As the proprietor of Ollivanders told Harry Potter, �[I]t�s really the wand that chooses the wizard.� Practitioners of Total Quality Management, that hot management trend, have never really learned this fact. They never seem to recognize that a data-driven system is only as good as its data. Most of the time they fail to acknowledge that the choice of data�what they chose to measure and how they chose to measure it�as opposed to the data itself predetermines the outcome.

My life has TQM gurus all over the place now. For those of you not in the know, TQM stands for �Total Quality Management.� There are all sorts of variations on the Total Quality Management theme with all sorts of lovely acronyms but they all come down to making a plan, carrying out the plan, evaluating the plan, and then tweaking the plan.

At work, my agency currently is being evaluated on how well it practices the TQM system. (Actually, they don�t call it TQM. They call it by some other initials that I think might be PDCA but I can�t remember what those letters stand for. Give me three demerits.) The idea is that if we practice TQM well, we must be a good, well-managed agency.

As part of this evaluation, the evaluators gathered a group of front-line workers together to determine how well management had indoctrinated us into the system. During the meeting, I was very well behaved. I tried to say all the right things. My agency needs all the good will it can get right now. Despite that, I couldn�t help a small tweak. I figured I would get away with it because it would demonstrate my understanding of the system. So, when they asked, �Are there any questions you wish we had asked?� I raised my hand. �I wish that you had asked how we decide what data to collect. After all,� I pontificated. �Failure to properly measure renders the whole system useless. Garbage in, garbage out.�

To her credit, the evaluator smiled as she sighed. �There�s some truth to what you are saying,� she conceded. �But we lack sufficient knowledge of your field to evaluate that. We�ll just have to leave that part to you.�

There is an old joke in which a man loses his ring in the dark by his car. Nevertheless, he looks for it over by the street lamp because �the light is better.� I guess she was evaluating us under the street lamp rather than by the car because it was brighter over by the lamp. Or perhaps the wand was waving the wizard.

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