
- Why change often fails not at the “explicit” level, but at the neural resistance (survival / autopilot) level, due to the way brains have evolved to survive.
That’s where BTFA steps in, as the biological underpinning that SECI overlooks.
Neuroscience tells a deeper truth: knowledge lives in the brain. It is wiring. It is firing. It is myelinated networks shaped by repetition, emotion, environment, and meaning. Knowledge is not passed around like a document. It is constructed, stored, adapted, and retrieved, neurologically.
What Deming gestured toward with incredible foresight, we can now see with precision.
According to Dr. Deming, in the fourth chapter of The New Economics,
“The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding of the system of profound knowledge. The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people.”
Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to. The individual, once transformed, will:
- Set an example
- Be a good listener, but will not compromise
- Continually teach other people
- Help people to pull away from their current practice and beliefs and move into the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past
When we view Deming’s words through the neuroscience lens, their meaning becomes strikingly clear:
“Transformation of the individual” can only mean one thing, a change in neural wiring. New default firing patterns must be formed in the brain. There is no other biological origin for what we call “individual transformation.”
“Once the individual understands SoPK” … we might say, once the brain has a neural wiring pattern which enables the individual to conceive of the interdependent relationships between all they experience, and how their own brain is wired to react … they will apply the principles in every kind of relationship with others.
“Every kind of relationship” is, at its core, a bi-directional signalling exchange between brains, carried through the body’s sensory, emotional, and behavioural systems.
And when people begin pulling away from current practices and beliefs, they aren’t simply adopting new habits, they’re undergoing a neurological shift. They are disengaging from entrenched wiring and forming new neural maps aligned to a different philosophy.
In other words, transformation of the individual is neurological adaptation, ergo, Organisational transformation is the neurological adaptation of multiple brains.
Neuroscience doesn’t challenge Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge, it illuminates it. It offers the biological precision behind what Deming observed, reasoned, and pioneered.
It reveals the hidden engine beneath behaviour, knowledge, psychology, and systems thinking. But that engine is complex, and neuroscience often takes years to master through academic study alone.
That’s where BTFA™ – Believe, Think, Feel, Act – comes in.
BTFA is biologically accurate, neurologically consistent, and practically simple. The heavy lifting has been done. It tracks the precise process by which:
- Variation is created in thought and action as well as process
- Systems are conceived, interpreted and valued, or resisted
- Psychological states are formed and triggered
- Knowledge is shaped and retrieved
But more than that, it introduces the neurological explanation behind each, making visible what was once invisible, and making profound knowledge finally trainable.
In short: brain function isn’t adjacent to Deming’s system, it’s central to it. And now, with the new technology (fMRI, PET and other scanning methods developed in recent years) we can finally see it.
We’re at a moment that feels a lot like the shift from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics. The tools we had were good, until we discovered that deeper forces were in play.
Deming’s models were grounded in the best psychological and philosophical thinking available at the time. But today, we’re no longer limited to inference. We can now see, directly, the neural architecture of belief, thought, feeling, and action.
BTFA (Believe–Think–Feel–Act) isn’t a reinterpretation of Deming’s work. It’s a separate lens, one that simply wasn’t available before we had a window into the skull, which neuroscience now provides.
It puts biological structure beneath abstract categories. It makes the subjective observable. And it offers a way to move beyond philosophical intent and into something we can train consistently, and apply practically.
Variation and Control: The Cortisol Connection
Deming’s insight on variation and control was brilliant. He showed that leaders must distinguish between common and special causes of variation, lest they inject more chaos by trying to “fix” noise.
But what’s rarely explored is how the brain responds to variation.
Unpredictable environments trigger the HPA axis, flooding the body with cortisol. The result? Reduced prefrontal function. Short-term focus. Emotional reactivity. A literal shutdown of higher-order thinking.
Control charts don’t just stabilise systems, they stabilise people. They signal predictability to the brain, which in turn restores access to logic, reasoning, and innovation, by altering the way glucose energy is processed and at what frequency the brain is firing to consume that energy.
So Deming was right: “tampering” increases variation. But neuroscience shows why. We’re not just managing processes, we’re managing brains and the negative effect inconsistency has on their ability to function rationally.
Psychology Without a Brain?
Let’s be blunt: most leadership psychology is floating in mid-air. Ambiguous terms like “engagement,” “resistance,” or “ownership” get tossed around like everyone agrees on what they mean. But these are not static traits or attitudes. They are outputs of neural conditions.
Take “resistance to change.” From a neuroscience perspective, this is not stubbornness, it’s prediction error. The brain is a pattern-recognition engine that builds comfort and identity around what it knows. When new information threatens the old map, the brain doesn’t just resist, it enters a threat state.
Or consider “motivation.” The dopamine system doesn’t care about slogans or quarterly goals. It cares about meaning, anticipation, and agency. Leaders can’t “motivate” people any more than they can rewire someone else’s brain. But they can create the conditions that enable self-motivation, if they understand how!
Michael Merzenich, an early pioneer of neuroplasticity, once said to me:
“Psychology without neuroscience is baseless. But neuroscience without psychology is pointless.”
The two must inform each other. And BTFA experience is the leadership education that finally brings them together, in context of leading change effectively … it makes clear how the psychological traits we ascribe to people and ourselves are imprinted wiring patterns, firing, triggered by stimulus from our socio-technical environment.
BTFA: Making SoPK Operational
In one direction, BTFA maps behaviour as an output: Belief → Thought → Feeling → Action. This mirrors a common sequence of neural processing, and explains why so many organisational efforts fall short. They try to shift action, without addressing belief.
It’s like trying to change the fruit without touching the root.
But BTFA isn’t linear. It runs both ways, AFTB. Action happens, and the brain reviews it for meaning, risk, and alignment. That reflective loop matters just as much. Yet because action is visible and measurable, we fixate on it, while the upstream processes that truly drive performance remain unseen, and often ignored.
This is where BTFA provides a new way to consider the elements of SoPK, to become truly operational.
- Variation becomes a story about the limbic system vs prefrontal cortex, about arousal states and calm cognition. The Variation of the human element.
- Systems thinking becomes easier when people learn that the brain’s default is to not think in systems. Due to its need to survive efficiently, the brain naturally processes in local, ego-protective terms, unless trained to do otherwise.
- Psychology stops being about personality and becomes about predictability, what wiring leads to which responses under which conditions and what conditions led to the current wiring-firing patterns / how to best update (via neurogenesis) established wiring-firing patterns.
- Theory of knowledge shifts from vague abstraction to concrete neurobiology, knowledge is established wiring, firing on demand… when context requires.
Deming’s 14 Points, Reawakened
Deming’s 14 Points for Management were always more than strategy, they were an appeal to deeper human wisdom. But without a neuroscience lens, we’ve often misunderstood what those points truly require.
Let’s take a few:
1. Drive Out Fear
Fear hijacks the brain’s limbic system and disrupts access to the prefrontal cortex. It impairs problem-solving, suppresses creativity, and promotes defensive, short-term thinking. Leaders who create fear, even subtly, are unknowingly activating neurological states that reduce performance.
BTFA gives leaders the tools to notice, reduce, and rewire fear-based patterns, first in themselves, then in others. This is no longer soft science or speculation. It’s biology.
2. Institute Leadership
Leadership isn’t a title, it’s a neural skillset. The ability to self-regulate, to perceive emotional states in others, to delay reaction and enable reflection, these are executive functions rooted in the prefrontal cortex. BTFA trains this system by making belief patterns visible and editable.
We don’t need more leaders with charisma. We need leaders with neural agility.
4. End the Practice of Awarding Business on Price Tag Alone
This is about more than economics, it’s about understanding value as a brain-based perception. People don’t see price; they perceive risk and reward. Neuroscience explains how humans judge long-term trust, not short-term savings. BTFA helps align decision-making with true, sustainable value… as the brain has evolved to determine what is valuable to its own survival.
13. Institute a Vigorous Program of Education and Self-Improvement
Neuroscience shows that the adult brain can change. But it won’t unless the owner of the brain finds themselves in the conditions in which training the brain to wire differently is safe and supported. Learning is less about the by rote presentation of information, and more about the neural adaptation that provides the brain the wiring patterns required to represent that information. This is why so many online learning modules are described as a ‘Tick box exercise by corporate’ … the brain perceives the value to the company and compliance issues, not their own advancement as an effective leader or team member.
Improvement is less process, and more neurological plasticity.
BTFA presents a new principle: organisations only improve when brains do.
14. Put Everybody in the Company to Work to Accomplish the Transformation
Why doesn’t this happen? Because most transformation initiatives ignore belief structures (neural wiring as origin of all human function). They focus on what people must do before reshaping what people believe. BTFA reverses that. It starts where behaviour starts, in the neural maps people live by.
A Call to the SoPK Community
Deming was not dogmatic. He was curious. Humble. Scientific. He wanted better thinking, not louder opinions … and he asked us to ‘Drive out Fear’ which often sits at root of conflict, confrontation, defensiveness and dismissal of anything ‘new’, in favour for what’s known and comfortable (already wired in brains). He knew psychology and understanding knowledge was essential, but he simply didn’t have the tools we now possess to define what that looked like in practice.
So let me say it plainly: We do!
If you care about Deming’s vision, you cannot ignore the neuroscience revolution. You cannot continue to treat human variation as something to be “managed” with culture decks or pulse surveys. You must understand the organ that creates variation. The brain.
BTFA doesn’t replace SoPK, it complements it with the addition of science and rigour where we once had amazing ideas. It makes it visible. Teachable. Repeatable. And, most importantly, neurological.
If we want profound knowledge, we must start with the most profound system of all.
THE BRAIN
For neurologically informed support and advanced leadership education – contact us