In Their Own Words
Our podcasts feature interviews with members of the Deming community, including industry leaders, practitioners, educators, Deming family members, and others who share their stories of transformation and success through innovative management and quality theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Podcast episodes prior to 2022 were hosted, produced, and edited by Tripp Babbitt.
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Category and Continuum Thinking: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 6)
10/03/2024
Category and Continuum Thinking: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 6)
Is quality simply a matter of two categories: good and bad? But then how do you get to "better"? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss categories and continuum thinking. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. And today is episode six, Category Thinking and Continuum Thinking. Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.9 Bill Bellows: Welcome Andrew great to see you again. All right, so in podcast five, I went back and it was just posted by The Deming Institute. And I just wanna clarify again on the topic of acceptability and desirability. Where we're going tonight is looking at acceptability and desirability in a little bit more detail, a little bit differently, but those are still the prevailing themes. And again, I just wanna reinforce that none of this is to imply that desirability is better than acceptability. What's important is to be aware of when I'm using acceptability thinking. And when I'm using desirability thinking and use the one that makes the most sense in that situation. We were talking earlier about companies whose products we enjoy using and we're loyal to them. And I mentioned that my wife and I have developed a loyalty to Toyota products. 0:01:40.4 BB: Going back to 1989 was our first Toyota product. And I knew I wanted a pickup truck. 'Cause I was borrowing a pickup truck from a number of friends and I thought, I really like a pickup truck. There's a lot you can do with a pickup truck. So, I knew I wanted a pickup truck. And I knew from having worked in my father's gas station, I had reason to believe I wanted a Japanese pickup truck and not an American pickup truck. So, I then it was a question of is it a Mazda, Toyota. 0:02:11.1 AS: Nissan. 0:02:13.2 BB: Sorry Nissan. And I looked at all of them and yeah I just all I knew is I was gonna be one of those. And I think the major reason I went with... My wife and I went with a Toyota... I don't think the prices were that different. But it just had a, it was the styling was a little bit better. But I did not... That's why I bought it. 0:02:46.5 AS: The loyalty wasn't built yet. 0:02:49.0 BB: No I knew to stay away... I knew I had seen plenty of examples of... Well, I had traded in my first car that my father, my parents got me when I was in college was a 1975 Chevy Nova. Four door Chevy Nova. And the reason four doors is important is a... If it was a two door, the door would be longer. But it was a four door. By the time I gave that car to a friend, the engine was running beautifully but the body was falling apart. And, so, by the time I sold it to get the pickup truck, in order to get out of it, I'd have to throw my shoulder into the driver's door. Why? Because the door droop was so great that when you close the door, I mean the door drooped and this is not a four door, this is a two door. So, imagine if it was a two door the door would be even heavier. So, on a four door, the door drooped. And, so, when you closed it, you'd had to lift it and then close it in order to get out you had to... Oh, it's just my wife couldn't drive. It was just a nuisance. 0:04:17.6 AS: And, that in '75 was just about when the Japanese were really starting to go after the US car makers. And but I want to tell you just a quick one. I can't remember if I've told you, but I used to have a 1963 Lincoln Continental here in beautiful Bangkok. And I owned it for 10 years. And then eventually I sold it. But what a beautiful car. And people always ask me the same thing and they said, isn't it hard to take care of? And I said, you gotta remember back in those days, cars were simple. 0:04:49.1 BB: Yeah, yeah. So, the... So, with... So, the experience of 14 years or so, with the '75 Chevy Nova. And the door was like the straw that broke the camel's back. It just done with this, all right. So, we're gonna buy Japanese, bought a Toyota. That was the first one. And I think I've mentioned in the first podcast I mentioned that we had a 1998 Toyota Sienna, which is their first, it was their Toyota third attempt at a minivan. The first one I think was underpowered, the second one... And we knew we wanted a minivan. It was time, the kids were getting a little bit bigger. It was time for minivan. And just as we were ready to go buy it, they had a... I think a competitor came out with dual sliding doors. Dual sliding doors. And, so, instead of Toyota coming out with a one sliding door, they stepped back. I think Chrysler came out with two sliding doors. And they figured we can't come to market with one sliding door. They've got two sliding doors. So, then we waited another year and they finally came out and given all of our delight with the Toyota pickup truck, boom, that's what we wanted. And then the transmission failed, six months later with 10,000 miles in the car. 0:06:18.5 BB: And I have a photo of that. Not only did the transmission fail at 10,000 miles, but it failed on Christmas morning on our way to see friends about an hour away. And this guy, people were going to see, he knew I loved Toyota. And when he drove to pick us up, we transferred everything from that to his Ford F-150. He says to me... So, then we had to have the car towed on a flatbed to his house and the next day to the dealership, what a nuisance headache. But when he showed up, he looks at me knowing that I like Toyota. And he says, how's this data point change your theory about Toyota? 0:07:06.5 AS: I thought he was gonna say, if it was me, I would've said pop in the back. 0:07:12.6 BB: And I was like, yeah, that really hurts. Well when I shared that story with students at Northwestern's Business School, the Kellogg Business School, their advice and these are students that had worked in all different industries from Coke to banking, and a number of 'em have worked in the auto industry. And their advice was, I said, Professor Bellows never buy anyone's first model year, even Toyota. Now I have a friend who he and his wife bought the same model year Toyota Sienna. They did not have a problem. Oe did. When I met at a Deming conference, a guy who worked in Georgetown, Kentucky which is where the Sienna was made. And, so, I met him at a conference and when he said he worked for Toyota, I said, oh, my wife and I buy nothing but Toyotas. He says, oh. And I said, we have a first model... 0:08:08.6 BB: Year Sienna. And everything was good. And then I'm thinking, I'm gonna ask the guy a question. And I looked straight in his eyes. We were pretty close together. And I'm about to ask him a question. I'm looking straight in his eyes and I said, we got a Toyota Sienna. He says, how do you like it? And I looked right at him and I said, the transmission failed at 10,000 miles. And he rolled his eyes. And I said, so, you know about this. It wasn't a look of shock. It was, yeah, all right. So, I said, all right, all right. Your expression just told me that you know something about this. I said, what's up? He says, we tried. This is so cool. He says, we tried to save a few pennies on a bearing. 0:09:00.8 BB: I said, you did but what you did cost me more than you saved. So, yeah you guys saved a few pennies on a bearing and cost my wife weeks of aggravation to have it towed from where it happened to the place we were going because it Christmas Day, it broke. Everything's shut down on Christmas days. You can't have it right? And, so, we had it towed, had to get a rental car. Then they're complaining about, we had... Who authorized this rental car? We only pay... It was just headache after headache. But we still buy Toyota Andrew. We still buy Toyota. Why? Because I'm afraid to buy from anybody else. Well, part of the reason I wanted to share that with our audience is I buy Toyota products based on value. And I believe that the best value we get in transportation, personal transportation is the money we spend buying a Toyota most often brand new. We've also bought some used, got great use out of them, never had a problem, anything like what I just shared with you. And that's having owned five or six different Toyotas. I mean, right now in our family we have three of them. 0:10:16.7 AS: I think I need to correct you. 0:10:19.1 BB: Go ahead. 0:10:19.9 AS: You buy Toyotas on value and values. 0:10:25.7 BB: Yes! 0:10:28.2 AS: You're aligned with their values and therefore you're willing to look beyond the mistakes and problems that it comes with every product, every service, every company, because you're aligned with their values. 0:10:42.2 BB: Well, what's funny is when we bought the Sienna and we're talking with 'em, doing the driving and signed agree to buy it, that's the color we want. We want these seats, blah, blah, blah. And then you go talk to the closer and the closer's a guy, the gal at the dealership that wants to add on the undercoating and the this and the this and the this and the this. And he wanted to sell us at a premium price, this extended warranty and I dunno what it costs, but I said, I've done a whole lot of research. And he says to me it's so funny. He says, when these things break down, a circuit board breaks and that'll cost you this and this and this, and, so, I'm gonna sign you up for the insurance policy, the extra coverage. And I said, no, and he is going on and on. And I said, look it, I've done a lot of research into how they're made and I said, and the values of that organization. So, I said, the reason we buy Toyota is that I have an understanding, a pretty damn good understanding of how they manage the product, the pieces and how it all comes together. And he's pushing back at me. Finally, I said, I teach university courses on how Toyota operates and their quality system. 0:12:14.8 BB: So, we didn't get the extra coverage. Now it was still covered under warranty, so, it was kind of laughable that. But anyways, the reason I bring that up is that... 0:12:27.3 AS: Before you do that, I want to just say for the listeners and viewers out there, what is the messaging from a corporate strategy perspective? And that is have values that you stand for. Communicate those to the market, stay loyal to them and the customers who align with those values will stick with you through the hard times that you're gonna definitely have. There's a quote by Alexander Hamilton says, "those who stand for nothing, fall for everything." If you do not stand for a clear set of values that the market can perceive, then people are gonna fall away from you as soon as times get tough. 0:13:07.2 BB: Oh yeah. And I...I, I. It's about that and that's why I've read lots about Toyota. How they operate written by people outside of Toyota trying to explain it, people inside of Toyota and their explanations. But part of the reason I bring this up is my fascination, my interest in Dr. Deming's philosophy, is a great deal to do with his system is based on an incredible appreciation of the difference between acceptability and desirability. All other quality management systems, whether it's the quality management within Lean is acceptability based, good parts and bad parts, Operational Excellence, Six Sigma Quality. In fact, there's a quote at the end of chapter 10 in "The New Economics". And chapter 10 was the original last chapter until the third edition came out. In which case there's chapter 11 written in large part by Kelly Allen, a good friend. 0:14:15.1 BB: And when chapter 10 was the end I thought it was pretty cool that at the very end of chapter 10. The last few pages of chapter 10 of “The New Economics” are about Dr. Taguchi's loss function. And this is what turned me on to Dr. Taguchi, was finding “The New Economics" in a brick and mortar bookstore. I knew from ASQ Quality Progress that this was coming out. So, I remember when it came out, this was before Amazon, going to the bookstore. Going through it and saying what does this guy think about Taguchi? Because Taguchi was my, the one I really idolized. And I opened it up and I turned to chapter 10 and it's all about the loss function, the problem and I thought this is way cool. So, the closing quote... The closing... The last sentence in chapter 10 which again was the original last chapter until third edition came out, is the following "Conformance to specifications," that's acceptability, "zero defects," that's acceptability. "Six Sigma quality," which is acceptability "and all other specification-based nostrums all miss the point, ,stated by Donald J. Wheeler." 0:15:42.6 BB: So, then I looked up, but what is a nostrum? And Dr. Deming not Dr. Deming a nostrum is defined as “quack medicine.” So, "Conformance to specifications, zero defect, Six Sigma quality, and all other specification-based nostrums all miss the point." And, so, I wrote an article about this, gosh, 20 years ago. I said, what's the point? And my explanation, the point is, all of them are about managing parts in isolation. Looking at things in isolation. Again that's acceptability. And as I said earlier, I'm not saying acceptability is bad, I'm just saying acceptability is not desirability. And the other thing I wanna add is, why do I... My wife and I love Toyota products. I've got reason to believe through a lot of research and talking, sharing the ideas that we talk about in these podcasts with people within Toyota. And they have a desirability focus that nobody else... That I'm not aware of anybody else has. 0:16:54.9 BB: And, that's having presented around the world doing classes, at Kellogg Business School, at university. Yeah, the Kellogg Business School Northwestern University. I teach online classes at Cal State Northridge, Southern Utah University. I've lectured at many universities. And I never had anyone come to me working in industry saying, Bill, what you're talking about, we practice where I work. No. And, so, for those that are pursuing the Toyota Production System stuff. My response is, I don't buy Toyota products because they use the Toyota Production System. Now, that may help with getting the car to market faster. But I don't believe the Toyota Production System is why people buy Toyota products. I believe Toyota's quality management system... At least I buy Toyotas because I believe their quality management system, inspired by Dr. Taguchi, inspired by Dr. Deming, is providing something that nobody else has in many industries. All right. So, I wanted to get that out. 0:18:06.7 AS: So, are you saying Toyota Production System is more of a tool that is in their toolbox of quality management system? 0:18:18.4 BB: Um, the Toyota Production System is classic Industrial Engineering. 0:18:26.8 AS: Right. 0:18:27.0 BB: It's how to... 0:18:28.3 AS: It's a natural. 0:18:30.5 BB: How to improve flow, how to improve throughput by minimizing number of steps, by minimizing inventory. It's highly credited to Taiichi Ohno, who was mentored by the founder of the Toyota Motor Company. And it's all about, they don't have a lot of money. So, we need minimal inventory, minimum steps. So, it's like... So, the Toyota Production System is an efficiency based system based on, we don't have a lot of money, we're not gonna buy a lot of inventory. But the quality aspect of the Toyota Production System everywhere, everything I've written, everything I've read by people describing the Toyota Production System it's all explained by acceptability. So, that they may be moving things closer together so people don't walk so far. 0:19:27.8 BB: But what I'm looking at with Dr. Deming's work inspired by Dr. Taguchi is what is it about the quality system that causes those parts to come together so well and the products to perform so well? So, it's not just having the parts when I reach out, the part is there, but those parts integrate better. I've mentioned in the first podcast series that Toyota had 100% snap-fit pickup truck in 1969 at a time when Ford was banging things together using rubber mallets to get the parts together. They took apart and assembled a Toyota pickup truck twice 'cause they didn't believe the results the first time the parts went together without mallets. That's what I'm talking about, that within that system, the ability for the parts to come together to work together cannot be explained by an acceptability based system. And, so, having spoken with people and having the opportunity to share with people within Toyota the ideas we talk about inspired by Dr. Deming, I've learned that they do desirability in a way that nobody... I'm not aware of anyone else having done. 0:20:48.5 BB: All right, so, what I want to get into, add to the discussion tonight, relative to category thinking, is this idea of category thinking, continuum thinking. Category thinking quite simply is putting things in categories. So, in acceptability we have two categories, good or bad, or maybe three categories. It's good or it's scrap or it's rework. So, category thinking is generically putting things into categories. And so, we could look at category... Categories could be... There could be two categories, three categories. 0:21:27.1 BB: It's been a while since I've gone to see a movie, but I believe they still have a rating system of PG, PG-13, R, R-17, maybe X. Those are categories. Fruits and vegetables. Those are two high level categories. Within each of those categories, we have types of, we have apples and oranges, and within them we have types of apples. That's all category thinking. You go into a supermarket and every aisle... There's the cereal aisle. That's a category. There's the canned goods, those are categories. Religions - talk about categories. So, every religion you look at is its own category. And, then within those categories they have subcategories. How about music? How many categories in music are there Andrew? 0:22:18.9 AS: Well, it gets all messed up on my iTunes where I'm like, that's not heavy metal. That's rock. 0:22:28.6 BB: Yeah. And then there's types of rock. In the beginning it was rock and roll, and then there's types of rock and roll. 0:22:34.0 AS: Progressive rock. 0:22:34.0 BB: Progressive rock. And then we have people... So, what category would we put... I think somebody asked Lucinda Williams, we're going to see her in a few weeks. So, what category? Well, she doesn't fit a category. So, that's category thinking. Category thinking is putting things in categories. We could say, where did you go to college? That's a category. These are USC grads, those are Cal State grads. And, part of the point I want to make is that we use category thinking all the time. Putting people in categories is what we do. Such as you and our daughter are Cal State graduates. 0:23:17.6 BB: And, so, what degrees do they have? Those are categories. So, I don't know what we would do if we couldn't put things in the categories. So, I don't think category, putting people in category is not a bad thing. Now, when you start to associate values with the categories, now we're getting into racism or sexism and then, okay. But this idea that putting people in categories is a bad thing, I'd say category thinking is our simple way of organizing everything around us and these little file cabinets. Now added to that is when you put four or five things into a category, then what you're implying is that they're all the same. And that gets into acceptability. 0:24:12.8 BB: So, if this is a good part, that's a good part. That's a bad part. That's a...
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Myth of the Bottom Line: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 3)
09/23/2024
Myth of the Bottom Line: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 3)
Is your financial bottom line the true story of your organization? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz take on the myth of the bottom line - maybe it doesn't tell you what you think it does. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Jacob Stoller, a Shingo prize winning author of "The Lean CEO" and also "Productivity Reimagined" which explores how to apply the Lean and Deming management style at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number two, the Myth of the Bottom Line. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:32.7 Jacob Stoller: Thank you, Andrew. Great to be back here with you. Yeah, the myth of the bottom line, it is widely believed that if you look at the financials, that tells you everything you need to know about the productivity in your organization. And it's almost when you think what we talked about last time, so that the pyramid, the idea that the whole equals the sum of the parts, I think the myth of the bottom line is really kind of flows naturally out of that. If you believe in this pyramid that Dr. Deming was so critical of, the myth of the bottom line seems to make sense. Just that dollars flow through, you save a dollar here, it's all going to add up. 0:01:23.8 JS: So the problem with that is that productivity as we've learned from Dr. Deming, is actually determined by lots of non-financial factors. And what the bottom line gives you is a kind of an oversimplified, I guess, aggregated view. So you take the total sales of a company and you divide it by the number of employees. You can call that productivity, but it's not really productivity, 'cause productivity, strictly speaking, comes from making increasing output with a set of inputs. So you go from time A to time B, are we making more while keeping all our fixed costs constant? So there are things that get in the way of measuring that and one of the big ones is something called price recovery. So if you look at profitability, it's really a combination of price recovery and productivity. But price recovery would be any change in cost, any kind of financial cost during or between the two periods that you're measuring. 0:02:45.7 JS: So if you've got say the cost of labor, cost of materials, facility costs, energy costs, all these things can change between two time periods. And at the same time, maybe your selling price changes. So it turns out that factoring all those things out is much more difficult than you would think. It doesn't come easily using ERP systems in those things. And one of the pioneers of Lean accounting [0:03:16.8] ____ explained to me how he, when he first realized this, how much work it was to actually just separate all these price recovery factors from the total that contributed to productivity. So it's not that easy to even get to productivity and really get an accurate figure on it. 0:03:39.1 AS: It's interesting. I'm a financial guy, so I look at the P&L all the time of so many companies. So I think I've got some fun stuff that we can talk about, but was there something more you were gonna wrap that up with? 0:03:51.9 JS: Well, yeah, I think what happens with that is you get a sort of a cultural divide, because executives, I'm told, typically see operations as a black box. They'll say, well, okay, someone worries about process and manufacturing process, or it could be in any field. It could be medical, it could be something else, but that's something that operations worries about, so we'll let them do that. So they're left, these executives, with only one language, and that's financial language to understand things. And that's basically the iron law there is you get what you pay for. So we wanna get better quality, okay, we invest in it, that costs money. We wanna get faster delivery times, well, we'll pay money for that. And we wanna lower cost, well, then we better get rid of some people. 0:04:51.7 JS: So these things are all looked at sort of transactionally from the outside, not inside this black box of process. But inside that black box, that's where all the magic happens. That's where the Deming chain reaction happens. The fact that when we invest in quality, costs are gonna go down, but you tell that to an accountant, they'll tell you you're nuts. So it's really, I think there's a big challenge there of getting people to understand that the laws of that really determine productivity are not purely financial. And people need to... I think a lot of people need to broaden their thinking to understand that. 0:05:43.0 AS: Maybe out having looked at the financial statements of thousands of companies and have valued thousands of companies in my life, let's look from a top down, first of all. So people organize, people give money, give capital to companies, because they expect to get some return from that capital. Some people care about what that company does, others don't care, but that's the first step. And so the company gets capital that they deploy and they organize their business however they want, and ultimately they generate revenue. Now, revenue is price times quantity. And I think the first thing that supports what you're talking about is that, if a manager of a company says, our revenue went up 20% last year, and it was all driven by increasing prices only, well, that's... If you could sustain that, that would be fantastic, but it's quite likely when you increase prices, you're gonna have a knock on effect of your demand falling as your competitors have lower prices. But then, what you could say is that that company really didn't change anything about the way it's operating, it's output, it's productivity. Would that be correct in saying that in your mind? 0:06:56.9 JS: Yeah, it would be correct, and I think that a lot of the companies that are protected from... We got stories about this that are protected price wise and are able to kind of raise their prices at will, actually get very sloppy with their operations, and they don't increase their productivity. So I would say to your clients or whoever when you're analyzing that, that what productivity growth will give you is sustainable improvement over time. Productivity is the one thing that every company has control over, and you can control it year after year, but it's long term. It's a long term prospect. So that's... If you're managing quarter by quarter, that's maybe not gonna be so attractive. 0:07:52.0 AS: Yeah. So I think that's a great point about the long-term nature of trying to improve your productivity, because anybody can be a one hit wonder and increase price, let's say, and then tell everybody, "hey, we got more revenue, or we got more profit." Now let's look at the other side. So the P&L, the profit and loss statement, or the income statement is revenue minus costs, equal profit. There's a second aspect, is that a top level executive who come in and say, "I'm slashing the marketing budget, and I'm slashing the cost related to our operations and all that," and in the end, they would get an increased... Increase in profit. But they may get that at the sacrifice of future growth of let's say the image, the brand image of the company as an example, which doesn't necessarily have to do with the black box of actually making the product, but does have to do with creating a bottom line that looks great, but sacrificing the future bottom line. What are your thoughts about that? 0:08:55.1 JS: That's a great point. Yeah, of course, Dr. Deming would tell us to look at the system. They're all interdependent, marketing, sales, production and everything. But when I said black box, I mean, yeah, it does conjure sort of an image of manufacturing, but that same black box thinking, I think needs to spread through the entire company. And some of these really mature companies, Lean companies and Deming companies too, they're thinking everything as within that operational framework. Because it's operations within that, that you have your complex adaptive system. Financial, pure finance is not really in the same way... The laws of finance are not... Don't reflect that kind of complexity. 0:09:45.0 AS: I would like to just define this black box, because what you're... When we think of it of a black box, we think, okay, people just look at it, and they don't really know what's going on inside. But you're saying that that's the way a senior executive oftentimes comes in and they don't even know what's really going on. I remember when I worked for Pepsi in the factory, that the factory manager was even out of touch with what was happening on the floor. He wasn't out there all the time. So when you're talking about black box, you're talking about kind of people looking from the outside in, but inside that black box is where all this productivity work is being done of how do we get more efficient in what we do, use less resources, and get a better outcome? How do we hit the specifications or the desire product that the customer needs. Which is one of the great things about capitalism is that you're actually trying to reduce the resources that you're putting in to create an output. 0:10:43.4 JS: Yeah, exactly. Well, I would expand the black box again. It can be anything, it can be in your accounting department. So the black box really is process. It's the whole concept of process. So it's not a physical entity at all, or a plant floor, it can be everything in the company, but yeah, you can look at... You can take same kind of principles and say, "how come it takes you 10 days to close our books at the end of the month? Can we shrink that down to three?" So we can use the same principles anywhere in the organization. And similarly, we can use these principles in healthcare and services industries and just about anything. So yeah, so the black box is a very conceptual idea. 0:11:33.4 AS: The process, the systems. 0:11:33.4 JS: Yeah. 0:11:37.0 AS: The other thing I always tell my finance students on first day, the first thing I put up on wall, on the board is, "finance adds no value." Which is a very disappointing thing for undergrads in finance. But what I try to show them is that, finance is a feedback. It's a tool for feedback. And the feedback in this case is financial feedback. And with that financial feedback, it's information that the management team can use to create value, to make better decisions, ultimately about the business and what they're doing. And so for those people that think that finance is something that creates value in a business, I always say it's a support function. And when it's done really well, it's a fantastic support function to give feedback of, here is the big picture of what we're producing, whether that's looking at the cost accounting on a production line, or whether that's looking at the overall company. So finance adds no value is one of the things I always say to kind of wake my students up to see that really, finance can be great if it's supporting the CEO and the management team at making good decisions. 0:12:47.8 JS: That's a great point, Andrew. And of course that's said often in the Lean world. When they separate out, muda, which they call waste, they have... Well, they have necessary waste and unnecessary waste. Unnecessary waste is too many steps in a process or whatever, but the necessary waste is things like finance, and it's not just finance, but it's things like having an HR department. Because HR is not actually making any products for your company. So all these support functions, administration, even executive management would be considered to be not adding value in that framework. So I think what you're saying makes perfect sense. 0:13:38.4 AS: I came across a company when I was a young analyst here in Thailand, and it's a factory. And I was looking at the financials, and I was seeing that the profitability was rising quite fast, and the cash conversion cycle basically went negative, which I've never seen a factory have negative cash conversion cycle. So I called up the company and asked if I could come out as a analyst. I went out to visit the CEO and the management team and went around and I asked him, "how did you get your cash conversion cycle to be so low?" He said, "well, we focused on reducing an inventory in our business." And I said, "how long did it take you?" He said, "it took us about five years." And he said, "but I really gave the responsibility to each team leader and each team to think about how they could reduce the inventory in their area." 0:14:27.4 AS: And that was, first of all, a lesson in focus. If you focus on one thing and it's the right thing, let's say, let's assume that was the right thing at that time, you can get there. But the reason why I'm telling you this story is 'cause he told me another thing that was interesting. He said, "we have a... Each area we have a profit and loss statement for, and we try to get people to think about that." But I said, "how do you handle the overhead of management, the cost of management?" He said, "we list out the exact cost of management and we post it on the wall, and then we calculate it per area so that everybody knows how the management cost is hitting their P&L. And then we challenged them to help push us to drive down that overhead." And I was like, that's pretty transparent, I thought, in a Thai factory. 0:15:18.2 JS: Well, that is interesting and I'd be curious. A lot of companies use standard cost accounting and what often happens is inventory actually... When they reduce inventory, that's an asset right? On the balance sheet, and they take a hit from reducing inventory. So I'd like to know how your client dealt with that, or if they had to deal with it. 0:15:42.1 AS: I am not sure how he did the accounting, but I know that many, many companies in Thailand do not use standard cost accounting, just because it's a pretty advanced thing. And I think that they're pretty simple in some of their operations. Not all, but yeah. 0:16:00.8 JS: Yeah. Okay. Well, no, standard cost accounting is just not a good way if you're interested in maximizing your productivity, because it basically hides the... It hides the true cost of inventory. It postpones them to a later year. So when you sell the product, then you're paying the carrying costs of the inventory, which is crazy. So somebody overproduces, they don't take the hit for that. 0:16:25.3 AS: Right. One last thing from me, and then maybe we'll wrap it up by thinking about the takeaway of what we want the listeners to be able to do from this discussion. But I just, since it's myth number two, the myth of the bottom line, I wanna address another myth that I always talk to about my students, and that is that the goal... This is the myth, "the goal of the management is to maximize profit." And I teach my students that if we wanna look at the financial goal of the management of a company, it is not to maximize profit. And if anybody says that, I always stop them and say that "actually, the goal of the management is to maximize value. And value is a function of profit and risk in the calculations that we use in the world of finance." So you can... A manager, two managers of different companies, but let's say competing companies, they could be, one could be getting a huge amount of future cash flows coming in, but they could be doing it through bribery, let's say. 0:17:28.8 JS: Yeah. 0:17:29.6 AS: And that is raising the risk secretly behind the scenes. And so the ultimate, the value that's being created in that company is going to disappear. Another good example is Amazon. When Amazon listed in the stock market, it went seven years with losses. So was it doing the wrong thing? No, it was creating value even though it had loss. So ultimately, the importance is to create value, maximize value, not maximize bottom line. That's kind of me from the top down finance perspective, but what are your thoughts about that? 0:18:08.6 JS: Well, value is tricky. Because it's determined by the customer. So a bunch of things. I always give the example of ballpoint pens because I scribble a lot on my calls with a ballpoint pen, but supposing I'm making 10,000 of these an hour or something, and I up that by 10%, well, that's fine. And with all my machinery, maybe I'm running it faster and I'm using all the same plant, I figured out a way to do that. But what if the productivity, or sorry, the productivity will show as an increase, but what happens if some of those pens skip? I have a quality problem as a result of picking that up. Well, if the pens are not really acceptable to my buyers anymore, then I haven't gained anything. So it shows... 0:19:01.6 JS: So you can't just do a productivity calculation based on numbers that are turning out. You have to maintain that quality and that's not that easy to do. 'Cause it might be that my quality problem is that, I have to increase by 10%, but it's only skipping one out of 10,000 pens or maybe one out of 5,000, but the customer might not care about that, or they might not... They might rather pay a little bit less and have that slight defect. So it's a tricky business, I think, with value, you have to constantly be getting customer feedback, and knowing what the customer needs, what level of quality they need, and making sure that you consistently deliver that. So value, yeah, absolutely. 0:19:55.8 AS: It's a good time to come back to point number one of Dr. Deming's 14 points, which is, "create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive, and to stay in business and to provide jobs." And the idea of focusing on improving product and service is the holy grail. If every day, you are working as an organization, as teams, as groups to improve product and service, it's just amazing, and I think that that's where Toyota has been a great example of just relentlessly pursuing that. But let me ask you, how would you sum up what you want people to take away from the myth of the bottom line number one, and what action do you think that they should take as they go back and look at their business or look at their department? 0:20:52.1 JS: I would say stop. First of all, stop pretending that you know everything based on the financials. Go look at, go study Deming principles or learn about what actually happens and how the value is created. Go onto the front lines where value is created. Whatever your company is, study that and start to learn what some of their problems are, and how that affects value. I think there's this... They've said that... It's often said that it's much harder to unlearn things than it is to learn new things. So I don't think it's an easy... I don't think it would be an easy thing to do. It's very convenient to believe that the finances tell you everything, especially if you're outside the company. If you're an investor or you're Wall Street or whatever, and you're providing guidance on companies, telling them that they don't really understand what's driving the value of that company is not a very welcome message. So I think it's it's not easy. 0:22:05.8 AS: I was just reading a book called, "The Six Month Fix" by Gary Sutton, which is a great book about turning around companies, but he has a chapter talking about Hewlett and Packard, the two gentlemen who started Hewlett Packard, but he talked about how they just... They were constantly walking around out in the production area. They were in the maintenance area, they were on the loading dock. They did it at evenings, they did it on weekends, they did it on day... They were just constantly out there. So...
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The Myth of Segmented Success: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 2)
09/16/2024
The Myth of Segmented Success: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 2)
Is the whole simply a sum of its parts? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss what happens when you divide a company into pieces and manage them separately - and what to do instead. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number one, the myth of segmented success. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:30.4 Jacob Stoller: Great to be here with you, Andrew. And yeah, before I dive into that myth, I'd like to just start with a quote by Albert Einstein. "There is no failure in learning, but there can be in refusing to unlearn." Now that's something that's gonna occur over and over when we talk about the different myths. And the fact is, as many people have observed, unlearning can be a lot tougher than learning. So I think we always have to keep that in mind. So I want to tell a little story which kind of illustrates just how deep this unlearning can go. And this was told to me by Rich Sheridan, who has a company called Menlo Innovations, they're a software development company. And very interestingly, the theme of his work has been about joy in work. Sounds familiar? 0:01:28.3 AS: I love it. 0:01:28.5 JS: Well, he didn't really discover Dr. Deming until he had already written two of his books. So it just shows to me that there's some very underlying truths behind what Dr. Deming was teaching. But anyway, the story Rich tells is that he had his family in for a wedding. And they had a new office they'd moved into, so everyone wanted to see it. So he brought his granddaughter in, an eight-year-old. And he said, well, where do you sit, pop-pop? And he said, right here. Here's my desk. Here's my computer. And the granddaughter looked at his desk and was puzzled. You know, she said, well, where's your name? You got to have your name somewhere. And so, I mean, Sheridan was amazed. He says, I thought, wow, she already has it in her head that as CEO, I should have a corner office with a placard that showed how important I am. And you know, I felt a little embarrassed. She was somehow implying that I can't be much of a CEO if I didn't have a placard with my name on it. 0:02:35.5 JS: And she's only eight. So no, here's a CEO that's just really, really, you know, ahead of a lot of people. You know, he understands a lot of the Deming principles. And he sees just how deeply people hold these myths. She believed that there's this pyramid structure and there's got to be a CEO at the top and there have to be all these departments and people reporting to various people, et cetera, et cetera. So this really, this belief she had is really, it's sort of the pyramid that Dr. Deming described. And Dr. Deming actually wrote, he said, in The New Economics, you know, his last book, he wrote, this book is for people who are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. And he talks about the pyramid. And I think that kind of encapsulates everything we're dealing with in terms of beliefs. And I'm just going to read it because he was so concise about saying it. "The pyramid only shows responsibilities for reporting who reports to whom. It shows the chain of command and accountability." 0:03:55.3 JS: "The pyramid does not describe the system of production. It does not tell anybody how his work fits into the work of other people in the company. If a pyramid conveys any message at all, it is that anybody should first and foremost, try to satisfy his boss and get a good rating. The customer is not in the pyramid. A pyramid as an organization chart, thus destroys the system, if ever one was intended." So I've never seen a more pointed description of the prevailing style of management. But think of this young girl at age eight, you know, I mean, and a lot of them, what happens is they go to school and they learn. And then maybe they eventually go to business school. And then sometime, maybe 30 years later or something, this person, this young woman is being told, we're not going to manage according to a pyramid anymore. 0:04:54.3 JS: We're gonna change the whole structure. We're gonna respect people and we're gonna respect their opinions. And we're not gonna assume that all these departments automatically fit together like building blocks. We're gonna work to define a system. All these things that Deming taught, you know, how do you think she's gonna react to that? You know, we're talking about things that this person has believed, not just from training in business school, but for years and years. So I think that kind of underlines the task we all have in terms of learning and unlearning. It's just an enormous thing we have to deal with, which is why I think it's important to look at the myths and various myths. And that's why I really worked to define those. So, when we... 0:05:46.5 AS: I would just highlight one thing about, if we go back to maybe, I don't know, constructing the pyramids, it was all about power and force, you know, get things done. It was about power and force. And I think what Dr. Deming was saying at a very, you know, many, many decades ago, he was saying that power and force are just, you know, a tiny factor in the world of business. The real motivating factor is intrinsic motivation, satisfying the customer, working together. Those types of things are the forces that will bring a much better outcome in your business, rather than just having an organizational chart that just shows the flow of power and force. 0:06:30.4 JS: Exactly. You know, and I think that if you look at the pyramid structure, it's actually a great system for consolidating power. So it works that, and, you know, but if you start to look at producing quality products and services for customers, it doesn't work at all. And, you know, so we need a new kind of logic, not this kind of logic. If we really do, like I say, we want to produce excellence. And if we want to have productivity as our competitive advantage, right? 0:07:06.4 AS: And one thing I just want to, for the listeners and viewers out there that may get confused, like what is a pyramid chart? We're talking about an organizational chart with a CEO, you know, and the like at the top, and then all the different department heads and the people below them. So Dr. Deming referred to that, and Jacob's also referring to that as a pyramid chart. Let's continue. 0:07:27.5 JS: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that. Okay. So that gets us to myth number one, because, and myth number one is the myth of segmented success. And the idea behind it is that the productive resources, this is a myth, this isn't true, but according to the myth, the productive resources of a company can be organized as a collection of independent components. The whole equals the sum of the parts. So this is essentially the glue that holds this org chart structure together. If that myth were true, then that org chart structure would be perfect for organizing a productive organization. But it is a myth. And what we see is that when you run a company according to that, with that assumption, you get into all kinds of trouble. 0:08:20.5 JS: And I'll just give you a very simple example. We have, let's say we have a company that does heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and they're selling stuff to industry, various machines, and they're installing them, and they're servicing them, all that kind of thing. Right? So let's say there's the end of the quarter and the sales rep has to make his or her numbers. Now salespeople are rewarded based on their sales numbers. Production people or the service people are rewarded based on their numbers, on how many service calls they satisfy or whatever. So installation people are rewarded for how much installing they do. So everybody's got quotas, and they're all sort of independent like components. So you get this sort of negative chain reaction where the sales rep does a big deal to make the numbers at the end of the quarter. He brings it in, the bell rings, you know, hooray, this person's made his numbers, he gets to go to Hawaii or whatever it is. Right? 0:09:27.6 JS: But let's supposing to get that deal, that's a big deal, it's high volume. So guess what? Low margin. And guess what? Maybe the sales rep had to make a few concessions to get that deal. Maybe the sales rep didn't reveal all the fine print to the customer, you know, in sort of the rush of getting the deal. So after the deal, the next quarter, well, the service department's got problems now dealing with this order. The installation department's got problems. So both of these departments have to hire extra people, have to pay overtime. So the end of that quarter, their numbers are going to look bad. Right? So that's a classic case. But it just happens over and over and over again, because you have all these different business entities compensated based on their own separate objectives as if they were separate companies. And yet that's glorified, that's seen as entrepreneurial. We'll run our department as a business, as a profit center. But they don't consider the whole overall system. So that's the kind of the tragedy, I guess, in modern business. And again, it's assuming that everything is kind of gonna work out if you manage them independently. 0:10:53.2 AS: And I was thinking that, you know, the head of the sales department is gonna be rewarding the salesperson for what they're doing. And if the head of the manufacturing or service department could anticipate that this deal that the salesperson's closing is gonna cause a lot of problems because of, you know, they're rushing it and they're trying to give great terms to get something under a deadline. There's just a very difficult for the head of the sales department to listen to that complaint to the head of, let's say the service department as an example, because they're being judged by the numbers they're delivering in their department by their boss. And so they got to kind of let it happen. 0:11:33.5 JS: Yeah. Yeah. And this is by the way, based on a real life story. And this is a company called Air Force, I think, Air Force One, it's called actually, and it's based in Ohio. It's a heating, ventilating air condition company. I could say HVAC, but they use the acronym. And they worked with Kelly Allen. And very soon after working with Kelly, they got rid of sales quotas and put everybody on salary. And the whole thing took off, you know, as the CEO told me. They're getting better deals, customers are happier, veteran sales reps are helping the younger ones close deals. Everyone's helping everybody. And the business is really, really expanded rapidly. You know, they've, I think, doubled or tripled their revenues in the last three or four years. So yeah, these things, when you get rid of these artificial barriers, businesses can really take off. And we got all kinds of case studies showing that. 0:12:45.3 AS: Yeah. And for the listeners and viewers out there, like, wait a minute, I can't do this. You know, my salespeople, they only are gonna work when they're incentivized individually as a department. I think the first thing that I would say is listen to what Jacob's telling you, listen to the stories that you're hearing and think about it. You don't have to move on it. I think that transformation in the way that you think about, you know, things takes time. And the natural reaction, when you hear something new, you know, you started with the idea of unlearning the natural reaction, when you hear something new is to say that can't work, but just keep that open mind as we continue through myth number one. So why don't you continue on, Jacob? 0:13:25.3 JS: Yeah, well, and as Kelly Alley, Kelly Allen you know, made some points on that. First of all, he said, you don't go in with your guns blazing and just take away the sales quotas. He said they worked very carefully so that CEO understood the whole system, how all the parts interact. And then once you understand the system, then you're in a position. Often people go in prematurely, remove all the sales quotas and you get chaos because people don't understand all the dependencies that are there. So it's really, really important, I think to manage the change in a responsible way. And again, as Kelly says, you've got to understand the system and how it works. 0:14:10.4 AS: Great. And I think you have more stories to tell. 0:14:14.2 JS: Oh yeah. Well, I actually a wonderful one. It's, and it's not just sales quotas, by the way, it's any kind of rating and ranking system. And one of the real classics is the, a company called Bama, Bama Foods, which is, uses Deming's principles. And the CEO, Paula Marshall, actually might've been this little girl, eight-year-old girl who was looking for the desk of the CEO 30 years later, because she started working with Deming just by accident, really, because she had taken over the company business at a young age and she, they were trying to deal with some quality problems. And she went to a Deming seminar and Dr. Deming asked who in the audience is the CEO? And she was the only one that raised her hand. And so he said, will you come and , be part of a study group? So that's how she got to work and got to become actually today's the only living CEO that's actually worked directly with Deming, or the only active CEO that's actually worked with Dr. Deming. 0:15:32.4 JS: But anyway, she started to talk with Dr. Deming about the problems they were having and he said, and she described a rating and ranking system that they had had, and they had spent, I think millions of dollars even back then with a very, very reputable consulting firm. And it was one of these things where they rank people on a scale of one to 10. And the idea was let's make all our people accountable. That's how we're going to get quality. We'll have accountability. Everybody has to be rated by their managers and we'll create some fear and we'll create some incentive for people to work harder and solve our problems. Well, the first thing Dr. Deming told her is get rid of that rating and ranking system. So it was very, very hard for her at first, you know, she'd spent a lot of money on it. And she said, you know, but eventually she said she realized that it wasn't helping the company. It wasn't doing anything, but it was still very, very hard to let go of that idea. But eventually she did. Eventually she got on a conference call. 0:16:40.3 JS: They got rid of it and the results were just incredible. She said by the, you know, everyone had hated the system and it just turned the conversation around. I mean, instead of saying, well, here's why I've ranked you, Andrew, on, I've only given you a seven instead of a nine. We would be having a sort of a constructive conversation about the problems you're facing in the workplace, how we can make things better, how can we work together, that sort of thing. So it was, it became much more constructive and much more cooperative. And they were able to evolve to a whole system where teams of people work together to solve problems. But without taking away that system, it would have been very, very difficult to do that 'cause, you know, well, that means that person will be ranked higher than me maybe, you know. 0:17:31.2 AS: And we know very well in the area of sports that, you know, great coaches are not sitting there ranking and rating and ranking their employees and beating them over the head with that. They're trying to identify the strengths and weaknesses. How do we, you know, build this team so that we can beat the other teams? And that really requires coordination. And if you do rating and ranking type of thing, you start to destroy coordination. And for those people that are thinking, of course, you know, I'm terrified to look at this and remove my rating and ranking. One thing you can do is take, you know, five or 10 people that you respect their opinion within the company and ask them how they feel about the rating and ranking system. And you'd be surprised what you hear. 0:18:15.3 JS: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Right. And, but yeah, about the sports team, I guess. Yeah. I mean, there's some documentaries on the Chicago Bulls, you know, and I think they had some very good stories about teamwork and stuff like that. 0:18:30.5 AS: Well, Phil Jackson was amazing in that the documentary on Netflix was great, The Last Dance. But what you can see and you can hear it from the players, I think Dennis Rodman was a great example where Phil Jackson understood how to deal with this kind of disruptive kind of situation and guy. How do you deal with that and get the most out of him on the court in a way that still follows the values of yourself and your team? And he just showed that very well in that. And so I think that that was a great example of how you coordinate your resources. 0:19:08.5 JS: Yeah, a great example, I think, for people to watch. Yeah, 'cause it really does. It does really show that. 0:19:15.3 AS: You know, you were talking to me about just before we turned on the recorder about Deming was a scientist and physics and all this, some things I never even thought about. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about your thoughts in that area. 0:19:28.4 JS: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that, first of all, the when you look at the traditional pyramid and all the traditional style of management, I mean, that's really based on reductionism, cause-and-effect. Essentially, it's Newton, you know, it's Newton's golden principles. So you have a business system that's built on 17th century logic, basically. And so what I think is wonderful about Dr. Deming, I mean, we think of him as this philosopher. But here he was, Dr. Deming in the 1920s, getting his PhD in mathematical physics. So at the time he's doing his PhD, I mean, there's Heisenberg developing his uncertainty theorems, all that kind of stuff was just exploding. And the whole view that people had of the physical world was just being turned upside down. So Dr. Deming was very, very cognizant of that. 0:20:35.2 JS: You know, when it started, you know, with statistics, but gosh, you know, science of psychology was changing too. And I think Deming, you know, when you read him, he was really thinking like a scientist. You know, this is the way the world works. And was very, very sensitive about all the components of that. You know, the science of the way people think and what motivates them. You know, he knew that people aren't motivated by sticks and carrots. And we'll talk about that later. He knew that there are limits to how much you can know if you're not right there in the workplace. You know, he understood all that because of variation. But I think when he was introducing those ideas, people really weren't thinking that way. I think they are a bit more today, but he was really a pioneer in that. 0:21:33.4 AS: Yeah. In fact, I was just looking at, he got his degree in mathematical physics from Yale university in 1928. So yeah, there was a lot going on in the world then. 0:21:46.3 JS: Sure was. Yeah. So yeah. And he, I guess he's very patient with us. You know, you think of someone having a degree like that talking, you know, over everybody's heads, but I think he really developed the style of communicating. 0:22:06.5 AS: So what else you got for us on this topic? I think you had some takeaways that you mentioned some four points or some other items. 0:22:14.3 JS:...
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The Red Bead Experiment: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 5)
09/09/2024
The Red Bead Experiment: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 5)
What can Dr. Deming's famous Red Bead Experiment teach us about quality? What happens when you only focus on the bad, and ignore the good? In this episode Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss acceptability vs desirability in the context of the Red Beads and a few of the 14 Points for Management. 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is episode 5 of the Misunderstanding Quality series and the title is "The Red Bead Experiment." Bill take it away. 0:00:30.4 Bill: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome back. Welcome back to our listeners. One thing I want to say is, one is I listen to every podcast two or three times, listening for, is there a need for clarification, reminding myself, thinking, oh, I should have said this. Or sometimes I say, oh, make sure you make this point, and I do or I don't. And. so one is, nothing comes up from the last one that I thought I missed or mispronounced, but what I do want to clarify is, I'm viewing the target audience as quality professionals in your respective organization or people that want to become a quality professional that are learning, that are trying to apply these ideas in their organization, are fascinated with it. Could be quality professionals who are consultants looking for new awareness of the Deming perspective. So, that's... 0:01:35.8 Bill: And so, some of what I have in mind is, and the examples is, things you can try at home. In fact one thing I encourage... What I encourage my students to do, undergraduate and graduate students, even the clients I consult with, companies I consult with, is develop the ability to explain these ideas, any of them, to people outside of work. So, that could be a spouse, a brother, a sister, a mother, father, son, daughter. And, why outside of work? 'Cause I view that as a safe audience. You say, hey, I just listened to this podcast. Somebody at work may not be as safe. And why are we having this conversation? So, I would say, it could be a college classmate, but one is, try explaining these things to people outside of work and then when whoever that is looks at you and says, I have no idea what you're talking about, or this makes sense, then as you develop that confidence then you're refining your explanations. And that puts you in a better position to apply, to explain it at work. 0:02:54.9 Bill: And why is that important? I'd say there's a lot you can do on your own. I mentioned that a month or so ago, my wife and I were in New England, and I met my doctoral dissertation advisor, who's 86 years old and lives in the middle of nowhere. And one of the things is the wisdom he gave us way back when it was so profound. One of the things he said, we were poor starving college students making seven bucks an hour, working 20 hours during the semester as Research Assistants or 40 hours during the summer. And what a life. Living in... This is poor starving college students. And he would say to us... We'd get together now and then, there'd be a keg on campus and we'd be... Which it wasn't all that often, but anyway, he'd say to us, "These are the best years of your life." [laughter] And we'd look at him like... Now again, I mean, we were... I wouldn't say we were poor starving college students, but I mean, we made ends meet. Now our classmates had gone, undergraduate, gone off to work and they were making real money, and we just stayed in the slum housing and doing... Just living cheap. 0:04:20.3 Bill: Then he says, "These are the best years of your life." We're looking at him like what are you saying? And what he said was, you're working on your research projects either undergrad, masters or PhDs. He said, "You will never have the time you have now to focus on one thing and not be distracted." Now a few of the classmates were married. Most were not married, but he just said this is... I mean, what a dream situation. You're in the laboratory every day. That's all of your focus. Your tuition is covered, blah, blah, blah. But it was just like, yeah, okay. So, when our daughter was in graduate school I shared that with her and she laughed at me. I said, "Allison, these are the best years of your life." 0:05:14.4 AS: If only we listened. 0:05:15.5 Bill: Right. So, that's... And well, I wanted to bring up... But the other thing I want to bring up aside from that story is, he'd say to us, when you go to work, he said trust me. He said "there will be more than enough time to get your job done. You'll have a lot of... You will have time to..." And he said, 'cause he used to brag about he'd be given a task and he can get it done in a fraction of the time that was allocated. And why I mention that is that every job has latitude. And so, to our listeners I would say, think about how to use the latitude you have to practice, to do a small scale Plan-Do-Study-Act thing. Now I really think that's what it's going to come down to is, either experiment at home or whatever, but just practice. And then as Andrew always reminds us at the end of each podcast, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. And that's led to a number of people I'm meeting with once or twice a month. 0:06:31.8 Bill: And they are exactly who I hope to meet, is young quality professionals wanting to know more, to know more, to know more, and they're either in the States or they're living in Europe. All right. So, before we get into the Red Bead Experiment I wanna go back and talk more about acceptability, desirability which will be a focus of the Red Bead Experiment as well. But in the first series we did, there were 23 episodes before we got into the Misunderstanding Quality, and somewhere in there we discussed, you may recall the paradigms of variation. And the paradigms are labeled letters A, B, C, D and E. And we will look at them in this series. So, for those who don't know what I just said, don't worry we'll cover you. And for those who heard it before, okay, we're going to review it. And I mentioned that because paradigm A, the only one I want to talk about tonight, is paradigm A, is does it meet requirements? That's what acceptability is. Is it good? 'Cause we have this binary world in quality. Part of paradigm A is a binary world. It is good or it's bad. We talked about last time is, if it's bad can we salvage it? Which means we can rework it. 0:07:52.3 Bill: Now some of the rework means it could be we can rework it and use it. And in the aerospace industry what happens is, maybe we can't put it in a flight engine. When I was at Rocketdyne maybe it doesn't end up in a Space Shuttle Main Engine, but maybe it ends up in a test engine and a test stand, so it doesn't fly, but we're still going to use it, or it's scrapped. We have to throw it away. But paradigm A is acceptability. Another thing I want to mention is, I was commenting on LinkedIn the last couple of days over process capability metrics. And there's Cp which stands for capability of the process. And, then there's Cpk which is a little bit different. And I don't want to get into those equations tonight, maybe in a future episode. But what I want to say is, if you're looking at a metric such as yield, people say the yield is 100%. What does that mean? It means everything is good. What if the yield is 50%? That means we have to... 50% is good, 50% is bad. 0:09:06.2 Bill: So, yield is an acceptability metric. Why do I say that? Because the measure is percent good. What is a good versus bad? Also say that indices that involve the requirements. And we've talked in the past about a lower requirement and an upper requirement, the idea because we expect variation we give a min and a max. And so, if the equation for the metric you're using includes the tolerance limits, then that's a clue that that's an acceptability-based metric. Now, I don't care whatever else is in the equation, but if those two numbers are in the equation, then the inference is, what you're talking about is a measure, some type of measure of acceptability. 0:10:00.5 AS: Right. 0:10:02.6 Bill: But even if people talk about... If the metric includes the middle of the requirements, well, as soon as you say middle of the requirements, as soon as you say requirements we're back to acceptability. So, these are things to pay attention to is what we're talking about acceptability and desirability, 'cause what we talked about last time was I was trying to give everyday examples of both. And so, acceptability is when people talk about... In fact I listened to about an hour long podcast today on quality management. And one of the comments was, if you follow the steps correctly you get the right result. Well, that's acceptability. Right? If things are right as opposed to wrong. So, again, when you're in this world of good, bad, right versus wrong, that's acceptability. 0:10:58.7 Bill: Again, the reminder is this is not to say acceptability is bad, but it's not desirability. Which one is it? And then what we talked about in the last podcast number four was choose. Do we wanna to focus on acceptability or do we wanna focus on desirability? Where desirability is saying, of all the things that are acceptable, I want this one. I want that orange. I want that parking spot. I wanna date that person of all the ones that meet requirements in my search... You know, in the dating app. And so, that's acceptability. What got me excited by Deming's work in the early '90s was, I was spending a whole lot of time at Rocketdyne focusing on things that were broken. I'm trying to apply Dr. Taguchi's ideas to go, to take something that used to be good but then slipped into bad, and now we're focusing on the bad stuff to make it good. And now the good news is it kept me busy. 0:12:06.5 Bill: I was having a lot of fun. These are high visibility things and the solutions. We got the solutions working with some really wonderful people. But that led me to start asking questions. And I was once at an all-day meeting in Seattle at Boeing. Rocketdyne had been sold to Boeing Commercial Airplane Company. I got invited to a meeting up there. And it was a monthly all-day production meeting. I don't know 50, 60 people in the room. And they asked me to come up. So, I went up. And what time does the meeting start? You know 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, whatever. And I said you know put me on a few hours into the meeting. Well, why then? Well, I want to listen to the first couple of hours of the meeting. Because in listening, now we're going back to what we talked about with Edgar Schein. And I've developed the ability... You know, I can hear are we focusing on acceptability, desirability, I can hear things you know with a Deming lens. People think of a lens as seeing, well, there's a Deming ear set as well. 0:13:10.7 Bill: And so, I listened for the first two hours and exactly what I expected. So, when I get up to speak at last I said before I got to the slides, I said, "How much time do you spend every day discussing parts that are good, that arrive on time?" And a couple of people in the front row made a circle with their fingers, zero. And I said, so why is that the case? And one of them says, if it's not broken don't fix it. And wherever I go that's what people say. I went to a big Boeing customer doing... Because they were a customer we sold them rocket engines of some size. And I was briefing that slide, had 110 people in the room for a lunchtime presentation. Before I could read the slide, the room erupted in laughter. And so, I share that because if we're spending all this time focusing on the bad but not the good, what is that? That's acceptability. That's what happens, is the economics of acceptability says, only focus on the bad to make it good. But we don't focus on the good because... And that's what we're gonna look at towards the end of tonight is, why don't we focus on the good? And so, next, I had a co-worker at Rocketdyne got a job in Chicago at a toy factory. They bottled soap bubbles. And as a kid's toy with a little wand inside and blowing bubbles and all that. 0:14:56.0 Bill: And she dramatically turned the place around, did some amazing, amazing work. She went from being the senior manufacturing engineer to the, I think plant manager. So, she called me up as she'd been promoted to plant manager. And the question was now that I'm plant manager what should I focus on? So, I said... I had known her for four or five years at that time. I had been mentoring her and the mentoring continued in that capacity. So, I said well, what do you think you should focus on? And the comment was, I think I should focus on all the things that are broken. Well, that's acceptability once again. And I said, so you're focusing on being 100% reactive. And she said, well, yeah. And I said, what you're doing then by focusing on acceptability, you're saying the things that are good I ship, the things that are bad I got to work on. But without understanding that there's actually variation in good... I mean, go back to the Boeing folks when the guy says to me if it's not broken don't fix it. My response to that was, if you use that thinking to drive your car when would you put gas in it? When it runs out. If you use that thinking relative to your plumbing system, your water system at home when would you call the plumber? When it breaks. 0:16:25.5 Bill: When would you go see the doctor? When... So, the downside of not working on things that are good and not paying attention to things that are good is that they may bite you. So, part of the value proposition of acknowledging from a desirability perspective that there's variation in good. If you pay attention to the variation in good there's two upsides. One is, you can prevent bad from happening if that's all you want to do. And two, the focus of a future episode is by focusing on things that are good and paying attention to desirability in the way that Yoshida, Professor Yoshida was talking about. That offers opportunities to do things that you can't do with an acceptability focus, which is improve how things work together as a system. And the idea being when you move from acceptability which is a part focus to desirability, which is a system focus, you can improve the system. Okay, more to follow on that. All right. So, I got some questions for you Andrew, are you ready? 0:17:37.4 AS: Uh-oh. Uh-oh. 0:17:39.8 Bill: So, Dr. Deming had how many points for management? 0:17:42.9 AS: Fourteen. 0:17:46.3 Bill: All right. Okay. 0:17:48.3 AS: I'm being set up here. I just feel it. You start with the easy ones. 0:17:52.8 Bill: All right. And... 0:17:54.3 AS: Listeners, viewers help me out. 0:17:56.9 Bill: All right. And which point, Andrew, was cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality? What number was that? 0:18:09.6 AS: I'm gonna say four or five, or six. I can't remember. 0:18:14.2 Bill: Three. Three. 0:18:14.6 AS: Really? Three. Okay. That was close. 0:18:16.1 Bill: I would not have known. That was number three. 0:18:19.1 AS: Yeah. 0:18:20.1 Bill: And it's followed by Dr. Deming saying, "Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality to the product." So, the first question is what point was it? And again, I had to look it up. I know it's one of the 14. Second question, Andrew, is, if Dr. Deming is saying cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality, would you think of that as an acceptability focus or a desirability focus? 0:18:55.1 AS: I don't know if I can answer that. I mean, I can only think about what he was saying, which was design quality in from the beginning and get everybody involved in quality, not just having an inspector at the end, but I'm not sure. 0:19:11.4 Bill: Yeah. No. And even as I asked the other question, I'm thinking... Well, this is great because if in the audience you think of quality from an acceptability perspective, right? 0:19:24.2 AS: Mm-hmm. 0:19:24.9 Bill: So, if you're working for Boeing, which is all about acceptability or most companies, and you hear step three, then you're thinking, cease dependence on the inspection to achieve..., you're thinking acceptability. If that's what you're used to, if you're used to quality being doesn't meet requirements... 0:19:42.9 AS: Okay. 0:19:43.2 Bill: Then what you're hearing is Deming talking about acceptability. But if you've been exposed to Yoshida's work and Dr. Taguchi's work and you're understanding that within requirements there's variation of things that are good, so it's kind of a trick question. The idea is it depends. Alright. 0:20:02.4 AS: Yep. 0:20:05.5 Bill: I got two other of 14 points to ask you about. Alright. Which of the 14 points is in the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone? Instead, minimize total cost. So, first which point is that? 0:20:26.9 AS: I think it was also... I would say then four. 0:20:32.1 Bill: Yes. [laughter] 0:20:33.6 AS: Yeah. 0:20:34.1 Bill: Yeah. [laughter] 0:20:34.5 AS: You'd think I know. I wrote a book about it. [laughter] 0:20:39.3 Bill: Alright. So, that's point four and... 0:20:42.1 AS: Okay. So, I got... I don't wanna be rated and ranked, but I got one right at least. Okay. Let's keep going. 0:20:49.1 Bill: Okay. And, so, is that acceptability or desirability? Let's say this. Is awarding business on price tag acceptability or desirability? 0:21:02.1 AS: Probably acceptability. 0:21:04.6 Bill: Yeah. 'Cause then you're saying... 0:21:06.5 AS: Can you hit this number? It's okay. 0:21:11.2 Bill: Yeah. Or you contact your insurance company and you say, I'm looking for a heart surgeon, and you say, and I found one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they call you up and say, yes, that person is a heart surgeon, but we prefer you use this one. [chuckle] What's the chance they're thinking about a cheaper option? Right? Alright? So, you're looking at from desirability perspective... 0:21:38.5 AS: This guy's really cheap on kidneys. 0:21:40.7 Bill: Right? And so you're thinking you've done a bunch of references. You've asked your friends. And why are you asking? Because all the doctors out there that meet requirements, you're blindly saying, I'll take any one. That's acceptability. And you're saying, I want this one. That's desirability. But the insurance company says, no. We consider them all to be the same in our policy. That's acceptability. Alright. Okay. And here's the last point we're gonna look at tonight. Which of the 14 points is "improve constantly and forever the system of production and service to improve quality and productivity and thus constantly decrease cost"? 0:22:23.5 AS: Isn't that number one? Constancy of... That's... 0:22:28.0 Bill: That's constancy of purpose. That's number one. 0:22:28.8 AS: Okay. Constancy of purpose. So, improve... Don't know. No. No. 0:22:39.4 Bill: That's number 5. 0:22:40.5 AS: Okay. Five. 0:22:44.5 Bill: And I was looking at, so I know those are three and one, and I thought, oh, that's three, four, and five. Alright. So, what I wanna do there is, we're gonna look at that a little bit later. So, I don't wanna ask you about acceptability, desirability, but I just wanna lay that on on the table. Alright. So, now we're gonna look at what Dr. Deming referred to as his chain reaction. The Deming Chain Reaction. Alright. So, what do you remember...
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Setting the Challenge: Path for Improvement (Part 2)
08/26/2024
Setting the Challenge: Path for Improvement (Part 2)
In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the first part of John's path for improvement model - setting the challenge. Using an example from United Schools Network, John explains their aspirations for cutting chronic absenteeism rates. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. And I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is "set the challenge." John, take it away. 0:00:24.6 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah. Last episode, we kicked off this new series. I introduced this improvement model that we can use to help us set ambitious goals backed with a sound methodology. I think I made this disclaimer last time. I'll make it again that this is sort of like showing listeners a peek behind the curtain because we're sort of talking about this as this model is being built and used for the first time in my network of schools here in Columbus in United Schools. So I think that caveat's important, and I think maybe starting with just a quick review of the model we looked at last time would be a good refresher for this episode for those that are reviewing and I'll talk through it for those that are only listening. I'll go ahead and share my screen quick. You see that all right? 0:01:17.1 AS: Yep. 0:01:18.4 JD: All right. Yeah, so this is the model we kind of stepped through kind of an overview last time. I think it's important to remember a few things. One, basically the core idea of the improvement model is it gives us the scientific way of thinking so that we can work in a way that makes sense to close the gap between our sort of current conditions in our organization and sort of our aspirations. So we frame those two things as the voice of the process, as current conditions, what's happening right now. And then the future aspirations, that's the voice of the customer. That's sort of what we or someone else wants those conditions to be. And what we're doing throughout this process is stepping through the four steps that you can see displayed in the model. So kind of just stepping through those quick. 0:02:06.5 JD: The first thing is that we set the challenge or the direction, and that's gonna be... We're gonna dive deeper into that step today. Then the second step over on the left hand side of the model, for those that are viewing, you work to grasp the current condition, so what's going on currently in your organization. And then the third step is we establish the next target condition. So think of that as like the intermediate goal that we're working towards sort of on a more proximate timeline. And then fourth, what we're doing is once we understand those things, then we're experimenting to overcome obstacles or impediments. And so all of those things we talked about, doing that with a team that includes someone or people working in the system, in our case students, a lot of the time, those with the authority to work on the system like the teacher in a classroom or the principal of the school building. And then that System of Profound Knowledge coach that has that awareness of the System of Profound Knowledge and sort of brings that lens to the improvement efforts. So that's sort of a quick rehash of the model that we went over in episode one. And then I'll stop. Well, you want me to leave that up or I can stop sharing? 0:03:29.9 AS: Either way. I don't mind. 0:03:31.0 JD: Okay. Well I'll stop sharing for now and then we can always pull it back up if we want to. Yeah. So with that sort of in mind, what I thought would be helpful is then do this deep dive into step one. And so kind of what we'll do through the next several episodes is focus on each of the steps. So we'll take this deeper dive into step one. Set the challenge or direction. So last time I mentioned that in step one of the model we asked this primary question, where do we want to be in the long run? And this is... Think about this as a overall challenge or direction that's set by organizational leadership typically. So senior leaders, the CEO, typically the board, they're gonna be the ones framing this challenge, setting the direction for the organization. 0:04:27.2 JD: And we can also think about it as a sort of a longer range goal that if we accomplish it, it will differentiate us in our case from other schools or if you're in the business community, it would differentiate you from competitors in some way. But even though it's something that we're striving toward currently we're setting this in a way that it's gonna stretch us and right now it almost seems impossible to accomplish this thing far out into the future. And this direction or challenge, I think it's fairly typical. Sort of set this on a six month to three year timeframe. So that kind of gives you a sense of sort of how far out we're looking and the timeframe we're looking to sort of achieve this challenge is. And last time I shared an example from our most recent strategic planning where we're trying to reduce our chronic absenteeism from the current state, which is 52% chronic absenteeism. We're trying to take that down to something closer to 5% chronic absenteeism. 0:05:44.4 AS: Seems nearly impossible. 0:05:44.5 JD: It does if you're on the ground in schools right now, especially schools like ours, it really does seem nearly impossible to sort of cut it at that large of a rate. So. 0:05:55.6 AS: I have an ethics class that I teach here, an ethics and finance class here in Bangkok. And I tell the students it's not mandatory to attend class from my perspective. School may require you, but it doesn't matter to me. My job is to make it so exciting and interesting that you wanna be here. That's hard. 0:06:16.7 JD: Yeah. That's a good frame. That's a really good frame. We have, unfortunately we have so many obstacles that our kids are going through to get to school. Even something as simple as consistent transportation from yellow school buses is a major impediment to school attendance here in Columbus. So there's all kinds of obstacles that... Challenges in front of us that we're gonna have to improve and solve to get down to that 5% rate. 0:06:43.0 AS: When I was growing up in Ohio, in Hudson, outside of Cleveland, the farm that I worked on in the summer, Barlow's farm. Mr. Barlow was our bus driver because there wasn't much going on in the wintertime. And so, yeah, he never missed [laughter] I don't ever remember a bus not arriving in my whole youth. 0:07:07.6 JD: Yeah, yeah. It's something in many places you take for granted. And then in a number of other places, it is a major, major challenge for sure. 0:07:13.0 AS: Interesting. 0:07:14.8 JD: That's certainly the case in Columbus where we are, for sure. So when we think about this challenge it's this... I kind of think about it and this is why it needs to a lot of times be set at the leadership level or the senior leader level is it's this new future condition and it serves as a sort of compass for us to follow. And that's important 'cause we don't have an exact roadmap for how to get there. So it's sort of like a general direction, but the specifics are what we're gonna have to be filling in as we go through some of those other steps. Some of those intermediate goal setting, some of the experimentation that I talked about. But think about this direction or challenge is it's really the purpose behind our efforts. And then when you sort of put together the tough challenge and then the scientific thinking, that's really powerful. And those two things together can really sort of move you into this new territory. I think that you're looking to... I think this map territory compass metaphor is really sort of spot on for this particular model. Oh, go ahead. 0:08:29.8 AS: I had a question because I have a client of mine and one of their objectives is to list their company on the stock market here in Thailand. Like many companies, but in some ways that's kind of an owner's goal. Like we've talked about some of their other goals, like being the leading company in their field in asia, Southeast Asia or something like that, and/or maybe to have a happy workforce or whatever. And I'm just curious, like how do people think about goals? What is a good way to think about it? Is there such a thing as like an internal or a higher level goal versus a goal for the company versus an external goal? How do you guys think about those types of things and target conditions? 0:09:17.2 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think... I don't know the exact answer. I mean, I think when you set a goal at the leadership level, then you're gonna... Well, one, you're gonna have to explain it throughout the organization, whether it's a 100 people or a 1000 people or 10,000 people. And then depending on the size, there's probably gonna be different types of goals that are in different business units, I'm guessing by business type. We're a pretty small organization and so we're pretty close to the... In fact, our office... My office, it is on the ground floor of one of our middle schools, so we're very proximate compared to like a bigger company. So I think this can look different in different places. I think the consistent thing is it's gotta be clear, it's gotta be spelled out, it's gotta be clearly communicated. It has to be something that you're talking about frequently. Otherwise you're obviously not gonna move in this direction. 0:10:11.2 AS: Yeah, I mean, that kind of answers it too. 'cause I thought... When you said that, I also thought about how people care about with them, what's in it for me. And so, as you said, you gotta explain it and you're gonna have to do a lot of talking about it. So people need to see that that goal is something that's gonna bring them value, otherwise they're not gonna be excited to go do the hard work that it takes to get there. 0:10:37.0 JD: Yeah. Maybe in that respect, like sometimes in education is... Some of the goals that we have set are so self apparent that there's just sort of immediate buy-in 'cause like who's against kids coming to school? Almost nobody. So that's I think a fairly easy one to get buy in. And maybe in other settings more time needs to be spent on the buy-in part, the explanation part. Maybe... This can be kind of hard, but who's involved in setting the goals in the first place? Maybe there's ways to get more people involved in that process. 0:11:10.6 AS: Well, and maybe the kids aren't involved in the buy-in. 0:11:13.8 JD: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Although, yeah, like the yellow bus thing that's out of their control. And I'd say that's actually a major obstacle. But I think... 0:11:26.5 AS: That's true. Nowadays, I'm sure there's plenty of kids that wanna be there. 0:11:29.5 JD: Oh yes for sure. 0:11:30.9 AS: But there's obstacles all over the place for them. 0:11:34.3 JD: The vast majority wanna be there, actually, I think. But your point is good, and that goes back to that team they're the ones working in the system and so they're gonna be the best at identifying the obstacles. So to stay in our setting, they certainly need to be a part of the experimentation that happens to improve the chronic absenteeism rate. One other important caveat to point out at this step in the process, and we've talked about this a little bit but I got this little chart that I think will help sort of explain when we were setting this direction or challenge, it's what I would call like an improvement goal. And it's not an accountability goal. And I think it's really important to be explicit about the difference between those two things. 0:12:24.4 JD: 'cause they often get conflated. And so I had built this chart for another improvement project, but I think it does a really good job. So I'll share my screen again. I think it does a really good job of sort of outlining the difference. And it's not that one is necessarily better than the other, it is just really important to know what's the purpose of this particular type of goal and what's it used for. And so I was just gonna take a moment to kind of run through this. So on the left you have sort of some key questions that are answered either by... And here it says measurement for accountability, but you can sort of replace that with an accountability goal and improvement goal over there on the right. So you have measurement for accountability or accountability goal, and then improvement goals or measurements for improvement. 0:13:20.7 JD: And you have some questions that that particular type of goal or measure will answer. Then you have in the next row their specific uses. And then why quality measurement matters. So just starting with accountability goals or measurement for accountability what those types of goals are gonna do is answer questions about merit or status or accomplishment of someone or something. Who's performing well, who isn't, who should be considered knowledgeable enough to do X. We're talking about end of line outcomes, like end of year outcomes. They're often... Goals for accountability often happen once a year. So I've talked about this repeatedly, but state tests would be a very good example of an accountability goal. The point of doing that is to separate the good from the bad basically, when you look at state test. Down there in the use sell for those that are viewing, it says the purpose of, or the use for accountability goals is to determine the applications of rewards or sanctions. Right? And so it's none of this really has to do with improvement. 0:14:38.8 AS: Sanctions, what a word, [laughter] 0:14:40.4 JD: Sanctions, right? Yeah. I mean, this happens in schools all the time. Schools can be sanctioned depending on what the law is at the time as it relates to state testing and accountability system. 0:14:50.9 AS: I thought we only sanctioned Russia [laughter] Okay. So there's even sanctions in schools. Okay, got it. 0:14:58.0 JD: Definitely sanctions in schools. And then we can juxtapose the accountability measures with the improvement measures over there on the right or improvement goals. When we're talking about improvement goals or setting the challenge, we're really talking about questions about specific changes as potential improvements to systems like our systems. So we're thinking about questions like, are the changes I'm making leading to improvement? How are my changes affecting other parts of my system? And what's measured is outcomes and processes relevant to the object of change. You know and how often are we doing this? Frequently. Much more than once a year, like the state test. And the whole point is to learn our way to a better system, right. And so with chronic absenteeism this could be both a measure for accountability and a measure for improvement, depending on how it's framed. 0:15:57.8 JD: Chronic absenteeism is actually reported on state report cards, but in this case, I'm talking about an internally created goal that we have for ourself that we've created for ourself that our organization is gonna work towards. And there's gonna be various things that we do to see if things that we're trying as interventions, experiments work in improving those rates, basically. So I think it's really important to call this out that when we are talking about this particular improvement model and the four steps, we are not talking about accountability goals at all. We're talking about improvement goals, two very different things. 0:16:37.6 AS: Interesting. And the improvement goals is the type of thing that it seems like is not as common as the accountability. Like everybody's trying to, you do this, you've gotta achieve this, that type of thing. Whereas this is such a bigger picture. 0:16:51.3 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think the key difference is because you could actually have an internal accountability goal. You could set up a similar system internally as what the state does when they're looking at schools. And if our mindset was, we're gonna set this goal and you people over here go do this, figure out how to do it, that would be much more like an accountability goal. But our mindset is like hey, this is something we all gotta take a look at. This has to get better. This isn't working for kids, so what are we gonna do? How are we gonna figure this out? That's really the key difference, you know? You're not doing this for some other group of people. You're a part of that group that's trying to make this thing better. 0:17:36.5 AS: So I'm just curious too, as I think about the listener or the viewer out here is how do they get started in this concept of setting the challenge or direction and maybe there's people at the top of the company. I mean, the first thing that I thought when you started talking about it is Oh, there's so many target conditions, there's so many challenges. Like there should be this one and that one. And all of a sudden I started coming up with like three to five challenges. And then I thought, oh no. Now this is overwhelming. 0:18:11.8 JD: Yeah. So in our strategic plan, we have 13 of these key metrics. And each of one of those could be its own challenge or direction, but they are divided up sort of roughly in like different department areas. And so some of 'em have to do with our fiscal responsibility raising funds and stuff like that. And there's a specific team that does that. And that would be different from like an academic team or a school-based team that was working on something like chronic absenteeism. So there is sort of a divide and conquer. The CEO maybe our superintendent are focused on all 13, but there are different teams that are actually running the experiments and working towards improving these things. And then there's someone like me that's sort of serving as the System of Profound Knowledge coach across multiple teams that are working on each of these key metrics basically. But in terms of where to start, I think that's a good segue. I mean, I think we've answered the question or we've said that basically that this strategic challenge answers the question, where's our organization going next? And I think one good... One simple way to start is to think of completing this sentence: Wouldn't it be great if we could dot, dot, dot. 0:19:37.0 JD: What is that thing or what are those things in your organization? It's, again, going back to it seeming nearly impossible, it's something we can't achieve with our current systems and processes. It's not easy, but not impossible. We think it's achievable even if we're not quite sure how we're gonna get there. It's something that's gonna be measurable. So we know if and when we get there. And another thing is that, especially when you're talking about, you were talking about like communication of these challenges across the organization, these challenges or directions are often expressed as some type of catchy statement. So just a quick statement that brings to mind this entire sort of area of work. And so I was kind of brainstorming because we've been talking about this chronic absenteeism example and I think we can just kind of keep that going throughout these episodes. So I was thinking of something like, every student every day, and then everybody knows that we think it's important for every student to be at school every day. And we're sort of working to get back to that post pandemic. 0:20:52.3 AS: Yeah. I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if every parent was fired up. 0:21:00.1 JD: Yes, absolutely. 0:21:01.2 AS: About every...
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Pay Attention to the Choices: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 4)
08/19/2024
Pay Attention to the Choices: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 4)
Continuing their discussion from part 3 of this series, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz talk more about acceptability versus desirability. In this episode, the discussion focuses on how you might choose between the two. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is Episode 4 of the Misunderstanding Quality Series, and the title is Quality, Mind the Choices. Bill, take it away. 0:00:31.3 Bill Bellows: All right, Andrew, welcome. So podcast three, I think the title was Acceptability and Desirability. And one correction there, when I went back and looked at the transcript the concept of... At least the first person I heard tie together acceptability, desirability, at least in the Deming community, was a professor, Yoshida, Y-O-S-H-I-D-A. He was a PhD student of Dr. Deming, I believe at NYU but I mispronounced or misspelled his first name. I thought I've heard people refer to him as Kauro, perhaps spelled K-A-U-R-O, maybe that's his nickname, and maybe I just didn't remember properly but his proper first name is Kosaku, K-O-S-A-K-U and he at one point in time was in Greater Los Angeles at Cal State Dominguez Hills. And then I think sometime in the mid '90s, early '90s, last I heard he moved to Japan. 0:01:51.1 BB: I've never met him. I've watched videos of him, there's a classic presentation. I don't know if it's got, it might be online someplace of he did a guest lecture. There was a... Dr. Deming was speaking in Southern California and needed an emergency surgery, had a pacemaker put in, so this would've been '92 timeframe. And Professor Yoshida was called in to give a guest lecture. And that ended up being something that I think was sold eventually. The video, the lecture was sold by Claire Crawford Mason and so he is... I don't know how much of that is online, but anyways. 0:02:38.4 AS: Is Kauro, Kauro wasn't that the name of Kauro Ishikawa? 0:02:43.7 BB: That may be where I... Yes that was a Kauro. There's two Ishikawas. There's a father and the son and I... So I'm not sure if Kauro was the father or the son, but anyway correction there. In the first series we did, going back to '23, 2023, I mentioned the name Edgar Schein, but I don't believe I've mentioned his name in this series. So I wanted to throw that, introduce that in this series today and give some background on him for those who have not heard his name or not aware, did not listen to the first series and Edgar Schein, who passed away January of this year. He was an organizational theorist, organizational psychologist, spent the greater part of his career at MIT. And one of the concepts I really like about what he talked about is looking at an organization in terms of its artifacts. So if you walk around an organization, what do you see? What are the artifacts? That could be the colors, it could be the artwork on the wall, but the physical aspect of the organization Schein referred to as the artifacts. And what he also talked about is if you dig beneath the artifacts, they come from a set of beliefs, and then the beliefs come from a set of values. 0:04:23.9 BB: And again, the first series we did, I talked about Red Pen and Blue Pen Companies, and Me and We Organizations, and Last Straw and All Straw organizations. And those titles should make it easy for our listeners who are not aware to go back and find those. And what I talked about is, this imaginary trip report, if you visited a Deming organization, if we could think in terms of two simple organizations, a Deming organization, and a non-Deming organization in this very simple black and white model. And I had people think about the physical aspects of both, if they were to go visit both. What I then followed up on in our conversation is what you see physically comes from a set of beliefs. Now, they may not be articulated beliefs, what Schein would call espoused beliefs. And then you have what they really believe and I forget the term, I use this for that, but it comes from a set... But anyway, the physical comes from the beliefs, the beliefs come from the values. 0:05:39.0 BB: And part of the reason I bring that up for our listeners, and I'm thinking in terms of the people that have a responsibility in their respective organizations. They could be consultants, internal consultants, working in quality likely, given the focus of this series. First of all, you have to start where you are. But even added on, included in start where you are, is you have to start where your management is. So, if your management is tasking you with an improving scrap and rework, then that's what you better be talking about. Now, you don't have to be guiding your actions based on acceptability because the other aspect is scrap and rework are typically associated... Well, not typically, they are associated with acceptability. The lack of acceptability, acceptability is the idea that this is good, it is acceptable, it meets the requirements, defines...the quality requirements that are defined. 0:06:52.0 BB: If it's good, it is acceptable, if it's bad. There's two categories of bad, bad could be I have to throw it away, that's scrap, which means I can't recover it or rework, which means I can do something with it and perhaps salvage it. And so if your management is tasking you with improving scrap and rework, then first of all, where they're coming from, quite naturally, is acceptability. And why do I say that? Because everywhere I've gone, that is the deepest foundation of quality in every organization I've ever met, worked with, I have met people that work from whether it could be... Whether it's clients that I've worked with, whether it's students, my university classes. Acceptability, scrap, and rework, all go together. And, so if that's where your management is, then they're asking you to focus on improving acceptability. 0:08:05.6 BB: But, you may find it invaluable to shift your focus to desirability to improve acceptability. And that will be a focus, well I get into some of that tonight and others or today, and then on a future podcast later. But, I remember once upon a time at Rocketdyne, the executives were, the VP of Quality was task master asking for improvements to scrap and rework and also things called process capability indices, Cp’s and Cpk’s. And if you've heard of a Cp or a Cpk, great, if you haven't all I could say is I find them dangerous. I find them, well I say they're all about acceptability. And what makes it, reason I would encourage people to stay away from them because they appear to be desirability, but they're really acceptability. 0:09:15.7 BB: We'll save that for later. But anyway you have to start where they are. So if people are asking for improvements in scrap and rework, then, instead of fighting them, you go with it. And then what we'll be talking about tonight is, is it worthwhile to shift? Well, what does it mean to improve acceptability and the difference between acceptability and desirability? And relative to the title tonight, Mind the Choices is being aware that there's a place for acceptability and there's a place for desirability. And going back to Yoshida in episode three, what I was referring to is, in presentations he was doing from the early '90s, maybe even going back to the '80s, he talked about Japanese companies are about desirability. So, he presented this model of acceptability and desirability. And then, his explanation of what makes Japanese companies, again, back in the '80s, Japanese companies were viewed as those setting the quality standards. 0:10:20.5 BB: And, he was trying to say that the way they're doing that is that they don't rely on acceptability as other companies in other countries do. They have a higher standard. And that's what I wanted to introduce in our last episode, Episode 3. And, what I wanted to do tonight in this Episode 4, is to put some, add some more to that. But, also reinforce I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with acceptability, it's a question of what does the organization need at that point of time? And, really it has to do with... Really, it has to do with how big a system you wanna look at. So if you're looking at something in isolation, which is, I mean, when you look at something and saying it's good or bad, that is the epitome of looking at something in isolation. 0:11:17.5 BB: You're looking at a pen and saying it's good. You're looking at the diameter of a hole and saying it's good. That is not looking at what goes in the hole, that is not looking at how the pen is being used. So by definition, that's what Ackoff would call analysis, which is looking inward. It's not what Ackoff would call synthesis, which is looking outward. And how far outward you look is all according... I mean you could look, it comes down to how big is the system. And I wanna introduce the name Shel Rovin, Sheldon was his full name. Shel was his nickname. I met Shel through Russ Ackoff in 2006. Shel was, he was in charge of the Chief Nursing Officer program, which was a two-week immersion program at the University of Pennsylvania. 0:12:14.5 BB: And he was doing that in the, 2003, 4, 5, timeframe when I met him. And Shel was a dentist by background. He was Dean of the School of Dentistry at University of Kentucky and University of Washington. And I met him through Russ and invited him to Rocketdyne on numerous occasions. And Shel spoke about relative to looking at a system, 'cause people talk about, well "Andrew, we've gotta look at the whole system," but how big is the system? And, so people say, well, systems thinkers look at the whole system. Well, how big is that? Is that 1,000 foot view? And people say, oh no, Bill, it's bigger than that. Is it a 10,000 foot view? Is it... How big is the system? Well, Shel's perspective, and the word I wanna introduce from Shel is relative to systems is boundarylessness. 0:13:12.7 BB: Say that a few times fast. 'Cause systems have no boundaries. So I'm sure our listeners... I'm sure you have heard, I don't if our listeners have all heard, Dr. Deming would say to executives, does your system include the future? He used to ask questions such as what business are you in? What business will you be in five years from now, 10 years from now? Well, why not 15 years from now? Why not 25 years from now? Native American Indians, associated with Native American Indians is the idea of looking at the seventh generation after you when you're making choices. And so what I would ask people is, well, why seven? Why not eight? Why not nine? Why not 10? I mean, within an organization, we could be working with our supplier to try to get across these quality ideas to our suppliers. 0:14:05.5 BB: Well, that's looking at the system. Well, wait a minute. Do our suppliers have suppliers? Yes. Do their suppliers have suppliers? And so relative to boundarylessness is this idea is when people start talking about the whole system, I don't know what "whole" means. What I'd rather look at is what size system are we looking at? That's a choice. That's a choice. So we could decide to look at our suppliers. We're gonna go one step, we're gonna look at procurement. Who do we buy from? Now, we may educate them and give them the responsibility of looking at their suppliers on... But that would be a way of managing quality. Likewise, we can look at the impact of our work on our customer and give them heads up as to how to look at the impact of their work on their customers. But that's looking at the system in an X, Y, Z, physical coordinate, add onto that, the time dimension. And so, again, all I wanna throw out there is that when it comes to making choices on acceptability, desirability, a lot of it has to do with how big is the system that we're looking at. Some everyday examples of acceptability. 0:15:23.5 BB: Again and what I wanna get across is, in part the difference to help people make choices. And so when we were on a vacation in Europe recently, I took a number of photos of people making choices. And,` when I travel, anywhere I travel, especially out of the country, I love walking into supermarkets just to see what they sell that perhaps is not sold in the States or in California. I know there are things you can't find in California that you can find on the East Coast. That's one thing. But I like going into supermarkets just to see what products are there. I mean, you can go to England and find in the refrigerator section, hard cider, apple cider, you know, alcoholic cider that I got exposed to going to a Deming conference in 2000. I've become a fan of it ever since. Well, in the States it's pretty hard to find hard cider, period. You go to England and you'll find, a dozen different brands and each brand may have a number of different types. 0:16:44.9 BB: And so that's, but anyway, relative to that when you walk into a supermarket, if you're looking at canned goods, or just look, well, looking at cider, we can look at this cider versus that cider. We treat a can as a can, whether it's buying tomato soup or cider, we treat all those cans as interchangeable, interchangeable parts. But when we go to into the bakery section, that's where I was taking photos in Amsterdam and I was watching people sort through the pastries. And yet what was laid out were a bunch of pastries of the same style. And yet people were, I want this one, I want that one. 0:17:26.0 BB: Well, part of acceptability is treating all those pastries as the same as we would treat all those cans of tomato soup as the same. Now relative to tomato soup I know you live with your mother, and I'm willing to bet your mom, early, early on when she took you to the supermarket, taught you how to buy canned goods, right? And she says "Andrew when you buy a can of something you pick it up, you're looking for dents," right? 0:17:55.1 AS: Mm. 0:17:56.0 BB: Because if it's dented, that's bad. And if it's not dented, that's good. I know my mother taught me that. So I know when it comes to buying canned good we look for dents. If dented, that's bad. If it's not dented, it's acceptable. But I don't see people sorting between cans of tomato soup made by the same manufacturer. They're just, we treat it as they're acceptable. Acceptable implies either one, the differences don't matter or I don't see differences. 0:18:33.0 BB: Desirability is, you wanna see a great example of desirability, go to the produce section and again, either watch people sort through pastries that are all acceptable, and yet they're looking for the biggest one, or... And when it comes to fruit, we're looking for the ripest banana, or maybe we're looking for bananas that are green because we're not gonna use them for a while. So acceptability, again, I'm trying to give everyday examples of acceptability is going in and saying, looking at all the fruit there, and just taking five peppers, whatever it is, and throwing them in the bag and saying, I need five 'cause my spouse said, go get five. And I throw them in the bag. And it could be time-wise, I don't have time to sort through them, or I quite frankly don't care that they're different. That's acceptability. So acceptability is either acknowledging they're different and saying, I don't care. Or... 0:19:29.6 AS: Seeing them as the same. 0:19:32.4 BB: Or pretending they're all the same. And I had a guy in class years ago, and I was asking about buying fruit and I was trying to use the example of we go into the supermarket. We sort through the oranges looking for the ripest one, and this guy says, well, I don't sort through the oranges. I said, well, how do you buy the oranges? I buy them by the bag. I said, do you sort between the bags? He says, no, I don't sort and his arms were crossed. I don't sort, I don't sort. So then I noticed that he had a ring on his left hand, a wedding ring on his left hand. So I said, I see you're wearing a wedding ring. And he said, yep. I said, did you sort? 0:20:15.2 AS: I don't sort. 0:20:15.3 BB: Meaning... I don't sort. And so when you're looking at things that meet all the requirements and saying there is no variation or the variation doesn't matter, that's acceptability, Andrew. When you look at all the things that meet requirements and you see them as being different and saying, I want this one, that's desirability. And so that could be, when it comes to selecting a spouse, when it comes to selecting an orange, when it comes to selecting a parking spot, in a university, you're looking for the, an ideal, the best professor for Thermodynamics II, and there's 10 professors the university says are acceptable. And you talk to classmates and you find out, oh, no, no, no, stay away from that one. What are you doing? You're sorting amongst things that meet requirements, that are acceptable and saying, that's not good enough for me in that situation. 0:21:17.2 BB: Well, what I wanna say then added to that is, this is not to say desirability is better than acceptability. It really comes down to is desirability worth the effort? Because when it comes to desirability, I am looking beyond, I'm looking at a bigger system. So I'm looking at the fruit in terms of how I'm using it. If I'm aware of that, I'm looking at the parking spots in terms of: I'm gonna be in the store for an hour and I want the most shade, or these parking spots have a little bit different distances between cars, and I want a spot with a little bit more width so somebody doesn't ding my car. So what I'm hoping is with these examples, people can appreciate that every day we make choices between acceptability and desirability. 0:22:11.3 BB: Every day we're making a decision based on saying, this is okay, code word for acceptable, or I'll take that one, that's desirability. 0:22:27.6 AS: That's quite a breakdown. 0:22:28.1 BB: Well, and the idea being... The other aspect of it is when you're choosing to say, I want... When you decide that acceptability is not worthwhile, my proposal it's because you're looking at a bigger system. You've got a bigger system in mind. You're not looking at that fruit in isolation. You are somehow saying, there's something about how I plan to use that, which is the reason for this decision. And then it gets into how big is the system that you're looking at? Are you looking at the person downstream of you at work, which that could be an internal customer. People used to use those terms. Are you looking at the person after them, two down from them, three down from them? And that gets into a choice. So what I would tell the folks I was mentoring at Rocketdyne is that they were designing things or going to see how they were used. And I'd say, first of all, nothing requires you to go see how that's used. Your job as a designer, whatever it is in engineering you design it, you give it to manufacturing. But you don't have to go downstairs and see how they're using it. 0:23:47.5 BB: I said, but if you do, you might learn a lot. And then they might say, "well, so I should go talk to the person who's first using it." Well that might be helpful. And then what about the person after that? Well, that might be helpful. And then what about the person after that? Well, that might be helpful. And I was trying to get across to them, we hire really bright people and if we just turn you down to don't look beyond, just deliver the thing, complete those drawings, do whatever it is, pass it to the next person. I said, the system may not require you to go look...
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5 Myths of Traditional Productivity: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 1)
08/12/2024
5 Myths of Traditional Productivity: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 1)
In this new series, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss five major management and productivity myths and how Lean and Deming thinking solve them. This first episode offers an overview and Jacob shares his journey from traditional management to a better way. Jacob Stoller is the author of The Lean CEO: Leading the Way to World-Class Excellence and Productivity Reimagined: Shattering Performance Myths to Achieve Sustainable Growth. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'll be talking with Jacob Stoller, who is a journalist and Shingo prize-winning author of The Lean CEO, which provides a boardroom perspective of Lean initiatives. Now, he connected with Dr. Deming's criticism of command and control management and recently wrote Productivity Reimagined to explore the reasons why organizations fail to apply the Lean and Deming style of management at the enterprise level. Jacob, welcome to the show. 0:00:37.8 Jacob Stoller: Well, thank you, Andrew. It's great to be here. 0:00:40.5 AS: Yeah it was actually really fun to talk to you before we even turned on the recorder to kind of really help people understand where you come from and why you are here. So maybe you can just explain a little bit of your journey of how you got to this point in relation to Deming. 0:00:58.2 JS: Okay, well, interestingly, I started out in sales. I was a corporate sales rep selling services and software and all that kind of high-tech stuff. And I did that for quite a while. But what I liked best about corporate sales was the dialogue that I had with customers, being able to talk to people and ask questions and explore topics. So fortunately, I was able to turn that into a career. I left that profession about 2001 and became a writer, journalist, did research projects, gave talks, did some training, did all the things I wanted to do. And through that, I discovered Lean by accident. And that, I think, wasn't probably till about 2010. And I was writing for a magazine, and someone told me to write about this Lean thing. What is it? And I started to ask questions and talk to people and eventually discovered this wonderful way of running companies. I was totally impressed, not just with how efficient they were and all that, but how they treated people. I thought, this is, boy, I would have liked to have worked at some of these companies. 0:02:14.6 AS: And for someone who's never even heard, let's just imagine someone's never heard the word Lean. What does that mean anyway? And what did it mean when you first saw it and after you really became an expert in it? What does it mean to you now? 0:02:28.4 JS: Well, I thought it was going to be super high tech. That's what I first thought. As a matter of fact, when I went to Japan to actually see it firsthand, I was expecting just flashing screens and everything. And of course, it was a very different thing. It was a lot of people, very, very people-oriented environment, people talking to each other, lots of communication. So I thought, wow. And I started to learn that it was really all about people. And so that was a gradual transformation for me. But it was very rewarding to see the human side of this. So that led me, really led me to some writing. I started working with some lean organizations like the Kaizen Institute, and I started doing writing for them, writing newsletters. I also wrote, helped Misaki Yumi the late Misaki Yumi, a very well-known Lean promoter, write the new edition of his latest book. And I did all the case studies for that. And I also helped various other initiatives. But the main thing was that I decided to write my own book, and that was The Lean CEO. 0:03:57.2 JS: And what I was interested in at the time was I saw that people doing Lean were running into all this resistance, and I was interested in exploring that a little more. And I thought, well, the people that really understand that will be the CEOs because they'll been there. They've been in the boardroom discussions. So that's how The Lean CEO came to be. And in that process, I was asking questions about management and the various practices. Now, I was expecting that there would be a sort of a standard executive playbook for Lean. That was my hypothesis, I guess. And it would have been really nice, very, very easy to write the book and neat and tidy and all that, but it didn't work out that way. They were all different. They all had different ideas. And interestingly, a lot of the thinking that went into their work, actually, they had learned before they even discovered Lean. That had been stuff that they believed in. They learned about teamwork early on, so they were somehow predisposed towards the people side of Lean. So I was really fascinated by that. But my conclusion really was that there was no one way to implement Lean, that there were just many, many different variations on it. 0:05:20.5 JS: And that's when I became and started to discover that there was a lot of the thinking that made these people successful at leading Lean outside of the Lean community. And that's where I started to get interested in some other. How the tech sector was handling change, how the sustainability people doing sustainability projects were handling change. And one speaker that spoke out loud and clearly to me was Dr. Deming, because Dr. Deming understood the fundamentals behind the thinking. I think that makes Lean successful. He understood what was wrong with conventional management and the barriers that people were running into. So, Andrew, I don't know if you remember, but the 1980s, everybody was talking about this ABC show, If Japan Can, Why Can't We? And here we are looking at a productivity crisis. I mean the US was their crown jewels in the US industry had been trounced by the Japanese. They were being outproduced two to one, right? I mean, and so this was recognized as a crisis. It was an election issue at the time. And I, they got Dr. Deming on television and they asked him what are we doing wrong? And Deming was very clear. 0:06:51.1 JS: He said you're not going to learn this, you're not going to be able to imitate the Japanese, and you're not going to learn a few production tricks. You've got to fundamentally change the way you manage. So that was a very, very strong message that I picked up when I was writing that book. And what's wrong with conventional management? What's wrong with command and control management? And why does it not why does it create companies that are so wasteful and do such a bad job at being productive? 0:07:22.6 AS: And as a devil's advocate, if I think about a Lean a company that's trying to adopt Lean, what I would assume was that at the management level, the objective of management is really to reduce resources, to reduce, if you could reduce the cost of electricity, your profit margin would go up. If you could reduce the raw materials that you have in your production process, your profits would go up, as an example, and the value of your business would go up. So how could there be any resistance to a young engineer that's picked up Lean and is bringing it through the organization? It's a little bit odd to think why would there be resistance to that? 0:08:04.1 JS: Well, the resistance is that people are used to doing what they're doing, for one thing. And Dr. Deming has identified with his knowledge of complex adaptive systems a fatal flaw in the hierarchical structures that corporations are run by. You see, if you're using corporate logic, you assume that every department and every work group is like an independent component and that if each component functions as intended and according to measured objectives, then the corporation will succeed. And Deming said that that is completely false, and he had the evidence to prove that. So what people are resisting is not that, people aren't resisting the idea of reducing costs and being efficient, but they're measuring efficiency in the wrong way. They're measuring efficiency of independent assets. And they say if these independent components produce efficiently, then the sum of the total will have an efficient corporation. But that's not true. That's only true according to 17th century logic. If you follow Newton and Newton's laws, that seems to be the case. And it's intuitively, we do tend to think that way. But if you're running a company, a company is not a simple system. It's a complex adaptive system. 0:09:38.7 JS: And it's the interdependence of all these entities and all these components that determine the success of your company. And that's what Deming was trying to teach, and that's what people didn't want to hear. 0:09:50.7 AS: So if I hear you correctly, the first thing is kind of the first wall that someone would come to at the board level or at the management level is just trying to overcome inertia. This is the way we do things. Why do we need to change? It takes effort to change. And then the second thing you're talking about is the lack of systems thinking, thinking that if we could just optimize every part, we're going to get the optimal output of this system. They didn't understand that, as you said, it's a complex adaptive system, that it's much more difficult than just saying, everybody do your best. Is there any other resistance that you saw? So the inertia is number one that I saw. The second one is a lack of systems thinking. Is there any other things that you discovered as you were working on The Lean CEO? 0:10:38.3 JS: Oh, yeah. Well, there's the elephant in the room. And this is that most large corporations anyway are focused on short-term shareholder value. Right. And the way to make your short-term numbers is not to be productive. It's not to invest in good long-term strategies to develop a long-term competitive advantage. It's to make your quarterly numbers. And that can be manipulated fairly easily. Well, maybe not easily, but it can be manipulated by creating perceptions about value, about market value and that sort of thing. 0:11:17.3 AS: And even more, even more than manipulated, it's just that if you don't follow, if all you do is just try to hit numbers on a quarterly basis, you're losing your focus on the long term. 0:11:27.1 JS: Absolutely. And there was a study, and this goes way back to 2005, but it said that corporate CEOs would sacrifice or 74% would sacrifice a long-term profitable initiative to make their quarterly numbers. They would throw it out the window. I think, if anything, that was 2005. I would think if anything, things have gotten worse since then. So we're actually talking about a slice of companies that really do want to be productive, where long-term productivity is their strategy. And that is, a lot of these are privately owned companies, manufacturers, and perhaps, there's some smattering of public companies that are doing this kind of thing, but it's rare. 0:12:24.7 AS: So let's just. So what we've been talking about is kind of the wall that you started to see, the ceiling that was Lean had a challenge, or Deming's teachings had a challenge, and that was this, overcoming the inertia, the lack of systems thinking, and this focus on short-term quality, sorry quarterly numbers. And very few companies were able to really focus on long-term goals of being productive. Now, maybe you can just take a moment to explain how your newest book, your latest book, then took what you saw from a Lean CEO and Deming and then brought it to another level. 0:13:07.8 JS: Okay, well, I interviewed about 60 people, and it's interesting. I thought it might be fairly easy, I would say. What are the basic myths? What do people get wrong? Usually, these are people that are pretty smart about Lean stuff, and people found that surprisingly hard to answer. And I think that was because a lot of these people I talked to had already been practicing this approach for a long time, so they really had to think about it. So it took some digging and a lot of interviews, but I found the thread was in five sort of primary areas, and one was the systems thinking, the pyramid that we talked about. 0:13:50.4 JS: That Deming so articulately talked about. Also, and then the other myths, I think, are somewhat derivative of that. But there's finance. The myth that the bottom line tells you what you need to know about the productivity of your company and it doesn't show up in the finances. So I did a chapter about that. The notion that the boss knows best, and that's not just the boss, it's also professionals. This idea of professional knowledge. Someone can go to school, learn how to tell people what to do, and that will accurately create the right procedures, the right kind of work. 0:14:32.6 JS: And when people follow directions from professionals, they will be the most productive. So that's a myth. Myth number four is the myth that people are motivated by sticks and carrots. And psychologists have disproved this about 70 years ago, I guess, but people still, if you look at compensation plans and you look at the way companies are managed and you look at structures, it's still assumed that people are going to be motivated by externals, by threats and rewards. So we talk about that and some companies that have dealt with that one. And then finally, there's this myth of tech omnipotence. We tend to have way more optimism about technology than is warranted, and we're seeing a lot of that in AI now. We're seeing a lot of disappointment with things not turning out the way people expected. So I really explored those five myths and how they stymie productivity and how companies can build a strategy around count.. what's the word I want? Counterattacking those myths or whatever. 0:15:45.5 AS: And then for the person who reads it, what is the outcome? So once they understand these risks, like number one, you mentioned about the pyramid and not understanding systems thinking. You mentioned number two about finance, you mentioned number three, about the professional or the boss knows best. And number four, people are motivated by sticks and carrots. And number five, tech omnipotence. Once they understand those myths, where do they go from there? How can they then apply that into their life and their work? 0:16:16.2 JS: Well, I suggest that they go into companies that are actually successful at dispelling these myths. You got to see it. But I have a last chapter, a long chapter, but I provide a sort of a roadmap for moving in. But there is really no alternative. If you want to build long-term productivity, there is no alternative to continuous improvement because you're just going to have to keep improving. And Dr. Deming explained that very well in terms of variation. It's always going to be there, and you're always going to have to be dealing with it. So you're going to have to create a culture, and it's going to be people-based. I don't care what kind of technology you have, long-term productivity gain is going to have to come from building the culture in your company. 0:17:10.1 AS: And I want to wrap up our discussion about this just so the audience understands. When you say productivity reimagined, what do you mean by the word productivity? 0:17:23.5 JS: Productivity is customarily just used as sort of a ratio. You know, people say, "Oh, yeah, I'll just take the total sales and divide it by the number of employees" or something like that. So it's seen as a sort of an indicator rather than something that you have to actually do. Right? That's something you have to actually pursue in a direct sort of way. And another, I'll make another side point, is economists like to say that take the GDP and divide it by the number of worker hours or whatever and say that's productivity. But it really, you know when you, the US government website defines productivity as increasing output with a given set of inputs. So from time A to time B, you've got to actually make more with what you have. And that's these indicators that people use for productivity don't reflect that at all. So you've really gotta... Productivity is not that easy to measure, and there's some, actually, some qualitative sides of it, right? I mean, if I'm making, say, ballpoint pens, and let's suppose I increase the production by 10% using the equivalent amount of materials and all the machinery. 0:18:51.9 JS: Well, that's great, but what if the quality goes down? You know, I haven't really gained anything. So it's kind of tricky to measure productivity. You have to get right down there in the processes to understand it. And so I would tell the finance people that it's inside that black box. You have to be in, understand what's going on inside that black box of operations to really understand whether, which direction your productivity is going. 0:19:20.2 AS: Okay. So if I hear that right, I think a lot of us could get lost in some sort of ratios or something like that and think about a measure. But in fact, what you're talking about is to really do productivity right, it sounds like you also really have to understand trade-offs. If you cut in a particular area, that's going to cause another problem, and that's going to...you may not be able to get more out of your existing resources. In addition, it's going to require work because you're organizing your company in a certain way to get a certain level of output with the inputs that you have. But in order to get a much higher level of that, you've got to rethink: How do I get the maximum out of this organization, which is a real challenge. 0:20:09.8 JS: Well, I think this is where this is, you know, it depends on how you do it, right? I mean, you can do it in a siloed way, which says, I have a quality department, I have an operations department, I have a maintenance department. And you can invest in all these and play around with your investments and see what works out. Or you can get into the process, and you can, by really, really understanding the process and letting people in the process improve it. That's where you get Deming's magic chain reaction, which is that you improve quality, and then your efficiency is going to improve and your costs are going to go down. But that's only if you're looking at productivity in a very broad way. It's not looking at quality in terms of the tolerances that I made on my grinding or whatever I'm doing. It's about the quality of the processes themselves. Right? So Deming was looking at quality with a big Q that encapsulates a lot of things. 0:21:16.0 AS: Well, I think what, what's, this is very interesting. And I know we're going to have a series that we're going to start doing, going through more detail of what you've discovered and what you want to share. So I'm really looking forward to that. And so, I appreciate this introductory discussion. And Jacob, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find Jacob's book, Productivity Reimagined, at jacobstoller.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming: "People are entitled to joy in work."
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Building an Improvement Model: Path for Improvement (Part 1)
08/05/2024
Building an Improvement Model: Path for Improvement (Part 1)
In this new series, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss John's model for improvement. This episode includes an overview of the model and how John uses it for goal-setting and planning in his school. 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is building an improvement model. John, take it away. 0:00:24.8 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, so we sort of wrapped up this last series. We had a six-part series on organizational goal setting. And we, if you remember, we talked through those four conditions that are important for organizational goal setting, especially healthy goal setting, where before we set a goal, we understand sort of how capable our system is. We understand how our data is varying within our system. We are looking at our system and seeing if it's stable or unstable. And then, of course, we want to have a method for how we go about improving. And so you kind of have to have an understanding of those four conditions before you set a goal. 0:01:03.6 JD: And I thought sort of as an extension of that, or possibly a new series, we could kind of take a look at an improvement model that would help us sort of better set ambitious goals. Because when we did those four conditions, it kind of leaves you wondering, well, how ambitious should my goals be? Should I still do stretch goals, those types of things? And I think this improvement model that we're building here at United Schools sort of addresses that. And it's something we're building. 0:01:34.4 JD: And so I think the listeners kind of get like a little bit of behind the scenes on what it looks like now. I think we'll see a version of it. And perhaps through this dialogue, through the series, we'll even think about ways to improve it. 0:01:48.4 AS: Can I ask you a question about that? 0:01:49.6 JD: Sure. 0:01:50.0 AS: One of the things, I do a lot of lectures on corporate strategy and workshops, and the lingo gets so confusing, vision, mission, values, and all kinds of different ways that people refer to things. But when I talk to my clients and my students, I oftentimes just tell them a vision is a long-term goal. And it could be a five-year or a 10-year goal. And because it's long-term, it's a little bit more of a vision as opposed to, you can see it very clearly. Like my goal is to get an A in this particular class, this particular semester. Whereas what I try to say is, a vision is: I want to be in the top of that mountain. And I want us all to be at the top of that mountain in five years. And I kind of interchangeably call that a long-term goal and a vision. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on long-term versus short and medium as we go into this discussion. 0:02:53.8 JD: Yeah. I think as we get into the model, we'll actually see both of those things, sort of a long-term sort of goal, sort of a more intermediate thing, and then how you work back and forth between those two things. So I think that's a good segue. 0:03:08.4 AS: Let's get in it. 0:03:08.4 JD: Yeah. And so just maybe just a few other things about the model before we get right into it. So one thing to know I've come to appreciate is when when I say a model, I just mean something visually representative that helps us understand and communicate how we think things should be functioning in reality. So when I say improvement model, I'm actually like talking about a diagram on a piece of paper that you can put in front of everybody on your team. So everybody has an understanding for how you're approaching goal setting in this case. 0:03:38.1 AS: Would you call it an improvement visualization? Or what's the difference between what you mean by model and like something that I would call, let's say, a visualization? 0:03:49.5 JD: Yeah, I'd say it's a type of visualization when I say model. 0:03:52.8 AS: Okay. Excellent. 0:03:53.8 JD: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. And I think you'll see it when we get into the model that definitely there's credit due to Mike Rother and his concept of Improvement Kata because this model heavily borrows from the work that he's done, if you're familiar with that four-step Improvement Kata process. 0:04:15.1 AS: Yeah. Very. 0:04:19.7 JD: But anytime, whatever the thing is that you call like key performance metrics, key metrics, whatever you call that thing that we all set in our organizations, there's always this gap between what we want and what we're currently getting. And this model gives us the scientific way of thinking and working to close basically that gap. In this world, the gap between the voice of the process and the voice of the customer, how do we close that gap? So that's sort of what the model is addressing. So I'll share my screen so you can see that and anybody that's watching can see what the model looks like. And I'll just kind of leave that up as I'm talking about it, put it in slideshow. 0:05:08.7 AS: Great. We can see that now. 0:05:14.6 JD: Great. So we can just start by just kind of giving an overview, especially for those people who are listening, but you can kind of picture like a path going up a mountain and that path has twists and turns. It has obstacles. In this particular diagram or model, there's rocks in the way of the path. There's a water hazard, there's trees in the way, there's a roadblock. And as you go, it's kind of strange because you're working your way up. And I'll explain this all as we go through it kind of one step at a time. But as you're working from left to right in the model, this four-step improvement model, you have a team over on the left. This team's working on a goal that you're setting. And then over on the left, you actually have step two, which is grasp the current condition. And then you have this big crack in the path that's called the threshold of knowledge. And I'll talk about what that is. 0:06:11.1 JD: And sort of the next step is actually step four, experiment to overcome obstacles as you're working left to right. You go further up this path, up this mountain. And number three, the step three is establish your next target condition. And then when you get all the way up the mountain and you have this challenge or direction. So that's what you were just talking about. So what's that long-term thing that you're trying to accomplish? We call that a challenge or direction. So the steps that you're taking actually chronologically are you're going to do number one first. 0:06:43.2 JD: You're going to set that challenge or direction, but it actually is the thing that you're working toward. That's the sort of beginning with the end in mind. So that's why it's way up on the mountain, but you're going to do that first. And the next thing you're going to do is go all the way back down to the start of the path and grasp whatever that current condition is in your organization. And then you're going to run experiments on the way to trying to get to the next sort of intermediate step, that next target condition. So four steps, and then you have this team working on it. 0:07:16.8 AS: Which I would say for the traditional American style, as from my perspective, it can be a bit confusing because you're starting with number one at the farthest point away instead of closest to you. Then you're going to come to number two. From a timeline perspective, it feels like you're kind of zigzagging back and forth in your thinking. 0:07:38.8 JD: Yep. You definitely are. And it takes a little bit to wrap your head around it, but we'll kind of work through this piece by piece. So let's start with the team. So you have these people on the left-hand side of this diagram. There's sort of three different groups within that team. And we've talked about this a number of times, but remember that there's this key concept when you're going to take a thinking systems or a systems view of an organization. That you have to have these three different groups of people. You have to have the people that are working on the system, the people that are working in the system, and then from Dr. Deming's perspective, you have to have somebody that has profound knowledge, has that lens. So again, someone from the outside that has profound knowledge. And then in our case, the people working in the system, generally speaking, are the students. And then you have to have the managers that have the authority to work on the system. So in our system, that would be teachers and school leaders. But this model is not specific to educational organizations. You could translate this to any other type of organization. 0:08:50.4 JD: So if we were a hospital, then perhaps the people working in the system, depending on the improvement project, could be nurses. And then the managers that have the authority to work on the system, maybe the hospital management team. And then someone from outside with profound knowledge could be either someone internally that has familiarity with the System of Profound Knowledge or someone that they bring in externally, like a consultant to help out. So the point is, is that, again, this team, whoever's working in the system is going to differ by the organizational sector that you're working in. But it translates in the system basically. 0:09:31.0 AS: It's interesting that I've seen this type of diagram or concept about work on the system, work in the system and a System of Profound Knowledge coach. But it just kind of clicked for me to think about it. It obviously, like when I work with a company, I'm working with the owners and the top management. And when I do that, we're working on the system. 0:09:58.5 JD: Yep. 0:10:00.2 AS: And I have the knowledge of the System of Profound Lnowledge. So I'm coaching them about the system. And then within the system, they have the employees who are executing on what they're trying to improve and do, but it just perfectly explains it. So I love that diagram. 0:10:17.8 JD: Yeah. And I have the same experience. And I think we've mentioned on this podcast before that in my world, we often have school or district-based improvement teams. And it's typically leaders of the organization, sometimes teachers, but almost never is it students working in the system that are a part of, or, providing significant input into the improvement. So, I think if you can combine, in our case, students working in the system, because they have things that they can identify in terms of how they experience the system that are different than the people that work on the system. And then having that third group that, or that person that has that outside profound knowledge, if you put all the three of those things together, I think you have a much better chance to improve. But I think in schools, that's probably never happening. I'm assuming that's the same in other industries as well. 0:11:08.3 AS: And this also explains why when Dr. Deming would see slogans and things like that, encouraging the workers to do better and higher quality, he was like, they don't have the authority to change the system. 0:11:22.5 JD: Right. 0:11:24.1 AS: And what you've said is the group that's working on the system has the authority or the ability to change the system. 0:11:35.4 JD: Yeah. This is one...the makeup of this team that's using this four-step process, that's one innovation that we've done to this model that would be different from the Improvement Kata. So in the Improvement Kata, there's just coach and learner. Usually sometimes there's a coach of the coach, a coach and a learner, depending on how it's represented, but this is in my view, an innovation where you have the work on the system group, the work in the system group, and then the System of Profound Knowledge coach. I haven't seen that in this model. 0:12:07.4 AS: And could that be because when Mike Rother was writing his book, he was particularly referring to Toyota. 0:12:18.7 JD: Could be. Could be. 0:12:19.5 AS: Where the workers have more authority to impact the system. Whereas in the typical American system, the worker doesn't really have the authority to stop the production line or something like that to the extent of the Japanese. So interesting point. 0:12:36.1 JD: Yeah, that's a really good point. My understanding of Mike Rother's work is he sort of derived this improvement model by watching, observing, working with Toyota over a very long period of time. So that very well could be the case. Cool. So we have the team, so let's go to step one, that's the challenge or direction. And I really like that because again, when we did that six part series on Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation, one thing that I did think was missing was like, well, still as an organization, we want to move forward. We want to improve. We want to be ambitious in how we're setting our goals, but I don't think that fully came through in the four conditions. And so I think layering this model on top of the four conditions really helps because I think it is important to be ambitious, especially when we're talking about like a mission driven organization, we need to be setting ambitious targets for student learning, coming to school, those types of things. 0:13:39.6 JD: So really what we're doing in step one of the model is we're asking the question, where do we want to be in the long run? So this is a long term goal. This is a longer range goal that would differentiate us from other schools if we achieved it. But currently when we think about this goal, it actually seems nearly impossible because it's so far from where we are currently performing. We don't know how we're going to get there. So an example in my world is, schools have been paying much closer attention to chronic absenteeism, which is when a student misses 10% or more of the school year. And those numbers basically skyrocketed towards the end of the pandemic and then for the last several years. So that's something we're focusing on as an organization. So our chronic absenteeism rate is really high, like 52%, something like that over the last several years. And we want to get that down to 5%. So there's this huge gap. 0:14:53.6 AS: That's a huge move. 0:14:54.5 JD: Huge gap, order of magnitude, right? To go from 52%, that's the voice of the process. That's what's actually happening. And the voice of the customer, what we want is 5%. And we really don't know how to get there. And that's going to be the case at the point where you're at step one, but you're doing that first. You're setting that challenge or direction. And that really is something that needs to be set, in my view, at the leadership level, at the management level. So, that's step one. 0:15:22.9 AS: And you just said something that's interesting is we really don't know how to get there. 0:15:25.6 JD: And we really don't know... 0:15:26.9 AS: I mean, if we knew how to get there, we'd probably be there. 0:15:28.6 JD: Yeah. Yep. Yep. So that's step one. That's why if you're able to view the model and you're watching the podcast and you can see the video, that's why number one happens first, even though it's on the far right hand in the upper right hand corner at the top of the mountain in the model. 0:15:45.8 AS: And is there a reason why it's a relatively vague thing, right? Challenge or direction. 0:15:54.0 JD: Yeah. 0:15:55.5 AS: Why is it vague as opposed to specific target, goal or saying something like that? 0:16:03.7 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think, I like challenge or direction. One, it fits on the page. And it sort of conveys that it's going to be a challenge. And it also, if you're going to work in this way to achieve something like that, that it's actually setting the direction of the organization, the direction that the organization is moving toward. So. 0:16:24.0 AS: In other words, is it acknowledging that we really won't, we really don't know that target. We think we know it, we see that mountain, but as we go closer to it, we want to go in that direction, but as we get closer, it'll become more clear exactly where we're going to be or want to be. 0:16:44.7 JD: Well, I think this would be something that... I think in my view, we're still learning. But when we set that challenge or direction, I guess I could see some circumstances where we would come off that, but I think we kind of want to set it in a way that really pushes us. Right. So I'd be, I mean, I think you could learn some things that would say, okay, maybe that wasn't the exact right number to set, but I'd also be careful about just adjusting it because it's hard. 0:17:13.2 AS: Okay. So you mentioned 5%. 0:17:17.9 JD: Yeah. 0:17:19.1 AS: Would that be, would you state it as achieve 5%? 0:17:25.9 JD: Yeah. 5% or less of our students are chronically absent. 0:17:30.4 AS: Okay. Keep going. I don't want to slow it down. But listeners may get it faster than I do. I'm a little bit slow and I have a lot of questions as we go along. 0:17:37.0 JD: No, no. And I think what we could do in future episodes is dig into each of the steps a little bit more too, and use this as an overview session. 0:17:46.9 AS: Yep. 0:17:48.3 JD: So that was step one. So now what's going to happen in step two, you're going to come all the way back down. Now you're at the very start of the path. 0:17:56.6 AS: Back to reality. 0:18:00.6 JD: Back to reality, step two. And the first thing you have to do, okay, we've set the target, this very challenging direction we want to head into because it's the right thing to do. The next thing we're going to do is grasp the current condition. And so in step two of the model, we're going to ask, where are we now? So we know the long-term goal and now we need to study the current process and how it operates basically. So basically this study represents our current knowledge threshold about the process. And then it's going to contribute to how we define the next target condition we've set that sort of intermediate step on the way to the challenge. And so a lot of that six-part series on goal setting is often an act of desperation, a lot of that learning is right here at what we're doing at step two, because we're creating a process behavior chart in a lot of cases, and understanding how our data is performing over time in this particular area. That's what grasping the current condition means. 0:19:02.6 JD: So part of it, it's a data thing. So in this chronic absenteeism example, what I'm gonna do is I know where I want to be. Now I need to understand where are we historically. And then also as a part of grasping the current condition, I may wanna do some things like interview students and families that are chronically absent, then sort of dig into why that is. Interview teachers about why they think that is. There's a number of things that you could do at this step on the ground where the work happens to grasp the current condition. And I think there can be a sort of quantitative component to that and a qualitative component to that. Also, we sort of understand like how are things actually working on the ground that contribute to us not being where we want to in this particular area. 0:19:56.7 JD: So that's step two. That's what we're gonna do next. After we've set the challenge or direction, we wanna sort of understand the situation on the ground, grasp the current condition. And then...
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Acceptability VS Desirability: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 3)
07/29/2024
Acceptability VS Desirability: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 3)
Is reaching A+ quality always the right answer? What happens when you consider factors that are part of the system, and not just the product in isolation? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss acceptability versus desirability in the quality realm. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today's episode, episode three, is Acceptability and Desirability. Bill, take it away. 0:00:28.1 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome back to our listeners. 0:00:30.7 AS: Oh, yeah. 0:00:31.4 BB: Hey, do you know how long we've been doing these podcasts? 0:00:36.6 AS: No. 0:00:40.8 BB: We started... Our very first podcast was Valentine's Day 2023. I was gonna say 2013. 2023, so roughly 17 months of podcast, Andrew. 0:00:53.4 AS: That was our first date, huh? 0:00:55.0 BB: Our first date was Valentine's Day 2023. 0:00:58.9 AS: All right. Don't tell your wife. [laughter] 0:01:03.1 BB: All right. And so along the way, I've shared reflections from my first exposures to Dr. Deming, as well as my first exposures to Genichi Taguchi. Talked about Edward de Bono, Tom Johnson, others, mentors, Bill Cooper, Phil Monroe, Gipsie Ranney was a great mentor. Last week, Andrew, while on vacation in New England with my wife, I visited for a day my 85-year-old graduate school advisor who I worked with for ten years, Bob Mayle, who lives in, I would say, the farthest reaches of Maine, a place called Roque Bluffs. Roque Bluffs. How's that for... That could be North Dakota. Roque Bluffs. He's in what they call Down East Maine. He's recently got a flip phone. He's very proud. He's got like a Motorola 1985 vintage flip phone. Anyway, he's cool, he's cool. He's... 0:02:15.9 AS: I'm just looking at that place on the map, and looks incredible. 0:02:19.0 BB: Oh, yeah. He's uh, until he got the phone, he was off the grid. We correspond by letters. He's no internet, no email. And he has electricity, lives in about an 800 square-foot, one-floor bungalow with his wife. This is the third time we've visited him. Every time we go up, we spend one day getting there, one day driving home from where my in-laws live in New York. And then one day with him, and the day ends with going to the nearby fisherman's place. He buys us fresh lobster and we take care of them. [chuckle] 0:03:01.3 AS: Yeah, my sister lives in Kennebunk, so when I go back to the US, I'm... 0:03:08.8 BB: Yeah, Kennebunk is maybe 4 hours away on that same coast. 0:03:15.3 AS: I'm just looking at the guide and map book for Roque Bluffs' State Park, and it says, "a beautiful setting with oceanfront beach, freshwater pond, and hiking trails." 0:03:25.9 BB: Yeah, he's got 10 acres... No, he's got, I think, 20, 25 acres of property. Sadly, he's slowly going blind. He has macular degeneration. But, boy, for a guy who's slowly going blind, he and I went for a walk around his property for a couple hours, and it's around and around... He's holding branches from hitting me, I'm holding branches from hitting him and there's... Let alone the terrain going up and down, you gotta step up and over around the rocks and the pine needles and all. And it was great. It was great. The week before, we were close to Lake George, which is a 32-mile lake in Upstate New York. And what was neat was we went on a three-hour tour, boat ride. And on that lake, there are 30 some islands of various sizes, many of them owned by the state, a number of them owned privately. Within the first hour, we're going by and he points to the island on the left and he says it was purchased in the late '30s by Irving Langmuir. Yeah, so he says, "Irving Langmuir," and I thought, I know that name from Dr. Deming. That name is referenced in The New Economics. 0:04:49.1 BB: In fact, at the opening of Chapter Five of The New Economics, the title is 'Leadership.' Every chapter begins with a quote, right? Chapter Five quote is, "You cannot plan to make a discovery," so says Irving Langmuir. So what is... The guy's describing this island purchased back in the late '30s by Langmuir for like $5,000. I think it's... I don't know if he still owns it, if it's owned by a nonprofit. It's not developed. It's privately held. I'm trying, I wrote to Langmuir's grandson who did a documentary about him. He was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from GE's R&D center in Schenectady, New York, which is a couple hours south of there. But I'm certain, and I was looking for it earlier, I know I heard of him, of Irving Langmuir through Dr. Deming. And I believe in his lectures, Deming talked about Langmuir's emphasis on having fun at work, having fun. And so I gotta go back and check on that, but I did some research after the day, and sure enough came across some old videos, black and white videos that Langmuir produced for a local television station, talking about his... There's like show and tell with him in the laboratory. And in there, he talks about joy and work and all that. 0:06:33.5 BB: So I'm thinking, that's pretty cool. So I'm waiting to hear from his grandson. And ideally, I can have a conversation with his grandson, introduce him to Kevin and talk about Deming's work and the connection. Who knows what comes out of that? Who knows? Maybe an interview opportunity with you and Irving Langmuir's grandson. So, anyway. 0:06:52.7 AS: Fantastic. 0:06:54.7 BB: But going back to what I mentioned earlier in my background in association with Deming and whatnot, and Taguchi, and I offer these comments to reinforce that while my interests in quality were initially all things Taguchi, and then largely Deming, and it wasn't long before I stopped, stepped back and an old friend from Rocketdyne 20 some years ago started focusing on thinking about thinking, which he later called InThinking. And it's what others would call awareness of our... Well, we called it... Rudy called it, better awareness of our thinking patterns, otherwise known as paradigms, mental models. We just like the way of explaining it in terms of becoming more aware of our thinking patterns. And I say that because... And what I'm presenting relative to quality in this series, a whole lot of what I'm focusing on is thinking about thinking relative to quality. 0:07:58.8 BB: And so last time, we talked about the eight dimensions of quality from David Garvin, and one of them was acceptability. And that is this notion in quality, alive and well today, Phil Crosby has created this focus on achieving zero defects. Everything meets the requirements, that gets us into the realm, everything is good. Dr. Deming and his red bead experiments talked about red beads and white beads. The white beads is what we're striving for. All the beads are good. The red beads represent defects, things we don't want. And that's this... Thinking wise, that's a thinking pattern of "things are good or bad." Well, then we can have high quality, low quality and quality. But at Rocketdyne, when I started referring to that as category thinking, putting things into categories, but in the world of quality, there's only two categories, Andrew: good and bad. This either meets requirements or it doesn't. And if it's good, then we're allowed to pass it on to the next person. If we pass it on and it's not good, then they're going to send it back to us and say, "Uh-uh, you didn't meet all the requirements." And what I used to do in class, I would take something, a pen or something, and I would go to someone in the seminar and I'd say, "If I hand this to you and it doesn't meet requirements, what are you going to say?" You're gonna say, "I'm not going to take it. It hasn't met the requirements." 0:09:36.4 BB: And I would say you're right. All the I's are not dotted, all the T's are not crossed, I'm not taking it. Then I would take it back and I'd say, "Okay, now what if I go off and dot all those I's and cross all those T's?" Then I would hand them the pen or whatever the thing was, and I'd say, "If all those things have been met," now we're talking acceptability. "Now, what do you say?" I said, "Can you reject it?" "No." I say, "So what do you say now that all those things... If you're aware that all those requirements have been met, in the world of quality, it is as good, now what do you say?" And they look at me and they're like, "What do I say?" I say, "Now you say, thank you." But what I also do is one more time... And I would play this out to people, I'd say, "Okay, Andrew, one more time. I hand you the pen, Andrew, all the requirements are met. And what do you say?" And you say, "Thank you." And I say, "What else just happened when you took it?" 0:10:45.4 AS: You accepted it. 0:10:47.3 BB: Yes. And I say, "And what does that mean?" "I don't know. What does that mean?" I said, "It means if you call me the next day and say, I've got a problem with this, you know what I'm going to say, Andrew?" 0:10:58.5 AS: "You accepted it." 0:11:01.5 BB: Right. And so, what acceptability means is don't call me later and complain. [laughter] So, I get a photo of you accepting it, you're smiling. So if you call me back the next day and say, "I've got a problem with this," I'd say, "No, no, no." So acceptability as a mental model is this idea that once you accept it, there's no coming back. If you reveal to me issues with it later, I deny all that. I'd say, I don't know what your problem with Andrew... It must be a problem on your end, because what I delivered to you is good. And if it is good, then there can't be any problems associated with it. So, if there are problems, have to be on your end, because defect-free, everything good, implies, ain't no problems, ain't no issues with it. I'm thinking of that Disney song, trouble-free mentality, Hakuna Matata. [chuckle] 0:12:04.5 BB: But now I go back to the title, Acceptability and Desirability. One of Dr. Deming's Ph.D. students, Kauro [actually, Kosaku] Yoshida, he used to teach at Cal State Dominguez Hills back in the '80s, and I think sometime in the '90s, he went to Japan. I don't know if he was born and raised in Japan, but he was one of Dr. Deming's Ph.D. students, I believe, at NYU. Anyway, I know he's a Ph.D. student of Dr. Deming, he would do guest lectures in Dr. Deming's four-day seminars in and around Los Angeles. And, Yoshida is known for this saying that Americans are all about acceptability meets requirements, and the Japanese are about desirability. And what is that? Well, it's more than meeting requirements. And, I wanna get into more detail on that in future episodes. But for now, we could say acceptability is meeting requirements. In a binary world, it can be really hard to think of, if everything's met requirements, how do I do better than that? How do I continue to improve if everything meets requirements? Well, one clue, and I'll give a clue, is what I shared with the senior most ranking NASA executive responsible for quality. 0:13:46.4 BB: And this goes back to 2002 timeframe. And we had done some amazing things with desirability at Rocketdyne, which. is more than meeting requirements. And the Vice President of Quality at Rocketdyne knew this guy at NASA headquarters, and he says, "You should go show him what we're doing." So I called him up a week in advance of going out there. I had made the date, but I figured if I'm going to go all the way out there, a week in advance, I called him up just to make sure he knew I was coming. And he said something like, "What are we going to talk about?" He said something like, "We're going to talk about that Lean or Six Sigma stuff?" And I said, "No, more than that." And I think I described it as, we're going to challenge the model of interchangeable parts. And he's like, "Okay, so what does that mean?" So the explanation I gave him is I said, "What letter grade is required for everything that NASA purchases from any contractor? What letter grade is ostensibly in the contract? What letter grade? A, B, C, D. What letter grade is in the contract?" And he says, "Well, A+." [laughter] 0:15:01.2 BB: And I said, "A+ is not the requirement." And he's like, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "It's a pass-fail system." That's what acceptability is, Andrew. Acceptability is something is either good or bad, and if it's bad, you won't accept it. But if it's good, if I dot all the I's and cross all the T's, you will take it. It has met all the requirements. And that gets into what I talked about in the first podcast series of what I used to call the first question of quality management. Does this quality characteristic, does the thrust of this engine, does the roughness of this surface, does the diameter of this hole, does the pH of this bath meet requirements? And there's only two answers to that question, yes or no. And if yes is acceptable, and if no, that's unacceptable. And so I pointed out to him, much to his chagrin, is that the letter grade requirement is not A+, it's D- or better. [chuckle] And so as a preview of we'll get into in a future podcast, acceptability could be, acceptability is passing. And this guy was really shocked. I said, "Procurement at NASA is a pass-fail system." 0:16:21.9 BB: Every element of anything which is in that system purchased by NASA, everything in there today meets a set of requirements, is subject to a set of requirements which are met on a pass-fail basis. They're either, yes, it either meets requirements, acceptable, or not. That's NASA's, the quality system used by every NASA contractor I'm aware of. Boeing's advanced quality system is good parts and bad parts. Balls and strikes. And so again, for our viewers, acceptability is a pass-fail system. And what Yoshida... You can be thinking about what Yoshida's talked about, is Japanese companies. And again, I think it's foolish to think of all Japanese companies, but back in the '80s, that's really the way it came across, is all Japanese companies really have this figured out, and all American companies don't. I think that's naive. But nonetheless, what he's talking about is shifting from a pass-fail system, that's acceptability, to, let's say, letter grades of A's or B's. That would be more like desirability, is that it's not just passing, but an A grade or a B grade or a C grade. So that's, in round terms, a preview of Yoshida... A sense of, for this episode, of what I mean by acceptability and desirability. 0:17:54.7 BB: In the first podcast which was posted the other day, I made reference to, instead of achieving acceptability, now I can use that term, instead of achieving zero defects as the goal, in the world of acceptability, once we continuously improve and achieve acceptability, now everything is passing, not failing. This is in a world of what I refer to as category thinking, putting things in categories. In the world of black and white, black is one category, white is a category. You got two categories, good and bad. If everything meets requirements, how do you continuously improve if everything is good? Well, part of the challenge is realize that everything is good has variation in terms... Now we could talk about the not all letter grade A, and so we could focus on the things that are not A's and ask the question, is an A worthwhile or not? But what I was saying in the first podcast is my admiration for Dr. Deming's work uniquely... And Dr. Deming was inspired towards this end by Dr. Taguchi, and he gave great credit to that in Chapter Ten of The New Economics. And what I don't see in Lean nor Six Sigma, nor Lean/Six Sigma, nor Operational Excellence, what I don't see anywhere outside of Dr. Deming's work or Dr. Taguchi's work is anything in quality which is more than acceptability. 0:19:32.0 BB: It's all black and white. Again, Boeing's Advanced Quality System is good parts and bad parts. Now, again, I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with that. And I would also suggest in a Deming-based organization there may be characteristics for which all we need is that they're good. We don't need to know how good they are, we don't need to know the letter grade. And why is that? Because maybe it's not worth the trouble to discern more than that. And this is where I use the analogy of balls and strikes or kicking the ball into the net. If you've got an open net... That's Euro Cup soccer. There's no reason to be precisely placing the ball. All you want to do is get it into the net. And that's an area of zero defects, maybe all that is worthwhile, but there could be other situations where I want the ball in a very particular location in the strike zone. That's more of this desirability sense. So I want to clarify for those who listened to the first podcast, is what I'm inferring is I'm not aware of any quality management system, any management system in which, inspired by Dr. Deming and Taguchi, we have the ability to ask the question, is acceptability all that is required? 0:20:55.7 BB: And it could be for a lot of what we do, acceptability is not a bad place to be. But I'm proposing that as a choice, that we've thought about it and said, "You know what? In this situation, it's not worth, economically, the extra effort. And so let's put the extra effort into the things where it really matters." And if it doesn't... So use desirability where it makes sense, use acceptability elsewhere. Right now, what I see going on in organizations unaware of Dr. Deming's work, again, Dr. Taguchi's work, is that they're really blindly focusing on acceptability. And I think what we're going to get into is, I think there's confusion in desirability. But again, I want to keep that for a later episode. Now, people will say, "Well, Bill, the Six Sigma people are about desirability." No, the Six Sigma people have found a new way to define acceptability. And I'll give you one other fun story. When I taught at Northwestern's Kellogg Business School back in the late '90s, and I would start these seminars off by saying, "We're going to look at quality management practices, past, present, future." And so one year, I said, "So what quality management practices are you aware of?" And again, these are students that have worked in industry for five or six years. 0:22:17.6 BB: They've worked at GM, they worked at General Electric, they worked for Coca Cola, banking. These are sharp, sharp people. But you got into the program having worked somewhere in the world, in industry, so they came in with experience. And so they would say, zero defect quality is a quality management practice. And I'd say, "Okay, so where'd that come from?" And again, this is the late '90s. They were aware of the term, zero defects. They didn't know it was Philip Crosby, who I learned yesterday was... His undergraduate degree is from a school of podiatry. I don't know if he was a podiatrist, but he had an undergraduate... A degree in podiatry, somebody pointed out to me. Okay, fine. But Philip Crosby, his big thing was pushing for zero defects. And you can go to the American Society for Quality website to learn more about him. Philip Crosby is the acceptability paradigm. So, students would bring him up and I'd say, "Okay, so what about present? What about present?" And somebody said, "Six Sigma Quality." So I said, "So what do you know about Six Sigma Quality?" And somebody said," Cpk’s of 2.00." And I said, "So what's... " again, in a future episode, we could talk about Cpk’s." 0:23:48.5 AS: But I said to the guy,...
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8 Dimensions of Quality: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 2)
07/08/2024
8 Dimensions of Quality: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 2)
In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss David Garvin's 8 Dimensions of Quality and how they apply in the Deming world. Bill references this article by Garvin: https://hbr.org/1987/11/competing-on-the-eight-dimensions-of-quality TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is the Misunderstanding Quality series, episode two, The Eight Dimensions of Quality. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.4 Bill Bellows: Welcome back, Andrew. Great to see you again. All right, episode two, we're moving right along. So in episode one, which the title I proposed, waiting to see what comes out, the title I proposed was, Quality, Back to the Start. And that was inspired by some lyrics from Coldplay. Anyway, but this is a, it's going back to my start in quality and last time I mentioned discovering Taguchi's work long before I discovered Dr. Deming. In fact, Gipsie Ranney, who is the first president of the Deming Institute, the nonprofit formed by Dr. Deming and his family just before he passed away, and Gipsie became the first president and was on the board when I was on the board for many years. And I spoke with her nearly every day, either driving to work or driving home. And once, she calls me up and she says, "Bill," that was her Tennessee accent, "Bill." 0:01:50.5 BB: She says, "It says on The Deming Institute webpage that you infused Dr. Taguchi's work into Dr. Deming's work," something like that, that I... Something like I infused or introduced or I brought Taguchi's work into Deming's work, and I said, "Yes." I said, "Yeah, that sounds familiar." She says, "Isn't it the other way around?" That I brought Deming's work into Taguchi's work. And I said, "No, Gipsie," I said, "It depends on your starting point. And my starting point was Dr. Taguchi." But I thought it was so cool. She says, "Bill don't you have it? Don't you... " She is like, "Isn't it the other way around?" I said, "No, to me, it was all things Taguchi, then I discovered Dr. Deming." But I was thinking earlier before the podcast, and I walked around putting together how, what I wanna talk about tonight. And I thought, when I discovered Taguchi's work, I looked at everything in terms of an application of Dr. Taguchi's ideas. 0:03:29.7 AS: And one question about Taguchi for those people that don't know him and understand a little bit about him, was he... If I think about where Dr. Deming got at the end of his life, it was about a whole system, the System of Profound Knowledge and a comprehensive way of looking at things. Was Taguchi similar in that way or was he focused in on a couple different areas where he really made his contribution? 0:04:03.9 BB: Narrower than Dr. Deming's work. I mean, if we look at... And thank you for that... If we look at Dr. Deming's work in terms of the System of Profound Knowledge, the elements of systems psychology, variation, theory of knowledge, Taguchi's work is a lot about variation and a lot about systems. And not systems in the sense of Russ Ackoff systems thinking, but variation in the sense of where's the variation coming from looking upstream, what are the causes of that variation that create variation in that product, in that service? 0:04:50.9 BB: And then coupled with that is that, how is that variation impacting elsewhere in the system? So here I am receiving sources of variation. So what I deliver it to you has variation because of what's upstream of me and Taguchi's looking at that coupled with how is that variation impacting you? So those are the systems side, the variation side. Now, is there anything in Deming, in Taguchi's work about psychology and what happens when you're labelling workers and performance appraisals and, no, not at all. 0:05:37.6 AS: Okay, got it. 0:05:38.4 BB: Is there anything in there about theory of knowledge, how do we know that what we know is so? No, but there's a depth of work in variation which compliments very much so what Dr. Deming was doing. So anyway, so no. And so I discovered Taguchi's work, and I mentioned that in the first episode. I discovered his work, became fascinated with it, started looking at his ideas in terms of managing variation to achieve incredible... I mean, improved uniformity to the extent that it's worthwhile to achieve. So we were not striving for the ultimate uniformity, it's just the idea that we can manage the uniformity. And if we... And we'll look at this in more detail later, but for our audience now, if you think of a distribution of the variation in the performance of a product or a service, and you think in terms of... It doesn't have to be a bell-shaped distribution, but you have a distribution and it has an average and it has variation. 0:06:50.4 BB: What Dr. Taguchi's work is about in terms of a very brief, succinct point here in episode two is how might we change the shape of that distribution? How might we make it narrower, if that's a worthwhile adventure? It may be worthwhile to make it wider, not just narrower, but in both cases, we're changing the shape of the distribution and changing the location. So Taguchi's work, Taguchi's Methods, driven by variation comes to me, variation impacts you is how do I change the shape and location of that distribution? So on a regular basis, as I became more fascinated with that, I started thinking about, well, how might I apply Taguchi's ideas to these things that I encountered every day? Well, prior to that before discovering Taguchi's work, when I was a facilitator in problem solving and decision making training, I did the same thing, Andrew. 0:07:52.4 BB: I started looking at, oh, is this a problem? Is this a decision? Is this a situation that needs to be appraised? And so prior to that, what I was thinking about is when I was just a heat transfer analyst working on my Ph.D., I didn't look at how the heat transfer stuff affected all these other aspects of my lives. I didn't think about it when I went into a supermarket, but there was something about the problem solving and decision making that just infatuated me. And I would look at, oh, is Andrew talking about a decision or is Andrew talking about a problem? So I started hearing things. And so when I went into Taguchi's work, it was the same thing. And then shifting into Deming's work, it's the same thing. And I've... There's nothing else that I've studied that I look at things through those lenses. Anyway, so in studying, getting exposed to Taguchi, I mentioned that I had some time away from work, I went out on medical for some reasons and went and bought a book, a bunch of books. 0:09:02.4 BB: And one of the books I bought by David Garvin had come out in 1987, is entitled "The Eight Dimensions of Quality." There's a Harvard Business Review article that I wanna reference in this episode, and I'll put a link to the article. It's a free link. And so when you hear people talk about a quality product or a quality service or quality healthcare. We think in terms of it's quality as things, it's either good quality or bad quality or high quality, or somebody calls it low quality, or we just say it's a quality product. But what does that mean? So what I find is very loosely, we think in terms of categories of quality, good, bad, high, low. What we'll look at in a future episode is what would happen if we thought about quality on a continuum, which I believe Taguchi's work really demonstrates vividly as well as Dr. Deming's work. 0:10:07.4 BB: But even to back up before we talk about the eight dimensions of quality, I wanted to give some background on the word quality. The word quality, and this comes from an article and I'll put a link to this article, I wrote it for the Lean Management Journal a number of years ago, the word quality has Latin roots, beginning as qualitas, T-A-S, coined by the Roman philosopher and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. He later became an adversary of this bad guy named Mark Antony. You've heard of him. Feared by Antony, this guy was feared by Antony because his power of speech led, you know what it led to, Andrew, his power of speech? 0:10:54.5 AS: What? 0:10:54.6 BB: His beheading. 0:10:55.8 AS: Oh my goodness. 0:10:56.5 BB: So for those of you with great powers of speech, watch out for your Mark Antony. But meanwhile, he introduced fellow Romans to the vocabulary of qualitas, quantitas, quantity, humanitas, humanities, essentia, which is, essence, he also is credited with an extensive list of expressions that translate into English today. Difference, infinity, science, morale. Cicero spoke of qualitas with his peers when focusing on the essential nature, character or property of an object. And this is kind of interesting. I mean, you can count how many apples do we have. And again, he came up with the term quantitas for quantity, but he is also talking about the essence of the apples. That's the quality word. And then 2000 years later when writing "The New Economics", Dr. Deming provided his definition and a little bit different. 0:12:05.3 BB: He says, "The problem anywhere is quality. What is quality?" Says the good doctor, "A product or service possesses quality if it helps somebody, it enjoys a good and sustainable market." And I said in the article, "As with Cicero, Deming saw quality as a property." And then some other background on quality before I talk about Garvin, "long after Cicero and well before Deming, quality as a property was a responsibility of guilds." Guilds. I mean, now we have writers guilds, we have actors guilds, and it's kind of cool that these guilds still exist and they are associations of artisans who control the practice of their craft, each with a revered trademark. So here in Los Angeles, we have writers guilds, actors guilds. They were organized as professional societies, just like unions. 0:13:00.2 BB: And these fraternities were developed, and within these fraternities they created standards for high quality. All right. So what is this quality management stuff from David Garvin? So this article was written 37 years ago and reviewing it for tonight's episode and I thought it fit in really, really well. I was reminded of... First time I read this article, 1989, I knew a lot about... Well, I knew, I was excited about Taguchi as I knew a lot about Taguchi, didn't know a lot about Dr. Deming. So I'm now reviewing it years later with a much deeper, broader Deming perspective than at that time. But I do believe, and I would encourage the listeners to get ahold of the article, look at it, if you wanna go into more depth, there's Garvin's book. And doing some research for tonight, I found out that he passed away in 2017, seven or so years ago. 0:14:04.6 BB: He was, I guess from, most of his career and education he was at the Harvard Business School, very well respected there. And so in the article it talks about, again, this, 1987, that's the era of Total Quality Management. That's the era in which Dr. Deming was attracting 2000 people to go to his seminars. 1987 is two years before Six Sigma Quality, two years before “The Machine That Changed The World.” And in the article, he says, "Part of the problem, of course, is that Japanese and European competition have intensified. Not many companies tried to make quality programs work even as they implemented them." This is back when quality was an era of quality circles. He says, "In my view, most of the principles about quality were narrow in scope. They were designed as purely defensive measures to preempt failures or eliminate defects, eliminate red beads." 0:15:10.3 BB: "What managers need now is an aggressive strategy to gain and hold markets with high quality," there we go again, "as a competitive linchpin." All right. So in the article, he has some interesting explanations of... Highlights. In the book is more depth. He talks about Joseph Juran, "Juran's Quality Handbook". Juran observed that quality could be understood in terms of avoidable and unavoidable costs. Dr. Deming talked about the economics. The New Economics, right? But Juran is looking at avoidable, unavailable costs resulting from defects in product failures. That's very traditional quality today. The latter associated with prevention, inspection, sampling, sorting, quality control. And so this is what I found fascinating, is 37 years later, this is still the heavy sense of what quality is all about. Avoiding failure, avoiding defects. 0:16:18.3 BB: Then he talks about Total Quality Control coming from Armand Feigenbaum, who was a big name in the '80s. Again Dr. Deming's work kind of created this big quality movement but it wasn't just Dr. Deming people discovered, they discovered Philip Crosby in a Zero Defects advocacy, Feigenbaum, Juran, sometime later. Again, mid '80s, Dr. Taguchi's name started to be heard. All right. And then the reliability. All right. Now I wanna get into the... Oh, here's, this is good. "In 1961, the Martin Corporation, Martin Company was building Pershing missiles for the US Army. The design of the missile was sound, but Martin found that it could maintain high quality only through massive inspection programs." 0:17:13.0 BB: You know what Dr. Deming would say about inspection? It's after the fact. Sorting the good ones from the bad ones after the fact. No prevention there. But Martin found that it could only do it with inspection. And decided to offer... Again, this is 1961, and this is still the solution today, decided to offer workers incentives to lower the defect rate. And in December, 1961, delivered a Pershing missile to Cape Canaveral with zero discrepancies. Buoyed by this success, Martin's general manager in Florida accepted a challenge issued by the Army's missile command to deliver the first Pershing missile one month ahead of schedule. He went even further, he promised that the missile would be perfect. Perfect. You know what that means, Andrew? 0:18:12.3 AS: Tell us. 0:18:12.8 BB: All good, not bad. 0:18:14.9 AS: All good, not bad. 0:18:15.9 BB: He promised missile would be perfect with no hardware problems or document errors, and that all equipment would be fully operational 10 days after delivering. And so what was neat in going back to this is we still have this mindset that quality is about things being good, not bad. What is bad we call that scrap, we call that rework. That's alive and well today. 0:18:45.0 AS: The proclamations are interesting when you listen to what he's saying, when you're quoting that. 0:18:52.4 BB: Yeah, no, and I remember, 'cause again, I read this recently for the first time in 37 years and I'm going through it. And at the time I was thinking, "Wow, wow, wow, this is a really big deal. This is a really big deal." Now I look at it and say, "This is what we're still talking about today, 37 years later." The absence of defects is the essence of quality. All right. But so I would highly recommend the article. Now we get into what he proposes as eight critical dimensions of quality that can serve as a framework for strategic analysis. And I think even in a Deming environment, I think it's... I think what's really cool about this is it provides a broad view of quality that I think Deming's work fits in very well to, Dr. Taguchi's work fits in very well to, and I think covers a lot of what people call quality. So the first dimension he talks about is performance. 0:20:01.4 BB: And he says, "Of course, performance refers to a product's primary operating characteristics." He says, "For an automobile, performance would include traits like acceleration, handling, cruising speed. For a television, sound and picture clarity." He says "A power shovel in the excavation business that excavates 100 cubic yards per hour will outperform one that excavates 10 cubic yards per hour." So the capacity, that could be miles per gallon, carrying capacity, the resolution of the pixels, that's what he calls performance. Okay. Features is the second dimension of quality. Examples include free drinks on an airplane, but not if you're flying a number of airlines they charge you for those drinks, permanent press cycles on a washing machine, automatic tuners on a color television set. A number of people in our audience won't know what those are, bells and whistles. Features are bells and whistles. 0:21:17.2 BB: There was a time people would say the number of cup holders in your automobile, a feature could be intermittent wipers. So these are features. So again, I mean, so performance is kind of cool. What is the capacity, is it 100 horsepower, 200 horsepower, that's performance. Features, bells and whistles. Okay. Fine. Reliability, now we're talking. The dimension represents the probability of a product malfunctioning or failing within a specified period of time. So your car breaking down, are you gonna drive to work every day and one morning you're gonna go out and it's... That's a reliability issue. Okay. That's... When I think about reliability, that's a Taguchi thing, that's a Deming thing. And looking at time between failures, okay, fine. Reliability comes down to... And if importance for the impact of downtime, if you're looking at engines not working and you're sitting at the gate, that's a reliability issue. The reliability is, it can be repaired, but it's gonna take some time, perhaps. Conformance. All right. 0:22:40.4 AS: Is number four, right? 0:22:42.2 BB: This is number four, a related dimension of quality is conformance or the degree to which a product's design and operating characteristics meet established standards. "This dimension owes to the importance of traditional approaches," it says, "to quality pioneers such as Juran." All products and services involve specifications of some sort. When new designs or models are developed, dimensions are set for parts or purity, these specifications are normally expressed as a target or a center. Now it's starting to sound a little bit like Dr. Taguchi's work, an ideal value, deviance from the center within a specified range. But this approach equates good quality with operating inside the tolerance band. There is little interest in whether the specifications have been met exactly. For the most part, dispersion within specifications is ignored. Ignored. That's balls and strikes, Andrew, balls and strikes. 0:23:51.2 BB: As long as the ball is somewhere in the strike zone, as long as the characteristic is somewhere within requirements, conformance, this gets into what I talk about in terms of the question number one of quality management. Has the requirement been met, the requirement for the performance, the dimension, is it within requirements? And there's only two answers, yes or no. That's conformance. I used to think that the American Society for Quality might be better known as the American Society for the Preservation of Conformance. I find there's a lot of conformance thinking. I'm reminded of, I'm a member of the American Society for Quality as I'm on the Deming Medal Committee, so I have to be a member of ASQ. So I get a daily or every other day newsletter with comments and conformance is a big part of the conversation. Good parts and bad parts, scrap and rework. All right. 0:25:02.3 BB: Conformance is number four. And it's not to say there isn't a place for the conformance, but conformance is then again different from what Dr. Taguchi is talking about. All right. Durability, the measure of a product life. Durability has both...
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Quality, Back to the Start! Misunderstanding Quality (Part 1)
07/01/2024
Quality, Back to the Start! Misunderstanding Quality (Part 1)
Where did your "quality journey" start? In this first episode of a new series on quality, Bill Bellows shares his "origin story," the evolution of his thinking, and why the Deming philosophy is unique. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey in the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is a new series called Misunderstanding Quality, and the topic for today is Quality Management, what century are we in? Bill, take it away. 0:00:35.7 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. [chuckle] All right. 0:00:39.5 AS: Exciting. I'm excited to hear what you've got going on in your mind about this Misunderstanding Quality. 0:00:45.6 BB: Well, first let me say that whether you're new to quality or looking for ideas on quality and quality management, quality improvement, quality management, the aim I have in mind for this podcast series is to improve your ability to manage quality through deepening your appreciation of the Deming philosophy and how to apply it. But specifically, a focus on quality, time after time, which is where most people heard about Deming, was through Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position. For example, the title of his first book. And relative to the title, what came to mind is an anecdote shared with me by two mentors that both spent a good deal of time with Dr. Deming. The first, Gipsie Ranney, who was a professor of statistics at University of Tennessee when she met Dr. Deming, went on to become a senior statistical consultant to GM and the first president of the Deming Institute, when Dr. Deming and his family, shortly before he died, formed a nonprofit called The Deming Institute. Gipsie and I used to speak literally every day, driving to work, driving home, we... "What's up, what's up?" And we always... It was so cool. I wish I had the recordings. Anyway, she once shared that she once asked Dr. Deming, "What do they learn in your seminars? What do attendees learn in your seminars?" To which she said Dr. Deming said, "I know what I said, I don't know what they heard." [laughter] 0:02:26.0 BB: And along those lines, in the same timeframe, Bill Cooper who just turned 90, he and my wife share a birthday. Not the same year. Bill turned 90 last November and he was senior civilian at the US Navy's aircraft overhaul facility in San Diego, known as North Island. So as aircraft carriers are coming into San Diego, which is like the... I think they call it... It's like the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet. So as aircraft carriers are coming back, planes for which the repair work cannot be done on the carriers fly off to North Island. And Bill was in charge of, he said, some 5,000 civilians. And his peer on the military side, Phil Monroe was in charge of all the military people, and they got exposed to Dr. Deming's work in the early '80s, went off, left there, became Deming consultants. Anyway, Bill said he once asked Dr. Demings, says, "What percent of the attendees of your seminars walk away really understanding what you said?" And he said... Bill said Dr. Deming said, "A small percentage." [laughter] 0:03:44.0 BB: And so what I had in mind in this series is... One is, what makes it hard to understand what Dr. Deming is talking about? And so for the listeners, what I'm hoping we can help you understand, what might be some invisible challenges that you're having in your organizations trying to explain this to others. So maybe you think your understanding is pretty good, but like Dr. Deming, maybe people are having a hard time understanding what you're saying. And I know what it's like to be in a room, presenting to people. And I had that same experience. I had one Rocketdyne executive... Rocketdyne was sold a few times. Every time it got sold, our Deming transformation efforts got set back a few years. So when the latest management team came in six, seven years ago, I met with one of the very top people, was explaining... Trying to explain to him for the first time what we had accomplished with some, I thought, absolutely amazing work by managing variation as a system. And he said something like, "So are people rejecting what you're saying?" And I said, "No, that's not it." He says, "So they're accepting what you're saying?" I said, "Well... " he said, "What's the problem?" I said, "What they accepted is not what I said." [laughter] 0:05:19.5 BB: I said, we're not in disagreement, but what they think they heard is... And that's when I found that I've experienced that. So anyway, so I wanted to get some background. So my first exposure to quality circles, and this is like... So I was living in this parallel universe, a heat transfer engineer working on rocket engines, and Quality comes into the organization. And unbeknownst to me, there's this quality movement going on, inspired by Dr. Deming, and we're on this wave. I had no idea. All I know is all of a sudden, we got Quality Circles, quality teams, every department... 0:06:03.8 AS: What year was that, roughly? 0:06:06.1 BB: 1984. 0:06:08.9 AS: Okay. 0:06:10.5 BB: Yeah. And I remember a book I was... I remember there was a pamphlet... You mentioned that. The company was AVCO, A-V-C-O, the Aviation Corporation, which is nearly as old as the Boeing Company. So it was one of the... So, Boeing gets into airplanes, the Wright Brothers get into airplanes, people are... Investors getting in, and AVCO, A-V-C-O, was formed by someone you likely heard of, Averill Harriman, major Wall Street guy at the time. And so anyway, I remember there being an AVCO book on quality circles. As you mentioned, I remember seeing that. And I remember just going along for the ride. I'm new to corporations, I'm just a subject matter expert in gas turbine heat transfer, and we're going to the... We got these things called quality circles, whatever. And I remember our department formed... Our department was a team, we had goals, and I remember going to these quality meetings, and let's say the goal would be that we read an article about heat transfer or something. I was just kind of fumbling with this thing called quality circles. 0:07:28.6 BB: But I remember, looking over the shoulder of the department secretary with a IBM Selectric typewriter, and this is before PCs, so we're using IBM 3270, dumb terminals. And I remember being over near the secretary, Kathy, and she's typing away the weekly activity reports, Friday morning kind of thing. And on a routine basis, I'd be over there and she'd be typing along. And then on the very last page, under the title, "Quality Circles," she would type in "Quality Circles are progressing as planned." [chuckle] 'Cause then these would be distributed to people in the department. So I'm watching her now create the next original. And it dawns on me, two things. One is, it's the very last topic in the meeting, in the weekly minutes, and two is it's the same damn thing every time, "Quality Circles are on plan." And I remember saying to her, "Why don't we just have that printed into the stationary?" [laughter] 0:08:39.5 BB: This is before I knew... For me, quality was just a seven-letter word. I don't know. So this is my exposure. And I remember thinking one of the quality goals we're thinking of in our department is... I think somebody even really brought this up, is we're gonna answer the phone by the second ring. That's gonna be our quality goal. And then, I remember we're negotiating for cleaning services. The floors were a mess. Tile floors, they were just a mess. And I remember in our department, we were lobbying to get better janitorial services, have the things cleaned more often. And next thing, we're negotiating with the VP of Engineering relative to, "Well, if your quality circles are on track, then I'll think about that." And it was just like... So it's some really ugly memories [chuckle] of this whole quality thing. 0:09:34.3 BB: But then I got into... I mentioned on the very first of our previous podcast, getting involved as a problem solving decision-making facilitator. I was hanging out with the HR training people, they had some... Their director of training, our director of training was a very astute guy and he was... I'm convinced, having met many people in that role, he knew what was going on. He knew a lot of the names in quality, not so... He knew of Deming's name, he knew of De Bono's name, Kepner-Tregoe, but he seemed to know his stuff. He's a fun guy to be with. And so, that's likely where I first heard Deming's name and that first book would've been Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, which is... It's almost impenetrable, but I can remember at some point looking at that. 0:10:29.7 BB: But anyway, but in the fall of '87, I started being assigned a taskforce as helping... 'cause now I'm a problem-solving facilitator. But I still don't know... I don't know what quality is. All I know is I get invited to help solve problems. And we were looking at a very bad wear problem, these gears wearing each other out, enormous visibility to the Pentagon, because the tank engines we were making, 120 a month, were being shipped to the tank plant. And then, these tanks with these engines were being sent... The majority of them, sent to Europe. And they were the frontline of defense in Western Europe. This is the Cold War, Andrew. 0:11:17.4 AS: Right. 0:11:19.2 BB: And so the problem that came up was that a couple of these tanks had these gears wear through each other within 50 hours. And I've never been on such a high visibility taskforce because the Generals concern was that every one of those tanks was likely to not operate. And that might be the opportunity for the "Russki's" to launch World War III, because, what a great time, the tanks... If they knew these tanks weren't working. So it was a lot of stress, a lot of pressure. And after months of slow progress, the Army said, "Hey, why don't you guys go look at this Taguchi thing. The transmission people from General Motors who make the tank transmission, anytime they have a snafu like this, they use this Taguchi stuff." So I got assigned the action to go look at that. And I remember, this is pre-internet. And somehow, I did a literature search. I remember it was through something called Nerac, N-E-R-A-C. And out comes these pages. And the thing on Taguchi was... So first of all, who is this Taguchi guy? 0:12:29.0 BB: What is this quality stuff? I don't know. I'm a problem solving guy. And then I remember the first article on reference to Taguchi says, "Quality is the minimum of loss imparted to society by a product after a shipment to the customer." And I thought, "What does that mean?" So I don't know what... I mean, minimum of... I'm thinking... And I thought, "This can't be anything." So anyway, went out to General Motors and got exposed to what they were doing, and a few years later, realized it wasn't exactly Taguchi, but it was... There's some nuances there. But anyway, they exposed me to Design of Experiments and what's known as fractional factorial testing. And coupled with shifting how we look at the measurement process, we solved this problem within weeks, a problem that had been going on for months. So then I got excited about... This Taguchi thing's kind of cool. I'm liking this. And it was a lot more exciting than what I was doing. And I thought, "I think I wanna do this." So the following year, I went to the Taguchi conference. So we had the application and I was so excited, Andrew, that I was turned down for funding. The Army would have paid for me to go to this conference, 'cause the Army, by that point, had invited me to work on at least two problems. 0:13:54.4 BB: Once we solved the first one, when problems came up, the Army literally turned to the program management people at Lycoming and said, "Do a Taguchi study, get Bill Bellows involved." So I was walking on water. I thought it was kind of cool. So I wanted to go to this Taguchi conference, and it was turned down. And they said, "It's not your job." So I told my boss when they told me it was gonna be turned down, I said, "I'm going to this conference." I said, "Whether the company pays for it or not, I am going." So I drove 14 hours each way to Detroit. And in the room are all the US experts on Taguchi's ideas at the time. I didn't know who Deming was at the time. I still didn't know what quality was, but I walked outta there thinking, "This is what I wanna do." And then, where I'm getting to is, a few months later, I was gonna go out on medical I had surgery planned. 0:14:53.1 BB: I was gonna be out for about two months. So my wife and I lived in New Haven, maybe 10 miles north of Yale. And I remember going to the... Again, this is pre-Amazon. I mean, talk about dating ourselves. What century are we in? So I remember going with my wife to the Yale bookstore, the Yale co-op bookstore, and every book they had on quality, I bought. And I'm gonna sit home for two months and read all these books. And I remember buying books. I'm pretty sure I got books about Deming, some about Taguchi, some by Phil Crosby about Zero Defects. Six Sigma Quality entry was a year away. 0:15:35.7 BB: And so I sat down... I got out of the hospital, I'm resting at home, sitting on the couch every day and reading, and also calling the Taguchi people that I had met, I think, at the previous conference. I met some big names. So I'm reading the books, calling them up. And again, these are like my personal professors. And I remember saying to a few of them... What blew me away, and I don't... It somehow dawned on me, I was naive. In the world of engineering, we use... Most of my exposure, at least in heat transfer, we use the same terms the same way. We talk about radiation heat transfer, conduction heat transfer, convection heat transfer. So many of the terms are the same terms, so we can have a conversation. So I'm thinking the same thing applies in quality, that we're all like the heat transfer people. It's easy to communicate 'cause we got the same models. We're using the same words the same way. Then I started thinking, I'm no longer... And this is a real shock. I'm no longer thinking we're using the same words the same way, hence my introduction to misunderstanding quality, [laughter] or I would say, the beginning of a journey to better understand the... I think there are incredible opportunities for people in quality organizations, or people that wanna get into quality. 0:17:08.3 BB: I think it's an ideal opportunity to introduce Deming's ideas. And I say that because everybody else is doing their own thing. Engineering's off designing, Manufacturing's off producing, and Quality has an incredible opportunity to bring together Deming's sense of a systems view of quality. Nobody else has that charter. So my hope is in our conversations, we can help people that are trying to do some things, whether it's jumpstart their continuous improvement program or get their quality program out of what it currently is. In fact... 0:17:52.4 AS: By the way, I wanna... 0:17:55.9 BB: Go ahead, go ahead. 0:17:56.0 AS: I wanna ask a question about that, because what you've mentioned is interesting, that the systems aspect... Is that unique? Would you say that's unique to Deming? I mean, if we think about Taguchi and I think about the Taguchi Method, I'm thinking about a really powerful tool for understanding variation. But explain what you mean by that. 0:18:24.0 BB: A couple of things come to mind when you ask that question. One is the predominant explanation of quality. And if we have time, I wanna talk about that. The term quality, "qualitas," comes from Cicero, a Roman in ancient times. But by and large, in manufacturing, in corporate quality, in corporations, the operational definition, what do we mean by quality? This thing is... What are Quality organizations doing? And what I find they're doing is calling balls and strikes. They're looking at a given quality characteristics, whether it's the fuel economy of an engine, of a gas turbine engine, the performance, the thrust level of a rocket engine, the diameter of a hole, and asking, "Does that characteristic of surface roughness diameter, does it meet a set of requirements?" 0:19:30.4 BB: And the requirements are typically set... There's a lower one and an upper one. We don't say the meeting is gonna start at 10 o'clock, because if you understand variation, we can't get exactly 10. We can't get exactly 1.00 inch thickness for the plate, for the hole diameter. So then, we define quality. Typically, this is what people do in organizations. This is what I... I didn't know anything about this until I started... Well, what are quality people doing? They're asking, "Does this thing meet requirements?" 0:20:07.4 BB: And even towards that end, I remember asking a... I had a coworker who's a quality engineer, I've got many friends who are quality engineers, and this one guy came into a class one day that I was doing, and he's just beating his head against the wall over... I said, "What's...what have you been doing lately." He says, "All I'm doing Bill is dispositioning hardware, dispositioning hardware," which translates to trying to find out why something doesn't meet requirements and coming up with a corrective action, or buying it as is. So either changing the requirements or explaining why we can use it as is. But he's just like, "That's all I'm doing lately. I'm just getting overwhelmed with all this." So I said, "Well, what if overnight, by some miracle, you were to come in, and beginning first thing tomorrow morning, everything meets requirements." And that's the goal of quality in most organizations, is that everything meets requirements. So I said, "If everything beginning tomorrow morning, through some overnight miracle, meets requirements, hence forth, how would your life change?" He says, "I wouldn't have a job." [laughter] 0:21:26.9 BB: I said, "What other changes would you begin to see throughout the day, the coming days?" He says, "My boss's job wouldn't exist." I said, "Okay, keep going, keep going." He says, "Well, the whole organization will have no reason to exist." [laughter] And that's not farfetched. And I throw that out, the challenge to our listeners is, seriously, if everything in the organization beginning tomorrow morning met requirements through some... Dr. Deming would say as you know, by what method? Let's say the method exists, what would change? Now, I'm not saying these people necessarily get laid off. Maybe they get moved elsewhere. Maybe we set our sights higher and try to do things we've never done before, 'cause now everything's gonna be a home run. But that's what I find in corporations, I think, a very extremely commonplace 21st century Andrew explanation of quality is, "Does it meet requirements?" And that goes... And this whole idea of setting requirements, setting a lower and an upper, allowing for variation, that goes back to the early 1700s. And I've also read that it might go back even longer in China. We were talking earlier about China. 0:22:58.2 BB: And so if it goes back longer, all the better. And the point being, fast forward to today, that's largely where we are today, in this early 1700s. Does it meet requirements? Yes or no? And what Dr. Deming is talking about is not acceptability. First of all, he would say there's a place for acceptability. There's a place for meeting requirements, maybe based on the circumstances, all that matters is that it meets requirements. So if...
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Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 6
06/17/2024
Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 6
In the final episode of the goal setting in classrooms series, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the last three of the 10 Key Lessons for implementing Deming in schools. They finish up with the example of Jessica's 4th-grade science class. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode six about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:26.4 John Dues: Hey, Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, for the past handful of episodes or so, we've been talking about organizational goal setting. We covered these four conditions of healthy goal setting and then got into these 10 key lessons for data analysis. And then we've been looking at those 10 key lessons applied to an improvement project. And we've been talking about a project that was completed by Jessica Cutler and she did a Continual Improvement Fellowship with us here at our schools. And if you remember, Jessica was attempting to improve the joy in learning of her students in her fourth grade science class. So last time we looked at lessons five through seven. Today we're gonna look at those final three lessons, eight, nine and ten applied to her project. 0:01:15.7 AS: It's exciting. 0:01:17.1 JD: Yeah. So we'll jump in here. We'll kind of do a description, a refresher of each lesson. And we'll kind of talk about how it was applied to her specific project, and we'll look at some of her data to kind of bring that live for those of the folks that have video. Let's jump in with lesson number eight. So we've talked about this before, but lesson number eight was: more timely data is better for improvement purposes. So we've talked about this a lot. We've talked about something like state testing data. We've said, it can be useful, but it's not super useful for improvement purposes, because we don't get it until the year ends. And students in our case, have already gone on summer vacation by the time that data comes in. And you know that the analogous data probably happens in lots of different sectors where you get data that lags, to the point that it's not really that useful for improvement purposes. 0:02:15.8 JD: So when we're trying to improve something, more frequent data is helpful because then we can sort of see if an intervention that we're trying is having an effect, the intended effect. We can learn that more quickly if we have more frequent data. And so it's, there's not a hard and fast rule, I don't think for how frequently you should be gathering data. It just sort of needs to be in sync with the improvement context. I think that's the important thing. Whether it's daily or a couple times a day or weekly, or monthly, quarterly, whatever, it's gotta be in sync with whatever you're trying to improve. 0:02:50.5 AS: You made me think about a documentary I saw about, how they do brain surgery and how the patient can't be sedated because they're asking the patient questions about, do you feel this and they're testing whether they're getting... They're trying to, let's say, get rid of a piece of a cancerous growth, and they wanna make sure that they're not getting into an area that's gonna damage their brain. And so, the feedback mechanism that they're getting through their tools and the feedback from the patient, it's horrifying to think of the whole thing. 0:03:27.7 JD: Yeah. 0:03:28.3 AS: It's a perfect example of why more timely data is useful for improvement purposes 'cause imagine if you didn't have that information, you knock the patient out, you get the cancerous growth, but who knows what you get in addition to that. 0:03:43.7 JD: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that's certainly an extreme example, [laughter], but I think it's relevant. No matter what our context, that data allows us to understand what's going on, variation, trends, whether our system is stable, unstable, how we should go about improving. So it's not dissimilar from the doctors in that example. 0:04:06.8 AS: And it's indisputable I think, I would argue. But yet many people may not, they may be operating with data that's not timely. And so this is a reminder that we would pretty much always want that timely data. So that's lesson eight. Wow. 0:04:22.6 JD: Lesson eight. Yeah. And let's see how we can, I'll put a visualization on the screen so you can see what Jessica's data look like. All right. So now you can see. We've looked at these charts before. This is Jessica's process behavior chart for joy in science. So just to reorient, you have the joy percentage that students are feeling after a lesson on the x-axis, sorry, on the y-axis. On the x-axis, you have the school dates where they've collected this survey information from students in Jessica's class. 0:04:57.0 AS: Can you put that in Slide Show view? 0:05:00.4 JD: Yeah. I can do that. Yeah. 0:05:02.7 AS: Just it'll make it bigger, so for the... 0:05:06.5 JD: There you go. 0:05:07.8 AS: For the listeners out there, we're looking at a chart of daily, well, let's say it looks like daily data. There's probably weekends that are not in there because class is not on weekends, but it's the ups and downs of a chart that's ranging between a pretty, a relatively narrow range, and these are the scores that are coming from Jessica's surveying of the students each day, I believe. Correct? 0:05:34.2 JD: Yeah. So each day where Jessica is giving a survey to assess the joy in science that students are feeling, then she's averaging all those students together. And then the plot, the dot is the average of all the students sort of assessment of how much joy they felt in a particular science lesson. 0:05:54.7 AS: And that's the average. So for the listeners out there John's got an average line down the middle of these various data points, and then he is also got a red line above and a red line below the, above the highest point and slightly below the lowest point. Maybe you can explain that a little bit more. 0:06:15.4 JD: Yeah. So with Jessica, you remember originally she started plotting on a line chart or a run chart when we just had a few data points just to kind of get a sense of how things are moving so she could talk about it with her class. And over time what's happened is she's now got, at this point in the project, which she started in January, now this is sort of mid-March. And so she's collected two to three data points a week. So she doesn't survey the kids every day just for time sake, but she's getting two, three data points a week. And so by March, she started just a couple months ago, she's got 28 data points. So that sort of goes back to this idea of more timely data is better for improvement. 0:07:00.9 JD: And a lot of times, let's say a school district or a school does actually survey their students about how, what they think of their classes. That might happen at best once a semester or maybe once a year. And so at the end of the year you have one or two data points. So it's really hard to tell sort of what's actually going on. Compared to this, Jessica's got these 28 data points in just about two months or so of school. So she's got 28 data points to work with. And so what her and her students are doing with this data then, one, they can see how it's moving up and down. So we have, the blue dots are all the plotted points, like you said, the green line is the average running sort of through the middle of the data, and then those red lines are our process limits, the upper and lower natural process limits that sort of tell us the bounds of the system. 0:07:50.4 JD: And that's based on the difference in each successive data point. But the most important thing is that as Jessica and her students are looking at this, initially, they're really just studying it and trying to sort of see how things are going from survey to survey. So one of the things that Deming talked about frequently is not tampering with data, which would be if you sort of, you overreact to a single data point. So let's say, a couple of days in, it dips down from where it started and you say, oh my gosh, we gotta change things. And so that's what Deming is talking about. Not tampering, not overreacting to any single data point. Instead look at this whole picture that you get from these 28 data points and then talk about... 0:08:41.5 JD: In Jessica's case she's talking about with her students, what can we learn from this data? What does the variation from point to point look like? If we keep using the system, the fourth grade science system, if we leave it as is, then we'll probably just keep getting data pretty similar to this over time, unless something more substantial changes either in the negative or the positive. So right now they... 0:09:10.1 AS: And I think for the listeners, it's, you can see that there's really no strong pattern that I can see from this. It's just, there's some, sometimes that there's, seems like there's little trends and stuff like that. But I would say that the level of joy in the science classroom is pretty stable. 0:09:32.1 JD: Pretty stable. Yeah. Pretty high. It's bouncing around maybe a 76% average across those two and a half months or so. And so, they, you kind of consider this like the baseline. They've got a good solid baseline understanding of what joy looks like in this fourth grade science classroom. Did that stop sharing on your end? 0:10:00.2 AS: Yep. 0:10:00.2 JD: Okay, great. So that's lesson eight. So clearly she's gathered a lot of data in a pretty short amount of time. It's timely, it's useful, it's usable, it can be studied by her and her students. So we'll switch it to lesson nine now. So now they've got a good amount of data. They got 28 data points. That's plenty of data to work with. So lesson nine is now we wanna clearly label the start date for an intervention directly in her chart. And remember from earlier episodes, not only are we collecting this data, we're actually putting this up on a screen on a smart board in the classroom, and Jessica and her students are studying this data together. They're actually looking at this, this exact chart and she's explaining sort of kind of like we just did to the listeners. She's explaining what the chart means. 0:10:54.2 JD: And so over time, like once a week she's putting this up on the smart board and now kids are getting used to, how do you read this data? What does this mean? What are all these dots? What do these numbers mean? What do these red lines mean? That type of thing. And so now that they've got enough data, now we can start talking about interventions. That's really what lesson nine is about. And the point here is that you want to clearly, explicitly with a literally like a dotted line in the chart to mark on the day that you're gonna try something new. So you insert this dashed vertical line, we'll take a look at it in a second, on the date the intervention started. And then we're also gonna probably label it something simple so we can remember what intervention we tried at that point in time. 0:11:42.7 JD: So what this then allows the team to do is then to very easily see the data that happened before the intervention and the data that happened after the implementation of this intervention or this change idea. And then once we've started this change and we start plotting points after the change has gone into effect, then we can start seeing or start looking for those patterns in the data that we've talked about, those different rules, those three rules that we've talked about across these episodes. And just to refresh, rule one would be if we see a single data point outside of either of the limits, rule two is if we see eight consecutive points on either side of that green average line, and rule three is if we see three out of four dots in a row that are closer to one of the limits than they are to that central line. 0:12:38.3 JD: So that again, those patterns tell us that something significant, mathematically improbable has happened. It's a big enough magnitude in change that you wouldn't have expected it otherwise. And when we see that pattern, we can be reasonably assured that that intervention that we've tried has worked. 0:12:56.0 AS: And let me ask you about the intervention for just a second because I could imagine that if this project was going on, first question is, does Jessica's students are, obviously know that this experiment is going on? 0:13:08.3 JD: Yes. 0:13:09.8 AS: Because they're filling out a survey. And my first question is, do they know that there's an intervention happening? I would expect that it would be yes, because they're gonna feel or see that intervention. Correct? 0:13:25.1 JD: Sure. Yep. 0:13:25.2 AS: That's my first point that I want to think about. And the second point is, let's imagine now that everybody in the classroom has been seeing this chart and they're, everybody's excited and they got a lot of ideas about how they could improve. Jessica probably has a lot of ideas. So the temptation is to say, let's change these three things and see what happens. 0:13:46.5 JD: Yeah. 0:13:47.1 AS: Is it important that we only do one thing at a time or that one intervention at a time or not? So maybe those are two questions I have in my mind. 0:13:58.6 JD: Yeah, so to the first question, are you, you're saying there there might be some type of participant or... 0:14:02.3 AS: Bias. 0:14:03.3 JD: Observer effect like that they want this to happen. That's certainly possible. But speaking to the second question, what intervention do you go with? Do you go with one or you go with multiple? If you remember a couple of episodes ago we talked about, and we actually looked at a fishbone diagram that Jessica and her students that they created and they said, okay, what causes us to have low joy in class? And then they sort of mapped those, they categorized them, and there were different things like technology not working. If you remember, one was like distractions, like other teachers walk into the room during the lesson. And one of them was others like classmates making a lot of noise, making noises during class and distracting me. And so they mapped out different causes. I think they probably came up with like 12 or 15 different causes as possibilities. 0:14:58.7 JD: And they actually voted as a class. Which of these, if we worked on one of these, which would have the biggest impact? So not every kid voted for it, but the majority or the item that the most kids thought would have the biggest impact was if we could somehow stop all the noises basically. So they came up with that as a class, but not, it wasn't everybody's idea. But I think we've also talked about sort of the lessons from David Langford where once kids see that you're gonna actually take this serious, take their ideas serious and start acting on them, they take the project pretty seriously too. So maybe not a perfect answer, but that's sort of what we... 0:15:38.0 AS: I was thinking that, ultimately you could get short-term blips when you do an intervention and then it stabilizes possibly. That's one possibility. And the second thing I thought is, well, I mean ultimately the objective, whether that's an output from a factory, and keeping, improving that output or whether that's the output related to joy in the classroom as an example, you want it to go up and stay up and you want the students to see it and say, wow, look, it's happening. So, yeah. 0:16:11.7 JD: And there's different ways you can handle this. So this joy thing could go up to a certain point. They're like, I don't know if we can get any more joy, like, it's pretty high. And what you could do at that point is say, okay, I'm gonna assign a student to just sort of, every once in a while, we'll keep doing these surveys and we will sort of keep plotting the data, but we're not gonna talk about a lot. I'm just gonna assign this as a student's job to plot the new data points. And we'll kind of, we'll kind of measure it, but we won't keep up with the intervention 'cause we got it to a point that we're pretty happy with. And now as a class we may wanna switch, switch our attention to something else. 0:16:45.2 JD: So we started getting into the winter months and attendance has dipped. Maybe we've been charting that and say, Hey guys, we gotta, gotta kinda work on this. This is gone below sort of a level that's really good for learning. So let's think about as a group how we could come up with some ideas to raise that. So maybe you turn your attention to something else, 'cause you can't pay attention to everything at once. 0:17:07.2 AS: Yeah, and I think I could use an example in my Valuation Master Class Boot Camp where students were asking for more personal feedback and I realized I couldn't really scale this class if I had to get stuck into hundreds of grading basically. And that's when I came up with the concept of feedback Friday, where one student from each team would present and then I would give feedback, I would give a critique and they would be intense and all students would be watching, it would be recorded, and all of a sudden all the issues related to wanting this personal feedback went away. And therefore, once I instituted it on a regular basis, I went on to the next issue and I made sure that I didn't lose the progress that I had made and continue to make feedback Friday better and better. 0:17:56.2 JD: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's great. I'll share my screen so you can kinda see what this looked like in Jessica's class now, what the chart looks like now. So now you see that same chart, that same process behavior chart, exact same one we were just looking at except now you can see this, this dashed vertical line that marks the spot where the intervention was started that we just talked about. And what the kids are actually doing, and Jessica are running a PDSA cycle, a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. That's the experimental cycle in her class. And what they're running that PDSA on is, again, how can we put something in place to reduce the distracting noises. And so what the students actually said is if we get a deduction for making noises, then there will be less noises. And so in the school's sort of management system, a deduction is sort of like a demerit. 0:19:00.0 JD: If you maybe went to a Catholic school or something like that, or some public schools had demerits as well, but basically it's like a minor infraction basically that goes home or that gets communicated to parents at the end of the week. But the kids came up with this so their basic premise is, their plan, their prediction is if there are less noises, we'll be able to enjoy science class. And if we give deductions for these noises, then there'll be less noises. So some people may push back, well, I don't think you should give deductions or something like that, but which, fine, you could have that opinion. But I think the powerful point here is this is, the students created this, it was their idea. And so they're testing that idea to see if it actually has impact. 0:19:44.8 JD: And they're learning to do that test in this scientific thinking way by using the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, and seeing if it actually has an impact on their data. So at the point where they draw this dashed line, let's call that March 19th, we can see a couple of additional data points have been gathered. So you can see the data went up from...
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Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 5
06/11/2024
Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 5
In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz apply lessons five through seven of the 10 Key Lessons for implementing Deming in classrooms. They continue using Jessica's fourth-grade science class as an example to illustrate the concepts in action. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode five about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:23.2 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, like you said, for the past few episodes we've been talking about organizational goal setting. We covered four healthy conditions, or four conditions of healthy goal setting and 10 key lessons for data analysis. And then what we turn to in the last episode is looking at an applied example of the 10 key lessons for data analysis and in action. And, if you remember from last time we were looking at this improvement project from Jessica Cutler, she's a fourth grade science teacher, and she did the improvement fellowship here at United Schools Network, where she learned the tools, the techniques, the philosophies, the processes behind the Deming theory, continual improvement, that type of thing. And in... And in Jessica's specific case, in her fourth grade science class, what she was settled on that she was gonna improve was, the joy in learning of her students. And we looked at lessons one through four through the eyes or through the lens of her project. And today we're gonna look at lessons five through seven. So basically the next, uh, the next three lessons of those 10 key lessons. 0:01:34.8 AS: I can't wait. Let's do it. 0:01:37.3 JD: Let's do it. So lesson number five was: show enough data in your baseline to illustrate the previous level of variation. Right. So the basic idea with this particular lesson is that, you know, let's say we're trying to improve something. We have a data point or maybe a couple data points. We wanna get to a point where we're starting to understand how this particular concept works. In this case, what we're looking at is joy in learning. And there's some different rules for how many data points you should, should have in a typical base baseline. But, you know, a pretty good rule of thumb is, you know, if you can get 12 to 15, that's... That's pretty solid. You can start working with fewer data points in real life. And even if you just have five or six values, that's gonna give you more understanding than just, you know, a single data point, which is often what we're... What we're working with. 0:02:35.6 AS: In, other words, even if you have less data, you can say that this gives some guidance. 0:02:40.9 JD: Yeah. 0:02:41.1 AS: And then you know that the reliability of that may be a little bit less, but it gives you a way... A place to start. 0:02:46.9 JD: A place to start. You're gonna learn more over time, but at least even five or six data points is more than what I typically seen in the typical, let's say, chart where it has last month and this month, right? So even five or six points is a lot more than that. You know, what's... What's typical? So I can kind of show you, I'll share my screen here and we'll take a look at, Jessica's initial run chart. You see that right? 0:03:19.3 AS: We can see it. 0:03:21.2 JD: Awesome. 0:03:22.3 AS: You wanna put it in slideshow? Can we see that? Yeah, there you go. 0:03:24.9 JD: Yeah, I'll do that. 0:03:25.4 AS: Perfect. 0:03:26.3 JD: That works better. So, you know, again, what we're trying to do is show enough data in the baseline to understand what happened prior to whenever we started this improvement effort. And I think I've shared this quote before, but I really love this one from Dr. Donald Berwick, he said "plotting measurements over time turns out in my view to be one of the most powerful things we have for systemic learning." So what... That's what this is all about really, is sort of taking that lesson to heart. So, so you can look at Jessica's run chart for "joy in science." So just to sort of orient you to the chart. We have dates along the bottom. So she started collecting this data on January 4th, and this is for about the first 10 days of data she has collected. So she's collected this data between January 4th and January 24th. So, you know, a few times a week she's giving a survey. You'll remember where she's actually asking your kids, how joyful was this science lesson? 0:04:24.4 JD: Mm-hmm. 0:04:27.2 JD: And so this is a run chart 'cause it's just the data with the median running through the middle, that green line there, the data is the blue lines connected by, or sorry, the blue dots connected by the points and the y axis there along the left is the joy in learning percentage. So out of a hundred percent, sort of what are kids saying? How are kids sort of evaluating each of these science lessons? So we've got 10 data points so far, which is a pretty good start. So it's starting to give Jessica and her science class a decent understanding about, you know, when we, you know, define joy in science and then we start to collect this data, we really don't have any idea what that's gonna look like in practice. But now that she started plotting this data over time, we have a much better sense of what the kids think of the science lessons basically. So on the very first day... 0:05:25.4 AS: And what is the... What is the median amount just for the listeners out there that don't see it? What would be the... Is that 78%? 0:05:33.8 JD: Yeah, about 78%. So that very first day was 77%. The second day was about 68%. And then you sort of see it bounce around that median over the course of that, those 10 days. So some of the points are below the median, some of the points are above the median. 0:05:50.4 AS: And the highest point above is about 83, it looks like roughly around that. 0:05:54.4 JD: Yeah. Around 82, 83%. And one technical point is at the point that it's a run chart we don't have the process limits, those red lines that we've been taking a look at and with a run chart and, you know, fewer data points, we only have 10. It's fairly typical to use the median, just so you know, you can kind of better control for any outlier data points which we really don't have any outliers in this particular case but that's just sort of a technical point. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know what you start to see, you start to get a sense of what this data looks like, you know, and you're gonna keep collecting this data over an additional time period, right? And she hasn't at this point introduced any interventions or any changes. Right now they're just learning about this joy in learning system, really. Right. 0:06:51.8 JD: And so, you know, as she's thinking about this, this really brings us to... To lesson six, which is, you know, what's the goal of data analysis? And this is true in schools and it's true anywhere. We're not just gonna look at the past results, but we're also gonna, you know, probably more importantly, look to the future and hopefully sort of be able to predict what's gonna happen in the future. And, you know, whatever concept that we're looking at. And so as we continue to gather additional data, we can then turn that run chart from those initial 10 points into a process behavior chart. Right. You know, that's a, sort of a, you know, it's the run chart on steroids because not only can we see the variation, which you can see in the run chart, but now because we've added more data, we've added the upper and lower natural process limit, we can also start to characterize the type of variation that we see in that data. 0:08:00.1 AS: So for the listeners, listeners out there, John just switched to a new chart which is just an extension of the prior chart carrying it out for a few more weeks, it looks like, of daily data. And then he's added in a lower and upper natural process limit. 0:08:18.9 JD: Yeah. So we're still, we're still plotting the data for joy in science. So the data is still the blue dots connected by the blue lines now because we have 24 or so data points, the green line, the central line is the average of that data running through the data. And we have enough data to add the upper and lower natural process limit. And so right now we can start to determine do we only have natural variation, those everyday ups and downs, that common cause variation, or do we have some type of exceptional or special cause variation that's outside of what would be expected in this particular system. We can start making... 0:09:00.7 AS: Can you... 0:09:02.2 JD: Go ahead. 0:09:02.8 AS: I was gonna... I was gonna ask you if you can just explain how you calculated the upper and lower natural process limits just so people can understand. Is it max and min or is it standard deviation or what is that? 0:09:18.3 JD: Yeah, basically what's happening is that, so we've plotted the data and then we use that data, we calculate the average, and then we also calculate what the moving range, is what it's called. So we just look at each successive data point and the difference between those two points. And basically there's a formula that you use for the upper and lower natural process limits that takes all of those things into account. So it's not standard deviation, but it's instead using the moving, moving range between each successive data point. 0:09:52.9 AS: In other words, the data that's on this chart will always fall within the natural upper and lower. In other words it's... Or is, will data points fall outside of that? 0:10:05.7 JD: Well, it depends on what kind of system it is. 0:10:07.8 AS: Right. Okay. 0:10:09.8 JD: If it's a stable system, that means all we see is sort of natural ups and downs in the data. And we use those formulas for the process limits. The magnitude of the difference of each successive data point is such that it's not necessarily big or small, it's just based on what you're seeing empirically. It's basically predictable. Right. And if it's not predictable, then we'll see special causes. So we'll see special patterns in the data. So I think maybe last time we talked about the three patterns, or you know, in some episode we talked about the patterns that would suggest there's a special cause that goes to the study. Those three patterns that I use are, is there a single one of these joy in science data points outside of either the upper or lower natural process limit that'd be a special cause. 0:11:05.4 JD: If you see eight data points in a row, either above the central line or below the central line, that's a special cause. And if I see three out of four in a row that are either closer to the upper limit or to the lower limit than they are to that central line, that's a pattern of the data that suggests a special cause. So we don't, in this particular dataset, we don't see any special causes. So now we have... Now we have a very solid baseline set of data. We have 24 data points. And when you're using an average central line and get... Getting technical, once you get to about 17 data points, those upper and lower natural process limits start to solidify, meaning they're not gonna really change too much 'cause you have enough data unless something really significant happens. And then if you're using the median, that solidification happens when you get to about 24 data points. 0:12:07.5 JD: So when you're, you know, when you're getting to 17 to 24 data points in your baseline, you're really getting pretty solid upper and lower national process limits. So, as of this March 1st date, which is the last date in this particular chart, there are 24 data points. So you have a pretty solid baseline set of data. Right now, the upper natural process limit is 95%. That lower limit is sitting at 66%, and then the average running through the middle, that green line is 81%. So this basically tells us that if nothing changes within Jessica's fourth grade science system, her classroom, we can expect the data to bounce around this 81% average and stay within the bounds of the limit. So we would call this a common cause system because we don't see any of those rules that I just talked about for special causes. And that's important. 0:13:07.4 JD: So do we have an unstable system or a stable system? We have a stable system. A stable system means that the data is predictable and unless something happens, you know, and this could be something that happens in the control of the teacher in the class, or it could be out of the control of the teacher in the class, but unless something happens that's significant, this data is just kind of keep humming along like this over the course of March, April, May of this particular school year. Right. So once we get to this point, so we have baseline data we've collected in a run chart, we start to understand how that data is moving up and down. We got some more data and we added the upper and lower natural process limits. Now we can assess not only the variation, but also the stability and the capability of the system, all of those things, those questions can start to be answered now that we have this process behavior chart. 0:14:09.3 JD: And this brings us to the final lesson for today, which is lesson 7, which is the improvement approach depends on the stability of the system under study. So that's why one of the reasons why the process behavior chart is so powerful is because now I have an understanding of what I need to do, like what type of approach I need to take to improve this particular system. Right? So in this particular case, I have a predictable system. And so the only way to bring about meaningful improvement is to fundamentally change this science system, right? 0:14:52.6 JD: The flip side would be if I did see a special cause let's say, it was an unpredictable system. We saw special cause on the low side. I'd wanna study that, what happened on that particular day. Because if I see a special cause, let's say on February 2nd I saw a special cause, let's say I saw a single data point below the lower natural process limit that's so different and unexpected, I'd actually wanna go to her classroom and talk to her in her class and say, okay, what happened on that day? I'm gonna try to remove that special cause. Study of that specific data point is warranted. If you don't see those special causes, then those, even though there are ups and downs, there are increases and decreases. They're within that, you know, the expected bounds of this particular system. Right. 0:15:46.9 AS: And I was gonna say, I can't remember if I got this from Dr. Deming or where it came from, but I know as an analyst in the stock market analyzing tons and tons of data in my career, I always say if something looks like a special cause or looks strange it's probably an error. [laughter] 0:16:03.2 AS: And it could just be for instance, that a student came in and they didn't understand how to fill it out or they refused to fill it out or they filled out the form with a really bizarre thing, or maybe they thought that number 10 was good and number one was bad, but in fact on the survey it was number one that was good and number 10 that was bad. And you find out that, you know, that special cause came from some sort of error. 0:16:26.6 JD: That's certainly possible. That's certainly possible. 0:16:29.5 AS: As opposed to another special cause could be, let's just say that the school had a blackout and all of a sudden the air conditioning went off for half of the class and everybody was just like really frustrated. They were burning hot. It was really a hot day and that special cause could have been a legitimate cause as opposed to let's say an error cause but you know, it causes an extreme, you know response on the survey. 0:16:56.9 JD: Yeah. And the thing is, is yeah, it could be a number of different things. Maybe she tried, maybe she had gotten some feedback about her lessons and maybe even she tried a different lesson design and it was new to her and it just didn't work very well. Maybe she tried to use some new technology or a new activity and it just didn't go well. But you know, if I'm seeing that data show up as a special cause and let's say I'm seeing that the next day or a couple days later, it's still fresh in my mind and I can even go into my chart and label what happened that day. Okay. And I... Now, okay, I'm gonna remove that thing or I'm, you know, if it's a lesson I'm trying, maybe I don't wanna give up on it, but I know I need to improve it 'cause it led to some issues in my classroom, but it's close enough to the time it actually happened that I actually remember what happened on that particular day and I can sort of pinpoint that issue. 0:17:52.9 AS: Yeah. 0:17:54.5 JD: And the data told me it was worth going into studying that particular data point because it was so different than what I had seen previously in this particular 4th grade science system. 0:18:06.5 AS: Makes sense. 0:18:09.9 JD: But in this case, we don't see that, that was a hypothetical. So all we see is sort of the data moving up and down around that green average line. So we have a stable system. So again, that tells me I need to improve the science system itself. There's no special causes to remove. So, the next question I think I would ask, and if you remember one of the data lessons is that we sort of combine the frontline workers, which is the students in this case. We have the manager or the leader, that's the teacher, and then someone with profound knowledge from the Deming lens, that's me, we're bringing these people together and we're saying, okay, you know, we're seeing this hum along this joy in science thing, hum along at sort of like an 81% average. So I think it's a reasonable question to ask, is that good enough? And should we turn our attention to something else. Now, there could be some situations where it's not good enough or some situations where that is good enough. They chose to keep moving to improve that joy in learning. But I think it'd be perfectly reasonable in some context to say, well, you know, sure, maybe we could get a little better here, but maybe it's not worth the effort in that particular area. Maybe we're gonna turn our attention to something else. You know. 0:19:23.7 AS: So you learn something from the chart and that could be... 0:19:26.4 JD: Learn something from the chart. Yeah, yeah. 0:19:27.9 AS: Because when I look at this chart, I just think hard work is ahead. 0:19:31.2 JD: Yeah. Yeah. 0:19:34.7 AS: 'Cause in order to, if you have a stable system with not a lot of extreme... Firefighting is kind of a fun thing, right? When you got special causes, you feel really important. You go out there, you try to figure out what those individual things are, you're the hero. You fix it, you understand it, you see it, whatever. But then when you get a stable system, it's like, oh man, now we got to think about how do we make some substantial changes in the system. It doesn't have to be substantial, but how do we make changes in the system, you know? And then measure whether that has an impact. 0:20:06.4 JD: Yeah. And to your point about fire... Fighting fires, like I didn't know, we had never measured joy in learning like this before, so I didn't know what we were gonna get with Jessica. And so you know what I think you also see here is a pretty well-run...
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How to Test for Understanding: Awaken Your Inner Deming (part 22)
05/22/2024
How to Test for Understanding: Awaken Your Inner Deming (part 22)
How do you know that the learning you and your colleagues are doing is leading to changes in behavior? In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss little tests you can do to see if the transformation you're working toward is really happening. 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunity. Today is episode 22, and the title is, Test for Understanding Transformation. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.7 Bill Bellows: Hey, we've been at this podcast for about a year now, right? 0:00:36.6 AS: It's incredible how long it's been. 0:00:39.8 BB: And in the beginning you said, I've been at this for 30 years, right? 0:00:43.7 AS: Yeah. [laughter] 0:00:46.7 BB: Maybe we should change that to 31. 0:00:48.3 AS: Oh, man, there you go. 0:00:51.2 BB: All right. 0:00:53.0 AS: That reminds me of the joke of the janitor at the exhibition of the dinosaurs and the group of kids was being led through the museum and their guide had to run to the bathroom. And so they were looking at this dinosaur and they asked the janitor, "How old is that dinosaur?" And he said, "Well, that dinosaur is 300,032 years old." "Oh, how do they know it so exactly?" He said, "Well, it was 300,000 when I started working here 30 years ago." [laughter] 0:01:28.8 AS: So there we are. 0:01:31.4 BB: That's great. 0:01:33.3 AS: Thirty-one years. 0:01:34.0 BB: All right, all right, all right. So first thing I wanna say is, as you know and our listeners know, I go back and listen to this podcast and I interact with people that are listening too, and I get some feedback. And in episode 19, I said the Germans were developing jet engines in the late 1940s. No, it turns out the Germans were developing jet engines in the late 1930s and they had a fighter plane with a turbine engine, a developmental engine in the late '30s. They didn't get into full-scale development and production. Production didn't start till the tail end of the war. But anyway, but I was off by a decade. In episode 21, I mentioned that checks were awarded within Rocketdyne for improvement suggestions and individuals who submitted this and it could be for an individual, maybe it was done for two people, three people, I don't know, but they got 10% of the annual savings on a suggestion that was implemented in a one-time lump sum payment. 0:02:36.1 BB: So you got 10% of the savings for one year and I thought, imagine going to the president of the company and let's say I walk into the president's office and you're my attorney. And I walk in and I say, "Hey, Mr. President, I've got a suggestion. You know that suggestion program?" He says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on in, come on in. And who's this guy with you?" "Well that's Andrew Stotz." "And who's Andrew?" "He's my attorney, and he and I have been thinking about what this is worth." "Well, tell me about it." "No, well, before we get into it, we've got this form to sign here." 0:03:10.9 AS: Andrew. 0:03:11.1 BB: "Right? And you wanna see the idea or not? But we don't have to share it." But I thought, imagine people going to great length and really taking advantage of it. Well, a few of us that were involved in our InThinking Roadmap training, what we started to propose is we want a piece of the action, Andrew. So the proposal we had is that, Andrew, if you come to one of our classes, a study session on The New Economics or Managing Variation of a System, we'll have you sign a roster, right? And so if you are ever given a check for big numbers, Andrew, then we're gonna claim that our training contributed to your idea and all we ask is 10%, right? 0:03:58.1 AS: Of your 10%. 0:04:00.9 BB: I mean, I think that's fair, right? But imagine everybody in the organization becoming a profit center. 0:04:08.7 AS: Crazy. 0:04:10.4 BB: That's what you get. All right. 0:04:14.5 AS: And the lesson from that is focus on intrinsic motivation. People wanna make improvements, they wanna contribute. 0:04:23.8 BB: You start... You go down the slippery slope of incentives, which will be part of what we look at later. There's just no end to that. All right? 0:04:31.4 AS: Yeah. 0:04:32.2 BB: So I mentioned in a previous podcast that I had an interaction, met the army's first woman four-star general, and I just wanna give you some more background and interesting things that happened with her relative to this test for understanding transformation. I don't know April, May, 2008, someone on her staff reached out to me and when they first... When the guy got a hold of me, I said... From the Pentagon, he called me, I think it was like 8:00 or 9:00 o'clock at night here. Whatever it was, it was after hours in LA so it was after hours in DC. I remember saying to the guy, "How did you find me?" He says, "There's a lot of stuff on the internet." So he says, "I came across a presentation you did for Goodwill Industries." And he says, "In there you talk about... " He says, "There's some really good stuff in there." 0:05:29.0 BB: And I said, "Like what?" He said, "You have a slide in there about you can minimize loss to society by picking up nails in a parking lot." And that was an example of what I used Dr. Taguchi's work, minimizing loss to society. I said, "Yeah, I remember that slide." He says, "We don't do enough of that in the Army." And he says, "Hey, we've got a conference next week, late notice. The keynote speaker bailed out." And he's calling me on a Monday. The presentation's a week from Wednesday and he says... And also he said that the Army had an initiative called Enterprise Thinking and Enterprise Thinking was part of what we called our effort within Rocketdyne. We used the terms Enterprise Thinking, organizational awareness, and that InThinking personal awareness. We were using those two terms. So he did a search on that, found my name, and he says, "What do you think?" And he says, "We're gonna... " 0:06:24.3 BB: If I agree, we'll have a follow-up vetting call the next day. So he calls me up the next day and it's him and a two-star general. There are three people in the room, all senior officers, and he says, "Okay, so, but tell us what you do." So I shared the last... It sounds funny, is what seems to have been the last straw in their interest was having me speak, was my last straw story. Remember the executive from the European airline and... Right? So I tell that story about my efforts within Rocketdyne and Boeing about this airline executive and how this deeply resonated with this executive of this customer of this company that buys a lot of Boeing airplanes that we focused on the one cause, not the greater system. 0:07:13.2 BB: And within minutes of sharing that story, they started laughing, leading to it a few minutes later to them saying, "you're the one." 0:07:19.2 AS: [laughter] That's very interesting. 0:07:21.3 BB: You're the one. So for our listeners, I'd say, let this be a reminder of how a personal story guided by insights on how Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge can open doors for you. And you can use that story, come up with your own stories, but you just never know when you're gonna be in a situation where you need a really simple story. So as an aside, they contact me, like I mentioned, 10 years later, and I think I shared with you offline that the speaker I was replacing was the great Richard Rumelt, the strategy professor from UCLA, who for whatever reason needed to bail out. And then when this podcast is posted, I'll put a link to the slides of the presentation. 0:08:05.7 BB: It's about 45 minutes long. What was not covered... I went back and looked at it earlier to say, what did I share with them that got them so excited? All I know is it fit into 45 minutes to an hour. What was not covered was the trip reports, whether Red Pen or Blue Pen, Last Straw/All Straw, Me/We organizations. But after it was done, as I'm coming off the stage, General Dunwoody in uniform comes up to me. She was thrilled. Her exact words were, "You hit it." She says, "Bill, you hit it out of the park." And I thought, well, I had help from a lot of people. She then says something to me that I'll never forget. So we're face-to-face, right? Let me just... Right? 0:08:45.1 BB: And she says to me, "Bill, you've got a real challenge on your hands. Bill, you've got a real challenge on your hands." So prompted by that, I held my hand out, my right hand, which is what you do to initiate a handshake, and then she reaches out to shakes my hand and I said, "General Dunwoody, we have a challenge on our hands." [laughter] And she erupted in laughter. And my only regret, even though we went out for drinks for the next couple of hours, but my regret was not having a photo of her and I doing a double high five as she laughed. So then I remained in touch with her for the next six to eight months when she was promoted to four-star and she looked for opportunities to get me to the Pentagon, which she did. And I was trying to get her or somebody on her staff to come to Rocketdyne to learn more about what we're doing. 0:09:38.1 BB: But I say I share this anecdote as an example of a Test for Understanding of a transformation. So what is a TFU, test for understanding? This is something I got exposed to in my Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Decision Making training, which I talked about in one of the first episodes. And in our training to deliver what was then a five-day course, we were coached on how to interact with seminar attendees, including how to answer questions and how to ask questions. And one of the things we got our knuckles wrapped for was saying, are there any questions? Because no one answers that. There is... And if I had said that when I was being certified, I'd have failed. So instead we're coached on how to ask questions or make comments, which serve as a test for someone's understanding of what I presented. 0:10:27.9 BB: For example, for me to reply to General Dunwoody with we have a challenge on our hands was to test her understanding of what I said and her laughter is a response that I could be expecting with something short. As an aside, an appreciation, we've talked about Ackoff's D-I-K-U-W model data, raw data information. You turn that into what, where, when, extent, knowledge. If we convert that to how does something operate looking inside of an automobile, how do the pieces work together? Remember he said understanding is when you look outward 'cause knowledge looking inward, Russ would say, doesn't tell you why the car is designed for four passengers. That comes from looking outward. And then wisdom is what do we do with all this? Well, the Kepner-Tregoe training was Test for Understanding and now that I'm inspired by Ackoff, well in my university classes, I ask "Test for Information" classes. I have them watch videos and say, what company was Russ working for? 0:11:31.1 BB: This anecdote, that's information. Nothing wrong with those questions. I can ask for "Test for Knowledge" questions asking how something operates. So what I don't know is like, why are they called Test for Understanding? They could be Test for Knowledge, Test for Information, Test for Wisdom. And obviously TFI test for information could be true, false, multiple choice and test for knowledge and understanding could be short, but then I want to go deeper. And so what I wanna share is in one of my university courses, I share the following, true, you can't make it up news stories. It says, once upon a time a national airline came in dead last on on-time performance one month even though it had offered its employees everything from cash to pizza to finish first in the US Department of Transportation's monthly rankings. Does that sound like incentives, Andrew? 0:12:33.0 AS: It's all there. 0:12:33.8 BB: If we finish first, pizza parties. Now if they got exposed to Rocketdyne, they'd be handing out checks for $10,000. So in one of the research essays, for a number of the courses, every week, every module, I give them a research essay very similarly, giving them a situation and then what's going on with the questions is having them think about what they've been exposed to so far. And so question one in this assignment is given this account, list five assumptions that were made by the management team of this airline? And so I just wanna share one student's response. He says, "assumption one..." And also let me say this comes from the second of two Deming courses I do. So these students have been exposed to a one, one-semester course prior to this. So this is not intro stuff. This is getting deep into it. 0:13:34.3 BB: And so anyway he says, "assumption one, offering incentives like cash and pizza would motivate employees to prioritize on-time performance." Okay? That's an assumption. "Assumption two, employee morale and satisfaction directly correlate with on-time performance. Assumption three, the issue of on-time performance primarily stems from..." Are you ready? "Employee motivation or effort. The incentives provided were perceived as valuable by employees." And you're gonna love where this goes. "Assumption five, employees have significant control over factors that influence on-time performance such as aircraft maintenance, air traffic control and weather conditions." 0:14:20.2 AS: Good answers. 0:14:23.0 BB: Again, what I think is cool and for our listeners is what you're gonna get in question two, three, four, and five is builds upon a foundation where these students have, for one and a half semesters been exposed to Deming, Taguchi, Ackoff, Gipsie Ranney, Tom Johnson, the System of Profound Knowledge, hours and hours of videos. And so this is my way of Testing their Understanding. And so if you're a university professor, you might find interest in this. If you're within an organization, this could be a sense of how do you know what people are hearing in your explanations of Deming's work or whatever you're trying to bring to your organization? So anyway, I then have them read a blog at a Deming Institute link, and I'll add this blog when this is posted but it's deming.org/the insanity of extrinsic motivation. All right. And they've been exposed to these concepts but I just said, "Hey, go off and read this blog." And it was likely a blog by John Hunter. 0:15:32.0 AS: Yep. 0:15:32.2 BB: All right, question two. All right. Now it gets interesting, is that "in appreciation of Edward de Bono's, "Six Thinking Hats"," which they've been exposed to, "and the Yellow Hat, which is the logical positive, why is this such a great idea? Listen, explain five potential logical, positive benefits of incentives, which would explain why they would be implemented in a ME Organization." And so what's seen is I have them put themselves in a ME Organization, put on the Yellow Hat and think about what would be so exciting about this. And so logical, positive number one. "Incentives can serve as a powerful motivator for individuals within the organization, driving them to achieve higher levels of performance and productivity. When employees are offered rewards for their efforts, they're more likely to be motivated to excel in their roles," Andrew. Logical positive number two, enhanced performance. Explanation, "by tying incentives to specific goals or targets, organizations can encourage employees to focus their efforts on key priorities and objectives. 0:16:46.9 BB: This can lead to improved performance across various aspects of the business, ultimately driving better results." Number three, attraction and retention of talent. Oh, yeah. Explanation, "offering attractive incentives can help organizations attract top talent and retain existing employees. Attractive incentives can serve as a key differentiator for organizations seeking to attract and retain skilled professionals." Now, let me also say, this is an undergraduate class. As I mentioned, this is the second of two that I offer. Many of these students are working full-time or part-time. So this is coming from someone who is working full-time, probably mid to late 20s. So these are not... They're undergraduates but lifewise, they've got a lot of real-world experience. 0:17:44.0 BB: All right. Logical positive four, promotion of innovation and creativity. Explanation, "incentives can encourage employees to think creatively and innovative in their roles. By rewarding innovative ideas and contributions, organizations can foster..." Ready, Andrew? "A culture of creativity and continuous improvement, driving long-term success and competitive advantage." And the last one, positive organizational culture. "Implementing incentives can contribute to a positive organizational culture characterized by recognition, reward and appreciation. When employees feel valued and rewarded for their contributions, they're more likely to feel engaged, satisfied, and committed to the organization." But here's what's really cool about this test for understanding, I get to position them in the framework of a ME Organization with the Yellow Hat. 0:18:40.9 BB: Now question three, in appreciation of Edward de Bono's, "Six Thinking Hats" and the Black Hat, what Edward calls a logical negative, list and explain five potential aspects of incentives, which would explain why they would not be implemented in a WE Organization. And this is coming from the same person. This is why I think it's so, so cool that I wanna share with our listeners. The same person's being forced to look at it both ways. Negative number one, potential for... Ready, Andrew? "Unintended consequences." Oh my God. "Incentives can sometime lead to unintended consequences such as employees focusing solely on tasks that are incentivized while neglecting other important aspects of their roles. This tunnel vision can result in suboptimal outcomes for the organization as a whole." 0:19:30.7 BB: "Number two, risk of eroding intrinsic motivation. Explanation, offering external rewards like incentives can undermine intrinsic motivation leading employees to become less interested in the work and more focused on earning rewards. Number three, creation of unhealthy competition. Explanation, incentives can foster a competitive culture within the organization where employees may prioritize individual success over collaboration and teamwork. This competitive atmosphere can breed..." Ready? "Resentment and distrust among employees." Can you imagine that, Andrew? Resentment and distrust? That seems like it would clash with my previous positive thought, but it really just points out how careful management needs to be. 0:20:19.0 AS: Yes. 0:20:19.2 BB: All right. Cost considerations. "Implementing incentive programs can be costly for organizations, particularly if the rewards offered are substantial or if the program is not carefully managed. Organizations may be hesitant to invest resources and incentives, especially if they're uncertain about the return on investment if budget is of concern." And then number five, "short-term focus over our long-term goals." Explanation, "incentives often improve short-term gains rather than long-term strategic objectives. Employees may prioritize activities that yield immediate results, even if they're not aligned with the organization's broader goals or values." 0:21:02.7 BB: And then question four, here's the kicker. "In appreciation of your evolving understanding of the use of...
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Transparency Among Friends: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 21)
05/07/2024
Transparency Among Friends: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 21)
How can you make lasting change at your organization? Recruit your friends! In this discussion, Bill Bellows lays out his experience recruiting and working with a small group to make big changes in a large company. 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunity. Today is episode 21, and the topic is Transparency. Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.1 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome to our audience. And I wanna thank a handful of people who have reached out to me on LinkedIn and elsewhere to talk about the podcast, what they're getting out of it, and which has been very interesting meeting people from around the world. And that's led me to a couple opening remarks for clarity on some of the things we've discussed in the past. And then we'll get into our feature topic. And so I say, [chuckle] is that in my early years at Rocketdyne, the Rocket Factory, a few of us started to see the synergy of what we were absorbing and integrating from, primarily from Dr. Deming and Taguchi, not just them, there were others. And we're 10 years away from really beginning to see what Russ Ackoff was able to offer us. At one point, there were eight of us. It started off with one, then another, then another. Next thing you know there's eight of us. We were what Barry Bebb and his cloud model would call advocates. Advocates of a change, of a transformation. We've been using that word. And I started to refer to us as the Gang of Eight 'cause this is the early '90's. And I think in China there was a group known as the Gang of Eight. Maybe that was the '80's. And I remember thinking, "Oh, we're like the Gang of Eight." 0:01:54.7 AS: I thought that was a Gang of Four in China, is that the Gang of Four. 0:01:58.9 BB: Well, there was a Gang of Four, then there was a Gang of Eight. There were both. 0:02:02.4 AS: Okay. 0:02:03.1 BB: But anyway, but I remember hearing that word, and then I thought, "Well, so okay, a gang of eight." We started to meet regularly, perhaps every other week, sharing ideas on how to initiate a transformation and how we operated, again, inspired by Deming. So at first we met quietly, we would meet in another building, not wanting to call attention to our efforts, not wanting to be visible for those who might have been adversaries again to borrow from Barry's model. 'Cause Barry's model was, there's, for every advocate there's a few more adversaries. So we were keeping our heads down. And this is before I knew anything about Barry, but I, we were just kind, a little bit paranoid that people would see what we're doing. And so who were the ones that were the adversary? Well, those were promoting rewards and recognition. Those were promoting individual cash incentives for suggestion programs including, as I mentioned a previous podcast, an individual could submit a suggestion award, get up to 10% of the annual savings in a onetime lump sum. They were giving out checks for $10,000, Andrew. And I would kid people, if the company's giving out checks for $10,000, do you think we've got photographs of me receiving a check for 10,000? You betcha. 0:02:03.5 BB: And there it is in the newspaper, me receiving a check, not that me, [chuckle] but somebody receiving a check for $10,000, a big smile with the President. And it's in the newspaper and did that cause issues? Yes. But anyway, it wasn't obvious for some of us that we might have been, sorry, it wasn't obvious for some time that those we might have considered the adversary to our efforts were very likely not meeting to plan how to stall our efforts. [chuckle] Right. And, but it took a while to realize this, so here we are trying to be very discreet, meeting discreetly. And then it, at some time it dawned on me and some of the others that, those of us that were inspired to learn, think, and work together on transformation efforts as we've been exploring these podcasts, we have the benefits of positive synergy. And the adversaries at best operate without synergy as they're not likely to be inclined to do much more than participate in what some at Rocketdyne called, you ready, "Bill Bellows’ Bitch Sessions." [laughter] And they come back from a class with me and they start bitching about me. And then the local people in that area would come by and tell me, and they said, "Anything we can do?" I said, "Yeah," I said, "Ask them what part of Rocketdyne moving in the direction of a Blue Pen Company do they not like." Right? It's just arrrgggggh. 0:02:04.2 BB: And I say, anyway. But once we had more and more results from our efforts, results from applying these ideas with very visible improvements in quality and costs leading to improved profits, it was all the harder for the adversaries to slow our efforts. Again, we were most fortunate to be working on challenges, we had challenges in fighting fires, but we also had challenges in designing hardware that achieved "Snap Fit" status, which translates to dramatically easier to integrate higher performing as well, as we shifted from parts to systems, challenges that required, guess what? A different lens inspired by Dr. Deming. That's, [chuckle] again, listening to the previous podcast, 'cause I thought, "Well, I wanna clarify a few things." Did we have ups and downs, Andrew? Yes, we did. We had days when we're excited, we had days when we were down. But what really worked out well, [chuckle] and the running joke was, there was variation in our excitement. 0:02:04.7 BB: So I may have been down, you'd be up, so you'd lift me up and then when you're down, I lift you up. And so the running joke we had amongst us was, thank God for variation in our moods. Because if we were all depressed at the same time, we'd go off the cliff. [chuckle] But we just took turns as to the ups and the downs. And we're very fortunate to have weekends 'cause that gave us time to not wanna choke some people. So, [chuckle] but come Monday we're relaxed. And then, but another thing that I wanted to point out from things we talked about previous podcasts, years ago, 30, nearly 30 years ago, I met a senior structural analyst from Boeing, Al Viswanathan, who was on the Boeing Commercial side. And he somehow got involved in the commercial side. 0:06:52.1 BB: Well, I don't know if it was the commercial side or military side. Anyway, Boeing had, there were both sides and one side was pro-Deming and the other side was anti-Deming. So he must have been on the defense side. And why would the defense side be pro-Deming? Because the Pentagon was pro-Deming. And so the defense side people would have been watching that. Anyway, Al somehow got involved in studying Deming's work and being a mentor within the organization. And I met him, I know when he worked there, when he retired. Anyway, Al, coming from Al, what I want to share is something he would say relative to Dr. Deming's funnel experiment. There's rule one of the funnel, rule two, rule three, and rule four. So rule one is you have a funnel and you drop marbles from the funnel onto the floor, and you get a pattern of where the marbles lay. 0:07:49.1 BB: And that's called variation. You're holding the funnel, you drop the marble, it lands in a different spot each time. And then rule two is you, if the marble is off a little bit to the right of the target that you're trying to hit, then you move the funnel the other direction. So two and three have to do with compensating. If it doesn't go where you want, then you shift it accordingly. Rule four, remember rule four of the funnel? 0:08:17.4 AS: I don't remember that. 0:08:18.9 BB: And this is... I think it's chapter eight. I know it's in The New Economics. Chapter 8, I'm sorry, rule four of the funnel is wherever the marble lands, position the funnel for the next drop. So in rule one, you keep it where it is and you get a pattern. Rules two and three, you compensate for where it lands. You either go left if it goes right and you compensate. And in compensating, it becomes worse. But what becomes really bad is when you put the funnel in rule four over where the last marble landed, and you end up getting farther and farther from the target leading to, remember the expression Dr. Deming used for that? 0:09:00.9 AS: Well, I remember the word tampering. But it meant when you get way off the target. What was that? 0:09:06.6 BB: He called it going off to the Milky Way. [laughter] And there are computer simulations where if, some people have done, you know, created. 0:09:16.0 AS: You do it in California and you end up in New York. 0:09:17.8 BB: Yep. And you, and you, and you keep getting further and further. Well, so in conversations with Al, and it could have been me and him and Dave Nave, Dick Steele and others, and at some point, Al would say, "How do we know we're not going off to the Milky Way?" Which translates to, how do we know that what we're interpreting from Deming is not getting further and further and further and further away from what he was trying to say? How do we know that we aren't wacky? How do we know? Because we think, "Oh, we're getting, we're understanding this better and better." And what I would say is, how do we know we're not going off to the Milky Way? “Actually,” I say, "We don't know." But part of having a community of people that work closely with Deming, people that know more than me about Dr. Deming's work is you can tap into that community and maybe lessen the chance that we go off to the Milky Way. Now, again, is that a guarantee? No, it's not a guarantee. 0:10:25.9 BB: But I would say, what I appreciate about Al saying that is, it's just a reminder that how do we know that what we're interpreting is true? So we're here, you and I are having these conversations, we're sharing interpretations, lessons learned, are we, is what Dr. Deming would say, "Is this worker training worker?" So, each of us are ignorant, and we think we understand Deming, and we're sharing it with others "well, I know, I know." Now, we can all be right, we can all be going off to the Milky Way. So I just wanted to say that, when I'm talking about diffusion from a point source and getting smarter and smarter and having these conversations within our organization. How do we know we aren't fooling each other? We don't know. 0:11:18.7 AS: I have a couple follow ups here. First of all, the 1991 Washington Post called it the Gang of Eight, as opposed to the Gang of Four, which was before that time, during the Cultural Revolution. And the Gang of Eight included seven men and one woman. And the Gang of Four, of course, included Mao's wife. So there's a little clarification. 0:11:44.6 BB: I wasn't sure if she was part of the four or part of the eight. I knew her name was in there somewhere. 0:11:49.0 AS: And the second thing you talked about the volatility of your feelings, your moods, right. And I just wanted to introduce the concept of volatility in finance, which is that volatility in itself is not bad. What's bad is correlation of volatility. So if all of you are upset on the same day, then it's just an absolute crash. But if one's upset on Monday and another one's happy and productive on Monday, then it starts to balance. And that's what we do in the world of finance is we combine correlation with volatility. And Harry Markowitz got a Nobel Prize in economics for coming up with the concept that risk can be reduced by understanding the correlation between assets and adding a highly risky asset to a Portfolio could, in fact, reduce the risk of the Portfolio overall, if the correlation between that asset and the Portfolio was, let's say negative or very low. 0:12:55.5 BB: Wow what you're talking about is the benefit of not being synchronous, being asynchronous. 0:13:04.2 AS: Correct. 0:13:05.1 BB: So you're up, I'm down, and I'm up, you're down, and then we can get through these periods. And yeah, and that's exactly what we're talking about. But you're right, I'm glad you brought that up because I've heard people talk about that as well. But that's exactly the point we're trying to make is, so for all those who think we ought to shrink variation to zero, I'd say, well, maybe there's value in variation, value in diversity of opinions. And also I have had people in the past say, "Well, so a Blue Pen Company is a bunch of people that go along to go along." I said, "No, it's a bunch of people that have strong disagreements on things and they share those disagreements." 0:13:49.5 BB: Now, at the end of the day by Friday, we've got to make a decision as to releasing this album whatever it is, because we've gotta ship. And we may arm wrestle, we may vote however we're gonna do it. So there can be disagreement. We have the ability to articulate where we're coming from. Borrowed from Edward de Bono, we can use a black hat and I can give you reasons why you don't think it'll work. You can call me on it and say, "Bill, how do I know it's your black hat and not what de Bono would call your red hat, which is my intuition." 0:14:26.4 AS: So if I say it doesn't work, you could say, "Bill, is that you don't feel it'll work or you know it won't work?" And I say, "Andrew, you're right. I have a bad feeling about it." I say, "Well, let's just be honest about it." But again, at the end of the day, we may vote. But we're gonna move forward. And what's not gonna happen is if you decide to take however we decide to make that decision, what there won't be a lot of room for is a bunch of "I told you so." 0:14:58.8 AS: Right. 0:15:00.4 BB: And we just we just dispense with that and just say this time, maybe the idea I had, we'll just have to wait till later and we're just gonna move on. So it's not to say it's a bunch of happiness and we're always in agreement. No, very strong relationships can have very strong disagreements. They just don't result in a civil war. Years ago, when my wife and I got married, she said I was just, it was lucky for me that she liked cats. I said that was non-starters. I said liking cats was a requirement. [laughter] 0:15:44.3 BB: So there's a few things that were non-starters. And if she didn't like cats, I'd have had a hard time with that. But on everything else, there's things we can disagree with. That's okay. All right. So given that I wanna talk about tonight is something that's come up in some other conversations recently. And it's about transparency. And then I have a quote that I've used in the past. I've once in a while attributed to Peter Senge, because I can't remember is actually Robert Fritz, a close associate of Peter Senge. And Fritz's comment is, “It's not what the vision is that is important. It's what the vision does.” And what I like about that is if you have a shared mental model of a Blue Pen Company. And I just began to appreciate how powerful it is that we have a shared vision. And relative to transparency, what I was sharing with some people is the transparency that exists in a Blue Pen Company, a Deming organization, a WE organization, an All-Straw organization and the transparency that which is as simple as me saying to you. 0:17:05.5 BB: Well, I say let's talk about the lack of transparency. I can meet a requirement, as we've talked about, an infinite number of ways to meet any set of requirements. And the letter grade is not A plus. It is not 100. It could be a D minus. I could leave for you the bowling ball on the doorway. And in a non-Deming Organization. I could meet any requirement you give me, Andrew, with the minimal amount of effort. Because all that we're measuring is that it met requirements. And so I give it to you and, and all you do is you look at the measurement and it says, "Yep, the car has gas." You're like, "Hey, I'm excited." 0:17:45.2 BB: Well, the black and white thinking allows me to hide a whole bunch of things. So if I said the car has gas. And you complain because it only has a quarter of a tank, I said, "Andrew. It has gas." But I thought in a Deming organization, I don't think we're gonna play those games. I think we're gonna have a lot more transparency relative to when I meet a set of requirements. Am I gonna leave the bowling ball on the doorway for you unilaterally? I don't think so. Maybe once I learn my lesson because I'm a new hire. I'm bringing something from where I used to work. But I think in a Deming environment, I think the transparency is gonna bring out the best in us. 0:18:33.8 BB: So I just want to throw that, that's part of where I'm coming from with transparency. You know, we don't have this murkiness as to, you know, where are they coming from? And. also we're going to be, you know, as Ackoff was, we're going to go to great lengths to be precise with language, and understand that efficiency is not effectiveness, that management is not leadership. And I think the better we have that clarity, I think that's a trademark of what that environment is about. 0:19:02.2 AS: It's interesting because, you know, the ultimate clarity is doing a run chart or a control chart on a process and seeing the outcome. And that's transparent and clear. And I've done a lot in my own management career by just getting data into a format that people can, you know, go back to and look at and think about. And just the transparency of that data can make a huge difference to the way people interpret what's going on in that unit. 0:19:38.9 BB: You're right. As opposed to the transparency of two data points, quality, I'm sorry, I think I've used this example. You can remind me of, you know, when I was at Rocketdyne once upon a time, and there was a meeting where the safety metrics, number of accidents, per employee in the first quarter was a certain level. Then in the second quarter, it went down. And I mean, the number of accidents per employee went down. Safety got better. And as you know, in this meeting with a bunch of directors and the VP and somebody says to the VP, why is safety improved? And their response was, because “We've let them know safety is important.” Well, who's the we? Who's the they? So, and, but imagine the transparency for somebody hearing that we've let them know. That's a way of saying, so you're, you're believing that because it went down, it's because of things we said, and they're not interested in safety. 0:20:45.3 BB: And then if it goes the other way, we're going to claim what? That they're not listening? So you're right. I mean, the ability, the transparency of looking at a set of data on a control chart and the realization that the process is in control. Then we look at the ups and downs and say, no reason for alarm here. 0:21:12.2 AS: The other thing that I thought relates to transparency is fear. In the sense that what is fear? Fear is, you know, a concern that something is going to happen is about to happen is in the process of happening, or, you know, something's happening to you and you're not being able to see, you know, what's going on. So I was just thinking, you know, another angle on transparency is, you know, reducing fear in an organization by being, you know, let more transparent. 0:21:41.5 BB: Yes. And, and I can even imagine, what's funny is that, a co-worker in my office, once upon a time. And. And she was upset with a decision made by the president at that time was my boss. And so she, so for about two years or so, she reported to me, lovely lady, lovely friend, great friend. So anyway, she was upset. She comes in. Did you...
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Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 4
04/30/2024
Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 4
Can a 4th grade class decide on an operational definition of "joy in learning"? In part 4 of this series, educator John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss a real-world example of applying Deming in a classroom. This episode covers the first part of the story, with more to come in future episodes! 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode four about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:22.6 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, we've been talking about organizational goal setting last few episodes. A couple episodes ago, we talked about those four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. Then we sort of introduced this idea of trying to stay away from arbitrary and capricious education goals. And then we got into these 10 lessons for data analysis. And so what I thought we could do now is we've got that foundation in place is that we could take a look at an applied example in real classrooms of those 10 key lessons in action to kind of bring those alive. And I ran this project a few years ago with a teacher named Jessica Cutler. She's a fourth grade science teacher in our network. And she was going through something we call a Continual Improvement Fellowship. So we do this sort of internal fellowship where people can learn that sort of way of thinking, the tools, techniques, the theories related to the science of improvement. And then they actually take that right away and apply it to a problem in their classroom or their department or their school, depending on who it is. 0:01:55.0 JD: And so what Jessica was doing, what her project ended up being was she was trying to improve the joy in learning in her fourth grade science class. So it's interesting to see how that sort of project evolved. So I thought we could revisit each of the 10 lessons and how that lesson was applied in Jessica's improvement project. And we'll maybe get through three or four of the lessons today. And then over the course of the next few episodes, kind of get to all 10 lessons and think through how they were... How that went in her improvement project. 0:02:08.1 AS: Sounds like a good plan, practical application. 0:02:12.0 JD: Yeah. I mean, it was interesting too, because she didn't initially sort of consider joy as a possibility. She was thinking like, I'm gonna work on improving test scores or something like that was sort of her initial brainstorm. And then sort of pivoted to this when we kind of talked through what was possible from the Deming philosophy type of standpoint. So it's interesting to see how things evolve. But just to kind of revisit, so we talked through these 10 lessons. Lesson one was "data has no meaning apart from their context." So we talked about these questions that are important, like who collected the data? How was it collected? When was it collected? Where was the data collected? What are the values themselves represent? What's that operational definition for the concept under measurement? Have there been any changes to that operational definition as the project unfolds? And so even with a project with a teacher and her students, all of those questions are relevant. They're still important just because you're dealing with students that doesn't mean anything changes on that front. So it was important for her to sort of think through all of those things as she thought through the start of her project. 0:03:28.9 JD: And what her and her students came up with after they sort of decided that they were gonna focus on joy, they focused on this problem statement. And they were like, well, what do we want science class to look like? 'Cause that was sort of their starting point. And what her and her students...Oh sorry go ahead. 0:03:45.9 AS: One thing you started off talking about her, now you're talking about her students. So she got her students involved in this process. Is that what you're saying? 0:03:56.2 JD: Yeah. So they were working together from the very outset even... 0:04:02.0 AS: As opposed to a teacher talking through this with a principal or something in a faculty room and then thinking of how do I... Okay. 0:04:09.2 JD: Yep. That's right. Yeah. And so what they came up with is the sort of desired future state of science classes. "We are able to stay focused through science, enjoy science class and remain engaged." And so to give some context, what was happening is that she taught science and social studies and it was sort of like a back-to-back class period. And they would do science second. And so by the time they were doing science, sometimes the students were getting off task, disengaged. They weren't as engaged as either the students wanted to be or the teacher wanted them to be in that second lesson. So they, they came up with that as the thing they were gonna focus on. And then because they were gonna focus on joy in learning, they had to define what that meant. So what did joy in learning mean to that fourth grade science class? And what they came up with as a definition, which I really like, is "we wanna have fun learning, finding things we like to learn and have fun completing classwork and activities." So they came up with this operational definition. And keep in mind, these are fourth graders and Jessica's having these conversations like, what's the operational definition? That's not probably typical language you're gonna use with fourth graders. But if you walk them through these things, they actually pick up on it pretty quickly. 0:05:26.1 JD: It's actually pretty cool to see. 0:05:28.1 AS: And to them, a more simpler word sounds like was fun. 0:05:35.0 JD: Yeah, right. They wanted that to be a part of the science learning process. So basically, once they had the operational definition, they had to think through, well, how are we going to measure that concept that we've defined? And what they did was they just developed a simple survey. Jessica did it in Google Forms. just had, really just had two questions. The first question was, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you enjoy science class today? And then there was a second open-ended question that said, what made you enjoy or not enjoy class today? So it was fresh in the kids' minds. So basically, at the end, each kid has a Chromebook in Jessica's science class. She would just sort of share the link to the survey, and the kids would complete that as the closing activity for the lesson. So she would get two things out of it. So 1 to 10, just a real quick sort of numerical quantified value, how much the kids enjoyed science class that day. And then, because it had just happened, the students could say what they did and didn't like about the lesson. Oh, we haven't used computers in a few days. Or it'd be nice if I had a video to help bring this concept alive. Or there's a few words that you use that I don't know the definitions to. Could you add those definitions to the glossary? So just things like that, simple things like that. 0:06:55.9 JD: Right away. And then what Jessica could then do is take that information and actually adjust her lessons as she planned maybe for the next week, she could make those adjustments based on this feedback she was getting from the students. So that's sort of the application of lesson number one. So what are we measuring? How are we gonna measure it? When are we collecting this data? That type of thing. Lesson two, if you remember back from when we covered the lessons was "we don't manage or control the data. The data is the voice of the process," right? 0:07:28.9 JD: So we talked about this ideas that while we don't control the data, we do manage the system and the processes from which the data come, right? So, and this is really key conception of the system's view. You, you say you're going to improve this particular classroom. So that's the system. So you're not necessarily controlling the data. You're not controlling how the kids are evaluating, the numbers that they're putting one through 10 to assess joy in learning, but what the teacher and then the students, because of this project do have control over are the learning processes that are happening throughout science class, right? And so back to your point about you switch from talking about Jessica, the teacher to the students. And then you said "we" that's also a key conception of taking this approach, right? 0:08:24.4 JD: So what I think Deming would say is that when you're going to improve an organization, you have to sort of combine sort of three critical pieces. One thing is you need someone from the outside, from outside the system that has Profound Knowledge. And then that person or persons has to be collaborating with the people working in the system. So those are the students, they're working in the science class system. And, then you that third group or that third person is the manager or managers have that have the authority to work on the system. So in this case, Jessica has the authority to change what's happening in her science class. 0:09:10.2 JD: The students are the workers working in that science system. And then that third part is that person that has the sort of understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge and it's sort of bringing all of these parts together that really is how you begin to transition sort of conventional classrooms to those guided by the Deming quality learning principles, right? 0:09:33.1 JD: So in in the case of Jessica's project, that person that was, that had a System of Profound Knowledge lens was me. So I was sort of acting as an, the outsider, 'cause I'm outside of the science system. But I have this understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge. And I'm working with Jessica as she's working with her students, to sort of bring that lens to the projects. 0:10:00.4 AS: And what's the point of doing all that if she doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to test, if you're gonna if we change this, it's gonna result in something why go and do all this if you're just stuck in a system that you simply cannot change because of government regulation or whatever, maybe. 0:10:17.5 JD: Right. Yeah. So it's bringing all those pieces together. But what I found thinking about the three parts of a team that's working toward organizational improvement, what I've found in the past is, in my experience, whether it's a school improvement team or a district based improvement team, most of them are devoid of at least one parts of one of those components, usually two of those components, 'cause usually students aren't involved. 0:10:45.9 JD: And then in most school systems, there's no one with this outside knowledge, the System of Profound Knowledge lens, right. And I think it's what we're really doing is the students can identify the waste, the inefficiency, the things that aren't going well from their perspective, but we don't often ask them. Or if we do, we do it in a way where it's an end of year survey or an end of semester survey, but this is collecting that feedback in real time and then acting on it. We're not planning to do something next year with this feedback, we're actually planning to do something the next day, or maybe the next week, to adjust the science lessons. 0:11:24.8 AS: And it's one of those two things that come into my mind, what, how do you handle the idea that what's causing the impact on joy in learning could be that the student had a bad night, the night before. And I guess by doing many samples that starts to kind of wash out. And then the other question is since the students know that the teacher could likely make an adjustment, is there any possibility that they could be gaming or playing the system. 0:11:57.1 JD: Well, that's interesting, because I think, well on the first point. I think pretty quickly, my experience with this and David Langford I know you've talked to has echoed this sentiment is you know, he was working with high school students, this is an elementary project but either way. You may get some students that don't take this seriously. At first. And you may get some kind of crazy answers crazy brainstorms or crazy survey submissions, although I don't think Jessica got much of that. 0:12:30.2 JD: But in other projects I've gotten some stuff at the outset that was a little bit off the wall. But like David said to me when I first started this and then it's been my experience since is that kids, once they realize that you're actually gonna act on the feedback, as long as the feedback is in good faith. They actually start to take it seriously, pretty, pretty quickly. And so I think pretty quickly, those sort of types of worries go by the wayside. Now, I will say I did say that the... 0:13:01.1 JD: One of the components that has to be on this improvement team is the person that has the authority to change the system. So at the end of the day, even though we're gathering this input, Jessica's really the person as the teacher of that classroom that has the authority to make the changes to the system based on her judgment or, her professional judgment as a science teacher of what should happen. And so the students certainly offer feedback and inform that process, but ultimately it's Jessica that's gonna determine the changes to the system. 0:13:34.0 AS: I hear David in my ears saying, you know what, Andrew? You don't trust the students? They probably have a more honest, view of what's going on than most adults do. So yes, I hear the voice of David Langford. 0:13:49.2 JD: Yeah. Well, and interestingly, and we'll get into this towards the end, not today, but when we get to some of the other lessons, interestingly, not to give away the story, but, one of the things that was getting kids off track was a lot of noise during class, kids making noises. And they actually came up with this system where they were kind of penalizing each other. This was their own idea. And so, kids know exactly what's going on in class. And so it was interesting to see how they came up with some ideas to rectify that. But yeah, so it was really just bringing together, these three groups or, the group of students and then Jessica and then myself. It's that combination that's really where the power for improvement lies. And again, I, that type of partnership is just not typical in school improvement situations. 0:14:45.7 JD: So that's lesson two, applied. Lesson number three is "plot the dots for any data that incurs in time order." Right? So we've talked about this a lot. The idea behind the primary point of "plot the dots" is that plotting data over time helps us understand variation, and that in turn leads us to take more appropriate action. I think that what we decided to do with Jessica's project is, start plotting the points on a run chart and connect those points with a line, and then it becomes pretty intuitive as we're looking at that data, what joy in learning looks like in this science class. And then once we have enough data, we can turn that run part chart into a process behavior chart and actually add the limits. 0:15:40.2 JD: So, like I said, Jessica, once her and the class determined that what they were going to improve was join in learning, and they defined that concept operationally and created the survey, right away they started gathering this survey data as a part of the project, and usually they would gather the data maybe, two or three times a week across the course of this particular improvement project. So maybe I'll share my screen just so you can see what that initial run chart looked like. So, you have this run chart, and I left this in the spreadsheet so you could see the actual data. So as she began administering these surveys, she would send me the data and then I would create it the run chart for her, start plotting that data so that both of us could sort of see the variation in that survey data over time. And then she could actually take this, she would put this run chart on a slide, and every week or so she would actually show the students what the data looked like. 0:16:49.7 AS: And just to be clear, we've got a chart for those that are listening, we've got a chart that has a blue line and it's going up and down kind of around the level of about 79. So they've got points that are based, that are days. Some days are below that 79 some days are above. But also I'm assuming that those points are the output of all the surveys. So the average answer on that day from the survey as different from the average or median of all the day's output, correct? 0:17:31.1 JD: Yeah, that's right. So this is, the run chart from Jessica's class that's displaying the survey results. And what they're measuring is joy in science class as assessed by the students. 0:17:44.3 AS: On the first day, the students basically said, 75% of the respondents said that they had joy in science. 0:17:51.9 JD: That's right. So in this particular school year, which was two years ago, so we had done some of the project planning before kids went on winter break, and then when they came back from winter break, they were ready to start administering the survey. And we started plotting the dots, charting the data over time. So the X axis for those who are listening are the dates. 0:18:16.2 JD: The, Y axis is the joy in learning, percent of kids that the rating of the kids from one to 10. And then I just turn it into a percent. And so you have the green line, the central line running through is the median. We're using the median 'cause that's fairly typical for a run chart because typically run charts don't have as much data as a process behavior chart. And so, outliers can have a greater impact. So we're using the median to sort of control for that. Although this data's fairly tight. So on day one, like you said on January 4th of this school year 75, the kids sort of rated the joy in learning of that particular lesson as a 75% of 100. And then you sort of see it bounce around. 0:19:04.7 JD: That median of 79. And so what I'm showing is the data from the first 10 surveys that Jessica administered at the end of class. So over the course of 20 days from January 4th through January 24th, she administered that this survey 10 different times. So about two to three times a week. And so we see a high of about 83% joy in learning and a low of 67% joy in learning. And you have about half the points above the median, about half the points below the median. So even though it's only 10 data points, Jessica and her class, and then myself, we were starting to learn about what did joy in learning, joy in science class actually look like? Now that we have this definition and we're measuring it with these surveys and then plotting these data points. So again, she's actually putting this up on, on the, up on the screen so kids can actually see this. And what she said was after the 5th or 6th survey, and she's plotted this and put this up on a screen a few times, the kids are actually getting excited. And they're wanting to see their data. They're wanting to see what the results look like for each survey as she started plotting this. 0:20:30.6 AS: It's funny because I, when I was a loading supervisor at Pepsi, I started putting up the percent correct for each of the loaders in the warehouse. And I didn't make any comment or anything, I just put it up there. And yeah, people are interested when they start seeing numbers, they start thinking, they...
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System of Profound Wisdom: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 20)
04/16/2024
System of Profound Wisdom: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 20)
Dr. Deming developed his philosophy over time and in conversations with others, not in isolation. As learners, we tend to forget that context, but it's important to remember because no one implements Deming in isolation, either. In this conversation, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss how there's no such thing as a purely Deming organization and why that's good. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 20, entitled, System of Profound Wisdom. Bill, take it Away. 0:00:31.6 Bill Bellows: But not just for 30 years. I forgot to say I started when I was 12. 0:00:36.6 AS: Yes. [laughter] Yes. And you've got the hair to prove it. [laughter] 0:00:43.7 BB: All right. Now, actually, I was thinking the proposal and the title, I thought... I mean, System of Profound Wisdom is cool, System of Profound Questions. Either one of those is good. Let's see which title comes out. 0:00:57.6 AS: Yeah. And I think we'll have to also understand that may some listeners that may not even know what System of Profound Knowledge means, they've been listening. They do. But if today's their first episode, we also gotta break that down, just briefly. 0:01:10.9 BB: Yeah. Okay, let's do that. All right. Well, let me give an opening a quote from Dr. Deming from chapter three, and then we can explain this SoPK, System of Profound Knowledge, thing. But in chapter three of Dr. Deming's last book, The New Economics, the last edition, edition three, came out in 2018. And chapter three, Dr. Deming says, "We saw in the last chapter, we are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. Most people imagine that this style has always existed. It is a fixture. Actually, it is a modern invention a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry, are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge to be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." So you wanna... 0:02:15.4 AS: That's good. 0:02:16.7 BB: So let's say something. Let's just say something about SoPK. How would you explain that? 0:02:23.1 AS: Yeah. Well, actually, I wanna talk very briefly about what you just said, because it's just... 0:02:27.1 BB: Oh, sure. 0:02:29.6 AS: At one point, I thought, "It's a system of knowledge." But he just said it was a system of transformation. 0:02:38.7 BB: It's a theory for transformation. 0:02:40.1 AS: A theory for transformation. Okay, got it. I see. And one of the things that I... I look at Toyota so much just 'cause it's so fascinating and how they've survived all these years, the continuity in the business, the continuity and the profitability of the business, the continued march to become the number one auto producer in the world, and having faced all the ups and downs and survived. And I just think that what they have is a learning organization. No matter what the challenge is, they're trying to apply learning tools, like System of Profound Knowledge, like PDSA, to try to figure out how to solve this problem. And I think that many companies, including at times my companies, [chuckle] we sometimes will scramble and we'll lose knowledge and we won't gain knowledge. And so the System of Profound Knowledge, to me, is all about the idea of how do we build a base of knowledge in our business and then build upon that base of knowledge rather than destroy it when the new management comes in or when a new management idea comes in. 0:04:00.7 AS: And that's something I've just been thinking about a lot. Because I do know a company that I've been doing some work with, and they basically threw away a huge amount of work that they did on System of Profound Knowledge and stuff to go with the prevailing system of management, is like going back. And now, they just produced a loss in the first quarter, and I just think, "Interesting. Interesting." 0:04:27.6 BB: Well, a couple things come to mind based on what you said. One is I would propose that Toyota, I'm in agreement of "Toyota's a learning organization." And that'll come up later. I've got some other thoughts on learning organizations. And we know that they were influenced by Dr. Deming. To what degree, I'm not sure of. Shoichiro Toyoda, who is one of the sons of the founder of the Toyota Motor Car Company, was honored with a Deming prize in 1990. And I believe it came from JUSE, as opposed to the American Society for Quality. One or the other. He was honored with a Deming Prize. 0:05:32.0 AS: Yep. 0:05:33.5 BB: Again, I don't know if it's Deming Prize or Deming Medal. But I know he was honored. What's most important, the point I wanna make is, upon receiving it he said, "There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the impact of Dr. Deming on Toyota." But, if I was to look at the Toyota Production System website, Toyota's Toyota Production System website, which I've done numerous times, I'd be hard-pressed to find anything on that page that I could say, "You see this word, Andrew? You see this sentence, Andrew? You see this sentiment? That's Deming." Not at all. Not at all. It's Taiichi Ohno. It's Shigeo Shingo. I'm not saying it's not good, but all those ideas predate Deming going to Japan in 1950. Taiichi Ohno joined Toyota right out of college as an industrial engineer in 1933, I believe. The Japanese Army, I mentioned in a previous episode, in 1942, wanted him to move from Toyota's loom works for making cloth to their automobile works for making Jeeps. This comes from a book that I would highly recommend. Last time we were talking about books. I wanted to read a book, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago. I wanted to read a book about Toyota, but not one written by someone at MIT or university. I didn't wanna read a book written by an academic. I've done that. 0:07:15.1 BB: I wanted to read a book by somebody inside Toyota, get that perspective, that viewpoint. And the book, Against All Odds, the... Wait I'll get the complete title. Against All Odds: The Story of the Toyota Motor Corporation and the Family That Changed it. The first author, Yukiyasu Togo, T-O-G-O, and William Wartman. I have a friend who worked there. Worked... Let me back up. [chuckle] Togo, Mr. Togo, born and raised in Japan, worked for Toyota in Japan, came to the States in the '60s and opened the doors to Toyota Motors, USA. So, he was the first person running that operation in Los Angeles. And it was here for years. I think it's now in Texas. My late friend, Bill Cummings, worked there in marketing. And my friend, Bill, was part of the team that was working on a proposal for a Lexus. And he has amazing stories of Togo. He said, "Any executive... " And I don't know how high that... What range, from factory manager, VPs. But he said the executives there had their use, free use, they had a company car. And he said Togo drove a Celica. Not a Celica. He drove a... What's their base model? Not a... 0:08:56.2 AS: A Corolla? 0:08:57.7 BB: Corolla. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. He drove a Corolla. He didn't drive... And I said, "Why did he drive a Corolla?" Because it was their biggest selling car, and he wanted to know what most people were experiencing. He could have been driving the highest level cars they had at the time. Again, this is before a Lexus. And so in this book, it talks about the history of Toyota, Taiichi Ohno coming in, Shigeo Shingo's contributions, and the influence of Dr. Deming. And there's a really fascinating account how in 1950, a young manager, Shoichiro Toyoda, was confronted with a challenge that they couldn't repair the cars as fast as they could sell them. This is post-war Japan. They found a car with phenomenal market success. Prior to that, they were trying to sell taxicabs, 'cause people could not... I mean, buying a car as a family was not an option. But by 1950, it was beginning to be the case. And the challenge that Shoichiro Toyoda faced was improving the quality, 'cause they couldn't fix them as fast as they could sell them. And yet, so I have no doubt that that young manager, who would go on to become the chairman, whatever the titles are, no doubt he was influenced by Dr. Deming. But I don't know what that means. 0:10:23.4 BB: That does not... The Toyota Production System is not Deming. And that's as evidenced by this talk about eliminating waste. And those are not Deming concepts. But I believe, back to your point, that his work helped create a foundation for learning. But I would also propose, Andrew, that everything I've read and studied quite a bit about the Toyota Production System, Lean, The Machine That Changed The World, nothing in there explains reliability. To me, reliability is how parts come together, work together. 'Cause as we've talked, a bunch of parts that meet print and meet print all over the place could have different levels of reliability, because meeting requirements, as we've talked in earlier episodes, ain't all it's cracked up to be. So I firmly believe... And I also mentioned to you, I sat for 14 hours flying home from Japan with a young engineer who worked for Toyota, and they do manage variation as Dr. Taguchi proposed. That is not revealed. But there's definitely something going on. But I would also say that I think the trouble they ran into was trying to be the number one car maker, and now they're back to the model of, "If we are good at what we do, then that will follow." 0:11:56.8 BB: And I'm gonna talk later about Tom Johnson's book, just to reinforce that, 'cause Tom, a former professor of management at Portland State University, has visited Toyota plants numerous times back before people found out how popular it was. But what I want to get into is... What we've been talking about the last couple episodes is Dr. Deming uses this term, transformation. And as I shared an article last time by John Kotter, the classic leadership professor, former, he's retired, at the University... Oh, sorry, Harvard Business School. And what he's talking about for transformation is, I don't think, [chuckle] maybe a little bit of crossover with what Dr. Deming is talking about. What we talked about last time is, Deming's transformation is a personal thing that we hear the world differently, see the world differently. We ask different questions. And that's not what Kotter is talking about. And it's not to dismiss all that what Kotter is talking about, but just because we're talking about transformation doesn't mean we mean the same thing. 0:13:10.6 BB: And likewise, we can talk about a Deming organization and a non-Deming organization. What teamwork means in both is different. In a Deming organization, we understand performance is caused by the system, not the workers taken individually. And as a result of that, we're not going to see performance appraisals, which are measures of individuals. Whereas in a non-Deming organization, we're going to see performance appraisals, KPIs flow down to individuals. [chuckle] The other thing I had in my notes is, are there really two types of organizations? No, that's just a model. [chuckle] So, really, it's a continuum of organizations. And going back to George Box, all models are wrong, some are useful. But we talked earlier, you mentioned the learning organization. Well, I'm sure, Andrew, that we have both worked in non-Deming organizations, and we have seen, and we have seen people as learners in a non-Deming organization, but what are they learning? [chuckle] It could be learning to tell the boss what they want to hear. They could be learning to hide information that could cause pain. [chuckle] Those organizations are filled with learners, but it's about learning that makes things worse. It's like digging the pit deeper. What Deming is talking about is learning that improves how the organization operates, and as a result, improves profit. In a non-Deming organization, that learning is actually destroying profit. 0:14:51.8 BB: All right. And early, spoke... Russ, Russ and Dr. Deming spoke for about three hours in 1992. It got condensed down to a volume 21 of The Deming Library, for which our viewers, if you're a subscriber to DemingNEXT, you can watch it in its entirety. All the Deming videos produced by Clare Crawford-Mason are in that. You can see excerpts of volume 21, which is... Believe is theory of a system of education, and it's Russ Ackoff and Dr. Deming for a half hour. So you can find excerpts of that on The Deming Institute's YouTube channel. 0:15:37.0 BB: And what I wanted to bring up is in there, Russ explains to Dr. Deming the DIKUW model that we've spoken about in previous episodes, where D is data. That's raw numbers, Russ would say. I is information. When we turn those raw numbers into distances and times and weights, Russ would say that information is what the newspaper writer writes, who did what to whom. Knowledge, the K, could be someone's explanation as to how these things happened. U, understanding. Understanding is when you step back and look at the container. Russ would say that knowledge, knowledge is what you're using in developing to take apart a car or to take apart a washing machine and see how all these things work together. But understanding is needed to explain why the driver sits on the left versus the right, why the car is designed for a family of four, why the washing machine is designed for a factor of four. That's not inside it. That's the understanding looking outward piece that Russ would also refer to as synthesis. And then the W, that's the wisdom piece. What do I do with all this stuff? And what Russ is talking about is part of wisdom is doing the right things right. So, I wanted to touch upon in this episode is why did Dr. Deming refer to his system as the System of Profound Knowledge? Why not the System of Profound Understanding? Why not the System of Profound Wisdom? And I think, had he lived longer, maybe he would have expanded. Maybe he would have had... 0:17:28.4 BB: And I think that's the case. I think it's... 'Cause I just think... And this is what's so interesting, is, if you look at Dr. Deming's work in isolation and not go off and look at other's work, such as Tom Johnson or Russ, you can start asking questions like this. 0:17:45.7 AS: One thing I was going to interject is that I took my first Deming seminar in 1989, I believe, or 1990. And then I took my second one with Dr. Deming in 1992. And then soon after that, I moved to Thailand and kind of went into a different life, teaching finance and then working in the stock market. And then we set up our factory here for coffee business. But it wasn't until another 10 years, maybe 15 years, that I reignited my flame for what Dr. Deming was doing. And that's when I wrote my book about Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. And what I, so, I was revisiting the material that had impacted me so much. And I found this new topic called System of Profound Knowledge. I never heard of that. And I realized that, it really fully fledged came out in 1993, The New Economics, which I didn't get. I only had Out of the Crisis. 0:18:49.9 BB: '93. 0:18:49.9 AS: Yeah. And so that just was fascinating to go back to what was already, the oldest teacher I ever had in my life at '92, leave it, come back 10, 15 years later and find out, wait a minute, he added on even more in his final book. 0:19:10.4 BB: Well, Joyce Orsini, who was recruited by Fordham University at the encouragement of Dr. Deming, or the suggestion of Dr. Deming to lead their Deming Scholars MBA program in 1990. Professor Marta Mooney, professor of accounting, who I had the great fortune of meeting several times, was very inspired by Dr. Deming's work. And was able to get his permission to have an MBA program in his name called the Deming Scholars MBA program. And when she asked him for a recommendation, "Who should lead this program?" It was Joyce Orsini, who at the time I think was a vice president at a bank in New York. I'm not sure, possibly in human resources, but I know she was in New York as a vice president. 0:20:10.0 BB: And I believe she had finished her PhD under Dr. Deming at NYU by that time. And the reason I bring up Joyce's name, I met her after Dr. Deming had died. Nancy Mann, who is running a company called Quality Enhancement Seminars with, a, at the beginning one product, Dr. Deming's 4-Day seminar, when Dr. Deming died, and I had mentioned, I was at his last seminar in December '93, she continued offering 4-day seminars. And I met her later that year when she was paired with Ron Moen and they were together presenting it, and others were paired presenting it. And at one point, as I got to know Joyce, she said, "His last five years were borrowed time." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "He started working on the book in 19'" evidently the '87, '88 timeframe, he started to articulate these words, Profound Knowledge. 0:21:11.0 BB: And I know he had, on a regular basis, he had dinner engagements with friends including Claire Crawford-Mason and her husband. And Claire has some amazing stories of Deming coming by with these ideas. And she said, once she said, "What is this?" And he is, she took out a napkin, a discretely, wrote down the, "an understanding of the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Difference between understanding special causes versus common causes." And she just wrote all this stuff down, typed it up. When he showed up the next week, she greeted him at the door and said, and she said, he said, This is Claire. And Claire said, he said, "What's that?" He says, "Well, I took notes last week." 0:21:54.2 BB: And he says, "I can do better." [chuckle] And so week by week by week. And as he interacted with the people around him, he whittled it down. And I'm guessing it put it into some, there's a technique for grouping things, you, where on post-it notes and you come up with four categories and these things all go over here. There's one of the elements of that, one of the 16 had to, or 18 or so, had to do with Dr. Taguchi's loss function. So that could have gone into the, maybe the variation piece, maybe the systems piece. But Joyce said, basically he was frustrated that the 14 Points were essentially kind of a cookbook where you saw things like, "cease dependence on inspection" interpreted as "get rid of the inspectors." And so he knew and I’d say, guided by his own production of a system mindset, he knew that what he was articulating and the feedback were inconsistent. 0:23:01.9 BB: And I've gotta keep trying. And she said, "His last five years on borrowed time as he was dying of cancer, was just trying to get this message out." So I first got exposed to it 19, spring of '90 when I saw him speaking in Connecticut. And I was all about Taguchi expecting him to, I didn't know what to expect, but I knew what I was seeing and hearing from Dr. Taguchi when I heard Dr. Deming talk about Red Beads. I don't know anything about that, common cause and special cause, I didn't know anything about that. And so for me, it was just a bunch of stuff, and I just tucked it away. But when the book came out in '93, then it really made sense. But I just had to see a lot of the prevailing style of management in the role I had as an improvement specialist, become, [chuckle] a firefighter or a fireman helping people out. 0:24:01.5 AS: I noticed as I've gotten older...
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Transforming How We Think: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 19)
04/09/2024
Transforming How We Think: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 19)
What happens if you transform HOW you think? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss the problem of thinking in one dimension at a time (as we were taught in school) and its impact on our ability to solve problems. BONUS: Book recommendations to broaden your understanding of Deming and more. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, well, episode 19, Transforming How we Think. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.9 Bill Bellows: And good evening, Andrew. 0:00:35.8 AS: Good evening. 0:00:36.2 BB: And, but just as a point of clarity, I view it as transforming how we think about our thinking. And that's what I've been focusing on for the, since the mid, the early '90s is not how we think, but what is our awareness of our thinking, and I think that ties in well with SoPK. So first in late breaking news, I am seeing with new eyes, Andrew. Literally, I've got new monofocal lenses in both eyes. The left eye three weeks ago, the right eye, a week ago. I was told about five years ago, eventually I'll have to have cataract surgery. And I spoke with a few friends who had it done, and they said, oh, it's easy. And what was so amazing was it was easier than they said. It was. 0:01:41.0 BB: But one neighbor who's had it done, and kind of a sad note is he claims, and I've not double checked this, he's a sharp guy. He claims 80% of the world's population would benefit from cataract surgery that they don't have access to and eventually go blind. And I don't know, I can believe, and he is in fact he's quoted me twice on that. But I am literally seeing with new eyes. The grays are now, shades of gray, are now shades of blue. When I look at the sky. My depth perception's a whole lot better. And so it ties in well with all this vision therapy stuff. So. 0:02:36.8 AS: Aren't you glad that those machines are high quality and the operations that they do are high quality? 0:02:41.6 BB: Oh, yeah. 0:02:42.4 AS: Just one little mistake on that one. And, that's... 0:02:46.2 BB: Well, and I'm signing the documents and there's a little bit of a flutter when I'm signing, in terms of the liability. And one friend's mom had a bad cataract procedure, so it doesn't always go. And I shared this with Kevin. Kevin's had the same, as likewise had the procedure done. And we shared the anxieties and then it worked out well. But yeah when I signed that form that there was in the event, and I thought, whoa, that'd be, anyway, it worked. All right, so where I want to pick up in episode 19 is where we left off with episode 18. And there near the end, I referenced from Dr. Deming. He says Dr. Deming says in chapter three of The New Economics, and he says, "we saw in the last chapter that we're living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. Most people imagine this style has always existed. It is a fixture. Actually," he said, "it's a modern invention, a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation..." 0:04:03.0 BB: You remember that word from last time? Okay. "Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge will be introduced in the next chapter. To be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." So I've got some bullet points and I want to get into the additional chapters and references from The New Economics on Dr. Deming's use of the term transformation. 'Cause I think what he's talking about... SoPK is a theory for transformation. So I think it's just not enough to talk about SoPK without understanding how does that fit in with what Dr. Deming's talking about? 0:04:49.0 AS: And for the listeners who come out of the blue here, SoPK stands for the System of Profound Knowledge. 0:04:56.1 BB: Yes. And system then gets into elements and the four elements that Dr. Deming proposed in The New Economics, going back to the late '80s when he started to put these thoughts together. We need to think about the elements of Profound Knowledge are looking at things as a system and understanding of variation and appreciation of psychology. That's the people aspect. And then theory of knowledge, which gets into what he would explain as how do we know that what we know is so. So the one thing I wanted to bring up on the System of Profound Knowledge is conversations with Dick Steele. And a neat way of looking at the System of Profound Knowledge is to say, well, what if we were to look at some data points, one element, we look at variation, and we see some data the output of a process. 0:06:00.0 BB: We see it go up and down. Well, if that's the only element we have, then we can't ask what caused that, 'cause that's the upstream system. Well, that's the system piece. We cannot talk about what does this variation do downstream? That's the system piece. We cannot talk about how might we change that. That might get into the theory of knowledge or would get into the aspect of the theory of knowledge and some theories as to how we can go about changing the average, changing the amount of variation. And then what that leads us immediately to is, where do those ideas come from but people. 0:06:44.7 BB: So it's kind of, I think it's interesting. So Dr. Deming says the elements, but it's as connected to each other. So what I explain to the students in my courses is, in the beginning, and I remember when I'm looking at this, I'm looking at the elements. I'm thinking, okay, that variation, that's the Control Chart stuff. Common causes, special causes, well, it also includes variation in people. Oh, now we're talking about the people stuff. And then, so I find it interesting is it is easy to look at them as separate, but then in time they meld together really well. So it's not to say that we shouldn't start out looking at things as the elements 'cause I think that's what our education system does. In fact, there's a great documentary I watched a few years ago with Gregory Bateson, who was born in 1900 or so, passed away in the 1980s. 0:07:52.6 BB: And when I ask people have you ever heard of Gregory Bateson? They say, no. I say, well, have you heard of Margaret Mead? Yeah. Well, they were married once upon a time. That was her, he was her first husband. And so Bateson gives a lecture in this documentary that his daughter produced. And he says, and he is at a podium. You don't see the audience. You just see he's at a lectern. And he says, you may think that there's such a thing as psychology, which is separate from anthropology, which is separate from English, which is separate from... And he goes on to imply that they really aren't separate. But then he says, "Well, think what you want." 0:08:38.1 AS: Think what you want. 0:08:39.7 AS: And I thought that's what the education system does. It has us believe that these things are all separate. And so that's what's kind of neat. Yeah. And, but again, I think when you go to school, you're learning about history, then you learn about math. But one thing I noticed later on, many years later was the history people never talked about, if they talked about the philosopher who was well known in mathematics, we didn't hear that mathematics piece, nor in the math class did we hear about this person as a historical figure. We just learned about... And so the education system kind of blocks all that out. And then years later when we're outta school, we can read and see how all this stuff comes together and it does come together. So the one big thing I wanna say is that, is I think it's neat to look at something with just one of those elements and then say, how far does it go before you need the others to really start to do something? 0:09:47.0 BB: And that gets into the interactions. And by interactions, I mean that when you're talking about variation and you're thinking about people are different, how they feel is different, how they respond is different. Now you're talking about the interaction between psychology, at least that's one explanation of the interaction between people amd psychology. I wanna share next an anecdote. I was at a UCLA presentation. A friend of mine turned me on to these maybe once a month kind of deal to be an invited speaker. 70 people in the room. And these were typically professors from other universities, authors, and there is one story I wanna share is a woman who had written a book on why really smart kids don't test well in secondary schools. And there were a good number of people there. 0:10:45.6 BB: And I'm listening to all this through my Deming lens, and she's talking about how kids do on the exams. That goes back to an earlier podcast. How did you do on the exam? And so I'm listening to all this and she's drawing conclusions that these students are really smart, but they freak out. And then how might they individually perform better? As if the greatest cause by them all by themselves. And so afterwards, I went up and stood in line and I had a question for her that I deliberately did not want to ask in front of the entire room. 'Cause I wanted her undivided attention, and I really wanted to see where she'd come with this. 'Cause perhaps it could lead to an ongoing discussion. So I went up and introduced myself and I think I said something like, are you familiar with W. Edwards Deming? And I believe she said she was. I think she was a psychologist by background. And then I moved into the... Essentially the essence of what if the grades are caused by the system and not the student taken separately, which she acknowledged. She's like, yeah, that makes sense. And I remember saying to her, "Well then how might that change your conclusions?" 0:12:11.2 BB: And so I throw that as an example of... Deming's saying you could be an expert in, you know, you just look at something. Actually, when that comes to mind is Deming is saying something like shouldn't a psychologist know something about variation? Well, shouldn't a psychologist know something about systems? And I didn't maintain a relationship with her, but it was just other things to do. Next I wanna share a story. And I wrote this up in an article. Then when this is posted... 0:12:49.0 BB: Typically these are posted on LinkedIn. Then I'll put a link into the article. And it's a classic story that Russ Ackoff was very fond of saying, and I heard the story told quite a few times before I started to think about it a little bit differently. So the story is he was working for General Electric back in the 1960s. He is in a very high level meeting. And in the room is this, the then CEO of GE, Reginald Jones and all of the senior VPs of General Electric are in the room. And Russ... I'm guessing he was doing, I know Russ did a lot of work with Anheuser-Busch, and he did a lot of work with GE. So Russ says he is in the room. There's maybe a dozen of these senior VPs of plastics of all the different GE divisions. 0:13:41.2 BB: And there's, Russ said there's one of them that was relatively new in a senior VP position, now over plastics or over lighting or whatever it was. And at one point he gets up. And one by one he raises a question with each of his peers. Something like, "Andrew, I noticed last year you installed a new software system." And you would say, "yeah, yep, yep." And I said, "I noticed you went with..." Let's say Apple, "you went with Apple Software", and you're like, "yeah," "that's what I thought. Yeah, you went with Apple." And then you might say something like, "why do you ask?" And he says, "well, the rest of us use Microsoft products. And it just seems kind of odd that you would go off and buy something different." 0:14:41.0 BB: And the point, and Russ didn't get into these details, the essence was every single one of them he'd figured out over the last year had made a decision, pretty high level decision that that senior VP felt was good for that division, but not good for General Electric. And Russ said what got his attention was, he wasn't sitting in that room hearing those conversations and he hears one decision then another, now he's got a whole list. So Russ says, he goes around the room and calls out every single one of his peers. So, and Russ shared this in one phone call, the Ongoing Discussions that I've mentioned. And people said, Russ, do you have that documented? And he is like, well, I don't think I have that any anymore. But somebody else asking. 0:15:35.3 BB: And then no sooner was the call over I had some friends call me up, said, "Bill, can you ask Russ if you have that, if he can get a copy of that? It's probably on his shelf. You're in his office". I said to one friend. I said, "so you'd be surprised that a member of Parliament does what's best for his district and not what's best for the United Kingdom. You think, you'd be surprised that a congressman from Los Angeles is gonna do what's best for Los Angeles, not what's best for the country. 0:16:07.2 BB: So you're telling me you're surprised by that?" Well, "no, no, no." I said, "well then why do you have to have the documentation?" So that's one aspect of it. So I heard that story again and again. And so finally it, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. So I said, "Russ, on that story, you being in the room with GE?" He says, yeah. He says, I know you don't have the documentation, I said, "but what happened after this guy called them all out? How did that go down?" He says, "one of the peers looks at this guy and says, so what's your point?" 0:16:42.3 BB: And the meeting moved on. And I wrote that for an article for the Lean Management Journal called, "You Laugh, It Happens". And when I look at that through the lens of the System of Profound Knowledge, is that surprising that that goes on? No, not at all. I wanna reference a couple books that I don't think I've mentioned at all. And I share these because for the Deming enthusiasts, these books have some brilliant examples of in different arenas that I think you absolutely love and you can use in your classes, use in your education, whatever. All fairly recent. The first one is "The Tyranny of Metrics" written by a historian. He is an American University historian, Jerry Mueller, and he has, I mean, Dr. Deming would just love this. Oh, bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Thank you. 0:17:48.4 AS: Yep. There it is. "The Tyranny of Metrics". 0:17:50.1 BB: Right? 0:17:50.7 AS: Yep. 0:17:51.3 BB: Right. Is that a great one? 0:17:53.2 AS: That's a great book. And you can follow him on Twitter also. He does do a lot of posts there. 0:18:00.4 BB: Now I reached out to him 'cause I relished the book 'cause the stories were just, you just can't make up all those stories. I mean the story that I shared with Russ is nothing in comparison to what Muller has in the book. I just don't believe that Muller has a solution that can... I don't think, I think the only thing missing from the book is if he had an understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge, he'd have a far better proposal as to what to do. 0:18:31.8 AS: Yeah. I read that and I felt similar that there was something that was missing there. It was, it was great stories as you say, but how do we connect that? How do we apply that? And what's the root cause here? And how do we, this, there was just... That was missing from it. And maybe that should be his next book. 0:18:53.9 BB: Oh, enormously. But it's worth reading regardless. 0:18:57.3 AS: Yeah. Agreed. 0:19:00.1 BB: But I was, I was, I wasn't surprised. I'd say this. He honestly tried to offer a proposal, but I just looked at it and said, Professor Muller, you would just love it. In fact, I believe I reached out to him. I don't know that I heard from him. Alright, that's one book. 0:19:17.1 AS: That reminds me of what Dr. Deming said. "How would they know?" 0:19:21.3 BB: Exactly. Exactly. 0:19:22.4 AS: So if he hadn't been exposed to the System of Profound Knowledge... 0:19:25.3 BB: Oh, no. No, no, no. 0:19:25.7 AS: Then it would be hard to pull it all together. Yep. Okay. 0:19:28.8 BB: Yeah. So the next book, which is somewhere behind you in your bookshelf, is "The End of Average" by Todd... 0:19:36.8 AS: Actually, I don't think I have that one. 0:19:39.4 BB: By Todd Rose, who's a research fellow at Harvard. It's a riveting book. Oh, Andrew, you would absolutely love it. Just, he goes back ages. I mean, hundreds of hundreds of years and looks at how lost we became... How lost civilizations were dealing with trying to make, deal with averages. And the book opens with the most riveting story. And I started reading this and immediately I started thinking, "Okay, okay, okay, okay." And I figured it out. So in the opening paragraph, he says, In one day in 1949, there were 17 military planes crashed. In one day. 17 military planes crashed in one day. And this was... It would have been after the Air Force separated from the Army Air Corps. And so I started thinking, okay, late '40s, planes are going faster. The US industry has German technology, and... Because the Germans had jet engines in the late '40s. So I'm thinking it's about speed. It's about something about speed, something about speed. And there's more and more planes flying. 0:21:06.6 BB: So they grounded the fleet. They had a major investigation, brought in this young guy as a data researcher. And he passed away a few years ago, I did some research with him recently. And what he found was the cockpits were designed, you're writing, Andrew, for the average size pilots. Everything in the cockpit was fixed for the average arm length, the average hand length, the average finger length, the average height, the... Everything about... All these measurements on the torso, the cockpit had, everything was fixed. And that's exactly what I thought was going on. As the planes are going faster and faster, reaction times need to be faster and faster. And they're not. So his research was, they went off and measured thousands of pilots and found out that there was no pilot met the average. 0:22:11.2 AS: Oh, God. 0:22:11.3 BB: And the conclusion was... And again, until the plane started flying faster, that was not an issue. And that's what I was thinking with all my training in problem solving, decision making, what is going on there? What is going on there? And that's what changes the... I mean, the speed was accelerating, but compounded by the fixed geometry. So the solution by the government Pentagon, to the contractors was, add flexibility to the cockpit, allow the seat to move up and down, and then the auto industry picked up on that evidently. And so this is one example of how a fixation on average and a number of other stories outside of engineering it's just fascinating. 0:23:01.4 AS: Let me just summarize. The End of Average by Todd Rose. And it was published in about 2016. It's got a 4.5 out of 5 review on Amazon with 1,000 ratings and has a very high for Goodreads review of about 4.1. So I'm definitely getting that one. I don't have it and I'm buying it. 0:23:22.1 BB: Yeah. And it's again, he, I believe in there he offers what we should do instead, which again, I think would be, benefit from an understanding of SoPK. And so, again, for the Deming enthusiast, there is stuff in those two books, which you'll just love. And the third book came out at, I think, 2020 during the pandemic, The Tyranny of...
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Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 3
04/02/2024
Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 3
In part 3 of this series, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about the final 5 lessons for data analysis in education. Dive into this discussion to learn more about why data analysis is essential and how to do it right. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 23 and we're talking about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:30.8 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, in this first episode of this four-part series, we talked about why goal setting is often an act of desperation. And if you remember early on, I sort of proposed those four conditions that organizations should understand about their systems prior to ever setting a goal. Those four were capability, variation, stability, and then by what method are you going to improve your system? And then in the last episode, I introduced the first five lessons of the 10 key lessons for data analysis. And remember, these lessons were set up to avoid what I call these arbitrary and capricious education goals, which are basically unreasonable goals without consideration of those four things, the system capability, variation, and stability, and then not having a method. So, it might be helpful just to recap those first five lessons. I'll just list them out and folks that want to hear the details can listen to the last episode. 0:01:31.8 JD: But lesson one was data have no meaning apart from their context. So, we've got to contextualize the data. Lesson two was we don't manage or control the data. The data is the voice of the process. So, it's sort of, you know, the data over time shows us what's happening and we don't really have control over that data. We do have control under that underlying process. Lesson three was plot the dots for any data that occurs in time order. So, take it out of a two-point comparison or take it out of a spreadsheet and put it on a line chart that shows the data over time. Lesson four was two or three data points are not a trend. So again, get beyond the typical two-point limited comparison this month and last month, this year and last year, this same month, last year, those types of things, this week, last week. 0:02:25.6 JD: And then lesson five was, show enough data in your baseline to illustrate the previous level of variation. So, we want to get a sense of how the data is changing over time and we need a baseline amount of data, whether that's 12 points, 15 points, 20 points, there's sort of different takes on that. But somewhere in that 12-to-20-point range is really the amount of data we want to have in our baseline. So, we understand how it's moving up and down over time sort of naturally. Sort of at the outset of those two episodes, we also talked about centering the process behavior charts, like the ones we viewed in many of our episodes. And we put those in the center because it's a great tool for looking at data over time, just like we've been talking about. 0:03:11.4 JD: And I think when we use this methodology, and when you start to fully grasp the methodology, you start to be able to understand messages that are actually contained in the data. You can differentiate between those actual special events, those special causes, and just those everyday up and downs, what we've called common causes. And in so doing, we can understand the difference between reacting to noise and understanding actual signals of significance in that data. And so, I think that's a sort of a good primer to then get into lessons six through 10. 0:03:51.2 AS: Can't wait. 0:03:53.3 JD: Cool. We'll jump in then. 0:03:56.1 AS: Yeah. I'm just thinking about my goal setting and how much this helps me think about how to improve my goal setting. And I think one of the biggest ones that's missing that we talked about before is by what method. And many people think that they're setting strategy, when in fact, they're just setting stretch targets with nothing under it. And they achieve it by luck or are baffled why they don't achieve it. And then they lash out at their employees. 0:04:31.4 JD: Yeah, there was really... I mean, that goes back to one of those four conditions of setting goal capability. You have to understand how capable your system is before you can set, it's fine to set a stretch goal, but it has to be within the bounds of the system. Otherwise, it's just maybe not an uncertainty, but a mathematical improbability. That's not good. Like you're saying, it's not a good way to operate if you're a worker in that system. So, lesson six then, to continue the lessons. 0:05:06.8 JD: So, lesson six is "the goal of data analysis in schools is not just to look at past results, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to look forward and predict what is likely to occur in the future," right? So that's why centering the process behavior charts is so important, because they allow you to interpret data that takes variation into account, allows you to classify the data into the routine or common cause variation or the exceptional, that's the special cause variation, and allows us to turn our focus to that underlying or the behavior of the underlying system that produced the results. And it's this focus on the system and its processes that's then the basis for working towards continual improvement. 0:06:00.6 AS: And I was just thinking about number six, the goal is to predict what is likely to occur in the future. And I was just thinking, and what's likely to occur in the future is exactly what's happening now, or the trend that's happening, unless we change something in the system, I guess. 0:06:16.4 JD: Yeah. And that's why just setting the stretch goal is often disconnected from any type of reality, because we have this idea that somehow something magical is going to happen in the future that didn't happen in the past. And nothing magical is going to happen unless we are intentional about doing something differently to bring about that change. 0:06:39.5 AS: And that's a great lesson for the listeners and the viewers. It's like, have you been just setting stretch targets and pushing people to achieve these stretch targets? And not really understanding that your role is to understand that you're going to get the same result unless you start to look at how do we improve the method, the system, that type of thing. 0:07:05.0 JD: Yeah. And usually when you have those stretch goals, you've looked at what happened last year, and then you base the stretch goal on last year. But perhaps, you're seeing, for the last three or four years, the data has been steadily decreasing, right? And you can't realize that if you haven't charted that over the last three or four years, hopefully beyond that. So, you have no idea or it could have been trending positively, and you may under shoot your stretch goal because you missed a trend that was already in motion because of something that happened in the past. 0:07:44.8 AS: You made a chart for me, a run chart on my intake for my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp. And we've been working on our marketing, and I presented it to the team and we talked about that's the capability of our system based upon for me to say, I want 500 students when we've been only getting 50 is just ridiculous. And that helped us all to see that if we are going to go to the next level of where we want to be, we've got to change what we're doing, the method that we're getting there, the system that we're running and what we're operating to get there or else we're going to continue to get this output. And so if the goal is to predict what is likely to occur in the future, if we don't make any changes, it's probably going to continue to be like it is in that control chart. 0:08:42.8 JD: Yeah. And that example is, in a nutshell, the System of Profound Knowledge in action in an organization where you're understanding variation in something that's important to you, enrollment in your course. You're doing that analysis with the team. So, there's the psychological component and you're saying, well, what's our theory of knowledge? So, what's our theory for how we're going to bring about some type of improvement? And so, now you're going to run probably something like a PDSA. And so now you have all those lenses of the System of Profound Knowledge that you're bringing together to work on that problem. And that's all it is really in a nutshell. 0:09:22.2 AS: Yeah. And the solution's not necessarily right there. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not. And we've got to iterate. Okay. Should we be doing marketing in-house or should we be doing it out using an outsourced service? What if we improve and increase the volume of our marketing? What effect would that have? What if we decrease the... What if we change to this method or that method? Those are all things that we are in the process of testing. I think the hardest thing in business, in my opinion, with this is to test one thing at a time. 0:09:58.5 JD: Yeah. 0:09:58.7 AS: I just, we I want to test everything. 0:10:00.4 JD: Yeah. Yeah. I read in the Toyota Kata that I think we've talked about before here, which talks about Toyota's improvement process. I read this in the book, I don't know if this is totally always true, but basically they focus on single factor experiments for that reason, even in a place as complex and as full of engineers as Toyota, they largely focus on single factor experiments. They can actually tell what it is that brought about the change. I mean, I'm sure they do other more complicated things. They would have to write a design of experiments and those types of things, but by and large, their improvement process, the Toyota Kata, is focused on single factor experiments for that reason. 0:10:48.1 AS: And what's that movie, the sniper movie where they say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast or something like that, like slow down to speed up. I want to go fast and do all of these tests, but the fact is I'm not learning as much from that. And by slowing down and doing single factor experiment to try to think, how do we influence the future is fascinating. 0:11:20.9 JD: Yeah, absolutely. 0:11:22.4 AS: All right. What about seven? 0:11:23.2 JD: Lesson seven. So "the improvement approach depends on the stability of the system under study," and there's really two parts to this. But what approach am I going to take if the system is producing predictable results and it's performing pretty consistently, it's stable, there's only common cause variation. And then what happens if you have an unpredictable system? So two different approaches, depending on what type of system you're looking at in terms of stability. So you know the one thing to recognize in thinking about something like single factor experiments, it's a waste of time to explain noise or explain common cause variation in this stable system, because there's no simple single root cause for that type of variation. There's thousands or tens of thousands of variables that are impacting almost any metric. And you can't really isolate that down to a single cause. 0:12:17.5 JD: So instead we don't, we don't try to do that in a common cause system that needs improvement. Instead, if the results are unsatisfactory, what we do is work on improvements and changes to the system, right? We don't try to identify a single factor that's the problem. So what we do then is we work to improve a common cause processor system by working on the design of that actual system including inputs, throughputs that are a part of that. And to your point, you sort of have to, based on your content knowledge of that area, or maybe you have to bring in a subject matter expert and you sort of start to think about what's going to make the biggest difference. And then you start testing those things one at a time, basically. That's sort of the approach. And then if you're working in an unpredictable system and that unpredictable system is unpredictable because it has special causes in your data, then it's really a waste of time to try to improve that particular system until it's stable again. And so the way you do that is at that point, there is something so different about the special cause data that you try to identify that single cause or two of those data points. And then when you've identified, you study it, and then you try to remove that specific special cause. And if you've identified the right thing, what happens then is it becomes a stable system at that point, right? 0:13:51.9 AS: I was thinking that it's no sense in trying to race your boat if you've got a hole in it. You got to fix the special cause, the hole, and then focus on, okay, how do we improve the speed of this boat? 0:14:06.5 JD: And the key is recognizing the difference between these two roadmaps towards improvement. And I think in education for sure, there's a lot of confusion, a lot of wasted effort, because there's really no knowledge of this approach to data analysis. And so people do their own things. There's a mismatch between the type of variation that's present and the type of improvement effort that's trying to be undertaken. I think the most typical thing is there's a common cause system, and people think they can identify a single thing to improve. And then they spend a lot of time and money on that thing. And then it doesn't get better over time because it was the wrong approach in the first place. 0:14:55.9 AS: Number eight. 0:14:57.6 JD: Number eight. So, number eight is, "more timely data is better for improvement purposes." So we've talked about state testing data a lot. It's only available once per year. Results often come after students have gone on summer vacation. So, it's not super helpful. So, we really want more frequent data so that we can understand if some type of intervention that we're putting in place has an effect. I think what the most important thing is, the frequency of the data collection needs to be in sync with the improvement context. So, it's not always that you need daily data or weekly data or monthly data, or quarterly data, whatever it is. It's just it has to be in sync with the type of improvement context you're trying to bring about. And no matter what that frequency of collection, the other big thing to keep in mind is don't overreact to any single data point, which is, again, I see that over and over again in my work. I think ultimately the data allows us to understand the variation and the trends within our system, whether that system is stable or unstable, and then what type of improvement effort would be most effective. And, again, in my experience, just those simple things are almost never happening in schools. Probably in most sectors. 0:16:25.9 AS: Can you explain a little bit more about in sync with the improvement process? Like, maybe you have an example of that so people can understand. 0:16:34.2 JD: Well, yeah. So, you mean the frequency of data collection? 0:16:39.0 AS: Yeah. And you're saying, yeah, this idea of like, what would be out of sync? 0:16:44.7 JD: Well, one, you need to... A lot of times what happens is there might be a system in place for collecting some type of data. Let's say, like, attendance. They report attendance, student attendance on the annual school report card. So, you get that attendance rate, but that's like the state test scores. Like, it's not that helpful to get that on the report card after the year has concluded. But the data is actually available to us in our student information system. And so, we could actually pull that in a different frequency and chart it ourselves and not wait on the state testing date or the state attendance report card has attendance... 0:17:27.5 AS: Because attendance is happening on a daily basis. 0:17:31.0 JD: Happening on a daily basis. So, if we wanted to, daily would be pretty frequent, but if we did collect the data daily, we certainly can do that. We could see, that could help us see patterns in data on certain days of the week. That could be something that goes into our theory for why our attendance is lower than we'd want it to. You could do it weekly if the daily collection is too onerous on whoever's being tasked with doing that. I think weekly data pretty quickly, would take you 12 weeks. But in 12 weeks, you have a pretty good baseline of what attendance is looking like across this particular school year. So I think when you're talking about improvement efforts, I think something daily, something weekly, I think that's the target so that you can actually try some interventions along the way. And... 0:18:29.3 AS: And get feedback. 0:18:31.1 JD: And get feedback. Yeah, yeah. And you could also peg it to something that's further out. And you could see over time if those interventions that are impacting more short-term data collection are actually impacting stuff on the longer term as well. 0:18:49.1 AS: And I guess it depends also on what is the priority of this. Let's say that attendance is not a big issue at your particular school. Therefore, we look at it on a monthly basis and we look to see if something's significance happening. But otherwise, we've got to focus over on another idea. And if, if, if attendance becomes an issue, we may go back to daily and say, is it a particular day of the week? Or is it something, what can we learn from that data? 0:19:20.0 JD: Yep, that's exactly right. And then the next step would be in lesson nine, you then, and this is why the charts are so important, then you can clearly label the start date for an intervention directly on the chart. So, what you want to do is, once you've chosen an intervention or a change idea, you clearly mark that in your process behavior chart. I just use a dashed vertical line on the date the intervention is started and also put a simple label that captures the essence of that intervention. So, that's right on the chart. So, I can remember what I tried or started on that particular day. And then that allows the team to easily see, because you're going to continue adding your data points, the stuff that comes after the dotted line, it becomes pretty apparent based on the trends you're seeing in the data, if that intervention is then working, right? 0:20:21.2 JD: If it's attendance, I may try, I do a weekly call to parents to tell them what their individual child's attendance rate is. And then we can see once we started making those weekly calls over the next few weeks, does that seem to be having an impact on attendance rates? And then I can actually see too, we've talked about the patterns in the data, there's certain patterns I'm looking for to see if there's a significant enough change in that pattern to say, yeah, this is a signal that this thing is actually working. So, it's not just because it increased, that attendance rate could go up, but that in and of itself isn't enough. I want to see a signal. And by signal, I mean a specific pattern in the data, a point outside the limits. 0:21:17.3 JD: I want to see eight points in a row in the case of attendance above the central line or I want to see three out of four that are closer to a limit, the upper limit, than they are to that central line. And again, we've talked about this before, those patterns are so mathematically improbable that I can be pretty reasonably assured if you see them that an actual change has occurred in my data. And because I've drawn this dotted line, I...
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Organizations are Holograms: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 18)
03/26/2024
Organizations are Holograms: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 18)
In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss seeing organizations as holograms—3D images. Holograms show all parts from different views at once. Learn how using the lens of the System of Profound Knowledge lets you see the problems and opportunities for transformation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas, to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, which we call Episode 18, is, Wouldn't It Be Nice? Bill take it away. 0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: Wouldn't it be nice if [chuckle] we were older and we wouldn't have to wait so long? Okay. So Episode 18, greetings, Andrew. So as I mentioned in the past, I like to go back and listen to the past previous podcasts and as well as hear from people and their feedback on them. And I have a few points of clarity on the last one, and then we'll get into today's feature. So the last one which we refer to as Diffusion From a Point Source. And I talked about being in a bathtub, you start off at room temperature water and, or you fill the bath and you went and got distracted and came back, and now it's not warm enough, so you crank up, let's add some more water, and you feel that heat coming towards you from the... And then the diffusion equation is about how that, all the water ends up about the same temperature, and then you turn off the water and you drop back to room temperature. 0:01:41.1 BB: But another aspect of the point source that I wanted to clarify is, is if you have in the bathtub some, a source of energy, a heat source, which is not, you know, is different than the source of the water coming out of the faucet. But imagine you've got a little generator in there pumping out heat, then the bathtub, depending on the temperature of that, the amount of energy being released, then the bathtub is going to get warmer, warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer, and what keeps it going back to room temperature is how much energy is coming out of that. And that's what I was referring to as what it takes to maintain a transformation either individually within an organization, is something which continues to churn. Else you end up by the world we're in, you're watching the news, you're hearing about some accident and people are looking for the singular source, or they're looking at two points in a row, a downturn or upturn and looking at two data points to draw a conclusion. So there's all these everyday reminders of how, of the prevailing system of management at work in terms of how people are treated, how we manage systems. And our challenge is, how do you fight that? 0:03:14.7 BB: And so even within your organization, if you're trying to get people excited by Deming's works, what you have to appreciate is when they go home, the rest of their lives, they're being immersed in a culture of blame of individuals, not the system, and that's part of what we have to deal with. So I just want to mention that what I meant by that source term is, what does it take individually that we can do within our organizations to try to keep things going and not get sucked back down, knowing you've got all this normality around us that we're trying to move beyond. So the next thing I want to talk about is transformation. [chuckle] And then as that leads into, Wouldn't It Be Nice. And I was looking at The New Economics, my Kindle version, and found out that there were 73 references to transform in The New Economics, 73. And the first one is in the forward written by our good friend Kevin Cahill, and in there Kevin references, this is in the 3rd edition of The New Economics, which is the white cover if you have it in print. And it came out 2018. In there, Kevin references Out of the Crisis. And Kevin says, "The aim of the book," again, Out of the Crisis, "was clearly stated in the preface." 0:04:48.1 BB: This from Dr. Deming now, "The aim of this book is transformation of the style of American management, transformation of American style of management is not a job of reconstruction nor is it revision, it requires a whole new structure from foundation upward. The aim of this book is to supply the direction." Okay? Now back to Kevin, then Kevin says, "Out of the Crisis supplies direction for any and all types of organizations, while many people focused on its application in manufacturing, it was a call to action for every organization from education, to healthcare, to non-profits and startups of all sizes." Okay. So now we get to the preface for The New Economics. And so this is from Dr. Deming, what I just shared with you is Kevin quoting his grandfather. So now going back to 1993, the 1st edition, Dr. Deming said, "The route to transformation is what I call Profound Knowledge. The System of Profound Knowledge is composed of four parts all related to each other, appreciation for system, knowledge about variation, theory of knowledge, psychology. The aim of this book is to start the reader on the road to knowledge and to create a yearning for more knowledge." He adds to that, 0:06:07.3 BB: "What we need is cooperation and transformation... " there’s that transformation word again. "To a new style of management, the route to transformation is what I call Profound Knowledge. The System of Profound Knowledge is composed of four parts all related to each other." And I'll just pause here and I, just thinking of a friend a couple years ago is inviting me to go to his company and do an in-house program. And he wanted to know how I would start the program, would I open up with the System of Profound Knowledge? I said, "No." I said I would build up to that, and he says, "Well, why not just start with it?" I said, "Because it's a solution to a problem you don't know you have." I said, "I would rather first give a sense of the nature..." now, and he said, "Well, how are we going to start?" And I said, "I'm going to start with the Trip Report, having people compare the ME versus the WE or the All Straw versus the Last Straw. And then use Profound Knowledge as a means by which to understand how you go from one to the other." I said, "But without that understanding of the problem we face... " again, it's an elegant... [chuckle] Every time, the System of Profound Knowledge is an elegant solution to a problem you don't know you have. So I look at it as, let's first create a sense of the problem/opportunity. Okay. 0:07:38.0 BB: So we're going to come back to transformation, but now I want to go back to the title, Wouldn't It Be Nice. And what I'll do is, when this is posted on the institute webpage, I'll put a link to an article I wrote in September, 2015 for the Lean Management Journal, entitled, Wouldn't It be nice. And that article includes in the opening, it says, "My appreciation of Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys has grown significantly in the past month," okay, and this was written in 2015, "after viewing the Brian Wilson Biopic “Love and Mercy," which for you, Andrew, and everyone listening, it's a fascinating, fascinating film. And it got me turned on to Brian Wilson and all these things about the Beach Boys I really underestimated. All right, so then I wrote, "Through this blast from my past, I was reminded of another Beach Boys classic, Wouldn't It Be Nice. And the yearning "wouldn't it be nice if we were older then we wouldn't have to wait so long." And then I closed the opening with, "And reflecting on this adolescent wishfulness, I propose a wishfulness that organizations, public and private and even governments, improve their understanding of variation in how it impacts the systems they design, they produce and they operate." 0:09:00.7 BB: And so when I was going back and looking at that, 'cause I was thinking about transformation in this article, and I thought the transformation I talked about last time was the transformation... We talked about the transformation going from an observer, me as a professor used a student, I'm an observer of your learning versus a participant, and that's just a systems perspective. What Dr. Deming is talking about is not just how we look at systems, but the transformation involves how we look at variation. Do we move past two data points and look at variation in the context of common causes and special causes? A transformation of how we engage people, do we engage them with carrots and sticks? Do we understand when we blame them as the willing workers, what that creates in our organizations? And then the last element of Profound Knowledge, theory of knowledge. How do we know that what we know is so? And so I was just looking back at that article, and the article was written about, what if we had a better understanding of variation as one element of a transformation? And what I wanted to highlight today is talk more about transformation, but also look at transformation from not just one aspect of the System of Profound Knowledge, all of them. 0:10:32.2 BB: And it may well be, we're going to need another episode to go through this. But the next topic I want to do as we go down this path. Some time ago somebody made reference to a hologram, and I have seen holographic pictures, and so I went back and I was trying to think, why did that strike me? What about this hologram got my attention? And I started to remind myself of it. And Kevin and I were in Idaho a few months ago meeting with an audience. And I was again reminded by this hologram thing, because people were saying, "How come people in operations are so antiquated?" And I said, "Well, it's not just operations, it's more than that." So first, holograms, so what is a hologram? So I found a dictionary definition. "It's a three-dimensional image produced by a pattern of interference produced by a split coherent beam of radiation, such as a laser." That's for the physicists in the room. 0:11:38.5 AS: I'm not sure if that helped me but... 0:11:40.6 BB: [laughter] But I also found on a website, the Institute for the Advancement of Service, and the website is, www.showanotherway.org. And there I found something I think it's a little bit easier to digest. And the text says, if you turn a photograph over and you see a blank white surface," so far so good. "A photograph shows the image only on the front, thus only from one side, a hologram is a three-dimensional image created by interacting light sources, it shows the same image from all angles regardless of how it's being viewed. When a hologram is divided into pieces, the text says, each part still contains the entire image within it, although each new image is from a slightly different perspective." And then, again, from this website, and this leads us into the transformation piece, is "how does a concept of a hologram apply to organizational structures?" And I thought, "Okay. Now we're getting some place." "Because when people come together, share a vision for an organization, each person has his or her own unique perspective of the whole." I said, "Okay." "Each shares responsibility for the whole, not just his or her piece, but the component pieces aren't identical, each represents the whole picture from a different point of view.” 0:13:08.0 BB: “When we add up the pieces, the image of the whole does not change fundamentally, but rather the image becomes more intense. When more people share the common vision, the vision may not change fundamentally, but it becomes more alive, more real in a sense of the mental reality that people can truly imagine achieving." And to me, what I say is, the role of the ME/WE Trip Report is in part to create a common mental model, a common 3D view of an organization. But depending on who you're talking with in an organization, they see only one aspect of it, they see what it means in finance, they see what it means in HR, they see what it means in, from engineering. And the beauty of, what I have found is, is when you look at organizations from Dr. Deming's perspective, we're able to appreciate that these views are different, but it is the same thing we're looking at. So the next thing I want to get into of the work we're doing at Rocketdyne, working harder in a ME organization at a non-Deming company, working harder is the mantra, working smarter, as you and I have talked about, is what does that mean? Think about things from a Deming perspective. What does that mean? So what you get is a lot of working harder. And in which case, you have KPIs and we're working harder to achieve these KPIs. 0:14:46.9 BB: Well, I was very fortunate, Rocketdyne in the mid '90s, the Air Force came up with a brand new program for a next generation rocket with a set of KPIs that a few of us believed were impossible. Now what's the relevance of that? As long as, my theory is, as long as a non-Deming organization can achieve the KPI in how it currently operates, then just get out of the way. And they will work harder, a lot of brute force will be done to meet those KPIs. And Dr. Deming would remind us, anyone can accomplish anything if they don't count the cost. So, I mean, it will destroy people's lives and marriages and all that, but as long as those KPIs are met, just get out of the way. Well, what I loved about the Air Force requirement, was I was convinced that it couldn't be met. And part of the challenge was to convince executives at Rocketdyne that we can't get there from here. And that then, what I thought was, "This is our moment." We, so again, if you're in an organization and everything can be done, how the organization currently operates, then I say try to find something that can't be done with the current system. It can't be done in the schedule, it can't be done at the cost, but if it can be done by the current system, then that's not your opening. But for us, it was the opening. So the Air Force in the mid '90s had a couple billion dollars to develop a next generation series of rockets. 0:16:30.7 BB: And so we're, nowadays we think of SpaceX launching rockets. Well, this is the mid '90s, which is 20 years or so before SpaceX. And so the requirement was, that everything in the entire rocket, everything in the entire rocket, that's a lot of parts including the engine. Everything had to meet requirements, everything had to be a White Bead, no Red Beads. In the past, if there were Red Beads, which the Air Force accepted, and we know you get Red Beads, we know how you get Red Beads. And if they have Red Beads, then you would get paid to repair them, extra. And a friend of mine who was the brainchild of the effort within the Air Force to eliminate the purchase of Red Beads, he said, "The entire rocket will not have Red Beads." And when I heard of that I thought, "ME organizations don't know how to do that." They just, all they know how to do is create Red Beads. And the strategy we had already developed was, if we look at the variation in the White Beads, as you and I have talked about, then that's a great means to prevent White Beads, Red Beads in the first place, let alone improve integration. So we started getting senior management on board with things we have done to explain to them, here's a strategy, as we heard this flow down from the Air Force. 0:18:04.6 BB: Well, the existing system, how bad it was, was... And I learned this from the brain, this Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force who pushed this incredible KPI, which was, everything must meet requirements. And it translated to something called "No Material Review Board, where a material review board in the industry, in the aerospace industry, is a situation where you've got a Red Bead that may be a very expensive Red Bead that the contractor wants to sell the Air Force, but it doesn't meet requirements. And then the contractor gets together with the Air Force and they schmooze over it, and what Lieutenant Colonel Ciscel explained is, you've got the contractor that really wants to sell that, even though something is not quite right. And what makes it work for the Air Force is when the contractor says, "Well, the bad thing about not using this is, it's going to take a couple of months to have a new one." And that time delay starts to bug the Air Force. Next thing you know that white, that Red Bead starts to look pretty good. But worse than that, what Dave explained is, he said, it's like going to the car dealership and finding that beautiful car you want. Then I, the sales person, tell you, "Andrew, okay, we're going to have it for you tomorrow, all ready to go." 0:19:36.0 BB: And then you come back the next day and I say... And you say, "Well, where's my new car?" And I say, "Well, Andrew, I told you we were going to wash it and wax it. Yeah, well, when we put it through the car wash we scratched it." And you're like, "You scratched it." And I say, "Well, yeah but we buffed out that and we're only going to charge you a little bit more for that. We're going to charge you for this and this and this." And they said, "That's what the Air Force does." And so what he was pushing for in the mid '90s was to get rid of all of that inspired by, you're ready Andrew? Inspired by his undergraduate education that the Air Force paid for when he was an officer, and he learned about Dr. Deming's work on control charts. And so when I heard that I thought, "We've got a requirement that can't be met." This is the, this is our means, our opening for initiating a transformation. 'Cause working harder, convincing the executives was, we can't get there from here. But boy, if you can get there from here, get out of the way. So now I'm going to go back to chapter two of The New Economics. Dr. Deming says, "Somehow the theory for transformation that's been mostly applied in the shop floor, everyone knows about statistical control of quality, this is important, but the shop floor is only a small part of the total. Anyone could be a 100% successful." 0:20:54.1 BB: Well, what I want to share there in terms of the situation we were dealing with in the mid '90s, if we started to talk to the executives about statistical control of quality, control charts, common causes and special causes. Well, as soon as we started to talk about the process being "in control," to the majority of our executives that translated to "everything met requirements." And so our starting point was just for that, just what does "in control" mean? And it was just so amazing how that got translated to meets requirements. And we're like, "No, no, no. We need to have the process in control, understand common cause variation and control charts and, let alone being on target." But that was our starting point, was just trying to get these ideas across on the shop floor. And chapter three... I've got a couple of things from each chapter, at least from some of the opening chapters. We'll cover the rest later. Dr. Deming says in chapter three, "We saw in the last chapter that we are living under the tyranny of the revealing style of management. Most people imagine that this style has always existed, it is a fixture. Actually, it is a modern invention, a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry, are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge to be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." 0:22:25.5 BB: And this is what we're trying to do with this NO MRB initiative, we are just trying to get executives to realize that if we keep doing what we're doing, we're not going to be able to achieve this goal. What I'll also say is, there was such a commercial demand for space at that time, that the Air Force didn't have to...
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Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 2
03/19/2024
Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 2
Do you struggle to meet your goals or targets? Find out how you can change your thinking about goals and your process for setting them so you can keep moving forward. In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss the first five of John's 10 Key Lessons for Data Analysis. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode two of four in a mini-series on why goal setting is often an act of desperation. John, take it away. 0:00:32.3 John Dues: Hey, Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, in that last episode, that first episode in this mini-series, we talked about why goal setting is often an act of desperation and I basically proposed these four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. So it's not the goals in and of themselves that are bad, but it's with this important understanding that's often lacking. So those four things that organizations should understand, one, what's the capability of a system under study? So that's the first thing, how capable is the system or the process? The second thing is what's the variation within that system or process under study? So that's the second thing we talked about last time. The third thing is understanding if that system or process is stable. And then the fourth thing was, if we know all of those things, by what method are we going to approach improvement after we set the goal, basically? So you gotta have those four things, understanding the capability of the system, the variation of the system, the stability of the system, and then by what method, prior to setting a goal. And so I think I've mentioned this before, but absent of an understanding of those conditions, what I see is goals that are, what I call it, arbitrary and capricious. 0:01:48.8 JD: That's a legal characterization. You look that up in the law dictionary. And it basically says that an "arbitrary and capricious law is willful and unreasonable action without consideration or in disregard of facts or law." So I'm just now taking that same characterization from a legal world and applying it to educational organizations and accountability systems, and I just switched it to "a willful and unreasonable goal without consideration or in disregard of system capability, variability, and/or stability." And we see these all over the place for education organizations, for schools, school districts, teachers, that type of thing. 0:02:31.6 JD: And so what I tried to do in the book and tried to do here in my work in Columbus is develop some sort of countermeasures to that type of goal setting and develop the 10 key lessons for data analysis. An antidote to the arbitrary and capricious goals seen throughout our sector. And this process behavior chart tool, looking at data in that format is central to these lessons. So what I thought we would do in this episode and the next is outline those 10 key lessons. So five today and then do another five in the next episode. And in the fourth episode of the series, what we would do is then apply those examples to a real life improvement project from one of our schools. It's helpful, I think too, to sort of, to understand the origin of the key lessons. So there's the lessons that I'll outline are really derived from three primary sources. 0:03:36.0 JD: So the first two come from Dr. Donald Wheeler, who I've mentioned on here before, a lot of Deming folks will, of course, have heard of Dr. Wheeler, who's a statistician in Tennessee, a colleague of Dr. Deming when Dr. Deming was alive and then has carried on that work to this day. The two books, two really great books that he wrote, one is called Understanding Variation, a thin little book, a good primer, a good place to start. And then he's got a thicker textbook called Making Sense of Data, where you get in really into the technical side of using process behavior charts. So I'd highly recommend those. And then the third resource is a book from a gentleman, an engineer named Mark Graban called Measures of Success. And I really like his book because he has applied it, the process behavior chart methodology, to his work and he's really done it in a very contemporary way. So he's got some really nice color-coded charts in the Measures of Success book and I think they're really easy to understand with modern examples, like traffic on my website, for example, in a process behavior chart, really easy to understand modern example. But all three of the books, all three of the resources are built on the foundation of Dr. Deming's work. They're, you know, Graban and Wheeler are fairly similar and I think Graban would say he's a student of Wheeler. 0:05:00.4 JD: He learned of this mindset, this approach to data analysis by finding a Donald Wheeler book on his own dad's bookshelf when he was in college and starting down that path as a young engineer to study this stuff. And basically what I've done is take the information from those three resources and make some modifications so they can be understood by educators, basically. I think it's also worth noting again that process behavior chart methodology is right in the center of this, really for three reasons. One, when you plot your data that way, you can start to understand messages in your data, I think that's really important. Second, you can then start to differentiate between special and common causes, special and common causes, translate that into regular language. I can translate between something that I should pay attention to and something that's not significant basically in my data. And then in so doing, I know the difference between when I'm reacting to noise versus when I'm reacting to signals in my data, so I think that's really important. So the process behavior chart is at the center of all this. So we'll go through five of these lessons, one by one, I'll outline the lesson and then give a little context for why I think that particular lesson is important. 0:06:25.4 AS: That sounds like a plan. So capability, variation, stability and method. You've talked about Donald Wheeler, excellent book on Understanding Variation, that's the one I've seen. And of course, Mark Graban's book, Measures of Success, very well rated on Amazon and a podcaster himself, too. 0:06:49.6 JD: Yeah. And if I was a person studying this and wanting to get into process behavior charts and really knowing how to look at data the right way, I would read Understanding Variation first because it's a good primer, but it's fairly easy to understand. And then I would read Measures of Success 'cause it's got those practical applications now that I have a little bit of a baseline, and then if I wanna go deep into the technical stuff, the Making Sense of Data, that's the textbook that drives everything home. Yeah. So we'll dive into the lesson then. 0:07:19.5 AS: Let's do it. 0:07:20.0 JD: Yeah. Okay. So the first lesson, and I've talked about this in various episodes before, but lesson one, the very first lesson is, "data have no meaning apart from their context." So this seems commonsensical, but I see this all the time where these things aren't taken care of. And what I'm talking about is answering some basic questions. So for anyone looking at my data, they should be able to answer some basic questions, very simply, anybody that looks at my data. First thing is who collected the data? That should be apparent. How were the data collected? When were the data collected? Where were the data collected? And then what do these values represent? So oftentimes I see data either in a chart or in some type of visualization and almost none of those things are known from looking at the data, all important questions. 0:08:18.6 JD: The second question would be, well, that first set goes together. The second question is what's the operational definition of the concept being measured? So we have to be on the same page about what it is exactly being measured in this data that I've collected. I also wanna know how were the values of any computed data derived from the raw inputs? That's important. And then the last thing is, have there been any changes made over time that impact the data set? For example, perhaps the operational definition has changed over time for some reason. Maybe there's been a change in formula being used to compute the data. 0:09:05.4 JD: So an example would be, from my world, high school graduation rates. You know, 20 years ago there was one definition of how you calculated a high school graduation rate, now there's a different definition. So when you compare those two sets of data, you've gotta be careful because you're actually, you're actually working from different definitions and I think that happens all the time. More recently here in Ohio, what it means to be proficient on a state test, that definition changed about 10 years ago. And so if you look at test results from 2024 and try to compare them to 2014, you're really comparing apples and oranges 'cause there's two different definitions of proficiency, but no one remembers those things a decade later. So you have... 0:09:52.3 AS: And then a chart will be presented where the different methodologies are shown as one line that says... 0:10:00.8 JD: Yes. 0:10:00.8 AS: That no one's differentiated the fact that at this point it changed. 0:10:04.6 JD: Yeah, at this point it changed. So first lesson, data have no meaning apart from their context. Second lesson is we don't manage or control the data, the data is the voice of the process. What we control is the system and the processes from which the data come. There's a difference there. Right? So I think this is one of the key conceptions of that system's view, that system's thinking in an organization. When we wanna make improvements in our schools, we need a few things in place. We need the people working in the system. So that would be the students for us, they're working in the system, people that have the authority to work on the system, so that'd be teachers if we're talking about an individual classroom, at the school building level, maybe we're talking about the principal. And those two things are, at least the teacher principal thing is usually in place, the students being a part of improvement projects, definitely less so, but maybe there are places where that's happening. But the third thing is someone with an understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge, I'd say that's almost always lacking in the education sector, at least. And I think the reason the System of Profound Knowledge becomes important, 'cause that's really the theoretical foundation for all the things that we're talking about when we're looking at data in this way. 0:11:38.8 JD: If you lack that conception, then it's hard to bring about any improvement, because you don't understand how to look at that data, how to interpret that data, you don't understand how to run a plan-do-study-act cycle. Because what you're gonna ultimately have to do is change some process in your system and there's some knowledge that you're gonna need to be able to do that, and that's, that third component of an improvement team has to be in place to do that. But I think the most important thing is that we're not in control of the data, we're in control of the processes that ultimately lead to the data. It's a distinction, maybe a fine distinction, but I think it's an important one. 0:12:17.5 AS: The idea of the System of Profound Knowledge and understanding what to do with the data and really understanding the whole thing, I was just thinking what would... An analogy I was thinking about is rain. Everybody understands rain as it comes out of the sky, but not everybody understands how to use that to make a pond, to make an aqueduct, to feed a farm, to, whatever that is. And so having that big picture is key, so, okay. So number... 0:12:57.8 JD: Yeah. Well, and a part of that is something really simple is constantly understanding data is the voice of the process. And so when you're looking at data, what often happens is I'm gonna walk into a meeting with my boss, and I'm looking for some data point, maybe we just got some type of performance data back or survey results or something. I'm gonna pick one of those items where the plot, where the dot from last time has improved when we look at it this time, and I take that and say, "Look how we've improved in this thing." And you need someone to say, "Well, wait a second, while there is a difference between those data points, if I look at the last 12, things are just moving up and down." And there's gotta be someone in the room that constantly points back to that, constantly. And that's where that person with the Profound Knowledge is helpful in improvement work. 0:13:54.5 AS: So the voice of the process is a great way of phrasing it that's been used for a while now and I think it's really good. I remember when I worked at Pepsi as a young supervisor, I saw some problem on the production line and I raised it to the maintenance guys. And they kept coming and fixing it and it would break and they'd fix it and it would break, and I basically got mad at him and I was like, "What the hell?" And he's like, "Bosses won't pay for the things that I need to fix this permanently, so get used to it constantly breaking down." 0:14:33.4 JD: And that's the best I can do. 0:14:34.0 AS: That's the voice of the system, here's what I can produce with what you've given me to produce. 0:14:40.8 JD: Yep. Yep. Yeah. Those guys had a very keen understanding of the system, no doubt in that example. Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of thing happens all the time, I think. That was lesson two. Lesson three is plot the dots for any data that incurs in time order. So a lot of people in this world know Dr. Donald Berwick, he started the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He was a student of Dr. Deming's, he's done a lot of work in this area. He has a great quote where he says, "Plotting measurements over time turns out, in my view, to be one of the most powerful things we have for systemic learning." And that's what really plot the dots is all about, it's all about turning your data into a visualization that you can learn from. And the National Health Service in England has this #plotthedots. And I think the whole point is that plotting the dots, plotting the data over time helps us understand variation and it leads us to take more appropriate action when we do that. So whether it's a run chart or a process behavior chart, just connecting the consecutive data points with a line makes analysis far more intuitive than if we store that data in a table. 0:16:03.6 AS: Yeah. And I was thinking about if you're a runner and you wanna compete in a marathon, plotting the dots like that is so valuable because you can see when changes happen. For instance, let's just say one night you didn't eat and then you ran the next morning and then your performance was better. Was it just a noise variation or is there something that we can learn from that? And then just watching things over time just give you ideas about what... Of potential impacts of what something could do to change that. 0:16:42.0 JD: Yeah. And we can start with a simple run chart, it doesn't have the limits, it's just a line chart. And then once we have enough of the data collected, enough plotted dots, then we can turn it into the process behavior chart. 0:16:56.3 AS: Some people don't even want to see that, John, like when we looked at your weight chart, remember that? 0:17:03.0 JD: I do remember that. Yeah. 0:17:04.0 AS: So for the people out there that really wanna let's say, control your weight, put a dot plot chart on your wall and measure it each day and just the awareness of doing that is huge. 0:17:18.7 JD: Yep. It is huge. It really is huge. And that works for any data that occurs over time, so almost everything that we're interested in improving occurs in some type of time order, time sequence. So these charts are appropriate for a wide array of data. But the bottom line is that... Oh, yeah, sorry, go ahead. 0:17:33.5 AS: The bottom line? 0:17:35.0 JD: Well, I was just saying the bottom line, whether you're using a run chart or a process behavior chart, it's always gonna tell us more than a list or a table of numbers, basically. 0:17:44.5 AS: I was gonna explain this, a situation I had when I was head of research at a research firm, a broker here in Thailand. I, my goal was to get more output from the analysts, they needed to write more and we needed to get more out. So what I did and I had already learned so much about Deming and stuff at that time. So what I did is I just made a chart showing each person's, what each person wrote each week, and it was a run chart in that sense where people could see over time what they wrote and they could see what other people were writing. And I purposely made no comments on this chart and I'd never really discussed it, I just put it up and updated it every week. And one of the staff that worked for me, an analyst, a really smart Thai woman asked, she said, she went to... She said, "I wanna see you in your office." I was like, "Oh, shit, I'm in trouble." And so she came to my office and said, "You know I went to, so this was maybe six months after I had put that chart up, she said, "I went out to lunch with my counterpart, my competitor, and she's writing research just like me on the same sector, and she asked me how many research reports do you write in a week, and I told her my number, and she was like, "Oh my God, that's a huge number." 0:19:16.6 AS: And she said, "Oh, I didn't really even think about it. But okay." And then she says, "What is Andrew's goal or target for you?" And she had naturally had thought that I had set a target of that amount, that's where she said, "I think I really figured you out." And I was like, "Well, what do you mean?" She said, "You just put that chart up there and you didn't give us any goal, but you knew that we were looking at it, and then it would provide us information and incentive and excitement, and the fact that you said nothing about it, got us to probably a higher level of production than if you had said, "I want everybody to read my reports." 0:19:57.9 JD: Right. Yeah, that's great. 0:20:01.0 AS: The magic of data. What's number four? 0:20:02.4 JD: The magic of data. Number four, so two or three data points are not a trend. So the first thing is, as soon as you've decided to collect some set of data, plot the dots, that should start right away. And again, this really includes all data that we're interested in improving in schools. And I know before I understood this way of thinking, this way of data analysis, I often relied on just comparing two points, that's the most common form of data analysis. What did last month look like, what does month look like? What did last year look like, what does this year look like? What did last week look like, what does this week look like? So that limited comparison is the most typical form of data analysis, especially when you're talking about something like management reports or board reports, revenue over time, those types of things. What was revenue last January? That type of thing. But the problem with looking at just two or three data points is that it tells you nothing about trends, it also doesn't tell you anything about how the data varies naturally. 0:21:17.5 JD: I remember looking at...
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Transformation is Never Complete: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 17)
03/12/2024
Transformation is Never Complete: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 17)
In The New Economics, Deming said “The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life…” (3rd edition, page 63) But are we ever completely transformed? Discover why Bill Bellows believes that transformation is an ongoing process and how you can keep your learning journey going. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. And the topic for today is, in this episode 17, Diffusion from a Point Source. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.6 Bill Bellows: And the title coincidentally, was the focus of my Master's thesis. We'll look at that later. 0:00:37.1 AS: It wasn't a rock and roll song. Yes, correct. 0:00:39.9 BB: No, not a rock and roll. [chuckle] Actually, Diffusion from a Point Source. Was that Mick Jagger or Keith Richards? Maybe it was Taylor. Maybe it was Taylor Swift. Okay. So some opening remarks, and then we'll get to today's feature. And I mentioned in the past, I go back and listen to the podcast, read through the transcripts, and it's very much like “Production Viewed as a System” - is to talk with people that have listened to it, listened to it myself and ask, have I... Are there holes in the explanation? Can I add some more clarity to it? The process I use for these podcasts is, some title comes to mind. I've got a long list that we started with at the very beginning, and then some other topics come up for any of a variety of reasons. 0:01:35.3 BB: And we'll have a title, have an outline, but then as we get involved in the conversation, something I say leads to something that you say leads to something that's not on the list. And sometimes some of those ad-libs, I go back and listen to and say, "Well, I don't know that sounded right. I just wanna add a little bit more clarity". Another thing I wanna say at the outset for those listening, is [chuckle] there is... Somebody posted somewhere on social media that one of the sessions was a total waste of time to listen to which I think is unfortunate. But what I like to say is, where I'm coming from to support The Deming Institute, as your ambition is as well, is to help individuals in respective organizations learn about Dr. Deming's ideas, try to apply them, deepen their understanding, explain them to others, and that's the target audience. 0:02:48.0 BB: So, for those who find that boring, well maybe this is not the podcast for you. And so, and the other thing I wanna say along those lines is, for the majority of my time at Rocketdyne, I had the responsibility of being a transformation agent or transformation person was part of my job. Now, I was brought in, I didn't have that job to begin with. The job I had to begin with was to lead the effort to provide training, facilitation of applications of Dr. Taguchi's ideas. And what I've shared in these podcasts is a lot of what I was doing early on was helping people put out fires. 0:03:38.2 BB: And that's not what Dr. Taguchi's ideas are about. His ideas are about improving the robustness of the performance of a product or service. Whereby what robustness Dr. Taguchi means is "it performs as an athlete incredibly well in spite of differing weather conditions." So the ability of a marathoner to run very consistent fast times in spite of the weather, in spite of the altitude. And so you're getting consistently high, or consistently faster and faster times. That's what Dr. Taguchi meant by, means by, his work means by "robustness." 0:04:16.2 BB: And what I was doing was using tools and techniques associated with his ideas to fight fires. And then, I got frustrated by that. And that led me to Dr. Deming's work, led me to revisit Dr. Deming's work. I had met him in 1990 and The New Economics came out in '93, and I had a couple of years of this frustration. The exciting thing was solving, getting involved, working with some really exciting people, and solving some very high visibility issues. But it wasn't breaking in as much as I would've liked into the, into the robustness piece. And when I came across Deming's work, I started to understand, it gave me a lot of food for thought as to why that might be the case. Now what is meant by transformation? And Dr. Deming uses that term, an individual transformed. 0:05:07.8 BB: And I had asked people that were close to him like, what is his operational definition of transformation? And when I explained it to them, I said, this is what I think he means this. And typically people say that's, they agree with that. And so my simple explanation of what I think Deming meant by transformation is as simple as, me saying to you, the professor to the student, “Andrew, how did you do on the exam?” Whereas I've said in the past, that makes me an observer of your learning to changing the question to how are, how did we do on the exam, where I become a participant? So I look at, so to me, the transformation Deming's talking about is that I no longer look around at things and see myself as separate from them. I look at myself as connected to them, and others being transformed or likewise seeing themselves as integral to what's going on, not watching it go by. Another reason I wanna bring that transformation agent piece up is part of my job, not part of my job, so I went from being mostly about Taguchi's work to mostly about Deming's work because I felt it was far more vital to focus on what Deming's talking about, the transform, how the organization and transform how the individuals operate. Another thing I wanna say there is what I think is interesting, if you look at the forward to Out of the Crisis and The New Economics. 0:06:48.1 BB: In Out of the Crisis, which I think was 1986 or so timeframe, Deming talked about the aim of this book is to help transform organizations. And then in The New Economics, he talks about the aim of this book is to help transform individuals. So he went through, he's shifted his focus from I'm trying to help organizations to I'm trying to help individuals. And that's what I'm hoping to do, interacting with you in these podcasts. So, on the one hand, I'd say to those listening, I don't know what your role is. If you're a transformation agent, that's one role. You may be an individual contributor, a senior software person, a marketing person, which means your job title does not include transforming the organization. 0:07:37.8 BB: So, what does that mean? It means some of what we're talking about may not apply to you. You may be personally excited about the Trip Report and, but it may not be your job to hold seminars within your respective organizations and go off and explain that to people. You may alienate people who think that's their job. So, I just wanna say, ask people, to be careful about what your role is in your organization. I've mentored many people and I'm used to going in and being the transformation person. And, one person I was working with, and she was all excited to wanna go share the Me-We Trip Report with her peers in this company doing software. And I said, "You can't do that". And she's like, "Well, why?" I said, "It's not your job". I said, "One is if you call a meeting to talk about transformation of the organization, or you get into that territory. I said, you're stepping on the toes of people who have that responsibility, perhaps. Or somebody's gonna say, wait, I thought we paid you to be a software engineer. Now you're over here. So, now you sound like you're astray, you're a loose cannon". 0:08:56.8 BB: Now I said, to this person, I said, now if you... There may be a place for you to say, "Hey, I wanna show you this neat solution.” If you think they're interested, ideally they ask you to show you how you did that. So, I think there's a difference when it comes to implementing these ideas, I would just advise some caution to people to not overstep their bounds and what it means to bring these ideas to the organization. So, I just wanted to say that. 0:09:32.4 AS: Yep. I just wanted to highlight the word transformation for a second. And the dictionary definition says, "transformation is a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. A transformation is an extreme radical change." And that's interesting, 'cause they say in form or appearance that you could have someone do a facelift that dramatically changes their face and the way they appear. But, has it been an internal transformation? Maybe, maybe not. 0:10:10.9 BB: Well, what's funny is, I mentioned that in previous podcasts, 'cause once a month for 17 years, I hosted an Ongoing Discussion where there'd be... I could have you on as a Thought Leader on a topic near and dear to you. And we send the announcement out and people would call in and it took a few years for Russ to agree to do it. And then, he eventually did, and he did it every January. Typically people would, every month be somebody different. But once I saw Russ's excitement by it, then I said, "Russ, every January we're gonna have you", we did it for four years, and every January I'd fly out to Philadelphia and be with him. So, the last time I did it with him, we were in his apartment. We were sitting pretty close together over the small desk. And in the sessions, the term transformation came up. So, the last session ends, we did four one-hour sessions over two days. The last session ends. And I turned off my recorder. And I said, "Russ, it just dawned on me that you and Deming, you and Dr. Deming both talk about transformation". 0:11:26.8 BB: And I said, "Dr. Deming talks about a personal transformation - I see the world differently.” And Russ looks at transformation as an attribute of a solution. That “we used to do it this way, now we do it this way.” And so, his is not transformation of an individual, but transformation of a solution. And I said, I just... I threw it out as I just, "You both used the word, but you use it differently". And I said something like, now I was waiting to see what he would say with that. And he looks at me and he says, "I see no value in that conversation", which followed by "let's go get lunch." [laughter] 0:12:22.8 AS: Exactly. 0:12:24.0 BB: And so I thought, oh, I was really looking forward to exploring that space with him. And I shared that conversation with one of his peers later that night. And he said, "He said that?" I said, "Not only did he say that", he said, "You know what? I really wasn't surprised". 'Cause Russ was... It seemed to be a little bit too abstract for him. Anyway, but it's, but he would've put it, "What is this transformation stuff?" 0:12:51.0 AS: That, it's interesting because sometimes we talk about the why isn't Deming more widely accepted and that type of thing. And I think one of the things is that he's driving for transformation versus I think majority of people are providing information and here's how you do Lean, here's how you do this, here's how you do statistics or whatever, and here's all the information. And then you use that to to make better decisions. I think Dr. Deming was never about being better in our decisions but about how do we transform the way we think. 0:13:33.9 BB: Yes. 0:13:34.8 AS: And also the second part is that the idea of shifting from transforming an organization to transforming an individual. I guess an organization doesn't transform unless the leadership has already transformed or is in a process of transformation. So, therefore targeting the individuals for trying to help them get a transformation ended up being the most important or first step, I'm guessing. 0:14:00.2 BB: Oh yeah. No, I thought it was just so neat to see that shift. I don't know if we've talked that much in these podcasts about transformation. I'll have to go back and check. But what we were doing within Rocketdyne to help differentiate, 'cause language is so important. What do we mean by transform? Because it's a very casually used term and I was trying to, you know, with colleagues at Rocketdyne trying to differentiate what Deming's use of that term. 'Cause we liked the term but the challenge became if we used it did it adopt a meaning that he didn't have in mind in which case we're off to the Milky Way. 0:14:48.8 BB: But what we did was try to differentiate physical change from mental, a physical shift from a mental shift. I guess to me a big part of what he is talking about is going from seeing parts to seeing systems to seeing things as being connected to start thinking about as Edgar Schein would as Peter Senge quoted Peter Schein, Peter Senge quoted Edgar Schein, "Culture are the assumptions we cannot see". 0:15:21.5 BB: And, so I was focusing on is we talk about, there's culture, culture comes from the assumptions. The assumptions come from beliefs and that's associated with our thinking. And that's the space that I think has... is the space to be to really believe, to really implement what Dr. Deming's talking about for all those benefits we've been talking about. And so the word, so in the training we were doing in our InThinking Roadmap, we differentiated reforming and we said "reforming is a physical change. Giving things a new name, adding more steps to the process. It's change you can, it's rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." And there's nothing wrong. You can move people together to be closer physically but that doesn't move them together mentally. So, there's a sense of we want everyone to be in the same room physically but they're... But you can hear they're in separate rooms mentally. 0:16:22.7 BB: And we've talked about this in a Me Organization I hand off something which is good to you and if it's not good, you give it back to me. If it is good, you say thank you and I'm separated. I am physically and mentally separated and there's nothing wrong with being physically separated I have to hand off to you. But how about an environment where I am mentally, we are mentally connected because we're thinking together. So if you come back to me and say, "Bill I'm having trouble getting these things together". And I say, "Well, hey I can, I..." not only do I understand that I caused that but I can possibly do something about that. That's the mental transformation piece. So there's... I look at it as there's nothing wrong. I look at it as there's a place for transforming, reforming, moving things to be closer, minimizing number of steps. Nothing wrong with that. But that's not what Deming was talking about. He was talking about transforming which is a change of how we see the world. How we hear the world. 0:17:25.3 AS: Yeah. And when I look at the System of Profound Knowledge and we look at Appreciation for a System, look at Knowledge about Variation and Understanding the Theory of Knowledge and then Psychology, I would say the one you mentioned about Appreciation of a System is the one that brings true transformation because we are taught to look so narrowly. And when we start to look at the bigger system it just blows your mind. 0:17:58.9 BB: Well, it's...it... No, I absolutely agree. I can remember in the early ‘90s I had met Dr. Deming once and I thought that's fascinating. And, I put it aside and got buried in the Taguchi stuff and then began to see the issues as I had mentioned in previous podcasts as well as today. And I started thinking there's, there's something missing. And, in the Taguchi school it was, we need more tools, more advanced tools. That's not about transformation. There's nothing in Taguchi's work that was about the transformation that Deming's talking about. And I'm not aware of that mindset. Well, I've not come across that mindset in many places. I don't see it in all the...a lot of the traditional improvement techniques whether it's Lean or Six Sigma or Operational Excellence. I don't see that, that focus. I agree. 0:19:07.6 AS: And, I bought this book Guide to Quality Control by Kaoru Ishikawa. 0:19:11.2 BB: Yep, yep. 0:19:12.6 AS: I got it in 1990. And, but it's a great example of, the objective wasn't a transformation. The objective was understand these tools and maybe that leads to a transformation, maybe not. That wasn't what he was aiming for. He was saying, "Here's the tools and here's how you can apply them". 0:19:32.2 BB: Well, I used to debate with some co-workers and his, one co-worker in particular. And his mindset was, focus on the tools, and the language, in the conversation we're having, his theory was, "Get people to apply the tools and the transformation will eventually happen". I had the same thought. 0:20:00.1 AS: If that was the case, we'd all be transformed already because we're all applying tools every day. 0:20:04.7 BB: And 'cause we, I had heard a comment, I was at a Taguchi conference and I heard a comment. And as soon as I got back to my office, and this gentleman we're both at work really, really early, we'd go down and get coffee at a quarter to six, go back and sit in his office for a couple hours and just have some great, great, great conversations. And I shared with him, I was at a Taguchi conference and somebody said, the reference was, "You wait for the... " It was something, "The journey begins after the transformation starts". And as soon as I said that, he said, "I think it's the other way around", that the transformation happens after. And I thought to myself, I knew you'd say that, because that was his attitude. Get 'em to use the tools, get 'em to use the tools, get 'em to use the tools. And I kept looking at it as, no, that does not. Yeah. I mean it doesn't mean you don't do it, you don't do something. But I think when you begin to see the world and hear the world differently as we're trying to convey, to me that's when the rubber really begins to hit the road. That's when you move. And again, as we talked, there's nothing wrong with tools and techniques, but tools and techniques are guided by your understanding of the system and the other things. And it's just not enough to be a tool head. 0:21:48.7 BB: Other things I wanted, oh, okay. [laughter] So let's go back the cloud model from number 16. And what I did not reference again, 'cause I went back and looked at it and there's what we shared, but what I wanted to add to it was, one is the idea learned from Barry Bebb that you're an individual contributor trying to get ideas up to the cloud, the cloud being the executives in their meeting space, and the idea of handing off to somebody above you. And then the idea that that transfer is going to take a few times from person to person to get someone in the cloud transformed with an appreciation. And relative to Deming's work, it involved the transformation. 0:22:34.9 BB: If it involves trying to get Dr. Taguchi's up to the cloud, ideas to the cloud, manner involve what we're talking about relative to Deming's work, fine. But the other aspect that I then neglected to mention is what Barry's talking about is, is once it gets to the cloud, then what rains down on the organization is the beginning of, in our case, transforming the organization. That's the raining down. So the cloud is not just that place on high that things get up to, but the idea of a cycle that things then start to flow down. And so, I mentioned, you know, I got back from that very first meeting with Barry and went into my boss's boss's office and that I had had that meeting, and little did I know what I was gonna learn from Barry. 0:23:26.8 BB: And learning from Barry, you either go back to... You have to be in your...
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Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 1
03/05/2024
Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 1
Did Dr. Deming forbid setting goals? Dive into this discussion about healthy goal setting, learn why your process matters, and the four things you need to understand before you start on goals. This episode is the first in a 4-part series about goal setting. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 21 and we're talking about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:26.9 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, 'tis the season for resolutions, I suppose, so I thought we could talk about organizational goal setting and sort of doing that through a Deming lens. And I was thinking about, at a recent district leadership team meeting, I put the following quote up on a slide. I said, "Goal setting is often an act of desperation." You got to watch people's faces when they see that. And to give some context, we're sort of updating our strategic plan at United Schools Network and my point in putting that on the slide as a part of strategic planning was to start a discussion on sort of what I think is healthy goal setting and how that's not typical to what I've seen across my career in schools, education organizations. 0:01:22.4 JD: And I wanted to provide a framework for the team so that anyone that's setting a goal as a part of the strategic planning process sort of had this sort of mindset as we're going through the goal setting process. I think that the typical reaction to that quote, at least in my experience, has been something like, "But I thought that goal setting was something that highly effective people or highly effective organizations do." And my basic argument is that I think that that's the intention, but it's rarely the case, whether that's individuals or organizations. And there's these, what I've come to sort of frame as four conditions that have to be met during the goal setting process. And without those, you kind of get fluff for a goal setting, probably more likely just completely disconnected from reality. I think... Yeah, go ahead. 0:02:22.5 AS: I just wanted to talk to everybody out there that's listening and viewing. I mean, I'm sure you're going through goal setting all the time and as we talk about, it's the beginning of the year right now, this is actually, we're recording this in mid-January of 2024. So it's like I've been working on what's our vision? What's our mission? What's our values? Where are we going? What is our goal? What is our long term goal? What is our short term goal? And I don't know about you guys, but for me, it gets a little confusing and round in circles sometimes and overwhelming, and then this whole idea about, that goal setting is often an act of desperation. It's like I've been working on this stuff for recently over the last week or so and then I just heard you say that and I was like, "Oh, I'm really interested to learn more." So let's go through those four conditions. 0:03:18.5 JD: Yeah, I'll get to those in a second. But I... So I'm not saying don't set goals necessarily. And people have that same reaction typically to that statement, but it's goal setting is often an act of desperation. So it's not the goal in and of themselves, but generally it's the process that you go about and the lack of sort of logic behind the goals that I'm talking about. And I know on these podcasts, many of my examples have sort of I've been banging on like State Department accountability systems and stuff like that. I'm going to continue to do that today but I think the same sort of errors happen at the school system level, at the individual school building level, at the individual teacher or principal level, it's just the stakes are higher when you're talking about states and countries, systems of education. 0:04:11.8 JD: But what I've seen is over the last two decades, certainly post-No Child Left Behind, what it seems like is that there's often these goals set and they're sort of, the targets are sort of chosen out of thin air. And then there's this whole accountability system built around those goals and then in the case of states, we then rate and rank school systems or schools based on how they perform in relation to those goals. And again, the same type of thing is happening at the school system level, at the school level but probably the state accountability systems is what most educators are familiar with when I'm talking about goals. And in Ohio, like a lot of states, we give state tests, we give them third through eighth grade. 0:04:58.5 JD: They take reading and math every year, third through eighth grade in Ohio and you have to hit this 80% benchmark in terms of the percent of kids that are proficient in your school to meet the state standard. So the first question is, why not 60%? Why not 95%? Why not 85%? Why not 82.5%? Just random, you know? And my hunch is, the first problem is that that benchmark for passage rates, if you asked 100 people at the State Department or 100 people working in public school systems in Ohio, I'm not sure if anybody could give you that answer, why 80%? So the first problem is that that target itself is chosen arbitrarily and without sort of a deep consideration. And so that's sort of where the fork initially comes... 0:05:58.3 AS: And I would say that if I look at that 80%, it's like below that and you would seem like you're really underachieving, and above that, it's like, let's be realistic here of what the system can produce. 0:06:11.6 JD: Well, it's a B, it's a B minus. You know, that's familiar, a C, you're not allowed to bring home a C, but a B is okay. So, I mean, my guess is, I don't know where that particular target came from, but my guess is it's something maybe not too far off from, "well, it's sort of a B minus" in the typical grading scale in the United States. 0:06:32.4 AS: Probably came just the way we just discussed it. 0:06:35.1 JD: I would not be entirely surprised. So a lot of the problem with goal setting and when I'm saying act of desperation, it has to do with that arbitrary nature of the goal in and of itself. And so what I've sort of told the team here is that let's put forth some conditions that came up, I mentioned four, that we should understand prior to ever setting a goal. So the first thing we want to understand is what I call the "capability of the system" under study. So in this case, we've talked about third grade reading because that's such an important time period in a student's life. 0:07:13.4 JD: The states, lots of states put a lot of emphasis on it. In Ohio, there's a third grade reading guarantee that exists in other states as well. So we'll kind of look at data in that realm. So the first one, what's the capability of that third grade reading system? The second condition is we have to understand the variation that that system produces. So what are the ups and downs in the data? What are the patterns in the data? So capability, variation is the second condition. The third condition is, is the system that we're studying, is the data stable? When we look at the patterns of the data over time, is there predictability to it? 0:08:01.8 JD: Is there stability to that data or is it all over the place? And then the third thing or sorry, the fourth thing we want is a logical answer to the question, "by what method?" So let's take sort of a deeper look at each of those four conditions, kind of unpack those a little bit. We'll use third grade reading state testing data. I have some data on a chart, but I'll share my screen in a second for those that are viewing the data. And then for those that are only listening, I'll sort of narrate what we're looking at so you'll still get some value out of the description. So you see my screen now? 0:08:42.5 AS: Yep. 0:08:43.3 JD: Okay, cool. So we've looked at these charts before in previous episodes. It's been a while. So this is what some people call a control chart. I call it a process behavior chart because it's literally a description, a visual description of a process unfolding over time. 0:09:01.7 AS: And maybe I'll just describe it. At the title it says, Ohio Third Grade Reading State Testing Proficiency Levels. On the y-axis is the percent proficiency ranging from, of course, zero to 100. And on the x-axis, we have seven school years going from the 2015 to 2016 school year all the way to 2022 to 2023 school year. And then most importantly, we have points, that's a blue line here, but the points that are showing the movement of third grade reading state proficiency levels year by year or school year by school year. Continue. 0:09:51.1 JD: Yep, that's right. That's a good description. So those blue dots are the percent of third graders that are proficient each testing year. And to give you some context, in Ohio about 125,000 third graders take that state reading test each year. One thing you'll notice is that there is no data for 2019-'20. That's because we give the test in the spring of a school year. So in the spring of 2020, schools were shut down due to the pandemic so there was no state test. So we missed one year of testing, but that's really not, that's not really pertinent to this discussion. So the other thing you'll see on here is the green line is the average of the data running through there. 0:10:38.4 JD: And those red lines that are on either side of the data are, some people call them control limits, I call them the lower and upper natural process limit. And they're based on a statistical calculation. They're not where I want the lines to be, they're where they are based on the data. And for those watching, the data points are 54.9% proficient in '15 -'16. The next year in '16 -'17, 63.8% of the third graders were proficient. In '17 -'18, 61.2% were proficient. In '18 -'19, 66.7% were proficient. In 2021, er, 2020 -'21, kind of dipped down to 51.9%. Then in '21 -'22, 59.8% of the third graders were proficient. And then in our most recent year, 62.3% of kids were proficient. 0:11:35.3 AS: So out of all those points, let's just say a high of about roughly 70% and a low of a little bit higher than 50%. 0:11:45.5 JD: Yeah. Yep. Yep. So the low was like, I think 59%. I can look back. Low was 54.9%, the high was 66.7%. 0:11:57.5 AS: Okay. 0:12:00.3 JD: And that works out to about an average of 60% across that seven-year time period. 0:12:08.3 AS: And when we talked about the 80%, is that 80% related to these test results? 0:12:13.7 JD: Sure. Yep. 0:12:13.8 AS: This is what the state is saying it should be? 0:12:18.1 JD: So the state says that in any individual school building, in any individual school system, and so as a result, in the state as a whole, 80% of third graders should meet the proficiency benchmark, basically. So in the state, on average, across the state, when you look at all the third graders, 80% of the kids are not at proficiency. It's lower than that year in and year out across the last seven years. And I should say I picked the starting point as 2015-'16, that was the first year of a brand new test. So it's really a new testing system as of that year. And then it stayed pretty consistent in terms of what the kids are being asked to do. Prior to that, the test was a different format. So it was sort of like a different system. 0:13:04.6 AS: And this is from all schools, so it's Ohio, it's not your school? 0:13:09.6 JD: Right. So this is all Ohio public schools. 0:13:12.9 AS: Okay. 0:13:13.9 JD: Yep. Which are required to give the state test once a year. So, like I said, beginning with this spring 2016 testing season, Ohio began administering this new state test, which is why I started with 2015- '16. And that's where the data starts. So again, schools need to have at least 80% of their students score proficient or higher in each tested area, including reading. So what we're doing here is sort of looking at that first condition. We're trying to figure out what's the capability of this third grade reading testing system. And when I say system, I'm literally talking about everything that could impact third grade reading test scores. 0:14:00.4 JD: Now, I mean, you could almost make an infinite list, but I'm talking about the actual students in Ohio public schools, the third graders themselves, their teachers, the various reading curricula that's being used in schools, technology related to reading programming, supplemental materials, the schools themselves, how the schools themselves are organized. And you can go on and on about any number of in-school and out-of-school variables that might impact a third graders performance on a state test. 0:14:37.2 AS: And I think about resources like between schools and parents and teachers and administrators, everybody's putting forward... Putting forth resources to try to get to this. 0:14:46.9 JD: Yep. The reading standards themselves, the reading test, that's all a part of the third grade reading system. And basically, for those that are viewing the video or heard the description, the capability is outlined in the process behavior chart. I mean, that's literally what the process behavior chart doing. It's, it's, it's visualizing the capability of that third grade reading system. So one thing that's pretty clear when you look at this seven years worth of data is that it's very unlikely that the state of Ohio is incapable of hitting that 80% mark. Now, seven years of data is not 20 years of data, but we, in none of the seven years that have occurred have we gotten anywhere close to that 80% mark. So that's one thing we can see. 0:15:39.9 AS: Sorry, what was the conclusion that you just said? 0:15:42.8 JD: Well, we're, we can see from the data here, even though it's only seven data points, which is something to work with, but it's not 20 data points, it's not 25 data points but it's pretty likely that the third grade reading system, that we're incapable as a state of hitting 80%... 0:16:00.9 AS: Okay, so the capability of the system, the goal of the, of the state representatives that set the 80% seems to be slightly outside of the capability of the system. 0:16:14.4 JD: I'd say more than slightly. 0:16:15.8 AS: More than slightly. 0kay. 0:16:16.9 JD: Yeah, I'd say it likely... I would go as far to say, I try to talk scientifically so it's, we are likely incapable of hitting that 80% mark as a state. 0:16:26.5 AS: Okay. Got it. 0:16:27.7 JD: Not impossible. 0:16:29.0 AS: That's point number one. 0:16:30.5 JD: Yeah, well, and these red natural process limits actually tell us what we could expect from this particular system based on what we've seen so far. So those process limits, kind of way to think about them is as you get more data points, especially as you get 20, 24 data points, they sort of start to solidify. So an individual data point has less of an impact on the limits. So I would call them a little bit soft right now, an individual data point kind of could have an outsized impact because we don't have tons of data but what these red lines are telling us is that our reading system, this third grade reading system is capable of hitting rates somewhere between 41%, where that lower line is, and 79%, where that upper line is. 0:17:19.8 JD: That's why I say that the 80% is unlikely, rather than impossible. It's technically within the capabilities of this system as illustrated by this process behavior chart. But based on the way the limits are constructed, the limits come from the data itself, how the data, not only the magnitude of the individual data points, but it's also taking into account the point to point variation. So time is an important factor in that formula that's used to calculate the limits. And so based on how the limit is constructed, there's about a 3 in 1000 chance that we would hit that 80% mark. So that's why I say... 0:18:03.4 AS: So you're saying there's a chance? [laughter] 0:18:06.5 JD: Very unlikely, very unlikely, right? So that's capability, that, this, that's sort of looking at the chart and talking about how capable is our system. The next thing we want to look at... Well, the last thing you could say is that that 60% average across those seven years is a pretty good descriptor, especially as you look at where the dots fall, some above, some below, that's a pretty good descriptor of the overall capability of the system, that's 60% proficiency. 0:18:37.6 AS: Right. 0:18:39.3 JD: So the second thing we'll take a look at is using the chart to understand the variation in our system. So again, we have seven data points. We just mentioned that they're bouncing around this average of 60%. And actually with seven data points, you have three that are below the line and four that are above. So about as even as you could be between how many points are below the line, how many points are above the line. So if you describe the year to year test results starting back in '15-'16, they increase and then decrease and then increase and then decrease and then increase and then increase again, a little bit in that last of the seven years. 0:19:27.8 JD: So when you look at the data, there's no sort of signals in those patterns that indicate that the increases or decreases are of significance. So in the Deming language, probably most people aren't familiar with the "common cause" language, but basically it's just saying that the thousands of variables that impact these test results are part of a common cause system. Just like, they're bouncing around, but the bouncing around is not meaningful. But what actually happens is, you know, inevitably when people describe these results, they'll pick two years. Let's say they look at, well, let's even say they look at the last three years and people will say, "Oh, we've increased the third grade reading test scores 'cause they went up a little bit from 2021 to 2022 to 2023." 0:20:19.5 JD: But again, the increases are meaningless when you're viewing this through the sort of understanding variation, knowledge about variation Deming lens. So, but again, even though seven data points isn't a lot of data, it's pretty clear from what we see so far that that, setting that 80% goal, holding schools and school systems accountable from a state perspective, it's not having any impact on the outcome of this third grade reading system. So that's what I mean to connect back to this goal setting is often an act of desperation. It's a hope and a dream that 80% of kids in this system are gonna meet this proficiency standard. It's just not happening by setting a goal. 0:21:10.2 AS: Right. 0:21:15.4 JD: The third thing is looking at stability. So we want to know if the results are predictable in this particular system. So the thing to think about here is if the system is in fact predictable, it means that the results are sort of performing as consistently as the system is capable of making it. And this Ohio third grade reading system is in fact a stable system. So based on these results so far, we can reasonably expect that future results will continue to bounce around this current average. That's just what's gonna happen. So the results might be a little bit below the average, maybe they'll remain a little bit above the average, but in all likelihood, unless something else of significance changes, this is what we can expect from this system....
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Get Off Of My Cloud: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 16)
02/20/2024
Get Off Of My Cloud: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 16)
"The Cloud" is a metaphor for the top level of corporate authority - the CEO, CFO, CTO and maybe some Vice President positions. And if you're trying to transform an organization, your ideas need to penetrate the Cloud - but how? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about influencing others with the aim of transformation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 16, and the title is, Get Off of My Cloud. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.5 Bill Bellows: Hey. Hey, hey. [laughter] Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, get Off of My Cloud. Yeah. Alright, so here we are, 2024. So before we get to the Cloud, some opening remarks. And in particular looking at session 15, which is soon to be released. And one thing I... What I tell people is, what's exciting about understanding Deming's work is how revealing, how you see the world differently, and Dr. Deming used the metaphor of a lens. But it's not only what you see, but what you hear. 0:01:19.5 AS: Right. 0:01:22.3 BB: And, and I tell people I can go into an organization and within a few minutes between what I see and what I hear, I can get a pretty good sense, is it a ME or WE organization. And we think back to the comment I shared in episode 15 where the Boeing executive said, "Let's be honest," to the room full of 300 plus internal audit people who just do great, great work. 0:01:54.4 BB: I mean, if they didn't do great work, why would they be there? Everyone in our organization does great work, otherwise, why would they be around? But when they said to them, "Let's be honest, we don't make the airplanes." And I thought, that's right up there with my wife saying to me, "Look at what your son did." 0:02:22.4 BB: My son? Or is it, look at what our son did. Another giveaway expression is, we're gonna do a root cause analysis or RRCA, which is Relentless Root Cause Analysis. Well, every, and from a Deming perspective, instead of talking about a root cause, we can say there's root causes, and there's... They're dozens, hundreds of root causes, or sorry, common causes, common causes. And then every now and then there's a special cause. 0:03:01.0 BB: But even when a special cause appears so does a bunch of common causes. So from a Deming perspective there's never a root cause. So I... One poke I have for people that like to think in terms of root cause, 'cause they have this sense of, you can explain everything by a series of connected root causes. This cause leads... It's like the five whys. That this leads to this leads to this. But it's always, this leads to that, this leads to, and it's singular strands. And I think of it like a strand of spaghetti and everything is along some pathway. And I thought, no, that's not the model Deming had in mind. Deming had in mind a multitude of strands that are all woven together that you can't... What comes out is a bunch of contributions, not just one thing. So my poke at people like to believe in root cause phenomenon is, "If life can be explained by a series of root causes, then why do you need two parents? Why isn't it a single parent?" Sorry. 0:04:18.9 BB: I just finished the fifth cohort at Cal State Northridge in a eight-week class as part of an 18-month program where the students, we start with about 30, by the time it gets to me there may be 24 or so. And one course after another, after another, it's a very rigorous program. And I do a class called Seminar in Quality Management. And I love at the beginning of the course when I ask them about, if all the beads are red, if all the red beads are eliminated, can improvement, can still go on to, all those things we've talked about in this program. And I have them write essays on it, and it's so neat to see where they are in the beginning and where they are at the end. 0:05:07.1 BB: And in the beginning they'll be talking about human error. And so every time I see human error, I just write back, is it human error or is it system error? And one student in the class commented at the end of the course of what she learned, she said, No one had ever pointed that out to her. And she distinctly remembers the very first time I said that it was like, but wait a minute. And then it made more and more sense and I thought, yeah, I mean not... Is there such a thing as a human error? Well, Deming would say that 94 plus percent comes from the system. Another cute story, I used to host a monthly conference call for 17 years, every month for 17 years. 0:06:02.0 AS: Wow. 0:06:02.8 BB: And featured on the call was a thought leader, Russ Ackoff did it four years in a row. He became the January thought leader. And generally it was random, different people. But then when it got to Russ, it was every January Russ did it. And I would go out and stay with him and be in the room with him and the distribution list was at one point in time, 5000 people around the world, that I had somehow interacted with. And the announcement would go off out every month, and it would say, this month's ongoing discussion with thought leaders, is Andrew Stotz, Andrew's gonna talk on this topic. Please find attached his thought piece. You can join us. And there were four opportunities to call in on 12 to one and one to two on the last Thursday and Friday of the month. And there was four different opportunities for the audience to engage with Andrew, and it wasn't a presentation by you. The protocol was they would read the article, then they would say to you, Andrew, on page five, you said this can you clarify? So I said to them, it's not a presentation, it's a conversation. 0:07:08.9 BB: So a friend had in mind, somebody that he worked with as a thought leader. I said, okay, let me, She'd just written a book. And the book title was along the lines of Think Like a Champion, so I read the book and it's sports stories, all these sports stories. Turns out she has an advanced degree in sports psychology and she was hired by his company as a coach. And throughout the book, her story is about people contacting her, I need help with this. I need help with this. I need help with this. A lot of these people are in sales, I need help, I need help with this. So I read the book cover to cover, and I started to notice a pattern. It was all individuals. I need help, I need help. And so when I got on the phone with her and the role of the phone call was to talk about the book, talk about the phone call, let her know what the overall strategy of what we're trying to do with these calls, promote a word as of Deming's work and working together, all that stuff. 0:08:20.6 BB: And then with that, see if that fit, what if she felt, in fact, what I had in mind was that there's things in there she could contribute, but there's things in there that might be slippery. So I shared with her that I had a friend who was a high school coach for the Valencia Vikings and I bumped to him one day in a park. And he's walking towards me and he is wearing a T-shirt, and across the top are the letters V-K-N-G-S. So I'm looking at the letters and I said, I don't get it. To which the author says, there's no I in team, and that's what it was V-K-N-G-S. And so she beat me to the punchline. So I said, so you're aware of that story? 0:09:15.0 BB: She says, oh yeah. I said, "Your book is filled with sports stories." She says, "Yes." I said, "Did you ever consider that story for the book?" She says, "it really wouldn't fit." I said, "that's right." I said, "that is it, it doesn't." I said, "'cause your book is all about the I and not about the team." So at the end of the call, I said you know, when I got your book, I said the cover was revealing. And this is what I find, going back to language. You can be in a meeting and you can hear how people think, which then leads to how they act and you can't separate, you can hear that. So I said, "I looked at title of your book," which is something like, Think Like A Champion. And I said, "as soon as I saw that title," I thought. But I said, well I told her, "I said, there's a lot of good stuff in here." I said, "but, and I'm not saying everyone hears what I hear, but I don't want you to be caught short on that." She said okay. So then I said the title was kind of a giveaway of what the book was really about. She said, "well, what would've been a more appropriate title?" I said, "Think Like a Contributor." 0:10:34.5 BB: And so we are within our respective organizations, we're one of many contributors, we don't do it all by ourself, we contribute to the results and we talked last time about... Sorry. 0:10:47.1 AS: And that's an interesting point because that's a, maybe a difference between let's say American style thinking and Japanese style thinking, where Japanese may see themselves clearly as a contributor in a system. Whereas Americans, we like to think of ourselves as a unique person that fits into a certain place in this world. 0:11:08.9 BB: And I won the game, I won the game and I made it happen. And, um, but sure, and I've heard that about Japanese management, that it's more like, I am humbled and honored to be your executive and there's a real... And it comes across that it's not just talk, there's a real sense of humility and honor to be in this position as opposed to a sense of I'm the smartest guy in the room. 0:11:39.4 AS: Servant Leader. 0:11:41.4 BB: Yes, very much so. So, next thing I wanna bring up is, we talked last time about Myron Tribus's his comment, management works on the system, people work in the system, and the theme was making a difference from where you are and I mentioned that this gentleman came in, was one of our classes, and he wanted to, how often I met with our president. And I said, not very often. He said, oh, it's really important, you gotta go meet with him. And I said, "well what if I spent time talking with senior people at NASA or senior people in the Pentagon," which I did. And a mistake I made, a minor perhaps a minor error that somebody may or may not have caught. So I said, that I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to speak at the Army's largest annual logistics conference back in the 2000s. And the invite came from a senior officer on the staff of General Anne Dunwoody, who went on to become the Army's first woman, Four Star General, and so in the podcast number 15 I said, I was invited and spoke with the Army's first Four Star General, it was the Army's first woman Four Star general. 0:12:57.2 BB: So this is a clarification. I also talk about how pragmatism is being practical, but I think is, if you're trying to introduce these ideas into your respective organizations making a difference where you are, I think it's important to realize that everyone is acting as if they're being practical. And if practical means work on things that are bad to make them good and stopping, that’s their, that to them is practical. Now, from a Deming perspective to not work on things that are good, to make them better to improve integration - that is practical, but it might not be practical where you are. And I mentioned, I had a Lean Management journal article that talked about that, and I couldn't remember the title. The title is Profits, Pragmatism, and the Possibilities of Possessing Other Eyes. I told you I like alliteration. 0:13:56.6 AS: Alliteration. 0:13:57.5 BB: Alright, so what is an application? We start where you are. And I would say an application, first of all, relative to an application, it's thinking, can I do this by myself? Do I need help? Do I see opportunities to reduce losses? And it's one thing to see opportunities to do something. It's a whole 'nother thing to realize that the timing might not be right. I may not have the support that I need. I may not have the funding that I need. There could be other priorities. So when I would tell people I was mentoring to see opportunities is a really big thing, whatever those are. An opportunity to shift from managing actions to managing interactions and realizing that addition doesn't work, that things are not adding up and you're realizing, holy cow, there's some opportunities for synergy here. There's opportunities to work on things which are going well to prevent the red beads, work on things that are well to improve integration. 0:15:05.3 BB: There could be opportunities to stop doing incentives within your sphere of influence, to stop handing out awards to your people on your staff. Had a friend who just became a manager years ago and I had been mentoring him and within a few weeks of him being manager in operations, he came to me and he said that somebody on his team helped him do something and he gave him a $10 lunch coupon. I didn't say anything, I just let it pass. A couple weeks later, he comes to me and he says the same guy helped him again and then reached out his hand, he says, “Where’s my coupon?” I said, “I was waiting to see how long that would take.” And Andrew, that happened 25 years ago, if I was to have breakfast with him tomorrow, it would come up. Every time we meet, which is not that often, he lives a lot too far. 0:16:05.5 BB: And it was just so cool how, as I said let’s just see how this goes. So the idea is that what can you do from where you are to not pass on the pain? And so it may be flowing down to you, but maybe you, if you’ve got a team, can stop it from where you are. Maybe. Maybe you can’t. I mentioned Jim Albaugh, who went on to become CEO of Boeing Commercial, CEO of Boeing Defense. He was my boss for a number of years at the beginning of his doing these amazing things. And one day after we had some really stellar applications of Taguchi’s ideas with Deming’s improving integration, the hammers went away and things came together. Performance, we had an incredible advances in engine performance and integration. It was really cool. So he was really thrilled by all that. So I go, I would meet with him once a month and I’d poke him. 0:17:10.0 BB: So one day I went in and I said, “I wanna bring something to your attention.” And he looks at me with this smile. And I said, “I wanna put something on the table. And I’m not saying you’ve gotta do it now, but don’t ever tell me I didn’t bring it to your attention.” And he is like, “okay, Bill, what?” [chuckle] I said, “we’ve got to get rid of incentives, rewards and recognition and performance appraisals.” And then he just rolls his eyes. I said, I says, “I know you can’t do this.” And I said, “but these are ankle weights on how fast we can run as an organization.” But I knew that was... I mean, he was, at the time he was a VP, even when he was CEO, he can’t get rid of those. Those are such an institution. But I just wanted to go on record with him. I just chose the moment to go on record with him knowing the limits, but I wanted to be upfront and honest with him that if I don’t go to those events, this is why. 0:18:18.8 BB: And so it’s just making a difference from where you are and sometimes you speak up, sometimes you just keep your mouth shut. Another thing I encourage people I mentor is, if you’re out managing interactions and things are improving, you’ve improved integration. Is that, my advice to them is go about it quietly be the change you wanna see in your organization. Be the change you wanna see in the world, to quote Gandhi, I said, but unless your boss asks you how that happened, don’t explain it to them. 0:18:53.2 BB: I said, if they ask you how did you know how to do that, that’s your opportunity. But if you’re not asked that, I mean, in other words, don’t do it expecting to be asked for what, you know, to be complimented. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. Use it as a learning experience. Be deliberate about it if you’re gonna go off and do it. But if you’re doing it to get praise, you’ve missed the whole point. If you’re doing it to get your boss’s attention, you’ve missed the whole point. What I tell people is, do it’ And maybe at some point in time, they say, ’'ve noticed a pattern. Tell me how you do this. ’I've got a manager I work with, with a client, was asking me about how to praise someone. And I said, one is, there’s nothing wrong with one-on-one in the office saying, your contributions were enormous. I said, do’'t ever imply without you, we could not have done this. You’re a contributor. But I said, more important than that is, ask them, how did you know how to do that? Where else could we apply this? 0:20:07.4 BB: I said, I think that is far more, I think being asked those questions are far more thrilling than a pat on the back. Back in ‘93, it was '92, I was nominated to be an engineer of the year at the Rocketdyne, which is a really big deal. I was one of a dozen finalists. And the vice president of engineering invited everyone into his office to ask us a bunch of questions. And he used our answers for the engineer of the year dinner. And what I found out from the others is, he never asked any of us, how can your work, what is your vision, Andrew, for how your work can impact the organization? And I thought that, that never came up. And I would have been thrilled, my whole interest in going through this, 'cause I knew at that time about awards and recognition, but my hope was that, that could create visibility and help me further the cause. 0:21:13.8 AS: Make an impact. 0:21:14.8 BB: This is... But another thing I would say is, I have my knuckles rapped this way a few times. And when I would try to explain to the executives how we achieve these solutions. And once one of the VPs, my VP, his comment to me was, he was watching me, he came by to see the slides I was gonna use. And he says, Bill, don't be tutorial with us. And I thought, oh, man. So what I tell people is, a staff meeting is not the time. This is really important. If you're trying to explain in a staff meeting how you accomplish something, what makes it bad is, even if you're invited, a staff meeting is not a classroom. When I walk into a classroom as the instructor, I walk in, and I know what my role is, and everybody else knows what their role is. But when you walk into a staff meeting, and you're about to present something you did, if it comes across as being tutorial, what makes that offending is, who appointed you to be the professor? But if you have a separate meeting and, but it's just these nuances, can really get in the way, which leads to tonight's feature, the Cloud Model... 0:22:42.6 AS: Before you go to tonight's feature, I'd like to go back in time to November of 1965. It was a tumultuous year. In fact, it was February of 1965 that Malcolm X was assassinated in America. 1963, November, John F. Kennedy Jr. Was assassinated. America was going through a lot of turmoil, and the Rolling Stones were the bad boys of rock and roll. In November of 1965, I was four months old, so I don't remember this personally, but the Rolling Stones came out with a song, and it was called Get Off Of My Cloud. And I just wanted to put it in context, because for us older guys, we know that this lyrics, Get Off Of My Cloud, is referring to this song where they're oftentimes saying, "hey, hey, you, you, get Off Of my Cloud." So with that introduction, tell us why you named it, this episode, Get Off Of My Cloud. 0:23:44.3 BB: Well, you're not gonna believe how apropos that, that intro was. Oh, this is so cool....
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Commit to Transformation: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 20)
02/13/2024
Commit to Transformation: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 20)
What does it mean to "commit" to transformation? What does "transformation" mean? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss Point 14 of Dr. Deming's 14 Points for Management - with John's interpretations for educators. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 20, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.1 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, we're on principle 14 today, which is Commit to Transformation. So I'll just start by outlining the principle itself. So Commit to Transformation - "clearly define top management's commitment to continual improvement of quality and its obligation to implement the 14 principles, plan and take action to put everyone in the organization to work to accomplish the transformation. Transformation is everyone's job. Start with education for all and positions of leadership." So, basically, we've been through these 14 principles, and the final one is, put it into action, basically. So I think a good place to start is just remembering or recalling what does Deming mean by transformation? And he's saying transformation is a change in state from one thing to another. So we're going from one thing to something completely new, and there's these 14 principles that help us get us there. 0:01:34.9 JD: And of course, when Deming was talking, he was talking about the prevailing system of management and changing into this new system of management and about this sort of, older version, this prevailing style from 30 years ago, which still is the prevailing style today. He said something that was really interesting. He said, it's a modern invention that cedes competition between people, teams, departments, students, schools, universities. And so when... What he is really saying is that when you transform your organization, you work together as a system. And he is advocating for cooperation and transformation. And I think of course, people are gonna say, yes, absolutely, we need to cooperate. And that's, that's the way that everybody wins. But in reality, I think that's not always what's happening in organizations because I think what you need in order to go about this switch is what Deming called Profound Knowledge. 0:02:41.5 JD: And most people don't have an understanding of, of what that is. So what happens I think is that the prevailing style of management, it's rooted in those management myths we've talked about before we started the principles. And it's sort of this false foundation for your organization. But that's where I think most people, people are. And so part of this commitment is then if we're gonna commit to transformation, there's some things that leaders have to realize, and then there's some steps you have to take if you're gonna sort of go down this path. I think the things that you have to realize as a leader, and these are things that are true for me as I continue this process and my organization is number one, there's gonna be a struggle. There's gonna be this struggle over every one of the 14 principles because it's so different from what we're doing today. 0:03:39.1 JD: I think another thing we're gonna have to realize is that this can't be one or two people at your organization. The entire leadership structure at your organization, it's gonna have to be educated in this new way of thinking, and then you're gonna have to bring along the entire organization. And this can be a challenge because if you are the person doing this at your organization, you very well may be fairly new to this new way of thinking, this new philosophy yourself, unless you've brought in someone externally to help you through this. And even if you do that probably for a good portion of the time, you're gonna have to be leading this before you may be feeling like an expert yourself. And that was definitely true in my case. But I think the emphasis in this initial introduction is that you gotta get that system's view and you have to help people understand the theory of variation. 0:04:43.0 JD: So that has to be sort of initial part of that introduction. And then of course, you have to take your organizational context into account and so how this sort of rolls out or plays out, it's certainly gonna vary by size of organization, by organizational type. But the good thing is, is regardless of size or type of organization, industry, sector, whatever, Dr. Deming offered several steps to get started in this process. So I think maybe as a start to how you commit to the transformation, if you wanna go down this route, it might be helpful to sort of outline those steps first. 0:05:24.8 AS: Definitely. And it just, the idea of everybody, being committed to the transformation, like this isn't something where you can say, well, maintenance department doesn't wanna do it. [chuckle] 0:05:36.4 JD: Right. 0:05:38.3 AS: Or the third grade teachers don't wanna do it, but the sixth grade do. So that's... Of course things can start in kind of piecemeal as they they go, but it is a true transformation. The other thing that's interesting is if you have a situation where you have been through a transformation as a unit at a school or as a company, it's also possible that a new person could come in and destroy that transformation real fast. And I have an example of a company that I've experience with where they had implemented the Deming principles to an extreme level, and the CEO resigned eventually. He was older, a new one came in and he said, I'm not in that school, I'm not in that camp. I got a new idea. I got a different idea. And it went right back to the prevailing system of management. 0:06:35.9 JD: Wow. That's really interesting. On the first point, I think, you're not necessarily gonna get all the departments or everybody at once. Obviously it's gonna be a process. On the second point, I think that actually is a good segue into step one because basically what he says, and I've translate this for education environment or education audience, but he basically says the school board and the superintendent have to study the 14 principles. Understand them, agree on a strategic direction, and then make a deliberate decision to adopt and implement the new philosophy, so why bring this up now? As I follow on to your comment there is that it seems to me that well, assuming that this was a company that had a board, then what that board should have done is include something about the System of Profound Knowledge and the job description for the new CEO. That's interesting that they didn't make that a point of emphasis. 0:07:41.5 AS: I think what's fascinating to me about it is that I think on the one hand, cooperation and working together and not living in an environment of fear is kind of our normal state, I would argue, but society just pushes us in so many different ways, that all of a sudden you find yourself in a very different state. And another example of that is how KPIs have taken Thailand in particular by storm, and now all of a sudden you have people who have been very cooperative in the way that they work together, all of a sudden pitted against each other, and it's so painful for them, because it's not the way that they naturally operate. 0:08:33.5 JD: Interesting. 0:08:35.3 AS: And so yeah, it's just... I think you gotta work. And I guess the thing you're saying about the board is that you really gotta work to make sure that this is something precious, and you could lose it in a blink of an eye if you don't... 0:08:52.4 JD: Yeah, yeah, and I'm not hiring a CEO obviously, but I have started including... I don't use System of Profound Knowledge, I don't use that terminology when I write job descriptions for people on my team, but what I do say is, what we're looking for is someone that can think in systems, understand variation and data, run small experiments to find out what works and do that with sort of like while working with people in a cooperative fashion, so I've sort of incorporated the four elements of the System of Profound Knowledge in the job descriptions for people that I'm hiring on my team, so then when I actually do use System of Profound Knowledge, describe the elements once they're on board, it's not a surprise 'cause it was a part of that hiring process. And part of that, even the job description itself, but step one basically is so that, you know, if you do have it at your organization, it includes both board and sort of the senior leadership being bought into that philosophy and that's not a guarantee, but at least if both components have that then if that CEO moves on, maybe it's more likely to continue on in your organization. 0:10:10.4 JD: That's step one. Step two is interesting, Deming basically said that the board and the senior leader or the school board and the superintendent in my case, must feel he said a "burning satisfaction", sorry, "burning dissatisfaction" with past procedures and a strong desire to transform their management approach, so it's almost like you almost have to be hitting your head against the wall, you have to be looking for something, because what he goes on to say is that you have to have the courage to break with tradition, even to the point of exile among peers, as you're going through this transformation process, because from an outsider looking in, if you're adopting the Deming philosophy, much of the stuff is gonna look so different that people are gonna be asking you, what exactly are you doing? And this has happened repeatedly. Not, not, I don't think that to that extent that I've been exiled, but for sure people will be like, well, I don't understand why you're just not setting a goal, just tell people what the goal is and then let them get out of the way and let them achieve it. That's not the approach with the Deming philosophy. So you have to... 0:11:33.2 JD: Again, for me, it wasn't exile, but constant pushback, questioning, why are you saying this, why are you operating in this way? I don't get it, why don't we just tell departments what their goals are and let them all meet them, those types of things, the typical way of operating, and it does take a lot of time and energy to explain that, but that's a part of the process. 0:11:55.1 AS: It reminds me of working with alcoholics and drug addicts, generally, they don't turn around until they've hit a bottom. 0:12:04.8 JD: Yeah. Yeah. [overlapping conversation] 0:12:05.4 AS: And they have a burning desire. 0:12:05.6 JD: Learning to satisfaction. I think that's right, and I think from the standpoint of someone that's really motivated to look for something new, look for a different way of doing things, that's not all together a bad thing, that they've sort of hit rock bottom. Step three is, again, it seems common-sensical. But even here, even as I was going through this, it was sort of a reminder of a number of things that I need to do on a regular basis, and one of the things he said in step three is that once that sort of senior leadership team, the board, the superintendent, whatever that make up is that your organization is that then you have to go out and explain, whether it's through community meetings or seminars or whatever to sort of a critical mass school system staff, he said, students, parents, why you're going on this transformation, why you're... This change is necessary. And then actually educating your people across the organization, what is this philosophy, what is the System of Profound Knowledge? What are the 14 principles? What are the typical ways that we work? Why are those management myths don't work. 0:13:36.4 JD: You gotta go out and do all of these things. It's gonna be a completely new language, a completely new operating for most people, and it has to be a part of the process, bringing people along and this... I think this isn't an overnight process, obviously. Deming said no instant pudding. He generally said, I think transformation was a five to 10 year process, depending on the size of your organization, but I've definitely found that to be true. There's fits and starts, there are some things that you seem to be able to sort of put in place pretty quickly, and then there's other things where there's a couple steps forward, a couple steps back, and you gotta bring people along, people turn over, you gotta re-educate those types of things. So it's a process. It's definitely a process. 0:14:27.4 AS: I was thinking about. I can't remember whether I heard Dr. Deming said that or whether it's somebody, or I read it or somebody told me, but that somebody asked him, "How long has this transformation take?" And he said, "Well, it can take as long as 10 years or as short as 10 years." 0:14:49.8 JD: [laughter] Yeah, so no matter what. It's a significant amount of time. There's no doubt about it. Step four, he basically says that every job and every activity within the school system or your organization is a part of this process that can be improved. And he talks about using flow diagrams for important processes within your organization so that people can see that this is about optimizing that whole system, and not the individual stages. But he really wanted people to see visually, even if it's just a simple sort of flow diagram, how one stage connects to other stages for us, maybe it's the teaching and learning process going from kindergarten to first to second to third grade. 0:15:37.3 JD: That again, seems obvious that that should be how the system works, what I think is less typical and common is actually doing activities from a systems thinking lens, where you are making sure people understand that the kindergarten teacher is also serving the first grade teaching team in addition to the students and families in their classroom and simple things like we have two elementary schools, two middle schools, do the middle school principals leave their school at some point and go to the elementary schools on their side of town and introduce themselves to the fifth graders, so things as simple as that is what I'm talking about. 0:16:28.8 JD: There are lots of other things. For sure. But how often does that happen? In some places, it may be fairly typical, in other places, it's not happening at all, but in the case, even where it's happening, do you explain why it is that you're doing this activity. Are people making that connection that they're part of a bigger system. I once consulted at a very small rural school district here in Ohio, and when we talked about systems, they just had two buildings, they had a sort of an elementary building and then a seven through twelve building. And talking to people, they said, I've never been to the high school - an elementary teacher, I've never been to the high school. And so people may say, Well, that seems strange. But when you were in the school system, it is very difficult sometimes to get out, so you actually have to make it... The leader has, or the leaders have to facilitate this, bring this about... There has to be some coordination of efforts, so that's step four. I think step five is you have to teach and then utilize the Plan-Do-Study Act cycle. You have to use it as a procedure to learn how to improve the organization's processes. 0:17:48.1 JD: I think that we've talked to your... And the Deming community is familiar with the Plan-Do-Study Act cycle, PDSA cycle, but most people aren't. Most people don't have this... Some people might call it sort of like a scientific thinking approach to testing ideas and see if they work, but most people don't approach change like that. They just try something, there's no system for collecting data, a lot of times it's just sort of a mass implementation, there's no process for testing on a small scale, seeing if it works, getting feedback on a short time frame, like a week or two weeks or three weeks, and then trying that next test. So that's, that's in terms of putting the Deming philosophy into action, I think that's a critical part using the PDSA cycle. 0:18:44.0 AS: Yeah, I'm just thinking about my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, and we're just about to start our round 13. And so having taught it 12 times before, but part of our PDSA, part of our process of understanding the cycle is that, at the end of every bootcamp, every single student gives us their recommendations for improvement. And we do it through a survey where they're all excited at that moment in time, because they're at the end of the process, but they've gotta go through the survey. And they give some great ideas, and then we capture all that into a document, and then we go through it and we see there's some ideas that just seem like obvious we should have implemented that a long time ago, or we knew. And then, so we say, okay, how do we implement this? But then there's others that are also a question. Right now, one of the ideas is to do one of our class sessions per week as a live session. 0:19:52.4 AS: And it's the feedback session where students get feedback, and in that case, people from outside can watch it. And it has some benefits. There's a marketing angle to it for us, but also, there is the excitement of showcasing your work and all that. But on the other hand, it could be terrifying and it could be that it doesn't do what we think. So in the end, we asked what is it that we think we would want from this as an outcome? And then we said, why don't we just try it one night in week four? And so we've set up that we're gonna do it on one night, we're gonna prep them ahead of time, and we're gonna see how it goes. And if it produces the effect that we want, which is, we think it's gonna up the intensity in, all of that, that it's gonna work. But if not, then we'll abandon it. And so that's a little bit of our little PDSA thinking on how do we test out an idea and see the result of it? 0:21:00.5 JD: Yeah, I love that. I love that because it's not... We're gonna just do this new thing in our course. We got this feedback, we're gonna just do it. We're gonna actually test it on a very short cycle, one session and get the feedback back right away to see if this works. And if it does, we're gonna do more of it. And what's likely gonna happen is you're probably gonna learn something, and you're probably gonna have to sort of change the approach a little bit, and you're gonna do it again and again and again until this is... Assuming the feedback is positive, then you'll do more and more of it. And, you know, if it doesn't work, then you'll learn that in a very quick, easy fashion and you'll know not to do, you know, more of that thing in your course. 0:21:44.2 JD: So I think that's the exact type of thinking that Deming was trying to get us to do, to improve our organizations, versus this sort of plan, plan, plan. We're planning these grand changes, then we put them in place, and then they don't work out like we thought, and then all of a sudden, we've had this significant investment in time and/or resources and sunk costs. And maybe we even keep doing it because we feel like we can't make a change at that point. So that sounds... 0:22:12.1 AS: Iterate, iterate. 0:22:12.2 JD: Iterate. Yep. Small, small, small test of change. So that was step five is use the PDSA cycle. Step six I really love, he says, Deming says, "Transformation is everyone's job." So no matter who you are in the school...
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Start Where You Are: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 15)
02/06/2024
Start Where You Are: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 15)
In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about where and how to start using your new knowledge when you're learning Deming. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today in episode 15 is Start Where You Are. Bill, take it away. 0:00:25.0 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And for our audience, you may notice there's a different background. This is not a green screen. This is actually a bedroom at my in-laws in upstate New York. Hey, Andrew, I've been listening to some of the podcasts, and I've collected some data on each of them. Would you like to see it? 0:00:53.0 AS: Yeah, definitely. 0:00:54.2 BB: I've got a control chart, I've got a control chart for each of the 14 sessions for how many times I say, holy cow. 0:01:02.9 AS: Holy moly. 0:01:04.4 BB: In each episode. Yeah, and the process is stable. [laughter] So I say holy cow, I think the average is 2.2, and the upper control limit is... I'm just kidding. 0:01:25.4 AS: You're a sick man. 0:01:27.7 BB: But I think outside of this podcast, I don't know if I use that expression. And I don't know where it comes from, I just, it must be... 0:01:37.7 AS: Did you grow up around cows? You said you're near where you grew up. 0:01:44.4 BB: Yeah, I am staying at my wife's sister's place. And my wife's father, when I met her, had cows in his backyard. And we used to chase the cows. When they got out, we would chase them. And let me tell you, they move fast. [laughter] And I came down several times, severe cases of poison ivy, trying to herd this one cow that was always escaping. And I thought, oh, I'll tell my father, let me go out and I can scare this cow back. Now, no the cow got the best of me. I got covered with mud and went home with poison ivy. Those things, they move fast. So that's my only personal experience with cows. [laughter] 0:02:33.5 AS: Did the cows ever go to a nearby church? 0:02:38.9 BB: No. 0:02:39.2 AS: To become holy. 0:02:40.1 BB: That's a good point? I don't... Yeah, how do those words tie together? I don't know. 0:02:43.4 AS: I don't know. 0:02:45.4 BB: I have to go find out who I got that from. So what I thought we'd talk about today is this, Start Where You Are, Start Where You Are. And first share where I... One context for that expression was the first time I saw Russ Ackoff speak, well, first where I met Russ. I had seen him speak before at a Deming conference, but I didn't get a chance to talk with him. But I saw him a few years later, and he was doing a one-day program in Los Angeles as part of a management series that he would do around the country. And there are about, I don't know, 150 people in the room, 25-30 from across Boeing sites in Southern California that I had invited. And at the end of the day, with about an hour to go, Russ says, okay, I'm going to give you a break. I'm going to give you time to formulate some questions and we'll spend the last hour discussing wherever you want to go. Well, I took the time to go up to Russ and ask him a couple of questions. I had met him earlier in the day. He knew that most people in the audience were there from across Boeing and that I had arranged them. 0:04:06.3 BB: And so I had a chance to talk with him. So I went up and said, I said I've got two questions for you that are not relevant to the audience, but I'd like to ask you one-on-one. He said, sure, go ahead. Well, no, I said knowing that you've known Dr. Deming for, since the early '50s, I said, over that period of time, what do you think he would say he learned from you that would stand out? And vice versa, what did you learn from him over those years that you would say stands out? And he looks at me and he says, well, I don't, I don't know what he learned from me. Then he says, then he answers the question and he says, he says, I think Ed, and he liked to say Ed, 'cause he liked to brag that, yeah, everybody calls him Dr. Deming. I call him Ed. I've known him since 1950. 0:05:05.2 BB: But Russ, by the comparison, if I ever introduced him to you as Dr. Ackoff, he would say, Andrew, call me Russ. So he says, relative to what he learned, what Dr. Deming learned from him, first he says, "well, I don't know what he learned from me. But I think his understanding of systems is very implicit and I helped him develop a better explicit understanding." And I think that makes a lot of sense. I think Dr. Deming's understanding of systems is a lot of what he talks about in The New Economics is what he learned from Russ. It's a very, I think you know when Dr. Deming shared the Production as a Viewed as a System that flow diagram in 1950, he always talks about systems, what comes around, goes around. But Russ was a master at systems from an academic perspective, and that was not Dr. Deming's forte. Now, when it comes to variation, that was Dr. Deming's academic forte. And that's where I would find Russ's understanding of variation, I would find to be very implicit, whereas Deming's was explicit. But anyway, he said he thought it gave him a better understanding of systems, that it was very implicit, very intuitive, and it helped him develop a better, a more academic sense of it. So I said, okay, so what did he learn... What did you learn from him? And he says, "well, I never gave that much thought to the whole quality movement.” 0:06:38.7 BB: “But he... I got a better, a warmer feeling of it." Russ would talk about quality of work life, and there's parallels with what Russ has talks about quality of work life that resemble Dr. Deming's work very well. And I'll give you one short story which ties in well with the Deming philosophy. Russ says he was at an Alcoa plant once upon a time, and he happened to be there on a day in which two workers were honored on stage in front of a bunch of coworkers with an award. Now, we both know what Dr. Deming thinks about giving people awards. So, but the fun part of the story is, Russ says he went up to these two guys afterwards, after they came down off the stage and he says, hey. And he says, and Russ was so precise with language. I mean, he walks up to these two guys and he says, ready Andrew? He says to them, I caught them at their point of maximum puffery. I mean, have you ever heard anyone use the word puffery... 0:07:56.7 AS: No. 0:07:57.1 BB: In a sentence? So he says, I walk up to these two guys and I said, I caught them at their point of maximum puffy. Right? And then he punctures them with the following question. "For how long have you two known about that idea that you were awarded for?" And they looked down at their feet and he said, "Come on, for, for how long have you had that idea before you shared it with management?" And they said, "20 years." And then Russ says, why did you wait so long to share it? And Russ says, he says to him, "Those sons of bitches never asked." 0:08:51.8 BB: And so, and Russ would talk about that as a quality of work life issue. Now, I've heard him tell that story many times, and I once asked him, I said, so what was the idea they came up with? And he said they would take these four foot wide rolls of aluminum foil off a machine, and these are the types of rolls that get used to make aluminum cans. And the roll may be, you know, so it's four foot tall. It's a, it could be easily a foot in outer diameter. And he said when they, when they're taken off a machine, they stand them on the concrete floor. And then to move them, the workers would tilt them back a little bit and then roll them. 0:09:43.9 AS: Which damages... 0:09:47.0 BB: The edge. 0:09:47.7 AS: Yeah. 0:09:47.8 BB: Exactly. So their idea was to, instead of putting them on a the concrete floor, to put them on a piece of plywood. So, what Russ saw was, which very much resembles a... The prevailing system of management where you're gonna wait 20 years before somebody asks you a question, until there's a program, until there's an award, then I'll come forward. All right, so let's go back to the audience. So I went up and asked Russ those questions, and now he is fielding questions from the audience. And one question really struck me and he says, Dr. Deming, not Dr. Deming, the guy says, "Dr. Ackoff," he said, "what you're talking about all day makes a lot of sense. And most organizations have little understanding of it, where you're just talking about, you know, managing interactions, the system, whatnot." He says, "but don't we have to wait for senior management to get on board before we do something with it? 0:10:54.2 BB: Don't we have to wait?" Right. And I'm listening to this, and I don't know what Russ is gonna say, but I'm hearing where the guy's coming from. And Russ turns right at him and he says, "Andrew, John, Sally, you have to start where you are." And I told him later, I said, I could've run up and given him a big hug, because if you're gonna sit back and wait for your management to get on board, you know how long that's gonna take? And so I just love that perspective of starting where you are. Now, let's flip to Dr. Deming, and a great quote that I like to use with students and clients with his work is "The smaller the system, the easier to manage. The bigger the system, the more complicated, but the more opportunities." Right? Now we'll go back to Russ. 0:11:54.0 BB: Russ would say, if you're a school teacher, like our daughter's an eighth grade teacher, start in your classroom. Why? Because you're not gonna start at the elementary school level or the junior high's, that's bigger than you. You're not gonna smart start smaller than that because then that's minimizing what your impact could be, but start where you are and then expand. Now, what that also means is it may be that when you start where you are, as you expand the size of the system, you might need to go back and change what you did now that you're looking at a bigger system. 0:12:37.8 BB: And so that's a great likelihood that what is optimum for you in the classroom may not be optimum when you're starting to think about the elementary school. But even if you start at the elementary school, what is optimum may not be optimum if you have the school district. So there's, no matter where you start, there needs to be an appreciation that in hindsight, what you did before may not be what's best for the bigger system. And the same thing applies when you're talking about integration. You know, Dr. Taguchi's loss function and the ideal value of a given characteristic, well, what I tell people is the ideal value depends upon the size of the system. And so if I'm designing two things to come together and I'm looking at the clearance between them, well, there's a clearance that makes it easy for these two things to come together if you're Andrew doing assembly. But let's say downstream of you is somebody who's using that product, you know, where that clearance is important, so the clearance that makes it easy to go together may not be the clearance that improves the functionality. 0:14:00.2 BB: And that will always be the case that you, that what is optimum where you are, may not be optimum when you expand the size of the system. So you have a few choices. One is, don't do anything. You know, for fear of making it worse, do nothing. Or, run a small scale experiment, use the PDSA model, try some things. But, that is still not a guarantee. 'Cause that small scale experiment still could be with me in my classroom and I run that experiment for a month, two months, three months. 0:14:44.4 BB: So even if I use that model, I can't know everything. And that's the... I mean, those are the complications of viewing things as a system, is to know that the system is not closed, it's open. I met a professor years ago at a conference and he had a model in his presentation that was very much a closed system. You know, they're working within this model, looking at these factors and these factors and these factors. And he went up after us. And I said, yeah, there's factors outside of that system. And he says, "Well, yeah, but we're just looking at this in scope." I said, "You have to frame it to a given size, but you know there's always the possibility that what's outside [chuckle] that you're not including, could haunt you for some time to come." And I didn't get the impression... I mean, it was almost like in engineering we talk about a free body diagram where you take whatever is your list you're looking at and you draw a line around it and you say, "That's the system I'm analyzing." 0:15:58.1 BB: But there's always a system which is bigger than that. And then again, bigger. So no matter where you start, again, and I look at the options are, if you're fearful of not including everything, well, then you're gonna do nothing. And that's easily what Deming and Ackoff were not saying. What they're saying is start where you are. Run experiments. Now, what I expect to be the beauty of a Deming-based organization, a "we" organization, is flexibility. 0:16:29.9 BB: And the flexibility is when things don't go as planned and we learn something, that we have the ability to reflect, note what we've learned, share it with as many people that we think could... would benefit from that. Get back on the horse and try again. I've worked with groups who were quite willing to do that. I worked with groups that were quite... They wouldn't get back on the horse. We were running some experiments dealing with hole machining of some small drills, you know, like on the order of a 16th of an inch, very small. And the experiment was, let's say eight... Seven different factors at two values each, eight experiments. And I don't know, they might've been machining in each experiment, 10 holes, say. And I wanted them to measure diameter of the top and the bottom of each hole, something like that. 0:17:29.3 BB: And I get the data prior to meeting with them. They sent me the data and I had enough experience running fractional factorial experimentation using Doctor Taguchi's ideas that upon first blush looking at the data, I either get a warm feeling or I get a queasy feeling. So in this case, I get a queasy feeling and there's... I'm looking at the data and immediately I knew this is... But I didn't know why. I just knew that, I'm not... And I'm wondering how am I gonna say this to them in the meeting? 'cause they're all excited. For a couple of them it wasn't their first study; they had done this before with great success. So I'm in the meeting and I'm listening and then one of them says, you know, in the experiment we're looking at starting each experiment with a new drill. And the experiments we're looking at different speeds of the drill, different cutting fluids, different parameters associated with machining these holes. And one of them says, they didn't... In hindsight, they didn't use a brand new drill for each experiment. So now I'm thinking, okay, say some more. 0:18:50.0 BB: Well, the drills we used in the experiment had all been used before and were resharpened to be like new, I mean, not new, but like new. And I said, "So say more." And then he said, "Well, when they looked at them under the microscope, the very tip of the drill was not in the center of the drill." 'Cause if you look at a drill, there's a cutting edge on the very top, you can say that near the left side or the right side. And those two cutting edges weren't the same length. So when the drill is cutting, it's not... The hole is not gonna be round, it's gonna have an oblong... So now I'm thinking, kind of explains the data. So he says, one of them say, "Can we salvage the data?" 0:19:45.3 BB: I said, no. And they said, why not? I said, because the assumption we had was that that the drills were reasonably the same. I mean, of course, even eight brand new drills are not identical, but now what you're telling me is the biggest source of variation is in the drills that we thought were the same. And that is wiping out the variation that we introduced. That's the issue, is that the signal coming from the drills that we didn't ask for is bigger than what we asked for. "So you mean we have to run all the experiments again?" 0:20:26.9 BB: And now they're, and I said, well, let me ask you this. So here's the good news. The good news is we didn't spend more time than we did on this experiment. That's the good news. I said, the good news is, we now know that the sharpening process needs to be relooked at. And as it turned out, probably the biggest thing we learned in the experiment, was that it ain't worth resharpening the drills. At that size, throw them away. But what I was hoping is that they would get back on the horse and go back to what we originally planned to do with eight brand new drills. It never happened. But we learned something, but what we learned is not what we had planned to learn. And that gets me to what I would tell people, is if you don't look, you won't find. But then you have to be willing to take the existing system and what is... 0:21:39.3 BB: Do anything, but that just means it stays the way... So if you don't look, you won't find. And if you do look, there's no guarantee. So that was a situation where I was very bummed. And every time, I mean, what I, one of the things I learned early on was preparing management and the team for such situations. 0:22:02.6 BB: That everybody was expecting, you know, a grand slam every single time. I said, no, that's not the way it works. In the real world, you try, you fail, you try, you fail, you learn, hey, you learn what we did here is that the sharpening process doesn't make sense. Had another experiment where, and I don't know which is, which was the bigger disappointment, but in the other one, there were 18 experiments with a lot of hard work, oh my God, and incredible precision as to how each of 1080 holes would be machines. So there were 1080 holes in a ring that was about eight feet in diameter. So there are holes about three tenths of an inch in this ring. The holes were all numbered one through 1080. Every hole had a different recipe. Somehow, the machinist wasn't informed of that. 0:23:08.5 BB: And the manufacturing engineer went to a meeting and he came back only to find out that the instructions, so machinists didn't know. And I said, "So, so what'd you learn?" He said "I learned not to go away to a meeting." So these things happen. Another thing I say in terms of starting where you are, my boss at one time knew I was involved in half a dozen to a dozen different Taguchi studies. And he calls me in one day and he says, "So how many studies are you working on?" I said, half a dozen to a dozen. He said, "Which of them is gonna have the biggest improvement?" 0:23:55.8 BB: So like the biggest... So I said, "So you mean like the biggest percent gain?" He says, "Yeah, which one's gonna have the biggest percent gain?" I said, "I guarantee you that we'll be smarter about everyone after we're done, I guarantee you that." He says, "But which one's gonna have the biggest percent improvement?" 0:24:17.2 BB: I looked straight at him, I said, if I knew the answer to that question, would I be working here? I'd be doing what you do, Andrew, I mean, financial forecasting. But he's like, "Well, don't give me that." I said, "I don't know which is gonna have the biggest gain, but I know we're going to be smarter. And I know all the things we try that...
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Go Beyond Skills Training: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 19)
01/30/2024
Go Beyond Skills Training: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 19)
What's the difference between education and training? Why is the distinction important? How does the Deming lens offer a new perspective on teacher effectiveness? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about why it's important to go beyond skills training and encourage education for personal growth. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: Here we go. My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 19 and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.2 John Dues: Andrew, good to be back. Yeah, principle 13 today, Institute a Vigorous Program of Education. I'll just start by reading the Principle, "Institute a vigorous program of education and encourage self-improvement for everyone. The school system needs not just good people, but people that are improving with education. Advances in teaching and learning processes will have their roots in knowledge." It's interesting, when I was reading about sort of this particular principle, Dr. Deming took this actually pretty far when he was asked where would you draw the line? And he basically said, I would allow any educational pursuits that people are interested in. So that was his sort of take on this particular principle. But I think it's maybe the first thing is to differentiate between training and education. When he was talking about those things, we talked about instituting training on the job back when we talked about principle six, and he basically said the training is for a skill and a skill is something that's finite because it ends when performance has reached a stable state for a person when thinking about that particular skill. 0:01:51.3 JD: The differentiator with Principle 13 is that it's focused on education and it's meant for growth. And in the Deming philosophy, this is sort of a never ending process of education. So skills, so training is focused on skills, whereas education is focused on knowledge and theory. And this is really an important distinction in my mind, and you need both, training and education are complimentary components I think of an effective school system or really an effective organization in general. So I think, I mean, obviously training is important. It's something that's necessary, especially when you come into a new job. We have lots of new teachers that come to us 'cause we're a relatively young organization. And it's pretty typical for these new teachers to come even if they majored in education many times, they don't have sort of the basic classroom management skills, the basic lesson planning skills, the basic lesson delivery skills that they need to be successful in the classroom. 0:03:00.9 JD: So we have a training program, and in the absence of that training program the teachers would probably flounder or it would take a lot longer time to get their legs under them. So training is important, but we have to sort of shorten that runway. So we have to be good at training 'cause we're like a relatively young organization and we have students that come to us on average that are below grade level. And so they can't wait a long time for these sort of teachers to get up to speed. And I think we've talked about the fact that we have this sort of three week training program before the school year starts for new teachers for that reason. And so training is obviously important, very important. But I think what I've sort of come to appreciate is this idea of... And Deming stressed this, that leaders, systems leaders understand this idea of a stable system. 0:04:00.7 JD: One of the things that he said was that "The performance of anyone that can learn a skill will come to a stable state upon which further lessons will not bring improvement of performance." And this for me, reading Deming at this point in my career was really an interesting revelation because for many years I had heard sort of policymakers, education reform types sort of lament the fact that teachers improvement largely levels off in about year five of their career. Now, there has been some more recent longitudinal teacher research in terms of effectiveness over time. And basically people have found that that's not quite true. And that teaching experience is positively correlated with student achievement gains sort of across the teacher's career. But it's definitely true that the gains and effectiveness are steepest in those initial years. 0:04:55.2 JD: And so when you put those two ideas together that there's sort of this leveling off in about year five with Deming's sort of concept of stable systems, it really sort of dawned on me that it was this perfect explanation for this phenomenon. When a teacher is in their first five years there's a lot of foundational skills like the things I was talking about, like lesson planning, lesson delivery, classroom management, those basic things. There's sort of this period of rapid improvement or growth, and then it sort of levels off after you get the basics of how to be a teacher. And then after that happens, you have this... The potential for improvement sort of lies within the organization, within the system itself and not in the individual. So this really lined up with this thing I had heard for a long time, even though I think sort of it was misinterpreted. 0:05:52.0 JD: And I think a lot of those people that were talking about teacher skills leveling off after five years, they didn't have this lens of a stable system. They didn't have that part of it. And so they were saying, well, teachers aren't improving. Well, it really wasn't the teachers not improving. It was the fact that most of the capacity, like we've talked about here for improvement lies within the system itself and not the individuals. And I would also make the argument that this is not just educators, that this is other sectors as well, healthcare or whatever that thing is. 0:06:27.0 AS: Yeah. I mean, a good way of imagining that is a person who knows nothing that has the prerequisites, the education or whatever's necessary to get the job. And they know nothing about teaching and about the school system or anything that you can just imagine that so much of the initial phase is just understanding how the system, how they operate within that system to do certain tasks, which can be a process of trying to understand all of that. But then it's like they become, it's like entering the stream and then they become the stream floating down the river where everybody's kind of doing the same thing. And then you realize, okay, by this time now their, their, the amount that they can improve has been hit for some specific tasks and things like that. And then all of a sudden their output is a function of the system. 0:07:23.0 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And I think where this can really go off the rails is when people don't understand the stable state of systems. I think that, and I think a lot of the educators from reformers were sort of talking about it as if teachers were kind of replaceable because they didn't improve after those initial five years, especially 10 years ago that was sort of the common way people talked about this. And you could then sort of the next step is to draw the conclusion that experienced educators aren't that important since that improvement sort of levels off pretty early in their career. But I think that is the completely wrong conclusion to draw. I think experienced teachers are incredibly important because of the stability they provide a school. They can provide mentorship to inexperienced teachers, they have longstanding relationships with families as multiple students come through the system. 0:08:25.0 JD: That stability is really important for all those reasons, which are hopefully fairly obvious to anybody that's worked in a school. But I think even maybe more importantly is this idea that once teachers have that baseline level of knowledge and skills, they can run a classroom, they can deliver a well-planned lesson. The reason that it then becomes important for improvement to have those folks is because once those basic things are in place, now we can actually start to work on the system where the real potential for improvement lies. And I think that was a point that was missed or glossed over in a lot of those conversations about education reform and this idea of the teacher skills leveling off after year five. 0:09:23.8 AS: Mm-hmm. One of the the things about education that I have a story that's... I guess one of the conclusions is that the next level of improvement of the system oftentimes comes from outside the system. And that's where education takes the mind into another space. 0:09:40.9 JD: Yeah. 0:09:49.2 AS: From that other space, they're getting knowledge and theories of what's going on out there. And I had an example, John, that was... When I was the head of research at Citibank, and I had been head of research before taking care of a team of analysts, and analysts are always late in their reports, they're writing long reports about whether to buy or sell a company. They're trying to gather as much information, talk to the company, things get delayed. They set their deadlines and then they... The job of a head of research is juggling those delays so that the sales team and the clients need an idea day. And it's always the case that you're juggling around and okay, we don't have something this day, let's make something up with what we've got. Okay, this guy couldn't produce on that day, but he's gonna come in on Monday. So I felt pretty good about my skills at managing that process. And then I got a job at the number one foreign, the number one broker, let's say, or investment bank at that time in Asia called CLSA. And when I talked to them, I asked them how do you handle the flow and how bad is it here [chuckle] with the analysts being late? And they said, the analysts are never late. 0:11:13.3 AS: And I was like, that's impossible. My whole career it's been about handling the analysts being late. And they said, no, analysts are never late here. And I was like, how are you doing that? And they're like, well, we have a three week plan ahead. Everybody knows it. You know your day. There is no excuse, there's no shifting, there's nothing, it has to be delivered on that day. So it's up to you to kind of bring your project to a head so that you're ready to present on that day. And if you have some kind of major setback or problem, talk to another person and switch the day with them and sort it out. And every single day we had great stuff coming out. And I would've never, I mean, I was operating at a certain level thinking I was really knocking it out of the park, 'cause I was accommodating. I was careful, I was thoughtful. I understood the pressures that people were feeling. I was doing my best, but I didn't have a knowledge that it could be a very different way of doing it. And that's where I think about going outside of your own system to observe and learn and see. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, [laughter] Okay. And that's where I feel like what you're talking about, about the education aspect is really the most amazing part. 0:12:33.2 JD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That actually... I hadn't planned to talk about this, but I've been reading recently about the... Called the... Well, there's a book called Toyota Kata and Kata is from martial arts. It's the various movements that you have to do sort of repeated deliberate practice so you can sort of, they become ingrained in your muscle memory. Well, the same idea is in place in Toyota. They call... Well, they don't, but the author called it... They don't call... They don't have a name for it, but he sort of observed it and gave it the Improvement Kata name Mike Rother. Yeah, there it is. Yep. There it is. That one. And one of the things that was interesting, and it kind of reminded me of this as you were talking, is that part of the improvement kata is there's a sort of a target that's aligned with the organization's vision that guides anything that the folks in the organization are working towards. 0:13:27.0 JD: And so there's always a target condition. There's an understanding of sort of where each individual is and the departments are. And they're always setting a new target on the way to that sort of vision target and running these experiments all the time. And they constantly set those targets so that they are ambitious but within reach. And then they're coached on the way repeatedly. And in that way they're sort of always moving forward the organization. And so I think of when you've changed investment banks and you're at this new bank and they're saying, Hey, this thing is possible, it's possible to do this. Here's the way we do that. Here's how we work towards that. And so you can imagine a place like Toyota being so successful, because if everybody has got this mindset, this scientific thinking where they're constantly moving towards a target and there's a method for doing so, [chuckle] that is an incredible education right there if you're an employee working in an environment like that. So that just made me think of the Toyota Kata. 0:14:41.4 AS: Yeah. And it's a great example of how reading books is part of education because you're getting exposed to new ideas and exploring and thinking about things. And that's where, well, think about the repetition in let's say a martial arts as an example. And when Dr. Deming talks about opening up education to everything for everybody, there's something to learn in almost everything out there. Like if it is about... What is it about those repetitions and why is that important and could that benefit our business? And he talked about painting and other things, you know? Like education very widely can bring you new ideas that can come back to improve your system. 0:15:27.3 JD: Yeah. And I think you have to invest in that sort of broader education, 'cause it's sort of an investment in the future, you know? Especially right now, things are changing fast. And you could have the best training program in the world, but if you are not also sort of looking out for what's next beyond that, to adapt to whatever's changing in your environment... A good example is this, we have a much better understanding of cognitive science than we did 20 years ago. And so if we didn't adapt... If we didn't sort of learn that and then adapt that and sort of include that learning in our training system that we're gonna start falling behind pretty quickly. And I think this can get... This may be part of the most important responsibility of a leader on the learning front. 0:16:28.5 JD: Because what I also see is that education leaders are often getting enticed by many, many fads that sort of come along. And so how to sort of actually latch onto something that represents a potential advantage, that's a real important skillset to have. And I don't think... That's a key... I think a key function of systems leaders is sort of to know what to let go of or what not to latch onto at all and what to sort of sink resources into because if you're gonna go do these educational pursuits, you're obviously gonna have to sink time and money resources into these things. And so being able to differentiate between what is good and what is bad is a real key skill. 0:17:22.6 AS: And one of the things about Toyota is it's like the ultimate Asian family business. And although it's now a big public company, the largest automaker in the world, and the family's ownings in the company is relatively low, it still has the influence of the family. And I was thinking about another huge company that I know of in Thailand here that shifted its focus away from, let's say, Deming in this case, to when a new CEO came in, he said, well, there's a different way and this is my way. And one of the things that's interesting about what Toyota's done, you know, Toyota gets a lot of blame for being slow to progress and stubborn and all of that, but man, they have built a machine and a... You just can't change the direction of that quickly, you really nurture what has been developed and how do you not just throw away. I was presenting to my students last night in my finance class here at Sasin School of Management in Thailand and I was showing them the DuPont Analysis in the world of finances where you break down the return on equity of a company. And I explained why they call it the DuPont Analysis, and that's because the DuPont company bought shares in General Motors in 20- or 1912 or something like that and they instituted this method of financial controls on General Motors. And I said to my students in passing, General Motors has been going bankrupt since 1912. [laughter] 0:19:00.9 AS: And it's like every... It's not a cumulative level of learning. And that's where I feel like Toyota, what Toyota has achieved is a cumulative learning process. 0:19:16.9 JD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, and it's a part of their DNA. I think certainly there have been challenges as they've grown across Europe and the United States and the world really. And a lot of the challenges that I understand is because people... That improvement Kata is sort of combined with a coaching Kata, like an approach to coaching and managers at different levels coach folks that are sort of a level down from them. And everybody in the organization, especially early, had sort of this mentor-mentee relationship. And so part of the challenge with growth was the fact that there are only so many of these folks that are grounded in this scientific thinking in the coaching part of this. And so that was a challenge as they grew, you know, in California and Kentucky and other places across the world. 0:20:17.9 JD: They had to build this coaching capacity across all of these new production facilities and other types of facilities across the world. So... But I think that what I really like about this principle...I, you know, if push came to shove, I started this by talking about Deming would basically allow almost anything when it came to allowable educational pursuits. And I think I would be much closer to that than I would be to limit those things. I think that is a really... That's a good sort of approach to take as a leader. I think here where I am at United Schools Network, one of the things that I was able to do was go take an improvement advisor course which required significant resources and time and money at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. 0:21:19.6 JD: And so someone could look at that very easily and say, well, why are you an educator going to a healthcare organization? And I think it's one of those things where people maybe don't realize that the Deming philosophy and some of the continual improvement stuff, it's sector agnostic. And so when you can learn the philosophy, the methods, the techniques, you can bring them back to your own organization. So I think had I not gone down this path to study Deming, I wouldn't have made it to IHI and then bring this stuff back to my organization. I think it's benefited our organization in lots of ways, even though that might not have been immediately apparent to folks, you know, initially. 0:22:09.8 AS: So how would we wrap this up for the listeners to make sure that they truly understand the idea of vigorous education, self-improvement, this type of stuff? 0:22:14.0 JD: Yeah. I mean, for me the main point is that systems leaders should really encourage...
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Remove Barriers To Joy In Learning: Deming in Schools Case Study (part 18)
01/23/2024
Remove Barriers To Joy In Learning: Deming in Schools Case Study (part 18)
How do grading systems, teacher ratings, school rankings, and other programs like those create barriers to learning? Should we eliminate them entirely, or do they have their place? John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about how to preserve joy in learning. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 18, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.3 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. In this episode, we're doing the 12th principle. So we're on 12 of 14, remove barriers to joy in work and learning. So that's a certainly a concept that we've talked about, but I'll start by just reading the principle. "Principle 12, remove barriers that rob educators and students of their right to joy in work and learning. This means working to abolish the system of grading student performance, the annual rating of staff and accountability rating systems for schools and school systems. The responsibility of all educational leaders must change from sheer numbers to quality." There's two really great quotes I like from Deming. One on joy in learning where he says, "Our schools must preserve and nurture the yearning for learning that everyone is born with. Joy in learning comes not so much from what is learned, but from learning." 0:01:24.4 JD: And then for joy in work, he says, "Joy in the job comes not so much from the result, the product, but from contribution to optimization of the system in which everybody wins." So he is saying basically the same thing in those two quotes, but he is talking about the contributions to the process is where the joy comes from, not necessarily the outcome. And so much of the time, we're focused on the outcome, be it the work product in a work setting or the test scores perhaps in a, in a school setting. But he's really talking about what is that process that you're contributing to? And, and you know, how do you feel because of that, those contributions you're making? I think whether you're talking about joy in work or joy in learning, sort of unifying theme in principle 12 as it's, this concern with the pride of workmanship, whether that's the workmanship of making a product or in the learning that you're doing or something you're doing as a result of that learning, like a report or a poem that you've written or whatever. 0:02:31.6 JD: And so I think as a result, it's barriers that get in the way of joy in work and learning. And you know, maybe one of the most important obstacles to improvement of the quality of our education systems in the United States. And you know, just like, sort of, it says in the outline of the principle, there's really sort of three levels that these barriers exist at. You got the students and the grading of students. And then you have oftentimes some type of rating system, evaluation system for teachers, for principals, perhaps sometimes those rating systems use test scores or other similar metrics. And then that third level is, you have the actual schools or school districts themselves that are being rated within these state accountability systems. So you sort of have, you know, these three levels. And then there's this common problem at all three levels, regardless of which one. And that's basically this thing that we've talked about repeatedly, where you under-appreciate the contribution of the system to the performance of the people, whether you're talking about students, teachers or, or you know, school systems. So I thought that's where we could focus today. 0:03:49.8 AS: Yeah, you know it strikes right at the heart of everything that we believe, as particularly as Americans, but certainly spreading that around the world, that it's all about measuring, ranking, tracking. You know, when a parent puts a kid in school, what do they want to know? What was their grades? When a student's in trouble, it's 'cause of grades. And what a student wants to know, like everybody wants to know and rely on grades. So it's just so, it's so difficult. You know, I was talking with someone else talking about why Dr. Deming's philosophy hasn't been adopted as as widely as you'd hope. And I think it's part of, it's just because it's just sacred, the sacred heart of everything that we believe. And if you can measure it, you can track it, you can feed that back and give it to people and show them where they are and you deserve where you are based upon your efforts, and you've gotta move yourself from there. That is so ingrained. And I'm just curious, like what's the hope from your side that this can be seen. I think it can be seen if you stop and look, but it's so hard to implement. 0:05:18.7 JD: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think one thing that can be confusing is obviously Deming was a statistician. So he is, has no problem with using data to improve the quality of our schools or even an individual lesson that a teacher delivers, gathering some data on how students are doing and tracking that over time. There's no problem with that. There's no problem with that I don't think at the school level either. I think the problem comes in when you create a reward and sanction system around that data. And I think that's, Deming actually think he indicated that, that system of reward or sanction on the other side is one of the main constraints from being able to develop this win-win culture. Whatever level of the system that you're talking about, that student level, the educator level, or the school and system level. They're, all those grading systems are really reward and sanction systems. And I think when you take the data and use it in that way, that's when I think Deming is talking about the real problems, the manipulation, you know, the competition for top spots that leads to all kinds of strange behaviors, those types of things. That's really where he's focusing most of his attention. 0:06:49.1 AS: And if you had no constraints from governments or other outsiders and you were setting up a new school right now with zero constraints, the only thing was absolutely optimizing the learning of young people. How would you handle this - grading? How would you handle all of this? Would you do it in a different way? Would you just do it and de-emphasize it and say, oh, well, it's not so critical? It's just information feedback, or would you teach them how to use that data like Deming may, or like how he uses data? Or would you say, no, that's just that there's no redeeming benefit, if we're not required to do it, then we wouldn't do it? 0:07:43.4 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think it'd be some combination of the things that you mentioned. I mean, on just from a practical sense, Demings certainly understood that we live within the world that we live within. And so if that hypothetical school that you're talking about is a public school and I was in Ohio, I would obviously give the state test and take whatever data I could use and use that in a positive way that I can. So I'm gonna do the thing that I'm caught on to do as a educator in a public school system. So I wouldn't opt out or anything like that. I think in terms of how I set up internal systems, I think, ..GAP. Yeah, I thought a lot about this but I haven't maybe put to paper exactly how I would do it. 0:08:36.2 JD: I think...I certainly would use assessments. I certainly would track how students are doing on standards. I would involve students in doing so they could track that over time. In terms of grading, I don't know exactly what I would do. I would definitely de-emphasize that to the extent that I possibly could so that the emphasis is on the learning and not on the grades. That would be a key sort of guiding principle. There's certain things that I think are outlandish that schools do, where they do pep rallies or pep rallies or something like that to, as the buildup to state testing comes, I find those things ridiculous. So I would stay away from doing anything like that. Kind of how we've treated state tests in the past, even prior to discovering Deming was matter of fact. 0:09:47.2 JD: Like, this is something we're preparing for, we're gonna do our best. We're gonna try our hardest, we're gonna learn from the experience, we're gonna work hard on it, and then we're gonna move on. You know, that's the type of mentality we had. In terms of like the mindset of the school I led, there was a poster in the hallway that said, you get it wrong and then you get it right. So that was the mindset is, we learn from our mistakes. We talked about creating a culture of air in our classrooms so that students felt, you know, safe, I guess is the word I would use to, or willing to call out when they didn't understand something, or they did make a mistake, and then we work together to rectify that. So that's a little bit a long-winded answer. I don't have it all worked out. I have some ideas, but I think overall using data is fine. I think it's, when you get into the rating and the ranking, that's where the problems and the rewards and the sanctions, I think that's where the problems generally come from. 0:10:50.8 AS: Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of unconstrained in my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, because I'm not under any, there's no supervision of what I'm doing by anybody. It's just me trying to make a better experience for the students. And the idea of grading never really came into my process. It's interesting, John, that one guy who was a student of mine, he graduated and then I hired him to work with me to take care of the other students. One of the first things he did was come up with a matrix and a grading system, [laughter] just because that's what he knew. And now he uses that system and he has little points that he gives. That system doesn't have any connection to whether you're gonna pass the class or not, or there's no ranking or anything related to it. It's just that, okay, you only got six points out of 10, which means you haven't really done the assignment. He's clearly defined what are the things that you need to have done? And then he goes through and says, did you do them? So it's definitely a, I think it's a good feedback mechanism. 0:12:08.4 JD: Yeah. 0:12:10.2 AS: But, you know, whether it's valuable. I think what I'm trying to do is create the experience that young people are learning how to value a company through the process of learning and discovery and, and discussion and, and, and going online and going through my material, asking me questions, and then demonstrating, showing different things. And then they're slowly putting those pieces together. And I can also see that it takes time. You know, it can't all happen in one week. We have six weeks and where they're at at the end of the six weeks is so much further along than where they were at the beginning. But I guess my point would be if I was completely unconstrained, which I am, it's just that it wouldn't be pro or con grades and ranking, it wouldn't even really exist because it's not a core part of learning. Core part of learning is providing the environment, the excitement, keeping people on track, helping them see, okay, here's what you gotta do now, see if you can do it. You know? 0:13:18.8 JD: Yeah. And I think what I was gonna do today is bring this alive. You know, we've talked about grading of students and even the performance appraisals in some of the past episodes. So what I thought we would do here is, sort of, focus on why grading schools could also be you know, a barrier to joy in work, how this might play out. So I think generally most people are now familiar with, because in the public school system, we've had various types of rating systems. You know, each state has their own. And I think it's, what's important here is to look at examine if the ratings help the public differentiate between schools that are doing a good job of educating kids and those that are not, because that's the point. 0:14:09.7 JD: Right? At least one of the points. And on its face, it sounds simple, you know, up until this year, Ohio has like an A through F grading system for schools, and there are sub components and you get an overall grade A to F. Right? And so it sounds simple. Schools with more A's are better schools, except for it's not that simple when you go beyond like a surface level analysis. So I thought it'd be helpful to just zoom in on two schools located here in Columbus. One's called Jones Middle School. It's in the Upper Arlington School District, which is close by. And then Columbus Collegiate Academy, I'll call it CCA, it's also a one of our middle schools. Both the schools serve grades six through eight. They're less than 10 miles apart here in Columbus. 0:15:03.6 JD: So they're geographically proximate. And this analysis comes from an article I wrote in 2020. So it's from a few years ago. So the results are a few years old, but you know, I think they're fairly representative of how the schools have performed over the last decade or school or so. So let's start with just the grades that the schools received. So the schools get an overall grade. Jones Middle School has an A, CCA has a B, so you know, fairly close there, but Jones outpaces. And then there's the achievement grade. And that's basically looking at all the kids' test scores, how they do overall. Jones gets a B, CCA gets a D, right? So Jones has quite a bit better performance. And then there's a progress category. So how much progress did the kids make during that particular school year? 0:15:57.9 JD: How much growth did they make? Now this is interesting now, CCA gets an A and Jones got a B. So just to recap, the overall grade for Jones was A, achievement B, progress B, for CCA overall, B achievement D, progress A. So basically a higher percentage of students at Jones begin year on grade level 'cause they have that higher achievement grade, but they don't grow as much as the students at CCA once they're there. This difference between achievement and progress grades becomes even more interesting as you start to factor in not only the school characteristics, but also the neighborhood characteristics. So let's talk about inside the school just to start with. So in terms of student population, Jones and CCA are pretty similar in terms of students with disabilities. So those kids with special education needs tend to, as a general rule score lower on standardized tests. 0:17:02.9 JD: So those populations are roughly equal, but 100% of the kids at CCA are economically disadvantaged as defined by the state. At Jones, just 2.4% of the kids are economically disadvantaged. When you look at other report card measures such as attendance, chronic absenteeism, Jones has much better rates. So 97 plus percent attendance rate, just 2% of their kids are chronically absent. At CCA 93% attendance rate, 21% of the kids are chronically absent. But when you start to look at these, some of these metrics framed in terms of the poverty rates in the community surrounding CCA, these numbers start to take on a different meeting. And I think what they're, especially things like chronic absenteeism, that's all the rage right now, attendance, I think what you start to need to understand is these are indicators of inequity, housing instability, neighborhood violence, lack of access to healthcare. 0:18:15.5 JD: I think they're more an indicator of those types of things than they are of school performance. So as you start to think about things in those ways, what you realize is that the students at CCA are just as capable as the students at Jones, but they face sometimes overwhelming obstacles related to poverty. It's also interesting to take a look outside the schoolhouse. So the median family income in the census tract where Jones is located is $184,000. So the median family income in that neighborhood, so it's a pretty affluent area. In the neighborhood surrounding CCA in that census tract, the median family income is just over $20,000. So we're talking about an order, orders of magnitude higher family income in upper Arlington than in the neighborhood that CCA sits in. And then there's all types of factors. Some grounded in historical reasons that relate to this, but they're also compounded by funding disparities. So the per pupil revenue at CCA for this year is $10,600. In Upper Arlington, it's nearly $17,000... 0:19:35.0 JD: This Jones Middle School has almost no students living in poverty, yet gets $6,000 more in additional revenue per student than the students that attend CCA. So think of the implications of that. 0:19:52.3 AS: When you say they get more revenue, you mean the state or the government's providing them more money per student? 0:20:00.1 JD: Yes, all in. From all sources. So when you look at what the federal government provides, the state government, and then local funding sources. When you look at all those sources combined, this more affluent middle school gets $6,000 more students, dollars per student. 0:20:14.5 AS: Obviously, it's not based upon need. Is that based upon the grade or some other? 0:20:19.0 JD: Well, it's because the funding is heavily influenced by local property taxes. And because of the affluence of... 0:20:26.7 AS: They have the resources. 0:20:28.2 JD: They have the resources. And in Ohio, charter schools don't have access to local money. So that explains most of the gap. Most of the gap. But back to my point, when you think about CCA, having kids with more challenges, less money per student, less resources to pay for a facility, to pay teachers a competitive salary, extracurricular activities, all those types of things that we want to equalize are highly inequitable between those two schools. So then you start to ask yourself, well, what are the report card grades measuring exactly? Are those grades on those state report cards a fair representation of what's happening inside the school? Or can a significant portion of those grades be attributed to this larger context in which the school sits? And I think that's where you sort of put on this systems thinking lens and realize that, sure, what teachers and the principal is doing inside the schools, they are certainly making contributions to those state report cards. But you cannot ignore what is going on outside those schools and those neighborhoods when you're thinking about these grades. 0:21:54.1 JD: And so if you're sort of thinking about... Like a formula that would sort of lead to the school's results and you just... Let's just call it A+B+C+D+E=71, where 71 is the score that the school gets. Let's just call it that. And let's call the school's contribution letter F. A, B, C, D, A+B+D+C... Or A+B+C+D+E+F=71. The school's contribution is F. Well, that equation cannot be solved unless you know the values of A through E or at least some of those values. But what we try to do with this state report card system is that we assign this value to F, the contribution of the school, with no knowledge of the effects of these other variables. 0:22:57.3 AS: So it's, in other words, the contribution of the school is 100%. You mean you're responsible for your results? Is that what it means? 0:23:04.4 JD: Well, right. So if you're going to give me... If you're going to give CCA Main Street a D in achievement, that means the only thing that contributed to that grade was the school. But there's all those things that we talked about. Some, sort of, when you look at the variables A, B, C, D,...
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Eliminate Management by Extremes: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 14)
01/16/2024
Eliminate Management by Extremes: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 14)
Many businesses equate "manager" with "leader," excluding potential leaders from across the organization. In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about leadership in Deming organizations - with a great story about senior "leaders" making a huge error in judgment at a conference of auditors. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, episode number 14, is Beyond Management by Extremes. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.7 Bill: Number 14 already, Andrew. 0:00:32.0 AS: Incredible. 0:00:32.6 Bill: It's a good thing we skipped number 13. That's an unlucky number. [laughter] 0:00:37.0 AS: Not in Thailand. It's a lucky number. [laughter] 0:00:40.6 Bill: No, we didn't skip number 13. This is 14. 0:00:42.1 AS: Yes, we didn't. 0:00:43.5 Bill: Alright, so I just enjoy going back and listening to all of our podcasts, once, twice, three times. And then I talk with friends who are listening to them. And so I'd like to start off with some opening comments and then we'll get into tonight's feature, today's feature. 0:01:00.9 AS: So let's just, to refresh people's memory, episode 13, which we just previously did, was Integration Excellence, part two. 0:01:09.2 Bill: Yes. And that's what we called it. [laughter] So... [laughter] So last week I... When we thought about getting together, but I had the wrong time, and it worked out well in my schedule. Last week, Andrew, I did three presentations. A two-hour lecture for Cal State Northridge, which is part of a master's degree program, where I do a class in quality management. That was Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I did a one-hour presentation with one hour of conversation afterwards with the Chartered Quality Institute, which is kind of like the American Society for Quality in the UK, and this... So this was several hundred people from the UK and also the Caribbean chapter from Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica. And so there's a bunch there. And then on Thursday morning I did a three hour session for a group in Rotterdam, which was really early for me and late afternoon for them. 0:02:25.4 Bill: And in all three, I covered similar material for all three groups, which included the trip report that we've done on the ME Versus WE, how did you do on the exam? How did we do? And so it was really neat to present that to the three. And in each case, when I threw out the question, "how did you do on the exam?" And then explained as I did one of our earlier podcasts that if you've got a long list of inputs, which includes - the woman I was talking to and, 'cause I said to her, the question is how did you draw on the exam? What are the inputs? And she said, the inputs are, my energy, my enthusiasm, my commitment that she got stuck. And I said, have other students helped you? And she said, yes, other students have helped you. I said, that's another input. 0:03:17.3 Bill: I said, given that input, how many can you see? And she said, oh my gosh. She said, my professor, my parents, my brother. And then all of a sudden there was this long list of inputs that she couldn't see. And so I explained that to the people and then say, "if you've got that long list of inputs and the original question is, how did you do on the exam? Does that long list of inputs change the question or are you okay with that question?" And what I look for is, and what we've talked about is, does the whole idea, how did we do on the exam jump out at you? No, it doesn't jump out. So, in each case, I said, here's the situation, might you reframe the question? And in all three situations, most of them that I asked said, there's essentially nothing wrong with the question. And if they did restate the question, they kept the "you," "do you think you could have done better?" Do you think... And that's what's so cool is that they just hold onto the you. Well, and for one of the groups it came a... It was kind of like what I was saying was semantics. 0:04:32.6 Bill: And I said this is not semantics. I said, there's a big difference between somebody, you know referring to our kids as my son and my daughter and our son and our daughter. And this, "my," is singular ownership, "our" is joint ownership. And so what I was trying to explain is that, saying “How did you do versus how did we do?” is the difference between being an observer of your learning if you were the student, Andrew and a participant. Those are not... Those are enormous differences. It's not, just, it's not just a simple change in pronouns. And so when I... And when I got to next, I was at a meeting years ago, I was at the annual, you ready Andrew? I was at Boeing's Annual Auditor's Conference. 0:05:40.5 AS: Sounds exciting. 0:05:41.4 Bill: 1999. So I got invited to be a speaker, Andrew at Boeing's Annual All Auditors Conference. Right? So I'm thinking going into this, that these are a bunch of people that don't feel valued. Because it's not like I get a phone call and I say, hold on, hold on. Hey Andrew, I got good news. And you say, you're a coworker, what's the good news? Annual... Andrew, we're gonna be audited next week! [laughter] 0:06:10.2 Bill: You're like, "Holy cow. Hold on, lemme go tell everybody." So I thought going into this meeting is, these are a bunch of people that don't feel valued. I'm an auditor at least that was, so that was my theory going into this, so it's a Monday afternoon gathering with a dinner and then all day the next, all day for a couple days. So the opening speaker, speaker on Monday night was the senior executive of a big Boeing division, it might have been Boeing defense let's say. And my theory was first of all, you got a bunch of people that don't feel valued and I came away from the three days thinking there's a whole lot going on in audit whether it's financial audit, data integrity audit, quality audit, these are necessary roles. And so I came out of it with great respect for that whole organization otherwise would think right, but I'm thinking this executive is going to come in, going to do the Friday, Monday night presentation and I'm thinking it's like they drew straws and they say well okay I'll go, I'll go up there and talk with them. 0:07:22.8 Bill: Within minutes of him speaking I'm thinking this guy's excited to be here. So I'm thinking he's going to kind of phone it in, now I'm watching this I'm thinking he is, he is really engaged with the audience. He's talking about, the future role of the audit organization being partners and all this and he's talking, I mean he's giving them an enormous bear hug and I'm thinking this is not what I thought and again and so... I'm still thinking he's either a really good actor or he really wants to be here. Then my theory was and I thought, holy cow, now I get it. How many people in the room Andrew would it take to leave the room with their nose out of joint and shut down the F18 program by noon tomorrow? How many people would it take? 0:08:21.3 AS: Not many, one. 0:08:22.9 Bill: Right, so then I'm thinking these, he needs these people to love him, because if he disrespects them, it's a bad day. So I went from thinking why would you want to be here if you were here, then I'm thinking, oh no. Now I'm thinking this is brilliant so then I look at the program and I'm thinking which other executives have figured out how valuable this is and I see the next day at lunch is Boeing Commercials I'm thinking they figured it out but the organization I was within was Boeing Space and they weren't on the program so I contacted a friend that was connected high up in Boeing Space, I said we've got to be in this program, right? So the program ending, it ended nice and I'm thinking wow, wow. So then just prior to lunch the next day is the number two guy for Boeing Commercial. Not the number one. The Monday night guy was the number one. The number one guy for Boeing Commercial at the time was Alan Mulally, it wasn't Alan Mulally, it was his number two person. 0:09:33.7 Bill: So he's up on stage, he's up on stage, he's up on stage. And he's talking to the audience and in parallel Jim Albaugh who at the time was CEO of Boeing Commercial, no Boeing Space and none of Jim's people were there, Jim wasn't there. Jim a couple weeks prior he had asked me to get with his speech writer at a presentation he was doing and he wanted some words in there about investment thinking and all the things we've been talking about in this. He said get with him and put some of that stuff in there put there some of that stuff in there. I said okay. So as I'm listening to the number two guy speak there's a lot of "we" and "you" but who's the we? And who's the you? So I'm making notes to myself to tell Jim don't say "you." Say "we" and make the "we" inclusive, 'cause the guy on stage is, the you and the we and the you and the we, and I said no no stay away from "you" focus on we but make sure they understand that "we" is all of us, right? 0:10:35.1 Bill: So this is what's going through my head and I'm writing it all down, writing it all down and then this guy says and I'll paraphrase. I wish I had the exact words and the paraphrase is pretty close to what he said as judged by what the audience heard, right? So when I heard the comment and I'm thinking to myself, you said what? Then I look around the room and I thought he did. Here's what he said again the paraphrase is: he made reference to those within Boeing that do the real work, and he said it in a way that was present company excluded right? Right, so I hear him say 'cause I'm getting, I'm making literally I'm making notes to myself and then I hear that comment and I'm like, did you just say what I thought you said? And I look around the room with 300 people and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, you did and I'm seeing I am seeing people irate, you see the body language, right? 0:11:44.3 Bill: And I thought wow, how could you say that? So then the lunch speaker was Harry Stonecipher, the chief operating officer. And he was up, walking around the stage. I don't think he knew anything about what happened prior so he's up there talking, okay. After Harry we're getting back to the program and the guy running the entire event is now up on stage and he's very deliberately he's got a, he's got a piece of paper rolled up, he's walking around on stage, "yeah Scott misspoke no doubt about it. He misspoke, I hear you." I hear you, you are ready Andrew? You are ready, you are ready? 0:12:36.8 AS: Give it to me. 0:12:37.4 Bill: And then he says then he says "But let's be honest we don't make the airplanes." And I thought, really? And as soon as he said that, I had this vision of 250,000 employees, which was about the employment at the time. And so as soon as he said that, I just imagined being at the Everett facility, which is huge, where all the twin-aisle plants are made. And I had this vision of 250,000 people in the building. And the CEO Phil Condit says on the microphone, "Okay, I'd like all of you who make the airplanes to move to the west end of the building." 0:13:26.4 AS: And everybody else. 0:13:27.4 Bill: And it's what you get, is all the flight line mechanics move all the way over there. And then you show up and somebody looks at you and they don't see any grease on your hand, and they say, "ahhh you don't make the airplanes." And you say, "you see that tool in your hand? Who do you think ordered it?" And so this "we" and the "you" stuff, how did "you" do? How did "we" do? It was just, it was... 0:14:00.3 AS: He wasn't deliberately setting up the auditors to be pissed and then to be really, really tough on the rest of the organization. I'm teasing with that. 0:14:12.7 Bill: It was, it is just, I shared that with you and our audience as how uniting language can be and how divisive language can be. And so how did we do, how did you do, and what, with just, this is what I find fascinating is - these words bring people together. What I love, I love watching politicians or State Department people speak and 'cause what dawned on me is they are very deliberate on, I mean they to great lengths to not be divisive. 0:14:57.1 Bill: That's their job. And so they introduce people in alphabetical order, countries in alphabetical order. But they, and I thought, what a neat way of not inferring that the first one I list is the most important one and I just thought there's a just an art of diplomacy. And that's what, to me, that's what diplomacy is, is that the art of uniting, not dividing. 0:15:25.7 Bill: Alright. So now I wanna get into, in the three different groups last week we were doing the trip report and we got down to the hallway conversations and the ME Organization versus a WE Organization. And then a question I asked him was, who are the managers in a ME Organization and what do they do? And you got, those are the ones that set the KPIs. Mark the KPIs, beat you up, sit in their office. Okay. Who are the managers in the ME Organization? What do they do? Who are the managers in a WE Organization? And what do they do? 0:16:01.8 Bill: They are mentors. They're out there on the shop floor, they're working with people. People work for managers in a ME Organization. They work with managers in a WE Organization. So I get that and I think "Okay, pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good." And then I follow with "Who are the leaders in a ME Organization and what do they do?" 0:16:26.4 Bill: And what's really cool is you get the same answers as the managers. And that's when I started noticing in a ME Organization, we'll refer to the senior leadership team, the senior management team, and we're talking about the same group of people. And I said, what we've just said is that manager and leader are the same. And then I say to people, so what is that message in a ME Organization? The message is, if you're not a manager, Andrew, then you're not a leader. Which means what? Which means you have permission to wait for direction. 0:17:12.5 Bill: Boeing had a leadership center in St. Louis. It was called the Boeing BLC, the Boeing Leadership Center. Yeah, Boeing Leadership Center. And in order to go there, you had to be a manager. You either had to be a first level manager, you would take frontline leadership, a middle manager, which I was, which is leading from the middle or an executive. But the model... So then I think part of the confusion is in a ME Organization, on the one hand we say, our managers are our leaders. If you're not a manager, wait for the direction, wait to be told. 0:17:49.7 Bill: But then we said, we want our managers to be leaders. But that's the ME Organization. In a WE Organization, in a Deming organization, I think of leadership is the ability to bring forth a new order of things, a new order of designing hardware, a new order of designing software, a new order of marketing, we're talking earlier and the ability to create a new order of things and the ability to create a path for others to follow. 0:18:20.6 Bill: And so then in a WE Organization, it's like show and tell. When we were in elementary school, you go in and say, I have discovered this. And I thought, in a WE Organization, everyone has the ability to be a leader on something within their realm. And why would you, why would you make leadership incl...exclusive, which is the ME Organization. And when I tell companies that I consult for I said, when you make leadership exclusive in a ME Organization, to me, that's a kiss of death 'cause you're telling a few people, you're in charge and you're telling everyone else, you're inferring that everyone else, you wait for direction, again. 0:19:09.0 Bill: And I'm not proposing, everyone's all over the place doing it. No. There's got, this is not chaos. And if I have an idea on something and it's not my assigned responsibility, then I know to reach out to you because you're the marketing guy and I just throw the marketing idea to you and then you do with it what you want. But I look at leadership in a WE Organization as being inclusive. And then we get into this idea of, driving...driving change. 0:19:38.0 AS: Let me just ask you about that. Would this really be down to the core principle of Appreciation of a System? That somebody who appreciates a system knows that there's all kinds of components to that system? 0:19:55.5 Bill: Yes, yes. 0:19:55.6 AS: And that you can't say, oh, well this system really is only the people that are working on the production line, when in fact we know that there's all kinds of people working in that system. If I think about my coffee business as an example, we have a hundred employees and not all of them are working on production. And some are moving paperwork and making phone calls and others are out in the field. So an appreciation of a system brings you to the "we" rather than.... 0:20:23.0 Bill: Yes. 0:20:23.5 AS: And a person who gets up and says about me, or, tries to identify that there's a certain number of people that are really driving the performance of this company are, they just have no appreciation for a system. 0:20:39.1 Bill: They have a narrow, a narrow view, a narrow view. So what you just said triggered another thought. But, um, the thing I wanted to add to this, in a ME Organization, it's about driving change. And we've talked about this in prior podcast. I go to, you put a gun to your head and I say, I want this KPI by Friday, Andrew. And you're like, yes, sir. And then I said to people in the past is, if driving change is the mantra of a ME Organization, like you're driving cattle driving, driving, and which is not an endearing concept. It is, it is, this is the where we're going. And I say to people, so what would you call it if driving is the ME construct, what is, what's the language of a WE Organization? And people will be wondering "ah," I say "lead, lead, lead." And if we like where you're going, we will follow. That's you creating the path that we will follow. 0:20:40.0 Bill: So I just wanna throw that out. But the other thing you mentioned about the metrics and the design of the organization and the thinking that, these are the critical people. At lunch with an old friend today, and I was sharing with her I taught a course at Northwestern's Business School, Kellogg Business School in the late '90s. And Kellogg then, and today is the number one or number two business school in the country. And I had a friend who was a student there in..., they liked what I was saying. So they hired me to teach a five week course for four years. And I presented, these ideas to them and it was pretty cool. I was, what was exciting is one of them told me that, what I was sharing with them about Deming, you are ready Andrew? contradicted what they were learning in their other classes. 0:22:46.2 AS: Huh. Funny that. 0:22:48.7 Bill: Yep. And so I did that for four years. There were three classes in quality. One was the use of control of charts, mine was called Quality Management, or TQM or something like that. And so there were roughly 80 students in the program, and they had to take two of the three, five week courses. So I got two out three students in the program. Then after four years, they waived the requirement. And so nobody signed up. And so I, um, after, right after 9/11 was when this happened, they invited me back because the person I was working with really liked what the...
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Does Competition Create Wins? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 14)
01/09/2024
Does Competition Create Wins? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 14)
Who wins when teams and team members compete with each other? In this final episode in the Role of a Manager in Education series, David Langford and Andrew Stotz discuss why cooperation beats competition, particularly in schools. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. And we're talking about the 14th of these different 14 items. And this one I want to read out, it is, "He understands the benefits of cooperation and the losses from competition between people and between groups." We decided to title this one: "Do you think you're winning from competition?" David, take it away. 0:00:53.7 David Langford: That sounds great. Great. It's good to be back again, Andrew. 0:01:00.4 AS: Yeah. 0:01:00.6 DL: Yeah. This is a great point, and it really is the basis for Deming's philosophy about everything that he brought to management and it got people to think differently. When I would give seminars with educators around the world and stuff, and we'd start talking about the differences between competition and cooperation, I'd often get people speaking very strongly that, "Competition is the way the world works and you have to have competition to get people to do stuff. And sports teams are always competing." And when you start to think about it, sports teams that, that usually have a sole focus of just beating the, the other team, generally don't have multi-year winning streaks, [chuckle] because you're not building a program, you're not building a whole philosophy, a whole basis to how you do things. 0:02:06.0 DL: And I've made it a point to really listen to all kinds of interviews with coaches over time. And one common theme I usually hear over and over and over from really good teams is they'll talk about the next game that they're playing. They don't talk so much about, "We're gonna beat these people." They talk about, "This will be a really good test for us." Or they'll say something about, "We're probably gonna really learn a lot this weekend [chuckle] at this game." Well, to me, those are really good coaches because they're lowering the fear level, they're lowering the anxiety. And the better we... The irony of this statement, this point number 14, is the better you cooperate, the better you compete. [chuckle] 0:03:04.0 DL: And when you're not doing that, you potentially could just go down in flames. And the same thing happens in a classroom. If you set up a classroom so everybody's competing against each other, or what Deming called the artificial scarcity of top marks, you'll end up with a whole bunch of people that are just basically at each other's throats, not cooperating, not getting along. You'll have all kinds of discipline problems and behavior problems and things that are going on in classrooms like that because it's all just set up on a competition level. So grading on a curve is a scarcity, artificial scarcity of top marks. So if there can only be three top marks or three A's or whatever it might be in this class, and people that are actually struggling in the class and actually trying to learn, they're gonna quickly learn, "There's no point in me actually trying because there's no way I'm ever going to get to that point. There's only gonna be three people that are gonna get the A." 0:04:14.2 DL: And that's the biggest thing about this, is getting to the point where you're understanding the losses of setting up artificial competition for, whether it be grades or points on a soccer field, or whatever it might be. Deming often used the analogy of the difference between a bowling team and a orchestra in terms of cooperation. So people that go bowling, they're generally just out for your own score and whatever you're trying to work through, and it's not really a team activity. Even if you're on a bowling team, it's still... You're just doing your own thing and doing your own score. 0:05:07.8 DL: So they have a very low level of interdependence in that environment. But I used to be a band teacher and orchestra leader and things like that. And so when Deming used the analogy of an orchestra about that being the pinnacle of interrelationships, it really struck home for me that like he said, "A 1OO people in an orchestra or a band, they're not there to compete [chuckle] who can play the loudest or who could play the biggest solo or... " Right? 'Cause that'd be a terrible thing to listen to if you went to a concert like that. 0:05:47.3 DL: But the reason we give people standing ovations, is because we recognize the interdependence and the cooperation it takes to reach a pinnacle performance. Even in a very small group, maybe just three or four people in a band or something, it takes a tremendous amount of cooperation to get to that level of performance. And just imagine some of our famous rock bands and stuff, if everybody on the stage was competing against each other, it would sound terrible. [chuckle] 0:06:24.9 AS: Yeah. It's interesting about the orchestra concept. I like to talk... When I'm speaking to audiences about Deming's teaching, I say, "Imagine that we have a new generation of leaders that are KPI managers, and they sit down with every person in the orchestra and say, 'You've got a KPI, we've got a limited pool of bonus here, and we're gonna distribute it amongst all the players based upon who was the A players, and C players you're going to get zero.' And so now you need to think about what is your contribution here. And then you pull up... The curtain goes up and you rise up and everybody claps. And then everybody in the orchestra stands up and plays to their best ability." 0:07:03.6 DL: Yeah. You'd have chaos. [laughter] 0:07:07.5 AS: It's interesting in this one that he sees the need to highlight that it's... He's talking about competition between people and between groups. Why did he have the need to say that rather than just competition in general? 0:07:25.1 DL: He did talk about competition in general a lot. He also talked about... He made statements like, "It's really good to have a good competitor." And that seems like it's the opposite of what this statement is about, but I think there's a difference between competition and comparison. So if you have another company, another school, another grade level. So let's say I'm a fourth grade teacher in an elementary school or something, and there's maybe three other fourth grade teachers in that same building. Well, I'm not trying to compete to [chuckle] win in that situation, I'm actually trying to cooperate. And the more that we all three cooperate together, share ideas, maybe even share kids and make a very fluid situation, everybody wins. The number of people that get to higher and higher and higher levels of performance increases and increases and increases. 0:08:35.9 DL: You may never get to a 100% of the people learning a 100% of the material a 100% of the time, but you're gonna get closer and closer and closer, the higher, the more that you cooperate. And the more that you set up competition, we're not talking about games, Deming talked about the difference between games that everybody knows it's a game. You go to a soccer game, everybody knows this is a game. We even call them games. [chuckle] 0:09:07.8 AS: Games. 0:09:09.4 DL: Something we can play, but that's not real life. And that's why I always try to explain to teachers that you can't set up your classroom as a game, because really what you're doing is teaching life and death situations. Somebody that can't learn to add is gonna have a tough, tough time in the rest of their life. So we can't just reduce it down to a simple game, or do this and you get a lolly or an M&M or a piece of candy or something. And we often have teachers that would say things like, "Oh, well, kids like that." "Okay. Well, I like that." [chuckle] But don't tie it to something so critical as performing well on fractions, [chuckle] that if you do really well on this, then you're gonna get a prize or you're gonna get something out of that. I remember, 'cause we're talking about the orchestra thing, as a band teacher, I had to learn the hard way when I was teaching young kids how to play, say, "Look, you need to be practicing 20 minutes a night. And that's the firm rule, is just you need to be doing that." 0:10:23.9 DL: Well, it was really pretty foolish on my part because they have a system too, and they have all kinds of things going on in their lives, that was what was happening. And when I really pushed it really hard, and they'd get little cards that they'd have to fill out how many times they'd practice, and their parents had to sign it and all this stuff. Well, what I found out is I had a bunch of kids cheating, writing down times even though they didn't practice. Some of them would even forge their parents' signatures, [chuckle] all kinds of stuff. And it's really easy to blame the individual and say, "Wow, look how ineffective kids these are. If I can get some better kids, we'd have a better program here." 0:11:05.7 DL: But after learning about Deming and studying all this, I made just one simple change. I just gave them a little run chart and I said, "All I want you to do is just mark down how many minutes a night you practice, that's it. And all you have to do is just, I don't care if it's one minute or no minutes, or whatever it might be, you just put that on this chart." And then we would turn that into a little run chart for a whole week's performance. And lo and behold, the average number of minutes per night that kids were practicing just went up and up and up because they wanted to see their chart get better. [chuckle] It's a human phenomenon that Deming tapped into, that people want to improve. And when they could just see the number of minutes going up. 0:12:00.5 DL: And I'd have really good conversations with them and sit down and say, "Hey. Well, how do you feel about that? Look at this. Look at your chart?" And you didn't have to have anybody verify it or anything else, but it was just you keeping track of your own performance within that. And then when we come together as a group, that's our time to optimize the situation. And Deming talked a lot about that. Sometimes people or groups would have to be sub-optimized, they may not be working to their full potential, so that the whole group or the whole system will work more efficiently. That's a hard concept to get somehow. But again, back to the orchestra thing, there's a lot of people in an orchestra when you play a piece that they're sub-optimized, [chuckle] they're just playing one little part of the whole big piece. [chuckle] 0:12:57.7 AS: Yeah. The cymbals. [vocalization] 0:12:57.9 DL: Yeah. 0:13:00.8 AS: There's a moment. 0:13:02.7 DL: But it's necessary. [chuckle] 0:13:04.7 AS: There's a moment. T And just because the cymbals guy is sitting there and not participating, as long as he's contributing that moment, that's really performance in that sense. There's a quote that I like by what Dr. Deming said that's somewhat related to this, and I see this in my work with companies here in Thailand. And that is, "A company could put a top man or woman at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together." 0:13:40.1 DL: Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. [chuckle] 0:13:43.4 AS: Yeah. I think that really says it all, as to what... 0:13:46.2 DL: Yeah. That's what he is getting at here. The more you cooperate, the better you're gonna compete, even though competition was not... Were really never your goal to start with. 0:13:57.9 AS: Yeah. 0:13:58.9 DL: Well, this made me think about when I was a high school teacher, and I tapped into how much the students really loved learning about Deming and everything. And we started going out and doing presentations actually, and going to the universities, corporations, all kinds of places to do presentations. And every person that did a presentation had to have like four or five people that were helping them, making sure that their video was working and making sure that the sound was right and all kinds of things. And the idea being so that they could concentrate on their presentation. And I'll never forget, we were at a state department somewhere, and somebody at the end got up and said, "The information you shared with us and everything is very [chuckle] profound and very wonderful, but the real show was the high degree of cooperation going on amongst all the students as things were happening." So somebody just didn't get up and do their thing and then just go sit down in a corner somewhere and just wait, everybody had an interrelated job to help people put on a really good performance, basically. 0:15:15.5 AS: Well, what a great way to end our discussion on the role of managers of people. And this was 14 items that Dr. Deming talked about in his book, The New Economics. And this final one, I think really stands out to me, and that is the idea of today, starting right now, stop pitting individuals and groups against each other and start figuring out how we can get people cooperating and how we can coordinate effort, because the coordination and the cooperation is where the real value is created and the real experience is created, whether that's in a classroom, whether that's on a factory floor, or whether that's in an office. All of those spaces, the idea of cooperation is so valuable for performance and getting the most out of people, but also, gosh, it makes it a happier day. [laughter] 0:16:17.8 DL: Absolutely. And not just limited to businesses and organizations, family works the same way. I have five children and I used to always tell people in my seminars, "How do I go about figuring out who amongst them is the greatest child?" [laughter] 0:16:38.0 AS: Child of the month. 0:16:38.1 DL: Yeah. And out of five kids, what? Two or three of them were gonna be below average probably. [chuckle] And so, if you start thinking about it that way, you start thinking about, "Oh, we wouldn't wanna do that." But I had the opportunity to take our family to Europe, we went to Singapore, we went to all kinds of places. And I remember when we went to Singapore to visit relatives there, we had 15 pieces of luggage [laughter] that we flew with for the seven people that were all going on this trip. Well, no one person can be responsible for all that, it has to be an interrelated related system. And everybody's working for the common aim of to pull this off and make sure that we can go on another trip. And it's really enjoyable and everybody had fun. And so... That's my final comment. 0:17:32.0 AS: Well, let's wrap it up there. David. On behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host Andrews Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."
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