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.

What do training and leadership really mean? Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 13) 09/26/2023

What do training and leadership really mean? Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 13) In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss what Dr. Deming meant by "institute training on the job" and "adopt and institute leadership" (principles 6 and 7). How do you follow those principles in the context of education? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 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 13, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of schools systems. John, take it away. 0:00:30.0 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah. We've turned to this set of principles that can be used by systems leaders to guide their transformation work. In the last few episodes, we've discussed the first five principles, the five of the 14. Just to recap real quick, we did constancy of purpose was number one. Principle two is adopt the new philosophy. Then we did principle three, cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Four was maximize high quality learning, and the last time we talked about working continually on the system. And then the plan today is to talk about the sixth principle, which is institute training, and then the seventh principle, which is adopt and institute leadership. So, I figure we just dive in with principle six. So sort of the short version is "institute training on the job." And this really is training for everybody in the system. So in our system that would be students, teachers, staff, management, basically so that everyone can make better contributions to the school system. 0:01:42.7 JD: And just to clarify, when I'm talking about training, I think what it's important to know is that I'm talking about learning how to do a particular job within the system using a particular set of methods and tools. And basically the purpose of training in a system is to allow a worker or a student to know exactly what their job is. Now, we're constantly updating that training because in our world for teachers and principals, you have to constantly develop new skills to keep up with changes in whatever it may be, cognitive science, new curriculum, lesson design, new technology, better teaching techniques. Any number of things that we're training on and improving our training on on an ongoing basis. But a major aim of the training in our system is to reduce variation in methods, basically. I think no matter what type of training you get as a teacher, I think you've experienced variation in methods. 0:02:51.3 JD: And if you go to pretty much any school building in the United States, I think most educators would very quickly tell you, and I think even parents and students, you could sort of go room to room and say, yep, that's the strict teacher. That's the teacher that lets you get away with anything. So this is sort of commonly known when it comes to how teachers run their classrooms, especially on the classroom management level. Everybody knows who has the highly structured classrooms or the disciplined classrooms, but this really does cause problems when you think about it, 'cause there's this mixed message about what a classroom is supposed to look like. And I think on the flip side of classroom management is instruction. And I think there's a lot of variation there. And that's more hidden, I think, but probably possibly more important to sort of consider. And so when you have a typical, let's say an elementary school, an elementary school has three third grade classrooms, and each of those three teachers in most schools in the US, they operate pretty independently of each other. 0:04:05.6 JD: And a lot of schools, each of those teachers would have their own sort of preferred methods. And even sequencing for how that, let's say, a math class is taught. But then the problem is that some combination of students from each one of those classes in third grade that following year are gonna end up in a fourth grade classroom. And now this fourth grade teacher has to deal with this. And really the fourth grade teacher is this customer of the third grade teachers. But if each of the third grade teachers are sort of doing their own thing, then they've sort of optimized each of their own classrooms at the expense of the system. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about sort of reducing variation in methods through training. 0:04:58.9 AS: So there's a few things to discuss in this that I think are interesting. The first thing is, let me just repeat what you said. The aim is to reduce variation in methods. I think most people, if they expected you to say something, they would've expected you to say, "The goal is to reduce variation in outcomes." So tell us why... Now, it may be that methods get to reduce variation in outcomes, but you're focusing on methods. So just tell us a little bit more, because also as we know, there's teachers want some independence and there's some academic independence, at least at let's say university level. They try to have more of that. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about the methods and why you focus on methods instead of just saying you do it the best you can. And one other thing I would say about that is that you could say that if you had three different teachers, different styles, some students would perform better in one style versus another. But a counter argument is, well, we're not sorting them by that to put them into those classrooms. So it's only by luck if that happens. So tell us more about that. 0:06:05.5 JD: Yeah, I think when I'm talking about methods, maybe I should maybe use a little bit different language, but I think probably the most important thing here is that the same sort of high quality curriculum is in front of students. And let's take a math curriculum, for example. Many schools, even at the school building level, there could very well be variation in what the teachers are putting in front of the students, and even in the same school, in the same grade level, let's take those three third grade math classrooms. Now, it's certainly possible that those teachers have taken upon themselves to have a highly sort of coherent system, it's also possible that their school or their district has a highly coherent system, but a lot of times what I found is that, each teacher is sort of making their own decisions, and they sort of say, I'm following the state standards, but those state standards are often general statements, and there's a lot of wiggle room [chuckle] into what you could sort of fit into that. 0:07:11.6 JD: And so what ends up happening is people go to the internet and go to various websites and they print off their preferred worksheets a lot of times. And so when I'm talking about variation in methods, what I'm mostly talking about is a high quality curriculum that's coherent and it's used in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade and fifth grade. Now, within that, teachers have... Still have many, many, many, many decisions to make in terms of how that curriculum gets used, how they sort of adapt it to their students, how they design individual lessons, there's all kinds of room for sort of creativity, individual decision-making, responding to how your students are doing when you actually put it in front of them, but that's mainly what I'm talking about when I'm talking about variation in methods. 0:08:04.8 AS: Okay, got it. 0:08:07.5 JD: Yeah. So, I mean, I think we sort of recognized this as a school network here in Columbus, we have the two elementary schools, the two middle schools. We're a fairly young organization and our oldest building is 15 years old, our newest building is only five years old, and so because we're a relatively young organization, many of our teachers are very early in their careers. So this sort of training, having a set of methods, a set of curricula that we're training on was really important, and so we thought it was so important in fact that we actually have a three-week... It's three and a half weeks that we call a summer institute for teachers prior to the start of the school year. It's a little bit shorter for veteran teachers, but for new teachers, it's three and a half weeks and they actually just finished it 'cause this is our first day of school actually today, so we have the summer institute, and so that was important to us, we're gonna have this training program for our early career teachers, but then the question quickly becomes, what is it that we're doing during that summer institute time period? 0:09:22.4 JD: And so that's where I think this sort of deliberate thought about training comes in, so one of the things that we did is design a capacity matrix for teachers, and so we've talked about this, but just basically outlining what are the capacities that we want teachers to learn and develop during their time with us, not only as new teachers, but it's a sort of an ongoing development road map really, and we have this capacity matrix that outlines the skills, the mindsets, the knowledge that we want teachers to sort of gain over time, some of it through this summer institute, and it sort of defines, "Here's the capacities." It breaks those capacities down into things that we're then linking to specific training sessions throughout that summer institute. And it's not really an evaluation tool, it's more like a road map for, "Here are the things I wanna be working on, here's how I'm doing, here's some areas where I can go learn this even, outside the training because the capacity matrix also has readings linked, it also has podcasts or videos or books that are linked, that if there's an area that a teacher is particularly interested in, they can do a deeper dive in it, and then there's also a way to sort of track their learning over time. So that's a way to sort of add some structure to this idea of instituting training on the job. 0:10:55.6 AS: It sounds like I would be excited to sit into that 3.5 week... Three and a half week summer institute. Like just the excitement of new teachers and of prior teachers sharing their experience. I imagine that they don't get that much time to do that during the school year. 0:11:15.7 JD: Yeah, it gets tough, I mean, unless you're really deliberate about building that into your schedule because most teachers are with students obviously the majority of the day, so we have this three and a half week summer institute for new teachers, and then we also built in at least an hour a week of PD on an ongoing basis, and then we also have eight days that are so... 0:11:35.1 AS: To the listeners out there, PD means Professional Development. 0:11:38.9 JD: Oh, right. Professional Development. Yep, Professional Development. 0:11:41.4 AS: Okay. Got it. 0:11:41.9 JD: Cheers. But you mentioned teachers are excited to share what they learn, and so this summer institute has a deliberate design on that front as well. So all teachers that are in their first and second year with United Schools Network go to this three and a half week training, and then it's about half that for more experienced teachers. But the reason we do that is because early on we got this feedback that for new teachers and the amount of stuff they're trying to download on the curriculum front, on the classroom management front and other areas is basically a blur. And then they come back after living it for a year now, they're going through that full summer institute as a second year teacher, they say, "Oh, I actually can sit at a table with the new teachers and they're actually a second teacher within the training." And that's a part of the deliberate design is you've kind of lived it, you've learned it, you've applied what you learned, and now I can come back, I'm still learning as a second year teacher, obviously, early in my career, but now I have a lot to sort of pass on during each of those trainings in addition to what they're getting from who the actual trainer is up in front of the room. 0:13:03.1 AS: Well, it's interesting because I was also thinking about a production line, like a worker on a production line doesn't say, "Okay, on my shift, we're gonna do this differently." A worker on a production line learns how that process works, how it's measured, why it's important to do it this way, so that it... How it impacts the next part of the process. So whether we talk about a worker on a production line, whether we talk about a worker in an office doing software development, the fact is is that ultimately what we really want is to standardize what we're doing and then innovate over time. It's not that we don't want an employee or a teacher to stand up and say, "Okay, I think we can improve this now. Yeah, we've been doing this for a year this way, but I see more improvements that could be done." And that's where you get into this process of PDSA and thinking about how do we improve this in a methodical way. 0:14:06.7 JD: Yeah. Well, and there's two things that come to mind. So I used to be the point person on curriculum development training. I led that training in our network for I think a dozen years. And so what I would tell the first year teachers... So I had first and second year teachers in my training every year. I would tell the first year teachers, you're gonna get a curriculum that's been built and tested over a number of years. Do not touch it across the school year. And here's the reason why. One, you're learning all these new procedures and processes, you're learning this new curriculum, and you're sort of learning it just in time to teach it to students in terms of the curriculum that you're gonna put in front of students. And all of these different stages are linked. 0:14:50.1 JD: And if you start making changes in an early stage, there's sort of this waterfall that happens throughout the entire process that you're not gonna be aware of initially. And so I tell them, wait till your second year that you have the full sort of system picture in your head of your curriculum before you start making changes. And that works pretty well, and and then you'd have the second year teachers there saying, "Yes, yes, do that, do that." [chuckle] 'Cause what he is saying is, "Basically, I learned this the hard way, or you know, I thought I could do this and what happens is, I had to... I thought I was changing a lesson and that ended up meaning I had to change a unit and then I had to change an assessment that's tied to this unit and so I didn't have that full picture." So that was one thing I'm thinking of. And another thing is, you know, we want feedback on this summer institute delivery. So many of the people that are delivering this training are senior leaders. 0:15:46.3 JD: Many have been with us for more than a decade. But even just this week we got this long feedback from a first year staff member on summer institute. And an organization can respond to that in different ways. It could be, well, "Who do you think you are sending me this feedback? You just got here." But the response to that staff member was, "This is great. School starts soon, let's... We'll wait a few weeks, schedule a time so this is still fresh in our heads, and we're gonna sort of take notes on this and think about how we could incorporate this feedback into the design of summer institute next summer." And so that's sort of the continual improvement mindset, be it... Could be at the individual teacher level, or in this case it's the whole network's summer institute that we're taking a look at, but everything is on the table for continual improvement, yeah. 0:16:35.9 AS: Well, and it raises another point, which Dr. Deming talks about. I know Toyota talks about too, in the stuff that they talk about, about being a learning organization. And what does it mean to be a learning organization? The most important thing about being a learning organization, to me, is the cumulative learning. It's not the training and we do this and we have this training and we support learning and all that, it's the cumulative learning. Like you said, we've been improving this, this process, this curriculum, this teaching process over many iterations and we've gotten it to here. 0:17:14.3 JD: Yep. 0:17:15.1 AS: The objective is to bring it to the next level. 0:17:17.3 JD: Yeah. 0:17:17.7 AS: Now, you can imagine, a way to think about that is, imagine you're a new CEO, you go in and you say, "We're throwing all that out and we're going with this." And it's like all that cumulative learning is gone. 0:17:30.5 JD: Yep. Yep. 0:17:31.3 AS: Now, it's not to say that that cumulative learning ended up in the right place. That's a whole another discussion about being in touch with the customer. 0:17:40.3 JD: Yep. 0:17:41.2 AS: And making sure that you're delivering with your cumulative learning. 0:17:44.5 JD: Yep. 0:17:44.8 AS: But if you are delivering what you're supposed to be delivering to your, you know, what your customer wants, then, then it really is a matter of how do you keep that learning in your organization? And I think that's... So your three and a half week summer institute is a great example of a training method and the response about, "Hey, that's a... We are going to get all this feedback of lots of improvements, but we're not gonna do it right now, we're gonna put that together, think about it, observe, and then try to figure out, okay, one of these is particularly good." For instance, in my case with my valuation masterclass bootcamp, I'm just about to launch my 11th bootcamp. 0:18:23.9 AS: So, and I can do my iterations in about eight weeks. Bootcamp lasts six weeks, I take two weeks off, then we do it again. And I'm trying to do as many iterations as I can. And the newest iteration, after many great iterations is we are gonna test a buddy system. And we've been designing it, discussing it, looking at how do we build this into the program with the objective that the buddy system basically helps our pass rate. In other words, the people that feel like dropping out don't drop out because they've made a connection with one individual, they're already on a team, so they got a team feedback. So that is a new, just one new learning piece that we're gonna test and then see where it ends up at the end of the, you know, of the, of the six weeks. So that's an example. 0:19:11.0 JD: Yeah, that's a really good example. And I know we talked about the, that class prior, that eight-week class and... Sorry, the six week class and how it's sort of a natural sort of PDSA cycle that you're running through each of those. So you have a lot of those cycles. You just kind of keep making it better and better, you know? 0:19:28.7 AS: Well, that's what... When I heard you talk about, we'll look at that at the next three and a half week summer institute I thought, "Gosh, does it, is that," I mean, I guess that you've got improvements that you're doing throughout the school year, that you're already determined this is the things we're gonna work on, but also you have to accept the fact that everybody's probably overloaded. And so it isn't that easy to say we're gonna improve a zillion things. And that's for the listeners out there, you know, it's an important thing to understand your own capacities in your organization and to understand the cycles that you're doing through your process. If you can speed up the cycles, then you can speed up your testing and... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/28045761

Who Needs Special Help? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 9) 09/19/2023

Who Needs Special Help? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 9) Most of the time, variation between students or workers is the result of common cause situations, but sometimes you find folks who consistently aren't performing at the same level. Does more punishment work? What should you do instead? In the episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss how managers (or teachers) should approach these "special cause" situations. 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 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 his New Economics book about the role of a manager of people after the transformation. This is on page 86 of the third edition, or page 125 of the second edition. And this is point number nine. Let me read it to you before we get started. So again, for a, the role of a manager of people, this is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. Point number nine, he will try to discover who, if anyone, is outside the system in need of special help. This can be accomplished with simple calculations. If there be individual figures on production or on failures. Special help may be only simple rearrangement of work. It might be more complicated. He in need of special help is not in the bottom 5% of the distribution of others. He is clean outside that distribution. And Dr. Deming presents a normal distribution and some other things, in this chart that he presents in this one. And we're gonna call this episode: Who Needs Special Help? David, take it away. 0:01:40.5 David Langford: Okay. Yeah, this is always a topic of discussion because, there's all kinds of management theories out there, right? About, how we manage, I can't remember who, was a proponent of just getting rid of the bottom 10% of your... 0:01:57.9 AS: Jack Welch. 0:01:58.0 DL: Organization every year. Jack Welch, yeah. Notoriously wrong, with that. And, or well, "if you can't cut it, out you go." And that all sounds good until it becomes so expensive to constantly be hiring new people and replacing people. And the fear level goes up so high that you can't get anything done because nobody wants to take any risks because you really can't take a risk because you might be gone. So Deming is saying a lot really in this point, he talks about the distribution of people. Well, so first thing is you have to figure out what is that distribution, right? So how are you calculating that? Or how are you figuring out what that performance level is? Well, as a teacher in a classroom, obviously, you have tests that you're giving, you have projects that are happening, etcetera. It is actually pretty easy to see that distribution of performance in a classroom. You give a simple test on something and then you look at the test results and you start to see, okay, everybody scored on this test from 70%-100% on this test, right? So you can say, okay, that's an average of about 85 or so for the whole class. 0:03:31.5 DL: When you look at it on a histogram scale like that, what Deming is really talking about, he's not talking about just the people that were scoring at the lower end of that distribution. People that were getting 70, 75, 80, etcetera. They were all at the lower end of the distribution of that system. But what it's showing is that's the capability of the system. You did something, you did a process with people, you tested the process, the process produced that curve, and on average, it gives you an average of 85. Now deciding whether or not that's good, is good, is good good enough, that's a whole different really discussion than what really Deming is talking about here. So he's not talking about people just on the lower end of a distribution of performance. He's really talking about somebody that's completely outside of that distribution. So in a classroom, if I did something like that and we did a project or a test or whatever, and everybody is scoring from 70%-100% except for maybe two people that got 10 or 5, right? 0:04:46.6 DL: Obviously these are two people completely outside of the system. And what he is really talking about is probably no amount of adjusting the system is going to help those two people. They are so far outside of the distribution that they really do need special help. So in a classroom that can mean, this could be children with special needs, they could be hearing defects, they could be the eyesight that, I don't know how many times I thought somebody was an understanding problem. And then we find out, oh, they couldn't see, either they couldn't see to read or they couldn't see the... 0:05:31.8 AS: Something very simple. 0:05:32.3 DL: The whiteboard in front of them. Yeah. And they got tested and got glasses and everything and wow, it just made a huge difference. But obviously when you have people in a special category, it's gonna take much more time and effort individually to deal with them. Right? And that's why it's called special, special needs, right? Because you are gonna take the time and effort individually to deal with those individuals. If you don't have anybody completely outside of the distribution of performance, then you're gonna go back and look at the system itself. So in my example, everybody is scoring from 70%-100% on some test that you give them. And the average is 85. Then you have to decide is good good enough, is that a good enough distribution on this? And as a teacher a lot of that has to do with understanding where does this fit in the entire curriculum. 0:06:40.2 DL: So is this a critical skill, that if these students don't have this skill and they don't have it just down pat, and are acing it, it's gonna cause huge problems later on. So it might be worth the time to go back and sort of rework that for the entire class and see if we can get a higher average. On other things, you might look at that and say, "Oh, okay. Only I know really the whole curriculum for the year, and I know that we're gonna be revisiting the same concept probably four more times throughout the year. So this average at this time of the year is probably good enough." I often joke with teachers and say, "If you're happy with your average, and you know it, clap your hands," so. [laughter] 0:07:31.0 DL: But if you're not happy with your average and you know it, then you have to think about, okay, well what am I gonna do about it? Do I have the time to go back and rework this? And Deming in his example in figure 12, that he's showing there, is actually talking about moving in the entire system forward. So shrinking the variation so that it's not nearly as wide as it used to be, and more people are getting a higher average within that. So how do you get that higher average? Well, prevention is the key to quality. So every time you're doing a lesson that you've done before and you're taking that feedback that you've gotten before, folding that in. And this time when I did it, ah wow, we got an average of 89, or we got an average of 93, or...Excuse me. It's really difficult when you're improving a system and you're moving that average up, each time you go through something, when you start to get up and really high levels performance, going from 93 to 94 is a really big effort. 0:08:57.4 DL: There's gotta be something really happening there to get that next level result. And do you really have the time right now to get that? Or is it a problem of tomorrow that we have to figure out, okay, what are we gonna do in this system, in the future, to get a higher average? But I didn't believe, really, this when I started working with Deming, but then I went back and looked at all the grades and scores that I had given people, and I was so predictable. Every year I had the exact number, the same number of people getting A's or doing top-level work. I had the same level of percentage of kids that were failing I had... But of course it was always their fault, not my fault, so. And so that was really eyeopening to me that all I had been doing is just basically, for five or six years I had been doing the same thing over and over, and over, and expecting a different result. And it just doesn't work like that. 0:10:05.2 AS: Yeah, this one is interesting because first of all, he's presenting us with a distribution. We can see a normal distribution, and he's presenting also a more narrow distribution, saying that the goal is to try to, maybe in this particular case that he's showing to, he says, "You wanna work to improve the system by narrowing that distribution so that..." And shifting it, as we can see, as we've talked about. But I think also in this one, if you don't understand the system, you can get caught up in chasing performance in individuals that actually are just a normal outcome. And you miss the time that you need to spend to fix that special cause that needs to be fixed. So that was one of the things I took away from it. What do you think about that? 0:11:02.6 DL: Yeah, that's why he hated practices like grading on a curve. Which is notorious, it is still is notorious in many universities, grading on a curve. And... Because that shows no understanding of performance and distribution and average performance and it takes no accountability. And for you as the teacher, it just all blame on the student. "Well, if you tried hard, you could do that." Well, no, that's not true. There's only gonna be so many A's, so many B's, etcetera. So you're not gonna ever get there, so. But really this is about... Go ahead. 0:11:43.8 AS: To understand that a little bit more, so is the problem about grading on a curve that you're constantly... You're not necessarily improving? You're just like, "Well, this group had a curve that was here on the continuum and this group had a little bit better, they were better." And what is it? 'Cause I'd say grading on a curve is something that people on initial blush would think, "Isn't that what Deming is talking about?" I mean, we see normal distributions, we see curves. Explain that in more detail. 0:12:15.1 DL: You're creating an artificial scarcity of top marks. So only... No matter how well we do as a class, there's only gonna be so many top marks or people that are gonna get the top grade, right? And so you're gonna create all kinds of competition and you're gonna create all kinds of weird behaviors that go on. You're actually encouraging people to cheat. And I can't remember if I told you this story or not, but one of my children, she was in a advanced chemistry class or something, I think it was. And she comes home the first day of school and she said, "Dad, I think this teacher would be really interested in talking with you about what you do and improvement, and everything else." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "'Cause he said, well, everybody in here can achieve, everybody in here can get an A, can do well." 0:13:14.1 DL: She comes home the second day of school and she said, "I think I'm gonna drop this chemistry class." And I said, "What happened in two days?" She said, "He came back today and he spent the whole hour of the class explaining how he grades on a curve. So there's no way in the world that everybody in here is gonna get an A," right? You're creating an artificial scarcity of top marks and it's just not gonna happen. And I said, "Okay, well, just let me know what you decide to do with that." Well, she comes home the next day and she said, "I think I'm gonna stay in the class. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be one of the people on top of the curve." And this was an honors chemistry class and in that class, half of the kids in that class had had straight A, 4.0 averages to that point. So, there was a bunch of kids that quit, 'cause they could not risk getting even a B in a class like that. 0:14:18.0 DL: But my daughter stayed in the class, at the end of the first semester, she comes home laughing one day and she said, "Dad, you'll never guess what happened." I said, what? And she said, well, this is a very, very smart group of kids. And not only did kids keep track of their own scores, they actually kept track of other kids' scores in the class as well. And I think there were one or two kids that found out that there were a bunch of kids that were just right on the line between a B and a C or something. But if those kids failed, it wouldn't make any difference to them. They're still gonna get the same grade at the end of the semester. Even if they didn't even take the final, it's not gonna affect them one way or the other, they're still gonna get that B or a C grade that was in that. But if they did fail it would mean it would change the curve and these other top kids could move up into the top echelon. 0:15:13.3 DL: And so they paid these kids $20 to fail the final. Well, somehow the teacher found out about it and then the principal found out about it. And there was a Spanish inquisition that was taking place and then they were talking about expelling kids and all kinds of stuff, I couldn't stand it, I had to go and talk to the principal and I said, how do you like it? He said, what do you mean? I said, "They're better at managing your system than you. They figured out how to play your game better than you. And you gotta be rewarding these kids not... And recognizing amazing statistical analysis and capability, not punishing them through that process, so." I think it was the same principal that said, "I know I'm having a bad day when your car is in the parking lot," so. [laughter] 0:16:06.6 AS: Exactly. You should have said, you should have been... You didn't even realize you were teaching 'em a double major AP chemistry and AP statistics. 0:16:17.6 DL: Yeah, absolutely. So. 0:16:19.3 AS: Well, let's wrap this up by... I think the key thing of what Dr. Deming is telling us in this is about understanding your system and then identifying if someone is outside of the system, and that person or result outside of the system is... You know, warrants some special attention or special help and that that, you can't really know that without understanding the system and also not being too distracted by the variation that's natural from that system. And therefore, ultimately, once you understand that, then you really can clearly identify that some outcome or some individual is a special cause and then you can focus in on that and fix it. And so that's how I would summarize it. Is there anything else you'd add to that? 0:17:12.9 DL: Yeah. I was just was recalling that you are... Deming explaining several times that if somebody is outside of the systems that, far outside of the system, further rating and ranking are not gonna help them at all. Giving them more failures, more Fs, docking their pay. Whatever you're thinking of doing to somebody that's completely outside the system it's really not gonna help them at all in that process. And that... That's not help. Rating and ranking and bribing people to do better is not actually helping them. You actually have to study cause or the reason why that person is special cause and then do something about it. And in a classroom, and it could very well be that this person really doesn't belong in this class. They don't have the prerequisite skills that the other 98% of the class has. And so therefore they really don't even belong in this class. So that just means you have to get them in a different class or help them in some way to get caught up or, and it's gonna take more time and effort. Special causes take more time and effort. That's why they're special. So. 0:18:31.3 AS: Well, David, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey and you can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work." /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/28044408

Resource Management: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 9) 09/12/2023

Resource Management: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 9) In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about resource management in a non-traditional sense. Bill explains how managing the variation and integration in your product or service is just as important as increasing consistency and removing waste. 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'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 episode nine, Resource Management. Bill, take it away. 0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And thanks for our audience and thanks for joining in again. So we're picking up following episode nine, which was, I called it the Paradigms of Variation. It was, I think the title on the podcast may be a little bit different, but what we've been building up to from the beginning is, parallel tracks. But one aspect that I've been trying to bring forward is this idea of variation in the white beads. We talked about the white bead experiment and the idea that the red beads are not caused by the workers, they're caused by the system. 0:01:13.5 BB: And then what if we got to the point that there were no more red beads? Yes, we can make the red beads faster, we can make the red beads cheaper, but could we make, I'm sorry, we can make the white beads faster. We can make the white beads cheaper with the elimination of the red beads, but if we're dealing with nothing but white beads that are cheaper and made faster, can we improve the quality of the beads? And what I found is, when I press on people, they'll say, "Yes, everything can be improved. Everything can be improved. When I press, press, press, they'll say faster. They'll say cheaper. I said, "Yeah, we said that." I said, "But can they be better?" 0:01:53.4 BB: Is that what Dr. Deming's trying to say with continuous improvement that we stop it a 100% white beads? Or can we go further? And I find people get stuck. And I think it's very easy to get stuck, because that's the world we live in of good parts and bad parts. We focus on the bad to make them good. And what do they do when they're good? Well, they met requirements. But what's missing is this key word called variation. And yes, there's variation in the red beads and Dr. Deming would plot that on a control chart. But Dr. Deming also discovered in, definitely in 1960, from Dr. Taguchi who he met a few years earlier, this notion of variation in the white beads and that the, so I talked earlier also about question number one and quality management. 0:02:44.0 BB: Does this quality characteristic meet requirements? There's only two answers, remember Andrew, yes or no. But then question number two is how many ways are there to meet requirements? And I'd say there's an infinite number if you take into account, how many decimal places you can go. And that, the idea that you can have anywhere from the absolute minimum to the absolute maximum of the requirements is there's all those places be in between. That's called variation. And does it matter where you are within spec? Within spec? And again, by spec I mean specification. You've met the requirements for the activity. And so what we did in episode nine, I'm sorry, episode eight is look at what I call the Two Distribution exercise. And you may have caught me saying there are four suppliers. 0:03:41.7 BB: And at the end I said, forget about the four. There's actually two. I've done it with four, I've done it with two but the important thing is when I show people a number of distributions within requirements, and one of them will be, we'll go from the minimum to the maximum with near zero and frequency at either end to then high in the middle. And I'll say, "The middle is the ideal value." And then I'll say, let's say you also have a really narrow distribution consuming, and I said, last time, 10% of the variation, what I meant to say, and I said at least once, is 10% of the tolerance that, so you're using a very small portion of the tolerance, but you're far away from the ideal value. 0:04:27.0 BB: You're shifted to the right. And so when I give people the choice of buying from one of those two suppliers under the idealized situation, you may recall, Andrew, of same price, same schedule, everything's guaranteed to meet requirements. We've got histograms, we've got control charts. The processes are in control with all those, what Ackoff would call idealized situations. Make it really, really simple. Do I go with the wide one centered on the ideal value or the narrow one over to the right? And time again, people take the really narrow one, which we said was about, why do you like the really narrow one? Because they're more consistent. Then I explained that that's precision. And that's the most popular answer. And I'm reminded of that every time I use the exercise. Within the last few days, I've used it again. 0:05:19.6 BB: And that narrow one gets people's attention. What I find really fascinating is if the goal is to meet requirements, then why is the answer not, I'll take either one of them, which was one of the choices. You could take the wide one in the middle that covers the entire, or the narrow one. Why does it matter? Why not say in the world of meeting requirements, what's the driver behind the narrow one? Why don't people say it doesn't matter anymore? And I think because there's something about variation and consistency. I was talking with somebody the other day and they said, "Being consistent is, that's everything in terms of quality." And I said, "Not quite. Not quite." What... And this will become the focus of a later episode, that you could, ideally you could put the variation where you want it to be along the ideal and end up with improved what? 0:06:18.4 BB: The answer is improved integration. Because the very simple model we use in organizations is that if the parts are good, whether it's two parts, three parts, four parts, number of parts going together, you have to have at least two. And I say if the parts are good, then they fit. That's the model. If the parts are good, then they fit, then is there anything wrong with that model? And people are like, "No, that's the model we use." If the parts are good, then they fit. Now, if you're developing an airplane or a rocket engine, you've got a wing and a fuselage, then you've got all the parts to make the wing, all the parts to make the fuselage, all the parts that do these separate components, you could say the same thing for a play. You have all the elements of the first act, all the elements of the second act, and then you put them together for the entire play. So the point is that what I'm talking about is that integration is not black and white. [overlapping conversation] 0:07:23.2 AS: What... Just... Can you define integration just so we can make sure we understand it? 0:07:27.5 BB: Yeah. Integration is when I'm going to put the cap onto the bottle of water. That's integration. The cap is good, the bottle is good. Now I'm trying to put the cap, which is good, and the bottle, which is good, and I'm trying to put the cap onto the bottle. 0:07:46.0 AS: Okay. 0:07:46.5 BB: Yeah. That's integration. Or I'm trying to put the, I'm trying to put two parts of something together. I'm trying to put the cap on top of the pen. What I love about water bottles as a prop is wherever I'm presenting, someone in your room will have a water bottle. And I'll say, can I use this as a prop? Sure. And I say, if all the requirements for the cap are met, what do we say about the cap? It's good. And if all the requirements for the bottle are met, what do we say about the bottle? It's good. Then I'll say, see what we're doing? We're managing parts in isolation. We're saying the cap is good, the body is good. Then I say, why don't we focus on how well the cap mates with the bottle? And I had a co-worker once said, well, if the cap is good and the bottle is good, then won't it fit. Fit as in absolute fit, right? 0:08:39.7 BB: Not relative fit ‘cause remember in early episodes we talked about black and white thinking versus shades of gray thinking. Good versus bad is black and white. Fit is black and white. It fits or it doesn't. What I'm talking about Andrew, is the idea that there's variation in good and the variation in good cap, and the variation in the good bottle show up when I go to put the cap onto the bottle. Because if the, if the outer diameter of the bottle is on the high side and the cap, inner diameter is on the low side, then I'm gonna have trouble putting the cap onto the bottle, ‘cause one's too small, one's too large. Boom. And, so what I'm trying to imply, [chuckle] not what I'm trying to imply. What I'm stating is fit is not absolute. It's relative. Integration, which is about fit, is relative. And I don't, did we talk Andrew about a hundred percent…? 0:09:41.1 AS: Wait a minute. You gotta say that again. I didn't catch that. I know many of our listeners are a little faster than me. But say that again about relative versus... 0:09:56.6 BB: Okay, so what I'm saying is the fundamental model we're using is if the cap is good of the water bottle and the bottle is good, then the cap will fit onto the bottle. It'll fit when you go to... 0:10:05.7 AS: Yep. 0:10:07.8 BB: Put the, put it on it fits just like that. What I'm talking about… 0:10:12.1 AS: And when you say fit, are you using that as a general term in a system or are you just talking specifically about the cap? 0:10:17.8 BB: No, no, I'm really, I'm glad you brought this up. What the suggestion is that fit, there's only one degree of fit. It goes together you know with a, technically what we're talking about is how much torque is required to screw it on, how much force is required. And so fit is about how much force is required to screw it on. And the implication behind them being good and fit is that they always fit the same. So the model is that parts that are good fit together the same way each time. And that's not the case. So there's a... And I, one of my first exposures to this was reading a book by David Kearns and I mentioned this, I don't know which episode. And I said that Frank Pipp, an assembly plant manager at this Ford factory had his assembly team routinely buy competitor's cars and put them together. 0:11:19.4 BB: Because at the Ford plant, most of the time when they're putting parts together, they needed rubber mallets to bang them together because they didn't quite fit. And, so they needed help. And the help was the hammers to bang them together and out. Every now and then two parts went together without a hammer. That means fit is easy as opposed to hammers, which means fit is difficult. So imagine you've got everything between I can put them together, with little effort at all to I need a hammer to bang them together. That's degrees of fit, which I'm saying Andrew is degrees of integration. 0:12:00.4 AS: Okay. 0:12:01.2 BB: And, so the point I was trying to, what got me excited about Taguchi's work and then really excited when I saw Dr. Deming realizing it, is that when I came across this a hundred percent snap fit Toyota pickup truck story account, I thought, well, holy cow. And I found in listening to these podcasts that I use a expression quite a bit. 0:12:24.1 AS: Holy cow cow, holy spicoli. 0:12:26.3 BB: Holy... Holy cow, Andrew [laughter] But what was cool is this Ford plant has discovered that Toyota, where I know Dr. Deming had some influence, but some influence, okay, what influence? that's a whole ‘nother topic, but I know Taguchi had an influence there. So I'm looking at that with my understanding of variation and thinking, that's incredible. And brought that awareness to my coworkers at Rocketdyne. And we developed, with, I provided the education, they provided the hands-on go make it work. They developed hardware that went together beautifully. And why is this important, Andrew? And this is one of the things we got to in the end of the last podcast is if you would like your customers to have products that go together easily if they're assembling it or going together means that it, this product fits well with how they use it. 0:13:22.7 BB: That the car starts each time or the stopwatch, whatever they're using, works really well, which means there's degrees of performance. That's what excites me about the idea that if we can pay attention to the variation, we can either have designs that require hammers to assemble or we can design them to go together well. And, and all of this is to say that's what prompted me to get people excited by the paradigms of variation to get them to better understand that a mindset of meeting requirements is different from a mindset of precision, which is different from a mindset of accuracy. And what I've just repeated is Paradigm A is meet requirements. Get the darts somewhere on the dartboard. Meet requirements be anywhere within the requirements. Paradigm B is this idea that we're striving for consistency, incredible uniformity, otherwise known as, as precision. 0:14:30.7 BB: And, and there may be a place for that. But what Dr. Taguchi's talking about is different than that, that's precision is Paradigm B. Paradigm C is trying to be close to target. So that's taken the distribution, which is precise, and then finding a way to adjust it to be on the bullseye. And what does that gain us, Andrew? That, well, first of all, I would say when we're working at home looking for, working on the recipe, trying to get exactly one cup of flour, exactly 350 degrees, exactly one hour in the oven. As we pay attention to how close we are to those values, chances are we're gonna end up with an incredible product. And that's, we're trusting that the person who developed the recipe has done that. 0:15:23.2 BB: But so whether it is woodworking or working on any project, it could be making things out of cloth where you're, you’re putting together some outfit out of cloth that my father used to do for my sister when he was in the textile business. That is about the idea that things come together well is about accuracy in improving integration. And that's what I find the Deming philosophy offers an understanding of what does it take to inspire an organization where, where it takes the people working on their different elements, not to meet the requirements any way they choose, but to meet requirements in a - ready Andrew - synchronous way. So you and I are on the soccer pitch, and it's not about your position, it's about my position and your position on defense that we're trying to win the World Cup. 0:16:25.2 AS: Yeah. 0:16:26.4 BB: And so all of that is about the Paradigms of Variation. Go ahead, Andrew. You were gonna say. 0:16:29.0 AS: You referenced sports and I was just thinking about how easily we work together in team activities, team sports that are just, clearly great teams are the ones that integrate each individual's doing their own personal work and they're doing training and they're improving themselves, and then they're practicing together. How do we bring this together into an integrated system that then wins? 0:16:54.9 BB: That's right. And so when you say bring together, that's what integration is. It's bring together, right? And we're looking, we we're screened a bunch of candidates on the phone, now we bring them in for face-to-face interviews. What are we looking for? Why isn't it enough that they meet the requirements that are on the website? We wanna know which of these potential employees is the best fit with our team, whether it's to play first base, or play senior researcher. Are they a fit? They may be very consistent in what they do, but is that consistency...I mean, they have to be, their consistency has to mesh what we want. So they may be consistently tardy, they may be consistently dominating the meeting, but what we want them to do is fit into the meeting. 0:17:50.0 AS: And the other thing that I always think about when I hear you talking about this stuff is, I think about when I was younger, when Lexus came out, if you remember Lexus, when they first... 0:18:01.8 BB: Absolutely. 0:18:02.5 AS: Launched... 0:18:02.5 BB: Oh yeah. 0:18:03.7 AS: Their great video or the great advertising was stacked up champagne glasses... 0:18:09.5 BB: Yes, yes. 0:18:11.6 AS: Onto the hood of this car. And then they lifted the wheels off the ground and then, or not off the ground, but like they had a roller that they were rolling it on, and then they revved that car up to as fast as it could possibly go, and those glasses did not fall. And you know the only way you can get that is by improving not only each individual part, but how those parts work together with the end result being less vibration, less friction. 0:18:39.9 BB: Yes. 0:18:41.1 AS: All of those things. 0:18:42.0 BB: Yes. Exactly. 0:18:42.5 AS: And you couldn't do it by just improving one part. 0:18:45.6 BB: That's right. And that's a great example because together you've got minimum vibration. That's not an accident. That's they have figured out how those things come together to have an incredible product, which is consistently, it works consistently. But the consistency, there's nothing wrong with consistency. Consistency is not the issue. But it, the issue is is the consistency we're talking about striving for precision or accuracy. So a car that consistently doesn't start is consistent, but that's not helpful. I want a car that consistently starts, right? I wanna be consistent around... I want you to bring your consistency in concert with others' consistency where those consistencies matter, you know? And if we don't need you to be consistent, then that's okay. Then we save money by having lack of consistency because why have consistency if you don't need it? But all of that's about... 0:19:50.6 AS: It's hard. It's hard. Consistency is hard and fit is hard. 0:19:55.4 BB: Yes. And, and, and, to build upon what you just said, consistency is about managing variation as a system. And so, another thing I wanna point out, and I got some comments from some friends about, you know, the last podcast. The Paradigms of Variation are about the paradigms of white bead variation. So, so, Paradigm A is we've got variation within the requirements and, and is that okay? Is it enough to have variation in requirement? It doesn't matter where we are? That's Paradigm A. Paradigm B is precision. We're consistent, but we're not around the ideal. That's accuracy. And then paradigm D is....and I was searching for the word, the expression Dr. Taguchi used. He calls that Technology Development, that we're developing an advanced technology for use in... And I, the example I used last time is, let's say we're fac…we’re developing a new way of making tubes for plumbers to use. 0:21:07.6 BB: And I said in the beginning let's say we just have one inch outer diameter tubes, and that's Paradigm C because everything we make is one inch outer diameter tubes. And then somebody comes along in our research labs and comes up with a novel way to make tubes of different sizes. That's variety. So they can make them down to quarter of an inch, half an inch outer diameter. And then what... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/28005024

The Student Supply Chain and Using PDSA for Improvement Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 12) 09/05/2023

The Student Supply Chain and Using PDSA for Improvement Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 12) In this series, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss principles that educational systems leaders can use to guide their transformation work. This episode covers principles 4 and 5: maximize high-quality learning and work continually on the system. 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 John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Today is episode 12, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of schools' systems. John, take it away. 0:00:34.4 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, like you said, we've sort of turned to this set of principles that can be used by educational systems leaders to guide their transformation work. Two episodes ago, we sort of kicked off the principles, gave a little bit of an introduction. We talked about principle one, which is create constancy of purpose. And then the last time we talked, we kind of broke down two principles. Principle two was adopt the new philosophy, and principle three was, cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. So in this episode, I was gonna sort of take on the next two, the fourth and fifth principles. So the fourth principle is, maximize high quality learning. And the fifth principle is, work continually on the system. 0:01:28.6 JD: So I thought we'd sort of kick things off with principle four, that idea around maximize high quality learning. And I think sort of... If I was gonna capture that principle in just a couple sentences, I would say, you wanna maximize high quality learning and minimize total cost of education by improving the relationship with educational institutions from which students come and to which they matriculate. So, we're thinking about a single source of students coming into a system, such as an elementary school student moving into a middle school, and seeing that as an opportunity to build a long term relationship of loyalty and trust. So that's sort of the overarching idea. And I think if you sort of look at this principle through the lens of United Schools Network, where I work in Columbus, Ohio, I think that's sort of a helpful lens. And when you think about our origin story, we started as a single middle school serving a few east side neighborhoods, near downtown Columbus. And I was the founding principal, school director of that particular campus. 0:02:55.3 JD: And at the time, we decided we were gonna open a middle school, 'cause this is the point often in a student's educational career where they fall so far behind, they often then drop out of school altogether just a few years later. So we wanted to get them in middle school. So, before we were this sort of network of schools in the school system, we were this one school that grew from serving just sixth grade over the first few years to sixth through eighth grade, right. And when you looked at these east side neighborhoods where we were located, there were 15 or so elementary schools from the city school system that formed this sort of de facto feeder pattern into our middle school. Most of those schools were performing in the bottom 5% of schools in the state. Which means when those students then matriculated to our middle school, they typically did so in... The typical kid was at least two, but more often three and even four grade levels below where they should be when they enrolled with us in 6th grade. 0:04:18.1 JD: And, while I didn't have this Deming lens at the time, I did sort of approach things from a process standpoint, from a system standpoint. But, as the middle school principal, I'm thinking about sort of all that entails to run a school and a new school at that, so we're doing all the things that come with a startup. There was no way for me to run around and form relationships with the 15 principals leading those elementary schools from which our students were primarily coming from. 0:04:54.0 JD: And so when we had this opportunity to grow from one school into a network that's now four schools, we elected to grow down into elementary schools. The point in doing so was to move towards this sort of single supplier relationship, that Dr. Deming outlined in his point four. And so now, we have two middle school principals, two elementary schools in our network, and they can work together on a whole host of sort of quality characteristics, like vertically planning curriculum across that K to eight pipeline. And, we were middle schools first and then elementary schools, so while we're getting some of our students from our own elementary schools we're also still getting students from other non-USN schools, non-USN elementary schools, but we're sort of increasingly moving toward that single supplier model. And I think that coordination is one of the ways that we can then maximize high quality learning, and the great thing about this is that we then minimize the total cost of education. 0:06:14.6 JD: And I think this is one of the important paradoxes of Dr. Deming's work, in that, as quality goes up, price goes down. Which that's sort of the opposite of what a lot of people think. In the case of schools, what we're talking about in terms of minimizing cost, a lot of that has to do with less remediation of students as they sort of increasingly come from those USN elementary schools and they're not as typically far behind when they arrive to our middle schools as they were previously. 0:06:54.1 AS: And for our international listeners, and also just for a refresher for myself. Is middle school what we... I used to call it junior high, I think I called it. But what is middle school and elementary as far as your grades and ages? 0:07:09.7 JD: Yeah, that's a good question. Middle school is six through eight for us. So sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And then our elementary schools are kindergarten through fifth grade. 0:07:19.4 AS: Got it. 0:07:23.1 JD: There's also this sort of... I think when Deming wrote his point four, his version said, "End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost, move toward a single supplier for any one item on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust." So I sort of translated Deming's framing to one that applies directly to students as they move through that K-12 pipeline. However, there's also this second component to this principle that's more sort of directly analogous to Deming's point, and it's definitely applicable to the business side of running schools. And this is the idea of ceasing dependence on price tag alone when we're selecting curriculum or technology or supplies or any number of goods and services that school systems regularly buy. I think the main ideas here, is to understand that difference between the lowest bidder and the lowest qualified bidder. And I think one of the things that Deming pointed out on this side of things was that basically price has no meaning without a measure of quality being purchased, including that after sale service. So I think that's a key point as well. 0:08:44.7 AS: When did you guys open the elementary schools? 0:08:48.6 JD: Yeah, so it sort of unfolded over time. So the first middle school opened in 2008. 0:08:55.2 AS: Right. 0:08:55.3 JD: Second middle school 2012. And then we moved toward elementaries in 2014 and 2017. But a key thing here is, when we open new schools, we sort of have a slow growth model where we typically open with just a single grade level. So they can sort of put systems and processes in place, hire staff, recruit students, that type of thing. And so it took about five years before those elementary schools were mature enough that they were actually feeding to the middle schools. 0:09:32.1 AS: So let's say 2020, 2019-'20 and then onwards, you're starting to get the students from the elementary schools, was there a significant difference? How would you describe the difference in what you received, from your elementary school versus... In other words, did it deliver on what you had hoped? 0:09:56.8 JD: Yeah, I think we have work to do there. But for the typical student that's coming from our elementary schools, one, they're very familiar with our routines, our procedures, our sort of school culture, the way that the school's run. A lot of those students often have older siblings that are either in our middle school or had been in our middle school and are now alumni. And then academically we see a difference as well, especially for those students that started early in elementary, like in K-1, 'cause we take kids at all grade levels. But for those kids that started K-1 and went all the way through our system and are enrolling now six years later or seven years later in sixth grade with us, the difference is stark. Both from a sort of student traits and responsibilities and sort of student academic side of things. 0:10:52.0 AS: And how does that changing... Ultimately what I think about... Toyota is a good example. And in Thailand here, Toyota has a huge manufacturing base. And part of what's so critical to that manufacturing base is all the supplier relationships that come with that. So they're surrounded by their suppliers and they've built great relationships with those suppliers. In a sense, you just happen to own that supplier in this case, but whether you're owning the supplier or whether a listener or a viewer is saying, "Okay, I need to build a better relationship with the suppliers that I have." The question I have in your case is, how did that change the final result at the end of middle school? 'Cause ultimately what you're trying to do is get your final output of your system to be better over time. I'm just curious, how has that reflected in what comes out? 0:11:48.8 JD: Yeah, I think it has a dramatic impact because so much of education and what a student is ultimately gonna do, is sort of... I don't wanna say determined, maybe a little bit too strong of a word, but maybe not too far off, by that sort of early education foundation. Specifically, did you learn to read proficiently. And when students were coming to us in middle school without that foundation in reading, it makes it really, really hard now that when you get to a point in your schooling career where things have shifted from being sort of learning how to read to, you are reading as a part of the learning process. And we did some intensive interventions before we had elementary schools to try to catch kids up, especially on that reading front. And those are really hard sort of interventions to sort of put in place when a kid is 12 or 13-years-old when they're getting those interventions. Not to say that they can't help, but the older the student is, the farther they've gone in their educational career, the harder that is. 0:13:02.5 AS: And I guess the majority of public educators are dealing with that all the time. People popping into their district and all of a sudden... Coming from many different sources and all of that. 0:13:16.1 JD: Yeah. Yep. And in some places that's more than others. That sort of coming and going tends to be associated with certain conditions in which the school sits and the community in which the school sits, where there's higher poverty rates, there's more movement. So one stat that jumps to mind on this front, in Columbus City schools, which is where our kids would have gone had they not come to us, were geographically within that district's boundaries. In any given year, 30%, nearly one out of three kids changes school buildings during the year, which is just an overwhelming number, an overwhelming amount of transition. That's just within a year, that's not even across multiple years. And so that's why this sort of single supplier [laughter] relationship is so important, because we're trying to push back in an opposite direction. 0:14:23.1 AS: And is there ever a chance that you could have all of your students come from your elementary program? Or is that unrealistic or is that happening or can happen? 0:14:35.5 JD: Well, right now it really can't happen, and that's mostly due to the size of our building. So in our elementary schools, there is basically two homerooms per grade level. So there is two fifth grade classrooms, let's say. But in our middle schools, there is at least typically three homerooms in 6th grade. So no matter what, right now, about a third of the kids would be new in a typical school year. 0:15:07.2 AS: So capacity matching? 0:15:09.2 JD: Yep, capacity matching. Yep. 0:15:11.6 AS: Okay. 0:15:12.1 JD: That's right. That's right. 0:15:13.2 AS: That's a great explanation of the methodology you're using. There's people who are public school teachers that may be listening to this and going, "Oh come on, I can't do that." Well, yeah, you're gonna have different challenges and limits, but you can start to build those relationships with the schools that are bringing students to you and trying to do the best that you can with that. Because we know that... What Dr. Deming taught was that fixing things at the beginning of the process is the way to do it. Because if you're trying to solve the problem at the middle or the end of the process, it just grows exponentially more complex, difficult, more costly. And that's the reason why a high quality means low cost. Wait, what? Yep. 0:16:01.0 JD: Yeah. And some public schools do this really well, and they, for all intents and purposes, already have this set up. But sometimes I've seen even in places like a smaller school district that maybe just has one elementary and one middle - high school building. I've been to a place where I have heard people say, "I never even thought about leaving our building and going to see what they're doing in the high school." And part of it I get, you're a teacher, you're kind of stuck in your classroom, it has to be facilitated for you to have a sub or whatever, but it's not an overwhelming barrier. And I think it's a very valuable exercise to have some of that cross movement between buildings. And I don't think it's actually that hard to do. And the good thing is, in most school districts there's geographic proximity, so that's not a barrier. But someone has to say, "This is important and we are gonna do this." 0:16:58.1 AS: I think it reminds me of my discussions with Bill Bellows, where we were talking about... Also on the podcast, and trying to talk about the idea of thinking beyond specification and thinking beyond... And asking the question, "How is this product or service being used by the next part of the process?" 0:17:18.4 JD: Yeah. Right. 0:17:19.0 AS: And looking forward, you find that even if you think that you're doing really well, you all of a sudden find that there is a huge amount of opportunity to improve in just that one step forward in the process. All right. Well, does that bring us to work continuously on the system? 0:17:39.0 JD: Yeah, I would just say, the takeaway here for me is developing those partnerships with suppliers. Whether it's on that sort of K-12 pipeline side, or if it's more like Deming's version of point four, where you're actually making purchases for the school system. And I think... A change in thinking for me was that the suppliers are a part of your system. Whether they're internal or external to the governance structure of your school system or your business, the suppliers are actually a part of the system. And thinking about them that way is really important. And I think both those approaches are keys to helping maximize high quality learning and then minimizing that total cost. And when I actually started to think about that, even though we didn't, again, think about it through this Deming lens early on, we have a number of vendors that sort of operate like that. Our IT vendor, our food services vendor, have been with us since day one in 2008 when we started. 0:18:42.0 JD: And you'll see their employees doing things here almost like they work here. They almost feel like an employee. So at least in certain cases, we've been able to develop those types of relationships on sort of more on the Deming business side of things as well, and I think that's just as important. 0:19:00.8 AS: There is an interesting business in the US that is a model for that. And that is... So, to talk about business aspect, a company called Fastenal, that makes fasteners and many different things that companies need. But they changed their business model many years ago to basically, rather than having a warehouse and distribution, and you order from the warehouse and all that, they actually set... They go into your factory, and they take over your whole inventory, and they run your whole inventory department. 0:19:30.6 JD: Interesting. 0:19:30.7 AS: And the benefit for you is that you don't own the inventory anymore. So you could have a million dollars in inventory in your factory, and all of a sudden that all goes onto their books. 0:19:39.4 JD: Wow. 0:19:40.2 AS: And the second benefit is that, you only have the cost of that inventory at the moment that you take it out of their system, and then put it into the operation that you're doing. 0:19:50.8 JD: Interesting. 0:19:51.2 AS: And that is this relationship, this super close relationship of that supplier actually working at your facility. And it's amazing. 0:20:05.0 JD: Yeah. This shift a little bit from antagonistic. "I'm trying to get the lowest price out of my suppliers" to, "Wait a second, I need to get the highest quality at a fair price, and I'm gonna work with you on an ongoing basis to make sure whatever I'm buying from you on an ongoing basis is high quality as it comes into my system." That's a much better way to operate than the sort of the antagonistic feel. 0:20:31.3 JD: Yeah, so I think that's a good transition point from principle four to five. So principle five is, work continually on the system. So as I was gonna sort of sum up this principle in just a couple of sentences, I'd say this one is improve constantly and forever the system of planning, teaching, learning and service to improve every process and activity in the organization, and to improve quality and productivity. It is management's obligation to work continually on the system, whether that's school design, curriculum, incoming supplies and materials, technology, supervision, training, retraining, whatever that thing is. 0:21:13.0 JD: And if you think back to when we talked about principle one, principle one and principle five are very similar, and that they both talk about improvement of the system and processes over the long-term. The distinction would be that, principle one is talking about constancy of purpose, the aim of the organization, and this in turn facilitates this principle, principle five, continual improvement of systems and processes. Sort of a key idea that you mentioned I think even in this talk is that, we have to keep in front of mind that quality must be built in at that planning and design stage of work. And I think that a lot of times in the education sector, we see teachers blamed for a lot of things that they have very little control over often. 0:22:10.1 JD: And I think one example as I was thinking of examples was when a school system selects a curriculum, they often select a curriculum for the entire system, but we don't often consider the downstream effects on teacher lessons and in turn student learning. How many teachers have had the... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27920934

Whose fault is it? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 8) 08/29/2023

Whose fault is it? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 8) When things go wrong, who gets blamed? When things go right, who gets the credit? Dr. Deming wrote that good managers don't play the blame/credit game. Instead, they "study results [of feedback] with the aim to improve performance." In this episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss getting honest feedback, how to react, and why it's important. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 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. The topic for today is improving performance. Who's at fault? David, take it away. 0:00:28.8 David P. Langford: Hello again. So we are at point number eight on Deming's role of a manager of people. And it says he will study results with the aim to improve his performance as a manager of people. So once again, Deming wasn't into all the pronouns that we use now and everything. So when he says he, he means he, she, anybody that's a manager of people. So, our aim is to improve performance and everything that we do. Right. So I think what's going on with this simple point that he's making is to get people to think about when things go right, or things go wrong, who's at fault, or who gets the reward or who gets the blame for that process. 0:01:29.1 DL: And as a manager, if things are going well, of course, everybody wants to take credit for that, whether you're a teacher or superintendent, business owner, or whatever, then it was, the same way in politics, right? Everything's going well. Oh, I did it all. And if things are not going well, then obviously it was somebody else's fault. Right. Or if you're a manager of people, like what Deming is talking about here, we have a tendency to blame the individual without first thinking about ourselves as the manager of that situation. So I was just coaching a group of teachers and talking to them about how difficult it is to really think like that as a teacher. Because you think, "Okay, I worked really hard on this lesson, I got everything prepared, I came in and I did it." 0:02:23.8 DL: And I don't know how many times I've heard teachers say something like, "Well, I taught them, but they didn't get it." [laughter] Well, that's probably the problem, you taught them, but they didn't learn it. [laughter] Well, that's probably the problem, right? You taught them, but they didn't they didn't learn it, which is two different things. It's possible to teach and get learning, but it's better to create actual learning experiences through that process. So you have to think about if I'm not getting good results I don't care what your position is as a manager of people I have to turn the finger of blame back towards me and start to say, “Okay, what am I doing differently?” And that's a hard pill to swallow when you start to think like that and because usually most people are trying to put in their best efforts. And Deming said many times we're being killed by best efforts, [chuckle] which is like a crazy thought to think about, wow, I shouldn't be trying hard. Well, you should be working in the right way. So if you're not getting the results that you want probably the very first thing is to go back to the people that you manage and ask them what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong or what could be improved. And I have seen this with just very little kids, like three, four, five-year-olds, when the teacher says, "We just went through that lesson and it seemed like some of you weren't interested, you know, what was the problem?" 0:04:05.4 DL: And they'll tell you, [laughter], "Oh, you went too fast, or we didn't have time to think about it, or we needed more time." Or they'll tell you exactly what the problem is. And it's usually a better way to go than having your supervisor come in and do an observation, because your supervisor probably isn't there every day watching how you're managing people, how you're communicating, how you're having conversations, et cetera. But the people are there every day. And if we're talking about education and kids in classrooms, they're the ones that are experiencing your management style. [laughter] And I've found out that the more you ask, the better they get at giving you advice, telling you what to do. And when you do it, then you get even better advice. So I remember I think I may have told this story before, but I remember I had a new student that came to class and I was in a project like that and I asked the students, I said just take out some sticky notes or whatever you want to, and write down a few thoughts about how you think this last project went. What could be improved, how we could have changed it what, I might do differently next year, et cetera. 0:05:27.7 DL: Just things like that. Well, this new student, he was just like blowing this off and he was not paying attention. He's screwing around everything else. And I'll never forget one of the students that had been there all year, she turned to him and she said, You better take this seriously 'cause he's gonna do whatever we tell him. 0:05:44.7 AS: [laughter], wait, what? 0:05:49.3 DL: Yeah, I'll never forget the look on that kid's face. It was just like, Oh. And then he did... He started to sit up and take it seriously. So. 0:06:00.0 AS: Yeah. Well that's, it's... One of the interesting points about that is, when you ask for feedback, how do you receive it? I asked... I have a bunch of interns working for me right now. And I asked them to go through one of my online courses, and write down feedback in a document, a shared document that they're all writing into. It's brutal, David. It's brutal! And then when I see some stuff, my first reaction, "Oh, I can't do that because, yeah, I can't fix that because of, yeah." And it's just so hard to, you know, it's hard enough to ask, but it's even harder to receive in a way that you're able to really use that to improve yourself. 0:06:42.7 DL: One time I kept getting feedback from the students saying, you're going too fast, or you're talking too fast or can't understand it, or we need more time to process what you're saying or... I said, well, okay, I've been doing this a long time, so I've got habits and so I don't always know [chuckle] that I'm doing that. So let's work out a signal or something that if that's happening you can just suddenly kind of signal me that, okay, we need some reflection time here, or something to happen. [chuckle] And so they came up with this idea that they would pull on their ear lobe if I was going too fast or working through stuff. It's very disconcerting to... I'm into something. I'm really explaining a concept and I think I'm really doing a good job. And you look out and you see about six people going like this, and you're like, oh, oh, okay, I'm doing it again. [chuckle] But... 0:07:46.1 AS: That's one of the things that was lost in the Zoom era. It's harder to read the audience too, just to even figure out if people are understanding. 0:07:52.8 DL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But Deming often said, help comes from the outside and by invitation. So when you're inviting those students or workers or whoever you might be managing to give you that feedback, it's just really amazing what can be accomplished like that. There's almost no problem that can't be solved, [chuckle] by using the people actually doing the work to give you the feedback. 0:08:27.1 AS: You know, when we started this episode, the one thing I started thinking about was that great saying that we all probably heard when we were growing up is "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." And my mom said that to me, and my dad or anybody, I'd heard it a lot, but I guess what I thought when I heard you kick off this episode, I thought to myself, yeah, but what if you led them to the wrong pool of water? [chuckle] or the wrong place? And that there's a responsibility on the side of the teacher or the administrator to make sure that it's not enough to absolve yourself, "Hey, I did it and they didn't drink it," that's not acceptable or that's not enough. 0:09:13.4 DL: Yeah, over the last 40 years, I've heard some awful things from teachers saying things about students about...you know... Privately or not, this kid just doesn't wanna try or doesn't care, or this kid isn't one of 'em that came to mind was "this student isn't even worth my effort." So how do you know that? [chuckle] And, Deming said, "Why would I give somebody a grade when I don't know who among them is gonna turn out to be great someday?" And I might be limiting them with a grade at that point in time, but a feedback information on feedback about how to improve what, wow. People really received that really well. I think that's really what he is talking about here in point eight and I think it's pretty simple, but it's tough to do. 0:10:16.4 AS: So let's wrap this up by... First I'm gonna just read point eight again, and this remember that for everybody, I forgot to say it at the beginning, but this is from the Role of a Manager of People section of The New Economics. And point number eight, "he will study results with the aim to improve his performance as a manager of people." And, I think one of the things that stands out is study results also. What is the result that we're getting? And some of the things that we talked about is like asking the question, what can I improve as a manager of people? How do I seek out information to do that? And you said, the more you ask, the more and the better advice that you get. And you also mentioned his quote that help comes from the outside and by invitation. And so I think the main thing is being on a path and a desire to improve yourself as a manager of people. Anything that you would add to that? 0:11:19.4 DL: Well, what he is after is how do we go about improving? The classic way we do stuff is we send somebody to a conference or where, go give them some training or now put 'em on an online thing that they go through, all those kinds of things. And what Deming is really saying is, look, study the results. You need to know how you are doing. [chuckle] And once you start to figure that out, then they are going to do a whole lot better. 0:11:50.0 AS: Fantastic. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work." /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27872658

Applying Deming’s 14 Points to Education – Points 2 and 3: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 11) 08/28/2023

Applying Deming’s 14 Points to Education – Points 2 and 3: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 11) Dr. Deming was a professor for nearly 5 decades, and while most of his examples and writing discussed manufacturing, he applied all the same ideas to teaching. In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss points 2 and 3 of Dr. Deming's 14 Points for Management - translated for people in education: adopt the new philosophy and cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. 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 John Dues who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Today we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John take it away. 0:00:29.4 John Dues: Andrew. It's good to be back. I thought since we've done a number of episodes now just to do a quick recap of where we're at folks that are following along on the Deming Institute website. We're on episode 11. In episodes seven through nine I outlined those six common management myths and you just talked about the point of those three episodes was to help the education systems leaders see what not to do. We've now turned to a set of principles that can be used by these same leaders to guide their transformation work. And in the last episode, episode 10, I introduced the 14 Principles for educational systems transformation. We talked about Principle 1 which was called Create Constancy of Purpose. In this episode I'll describe the second principle which I call Adopt The New Philosophy and the third principle which I call Cease Dependence on Inspection to Achieve Quality. And I mean I think a really important point to make that I got from Dr. Deming when I think about these 14 principles is a preemptive strike. Over the course of 60 years or so of continual improvement work Dr. Deming worked with Japanese industrial leaders, governments, top companies in the United States. Maybe a little bit lesser known was that he was a professor of statistics at New York University for nearly 50 years. 0:02:06.1 JD: And in his books he not only taught the 14 Points to the leaders with which he worked but they also guided his own teaching practices as a professor. And so there was a, sort of, a short Deming quote that stuck out in regards to the 14 Points and who they apply to. He said the 14 Points apply anywhere to small organizations as to large ones to the service industry as well to manufacturing. So I think it's sort of a preemptive strike of sorts, in case people in schools would think that maybe these 14 principles only apply to industry or only apply to healthcare and other sector but they really do apply to the education sector and in fact that was, sort of, a sector close to Deming's heart since he spent like I said five decades or so in academia. 0:03:00.3 AS: Yeah I mean so it's a good point that I think when you read Deming's material or if you watch his videos there's an overwhelming amount of information about factories and businesses and all that. And there's less about service sector. There is talk in there about service sector. But so I think a lot of people that first stumble upon it start to think, "Oh, this is just for factory quality control", or something like that. And that's been proven wrong particularly the LEAN startup in the world of startups really applied Deming's PDSA cycle as an example in very much service industries so it's a good point that this applies everywhere. 0:03:42.3 JD: Yeah. And basically what I tried to do with the 14 Principles in my 'Win-Win' book was just basically just translate the language from, sort of, manufacturing or sort of, industrial language to education sector language. So I actually literally created a crosswalk where I said here's Demings Point 1 and here's how I'd frame that for school people. And so that's, sort of, what I'm taking folks through in this most recent set of episodes. So thinking about diving in here. Principle 2, sort of, the short name is Adopt the New Philosophy. The descriptor, sort of, is Adopt the New Philosophy: Systems leaders must awaken to the fact that education reform movements often lack a sound philosophical foundation, must learn their new responsibilities and take on leadership for improvement. So this, sort of, goes back to this idea of what came out of A Nation At Risk. What was the next steps? What was, sort of, the response? And what I'm saying is that was probably the wrong response and instead we need to Adopt This New Philosophy. That's what Dr. Deming is calling us to do. And that's his point too and I've translated that for education folks. 0:05:01.8 AS: And just for clarity purposes. This principle number two and, you know, what Deming's talking about Adopt the New Philosophy is a very kind of a general statement yet it's maybe a specific statement. Is he telling us to adopt this new philosophy, like generally or is he saying the philosophy of such and such, the philosophy of quality, the philosophy of constancy and purpose, the philosophy of being a learning organization? I'm just curious how you're interpreting that. 0:05:38.7 JD: Yeah I think the 14 Principles are a part of the philosophy. Really, the philosophy is the System of Profound Knowledge though. And if I could, sort of, frame the Deming Philosophy for education what I would, how I would put that is that it's really about studying and applying the System of Profound Knowledge to do two things basically. The first thing is we wanna view teaching and learning as dynamic processes that occur within a system. That's, sort of, the first frame. The second frame is understand the nature of variation of those teaching and learning processes so that we can take the appropriate action within our systems and then we're doing that so we can accomplish improvement on this continual basis. So that's the, sort of, frame I would give the application of Deming's Philosophy to the education system. 0:06:40.9 AS: So is the goal improvement, and understanding the process and understanding variation are steps we get to, of how we improve better, faster, more sustainably or how do you see that? 0:06:56.4 JD: Yeah I think that's exactly right. I think it's all of those things. It gives us the information that we need the knowledge that we need within our systems to make the changes that need to be changed on a, sort of, continual basis. And, you know, it's something that never ends. It's a process that really never ends. It's, you know, not a recipe it's not a program to be implemented but instead it's a method it's a way of thinking that allows to, sort of, continually improve our organization. 0:07:29.1 AS: One other thing I would just mention about this is that if you take away one thing... One thing we could take away is to become a learning organization. I didn't really understand that for many years, but now I really understand that in order to truly learn you have to understand variation in the System of Profound Knowledge and all of the systems stuff in order to truly learn. And then you start to realize that if you're on a mission to truly learn the amount of improvements that you're gonna be able to do is way beyond most other people most other companies competitors most other schools. Because you have... That is part of the Constancy of Purpose is learning and that, I didn't really understand that when I first got into the Deming stuff but now I see just become a learning machine. 0:08:28.3 JD: Yeah. That's what you sort of have to commit to. And I think really what the 14 Principles do is serve as this practical guide by which, you know, systems leaders can lead. It's really that guide. So those management myths avoid those things and then here are these 14 Principles that we can, sort of, follow and some of those principles like Principle 1, Create Constancy of Purpose really tell us what to do and then, sort of, other principles in the list instruct us on how to, sort of, remove barriers in creating this environment the very environment that you were, you know, talking about just now in terms of an environment that's conducive establishing a new philosophy, establishing a learning organization, avoiding barriers to those things like management by objectives. One of the points that we'll get to is "abolish management by objective". That's something we want to get rid of. And really the backbone of the philosophy is transformation from this culture of competition where I win you lose or I lose you win. And really what we want the dominant paradigm in order to, sort of, have the environment that we need to be that learning organization is to create this, sort of, win-win paradigm based on this culture of cooperation. 0:10:00.1 JD: I think, you know, especially when Deming was speaking 45 years ago, 50 years ago when he became really popular in the United States, we had a long way to go. And I think there's still a long way to go but you can almost see, well, you can see a lot of the Deming philosophy in companies today. It is just most companies aren't anywhere close to all the way there, right? And that same thing goes for school systems. I think, sort of, that this idea of win-win philosophy it is a new way of thinking for a lot of leaders. I think one of the, sort of, primary concerns which once you've adopted, sort of, this new approach is that we want to develop joy in work and learning among students, for us as staff as well, as a prerequisite to achieving the core purpose of the organization. Because when people are joyful in their work or joyful in their learning you know you've already created this, sort of, environment that you're referring to where people can learn and improve and people are gonna use data in a way that drives towards that instead of, sort of, guarding their corner of the system like we've talked about before. And I think, you know, I think when you read Deming and I think when you think about transformation of an organization from one philosophy to another philosophy that can certainly be daunting. 0:11:39.0 JD: I think I've said it on this podcast episode, one of these episodes before but this transition is not gonna happen overnight. And I think Deming said something to the effect of when it comes to transformation there's no instant pudding. This doesn't just happen instantly. I think a more realistic goal is this constant consistent movement towards the new philosophy where you're moving towards total involvement of the entire organization everybody from top to bottom and then you're getting everybody working on this continual improvement activity of all systems processes and activities, you know, within the school system. Now it doesn't mean you're necessarily, sort of, attacking every single system or every process at the same time. It just means that you're sort of equipping everybody across the organization with knowledge of the philosophy, knowledge of the methods, and then the tools that go along with those methods like the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, like the Process Behavior Chart. And you're getting everybody, sort of, working towards this common aim. And again this is, this is a process and it takes, it takes time for sure. 0:12:51.9 AS: And that's why you need Constancy of Purpose too. Because if you don't have Constancy of Purpose and you have constant change, you know, change in leadership and direction, you know, you're never gonna get there. And I think about the...so many companies that we looked at when I was first studying Deming and listening and learning, many of those companies went through a 5 year phase of implementing the Deming teachings and then they got a new CEO and he says I'm not up for that. I like this. I'm, you know, I'm up for measuring everybody's KPIs and kicking ass and holding people accountable around here. Enough of this cooperation. [laughter] 0:13:36.1 JD: Yeah I think that's a common occurrence and I think, you know, in addition to the 14 Principles there's also the five... I forget what he exactly called them Deadly sins or something like that. 0:13:52.4 AS: Six Deadly Diseases I think it was. 0:13:55.0 JD: I think it was started as five and maybe it grew to six or seven but definitely one of them was the transition of senior leaders on a frequent basis because that makes this virtually impossible to, you know, to change to a New Philosophy. 0:14:08.5 AS: So that really ties together the Constancy of Purpose and Adopting the New Philosophy because then you really see that this is a real commitment. This isn't a fad, this isn't some new tool or something like that. It's a new way of thinking that's gonna require work to get there. 0:14:28.3 JD: Yeah that's exactly right and a lot of people, sort of, associate Deming with Control Charts or something like that, which obviously again he was a statistician. He used Control Charts frequently. I think the Control Charts and Process Behavior Charts are an important tool but what's more important is this way of thinking this is really what Deming was focused on more than anything else is this way of thinking that went with understanding your organization through the lens of the System of Profound Knowledge. It's really this philosophical change adopting this new philosophy that's really what he was most focused on when he worked with governments or schools or corporations, organizations. But that was Principle 2. That's Adopt the New Philosophy. It's not easy. Takes commitment, takes Constancy of Purpose. You've got to stick with it. 0:15:21.8 JD: I think Principle 3, sort of, transitioning to that, I talked about ceasing dependence on inspection to achieve quality. And when I'm talking about Principle 3 in education I'm talking about two specific types of inspection. So I'll just, sort of, read the whole principle and then we can, sort of, unpack it a little bit. So Principle 3: "cease dependence on standardized testing to achieve quality and work to abolish grading and the harmful effects of rating people eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis. For example standardized testing by building quality into the product in the first place. The product in education systems is high quality learning." That's, sort of, Principle 3 in a nutshell. There are two, sort of, different concepts to deal with in Principle 3 and this will be probably fairly controversial for a lot of, sort of, educators but those two concepts are... 0:16:28.9 AS: Bring it on John. 0:16:30.4 JD: Standardized testing and grading. And the prescription is actually different for each of those things if you're following W. Edwards Deming's teachings. And I think that calls to attention an important point with all of this stuff this principle for sure. But all the principles. You really have to do close reading of the 14 Principles because Dr. Deming chose his words very carefully. And I think, you know, when you say, you know, stop over-reliance on standardized testing or abolish grading. A lot of people's initial reactions is probably going to be to scoff or laugh. And I think, you know, I think that's really just a demonstration of how far away they are from the standards that he demanded. 0:17:22.3 JD: So a lot of people might hear this and say oh this is fluffy stuff or something like that. He must not want real quality to exist and he was actually saying the exact opposite. So if we start with the standardized testing part, you know, when I think of... Is Deming saying that we should abolish inspection in the form of standardized tests or assessments in general? And I would say no. Of course not. And I think without assessment we are not able to answer the critical question, how are we doing? So assessments in and of themselves are useful I think. But I think we're overly reliant specifically on, sort of, mass inspection style standardized testing like in the form of state testing as the, sort of, key way that we're trying to ensure that there's quality throughout the education system. 0:18:26.0 AS: It's interesting because I'm thinking about in the case of a business, inspection is an internal activity that has happened in the past, and our objective is to get rid of that and build quality into the process and the system. But as a business, you're ultimately judged by the quality and you know, value that your product provides. And you'll instantly get the customer feedback by looking at the revenue that you're getting or not getting when you bring that product to market. Whereas in the case of education, what my question to you is, is the signal that we get from business, from the customer. Like, it's just so in your face you go start up a company, you put a million dollars in it, and you don't get any revenue. You think, oh my God, I really messed up. Or you've got a defect in something and it causes a recall and a big cost and, you know, a lot of damage to your reputation. It's just right there in the revenue numbers. But is there a disconnect in that for education? Or is there something that I'm missing in education? 0:19:42.8 JD: I don't, I don't think there's a disconnect there. One, every day a student, let's say a 10 year old student goes home and their parent says, how was school today? Do you like your teacher? Those may be a little more qualitative but they're pretty powerful, you know, 'cause you're getting this report back, every single day. In our case in our specific case where I work at United Schools Network in Columbus, we're a public charter network, and so there are no kids that are assigned to us by geographic boundaries. So we have to go out and recruit every student, sort of, in a grassroots way, knock on doors, make calls, send mail, do tours and open houses, those types of things. And so if people aren't satisfied with our school program, they literally walk out the door to another school. They have other schools they can go to. That's pretty powerful as well, that enrollment factor, that would be a little bit different in a traditional public school. But they... People do... When you think about going and buying a house, for example, one of the first things most people do is check out the school system. Or... 0:20:54.4 AS: My parents specifically, you know, looked at that when we moved to the town that we moved to in Ohio. And my dad's work was not in Ohio, it was in Detroit and other areas, but he ended up, you know, he was traveling as a salesman, but he ended up choosing, my mom and dad chose that town because of the reputation of that school. And so, yeah. 0:21:15.4 JD: Yeah, yeah. And really when you think about Principle 3 too, and specific to standardized testing, it, you know, the way I'm interpreting Deming's Principle 3 and then applying for education - it's not, it's calling for the elimination of the dependence on standardized and other types of tests as the sole measure of quality, not necessarily for their elimination altogether. 0:21:42.4 AS: What damage does...I mean, for those, there's a lot of people that may be listening or viewing that think, wait a minute, I mean, standardized testing is what it's all about. I mean, I want everybody in the school system to be tested on the same thing so I can figure out, you know, which one's doing a good job, which one's not, which students, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So just for a moment, if you could just explain why standardized testing, what are the flaws with standardized testing? 0:22:07.0 JD: Well... Well a big thing is I think there's a big difference between mass testing as an attempt to provide, you know, sort of... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27785616

Understanding Shades of Variation: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 8) 08/15/2023

Understanding Shades of Variation: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 8) In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss the shades of variation: meeting requirements, accuracy, precision, and precision around variety. Is reducing variation to zero a good thing? Plus, Bill and Andrew share stories that offer practical ways to think about these concepts. 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 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 the day is The Paradigms of Variation. Bill, take it away. 0:00:28.1 Bill Bellows: Ooh. 0:00:28.1 AS: Exciting, exciting. 0:00:33.1 BB: Alright. So let me start off by saying this is episode number eight, and I wanna just make a couple comments about episode number seven, where we talked about "all straw" and "last straw" organizations also otherwise known as "me" or "we" organizations, or red pen or blue pen companies. And I just wanna burst a bubble and say neither one of them, neither organization exists, whether it's all or last or me or we. I view it as a... It's really a matter of which direction your organization is moving, it's a really simple model that I've seen get people to begin to appreciate what Deming's talking about, because I think that contrast is very much like a Deming organization versus a non-Deming organization. But instead of black-and-white thinking, there's really a continuum, and so I think... I just want to say at the beginning, it's really a question of which direction is your organization moving? Another thing I wanna throw out is... I don't think people know, I think absent an understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge, if you're in a last straw organization or a me organization, or a red pen company, I don't think you know that. I think if you become aware of Deming's work, you become aware of what could be. And I liken it to Dr. Deming saying, "How could they learn? How could they learn? The answer is frightening, how could they know?" So I think absent an understanding of The New Economics - Deming's work, I think it's hard to appreciate what you're missing. 0:02:11.4 BB: That you're being blamed for the grade, you're being blamed for the red beads. You're being blamed for the weather, if you're the weatherman. And the other thing that comes in mind there with that, "how could they know" is... There's a great video with Peter Senge, which he did a case with Dr. Deming, and there's a blog I wrote about it on the Deming Institute website if you just search for Peter Senge and my name. And you can find the blog as well as the link to the video. And in there Senge is talking about the present state of education systems and very much in this contrast of industrial and post-industrial, and he says, very much what it comes down to is, he says it's the water. He says, "We don't know what fish talk about, but you can be damn sure it's not the water." And likewise, I think people in a red pen company are not getting together. You and I talking about, "Andrew, this system sucks. I'm being blamed for the red beads," and I don't think we're the wiser. Now, if you turn me on to The New Economics. And we started listening to DemingNEXT and we became aware. But absent that, I think we're both frustrated, but we wouldn't know better. Alright, it's on the topic of variation. 0:03:30.8 AS: It's... 0:03:31.5 BB: Go ahead Andrew, you wanna say something? 0:03:32.4 AS: I was just gonna say that... That's where I think Dr. Deming's making the point of the difference between training and education. Education is the idea of bringing outside ideas into your mind, into your business, as opposed to training, which is trying to upgrade skills. And I had a little story of that when I was a head of research at an investment bank in Thailand. The whole job of a head of research is managing all these analysts who are writing research reports on company A, buy company A, sell company B for our institutional clients. And the job of a head of research is to try to manage that schedule. And you know that analysts are always gonna be interrupted and clients are gonna call, the market's gonna do this. So they're very rarely on time when they say that they're gonna finish something. So you're constantly scrambling for the morning meeting, because on the morning meeting you gotta have a story. 0:04:22.0 AS: And so that was just the job of a head of research. So I did that really well, managing them and, kind of, all that. And then I went to the number one investment bank, the number one broker in Thailand as the head of research. And I asked them, "So how often do you guys miss?" And they said, "Never." I said, "That's impossible." Because I've spent my whole career managing the flow of analysts. They said, "No, we never miss." When an analyst is gonna be on, they're always on. "And how do you do that?" "Well, we do a three-week-ahead schedule, everybody knows that you are held accountable for being that person on that day. And if you find out that you can't do it, you're gonna talk to someone else and rejigger it and say, hey, could you do Friday? And I'll do Monday the next week?" But they never miss. And I just thought, like the water, I never even knew I could go to a different level. 0:05:15.0 BB: Yeah. 0:05:16.8 AS: And then I went to a different level. 0:05:19.8 BB: Yeah, it's...it's the ability to step back. Alright, so on the topic of the paradigms of variation, I wanna throw out four words. Variety, variation, accuracy, and precision. A variety is, there's red beads and white beads, that's variety. There could be, eight different colors, that's variety, sizes of pants 32 waist, 32 length, that, to me that's variety. As opposed to variation is that a 32-inch waist or a gallon of gasoline, every time you go to get the gallon, you get a gallon of gasoline, it might not be exactly a gallon, that's variation. The reason I throw those out to begin with is that Dr. Deming is known in some circles back in the '80s, he was interviewed by somebody at the, I think at the BBC in England and an interview ends with him, with the interviewer saying, "Dr. Deming, if you could condense your philosophy down to a few words, what would it be?" And I thought, he's gonna say... He is just gonna reject that, that "I can't be condensed." No instead of that, he says, "Reduce variation." And I thought, "Oh, no... " 0:06:50.4 BB: So, and there are people alive and well today in the Deming community, who will quote that to me? "You know, Bill, Dr. Deming said, we gotta shrink variation to zero." And I said, "So, is he saying we all ought to be the same size? We ought to be the same skin color? Is he saying that he doesn't like diversity? What does that mean? And same religion?" I mean, you could look at religions as variety, and then you could say within each religion there's variation. So part of what I wanna get at today is what I think is confusion as to what he meant by shrinking variation to zero. So there's variety, variation. Accuracy is that when I get a gallon of gas, is it a gallon, or is it a couple ounces high, a couple ounces low? You go to the gas station, you'll see a sticker on the pump that says that it was calibrated to some standard, when you go to buy a pound of meat, are you getting a pound? Are you getting 15 ounces? And so the National Bureau of Standards is looking at accuracy, are all these things... Is every customer in the United States getting a gallon's worth of milk? 0:08:15.3 BB: Now, so that's accuracy. Precision is the idea that you get the same value each time, so I could go to the scale and it measures exactly a pound, exactly a pound, exactly a pound. But is that pound the same pound as the National Bureau of Standards pound? So I could be. 0:08:37.3 BB: Sorry about that. I could get the same value each time, and that's precision, but that's not to be confused with accuracy, so I just wanna throw those terms out. Relative to shrinking variation to zero, shrinking variation to zero which I, for the record, do not believe in. Dr. Deming would say anyone could accomplish anything if you don't count the cost. I think if you start to look at what is the benefit of having less variation versus the cost of that, then we can get to some point that makes sense economically as in The New Economics. But this idea of driving defects to zero, driving variation to zero without looking at cost. 0:09:24.1 BB: And you can look in The New Economics, we'll come back to this in a future episode. He definitely had in mind that you have to consider the cost, in fact, Dr. Deming would say, anyone could accomplish anything if you don't count the cost. But there's a... What I wanted to reference is a book by Peter Block called 'The Answer to How Is Yes' and what Block talks about is... Could be like, how...we get focused on, we're gonna go off and reduce variation, we're gonna go off and drive variation to zero or non-value added to zero. What Block talks about that I really appreciate, that I think Dr. Deming appreciate is, why? Why did... Let's step back a minute, and so part of what I wanna get at tonight in this paradigms of variation is the 'Why' piece. Okay. So the first example I wanna look at a variation is throwing darts okay? And hopefully that makes sense, you're throwing darts in a dart board and imagine meeting requirements is being on the dart board, so imagine it could be a foot in diameter. 0:10:29.4 BB: And in terms of meeting requirements, you wanna be on the dart board. So I throw it three times, and if you get three that are really close together, they may not be on the bullseye, and that says, I'm very precise, but if the three are not on the bullseye, then that's not very accurate. So again, throwing three and getting really, really consistent is one thing, but then how do I move that to the bullseye? So that's an idea that I could first focus on precision, and then often I find that if I could just slightly adjust my release or my arm, then maybe I could then move it over, so I wanna look at that. 0:11:14.7 AS: And moving over is accuracy or? 0:11:17.5 BB: Moving it over is accuracy. 0:11:19.2 AS: Okay. 0:11:19.5 BB: I mean, so the first thing could be, I'm just looking for three... 0:11:22.5 AS: Get on the board. 0:11:23.6 BB: I wanna be consistent. 0:11:25.9 AS: Yep. 0:11:26.6 BB: And then make the adjustment, 'cause I find often it's easier to make the adjustment, I think it's a lot of work to get consistency. So I just want to separate those out as two different strategies. 0:11:39.2 AS: Yeah, just go to the bar and start throwing darts and you'll see it's a lot of work. Yep that helps, that helps, that helps us to understand it. 0:11:45.9 BB: Alright, so next. Next I wanna talk about what I refer to as the Two Distributions Exercise, and so here's the context. Imagine that you are in the procurement organization, and your job is to make a decision as to who to buy a given product from. So your company goes out and gets quotes from four different suppliers, and they provide you with the information. And for simplicity, let's say what you're buying are these metal tubes and... Short metal tubes perhaps used in plumbing, they're a given length, a given diameter. And imagine these four suppliers come back to you. And again, you're the procurement person, "Who are we gonna buy from?" They come back and they say, they quote you the price, and they quote you exactly the same price. All four of them quote you exactly a dollar each, $10 each. It's like, "Holy cow, they're the same price." 0:12:46.2 BB: Imagine also, they quote the same delivery schedule. So you've got a plumbing supply, you need lots of these, they all tell you they're gonna give you the volume that you need. So I think, "Gosh, volume-wise that's the same, cost-wise, it's the same." Now imagine what they tell you is relative to meeting the diameter, let's say it's the outer diameter is really critical to how these things fit together. And they quote you and say, "All the outer diameters will meet requirements." They're gonna take care of the scrap and they're gonna get rid of the red beads. All the tubes they will send will meet requirements, guaranteed. And you're thinking, "I want that same schedule, same costs, same quality," now what? Well, now imagine they send you the distributions from the control charts and they tell you that these distributions, you're thinking, "Holy cow, these suppliers are using Cisco process control." And they provide you with the histograms, and they say, "These distributions will never change, shape or location." Holy cow. 0:13:49.6 BB: And then added onto that is that you're gonna use them as is. So you're not gonna take them and modify them, you're just gonna bring them into the inventory and send them off to the plumbers to use. So you're saying, "Okay, the process is in control, the level amount of variation, location is predictable, stable, forever. How could I go wrong?" And then the last thing they tell you is, procurement that, "Here's the lower requirement, here's the upper requirement, and here's the ideal value." And so then you end up with two distributions. If I was confusing, I meant to say two, not four [chuckle] 0:14:24.1 BB: Alright, so imagine you've got two suppliers and the one distribution goes from the lower spec to the upper spec. And let's say it's a normal Gaussian distribution and it starts at the low end, goes up, high in the center, then off to the other, and that's supplier A and then imagine the other supplier uses 10% of the variation, but is towards the upper spec so it's far more uniform, but it's off of the ideal value. And so I've been using those two distributions with people as an ideal scenario saying, "You're never gonna have all that information, let alone that's all the same." And very deliberately, what I want people to do is say, if it's the same price, same schedule, zero defects, guaranteed, distributions never change and you're looking at the lower spec, the upper spec, and you're saying, "Okay, so one distribution, it has more variation, but the average is right in the middle, which is the ideal value. And the other one is shifted towards the high end of the tolerance, but incredibly uniform," who do you choose? 0:15:38.3 AS: So it's a tall curve? 0:15:39.4 BB: It's a very tall curve, let's say it uses 10% of the variation, 10% of the tolerance and so I've been using that going on 30 years, and I'll have 30 people in the room and I'll ask them to write down on a three by five card, "Who would you buy from?" And I'll say, "Here are the choices you can buy from the, the one that's the widest, we'll call that supplier A and supplier B is the narrow one to the right, or You could say it doesn't matter." And what I find is incredibly consistent inside and outside of Rocketdyne and literally around the world is the majority of people will take the narrow distribution, to the right will call that supplier B, what I ask them, "Why do you like supplier B?" To a person they will say, "It's more consistent, there's less variation." And I say, "Less variation from what?" "Well, less variation from each other." Well Andrew, that's precision. 0:16:40.9 BB: And then I ask the others, and my find is three quarters of the room will take that distribution, the one which is precise. And for the ones who are focusing on the wider distribution, where the average is on target, I say, "Why do you like that one?" And they say, "Because it has less variation from the ideal value." Alright? And so I wanna throw that out is part of the confusion I find inside and outside of the Deming community, in the world of Six Sigma quality distribution B, using a smaller percent of the tolerance, is, has the higher process capability index. 'Cause what that index is doing is comparing the amount of variation, the width of the variation to the overall tolerance. And the idea that you're using a smaller portion is valued. And I said, "Okay, well that's not quite the same as what Dr. Taguchi is talking about. What Dr. Taguchi is talking about," and this one we'll get into in a later episode, "is the closer you are to the ideal value, what you're doing is affecting how this is used in a greater system, so if I'm at home cutting a piece of wood to a given length and I want it to be closer and closer to the ideal value, then what I'm gaining is making it easier to put that piece of wood, or whatever I'm making, together. 0:18:00.5 BB: And I find that people who preferred distribution B are really confused 'cause in a big way what they're saying is, "I don't care about where I am within, all I care about is using a small portion of the tolerance." And then when I press on that more and more, they say, "Well, I want fewer and fewer defects." I said, "Well, zero defects is guaranteed, so if you really believe in zero defects as the goal, then you should have said it doesn't matter." And so the reason I wanna talk about the paradigms of variation is that one: variation is one of the elements of the System of Profound Knowledge and it's not just the variation in the number of red beads, right? 0:18:58.0 BB: And not to dismiss that the variation of the red beads is caused by the system. But what I've tried to bring to these episodes interviews with you is what I learned from Dr. Taguchi is the variation in the white beads and what is the impact of the variation on the white beads. And if we ignore that, then what we're saying is, "As long as you meet print, that's all that matters at the end of the day." And I'd say if that's where you're going then, then you could do the same thing with Lean or Six Sigma operational excellence. What differentiates Dr. Deming's work, I believe in terms of his appreciation of variation as an element of Profound Knowledge, is what he learned from Dr. Taguchi. That the closer we are to the ideal value, that affects how the system, which is another element of Profound Knowledge, comes together. 0:19:53.8 BB: All right, so going back to those two examples, what I started to do, one is I was detecting that less variation, less, I was detecting within Rocketdyne and elsewhere that there was a far greater regard for less variation, less variation from each other than being on target. And I was just wanting to one; find out why does it matter if all you have to do is meet spec? Why does it matter? So relative to the paradigms of variation, and this was back into the mid '90s when I was working with some people in manufacturing and was greatly confused over this, and the confusion was, "Is it enough to meet print, Bill? You're not sure? And then we've got these capability indices. We want to use a small portion of the tolerance and then we've got this, "Bill you're telling we wanna be on target, help me understand that." 0:20:49.7 BB: Was what these guys were asking for. And the paradigms of variation that I come up with. And I described it, I said, "Well, let's look at it this way." I said, "There's this thing called... Let's call it paradigm A, and Paradigm A is meet print." All that matters at the end of the day, we wanna meet spec. So. 0:21:06.4 AS: When you say meet print, print is a kind of a word that maybe not everybody understands what that means. 0:21:12.7 BB: Thank you. 0:21:12.9 AS: What, that means spec? 0:21:13.6 BB: Meet the requirements. 0:21:14.6 AS: Meet the requirements. 0:21:15.6 BB: Meet the requirements. And so we want the meeting... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27686499

Starting the Transformation: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 10) 08/08/2023

Starting the Transformation: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 10) In this episode, John and Andrew shift from management myths (don't do this) to principles for transformation (do this instead) based on Deming's 14 Points for Management. This episode introduces the principles and the context you need to get started. 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. The topic for today is shifting our focus from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.8 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew, it's good to be back. It's good to make this shift from the sort of the "don't do this" to the "things that we should focus on" as leaders of our systems, whether it's in business or education or whatever. And just as sort of a recap, we did these three episodes on management myths, and I think I made this point where sort of the common thread amongst all those myths is that they suboptimize our systems. I think the key thing to look for, whether it's sort of something we should be doing or whether we should not be doing when it comes to management practices, is does the thing, whatever that practice is, does it fragment the whole into parts and fail to appreciate the organization as a system? I think that's sort of the key differentiator between what I would call management myths, and then the things that we should be doing, some principles that we should be following. And I think that Deming philosophy is the opposite of the management myths. 0:01:33.0 AS: It's so tempting to fragment... I like what you said, fragment the whole into parts and optimize those parts. That is just so natural for us in some way, that it's manageable, it's accountability. And what you've taught us is that well, actually it produces a suboptimal result for the system. So I think, it's exciting to move into like, okay, now I understand that, so what do we do? 0:02:06.4 JD: Yeah. And I think with the myths, a common...sometimes people are gonna push back, obviously and it can be hard to wrap your head around the myths because they're often common practices. That's how we're often trained in business schools or schools of education. But if you sort of start to unpack and say, "Okay, you say that practice is working in your organization, but tell me what you hear when you talk about a particular practice, let's say merit pay for example?” "No, that works for us. That works for our organization." But then you start to say, "What do you hear around that particular system?" And I think a lot of times people start to say, it sort of dawns in them that, oh yeah, departments are competing against each other. Well, we sort of go around the rules to do X, Y, and Z so we can get the reward. And when you start to sort of think about those things, you can see how those myths sort of lead you in the wrong direction and you wanna sort of steer towards these principles that guide you in the right direction. 0:03:03.7 JD: But I think it's important to understand those myths and then take that next step, that next step to follow the principles that Dr. Deming talked about. Of course, many people that follow Dr. Deming's work are familiar with his famous 14 Principles for Management. I basically took those 14 Principles and translated them into sort of a language that's closer to what education folks are used to. And really what I think they do is they provide this sort of strong philosophical foundation. The management myths, again, are the don'ts, the principles, the guiding principles are the dos. But I think it's always good to steer it back to sort of these central ideas, quotes from Dr. Deming or someone else that captured the essence of what you're trying to do. And I thought one of the Deming quotes that stuck with me when it came to transformation is that Dr. Deming said, "The transformation will release the power of human resource contained in intrinsic motivation." 0:04:14.3 JD: And so, a lot of times people talk about transformation, but what do you actually mean? And to sort of put it simply in the Deming world is: transformation is a process where you begin to understand the System of Profound Knowledge and that helps you pull away from this prevailing system of management, the management myths that we talked about, like accountability, or merit pay, or a number of the other things that we talked about and move to this new philosophy. That's where the transformation is actually happening. And again, these guiding principle... 0:04:47.5 AS: You said release the power of human resources contained in intrinsic motivation. Is that what you... Did I get that right? 0:04:53.1 JD: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I said... 0:04:54.5 AS: Incredible. 0:04:55.5 JD: The transformation will release the power of human resource contained in intrinsic motivation. And so, what you're trying to do is set up your system to tap into that intrinsic motivation instead of stomping it out. And those management myths stomp it out. And then these guiding principles will lead us in a different direction. 0:05:13.4 AS: And one of the things I would like to just highlight is that, a lot of times I'd like to just go back to childhood and look at what do we naturally do? We naturally work together. We naturally make friends. We naturally try to solve problems and we share. There's just so much natural learning that goes on. And if we would just go back to that, instead what happens is, like you said about the myths, adults start layering on all kinds of systems that all of a sudden just crush. 0:05:52.4 JD: Yeah. I think a lot of that comes from optimizing for competition versus optimizing for cooperation. And if we really wanna make our systems work, then we have to do the latter. I think that's key. And one thing I was gonna do is sort of tie these principles and the myths back to two sort of major problems that have unfolded in education over the last 50 years. And I think we've sort of talked about this in some earlier episodes. But sort of that first problem I would frame as, you remember that Nation at Risk report that we talked about came out in the early '80s, so 40 years ago or no. So I think all of the sort of major federal education reform policies that have come out since A Nation at Risk have fallen prey to one or more of those myths. So that's the sort of problem one. 0:06:49.1 JD: About the same time in the late '80s, we saw this major shift in the demographics of the teaching profession that we've only just more recently started to realize. So this actually blew my mind when I read this in a research report. But basically in 1988, so not that long ago, the typical teacher in the United States had 15 years of experience. You fast forward to 2017, the typical teacher was in their first year of teaching. So we've had this dramatic shift where the model teacher used to be sort of mid-career, and now the model teacher, the most typical teacher in the US is in their first year, they're a beginning teacher. So that's gonna cause all sorts of problems. 0:07:39.0 JD: Now, part of the issue, I can't tie this back to the federal education policies, and I'm not attempting to do that. I think maybe a contributing factor to sort of the general ecosystem, but not maybe causality, that's too strong to say that it caused it. But there's one, there's been the significant growth in the teaching profession, meaning there's lots more teachers than there were today, or in 1988 as compared to today. So of course if you're gonna add teachers for all sorts of reasons, more specialization is required, kids receive special education services that require smaller groups and things of that nature. So that's led to this explosion in the number of teachers in the United States. 0:08:28.7 JD: But regardless of the cause, this means that large numbers of teachers are entering the profession and they're leaving the profession, so there's all this churn. And so when you tie these two problems together, so number one is you got the federal education policies following sort of a lot of those management myths, then you got this sort of significant change in teacher demographics. It's basically massive instability in the US's education ecosystem. 0:09:03.6 AS: And before you go on, that statistic is almost unbelievable. And I wanna get more from you on that later, but I just...in order for that statistic to be correct, it would seem like there was a huge drop off of older teachers exiting, as you mentioned. And also, I guess what would be correct is that it was a massive influx of brand new teachers. 0:09:34.0 JD: Absolutely. Yeah. 0:09:34.4 AS: Like huge. And it kind of depends on what year that happened, because if that's the case, that number will be changing very rapidly as those new huge mass of new teachers mature over time. I wonder, I have a lot of questions about that data and I'd love to see more of that. 0:09:53.9 JD: Yeah. And I think...I'm certainly not an expert in demographics in the US but I think what I've seen is there's both a graying and a greening of the profession. Meaning there's lots of people that are retiring or nearing retirement age and there's lots of new teachers. There's less people in the middle. And a big reason for the churn is, or to keep in mind, is that a lot of these new teachers are leaving, so they're being replaced by more new teachers. So I don't see this sort of subsiding anytime in the near future. 0:10:28.1 AS: Could you imagine running a business like that? It would be just impossible. 0:10:34.1 JD: No. No. And that's sort of one of my theses right now. And sort of tying back some of the work that I've done with the book I wrote is that there's this massive instability in the education sector. And part of the reason for that is that we as a sector lack this sort of solid philosophical foundation and a sound theory of management. And I think that's where the Deming Philosophy can actually fill in sort of this major hole in how we're operating in education. I think specifically that's where these 14 Principles for educational systems transformation, is what I call them, I think that's where these principles can come in and play a role in sort of stabilizing the education sector that's been so topsy-turvy for 30 years or so. 0:11:36.1 JD: So I think it's a good place to start with sort of an introduction to the 14 Principles. So the Deming sort of crowd will be familiar, if you're coming to this as an interested party but less familiar with Deming, you may not know. So I think there's some things to clarify that were a little bit confusing to me initially. 0:11:56.4 JD: One thing that you'll hear in the Deming community is people will refer to the 14 Points, but then also Deming sometimes called them Principles. He sometimes called them Obligations of management for clarity and just to be straightforward I just call them Principles, my 14 guiding principles. I think it's also important to sort of call out that while they're an important component of the Deming philosophy, they're not in and of themselves the Deming philosophy. I think that's really important to call out. And I think when you discover something like anytime you have a numbered list, like 14 this, or 10 this, or five this, I think there's this sort of almost human nature to sort of start to think of them as a checklist to be implemented. Really, they're not. They're not. You can't just do number one and then you do number two, and then you do number three. That's not how they're set up. Really, what they're set up to do is sort of open your mind to a whole new way of thinking in terms of how we organize and run our institutions, in this case, our educational institutions. 0:13:09.2 JD: And I think most importantly, these 14 Principles are these interlinked points within this larger management philosophy. And you can't simply put the points into action without first understanding why Deming wrote them in the way that he did. So, they're not super long. Some of the points are a couple pages, some of the points are just even a page or so in Out of the Crisis, one of Deming's books. So he is very deliberate about the words he chose and the framing of the Principles. 0:13:43.4 JD: And the last thing I would say, if you're sort of new to the 14 Principles, that you have to account for your organization's context. So you can't just adopt the 14 Principles without a deep appreciation of both the principles themselves, and that organizational context. If you just sort of tried to throw this into your system, without deep study and deep understanding that, it could cause sort of mass chaos. So I think those are some things that I would say to anybody that's considering looking at the the 14 Principles. 0:14:19.9 AS: Yeah. And the point is that the reason why it's not a checklist, it's because number one, it's hard, it forces you to think, number one. You really have to think about what it is that he's presenting. And number two is, it's even harder to implement, because once you start to realize that there's so much value in what he's saying, now you're gonna have to come up against the prevailing system of management, all the myths and all of that stuff. And that's the reason why, one of the reasons why it's not a checklist, it's 14 Points for Management. And here is what...and I can say I first read that when I was 22, 23 working at Pepsi, and now I'm 57 and I can say that I still look back at them and go, "Oh, now I see." 0:15:18.5 JD: Yeah. I think there will always be that. There will always be that, even for somebody that's done this for 30 years or 40 years, there's always gonna be that sort of continual "aha" moments, or connections. But you sort of have to go all in in the sense that you can't pick and choose like a menu, like, "I'm gonna do, of the 14 Principles I'm gonna do 1, 2, 4, 6, and 9," it just doesn't work like that. You have to sort of go in all in on the 14 Principles. It doesn't mean that you have to do them all at the same time, or at the same rate, but you can't just sort of pick and choose which ones you're gonna do. They work together. 0:15:55.9 AS: And it's interesting cause the first one talks about constancy of purpose. 0:16:00.8 JD: That's right. 0:16:00.9 AS: I would say that, that's the one that really challenges the management. I'm gonna be meeting with the management team of a...the ownership team basically of a factory in Thailand next week and what we'll be talking about is: how do you build constancy of purpose, or how do you think about that? And also the idea of constancy of purpose of thinking that our job is to improve. How do we keep learning? How do we keep improving so that we deliver more and better value to our customer, to our student, to whatever. And that, without that commitment, it's hard to do the other ones. But I agree that there's...you can jump around and think, "Okay, I can do this one right now, I can drive out fear right now. This one's gonna take more time," or that type of thing. So, yeah. 0:16:52.3 JD: Yeah. So I think that's a good segue and so, with that sort of introduction of mine, I think diving into Principle one, sort of the short version is "create consistency of purpose." And then I sort of took Dr. Deming's version and rewrote it for educators, and the way I did that was I said, "Create consistency of purpose toward continual improvement of high quality learning systems. These systems should be designed in such a way that they enable joy and work for staff, and joy in learning for students, with the aim that everyone can access opportunity rich lives in our society now and into the future." So that's sort of the long-term vision, that's the long-term purpose that we're working towards. Now you have to say, "Okay, now what do we have to do to get there?" That's the hard part. 0:17:45.8 JD: And I think, what I read from Dr. Deming is that he often spoke about two problems that all organizations face if they want to stay in business, whether they are a factory, or whether they are a school or some other type of organization, doesn't really matter. First, there's these problems of today, and second, there are the problems of the future. And both camps are a fairly daunting list, but we'll start with sort of problems of today. I think with all schools, but maybe even especially so for schools like where I work where they're... We're a network of public charter schools, we don't have any kids geographically assigned to us. But even for a traditional public school I think enrollment, student enrollment is a constant concern. "How are we gonna make sure that we are setting up our program so it best serves our students and families?" 0:18:48.3 JD: And I think if you think of the problems of today, of the typical public school, ensuring the quality of learning experiences, balancing the demands of local, state, federal education policies, attracting, retaining... Or attracting, training and retaining employees, making sound budgeting decisions, recruiting and retaining students. Fundraising is a component of our system. Acquiring, maintaining, upgrading school buildings, you could go on and on and on. It's pretty self-evident from that list that educational leaders could easily stay tied to those problems of today, and that would be more than a full-time job, just sort of keeping up. 0:19:40.8 JD: That's even before you consider this second camp, this idea of problems of the future. And that's really where constancy of purpose becomes especially important. And this is where this idea of continual improvement of the school district's competitive position within the educational ecosystem really comes into play. So why are parents gonna choose my school or my school system for their child? And a really important question for all school systems to consider: is the board and the superintendent dedicated to the short-term or are they dedicated to the long-term of the institution? And of course, short-term, maybe in a business setting may be quick profits. Short-term in a school system may be something more like really focusing on these state test scores. 0:20:47.6 AS: Pass the exam. 0:20:50.1 JD: Pass the exam, right. There are certain things we could do to increase those scores on the short-term. Or are we taking the mindset that our school is set up to ensure that our schools will be success...or our students will be successful 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. And focusing on short, long-term is not mutually exclusive. There's certainly things in the short-term you need focus on, certainly things in the long-term, but I think taking that long-term view is the most important. I am not as concerned with how a sixth grader in my system does on the state test, although that has some importance to me. What I'm most concerned about when I'm thinking about that 12-year-old is what will they be doing when they're 18, when they're 28, when they're 38. Did we set the right foundation for them on a long-term basis? And that's a really weighty responsibility for school to balance those two sets of problems, the everyday things that we have to deal with and then keeping our eye on future problems that we should be anticipating. 0:22:03.0 AS: Yeah, one of the things about that, that's interesting is that you're pretty much never pulled to future problems and you are constantly pulled into today's problems, and therefore majority of people just...all they can do is deal with today's problems and the idea of starting to think about how do we start to devote a portion of time, some of our thinking, some of our efforts. I remember Dr. Deming saying that somebody could put out fires for their whole career and... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27553383

Unleashing Hidden Powers for Improvement: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 7) 08/01/2023

Unleashing Hidden Powers for Improvement: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 7) David and Andrew discuss the three types of power that leaders have: authority, knowledge, and persuasion. David also explains where the current style of "command and control" management comes from and what a nearly failed family vacation can tell us about power. 0:00:02.7 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 am 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. The topic today is the Three Power Rangers and Their Sources of Power for Improvement. We are now on item number seven on the list that was given to us by Dr. Deming in the book, The New Economics. It's called, the title of the list is called Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. For those of you who have the third edition, this is on page 86, and for those with the second edition, it is on page 125. 0:00:56.7 AS: So now let's get into number seven. So we're talking about the manager after transformation. He has three sources of power. Number one, authority of office. Number two, knowledge. Number three, personality and persuasive power or tact. A successful manager of people develops number two and three, that is knowledge and personality. He does not rely on number one, which is the authority of office. He has, nevertheless, obligation to use number one, as this source of power enables him to change the process - that's the equipment, materials and methods to bring improvement, such as to reduce variation in output. Dr. Robert Klekamp says "He in authority but lacking knowledge or personality must depend on his formal power. He unconsciously fills a void in his qualifications by making it clear to everybody that he is in a position of authority. His will be done." David, take it away. 0:02:02.5 David Langford: Okay, that's great. So this is one of my favorite points, which has three subset points or Power Rangers, sources of power for improvement. And I've used this with managers around the world for the last 40 years. And in some cases, they just drop their jaws and they're just amazed at how simple this is. But the more you think about it and realize what people, managers of people are not doing, it gives a roadmap about: what do you do? How do you do something? And I get that question all the time from superintendents and principals in my field of education, and people that do have a formal position. Then they wanna know: well, how do I get these people to do stuff, make things happen? 0:02:58.2 DL: So, before we get into each of the three Power Rangers, I wanted to give a little bit of context too, because I wanna remind everybody that, Deming lived through World War II and was a part of the quality improvement effort for World War II. And what happened during World War II is that a lot of the manufacturing was being done by women in the United States especially. And so when the war ended, you had all these military people coming back to corporations and moving into top management positions, and basically the management style that they brought with them was military. And so that's where you got phrases like, "My way or the highway," and, "You're not getting paid to think. You just do what I tell you to do and everything will be fine." 0:03:51.5 AS: Attack that hill. 0:03:53.1 DL: Yeah, right, which was totally opposite to the whole manufacturing thing that had been going on during the war and was really the key to the war machine was being able to produce huge amount of military items in a very short period of time. 0:04:09.3 AS: Well, and also when you think about that, David, it's interesting to think about the patriotism and the commitment to a cause that those women went into those factories to do. And so when it was all done and the cause was met, the challenge was met, then to be faced with that, it's like, "Wait a minute, we lost something here." 0:04:30.9 DL: Yeah, and then I remember Deming talking about it one time at a conference and stuff and talking about, basically, in those factories, women liked to get together and talk about what was going on, and their performance and everything that was happening in the factory. And then when the men came back in, they said, "No, we're not gonna have groups or teams or anything like that. You're just gonna do what I would tell you to do, and if you don't like it, then find someplace else to work." One of the phrases I always remember Deming used to say was that: "pretty soon you're left with only the people who can't get a job someplace else." 0:05:14.0 DL: And I've found that to be so true in every profession that I've worked in or helped people with, etcetera, and have... So it leads us to number one, your formal position. So yeah, you have a job. You're the CEO, you're the principal of a school, you're a headmaster, you're whatever it might be. You got the job, right? And so with that comes formal position that you need to be able to...you have to do stuff and you have a job to do. And you may even be given goals by a board or something that it's your job to make this happen. Well, the question is, how do you make it happen? If it was just so simple that a new boss could come in and just start bossing people around and tell them what to do, and then they all do it and things get better, then we wouldn't actually need any of this Deming stuff, right? 0:06:13.6 DL: But it's not so simple as being able to do that. And basically what Deming is saying in this point too, is that if you act like that and you use your formal position to make change, basically, you're not gonna be around long, because pretty soon the people that work for you are gonna start to kind of revolt, and either they'll find other jobs or the pressure will become on you to get out and get somebody else in there. This is also the reason that some boards think improvement means, we'll just hire somebody else. Well, that doesn't work either. I'll never forget a superintendent of a huge school district that I worked with, and I had asked him, when we started working with him, I said, "Well, what's been your method of improvement?" And he very looked at me very clearly and just said, "Well, we fire people." 0:07:17.3 AS: That's the Jack Welch School. 0:07:19.8 DL: Yeah, exactly. 0:07:20.3 AS: Take the bottom, bottom half or the bottom quarter or the bottom 10% and make sure you're firing them often. 0:07:25.8 DL: Yeah. But that's means that you're also in that category too, right? To improve your position, all we got to do is fire you and find somebody else in that position. But are you finding somebody else with the exact same philosophy or are you actually looking for somebody else that has a different philosophy? And I think that's really what Deming is talking about here, is that, hey, if you want to stay around a very long time, yeah, it might be your formal position, but don't use that unless you absolutely have to. I often tell managers, if suddenly there's a fire in a building, you're not gonna get a bunch of people together and have a meeting and say, "Okay, what do we do? And which way should we go?" And things like that. You're probably gonna use your formal position to take charge and say, "Let's get out of the building," etcetera. But then very quickly, you should get people together to say, "Okay, how could we have done that better? And how could we work through that and improve that whole process?" 0:08:31.6 DL: And so that's where I think point number two really comes in, is that, do you have knowledge of a different way to manage, different way to think? And that's all Deming, about statistics and understanding process analysis and understanding how people work together, and do you understand how to do Plan-Do-Study-Act - the PDSA process - to improve something? And so you're using your knowledge of theory and background to improve something. And the irony of that is, when you concentrate on using your knowledge to do stuff, you actually gain authority. Just 'cause people start to look up to you as, oh, he or she, they have a process of improvement and they just stick with it. Anytime that something comes up, it's never blaming people. It's always looking at what is the process? What's happening? Let's use a few tools. Let's analyze what's happening. Let's look at a flow chart of the process and let's improve the process. That's knowledge. 0:09:40.4 AS: So the people want to follow you rather than people must follow you. 0:09:46.6 DL: Yeah, that's a good way, it's a good way to put it. Exactly. So, I think of the three, probably that's most important, right? 0:09:57.9 AS: Yeah. 0:10:00.6 DL: And the other thing about these three points is that, maybe you're working in an organization, maybe you're just a teacher. I say just, maybe you're a teacher in a school, and there's maybe 200 teachers, and you see that things are not going well. What can you do? Well, you're not the person in charge, right? And if you just march into the headmaster or the principal or whoever and start telling them what to do, you're probably not gonna be around. But what can you do? You can use your knowledge of improvement. And through that process, you actually become very powerful, because lots of people wanna work with you, 'cause every time we do, we get things done and we look at problems differently. And then pretty soon, your boss is coming to you when problems arise or when process improvement is necessary and saying, "Hey can you help here? Help us work through this problem?" And that's a level of power that's for change or improvement that is significant, if you think like that. 0:11:14.2 AS: I was thinking about, if you're a young person going into the workforce, you don't have authority. I mean, you may be given it in a small position. I was a supervisor at Pepsi when I first started, so I had a certain level of authority, but there's no way I could use it when all of my work... All the guys working for me had been there 20 years or whatever. 0:11:33.7 DL: Yeah, exactly. 0:11:34.8 AS: And do it would be foolish for me to do that. And so, I definitely used my personality and I didn't have much knowledge, so I had to try to acquire knowledge, which was making me...I took a note and just thought about, to be able to use knowledge as an a form of management, you've gotta acquire it, and it comes through your own acquisition plus also hiring people who...you can acquire knowledgeable people that are around you that can help to solve things. And then as I started, and in my case, David, what we were doing was we were filling Pepsi trucks every night, and they were all wrong. So the drivers in the morning would come in and they'd have to waste a lot of time counting their trucks, counting what's on their trucks, and then going back and getting what was missing. 0:12:24.3 AS: And I had to then develop...I had to then acquire knowledge of why were we making these mistakes? Which one on my staff was doing really well? How could we learn from that? And how could we do it so that we could lock those trucks and guarantee those drivers that that truck was accurate? And it took me many months to get to the point where I acquired enough knowledge to be able to then have the authority to go, "All right, now we've done all of this. Now, this is the way we're doing it from all that we've learned." So anyways, this is just me rambling, but that was just something that I thought about. 0:13:00.9 DL: Yes. No, that's a good... That's a really great example. That's a great, great story about that. And I'm sure that it took a while for the drivers to trust that it was actually right. 0:13:14.7 AS: I mean, I had to negotiate with them, and I'd tell them, "Look, if you find a problem out there, we're gonna fix that," and blah, blah, and all that, but then they were like, "Well, if I find a problem out there, I don't have the product to sell, so it has to be right," which basically it was, there's a lot of teaching actually involved in that to help everybody understand. 0:13:33.9 DL: Yeah, exactly. So then point number three is about personality. And so, you probably have worked for people, if you've had several jobs, everything from delivering papers on up to a current job you may be in now, you probably worked with people that are just really great people to get along with, right? And that's a source of power. I mean, they get things done because they're just really nice people and supportive, and they just have a really great personality about how to work and what to do. And I can visually see people in my mind that I worked with over the last 40 years that, just great people like that. But it's not enough, because you might be a really great person to work with. "Joe is really a great person to work with, and he's really fun and everything else, but he never gets anything done." Because he doesn't have the knowledge of basically the Deming philosophy about how to get stuff done, right? 0:14:45.7 DL: So what Deming's talking about here is that these are the three Power Rangers, the three sources of power, that if you wanna get something done and move forward and improve something, really you have to think about it as an inter-relationship of parts to the whole, of these three areas working together. So if you start concentrating...and the explanation in the following paragraph, he talks about, well, you don't have any knowledge and your personality stinks, and so what you rely on is your authoritarian position just to tell people what to do, you won't last long and also you're not gonna improve things. Things are not gonna get better when you do that. So you may have a formal position, but he talks about concentrate on two and three, your knowledge and your personality, and you will start to see a major transformation. 0:15:44.8 DL: Everybody knows you're the boss. You don't have to go around and tell people you're the boss. By virtue of the formal position, you have that. And I always take these things down to a teacher in a classroom. A teacher, that's a formal position that a teacher has. I have authority over these students during this time period, right? And I've known teachers that that's all they concentrate on, is the authority. And again, we've talked before about oftentimes, especially in like grammar school or primary school or elementary school, you're physically bigger than them and so you use that as part of your authority, that, "I'm the boss here. You do this, out you go." Well, even very little kids don't respect that. 0:16:42.1 DL: I think I told a story one time of 5-year-olds testifying for a state board of education, and they were so amazing explaining all these wonderful things that they were doing in their classroom and collecting data and improving stuff. And one of the board members said, "Well, where's your teacher when all this is going on?" And this 5-year-old, without hesitating, grabbed the microphone and said, "The teacher's not in the closet, you know." And as soon as I heard that, I thought of these three points. That little person knew they had been coached and mentored and taught a process of how to work together and improve that classroom, and the person that he looked up to was the teacher. So even at 5 years old, these things come in to play in a very real way, so. 0:17:41.6 AS: I would like to bring this back to constancy of purpose for a second, because...and I wanna think about, there's a book I recently read by Richard Rumelt, which is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy, and it's an excellent book about setting corporate strategy. But he talks about how businesses kind of move in waves, where you have a decentralization period of time where you're expanding and your giving authority. And then, basically the organization can lose focus, and then it's gonna require the authority of the senior management to say, "Okay, we have to, at some point, restructure and refocus this," and then you rely on more centralized, and he was just talking about the waves of that. And then I was thinking about the authority, from a positive perspective, is the role of the leaders of an organization, of the school, of a business, the role of those leaders is to set that direction. 0:18:37.5 AS: And you do have to claim authority or else you can't...that's what I also liked about what I learned from Deming when I first started learning, is that you can't just go, "Okay, what do you guys think our direction should be?" I mean, that is a fun question, but ultimately, as a leader, you got to really make sure that the constancy of purpose and the aim is there, and that sometimes requires what I would call good authority, authority coming from a knowledgeable and experienced perspective, but there must be authority. 0:19:07.3 DL: Right. Well, you could be the manager that comes and says, "Look, we need to reestablish our constancy of purpose. So let's talk about some ideas about how we can go about that and that are different than what we've done before, because obviously that's not working. So let's work together to figure out a good pathway that we can make that happen." So that's using your personality to run a meeting and get what you need to have happen, but you're bringing people with you instead of doing stuff to them, so. 0:19:39.2 AS: Yeah, I have one little story to tell about this authority concept, is that in our coffee factory many years ago, my business partner Dale was sitting in the office up above the roasting area and he started to smell smoke. And roasting coffee has... We have roaster fires that happen in the roasting machine. And basically, he went rushing down to realize that a fire was raging in the roasting machine, particularly in the chimney, and was getting down into the machine. And so the first thing he did is he just started yelling, "Everybody out!" And he got everybody out of that building first thing, except for one or two men that were there working. And with one of the guys, he said, "Grab that little hose," and he's got this little hose that they had to try to cool down the plate that he had to unscrew all these screws on. And he told the other guy, "Get up to the top of the building and start pouring water down the chimney of this roaster to start putting this fire out." 0:20:49.6 AS: And then they eventually got the whole thing out. But it required authority at the time to save the factory and to save the lives of the people. And so authority is necessary. It's just that that authority came at a time of emergency. Also, the other question is, is it good authority? There are people that give really bad advice in the middle of an emergency. And so, you know... 0:21:14.2 DL: Yeah, but then, points two and three come into play, personality and knowledge, because the very...soon as that crisis is over, the very next thing that guy should have done is bring everybody in and say, "Okay, what do we do to make sure this never happens again?" 0:21:31.8 AS: Which is exactly... 0:21:31.9 DL: Yeah, and if it does happen, what's going to be our process? 0:21:38.7 AS: Which is exactly what happened. And they analyzed why it happened and it was because they hadn't been maintaining the machine by the schedule that they had set. So they had to set up a better schedule to make sure that all of the husk that's coming off of the coffee, the chaff, is taken out on a daily basis and all clean. And so, we've never really had a major fire like that, and that's been, probably be 15 years ago. 0:22:00.3 DL: Wow. No, that's really a great example. So if you have a crisis, my advice to managers always is get through it. And then as soon as you get through it, bring everybody together to just say, "Okay, how do we make sure this never happens... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27553698

Seeing Through New Eyes: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 7) 07/25/2023

Seeing Through New Eyes: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 7) Learning Deming is like seeing the world through a different lens. In this episode, Bill Bellows uses various examples to show us how powerful that new vision can be. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03.4 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 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 Vision Therapy. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.9 BB: Welcome back, Andrew. Yes, I wrote an article, gosh, maybe 10 years ago now for the Lean Management Journal under the title Vision Therapy: Shift from Big Problems to Great Opportunities. And in the article, I talk about vision therapy - as getting glasses is one form of vision therapy or perhaps you need surgery on your eyes. I also talked about therapy our son once went through which is hand-eye coordination. And all of that is leading up to a vision exercise I put together 1998 timeframe and was inspired by a number of things. One is I had read a book written by David Kerns, former CEO of Xerox, and it's called 'Prophets in the Dark.' And he shared a story in there of a senior executive who had come from Ford. And he said, this guy named Frank Pip, who went on to become an outstanding leader within Xerox. If there was... I get the feeling if there was a hall of fame within Xerox, David Kearns would be in it. Frank Pip would be in it. 0:02:02.0 BB: And quite likely Barry Bebb, who's a mentor of mine, would be in it. And others, and... Anyway, relative to Frank Pip: Pip started his career at Ford and he got to the point of being a plant manager for the Ford final assembly plant. And there was an account he gave to Kearns of whenever they did final assembly of automobiles, rubber mallets were used to bang the mating parts together. They didn't quite fit. And every now and then, two parts would go together without a mallet. And the Ford, at Pip's plant, they called the parts that assembled without a mallet Snap-fit - everything else required mallets and mostly it was mallets. But every now and then there'd be Snap-fit. And then he explains how they, Pip was inspired to go off and buy competitor's cars for the purpose of buying them, taking them apart, putting 'em back together. And unfortunately, Pip died a few years ago, and I... And it never dawned on me to reach out to him. I thought by the time I heard of him, it was maybe too late then, it turns out I had plenty of time to reach out to him. So I don't know what inspired him, but I get the feeling he was routinely buying competitors' cars, taking 'em apart, putting 'em together, just alike, and they assembled just like theirs, just like theirs, just like theirs. 0:03:26.7 BB: And then there was a pickup truck they took apart, put together, and never used a mallet. It was, in Ford's language, 100% Snap-fit. And Pip was so astounded by the results he had the assembly team take it apart again and put it back together again 'cause he couldn't believe it was a 100% Snap-fit. Well, when he found that it was 100% Snap-fit twice, now he thought, "Holy cow," he calls up corporate, had someone come out from Dearborn, which was Ford's corporate headquarters, and I don't know if it was his boss, whoever the person was, came out very, very senior. And he says, they met with the team. The team's answering his questions. And as I explain it to people, you can imagine what it's like when somebody from corporate comes out. That's typically in my experience, somebody coming from corporate that's either, they're there to celebrate something or it's a bad day or it's a routine, but it... Anyway, it's a big deal for him. And as Pip's account was when the plant manager, when this executive came out from Dearborn and heard this account first hand, blah, blah, blah, his comment to the team was "The customer will never notice the difference." 0:04:38.1 BB: And in the book it said Pip was so frustrated with that attitude that he quit 'cause he thought, "We have uncovered something and this guy is treating it as no big deal.” Well, then I point out to people that was the late '60s and which was at the beginning of Ford, I'm sorry, of Toyota selling cars in the States. It was a Toyota pickup truck. So I just... I shared this story in part for this term, Snap-fit. Well, then in the late '90s I was teaching a graduate class in quality management at the Kellogg School of Management, Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University, which I checked very recently. It's the number two business school in the United States. And I'm teaching a class there. Through some interesting occurrences, I was invited to teach this class there. And I wrote up this contrast between the very simple black and white model. And we've been talking black and white models and I was using a black and white model of organizations which were about continuous improvement versus black and white thinking in that kind of contrast. And I gave them pairs of words and I said... 0:06:16.5 BB: You could have "good versus bad" - is one model. What I was showing 'em is, is black and white words versus continuum words versus relative words. I said, there's, let's see the good versus bad, and then that would be a black and white. And I said, "If you take the good versus bad and put it into a continuum, what would it be? And people would joke, "Gooder." And I said, "Well, faster, it could be tall versus short - taller, cheap versus expensive - cheaper." And I was using those pairs, getting them a sense of relative thinking versus black and white thinking. And I put out the word Lean, L-E-A-N and I said, "Let's say you don't know anything about the word. In which category does this word apply? Does it fit into the black and white mold or the continuum mold?" And a first of them would say it's shades-of-gray thinking. And I said, "Well, why?" And they come up with explanations and finally one guy says, he says, "It's black and white thinking." And I said, "Why?" He says, "There's no 'er' in the end." 0:07:36.4 BB: Lean, Lean. It's right? And then there's a woman who pushed back on that. And she said, "No, I disagree." She said, "You can continuously eliminate waste." And I said, "How far are you gonna go with that?" And she said, "Until there's no waste." And I said, and I was trying to point out is, well then we're done. I said, "Where is the continuous improvement, the continuum thinking behind being done?" And I said, [laughter] what'd I tell her, saying to her, I said, "So if you're done, well then what do you do?" She said, "Well, you continuously eliminate waste until you're done." Well, then I said, "Well, describe to me what an organization looks like that has no waste. Is what does it look like?" She says, "I don't know." Well, I think those two things inspired me in a class later that year, this is 1998, to throw out as an exercise, a vision, and I call it vision therapy exercise. 0:08:38.0 BB: And I said to them, "Yeah, I want you to take a piece of paper, divide it into half, into half, left and right, and then top and bottom. So there's four quadrants." And I said, "Label on the left hand side Blue Pen for Blue Pen Company. The right hand side for Red Pen as in Red Pen Company." And I held up, I would have these transparency markers. I had eight different colors. And I pulled out one, which is blue. And I said, "Imagine each of you have recently visited a company which makes blue pens, only Blue Pens. And every week I'd buy one that costs a dollar." And, I pulled out a Red Pen. Why red? 'cause I wanted something the other end of the spectrum. So I had eight different colors to choose from. So one was blue, one was red. Later somebody said to me, "Why did you pick blue versus red?" 0:09:31.2 BB: And I said, "Well, Rocketdyne was owned by Boeing at the time." And when I looked at the colors, you know a lot of the, advertising the logos of Boeing were blue and white. And I thought, blue is the company I have in mind for one side, and then something not blue, not green, not brown, red is the other side. So I said, "So imagine you've recently visited a Blue Pen Company, that only makes blue pens. You buy one every week, it costs a dollar. When you need a Red Pen, you buy that from the Red Pen Company, and they only make red, you buy it, it cost a dollar." So I had them create this - left and right. Imagine you've recently visited both organizations for two weeks each. All right? And then I said on the, you've got a left side and a right side, one's red, one's blue, top versus bottom. 0:10:24.1 BB: I said, "So imagine for the first week as you're visiting these two companies, nobody's there. So give us some additional information. What I want you to do is describe the physical layout of both organizations." And this ties in really well with... So my idea, as I shared in a recent session from Edgar Schein who had passed away back in January. He was an organizational therapist for most of his career at MIT. And in his book, 'Organizational Culture and Leadership,' he talked about organizational culture can be analyzed at three levels. And I didn't know about these levels back in '98 and found about them later. And I found it fits really well. And he said the first level is artifacts. And he says, I just wanna read, he says, "The constructed environment of an organization, including its architecture, technology, office layout, dress code, visible or audible behavior patterns, public documents like employee orientation, handbooks." 0:11:27.8 BB: And, what Schein says is that those artifacts come from values, the reasons and/or rationalizations of why members behave the way they do. And values come from assumptions. And again, I'm quoting from Schein, "Typically an unconscious pattern that determines how group members perceive, think and feel." And again, I didn't know about those at the time, but going back to the exercise, there's a left side and a right side. One is Blue Pen Company, one is Red Pen Company. The top two cells are, what would you see physically as Schein would say: what are the artifacts of these two organizations? And all you know so far is that one makes blue, one makes red, they both cost a dollar. And I buy one from each. Well then in the bottom two cells, what I want you to imagine is, so for the first two weeks, you visit both organizations, write down what are the physical characteristics of both organizations for the bottom two cells. 0:12:25.5 BB: And I apologize for coming back to this. In the first week you visit, there's no one there but you, no one there but you. So you're walking around both organizations, you're the only person around. You've got a clipboard. All you can talk about are the artifacts. What do you see? And the bottom two cells, imagine the second week in both organizations, there are people there. So for the bottom two cells, describe the people in both organizations. So all of this is artifacts and they come from values, they come from assumptions. But all you're doing is saying...but what I specifically wanted to differentiate is, what does the place look like different from what are the people like? And so everybody's ready to go. I'm gonna give you five minutes to put something in each cell. And here's the additional information. Andrew, you're ready? 0:13:12.7 BB: When I go to use the Blue Pen. So I would take the Blue Pen out and I would say, "When I use the Blue Pen, the cap goes off, the cap goes on, it goes off and it goes on nice and easy." And at the time I'm explaining this, they don't know anything about the prior story of Toyota, the pickup truck, 100% Snap-fit, Frank Pip. I usually... I save that for later. I said, all you know is the cap goes on, goes off nice and easy. Now the Red Pen, when I go to use the Red Pen, I need pliers to get the cap off. And there were times I had a little pair of pliers and I would use the pliers to pull it off and I need a hammer to get it back on. And I would have a little hammer and I boom, boom, boom. Now however, the Blue Pen... The cap is said to be Snap-fit. Then I would say just like snap your fingers, it comes off nice and easy goes on nice and easy, it doesn't fall off. That's all the information I have. Spend the next five minutes putting something in each cell. 0:14:14.3 BB: I've done that exercise around the world over 500 times of all different audiences, as young as college students, people working in the fishing industry, all over. And what's really cool is what shows up in those four cells is nearly identical. There may be some caveats due to language and whatnot. 0:14:40.8 AS: Identical across the 500, or again, identical... 0:14:44.1 BB: Yes. 0:14:44.5 AS: Across the red and blue. 0:14:46.5 BB: Yes, I... Well... What shows up in those four cells is nearly identical. So I would give people five minutes. And the other thing for those who are listening, my advice when you're doing this, that it took me a while to figure out the additional benefit is, what I would do is go around the room in each cell, the Blue Pen physical and ask if anyone has an example. So for the Blue Pen physical, someone will say: an open environment, bright lights, windows. All right. Then I'd go to the Red Pen Company, physical, "Okay, what do you see over here?" People might say, "Closed doors." Then I'd go to the Red Pen people, what about the people? And the... There might be "rigid,” “looking over their shoulder,” “on a time clock." Blue Pen Company, people might be happy and smiling. So I would go around the room before I give 'em five minutes just to make sure most of us are on the same page 'cause now, and then there'd be some people who are lost. And... But in general, people are pretty good. So then I give 'em five minutes and then depending on the size of the room, I might go around the room, table by table, look over your shoulder, see how you're doing, onto the next one, onto the next one and I get a feeling that they're doing pretty good. So then when I have them stop and there's different things I do at this point. I've had people at this point after five minutes stand up. Okay, there's a couple hundred people in the room at a conference. 0:16:31.0 BB: And I'll say: okay what I'd like you to do is find someone you've not met today and go introduce yourself and spend five minutes comparing trip reports. What's in your trip reports? And the room will very quickly erupt in laughter, whether I do it having you stand up, go find somebody or whether you are sitting at a table of four or five and I say across the table share. And then after they're done with that I'll say, "Okay, what did you find when you share your answers with others at the table?" And again and again, they'll say, "Their answers are just like mine." And I'll say, "Did anything come up in any of those quadrants that you were lost? That you said, Andrew, I... What do you mean by this? I don't know where you're coming from." And that's never happened. Every single time, they may have... They're looking at a factory and somebody may be looking in the kitchen, someone's looking in the lobby area. So they may be looking at different places, but it always fits together well. In the very beginning, what I would do, is I would give them five minutes. I wouldn't have 'em share anything yet. And I would go around the room and I'd say, get in the front of the room and the very first person, and I'd say if it was you say, "Andrew, what's the first thing you have for Blue Pen Physical?" And you'd say, "Clean." In fact, what's really cool is "neat, clean and organized" came up in order again and again. 0:18:13.6 BB: So I would ask you, "Andrew, what do you see?" You would say, "Neat," next person "Clean," next person "Organized." And I go all the way around and just fill up one cell with the very first... One thing you have that you haven't heard yet. Then I would jump over to the Red Pen, fill it out, then I'd go to the Red Pen people. So I would fill up a given cell and in the beginning I would write these on flip charts. And again, I don't know exactly what I was... I had in mind, "It's gonna be interesting," but I didn't appreciate how powerful this has become. And in the beginning I would write these on flip charts and then at the end of the class, I would throw them away. Then as I began to see how common the patterns were, then I would write them onto transparency and save them and I would date them. And at one point of time I've a colleague who's working on a PhD thesis, University of Texas and his PhD research, Andrew, [laughter] came from 200 trip reports that I still had in my files that I hadn't thrown out. And he and his brother took the data 'cause we knew exactly who was in each class. And so he had... He and his brother had some methodology in his... So his research data for his PhD thesis, looking at the leadership styles of these two organizations. And so let me... 0:19:52.3 BB: So in the Blue Pen physical, it's: an open layout neat, clean, organized, what else? Harmonious and as needed, if you were to say harmonious, then I might say, "Andrew, what do you mean by that? What do you mean? What do you mean clean? What do you mean this? What do you mean?" And so there's nothing wrong for our listeners who are trying this out with people. It's just keep asking them: "What do you mean by, what do you mean by." What's most critical is write down exactly what people say. Don't interpret. Don't yeah I would just say don't interpret. So I go all the way around and people would be astounded. 0:20:40.9 BB: I mean, I'd say a couple of things. One is quite often what people see in the contrast is where they work [laughter] versus where they would love to work. [chuckle] Now let me also say, in the very beginning when I did it, I did not explain to them what Snap-fit meant. So I did not say Snap-fit is good. I just said Snap-fit. Now, there would be people who would say, "Well, does it mean because it's Snap-fit, that it's good." And I would just say, "I didn't say one is good, one is bad. All I'm saying is one goes together with the hammers, one doesn't," and then I would eventually explain to them the a 100% Snap-fit Toyota pickup truck, and it would come together nice for them. Well, when I found the uses of this are one, people can, but Dr. Deming talked about prevailing style of management, but talking about it and having conversations about it is, what I found is this exercise... 0:22:00.1 BB: I think helps people in their own words, explain to them. It allows them to create a sense of: what is the prevailing system of management? And it's the Red Pen Company's side in many ways, and then: what is a Deming organization? It's the opposite. Now this is a very simple black and white model. And as George Box's quoted saying "All models are right. Some models are useful." I have found it enormously useful to look at the two organizations and ask people, what are the conversations like in both organizations? And I would say, "Okay, you're walking around a Red Pen Company, you come across two people in the hallway, what are they talking about?" 0:22:48.4 BB: And what you'll get is: it's second-shift people complaining about first-shift people, or it's engineering complaining about manufacturing. And then people would say, there's a lot of "us and them" and I said, okay. What I've also heard people say, is they'll say, "Well, on second shift where they work, we're a Blue Pen Company." "Also on second shift we're a Blue Pen, but those first-shift people, those are Red Pen." And you know, I said, what's a conversation like in a Blue Pen Company? "I've got an idea. Hey, let me hear about it, blah, blah, blah. Tell me more. Tell me more." I'll ask them, what are survival skills in... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27439074

Going Beyond Good: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 6) 07/18/2023

Going Beyond Good: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 6) If something is "good" is that good enough? Who decides? In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss how people define "good," what interchangeability has to do with morale, and the problem with a "merit-based" culture. Bonus: Learn how Americans became the first to use the French idea of interchangeable parts in manufacturing. Note: this episode was previously published as Part 5 in the Awaken Your Inner Deming series. 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'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, Deming Distinctions: Beyond Looking Good. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.4 Bill Bellows: Funny you mentioned that. You remind me that I've been at this for over 30 years, and coming up in July, I'll be celebrating 40 years of marriage. Like 30 years, 40, where do these numbers come from? 0:00:44.5 AS: Okay. Yeah. Who defines quality in a marriage, Bill? 0:00:47.0 BB: Alright. 0:00:50.8 AS: Okay, we won't go there. Take us, take it away. 0:00:52.2 BB: We won't go there. So we are gonna talk about who defines quality, and to get into "beyond looking good." As I shared with you, I've listened to each of the podcasts a few times. And before we get into who defines quality, I just wanna provide clarification on some of the things that came up in the first five episodes. And so, one, and I think these are kind of in order, but if they're not in order, okay, well, I made reference to black-and-white thinking versus shades-of-gray thinking. And I called black-and-white thinking - black and white data - category data, and the word I was searching for that just wasn't coming out was attribute data. So for those who are keeping score, attribute data is probably the most relevant statistician term in that regard. 0:01:44.9 BB: Attribute data versus variable data. And what I've made reference to, and we'll talk more in a future session, is looking at things in terms of categories. And categories are black and white, or it could be red, yellow, green, that's three categories, or looking at things on a continuum. So I'm still excited by the difference that comes about by understanding when we're in the black-and-white mode or the category mode or the attribute data mode versus the variable mode, and still have a belief that we can't have continuous improvement or continual improvement if we're stuck in an attribute mode. 0:02:22.9 BB: And more on that later, that's one. I talked about Thomas Jefferson meeting Honoré Blanc and getting excited about the concept of interchangeable parts. And I had the date wrong, that was 1785, if anyone's keeping score there. He was ambassador to France from 1785 to 1789, but it was in 1792 that he wrote a letter to John Jay, who was a...I think he was a Commerce Secretary. Anyway, he was in the administration of Washington and shared the idea. I was doing some research earlier and found out that even with the headstart that Blanc had in France, 'cause back in 1785, Jefferson was invited to this pretty high level meeting in Paris where Blanc took a, I guess, like the trigger mechanism of 50 different rifles. Not the entire rifle, but just the...let's just call it the trigger mechanism with springs and whatnot. And he took the 50 apart and he put all the springs in one box, all the other pieces in their respective boxes and then shook the boxes up and showed that he could just randomly pull a given spring, a given part, and put 'em all together. And that got Jefferson excited. And the...what it meant for Jefferson and the French was not just that you can repair rifles in the battlefield quickly. 0:03:56.9 BB: Now, what it meant for jobs in France was a really big deal, because what the French were liking was all the time it took to repair those guns with craftsmanship, and Blanc alienated a whole bunch of gunsmiths as a result of that. And it turns out, Blanc's effort didn't really go anywhere because there was such a pushback from the gunsmiths, the practicing craftsmanship that jobs would be taken away. But it did come to the States. And then in the early 1800s, it became known as the American System of Production. But credit goes back to Blanc. I also made reference to absolute versus relative interchangeability. And I wanna provide a little bit more clarification there, and I just wanna throw out three numbers, and ideally people can write the numbers down, I'll repeat 'em a few times. The first number is 5.001, second number is 5.999, and the third number is 6.001. So it's 5.001, 5.999, 6.001. And some of what I'm gonna explain will come up again later, but...so this will tie in pretty well. So, what I've been doing is I'll write those three words on the whiteboard or throw them on a screen, and I'll call... 0:05:28.9 AS: Those three numbers. 0:05:31.4 BB: A, B, and C. And I'll say, which two of the three are closest to being the same? And sure enough people will say the 5.999 and the 6.001, which is like B and C. And I say that's the most popular answer, but it's not the only answer. People are like, "well, what other answer are there?" Well, it could be A and C, 5.001 and 6.001, both end in 001. Or it could be the first two, A and B, 5.001 and 5.999. So what I like to point out is, if somebody answers 5.999 and 6.001, then when I say to them, "what is your definition of same?" 0:06:14.9 BB: 'Cause the question is, which two of the three are close to being the same? And it turns out there's three explanations of "same." There's same: they begin with five, there's same: they end in 001. And there's same in terms of proximity to each other. So I just wanna throw that out. Well, then a very common definition of "quality" is to say, does something meet requirements? And that's the black-and-white thinking. I've also explained in the past that requirements are not set in absolute terms. The meeting must start at exactly 1:00, or the thickness must be exactly one inch. What I've explained is that the one inch will have a plus or minus on it. And so let's say the plus and minus gives us two requirements, a minimum of five and a maximum of six. Well, then that means the 5.001 meets requirements and the 5.999 meets requirements. 0:07:15.4 BB: And so in terms of defining quality, in terms of meeting requirements, A and B are both good. And then what about the 5.999 and the 6.001? Well, those numbers are on opposite sides of the upper requirement of six. One's just a little bit to the left and one's a little bit to the right. Then I would ask people, and for some of you, this'll ring - I think you'll be smiling - and I would say to people, "what happens in manufacturing if, Andrew, if I come up with a measurement and it's 6.001?" Okay, relative to defining quality as "meeting requirements," 6.001 does not meet requirements. So what I'll ask people is, "what would a non-Deming company do with a 6.001?" And people will say, "we're gonna take a file out, we're gonna work on it, we're gonna hit it with a hammer." And I say, "no, too much work." And they say, "well, what's the answer?" "We're gonna measure it again." 0:08:25.7 AS: Until we get it right. 0:08:27.7 BB: We will measure it until we get it right. We will change the room temperature. We will take the easiest path. So then I said, get people to realize, they're like, yeah, that's what we do. We measure the 6.001 again. Well, then I say, "well Andrew, why don't we measure the 5.001 again?" And what's the answer to that, Andrew? [laughter] 0:08:51.5 AS: 4.999. [laughter] 0:08:54.7 BB: But what's interesting is, we'll measure the 6.001 again. But we won't measure the 5.001 again. We won't measure the 5.999 again. And so to me, this reinforces that when we define quality as "meeting requirements," that what we're essentially saying in terms of absolute interchangeability, what we're pretending is that there's no difference between the 5.001 and the 5.999. At opposite ends, we're saying that Blanc would find them to be interchangeable, and putting all the things together. I don't think so. 0:09:36.7 BB: I think there's a greater chance that he'd find negligible difference between the 5.999 and the 6.001. And that's what I mean by relative interchangeability, that the difference between B and C is nothing, that's relative interchangeability. The closer they are together, the more alike they are in terms of how they're integrated into the gun, into the rifle, into the downstream product. And I just throw out that what defining quality as "requirements" is saying is that the first two are...the person downstream can't tell the difference. Then I challenge, I think there's...in terms of not telling the difference, I think between 5.999 and 6.001, that difference is minuscule cause they are relatively interchangeable. The other two are implied to be absolutely interchangeable. And that I challenge, that's why I just want to throw that out. All right, another thing I want...go ahead, Andrew. 0:10:38.3 AS: One of the things I just highlight is, I remember from my political science classes at Long Beach State where I studied was The Communist Manifesto came out in 1848. And Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were talking about the alienation of the worker. And what you're talking about is the kind of, the crushing of the craftsmen through interchangeable parts that was a lot like AI coming along and destroying something. And after 50 or 60 or 70 years of interchangeable parts, along comes The Communist Manifesto with the idea that when a person is just dealing with interchangeable parts, basically they're just a cog in the wheel and they have no connection to the aim of what's going on. They don't have any connection, and all of a sudden you lose the craftsmanship or the care for work. And I think that the reason why this is interesting is because that's, I think, a huge part of what Dr. Deming was trying to bring was bring back...it may not be craftsmanship for creating a shoe if you were a shoemaker, but it would be craftsmanship for producing the best you could for the part that you're playing in an ultimate aim of the system. 0:12:02.6 BB: Yes. And yes, and we'll talk more about that. That's brilliant. What you said also reminds me, and I don't think you and I spoke about it, you'll remind me. But have I shared with you the work of a Harvard philosopher by the name of Michael Sandel? 0:12:24.3 AS: I don't recall. 0:12:27.0 BB: He may be, yeah, from a distance, one of the most famous Harvard professors alive today. He's got a course on justice, which is I think 15 two- or three-hour lectures, which were recorded by public television in Boston. Anyway, he wrote a book at the beginning of the pandemic. It came out, it's called The Tyranny of Merit. 0:12:54.0 BB: And "merit" is this belief that "I did it all by myself." That "I deserve what I have because I made it happen. I had no help from you, Andrew. I had no help from the government. I didn't need the education system, the transportation system. I didn't need NASA research. I made it happen all by myself." And he said, what that belief does is it allows those who are successful to claim that they did it by themselves. It allows them to say those who didn't have only themselves to blame. And he sees that as a major destructive force in society, that belief. And I see it tied very well to Deming. Let me give you one anecdote. Dr. Deming was interviewed by Priscilla Petty for The Deming of America documentary, which was absolutely brilliant. 0:13:49.8 BB: And she's at his home, and he's sharing with her the medal he got from the Emperor of Japan, and he's holding it carefully, and I think he gives it to her, and she's looking at it, and she says to him something like, so what did it mean to you to receive that? And he said, "I was lucky. I made a contribution." He didn't say I did it all by myself. He was acknowledging that he was in the right place at the right time to make a contribution. And that's where Sandel is also heavily on, is don't deny the role of being born at the right time in the right situation, which is a greater system in which we are. Well, for one of the college courses, I was watching an interview between Sandel and one of his former students. 0:14:48.1 BB: And the point Sandel made that I wanted to bring up based on what you just said, he says, "what we really need to do is get people dignity in work." And that's what you're talking about, is allowing them to have pride in work, dignity in work instead of as they're making interchangeable parts, having them feel like an interchangeable part. And I'm really glad you brought that up because when we talk later about letter grades, I would bring back one of the reasons I find Deming's work astounding, is that he takes into account psychology in a way that I hope our listeners will really take heart to in a deeper way. 0:15:30.2 AS: And so for the listeners out there, just to reinforce, the book is called The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good. Published in 2020 by Michael Sandel. And the ratings on Amazon is 4.5 out of five with about 2,446 ratings. So it's a pretty well-rated book I'd say. And looks interesting. Now you got me wanting to read that one. 0:15:57.0 BB: Oh what I'll do is I'll send you a... Well, what I encourage our listeners to do is find the interview... Harvard Bookstore did an interview in 2020, 2021, with Michael Sandel being interviewed by his former student by the name of Preet Bharara. [laughter] Who used to be the... 0:16:24.3 AS: SEC... 0:16:24.4 BB: Head of these...no, well, he prosecuted a number of people for SEC crimes, but he headed the Justice Department's long oldest district, which is known as SDNY or the Southern District of New York. And so he was a...in one of the first classes his freshman year at Harvard, Preet Bharara's freshman year at Havard was one of Sandel's first years. And so they had an incredible conversation. So I would encourage the listeners to... 0:16:51.8 AS: Yeah, it's titled: Michael J Sandel with Preet Bharara at Harvard. And the channel is called Harvard Bookstore. 0:16:58.6 BB: Yes, absolutely. All right. So another topic I want to get to in terms of clarification and key points, last time we talked about tools and techniques and what I'm not sure I made much about.... First of all, I just wanna really reinforce that tools and techniques are not concepts and strategies. Tools are like a garden tool I use to dig a hole. Technique is how I go about using it, cleaning it, and whatnot. Not to be confused from a concept...and what is concept? We talked about last time is a concept is an abstract idea and a strategy is how do we apply it? So tools and techniques within Six Sigma quality could be control charts, could be design of experiments. And all, by the way, you're gonna find those tools and techniques within the Deming community. So it's not to say the tools and techniques are the differentiator. 0:17:50.8 BB: I think the concepts and strategies are the differentiators, but I don't wanna downplay tools. Lean has tools in terms of value streams, and you won't find value streams per se in Dr. Deming's work. Dr. Deming looks in terms of production viewed as a system. In a later session, I want to talk about value streams versus Deming's work. But I just wanna point out that I find it...it's easy to get lost in the weeds with all we find within Lean, Six Sigma, Deming and whatnot. And this is why last time I wanted to focus on tools and techniques as separate from concepts and strategies. And what I think we did speak about last time, again, for just as a reminder, is what's unique that we both enjoy with Dr. Deming's work is that KPIs are not caused by individual departments, assigned to individual departments. 0:18:46.0 BB: KPIs are viewed as measures of the overall system. And if you assign the KPIs across the organization and give every different function their own KPI, what you're likely to find - not likely - what you WILL find is that those assigned KPIs are interfering with others' abilities to get their KPIs met. And in the Deming philosophy, you don't have that problem because you understand that things are interdependent, not independent. And so I just wanna close by saying what I find in Deming's work to be most enlightening is this sense of "what does it mean to look at something as a system?" And it means everything is connected to everything else. When you define quality in terms of saying "this is good because it meets requirements," what you've just said is, "this is good in isolation." Whether it's the pass from the quarterback to the wide receiver, saying the pass met requirements. 0:19:52.0 BB: What I think Dr. Deming would ask is, "is the ball catchable?" [laughter] And yet, what I've seen in my aerospace experience is parts being measured for airplanes in Australia that they meet requirements because the measurements are taken early in the morning before the sun has had a chance to heat the part up. And we get the 6.001 is now 5.999. You know what that means, Andrew? It's - we can now ship it. [laughter] 0:20:23.9 BB: And send it off to America for some airplane factory. 0:20:26.2 AS: When we shipped it, that's what it was. 0:20:28.9 BB: Exactly. And so, again, interdependence is everything. Go ahead, Andrew. 0:20:34.6 AS: I wanted to point on, there's a company in Thailand that really has gotten on the KPI bandwagon, and I was talking with some people that work there, and they were just talking about how they've been rolling out the KPIs for the last couple of years and down to the number of seconds that you're on the phone and everything that you do is tracked now. And then I just witnessed that company basically use that KPI as a way to basically knock out a whole group of people that they were trying to get rid of by coming in with tight KPIs and then saying, "you're not keeping up with 'em and therefore you're out." And I just thought...and the manager that was involved I was talking to, you could just see, he saw how KPI can just be weaponized for the purposes of the senior management when you're doing KPIs of individuals. And the thing that I was thinking about is, imagine the CEO of that company in a couple of years, in a couple of months, they happen to listen to this podcast, or they pick up a book of Dr. Deming and they think, "Oh my God, what did I just do over the last five years implementing KPIs down to the individual level?" [laughter] 0:21:48.5 BB: Oh, yeah. And that's what we talked about last time is...as I told you, I had a friend of a friend who's worked for Xerox, and he said there wasn't a KPI that was flowed down that they couldn't find a way to beat. And that's what happens, and you end up getting things done, but what's missing is: at whose expense? All right. So we talked about...now, let's get into beyond looking good, Deming distinctions. Who defines quality? Well, from Philip Crosby's perspective, quality's defined by the...it could be the designer. The designer puts a set of requirements on the component, whatever it is. The unit, the requirements have latitude we talked about. They're not exact. There's a minimum of six, a maximum of...or a minimum of five, maximum of six. 0:22:48.8 BB: There's a range you have to meet, is the traditional view of quality. And in my 30 years of experience, I've not seen quality defined any other way than that. It has to be in between these two values. Sometimes it has to be five or below or six or above, but there's a range. But also what we talked about last time is Dr. Deming said "a product or service possesses quality if it helps someone and enjoys a sustainable market." But what I found... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27438822

Beyond Tools & Techniques: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 5) 07/13/2023

Beyond Tools & Techniques: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 5) Data represents raw numbers and information represents the what, when, where, etc. of something. Knowledge requires looking inward at how something works. Understanding requires looking outward at a bigger system for an explanation of what lies inward. Wisdom is the ability to utilize these elements. So how do we go from having data to having wisdom? Bill and Andrew talk about tools, techniques, concepts, and strategies. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 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 idea is to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunity. The topic for today is: Tools and Techniques and Concepts and Strategies. Bills, take it away. 0:00:30.2 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And as we get into number five, I was listening earlier to episode number four, and I just want to start off with a clarification and addition. I shared a quote, "I'd rather know a little less than to know so much that ain't so." Which is the opening quote of The New Economics. Every chapter of The New Economics has a great quote. And that quote is attributed to Josh Billings, who is an author who lived in - the author, humorist in the late 1800s. And I thought that was attributed to Will Rogers. Will Rogers is kind of the Josh Billings of the early 1900s. And Will Rogers quote, which a little similar is, "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." 0:01:26.8 BB: And to that end, we've been talking about black and white thinking, question number one, shades of gray thinking, question number two. And something I learned from Ed Baker who's a genius who worked at Ford, followed Dr. Deming around the world, a really sweet guy. And one of the first times I met him, he said something about having the ability to realize that the more you know something may be the less that, we're so used to thinking that I know it better and better and better. And where he was coming from my interpretation was, there's a possibility of getting to a point of questioning your understanding, which means your understanding goes backwards. And that's where I think these quotes from Billings and Rogers are so appropriate. Are we willing to let go of dogma? I mean, that's what we were talking about last time. Zero inventory, zero variation, and that's all dogma. And what these two people are talking about is that understanding is relative. 0:02:42.1 BB: It's not absolute. And also that it can go backwards. So you could look at what you're knowing and all of a sudden say, "Maybe I'm not as confident." And if I go there and say... I met a really cool guy, it was at Deming's first seminar in the UK, he worked for Ford. And I used to meet him at this annual UK Deming forum. And at the end of the days there we'd go to the pub, and I liked to hang out with him 'cause he is just, he had so much great wisdom. And one of the things he said is that he constantly challenges his understanding, and not just of Deming, but is this, is it, 'cause he found himself really passionate, but he was questioning, he had the ability to step back and question why he thought it was so important. "Am I crazy?" And, I said, "You're not the only one who does that." But I think that's really healthy, that you can step back, read other people's stuff. But the ability to keep challenging and I think in the world of continuous improvement, we use that phrase, the ability to question your understanding I think is absolutely important. So anyway, I just want to get that off first. 0:04:05.8 AS: It made me think when I teach my finance classes at university, one of the first things I say to my students, is I say, if I'm successful in this class, you'll be less confident when you leave. 0:04:18.0 BB: Yes. 0:04:19.3 AS: And they just can't understand that at that moment in time. But at the end of the course, they realize that nothing's written in stone and that it is a shifting sands, particularly the stock market. Stock market is just a, as one of my guests on my podcast on investing said, "The stock market is a predator, and it's just constantly evolving ways to take money from you." But the point is that if you think that you've got it licked, then it's your, it may be your time up next. And then the other thing I was thinking about is, does knowledge go backwards or does it just become that we have a different vantage point? And also, what's the motive of learning? In the beginning it was just to gather information. The ability to interpret that information strongly didn't come until you really start to feel better and you have more experience. But then the further you go, it's like playing a piano solo and you go far away from what you learn in the rudiments. Does that mean the rudiments are wrong? No, you're just coming at it from a very different angle now. 0:05:32.1 BB: Well, let me add, and this adds to where we're going. And I've shared my, what I've learned from Dr. Deming. I met him twice and never asked him a question. I learned a whole lot from Russ Akoff, who I asked a lot of questions, Dr. Taguchi I asked a lot of questions. And one of the things I share in all my classes that I learned from Russ, and I find... I use the word profound. It's a model he refers to as the D-I-K-U-W model. Others have used four letters. I like Russ's model, D-I-K-U-W. So what is D? "D" is data. And what is data? Data are temperatures, pressures, sales numbers. Those are, that's data. "I" is information. And as Russ would say, information is what a newspaper reporter writes. It's what, where, when, how, and a car accident occurred at this time. That's information. And what's neat is what Dr. Deming said was the dictionary is filled with information. 0:06:52.4 BB: But the "K" is knowledge. And Russ uses K the same way Deming uses knowledge - as in Theory of Knowledge - which is, what is my theory for how this thing works? 0:07:06.8 BB: If I tweak this, then this happens. So the ability to understand causes and effects, that's knowledge. I take something apart and I understand the springs and this turns this, and I would turn it clockwise and boom, boom, boom. That's knowledge. Understanding, the "U," comes from stepping back. And an example I used with my students is, a number of years ago, I took apart our washing machine, 'cause I heard the bearing is starting to hum. And I thought, well, given the experience in corporations, I can either continue to let this hum and at one point it breaks, in which case I am where I am, or I can be on top of it and get ahead of it. And that's what I decided to do. So I went online, found a couple websites, and got great instructions, took the whole thing apart, and was able to get back together. Taking it apart, putting it back together, looking at how all these things work together, is that I gained great knowledge. But what Russ would say is, understanding how the washing machine works doesn't tell me why it's sized for a family of four. 0:08:27.5 BB: Russ would say, taking an automobile apart and putting it back together doesn't tell you why it's designed for four passengers and why the driver sits on the left. So understanding is when you look outward at the greater system, and Russ also refers to that as synthesis, as opposed to analysis is when we bore in. And he said... And what's really also, we'll get into this. I mean this, these terms will come up in this conversation later, so it works out well to throw it in now. So there's data, information, knowledge. Okay, fine. Again, understanding is: we step back and say, why is the car, why does the car have four passengers? And that's also what Russ calls synthesis - which is when we look outward at the containing system. And analysis is when we go inward. So there's analysis inward, which is where the knowledge piece comes in, stepping back. 0:09:28.9 BB: And then the "W" piece is wisdom, which is, what do you do with all this stuff? So I'm sitting in a staff meeting at Rocketdyne, and they're talking about the results of the latest survey. And every director in the room has got a solution on how to improve their issues, and every solution involves some awards program. And I'm listening to one person after another, after another, after another. And this is a, I knew all these people, but I was recently assigned to this vice president, and I was all set after the 12th or 13th of them said, "and I'm gonna implement an award system." And I was all set to say, “for the record...” but I bit my tongue, and it's a good thing I did, because immediately after the meeting was the monthly awards and recognition luncheon for the buyer. But I say that that's the wisdom piece. The wisdom piece was, I was lucky. I just, but the wisdom piece is knowing, when do I use this knowledge and when do I just shut up? 0:10:45.6 AS: That's true isn't it? 0:10:47.5 BB: Yeah. And I would say I was, I was lucky. But still, with what we're sharing with people, it's one thing to be aware of it, but you have to pick your battles. You have to pick your opportunities, and you can't be a bull in a China shop. All right. So back to tools and techniques. 0:11:08.6 AS: Okay. But wait, I want to go back through this just to highlight it because I think it's a good... I teach students how to value companies, and I've been doing it for 30 years. So, I would argue I'm close to the wisdom part, further away from the data part. But when I bring students in the class, the first thing they do is, hey, I got data, I got data, I got these charts, look at this, look at this. But then I say, okay, so what, what, tell me more. And then they say, then they get into the information. Okay, what, when, how, where, but they still don't have an interpretation of what this means. And then we get to knowledge where they start to ask more questions: okay, how does this all work together? 0:11:49.2 AS: And then as you get better and better in what you're doing, you get an understanding of how it all works together. You're not just valuing one stock, you're looking at that stock relative to the overall market. And then when you get to wisdom in the valuation and in the finance world, you've now seen many different parts of this overall system. And when you come back and look at the idea of: how am I valuing this particular stock? So many more elements come into that decision. What's the FED doing? What's happening in that country? What's happening in demand? If it's a car company, like I've just valued Toyota, what's happening? And we going into recession? Has that been put into the...is that already in the price? So Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, Wisdom. Alright, great. Let's continue. 0:12:35.2 BB: Oh yeah. And then again, we'll see where it shows up. So first one, talk about tools and techniques. And when I presented my classes I said there's tools and techniques, and then there's concepts and strategies. So what are tools? Tools are the implements that we use to complete tasks. So in the backyard I've got an axe, I've got our hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, those are tools. So is my cell phone, it's a tool. The computer, the cameras these are tools. The microphone, these are tools. Techniques are the methods of how they're to be employed. So when I get ready for the podcast, I turn off anything that would just come on board and distract us, things like that, close the door. So the technique is: what is the method by which I use the ax, use the screwdriver? Okay. Now we get to concepts and strategies. 0:13:29.8 BB: So concepts represent abstract ideas such as the theory of System of Profound Knowledge, as well as fundamental building blocks of thoughts and beliefs. So, those are concepts. Again, concepts represent abstract ideas as well as fundamental building blocks of thoughts and beliefs. All right. So I couple that with strategies. Strategies represent a plan of action or a policy designed to achieve a major overall aim guided by a concept. So if I want to implement Lean, implement Six Sigma. So Six Sigma and Lean are concepts, and then we have a strategy to implement - training people, whatever. And I throw those out because what I find is well, let me even back up in terms of another model I want to share with our audience. And I'm aware that there are people listening to this if they're joining online on the Deming Institute webpage. 0:14:32.1 BB: And then for our viewers that are watching us, Andrew, through DemingNext, then they can see us. They have a video. But I want to, as much as we cannot rely on PowerPoint slides that the listeners can't listen to. So I want people to imagine an input-output diagram, a rectangle where you've got inputs coming in one side, and what are the inputs? The raw materials used to create something. It could be literally materials or information or students as inputs into an education system. And then the output is whatever it is you're trying to achieve. So the left hand side is the inputs coming in the outputs are going out the right hand side. Well, what I also think about is imagine coming down from the top are concepts and strategies, and coming up from the bottom are tools and techniques. And the idea is that the tools and techniques are used to manipulate, convert these things, these inputs through concepts and strategies into the output. And so, tools and techniques offer us speed, the ability to dig the hole with a shovel as opposed to my hand. The ability to contact thousands of people in email as opposed to one at a time. Tools and techniques offer what Akoff would call efficiency, doing things well. So efficiency is about lowering cost, improving speed. 0:16:14.7 BB: And so, again, Akoff would talk, again another concept from Akoff is differentiating efficiency from effectiveness. And I don't think we've talked about this in the past, but when I first heard Russ explain this I thought, "holy cow, I use the words efficient and effective interchangeably." If I was writing something I'd talk about, let's do it efficiently then over here, not to be redundant, and I'd say, we're gonna be effective. And in Russ's work, and he is incredibly eloquent, and he says, efficiency is doing things well, effectiveness is doing the right thing. And he'd say that the better you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. And the idea being effectiveness is asking: "why are we doing this in the first place?" And I say that because concepts and strategies are about effectiveness, an overall plan of action. 0:17:17.4 BB: And my concern is we get hung up on tools and techniques wanting to do things faster and cheaper. Again what Russ would say is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become, because we're not challenging that. Reducing cost of something in isolation may make the whole thing worse, and we get all hung up on driving cost of zero, cycle time to zero, variation to zero, defects to zero, not understanding the greater system. So again back to this model is the raw materials, the inputs and come in the left hand side, they're acted upon by tools and techniques, but the tools and techniques are guided by concepts and strategies and that gives us the output. Well the... 0:18:04.8 AS: Go ahead. 0:18:06.5 BB: Go ahead Andrew. 0:18:07.5 AS: I was just gonna say, I was gonna put it in the context that in my coffee factory, the main input is raw coffee beans. And then the process is roasting and packaging, and then a finished product comes out the other end. And if I think about the tools and techniques, we use thermometers, we use roasting equipment, we use coolers and we have techniques that we've worked on that we have certain recipes, certain dump times, so these are the tools and techniques. And then the concepts and strategies. Well, as far as concepts are concerned, part of it is making sure that we're making the right product. We have a lot of competitors that come in the coffee business and they're absolute coffee lovers, and they start up little roasting factories to compete with us, but what they don't realize is that we're not roasting for the best tasting coffee, we're roasting for the best match with what the client wants from a taste and a cost perspective. And it may have nothing to do with what you and I appreciate in a nice espresso. And so when I think about the concepts, it's like really understanding where are we going with what we're doing with this. 0:19:28.0 BB: Yes. 0:19:28.4 AS: And then this, the strategy is kind of, in some ways I would say it's kind of the overall, how does this fit into our overall strategy of the service that we're bringing to our clients. The machines, the coffee, the coffee doesn't brew itself. It has to be brewed in equipment. So we have to optimize for that equipment. Then we have to have service technicians that train. So there's a strategy of kind of how we implement that overall thing. I'm just trying to apply what you've said about tools and techniques and concepts and strategies. 0:19:56.9 BB: Well, that's brilliant. And what is else is cool that I've never shared with you is our... One is our, your undergraduate degree and our daughter's undergraduate degree are both from Cal State Long Beach. 0:20:08.8 AS: Interesting. 0:20:10.1 BB: And she went and studied - a few changes in direction - and came out with a degree in English. She wanted to be an English teacher. And then upon graduation decided it's not what she wanted to do. But she spent one year in Europe and somehow got turned on to coffee. And her senior year she was working in these coffee shops making lattes and espressos. And she is a coffee snob, let me tell you. She turned me on to the difference between, let's just say Starbucks Coffee and Intelligentsia Coffee. And it's never been the same. And she would say 'cause I put, cream or half and half and that she says, dad, she said, “Coffee lovers, if you have to put something in it, then you're not a coffee lover.” 0:21:17.1 BB: But she worked in the coffee business and just an incredible mind for exactly what you're talking about. And then decided to go back into education. 0:21:30.2 AS: Yeah. Whenever I go out on a dinner, since I don't drink wine and they pour me a glass of wine, I always pour in about, a little about a quarter of a cup of milk into my wine just to freak 'em out. And think, now who would ever do that with coffee anyways. 0:21:46.4 BB: But no, but those are great examples. And they... But the other thing I wanna point out is, I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen, people look at Deming's work and they say, well, he uses control charts and so do the Six Sigma people. Hey both of them talk about design of experiments and both of them talk about continuous improvement. Isn't it all the same? And when I started to explain to people is to say, don't confuse tools and techniques with concepts and strategies. And it's really powerful to differentiate. And I point out to people, I'm not against tools and techniques, but I shared in the past that, when I joined Rocketdyne in 1990, I got involved in problem solving and working on things and doing training. 0:22:40.7 BB: And in hindsight, most of my focus was tools and techniques. Was showing them how to go in there and apply this and apply this. And that was kind of in the community where I was being mentored by these people outside the company. That's the path I was on was, looking at, how I was being trained by the people doing the training and that it made sense. But it wasn't until I... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26963529

Tackling More Management Myths: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 9) 07/11/2023

Tackling More Management Myths: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 9) How do we motivate employees? Traditionally, we offer merit pay, focus on accountability, and use other extrinsic motivators tied to performance. The ideas sound good on the surface, but John and Andrew discuss the many pitfalls and unintended consequences - and what to do instead. 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...well, in fact, we are continuing our discussions about management myths that keep fooling us. And today, we're talking about merit pay, accountability, and extrinsic motivators. John, take it away. 0:00:37.7 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. We've sort of been on this sort of mini-series talking about some of these myths that Dr. Deming talked about. So two episodes ago we sort of introduced the idea that Deming said we're living in this sort of age of mythology. We talked about two myths: the myth of best practices, and the myth of the hero educator. And then last time we talked about the myth of performance appraisal, and really talked about sort of this failure to consider the role of the system on individual performance. And really what we're gonna do is kind of wrap up those myths with the three you mentioned today. I think when I think of the myth, I'm thinking about sort of management dos and don'ts, and the myths are the don'ts. And then sort of the idea would be after we cover the myths, we can turn to some guiding principles, and those would be sort of the dos, the things that management leaders should do, that sort of Dr. Deming talked about. 0:01:38.7 JD: So we can dive into the first one, which is sort of a continuation of last time, this idea of rating and ranking. Last time we talked about performance appraisal, and now it's sort of the merit pay side of rating and ranking. And it something...merit pay is a practice that has been sort of tried over time in education. What I can tell, it goes...the idea in education goes back at least to the Reagan administration. So at least to the '80s. So since that time, this sort of merit pay idea for teachers or other educators in the system has been taken up by various governors and presidents in the United States. I think most recently during President Obama's administration, there was the Race to the Top program. And sort of as a part of that program, there were teacher and principal evaluations where merit pay was sort of a key part of those evaluation systems. 0:02:36.1 JD: And so the basic theory is that if you pay people based on results, that motivator to make money will drive improvement of outcomes in schools. And I think one sort of key differentiation, because pay in all sectors, but especially in education, is a hot button topic. I'm not talking about sort of the core salary, whether or not teachers are paid enough or not. Those sort of base salary levels are sort of a separate discussion topic altogether. I'm just talking about sort of merit pay, bonus pay, performance pay, that type of thing. And when I think of merit pay, I mean a lot of these ideas, I think, sort of sound good before you really dig in and start to think about them. 0:03:34.0 AS: And that's, Dr. Deming would say pay for performance makes sense. Seems like you're gonna get a good outcome, but in fact it's a little different or a little bit more complex than that. 0:03:44.9 JD: It's a lot, yeah. A lot more complex, I think that's exactly right. When I was thinking about merit pay and the theory behind it, what are the problems, especially in education? So for me, problem number one is paramount, and that's how do you define a meaningful measure of performance by which to judge individual educators? That's a pretty thorny problem. I think problem two is that the basic theory suggests that additional money will incentivize these...improves teaching and in turn improve student outcomes. But for that to be true, that means that teachers were previously withholding their best efforts and if you just paid them this bonus, that they would then sort of unleash this previously withheld power. And then another really thorny problem is this idea, if you sort of create this environment where you have a merit pay system, it sort of disincentivizes the behaviors that are important to improving any complex system. 0:05:00.2 JD: Things like, cooperation and teamwork. And so, especially in a merit pay system, the ones that I've sort of been aware of, the merit pay calculation is often sort of viewed as sort of opaque. How is this calculated? Often sort of the algorithms are proprietary, they're viewed as unfair, and then they can lead to these undesirable behaviors like unwillingness to share ideas or, just as problematic, unwillingness to take on certain teaching assignments, the tougher assignments. The very kids that you want to have the best teachers are often the toughest to get results with. And so you're sort of disincentivizing people taking those assignments because of the differential pay or the poor rating. 0:05:57.9 AS: Yeah, it's interesting too - that the point that people are withholding their best work. If we just give them merit pay, then...and I just had a vision in my mind. Imagine that we had a peaceful cage of tigers, and they're all chilling out and these tigers consume, at every meal, they consume, let's say all of them consume a hundred kilos of meat. [laughter] And we end up putting in 50 kilos in there and say, "okay, you gotta fight for this." 0:06:44.9 JD: Yeah. 0:06:47.4 AS: What's it gonna look like? 0:06:48.8 JD: What's it gonna look like? Yeah. 0:06:50.2 AS: And in a way, like what we're doing with merit pay is saying there's a limited pool. We've allocated a pool that's available to you. Yes, you've got your survival pay, but here is this pool of additional merit pay. And then...yeah, some people, some of them may just some people may sit back and go, "I'm not doing the work for that. I'll stick with my monthly pay." Whereas others will be extremely competitive to get that pay. 0:07:19.8 JD: Yeah. Yeah. But all of it assumes that, let's say, today I don't have the merit pay system. I get certain results. Tomorrow, I have this merit pay system. It assumes I'd know what to do tomorrow to get the outcomes, right? And I think that's a huge problematic assumption. 0:07:42.7 AS: So is that's part... If you think about what you're saying, that's part of the myth that, you know, you just think... 0:07:47.8 JD: It's part of the the myth. Yeah. 0:07:49.3 AS: It's like "just put this in place." I mean, come on. It's internal competition. We want everybody to...well, wait a minute. Internal competition in the company? 0:08:00.4 JD: Yeah. I mean, I could work, potentially, work harder for some period of time, but if I don't have any different methods for bringing about these outcomes, then the merit pay itself is...assuming everything else went well, assuming it was seen as fair and transparent, the fact that you don't have any new methods with which to bring about this improvement is a serious impediment to just thinking that merit pay in and of itself is gonna be an effective system. Putting aside all the other issues like disincentivizing the very behaviors or taking on the various assignments that you want the sort of top-notch teachers to do. 0:08:36.5 AS: Yeah. I guess that's another way of thinking about it too, is that it's like you have a certain set of tools on the tool floor, on the factory floor or in the classroom or whatever. There's a certain set, and you're not adding to any of that. You're just saying, "we're gonna pay you to get more out of that," and it's just...there's a limit as to what you can get on that. All right. 0:09:01.9 JD: Yeah, and I think the most typical way this has showed up in, say, the last 15 years or so, are these value-added models, that instead of just focusing on the absolute test scores of individual students, what percentage are hitting that proficiency standard? The value-added models did allow you to sort of attempt to measure the progress of individual students. So even if they didn't hit proficiency, you could look at, well, did they grow a lot? And a lot of the sort of merit pay schemes, during the Race to the Top era, were based on these value-added models. But I was...just as an example, I was reading a working paper from a Cal Berkeley economics professor who looked at some of these models. And one of the things that he said really stood out, he said, Teachers gain... "Value-added model scores are evidently inflated or depressed, in part due to the students who they teach, who differ in unobserved ways that are stable over time. 0:10:04.5 JD: This bias accounts for as much as one third of the variation in teachers value-added scores, enough to create a great deal of misclassification in value-added model based evaluations of teacher effectiveness." So I think that that type of finding is exactly the thing that I'm talking about. Creating these models is very, very difficult. And according to at least that one research study, up to a third of the variance in the results of teachers value-added gains for their students was not attributable to the teacher themselves. It was for...to these other things. 0:10:41.5 AS: And so... Go ahead. 0:10:43.7 JD: Oh, go ahead. Yeah. 0:10:45.1 AS: I was just gonna say that one of the takeaways that people take from this type of discussion is, oh, I see, but okay, so merit pay needs to be better implemented. [laughter] 0:10:56.0 AS: Right? Like, and I had...there was a LinkedIn discussion where someone posted something about KPIs, and I said the damage caused by KPIs is almost immeasurable. And I mentioned something about that and pretty much every post said it's not KPIs that are bad, it's just that we didn't train people well or they weren't explained well or they weren't implemented well. And that's a cover that can keep you doing merit pay or that type of thing for a decade - trying to create something that's fair and all of that. And I think that is part of the myth, part of the...where people get lost for years. 0:11:39.5 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And even in those systems, they were heavily focused on reading and math, because those were the heavy focus areas of No Child Left Behind, which was the key legislation at that time. Race to the Top was sort of a supplemental sort of grant-making process that sort of layered on top of No Child Left Behind. So even the models in reading and math weren't great at pinpointing where results were coming from. But then you also had this whole other problem where reading and math teachers make up a fairly small percentage of any staff. I mean, there's social studies teachers, science teachers, teachers in the arts, the physical education teacher, the administrators, the support staff and so you really have to finagle just the reading and math scores, to sort of make them applicable to all those other people, that have much less of a sort of direct impact on reading and math score. So that's just a sort of another problem with those systems, is how do you include the vast majority of school staff? 0:12:41.6 AS: And so I would say, let's wrap up this particular one by also saying that it's not about doing merit pay better. 0:12:50.9 JD: No, it's not. Nope. I think the practices themselves, whether it's performance appraisal or merit pay, they lead to sub optimization of the system as a whole. But I think what happens when you don't have profound knowledge, and this definitely happened to me with all of these myths, and I sort of latched onto them, when you don't have profound knowledge, these practices are continually recycled by education policy and political leaders, which is why I think you see them in the '80s during the Reagan administration, then you see 'em about 20 years later [chuckle] with the Obama administration. They get recycled, these bad ideas. When you don't have that solid philosophical foundation, you get latching onto these sort of policy implications or policies that have been tried before. You sort of forget that they didn't work the first time. 0:13:44.4 AS: Yeah, I think about Dr. Deming saying, how could they know? 0:13:47.8 JD: Right. 0:13:48.7 AS: And that there's just so many people that are kind of misguided by - just because something is done, that there's actually a foundational evidence that this is really the way that we optimize. So, all right, what's.... 0:14:08.9 JD: And that was exactly what he said when he found out that President Reagan had, or his advisors, had proposed this merit pay system for schools. He said, "the problem lies in the difficulty to define a meaningful measure of performance. The only verifiable measure is a short term count of some kind, where were the President's economic advisors? He was only doing his best." So basically he was saying to the President exactly what you said. So I think the real key here is things like joy in work, intrinsic motivation, cooperation, are key to a healthy organizational culture. And these things sort of upend that. I think what we should have what Deming is telling us to do: just work to optimize the system, rather to try to incentivize those individuals working within the systems, the system as a whole that you want to work on. 0:15:00.7 AS: Okay. So accountability. 0:15:03.9 JD: Accountability. Yeah. So when we say "accountability" in school systems, what we're typically talking about is state education department accountability systems, so basically all 50 states have some type of district and school report cards. School system gets it, individual school within the school system, get them. And they're typically based on performance metrics, like proficiency rates on standardized tests, absenteeism rates, college and career readiness indicators - which on their face seem like sort of noble things to keep track of. In my home state where I am in Ohio, that sort of system trickles down to not only individual schools, but in the teacher rating system, those ratings are applied to individual educators at many traditional public schools as well. I think when we're talking about accountability systems, if you're reading Deming, he often labeled them something like "management by objective" or "management by the numbers." But really those are all the same thing. It's some type of practice where you're focused heavily on outcomes. But I think like the merit pay, several problems with the myth of accountability. 0:16:26.3 JD: So one we've talked about before, but I think a key one is that too often goals for accountability and goals for improvement get conflated as if they're one and the same. But accountability goals, they're sort of like inspection. They come after the fact, they don't improve the processes that produce the defective results in the first place. So when you get these results and you haven't been sort of getting sort of local data that tells you how your practices are doing, the idea is that you're supposed to then take this once a year data and then figure out what to do when it doesn't look like you want it to. And that data is not very good at that. So those two things, improvement goals and accountability goals get conflated. The sort of second problem is we talked before about how you can react to data. 0:17:20.9 JD: You can take it and try to improve your system, or you can distort the system itself or distort the data that's coming from the system. So a second problem, that I saw up close when No Child Left Behind was launched in the early 2000s, I was teaching in Atlanta, the legislation comes out. And if you ask teachers, what did you experience? Very often, they're gonna tell you some version of what I experienced, where as a teacher in Atlanta, we were required to spend an inordinate amount of the day on reading and math, recess got cut from an elementary schedule. I taught in an elementary school at first, and gym and the arts, while we had them, they were for very, very short periods of time and a couple times a week. Big chunks of the day on reading and math. 0:18:14.4 JD: And so that's a good example of distortion of the system because the legislation focused on math and reading results, to the exclusion of science and social studies and the arts and these other things. Well, that's where the school schedule then focused. And I don't think if you asked anybody that was sort of delivering schooling in that way, that that was in the best interest of kids in terms of giving them a well-rounded educational experience. The third problem is the distortion of the data. And this is something that happened many places, especially during Bush two and Obama's administrations, when No Child Left Behind was in full swing. So if you ask any educator and even many people outside of education, can you remember some major cheating scandals that happen with state test scores? Everybody can remember a few. There's a big one in Atlanta a few years after I left. I know there was a major one in DC. 0:19:13.1 JD: There was a major one here in Columbus in the Columbus City schools in like the 2013-2012 range, and they happened all over the country. I mean, even the one in Atlanta, the superintendent of the schools was charged with running a corrupt organization. They used the RICO statute because they were actually giving bonuses based on test scores that were - I forget how they were cheating exactly. And obviously, this isn't the majority of people. But it is sort of a product of a system that's putting so much focus on these test scores, and then you're layering the merit pay on top of it, and this is sort of what you get. 0:20:01.3 AS: That's the problem around here. We don't have enough accountability. 0:20:04.2 JD: Right, right. 0:20:05.4 AS: So, we're getting everybody accountable, everybody's gonna be... And we are gonna get tough on accountability. 0:20:12.5 JD: Yeah, yeah. 0:20:13.1 AS: Squeeze. 0:20:14.0 JD: I think that's the Deming sort of point with management by objective accountability system, is stop holding people accountable in lieu of improving processes. Of course accountable to our teammates, Deming talks about a system, where do you fall in the system? Understanding the system's view versus the organizational chart. Who's relying on me? Who do I rely on? Those are important...that's accountability. But what he's talking about is when all of this focuses on accountability by inspection rather than sort of working together to improve the processes that ultimately lead to the outcome. 0:20:54.1 AS: Yeah, and seeing the data as a tool, a feedback mechanism that helps us understand, and test what we're doing with the system. So, yeah. 0:21:05.2 JD: I think another thing that's really underappreciated is that one, numerical goals don't produce quality especially when those goals are outside the capability of the system as it's currently designed. So, if you remember back when we looked at those third grade reading test scores, they were sort of bouncing around about a 60% average, if I remember right. They were like 58% then up to 62% and down to 60% and up to 61% and down to 59%. And so, they're bouncing around about a 60% average, the goal is 80%. That goal is outside of the capability of the system. 0:21:40.6 JD: And so, if people over time, depending on what sanctions are being issued, realize that... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27252045

Performance Appraisals: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 8) 07/04/2023

Performance Appraisals: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 8) Dr. Deming railed against performance appraisals, listing them 3rd in his Seven Deadly Diseases of Management and calling them "Destroyer of People." In this discussion, John Dues explains our cultural attachment to appraising workers and why it is a myth to assume that appraisals have any impact on performance at all. 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'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 a continuation of our discussion about management myths that keep fooling us, and we are gonna be talking about performance appraisals. John, take it away. 0:00:32.1 John Dues: It's good to be back Andrew. I thought it'd be helpful first to connect back to what we've done, because it'll help listeners connect the dots between the various episodes that we've done together. I think this is the eighth episode, so episode one and two were all about the System of Profound Knowledge as a theory, and then episode three, we started working on understanding the concept of variation, special causes, common causes, that type of thing, and then four and five, we switched gears and talked about how to then apply the System of Profound Knowledge in our organizations. And so we talked about two powerful tools, process behavior charts, and then the PDSA cycles. 0:01:21.9 JD: Episode six, we started talking about A Nation at Risk and the Sandia report and how calls for education reform haven't always been built on a solid philosophical foundation. And then last time I introduced this idea of living in an age of mythology, and we talked about two myths. The myth about best practices and the myth of the hero educator. And so today, like you said, I thought we continue that discussion of the myths with a focus on performance appraisals, which is something that is a little bit hard to understand, I think it was hard for me to understand initially, but it's something that I thought was important because it's something when I listen to Dr. Deming's recorded seminars, it's something that he railed upon often. 0:02:14.9 JD: And I think tying all of the myths to a couple of key ideas is helpful. So I think that first idea is that when we see outcomes in a system, they're more than the skills and efforts of the individuals that work within the system. So those results come from more than just how the individuals within that system are working. The outcomes, that second idea is that the outcomes are mostly attributable to the system itself, and workers are only one part of that system. I think that's really important. That underlies all these myths and certainly underlies this idea of the myth of the performance appraisal. 0:03:00.8 JD: And I think that when we're talking about these myths, so we've covered the theory, we've talked about some ways to apply that theory, that System of Profound Knowledge in actual organizations. When we're thinking about the myths, what I'm thinking about is, dos and don'ts. And so the myths are the don'ts. There are specific prescriptions following the Deming philosophy that leaders should learn to stay away from and why to do so. And then of course, the do's would be a set of guiding principles to follow, and I thought, right now, we're focused on the myths and as we get through this episode and maybe one more on the myths, then we would then focus on the "what do you do?" That's where the guiding principles would come in, and so Deming outlined all of this for us. The theory, the application, the Do's and the Don'ts, and so that's where I thought we would start today. 0:03:55.6 AS: That's great. And we were talking before we turned on the recorder about how performance appraisals are such a fascinating area, and I know for a lot of people, there's nothing else. That that is the key of how you manage people. Like, you're talking about the core. Without performance appraisals, people are gonna be lazy. Without performance appraisals, people are gonna get distracted. Without performance appraisals people aren't gonna work hard because they're not gonna get compensated. Without performance appraisals, we can't get this organization to work and everybody to work together and this is the ultimate incentive that we need to motivate humans. So boy, you're taking on quite a tough topic here, John. Tell us a little bit more. 0:04:45.6 JD: We'll see how we do. And one thing to clarify when I say performance appraisal, in my world, in schools, this is typically called the Teacher Evaluation. So it has different names, but, an evaluation, an appraisal, some type of rating and ranking of employees basically. So I think one thing that, and you kinda just brought this up, is "if I don't do a performance appraisal, how am I gonna give feedback to team members?" And I think that's a good place to start is that, of course, I think that leaders and managers should, as a part of their job, provide direction and give feedback to team members. 0:05:33.9 JD: But I think it's a far cry to make the leap that giving direction and feedback is synonymous with administering performance appraisals. And I actually think that performance appraisals can actually work against giving good feedback. But like as a starting point, what makes up the typical performance appraisal? Thinking about four parts, just so we are all starting from the same place. 0:06:06.7 JD: First there's standards that are set. "Here's the standards that are gonna be outlined in this performance appraisal." Then there's a time limit set to meet those standards, then the manager makes observations and judgments, and then finally, the evaluation is given to the individuals by the person sort of in the organizational hierarchy. I think a key thing that I've learned in studying the Deming philosophy when it comes to performance appraisals is that they fail to consider the role of the system on individual performance. So that's one problem. 0:06:50.2 JD: They also fail to appreciate the variation in performance attributable to common causes. So that's why I was connecting our earlier episodes on theory and the applications to performance appraisal, 'cause you have to understand that to understand why Dr. Deming was railing against performance appraisals in the way that he did, and those are two of the key reasons. 0:07:20.2 AS: Right. So a person being evaluated or being talked to with a performance appraisal, a common thing is, they could say, "wait a minute, you're saying I didn't do this, but I couldn't do this because the system has this whatever." Or you get a boss that's focused on common cause variation going, well, "you did this, and then that, and this guy did that, and this is and then all..." What they're really doing is chasing their tail on all of these common cause variation, which is not going to improve the system and it's just rewarding and punishing what is just a natural outcome of the system. 0:08:01.1 JD: Yeah, that's a big part of it. So if I'm a teacher and part of my evaluation is something like outcomes of students and how well I deliver the curriculum, the effectiveness of the curriculum, those types of things. Well, the vast majority of teachers didn't select the curriculum. So that's a good example of something that's a part of the system that a teacher has no control over typically, but that it could play a role in an evaluation, and there's all kinds of examples like that. That second idea in terms of the appreciation of where the person is falling performance-wise within that common cause system, what that means is that, sure, people could be performing at different levels, and there could be slight variations in that, but it's very possible that those ups and downs, just like any other ups and downs that we study are just common cause. And so it's not one person different from another within the rating system? 0:09:06.6 JD: Are they far enough outside that they show up as a special cause. That their performance shows up as a special cause. Because if it does in the case of a teacher or maybe a student that is outside of the system in terms of performance, then there may be special help or special support that's needed. But I think many, many times that's not the case, and that the ups and downs don't represent anything meaningful. And I think one of the things that helps bring this into view for people is to say, "well, how did you experience teacher evaluations or performance appraisal or whatever you call it in your system, how did you experience as... 0:09:50.6 JD: How did you experience that practice as a receiver of those things?" Because that puts you in a different mindset. For me, performance appraisals, when I've been evaluated, have largely been positive in terms of the overall rating, but they've also, a lot of times not made a lot of sense on any number of fronts. And so I think of, as a teacher in Atlanta, and Atlanta Public Schools had a teacher evaluation system, the principal would come in for one hour across the school year and observe me and write it up and formally evaluate me, sit down with me and go over that evaluation. Well, if you think about that, one hour of observation, the typical 180-day school year, seven hours a day, that's about 0.08% of the school year that the principal observed. So that's a big problem. 0:10:52.1 JD: So we're saying that that represents the entire...my entire time teaching across the school year. That one hour observation. So that's a major problem. Another issue is, what is it that I'm being evaluated on? One that stands out for me, and granted we were in a different time, 23 years ago, 22 years ago when I first was evaluated, but they're still a technology category in the evaluation. And so part of the evaluation was to "use technology effectively in a lesson." And so one of my first questions would be, well, "do you have to use technology in a lesson for it to be effective?" 0:11:40.4 JD: I think that would be questionable at best. But what if I use technology in some lessons and not in others, and the one you happened to observe, I didn't use it, right? You didn't see the ones where I did. I was working in a large urban school system, I had seven computers in my room and five of them didn't work on a regular basis. So that's another obstacle, right? And so I get this rating, I take it, I don't really say anything about the computers not working, or what about my other lessons where I did use computers, I just listen to this, but... 0:12:13.3 AS: Otherwise you're gonna be labeled as argumentative. 0:12:15.4 JD: I'm gonna be labelled as argumentative and the rating was fine as it was, although I lost some points for those things. It's probably not worth...it's not.... You kind of pick your battles. But the point is, what does that leave me with in terms of the taste in my mouth about my school, about this evaluation system, granted it's one part of the system and maybe I didn't care about it too much as long as the rating without a satisfactory level, but the point is, it didn't seem fair, it didn't seem to make sense, it didn't seem to line up with what you would need to look at in terms of what you need to make an effective lesson. 0:12:55.0 JD: And how many people are experiencing evaluations in those same ways, whether it's ridiculous and being evaluated for something that doesn't work in your room, like the computer's not working, or a smaller like, do you need computers to be a part of the lesson in the first place. And so there's all kinds of things like that that I think are part of a typical evaluation system. 0:13:22.0 AS: So to summarize what you're saying is one way to think about performance and appraisal is to think about your personal feeling when you're receiving your evaluation, and I would argue that most people don't feel great, it's not something they're really looking forward to. 0:13:36.2 AS: And the second way you can look at this is look at the person who's delivering it. If you're having to deliver performance appraisals, is that like your favorite day of the year that you're working with that person? Yeah, so that's a good way to look at it so that you kind of understand that there's just something that doesn't feel right here, but continue on. 0:13:56.6 JD: Yeah, it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. No one actually likes the process, generally speaking, and I think the thing that I wanted people would hold on to was that they don't get magically better when you're on the other side and being the evaluator. So my feeling wouldn't change whether I'm on the receiving or the giving side of the evaluation system now, I think for some leaders, unfortunately, I think that changes as long as they're on the other side, it's fine, but I think that's why I think putting yourself back in the shoes of the person receiving the evaluation is a good thing to hold on to. "I'm not special, there's not something about my personal characteristics that make evaluation unnecessary for me, but everybody else needs those things." 0:14:43.6 JD: So I think holding on to that as you move, especially if you move into a leadership role is a really important mental model. I think another key thing is after the evaluation, all of these people for the most part, are gonna still be working together, and so another key question that I learned from a Deming student named Peter Scholtes in a book called, The Leader's Handbook, a great book. 0:15:15.8 JD: He said, "what are the factors that differentiate highly effective versus lower rated people?" He outlined these five factors, so there's A, would be native ability and your early education, the second factor would be, B, your individual effort, how much work am I putting in as a teacher, as an employee. C, would be training, an orientation that I get as a part of the onboarding process or the ongoing professional development that I get as a part of the job. D would be variability of the processes and systems that are going on within my job, and E would be the system evaluation itself to some of those things that we just talked about, is it fair? Is it well constructed? Is it representative of my total work, that little sample that's seen by the manager. 0:16:17.0 JD: And if you look closely at those five items, really only one of them, that being, I think I call it D, that individual effort is under the control of the individual person working in the system. The other four factors really don't have anything do with individual performance, but what the performance appraisal system attempts to do is solve that equation, A plus B plus C plus D plus E equals my rating, let's call it 100. 0:16:54.5 JD: But if you can't solve that equation, if you don't know already what the variables A, C, D and E account for in terms of its contributions to the rating, the only thing you know as an individual effort, right? 0:17:11.2 AS: And you don't really know that either. 0:17:17.0 JD: Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. 0:17:20.1 AS: So it's a shifting sand that you're working on, which is what probably one of the counter-arguments to performance appraisals is that there's just... It's so subjective and difficult, particularly, okay, if you're a narrow-minded person and you've never thought about the fact that there is variable B, C, D and E as an example, then...but once you start to think about those things, you realize that not only is it difficult to quantify and all that what a person's doing, and how do you factor in the fact that that person just went through the loss of a parent over the period of time that you appraise them. How does that impact performance? 0:18:02.5 JD: Any number of things. Any number of things. Yeah, I can think of a lot of examples when you start to unpack those various factors, like when you're talking to the manager, "oh, well, we didn't quite onboard them like we typically do now, no one acclimated them to our curriculum system" or whatever it is. 0:18:27.3 AS: But they're still responsible for delivery. 0:18:29.8 JD: Yeah, they still move forward with that response. And again, it's not that there's not gonna be variation in performance amongst employees, it's just, are we getting what we think we are from this rating and ranking system. I think what we're doing basically is disregarding the contributions of the system on the performance of individuals that are working within that system. 0:18:57.0 AS: And I guess if you talk about that to people, they're gonna be like, "Now you're unleashing something that's just unmanageable." Okay, yeah, fine. We're gonna start talking about the system and the impact and that everybody's just gonna blame the system! John, don't you know people are just gonna blame the system, then if we start talking about why it's not your responsibility. 0:19:23.2 JD: Yeah, I think, yeah, we'll kinda get into what's the prescription in terms of...what would of the prescription be from the System of Profound Knowledge in terms of what to do instead, but one thing to do, if you did have some type of evaluation system, you could just remove the numbers and have a narrative feedback on characteristics or competencies or capacities that are important for your particular organization. I think that that would be one way to handle it. 0:20:00.4 JD: Another great tool that I learned from David Langford is a tool called the capacity matrix, where you outline what are the capacities that are important for a given role that you want to see develop. You define a series of dimensions of growing from more basic to more proficient in a particular capacity, and then you ask the person to track their own learning in those areas, and as they self-evaluate, they have to provide evidence, be it - maybe they give a presentation or incorporated a technique into their lessons on a regular basis, or maybe they presented at a staff meeting, something like that, but they have to link the capacity development to some evidence that it's been put into place. 0:20:51.0 JD: That's another way to handle... The point is to develop the person and build capacity, that's a much more powerful way to do it, and I think the goal of starting to use the Deming philosophy is transformation, and I think what Deming was talking about when he talked about transformation is this process from going from - starting to understand these assumptions and these myths and then working to move away from them. So one of the things...one of the lenses I have just in studying the Deming philosophy is to ask questions because so many of the practices like the performance appraisal, prior to studying Deming, I never even stopped and said, "well, what is the theory behind the performance appraisal? Where did it come from? Why do people think it isn't an effective practice? Are there practices that would be more effective?" 0:21:52.3 JD: So just as a starting place, you can start to ask questions about some of these things that you probably never even stopped to think about. I think that was true for me, whether we're talking about these myths or any other number of things that are common in organizations, work settings, and we have this... 0:22:14.0 AS: And for performance appraisals: what is the theory behind them? 0:22:20.0 JD: That's a good question. That is a good question. Where did they come from? Well, I don't know for sure, but I know that...a lot of corporate practices can be traced back to things like the military and early... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/27251898

Tackling Management Myths: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 7) 06/27/2023

Tackling Management Myths: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 7) In this episode, John and Andrew unpack a few of the myths Dr. Deming identified that continue to destroy organizations from the inside. John explains how these myths also negatively impact schools and kids - and what to do instead. 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 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, Management Myths that Keep Fooling Us. John, take it away. 0:00:28.3 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back, good to talk again. Yeah, I thought we could build on the last conversation, which unpacked these two education reports. One that had a seminal impact for the last 40 years called A Nation at Risk, and another Sandia Report that we talked about that has a much lesser known. And I was thinking what comes out of some of the reports often as a shake-up, and then there's various ideas about what to do about the crisis outlined in this case. But I think, a lot of the times, those management practices have the opposite of the intended effect. And I think... One of the things I was thinking about is that Dr. Deming, maybe his most radical idea that he put forth is that any outcome that we see within a system, like a system of education, is the result of more than the skills and efforts of the individuals who work within that organization. And what he would say is that most of the performance differences observed between individuals are generated by these complex and dynamic, adaptable systems, and workers are only one part of that system. 0:01:49.8 JD: And I think understanding that sort of core idea of Deming is one of the ways that we can start to move away from the common management and maybe understanding those management myths is maybe the most important part of understanding the new philosophy that Deming was sort of putting forth. I think one of the things that I learned in watching some of his videos from his famous four-day seminars is that he often began those seminars by saying, management is living in an age of mythology, and even though he was saying that throughout the 1980s and even into the early 90s, before his death in 1993. I think that idea applies just as well today across numerous sectors, including education, as it did when he was saying it 30 or 40 years ago, I think it applies the education, applies to government, applies to industry. 0:02:52.6 JD: And what he meant by the age of mythology, at least my interpretation of it, is that leaders in these various industries basically operate according to these assumptions and these myths, and these myths are harmful to our organization. And so when he talked about the transformation process, part of the transformation process is understanding these myths and then moving away from them, actively trying to move away from them. So I thought we could talk about a few of those myths today and unpack those myths, where they originated and what were they are and then what to do. 0:03:29.3 AS: Great, great idea. And I remember he would say something like, how could they know? They did their best efforts, that's all that they have. Who came up with the idea of rating and ranking? Someone just... And then you realize people just may make things up ultimately and then they stick, not based on science or something like that. Sometimes the science creeps in there, but most of the time, based upon emotion. You jarred my thinking process when you're talking about the role of an individual in a system. 0:04:07.4 AS: And I was just thinking about how the beauty of the individual is that the individual is malleable. We're malleable, we're able to be contorted. Whereas when you install a particular piece of machinery that only has... Can produce so many units or such level of quality, it's a very rigid part of the overall system. And I was just thinking how, one of the reasons probably why we're always chasing after the individual, despite the fact that the very, very rigid machine over there is what's setting the ultimate specifications of the output of this is because the human is so easily manipulated. Well, put them over here and we'll do this, we'll do that, we'll start early, go late, try this, try that, whereas with the machine, you just have a lot less flexibility. And so you just made me think about that as I was listening to you talk... 0:05:02.3 JD: Yeah, that brings a good point. One, I think some prescient on your part is you mentioned the myth of rating and ranking, which is definitely one of the myths that I wanna get to. And I think you talk about machines versus workers. I think a couple of things I think of there, one is our organizational systems have become increasingly complex as we moved from the farm field to more of the industrial age, and maybe even the post-industrial age now. And who bought the machine? I think that's a lot what Deming was talking about is who designed the system, who had control over the system. If the machine is a major part of the process, who designed the machine and who bought it? Probably not the individual workers on the line. And yet, they were held responsible, or maybe even still today, held responsible for the results when they didn't design or pick the machine themselves. So I think that's a really good place to start. And I think that also brings up like, where did these management myths originate? Because if we go back a few hundred years, I think there's probably the lack of complexity, there's the... 0:06:26.8 JD: Mostly what we were doing is managing the work of... Managing our own work, I think of the farmer in the field or the craftsman in their workshop, is that sort of first line of management. And then as things got a little more complex, they're management by directing. So think of the craftsman taking on an apprentice, but it's still a pretty simple system and it's the manager, in this case, the master is directing the apprentice directly. And then you get the Industrial Revolution and you get this sort of third wave of management thinking... And here I'm thinking about management by results. And this is numerical quotas come into play, this idea, this common quip of, "I don't care how you do it, just get it done" type thing. And I think this is third generation management, and I think that's the dominant sort of paradigm of the 20th century. I think that probably paradigm in a lot of ways continues to the present day. But I think what Dr. Deming was a proponent of was this sort of fourth generation management, which was "management by method." So he was calling on, especially leaders, management of organizations to work with people on these methods rather than judging them on results, to your point about rating and ranking. 0:07:57.1 JD: And I think that's sort of a big part of the Deming philosophy, is to move from just rating and ranking people and thinking about instead, what are the methods people... What are the processes people are using within our systems to get the work done? 0:08:13.1 AS: Yeah, one other thing it just made me think about is that when you manage people, let's say in the US, people don't wanna be micro-managed, they want... They like to be told, "Well, you figure out how you're gonna do it and then do it." And let me take responsibility for that, right? So it is a bit seductive to forget about the methods and just focus on the individual and say, "Make it happen." And there are times that, that can be a valuable tool, a valuable way of managing when there's just so much going on, but also juxtaposing that to the typical manager in Thailand, which I'm very familiar with, they don't wanna be told that. 0:09:01.3 AS: It isn't necessarily their desire to be independent in their work and to originate the method. There's many managers here that really appreciate the boss that says, "Here's how I want you to get there," or "how do you think we should get there?" And that there's a much bigger discussion on that, maybe it's because there was less of an industrialization over the years, and that that's a newer thing compared to where America is at, but I know that my experience with management here is that managers do appreciate that concept of, "Let's look at the method of how you're gonna get there." 0:09:46.1 JD: Yeah. I think method is important, and I think one of the first myths that I was thinking about is, now label these as we go, but I was thinking of this myth of best practices, which it wasn't exactly what you were talking about, but it sort of made me think of where do the methods come from that we are working with it in whatever sector we're working with. 0:10:12.3 AS: So is this myth number one? 0:10:12.8 JD: Yeah, myth number one. 0:10:16.8 AS: Boom. 0:10:17.3 JD: Myth of best practice, so I think you teed us up really well. And this is an area that I've done some deep thinking on this because this has been a very... With all of these myths, you gotta be careful. You gotta really think about what it is that Dr. Deming was saying. And I'm not... So I'm not saying when I say myth of best practices, I'm not saying don't go out and study what other people are doing and try to bring the best of that to your organization. I don't think that's what Dr. Deming was saying. But I think that you gotta be really careful when you label something a best practice, and then try to incorporate it into your organization. 0:10:58.9 JD: And I was thinking in my role over the last two decades or so, maybe decade and a half, I've been fortunate because I've been a part of an informal network of schools and I've been able to sort of leverage that network, and go on many, many school visits probably many than the typical educator, even one that's in a leadership position. Dozens, I counted them up a couple of years ago over the last decade and a half, I think I've gone on over 120 school visits, and that's all types of different schools. Traditional public schools, public charter schools, private schools, and all over the United States, in South Midwest where I'm based out of here in Columbus, the Western United States to northeastern parts of the country. And I think on one hand, these visits have been extremely beneficial. I was able to observe classrooms and school practices in these many different places. 0:12:00.3 JD: I was able to speak with teachers, building administrators, school district leaders about the many challenges they're facing, how they're counteracting those challenges and the solutions they've developed with. And I think I've always tried to pay very careful attention to what context is this particular school operating under - what's their student demographics? What resources do they have both financially and from a human resource standpoint? Where are they situated? Are they in a city or in a town? Are they in a rural area? Some of the factors associated with those different practices. So I pay attention to those. 0:12:45.4 JD: And every time you go into a school, each school has its own culture, it has its own feel. But I think that... Well, I have this appreciation of the context, I think as I've thought more about these various practices, I've grown more skeptical. I think there's really an under-appreciation for these contextual elements within which these best practices often operate. There's... I remember hosting my own school visit and we, in our own schools, in our elementary schools, we have these carpets where kids come to do reading, read-alouds. 0:13:29.5 JD: And after one of these school visits, one of the superintendent said, we're gonna go buy these carpets and we're gonna do this too. These carpets are great in the classrooms and I don't know how it worked out, but I got the sense that there was sort of like, there's a whole system, a whole set of processes and procedures that are set up. It's just not having the carpet in the classroom, it's how it's used, it's how the kids move to the carpets, it's what's happened once you get to the carpet. You can sort of under-appreciate all of the sort of thought went into something as simple as the read aloud carpet that you see in a classroom. 0:14:07.2 JD: And I think there's this part of about context, and then there's just also a part about, is this practice... Does it have a sound research-base as well? So you're looking at both of those things. And I think in education, those best practices, often the research base is very, very thin. And then there's this whole other side of things where you really have to understand what is the context, the different variables that went into making that practice work. It may have been something that unfolded over four or five years, and you just can't pull it out of that school and then drop it into your own setting. So I think one of the things that Deming said about best practices is "to copy is to invite disaster." And so I think there, he's not saying, "Don't go study other organizations," but it's not as simple as, "Oh, I see this curriculum or this teaching practice or this method in one place. We're gonna do that tomorrow." It's just not that simple. So I think this is, like I said, one of these myths that I've come to appreciate how important in the context that they're operating under is before you can take it to your own school or network. 0:15:20.0 AS: Yeah, a great way of thinking about this one is, imagine that you take a General Motors car. Let's take a, I don't know what's fancy these days, but let's say a Cadillac as an example. And we say, here is the design for the Cadillac and here's everything you need to know, all the parts and everything, and you deliver that to Toyota, and say, "You have a car factory, so build this car." What you don't realize is that in particularly with the Toyota production system, that the whole production operation at every company is built around an infrastructure or a context, as you said, that sets the stage for how that is done. 0:16:29.4 AS: And therefore, things are not interchangeable. And so if your idea is, I'm just gonna go around to these 120 different schools and look for best practices and bring them in, it's like an amalgamation of unnaturally developed things. And also the other thing that it made me think about is that the whole point of PDSA is that you're working in your own organization to build a deeper understanding of a particular problem and solution. And when you repeat that process, you are also building a unique competitive advantage. Now, whether that in, let's say, in the world of business, that competitive advantage may be kept secret or not necessarily shared - in the world of education, it may be made public, but it's very hard to duplicate something that has been constructed internally through process of learning. And so just putting amalgamation of different things onto a body or onto a facility doesn't make the combination of those something great. 0:17:35.7 JD: Yeah, and I think of, what's the idea of the day? For schools coming out of the pandemic currently, 'cause the impacts of the pandemic and learning loss and those things are still sort of obviously being felt by schools, and we're seeing that ramification show up and in test scores and other measures. So one of the things that has been sort of promulgated as a silver bullet is high dosage tutoring, which means like a significant amount of tutoring happening for an individual student or a small group of students on a regular basis where what happened three or four times a week. And you see this in education publications, you see this policy makers and even legislatures are pushing this idea. 0:18:33.3 JD: But the problem is, while the research base for that particular intervention may be strong somewhere and under some set of conditions, the question for a practitioner is, well, who are these tutors? How will these tutors be trained here? Who is training these tutors? What curriculum are the tutors using? What financial resources are there to pay these tutors and to acquire the curriculum? Where in the school day is that going to happen? What are kids that are going to high-dosage tutoring gonna miss in the school day to be able to attend that tutoring? If it's not happening during the school day, if it's happening before or after school, how will kids get home from that tutoring? 0:19:22.0 JD: Who's providing the management of the tutors? How are those tutors hired? How are those tutors replaced when they inevitably will turn over? I could go on and on and on and on and on and on about these things, well, someone tells me that as an educator leader that, yes, for sure high-dosage tutoring is the best practice that you should drop into your organization, those questions remain unanswered and those questions are actually the thing that will actually make the practice come to fruition and work or not, and oftentimes, when these different ideas are being thrown about, none of those questions have been answered. And so I think we do this over and over for certain in the school world that I'm in. 0:20:10.5 AS: It reminds me of that old time song that maybe our older listeners and viewers would remember, "Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter when the caretaker is busy taking care?" [laughter] 0:20:22.9 AS: So who's taking care of all those different things behind the scenes and putting them all together? So that's a great one to help us realize that it's good to understand best practices, it's good to go out and survey and get them and consider them, but then what really matters is how do you take best practices that you see, narrow them down, the one that you think will fit in your system and then develop it slowly and steadily, so it becomes a permanent improvement in your system? I think that's what you're getting at. Would that be right? 0:21:02.4 JD: Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think of something that may come to us through something like a randomized controlled trial, like the effectiveness of high-dosage tutoring, I think looking at RCTs or other similar... That's sort of the gold standard research. But even... 0:21:20.4 AS: RCTs for the listener is Randomized Control Trials? 0:21:25.0 JD: Randomized Controlled Trial, a study where people are randomly assigned to groups and then there's a treatment for one group and not a treatment for another group, there's no real differences between those two groups, and then you see if there's an effect. I don't think there's a lot of the studies that sort of rise to the gold standard RCT, there are other types of studies in education for sure, but either way, I think that's to the difference between when an ideas come through a randomized controlled trial where it's worked somewhere for some group under some set of conditions. 0:22:03.5 JD: Versus the Plan-Do-Study Act cycle that we've talked about, I think reading the research base can give you a starting place, give you some indication of the types of interventions or the types of curricula, or the types of practices that may work, but the Plan-Do-Study Act cycle allows you to sort of take an idea in your context and try to get it to work under the very conditions under where the idea or the practice would ultimately have to be working for it to be effective in your organization. 0:22:36.4 JD: So I think that's the two differences. Those two things, the RCT and the PDSA cycles can be complementary, and I think that's how I actually think of those two things, but you can't just... Can't force these best practices into contexts that they... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26883057

Managing Mistakes: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 6) 06/20/2023

Managing Mistakes: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 6) In this episode, David and Andrew ask: should we tell people when they make mistakes? How do educators manage mistakes in a classroom setting, after their organization/classroom is transformed by learning and implementing Deming? 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 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. The topic for the day is, "should we tell people when they make mistakes?" We are continuing a discussion about Dr. Deming's section of the book, The New Economics. If you have the 3rd edition, that's page 86. If you have the 2nd edition, that's page 125. And this is a list that Dr. Deming has given us of 14 points. It's not The 14 points that we normally talk about, but these are... The title of this 14 points is called Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation, and we are on point number six. And I'll just read it before we get David to start talking on it, and that is this. 0:01:02.7 AS: "The role of a manager in a new style," basically he's saying, "If he understands a stable system. He understands... " And I know we can also say she, "understands the interaction between people and the circumstances that they work in. He understands 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. A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake." David, take it away. 0:01:41.2 David P. Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again. Yeah, I was just reflecting on this list is... It's such a great list. I'm sure that when people first read through this book they kinda just take 30 seconds to read through the list and then you go on. I've been studying Dr. Deming's work for over 40 years now and still find so much insight into all these things. So if you go through this and you start thinking about, "Well, what can I do differently and where do I begin?" I was also thinking that, when I got my Master's in Administration, I never heard of any of this. I never heard of a stable state, control charts, theory. I never got any of this or had a list on to how to manage people, which would have been very helpful, very insightful. So if you're working at a university right now and you're a teacher of classes of administration, here's some good advice, take people through this list and they'll actually come out with capability of what to do. But now back to the list. So, the first thing he says is you have to understand a stable system. 0:03:01.1 DL: So we did a couple of previous podcasts on stable and unstable systems, and on face value, a lot of people think: "Okay, well, stable system, okay, well, it's working well." But Deming's thinking around a stable system is much, much deeper than that, and it has to do with statistical stability. And so if you understand a stable system, then the first thing you're gonna have to do is you have to find out, "Do I have a stable system?" And so often when I work with people, I'll just start with sort of disarming questions and say, "Hey, how are things going?" [chuckle] 0:03:45.4 DL: And they'll usually say, "Well, it's going pretty good." And, "Okay, well, how do you know?" "Well, 'cause people are telling me that it goes pretty good." "Well, how many people do you manage? Oh well, I have like 30 people on the staff." So you're telling me that 30 people are telling you every day that things are going really well? "Well, no, one person told me." "Well, do we know what the other 29 think?" So, right there you realize a manager does not understand a stable system. They have no idea what they're doing, and the phrase in America is "you're flying by the seat of your pants" which basically means you're just…whatever is happening from day to day, you're just going with the flow, but you're not managing a stable system nor do you really understand it. 0:04:39.7 DL: So the first thing I wanna point out is that this is telling you, before you do anything, you have to understand the system. So you have to figure out, "Okay, what am I gonna collect data on? What's really important? How do I really understand if I have a stable system?" Then you're gonna have to set up that process and you're gonna have to do that for at least 12 data points, if not 20 data points. And in education that could mean 12 days, 12 months. It could mean long periods of time. Or the other thing is you have to go back into history and get that data for previous years. That's another way you can get the data points, put them on a run chart and see, "Is this system stable?" 0:05:32.7 DL: So what does that mean? Well, once you do that, you'll find out you have average performance over a long period of time. Okay? And usually there will be variation in that. Some data points will be higher and some will be lower. There are only three possibilities for a data point, up, down or the same. And that's called variability in a process over time. And so you have to understand that, and you can't understand that just by intuitively sort of going day by day going through things, because psychologically you're constantly reacting to a situation. 0:06:17.6 DL: You go home at the end of the day and your wife or your husband says, "How was your day, dear?" And, "Oh I've had a terrible day," and duh, duh, duh. But they usually don't say, "Well, how do you know it was a terrible day? How do you know it was worse than any other day, or better than any other day, or..." Well, until you actually understand a stable system and understand what's going on, you don't know really. You're reacting psychologically to that, and that's part of human nature. 0:06:47.5 AS: I wonder, David, would it be...do you think it would be...would it be proper to say that most systems that are kind of running, and haven't been looked at as to whether they're stable or not, are probably unstable? 0:07:04.3 DL: Not... My experience, I'd say 90% of my work has been in education, not business, etcetera, but what I found out is that intuitively people will stabilize a system over time. If they don't unintentionally do that, they kinda go nuts, they go crazy. Because one day they're in euphoria and the next day they're in hell, and then they're just... The roller coaster swings are so great that they'll usually leave the profession, go find something else. I used to see that a lot with new teachers, brand new teachers. And they call it the Fall Wall. So you start school and everything seems really great, and then you start to realizing, "Wow, this is work, and this is managing people, and this is every day, this is..." You're on and you're working through that, and then there's the Fall Wall of this huge depression cycle, and...teachers that stay with it and really have a love of kids and a purpose behind why they're there, they'll start to normally just stabilize the system. They may not get great results, but on average they're no worse or not much worse today than they were yesterday, or vice versa. But they're not gonna get a breakthrough in that system. 0:08:35.4 AS: Yeah, and I'm thinking about even when I recently did like a fast and my weight went down, and I had it down for a little while, and then I went back to eating, of course, and then all of a sudden you've realized there's this rebound and now that you're back, and now I'm back up to where I was and it's stable. It's not what where I really want it to be, but it's stable. And so you realize like there's a...as you're saying, people can't deal with chaos every day, so it stabilizes at some point, but that point may be far from the optimum of what that system could produce or something like that, I guess. 0:09:13.4 DL: Well, that's a good example, 'cause the person says he understands the stable system. Well, before you started to do that fast and actually track your weight, you were probably...your weight was probably in a normal range. That's the way it is for me. If I don't track it at all, it's usually within five or six pounds, given what's going on over a long period of time. But as soon as I track it and I start to understand what's happening and I see what the average weight is, then I have to think about, okay, am I happy with the average? So, again, this is back to the stable system. I always tell teachers, if you're happy with your average and you know it, clap your hands. [laughter] 0:10:00.8 AS: If you're happy with your average, and you know it, clap your hands. [singing] 0:10:03.4 DL: And you know it, clap your hands. Yeah. 0:10:06.7 AS: There you go. 0:10:06.8 DL: So yeah. And they all laugh and everything else, but how do you know if you're happy with your average? Well, you're gonna have to collect some data. So it really doesn't matter what system you're thinking about managing, you have to understand...do you understand a the stable system? So let's say that: "Well, these kids today, they're always late to class." Okay, well, set up a run chart, track that for 12 days or 20 days, and find out what you're talking about. Find out. Are all the kids late to class? "Well, no, they're...no, they're not all late to class." Well, okay, well how many are late to class and what's happening with the data over time? 0:10:46.7 DL: So you have to figure it out what's important to you and how you're gonna go about that. The example I often give is, I worked with a middle school principal and he said, "Oh well, the teachers are complaining that the buses are always late." And I said: "Okay, well, that's pretty easy to track, so let's set up a run chart and you track the buses for 30 days, the arrival times of buses." Well, he did that, and not only were they not late, they were consistently really good. It was a stable system. 0:11:23.6 DL: 20 buses were arriving within a five-minute span. These people knew their jobs. But then one day they had fog, and one of the buses got delayed with the fog for like two hours before they arrived, and then all...so all these kids get off the bus and they're two hours late, and everybody in the front office has to get them caught up, the teachers have to get them caught up, it's a big emotional deal. But that's what everybody is responding to. They're not thinking about the stable system. They're responding to this one special cause, and psychologically it was a big problem, therefore "these buses are always late." 0:12:05.3 AS: Recency bias. 0:12:07.0 DL: Yeah, there you go. 0:12:08.3 AS: And it's an emotional attachment. I had two quick stories I wanna tell you, David, about this, and then maybe you can help me understand them. But the first one was that I was teaching at...I teach a program called Masters in Marketing at a university here in - Thammasat University in Thailand. 75 students that are studying in the class. And then I teach at another program in another place. And one of the things you notice is that in the other program, the students are late. You just count on it. And so you kind of don't start until five minutes after, or 10 minutes after, and let them drift in. And with the Master's in Marketing students, I've never ever seen any of the 75 students late. And here we have Bangkok traffic, you got something to blame it on. And it's never late. So is it different students or is it a different system? Well, when I investigated it more, many years ago, to try to understand it, I realized that they set a rule. They said if you're not in the classroom five minutes before, we're locking the door. Come back next time. 0:13:14.1 AS: And for some people that was really harsh, but once people signed up and they knew that that's the way the system worked, the output of the individuals was very different, the activity of what they did, just because they knew what to respond. 0:13:29.4 DL: Well, you bring up... Yeah, you bring up a good point. One way that people often stabilize systems is to make more rules. Well, let's just make a rule like that, and if you show up late something bad is gonna happen to you, or you can't get into the door or something like that, and if it doesn't work then just make it harsher. And public schools...or not public schools, but all schools, K through 12 schools especially, go through that. So if somebody's late, what happens to you? Well, you know, this is gonna happen, and then if you're late three times then this happens, and if you're late six times then this, and then so many times you're gonna lose credit and.... Does it work? It will stabilize the system to a point, but every administrator knows, there's just students that are like, "I don't care. Do whatever you want. Because I don't wanna be here in the first place." 0:14:31.8 DL: "The system you're running is so terrible and I hate it so bad, that [laughter] only reason I'm here is to avoid the punishment". And if that's the system that you're running, and soon as you stop doing those things, the variation is just gonna go back to where it was before. 0:14:51.2 AS: And is there a difference when it's...in the case of the Masters in Marketing students, they're all kind of voluntarily there, they paid a lot of money to get this education. Does that make any difference? Do you have to handle it differently or would you do pretty much the same and say, well, just squeezing down on people may stabilize, but it may not actually solve the root problem? 0:15:16.3 DL: Well, the answer to it actually is in this point that we're talking about here. Because the next sentence, he [Deming] says, "The manager understands the interaction between people and the circumstances that they work in." Okay? "Understands that the performance of anyone...they can learn a skill in a stable state." And so the answer to the question is right there. I would like to think about, you're starting class, if you want everybody there immediately, you're starting class immediately. So if I'm late to class, and you better make darn sure that what you're doing immediately is really important and really fun and really interesting. So if I walk into class late, I know immediately I've missed something. But the reverse... 0:16:06.5 AS: So it makes me think of start with a hook, start with something that's a grabbing activity that they wanna be a part of. 0:16:12.7 DL: Yeah, it could be. And sometimes I've been in situations where I had to manage like that, and so I would just start the class outside. If you're late, you came to class, you'd show up and there's nobody there, and you're like, "Where is everybody, what happened?" So the next class, you're probably thinking, "Well, I better get there on time because they're gonna be doing something." Or what I used to always, or still do, is tell teachers is, "Start class before class starts." What's that? Well, that means, well, when people are on their way to class, what do you want them to be thinking about, getting ready to do? Well, that's probably gonna have to start at the end of the previous class. 0:17:02.4 AS: Hold on, David, that's so valuable. I'm just thinking about my own students tonight, that I have my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, and starting class before class with the idea, I have a communication channel and I know what I'm gonna talk about tonight, and I know what we're gonna be doing. So maybe in that channel I should be throwing out some things that get them excited about, "What are we gonna do tonight?" 0:17:31.2 DL: Yeah, or you actually go through a quick process with them to set up a little flow chart, how to start class before class starts, and get their feedback about, "Well, what should you be doing when you're stuck in traffic in Thailand and trying to get to the university on time? What should you be doing?" I should be going over about, "Hey, what are they gonna be talking about this time and what's gonna be happening?" "Well, how am I gonna know that?" Well, somehow through the syllabus or the previous class. Or that's why ending a class by going over what are we gonna start with next time, is really a good thing, because people are like, "Oh yeah, okay, and now I know what's gonna happen as soon as I hit the door." 0:18:14.1 AS: So that's another practical thing right there, and I learned this from attending an online course of a guy named Brandon Gale, and he had at the end of each of his presentations, he'd say, "Up next, I'm gonna show you da, da, da." And I was just like, "Okay, that just absolutely made me wanna go to the next one." So now in all of my presentations I always have this one slide that says, "Congratulations, you've made it to the end of this section. Up next, you're gonna learn the one thing that da, da, da." And then that really helps people. And I have another... 0:18:47.4 AS: Okay, so now here's another actionable thing that a friend of mine does. He issues podcasts out to the world, but they're directed at his students. And think about following up - a preview podcast about this material that then is published out there to the world, but his students know they need to listen to it when they're in the car on the way to the class. So, yeah. Okay, these are some great, great ideas, let's continue. 0:19:15.6 DL: Yeah, So that's a really great example that: here's the process that we're gonna go through. And so you need to have listened to this podcast because when you hit the door, you're gonna be put into random groups and you're gonna be asked to start a discussion immediately on the podcast that you were supposed to listen to. See? So now the responsibility is shifted from me as the instructor to them as the students: it's your responsibility, as soon as you hit the door, get together with three other people, you got 10 minutes to go over the podcast, and what were the significant points that you got out of that. 0:19:53.0 DL: Well, somebody that didn't listen to it, is gonna be in that group and they're gonna feel very foolish once or twice, and then they're gonna start actually paying attention and doing the podcast. 0:20:05.8 AS: So for the listeners and the viewers out there, here's a challenge, here's a challenge to you: take some of these actionable ideas and play with them, enjoy them, bring them to your students, bring that into the classroom. You highlighted something that I didn't think about either, but the idea of starting class with something like pleasurable, rewarding, something like that, and when I start... 0:20:31.3 DL: It doesn't necessarily even have to be that. It has to be something that needs to be relevant, needs to be timely and it needs to be engaging. So I have to do something as soon as I hit the door. I have a responsibility as soon as I get there or online, if it's an online class, and what do you want them to do immediately as they're sitting there waiting for the online session to start or something, right? Those are all processes that's gonna get you a different stable state than if you just wait and you're gonna tell them what to do when things start. And people learn from that too, because they'll learn that, "Oh well, don't bother to read the syllabus or understand what's going on because he's gonna tell us what to do as soon as we get there." They'll learn really quick that they don't have to think or plan, or do anything, because you're gonna tell people when they get there. 0:21:38.7 AS: Right. One of the other things that I tried something kind of... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26963745

Is Transformation Needed? Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 6) 06/13/2023

Is Transformation Needed? Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 6) In this episode, John and Andrew discuss what "transformation" means in education. John juxtaposes two reports, conducted a decade apart, that have influenced education for the last 40 years: A Nation at Risk and the Sandia Report. 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'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, Do we really need to transform our education system? [chuckle] John, take it away. 0:00:26.7 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back with you. Yeah, I thought... Sort of as a jumping off point from our other conversations, I remember, I think in our first conversation, you mentioned you graduated from high school, 1983 in Cleveland area, went to a solid... 0:00:44.9 AS: Hudson High. 0:00:45.2 JD: Hudson High, good traditional public school in Northeast Ohio. And your question was, if I went back to the high school 40 years later, would it look and sound the same, would it have gotten better? Would it have gotten worse? What's going on with our schools in United States, I think was the basic question, I think... When I answered you, I said two parts, there's the question about what most people probably focus on when you think about that question about Did a school get better? Did the test scores improve or decline over time? And then there was a secondary question of, Did the school transform along the lines of the Deming philosophy? And I think that those two questions would have different answers depending on which schools you're looking at, but I thought it would be interesting to sort of think about this question, Do we really need to transform our education system through the lens of a couple reports... 0:01:48.5 JD: Education reports, one that's well known in our world, one that's lesser known, that took a look at the... At least the test results question in the education sector, and then build from there this idea of whether or not we need to transform our schools. One thing, there's no shortage of calls to transform or some people would use the word reform our schools, and those two words probably in and of themselves, probably have different applications, but we'll use them interchangeably as we go through that question and attempt to maybe answer that over this episode and maybe a couple additional episodes. 0:02:36.7 AS: I find that fascinating as I observe education around the world from my own experience outside of the US, and I look at the US, and I think about the importance of education, the role of education. There's a part of education that you could say is kind of indoctrination in the way a country educates its youth to be a certain way or to understand things a certain way, so I didn't see that part of education when I was young, but now I see every country's got their indoctrination that they do within their school system, so I see it kind of broadly, but I'm just curious, really take us through what you'd like to explain about that. 0:03:20.4 JD: Yeah, I think the sort of start... I think there's this quote in The New Economics where Dr. Deming says that people are asking for better schools with no clear idea how to improve education, nor even how to define improvement in education, and I think if that's... And he's saying this roughly the same time that these reports are coming out, and if that's true, I think what happens is when reports come out about the state of our education sector, it's pretty easy to get pulled this way and that. When you don't have a clear picture in your mind for what schools should look like or how to improve schools, these reports have large impacts. And so the first report is well known. It came out about the same time you were graduating from high school, in 1983 in the first Reagan administration, called A Nation at Risk. It's pretty well known in the education sector, and it's had a lot of far-reaching impact in both time and place, where even today, 40 years later, we still... Some of the roots of the various reforms that we've undergone in our sector, it's still playing a role. 0:04:40.6 JD: The second report is, that I'll sort of juxtapose against The Nation at Risk is a report that came out about a decade later called the Sandia Report, and I think it's really interesting just to look at those two reports and the impact or lack of impact they've had over the last 30 or 40 years in the world of education. So I think I would start with, when A Nation at Risk came out, and it was commissioned by the Reagan Administration, the National Commission on Excellence in Education is the group that released the report and one of the leading statistics that's in the report is that the SAT, the college entrance exam that high school students take demonstrates a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980, where average verbal scores fell over 50 points, and average mathematic scores dropped nearly 40 points in that roughly 20 year time period. And there's these really memorable quotes that are clearly meant to awaken the public to the state of its schools that people still remember to this day, and I'll read one. It says, "We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." 0:06:24.0 JD: You couldn't get much more of wake up type people language, it's really, really interesting. Like I said, this report over the last four decades has been that foundation or bedrock for the various federal reforms that people are probably familiar with, starting with... 0:06:41.0 AS: And to put it into context, that's the kind of talk that was coming out of the Reagan administration, like government's not helping and government can be a problem and we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and you need to take personal responsibility, so it's very... It makes sense that that type of language was coming out of the Reagan administration. 0:07:05.4 JD: Yeah, and I think... So this report is floating around, there's a convening of all the governors in the United States in about 1989, and some pretty strong federal education legislation starts getting put together, it starts with the first Bush and then it ends up being passed during Bill Clinton's years called Goals 2000. And has various goals around increasing graduation rates and test scores and things like that, and then that transitions to No Child Left Behind with many people are familiar with that. Came out in the early Bush years and had a lot of impact on schools when my career was first getting started down in Atlanta, but it was federal legislation, so it covered the entire country, and then it even played a role even into the Obama years when he released the Race to the Top legislation, and that was more of a competitive grant program federally that was lots of strings attached a lot of focus on test scores, a lot of focus on teacher evaluations and principal evaluations and using test scores in those evaluations. 0:08:21.3 JD: And so you can see this, I think, direct linkage between A Nation at Risk, to Goals 2000, to No Child Left Behind, to Race to the Top, and even to the stuff that you see at the federal level to this day. So when a report like this comes out, it's called A Nation at Risk, the thesis of the report is right in the title. A nation is at risk because of its education sector, and so it's like... Most people say, Well, we gotta do something about this. We need to take action. There's some serious implications. And so about a decade after this report comes out, the Department of Energy sort of commissions its own report. The point of this report, as you might expect, is the department of energy, they're actually looking to do some economic forecasting, so it's not directly about our schools, but they wanna take the same data set that The Nation at Risk authors looked at and analyze it. 0:09:32.3 JD: And interestingly, they entered this analysis thinking that they are going to verify the results from a Nation at Risk, but what actually happened is that on nearly every measure of achievement, the Sandia analysts found actually steady or slightly improving trends in the test data. So they were... 0:10:02.1 AS: And in the same test data or in new test data that was coming out? 0:10:04.7 JD: Same exact data. They actually didn't look just at test data, they were actually looking at graduation rates, dropout rate, college-going rates so on just about every one of those measures, it was either steadily improving or slightly improving. And so you go back to A Nation at Risk and you have this absolute decline in SAT scores from the early '60s to the early '80s, and the Sandia authors aren't disputing that, but they're looking at their analysis and they're saying, wait a second, this decline in average scores, actually doesn't mean that the high school students of the early '80s or early '90s, weren't as capable as their 1960s peers. And so then you start to think, Well, how could this be? It's really, really interesting. And what the Sandia report authors go on to say is that when they broke out the test scores and these other measures like I said, graduation rates and other things like that, they broke them out by race and socioeconomic status, class rank, gender, they found these steady or improving rates in all of these groups, and they chalked it up to this statistical phenomenon called Simpson's Paradox, and basically what that is, is when trends that appear in this aggregated data set, which is sort of A Nation At Risk analysis, that reverses when the data is separated into sub-groups, like it was in the Sandia report. 0:11:45.6 JD: So basically what they're saying is that there are a more diverse mix of students on any number of measure, socioeconomic status, gender, race, those types of things, class rank, that there's a more diverse mix of students taking this test, and that is what causes this sort of change in average test scores and other similar measures. 0:12:10.6 AS: Which I guess A Nation at Risk should have controlled for? 0:12:17.6 JD: At least... I think breaking the scores out in the way that the desegregating the data like Sandia did would have been an important step given that the population of test takers was very different in 1963 than it was in 1983 or 1993. So the Sandia researchers basically found these improving trends on dropout statistics, standardized tests, post-secondary studies, educational funding even, international assessment comparison, so all these different measures that... This sort of earlier report is raising serious alarm bells about. This new report is saying, Well, wait a second, if we look at this data and we drill down in a little bit different way, we get the opposite results, but hardly anybody knows about the Sandia report, and just about everybody in my sector, my age and older knows about the A Nation at Risk Report, it's cited all the time. Even to this day, I just heard someone on a podcast a week or two ago talking about A Nation at Risk. 0:13:24.7 AS: So I guess one of the lessons is be careful with how you handle data. 0:13:30.6 JD: Be very careful. I think one of the principless we use here is data has no meaning apart from its context, and this is a very good example of data taken out of context. I think one of the lessons for me is that when you look at our schools, and I think this is maybe what happened with A Nation at Risk, is that for most people, what you see in educational data that comes out of our schools depends, in large part, on what you thought about our schools before we looked. I think they kind of drew a conclusion and then they sort of found evidence to support that. 0:14:14.2 AS: Supposed to be the opposite way. Good research. 0:14:16.8 JD: Yeah, I think so. I think so, should have been an open question, and the Sandia Report had... I think maybe their eyes were a little more open or their willingness to consider alternative explanations was a little bit more because they were not inside the Education Sector, they were outsiders, they were physicists and economists in the Department of Energy, and so they didn't really have a dog in the fight. I guess you'd say. 0:14:41.5 AS: Well, I guess you could probably say we actually don't really know, but the assumption is because they're outside in the department of energy, they're completely neutral, but they may have had their own biases that they brought into that too, but still... 0:14:56.3 JD: Yeah, for sure. For sure. 0:14:58.2 AS: It's a great lesson on... What was it you said, data has no meaning without... 0:15:02.3 JD: Apart from its context. Yeah. Apart from its context. Yeah, I think that's a good example. Yeah. 0:15:06.6 AS: Yeah, and what it also makes me think about. One of the things that's so interesting about the stock market is that you can take a lot of data, you can analyze it and come up with your opinion, and let's just say that you're not that good at analyzing and you've missed some very key things in that data, and then you put your money down and the market will take it away from you, boom like that. Like as an immediate punishment for poor logic and reason, and I'd say that it's kind of one of the last places where that's kind of allowed and where it's kind of supposed to happen, but I think that the immediate punishment for bad logic and reason is not that common any place anymore. 0:15:53.6 JD: Yeah, I would agree. And the troubling thing is the, like I said, the wide-ranging implications that reports like A Nation at Risk can have even 40 years later. 0:16:11.9 AS: Yeah, and I guess that's another lesson from this, so first lesson is about understanding the data and being very careful of how you're interpreting that, the second one is that I like to say first to the mind wins. It's just... I have a funny story where I moved to Thailand and I didn't have a girlfriend and I lived with my best friend, and basically there was people at that time that took that circumstantial evidence and they said, Andrew is gay. Okay, that circumstantial evidence could point to that, and I didn't make any attempt to answer that question, so 20 years, 25 years later, a friend of mine was at a bar, and he said that he overheard two people talking about me, and they were talking about how I'm gay. And my friend went up and said, Well, actually do you guys know Andrew? And they're like, No, we've never met him. And he said, Well, I'm friends with him, and I can put this to rest that Andrew is in fact not gay. They refused to accept that. And I just thought, first of all, first opinions are very difficult to reverse. It takes a lot of emotional and intellectual energy for somebody to do that, and therefore that partially explains... 0:17:46.9 AS: Now, the second part that explains it, is that when you attach emotion to something, it also emboldens it or it makes it in your mind much more so if you think... If you ask an older person, Where were you when you heard that John F. Kennedy was shot? They know exactly where they were because that scary negative painful motion was attached to that particular event. So that's another lesson. But really, John, I wanna know. So my iPhones improve. The car I drive has improved. The TV I use is improved. Everything around me, the medical advancements have improved. Has education improved? 0:18:35.0 JD: Yeah, that's a great question because, What is education? I think probably in some places, and in some times it has and in other places, in other times it hasn't. And in the same place, in different times, the answer would probably be different and depend a lot on what it means to improve, going back to that original quote from Deming, What does improvement mean? 0:19:01.0 AS: So I'm asking a very non-specific general question, it sounds like what you're saying. 0:19:07.8 JD: Yeah. Well, and... 0:19:10.2 AS: Can I ask it in a little bit different way? 0:19:12.4 JD: Sure, because I was gonna say, before we move on from your story of the bar story, I think somewhere... There's a researcher named Zeynep Tulfekci, and I was listening to her on a podcast, I think she's some type of researcher. She said, I can't remember what they were talking about, maybe it was something COVID-related or something from a few years ago, and she said, "Whatever thing is that you're researching or just hearing about, go to the primary source and read the entire thing." And I wrote that down on a post it note. 0:19:45.7 AS: Nobody does that. 0:19:46.8 JD: 'Cause nobody does it. Now, in fact, I talk about being first to mind in some training or conversation or a book, I am sure that I heard or read about A Nation at Risk, and then I just repeated a few things over and over as if it was truth in fact, for probably 15 years before I went and read the thing myself, and my first impression reading it was, Whoa, this is all that's in here. I forget if it's 30 or 40 pages. There's not a lot of data in it. There are some compelling statistics like the SAT thing and some quotes that jump off the page, but I was struck when I actually read it for myself. There wasn't a lot there, certainly not enough to base 40 years of education reform work. That's for sure. 0:20:31.2 AS: And I think that's another lesson too, related to Dr. Deming's teaching. And let's say sometimes the Japanese were kind of famous about go to the location where the problem is coming from, get out of your office and go out. I think that Dr. Deming really highlighted the importance of valuing the workers and their inputs 'cause they know what's going on, and so that's something that I think if people aren't reading some of the basic research or originations of ideas, they're also probably not going down and checking out what's actually happening and you could find a very different story. 0:21:10.0 JD: Yeah, go to the Gemba, go to the factory floor, in our case, it's go to the classroom to see what's actually happening. Yeah. And you're gonna ask that question. 0:21:17.7 AS: So I wanna break my question then... I'm gonna break it down and make it a little bit more specific in hopes that you... 0:21:26.7 JD: You pin me down. 0:21:28.3 AS: Could answer it. The first question I have is that, If we go back 40 years, and I can remember, I had to take a French class and I wasn't particularly interested in France and French language, and I had no interest in that really at the time. And now, let's say it's 40 years later and a young kid like me has to take a French class: Have we come up with a better methodology for learning a language like, Okay, we've advanced, we've been teaching French for 40 years from that time to now, and now we know that there is a better way to acquire a language that cuts the language acquisition time from 40 hours to proficiency, or let's say, I don't know, 400 hours to proficiency to 300 hours to proficiency, this has nothing to do with education or the system of education, but: Have we come upon methodologies that can allow us to acquire knowledge any better or faster than what we did 40 years ago? 0:22:36.9 JD: That's a good question. I think... how would I answer that? I would say that in many areas of education there have... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26614665

Coaching vs Judging: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 5) 05/30/2023

Coaching vs Judging: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 5) In part 5 of this series, David and Andrew discuss the pitfalls of managers acting as judges versus the benefits of acting as a coach. They explore the history of traditional management practices, and how Dr. Deming's philosophy creates happier, healthier, and more productive workplaces. 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 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. The topic for today is: management through coaching and counseling. And as a reminder, we are reviewing the role of a manager of people in The New Economics that Dr. Deming wrote. And if you are in the third edition, this is on page 86, if you're in the second edition, this is on page 125. Now we've been through steps or the list, let's say, all the way up to number four was our last one, and now we're into number five. And what Dr. Deming says pretty short to the point, and that is the new manager, a transformed manager is a coach. He is coach and counsel, not a judge. David, take it away. 0:01:07.7 David Langford: Okay, thank you, Andrew. Yeah, so this seems like a pretty short point and pretty obvious on the surface, but the more you get into it, the more you start to really think about, Well, how do you do that on a daily basis? And once again, I'm applying all this to the field of education, so when we're talking about the management of people, we're talking about teachers, we're talking about principles, professors, we're talking about administrators, so we're not... It's not just corporate thinking that we're after here. So what does that mean managing through your, somebody's a coach and counselor? Well, why, I had to always think about Why did Deming say this? Why did he make that as a point? Well, through his lifetime, 80 years in applied management, he constantly saw people that were, sometimes is called Boss management. It's: either my way or the highway management. There were the years during World War II where there's military management, and if you didn't follow orders, you could be court marshaled, or shot or whatever. And so really after World War II, all those people in the military came back, and people who had been in the service went right back into management positions in corporations, and so what philosophy are they bringing back with them. Well, they're bringing back military management. 0:02:54.1 DL: It's my way or the highway kind of thinking. And all these phrases that have bounced around for the last 50, 60 years, you're not getting paid to think, you're getting paid to do. Well, Deming was just the opposite. He was always trying to get people to think. In the previous point, we spent quite a bit of time talking about creating training and learning for people, and on the job, all kinds of training and learning, not just things that are gonna help you with your job because you wanted people to think. And why. Why would he want people to think? Because that's where creativity comes from. You get everybody in an organization and you have a Thinking Organization going on, you've really got something fantastic happening. 0:03:48.8 DL: If you don't have that and you got boss management and everybody's just waiting around for the boss to tell them what to do, you're not gonna get creativity, you're not gonna get new thoughts. In fact, creativity gets shut down in a situation like that. I'll never forget, a friend of mine talked about working in an auto plant in California during the 1960s, and his job was to put in screws. And as the cars came by, he'd put in these screws and he kept noticing that the tool that he had to put the screws in was stripping the screws out every tenth screw or so. So he actually took his time to create a special little attachment and a tool to make sure that every screw that he put in would be perfect, and he wouldn't be stripping those screws out in these vehicles, and he was so excited that when his manager came around, he's shared with him this idea about... 0:04:50.2 DL: Look what I've done, I've created this tool that goes on the end of the rivet gun or whatever it is, and to make sure that the screws are always in perfectly. Well, he got in huge trouble. Manager just ate him out and one side down the other. You're not getting paid to think, you put it back on. And that was prominent thinking then and probably management thinking that Deming encountered in our auto industry and why the Japanese suddenly started beating us in the auto industry is because they had people that were thinking and not just doing. So Deming wanted... What does that mean for like a teacher? Well, you're trying to get students always to think on their own. I've helped teachers many times, especially young kids to come up with a flow chart with their students, what to do when you don't know what to do. And there's a lot of thought in that. Right. I have a whole flow chart, well, what do you do when you don't know what to do. Do you just sit around and goof around and bother other people? Do you... What happens in those kinds of situations? 0:06:11.5 DL: Or have you gone through a process to try to solve the problem yourself? I know after a couple of years of working like this with students in classrooms, I'd have students come up to me and they'd get ready to ask a question, and then they'd look at me and they'd go, never mind. I said, No, I'd say, No, wait a minute, don't leave, why don't you wanna ask your question? And... Well, I haven't really gone through the process of trying to solve it myself yet. Oh, okay, well, let me know how that goes. Because until you do that, you're not really thinking and you're not really... The neurons are not gonna connect in a pattern that next time around, you can actually think through and solve the problem yourself. And so there's steps to going through those things and getting students of all ages to be able to think and solve problems themselves, and unfortunately, we're not getting better at this in organizations, we are still reverting and going backwards in many cases, partly because once you become a manager, there's power in that and control. And if I think that people don't need me, does that make my job sort of worthless? Maybe I don't need to be there. 0:07:39.8 DL: Well, it's actually just the opposite, that if you have people taking autonomy, solving problems, figuring things out on their own, and when they come to you, you're giving them coaching and counseling. Have you thought about this, have you thought about this way? And what do you think would happen if you did this? And rather than judging them about it, you get people thinking on a higher level all the time. I'll never forget... I can't remember if I told the story or not, but the school district I was working in, in Texas, the State Board of Education asked me to come and speak to the state board and talk about what I was doing with the schools in Texas. And I said, Well, I won't come unless I can bring a hundred of my friends. And he said, What are you talking about? And I said, Well, I won't come unless I can bring some of these students that are already in classrooms functioning this way with Deming thinking. And he said, Oh yeah, that'd be great. We never get to see any students. Isn't that odd? State board of education never sees their customers. Anyway, so a school district brought a bus load students, and in that bus load of students was a teacher and her kindergarten, five and six-year-old students, and they had told me at the state board that I had 10 minutes to make a presentation. 0:09:16.3 DL: So I talked about 3 minutes, and it's about who was Deming and applied thinking, etcetera, and then I had these kids talk. Well, I'll never forget these kindergarten kids were at the microphones and they're talking about how autonomous they are in their classroom, how they solve their own problems, how they work together, how they support each other, they're just amazing. Going on and on. And one of the state board members says, "Now, I understand that you have a lot of control and responsibility in your classroom," and all these kids are shaking their heads, yes. And she said, "Well, if you have all this control and responsibility over what you do every day, what's your teacher doing?" And this little boy without hesitating grabbed a microphone and looked right at her, and he said, The teacher is not in the closet, you know. It was stun silence. There's like 300 people in the room, it's dead silence and you hear all those whispering, What did he just say? Deming said profound knowledge is not limited to age. At five and six, he knew that he'd had a coach and a counselor in the classroom, and he was able to do this and take this kind of responsibility because of the teacher, not in spite of the teacher. 0:10:44.4 DL: So if you're not allowing your students to take responsibility and own their own situation, then you can have a rebellion going on. And you might never even know it because it could be an underground rebellion going on. 0:11:00.1 AS: Yeah, by the time you know it, it's too late. I was just thinking about some of these words, just to make sure that we're super clear, like I was looking at the word coach online, and one dictionary says someone whose job is to teach people to improve at a sport or skill or a school subject. Another one was counsel, which is to give advice, especially on social or personal problems. Another one was judge: to form, give or have an opinion or decide about something or someone. And I'm also reminded of a very good book that I found helpful in the coaching space, written by Michael Bungay Stanier, and he has some questions, it's called The Coaching Habit, and he had the questions that being a coach, he said You should ask, what's on your mind? What else is on your mind? And another question is, what's the real challenge for you that you're facing? What do you want? How can I help? If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? And what was the most useful for you in that process? So those are some of the words, and I'm just curious, can you really be a coach in school? Or do you need to be kind of authoritarian to control a classroom? That's one of the questions that I'm sure some people are like, Yeah, that sounds great, David. 0:12:24.9 AS: But my classroom is out of control and I've gotta really... I've gotta squeeze down here to get things together. 0:12:32.8 DL: We need some discipline around here. 0:12:34.8 AS: Exactly. 0:12:39.2 DL: Yeah, the beatings will continue around here until morale improves. 0:12:43.4 AS: Exactly. 0:12:43.5 DL: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, every time I hear educators talking about, Oh, we got a discipline plan, or these kids need more discipline or... Every generation says, These kids today, they don't understand discipline. And I often will tell teachers, have you ever looked up discipline in a dictionary? Most dictionaries, the first definition of discipline is training. 0:13:11.0 DL: So you have a discipline problem, Oh, you got a training problem. And that totally changes things, and it actually goes to Deming's point when he says, Don't sit around and judge people. Train people in the way that you want them to go and what you want them to do and how you want them to act and let them make decisions and... Don't just judge them and heap so many demerits, this is gonna happen to you, and three tardies equal an absence, and three absences is equal this, and that's judging people and you're not actually improving the situation at all. I just read an article that Los Angeles has a chronic absentee problem. Well, partly because nobody wants to go to school there, right? You're not gonna miss something you think is fun and you're involved in, and you're actually learning. Learning is the most motivating thing that could be happening, and if students are going to school and they're not learning, then why am I even bothering? 0:14:27.8 DL: Now, you can try to discipline by heaping judgments and punishments and all kinds of things on people, but the bottom line is people are gonna vote with their feet and they're just... They just don't wanna put up with it over time or they'll show up, they won't do anything, they won't learn anything, they won't get involved. And the thing is that we always wanna blame the people and not the system, and that's what Deming is talking about, not being a judge, stop judging and blaming the people in this system and start fixing the system. And you'll get a different result. 0:15:10.4 AS: I went on the dictionary again to look at discipline, once you said that, I'm your handy-dandy fact checker here, and in fact, the first word in the description in the dictionary is training, and it says, training that makes people more willing to obey or more willing or more able to control themselves. 0:15:30.7 DL: Yes, and that's ultimately what you're after is to get people to control themselves instead of you thinking that you have to do everything. 0:15:43.9 AS: Another way of looking at this too, is to think about, How would you like to be treated? I think one of the best questions in a job interview that I've learned to ask is, What's the best way to manage you? And sometimes, I'll ask it by saying, if I was to talk to your last boss and ask them, what's the best way to manage you, to get the most out of you? And then it's amazing what that opens up. Some people say, like for me, I often explain that I'm kind of an incrementalist, so if I have a project, I want to check that it's on track, and I wanna work on a bit of it at a time, and then go from there, whereas there's some other people like, Just leave me alone and I'll produce this thing at the end of the... And when a boss or a colleague understands that that's the way my mind works, then it's easier for them to understand that doing a project with me, it's better to have daily check-ins versus someone else that may not want that, so think about how you would describe yourself to your boss, to your administrator, and describe how you would like to be treated, and surprisingly, it may be the way you should be treating other people too. 0:17:04.0 DL: Yeah. So take that same thinking and translate it to a second grade classroom. Do you really know your students and know how to coach and counsel each of those students either collectively or separately? And rather than thinking that since I'm bigger and have a stronger voice, and I'm the authoritarian person here, I can just tell you what to do and if you don't do it, I'm just gonna make your life miserable until you do do it. It's not a really good way to manage, and... 0:17:36.1 AS: Yeah. I'm imagining a little kid saying, and a teacher in that classroom saying, So how do you learn? How do you learn to memorize something? And they say, I take the first letter and then I make a rhyme. Alice likes such and such, and then I sing it in my head, and then people are like, Wow, okay, I never even thought about doing it that way. I know for me, I write out, let's say the first letter of something that I wanna memorize and think about it as a neumonic, but the idea of sharing those things in classrooms, and that's one way to coach, Counsel and discuss. 0:18:16.0 DL: Well, when you hear athletes in interviews and there's great coaches and that these athletes have worked for and they say, what about this guy? What makes him a great coach? Invariably, they'll say things like, he's a teacher, or she's a teacher. And just an incredible teacher. So when you're a manager of people like that, like whole groups of people, whether in a classroom, a team or a company or whatever it might be, and over time, you are a coach and a counselor versus being a judge with people. What does that do for you? Well, when times of crisis do come along, Covid, whatever it might be, if you've trained people up well, discipline them to think and understand and to work well with each other and support each other to a very high degree, you are now capable of taking on challenges that just across the street, the same kind of organization, they can't cope with it, they just fold because they have no internal ability to work together to a high degree to support each other to get through a crisis kind of a situation. 0:19:34.9 AS: When I think about Coach, I think about my dad and my mom to some extent, because they kicked me out when I was 18, and they said, Go make it on your own, but the deal was at that point, that was when they stopped giving any advice, it's like, You gotta do it. And we don't have any right to say, No, you've gotta make it on your own. My parents were never big on advice, but what they did is they listened to me, and then they tried to understand and all that, but I don't really remember my parents giving me advice specifically, and I can say that I remember when I had a girlfriend a long time ago in Thailand and I had some difficulty in my life that was pretty bad. It was pretty tough. And she said, You know what did you do? And I said, Well, I called my dad. And she's like, You talk to your dad about something like that!? 0:20:27.9 DL: Oh, wow. 0:20:30.5 AS: Yeah, and I learned in Asian culture, dads are not necessarily as approachable as they may be in the Western culture, which was a real surprise to me because I had seen Asian families as being very, very close, but what I just recall is just the comfort of being able to talk honestly and openly about a problem that I was facing. That was half of the solution, right there is to get rid of the anxiety and then start to think through. And so from a coaching perspective, I feel like coaching and counseling is really all about listening. 0:21:10.5 DL: Yeah, you made me think about... I grew up on a farm, and my father intuitively understood a lot of these things, even though his father was never like that with him, but my dad would take me out, we'd go to, put in a new fence or would repair something or do something, and one of the first things he'd say is, Okay, now what are we trying to do here? And the first few times, I remember thinking, Oh, don't you know? [chuckle] 0:21:42.5 AS: Fixing this fence. What are you talking about? 0:21:43.5 DL: Right, that's right. But he was trying to get me to think, and then by the time I was like 15 years old, he could just send me out to go, Hey, go down there and fix that fence or put that fence in. And he knew it was gonna be done right and done well. Because he taught me to think about situations and work through it. 0:22:04.9 AS: Well, maybe I'll wrap up this topic by... First of all, I think highlighting... We're on point number five. And that's... These points that Dr. Deming has highlighted. There's 14 of them. It's different from The 14 Points. And remember, if you're in the third edition, this is on page 86 of the new economics, if you're in the second edition, it's on page 125, and before I summarize point number five, I do wanna go back to point number four because you highlighted that, the point about being an unceasing learner, and let's just review point number four. He is... So we're talking about the transform manager, he is an unceasing learner, he encourages people to study, he provides when possible and feasible seminars and courses for advancement of learning, he encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined, and that brings us to number five, which we've just been wrapping up, and that is he is coach and counsel. Not a... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26805999

Secret Weapon for Improvement: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 5) 05/23/2023

Secret Weapon for Improvement: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 5) Is there a secret weapon for improvement? Yes! John and Andrew discuss how students fit into improvement projects - and how that translates to businesses. 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 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 "Engaging Students is the Secret Weapon for Improvement". John, take it away. 0:00:28.0 John Dues: Andrew, it's great to be back with you on the podcast. Yeah, this is sort of a revelation to me when I was working with... It's actually working with David Langford, and we were talking about, "How do you bring about improvement in schools," and at one point, he said to me, to kinda give it away at the top of the program here, "Students are sitting right in front of you, and they are the secret weapon when it comes to school improvement." Engaging them in those improvement processes is really the secret to improvement, because almost everything we want to improve in schools has to do with students, but we almost never directly engage them in this improvement process. It was so obvious they're sitting right there in front of me, but it wasn't until David said it that way that I said, "Oh, my gosh, all this time." Of course, as a classroom teacher or a principal, students were sometimes tangentially involved in improvement efforts, but how many times are they central to it, how many times do we put the data that we want to improve right in front of the students and elicit ideas for improvement as we watch that data move up and down over time? So it was a real sort of eye-opener for me to start thinking in that way. 0:01:50.8 AS: It's funny 'cause when I first started teaching many years ago, teaching finance, I was always worried that I would get a question that I couldn't answer. And what I came to learn from that was that a question that I couldn't answer is a great opportunity for a discussion. And then I would basically say, "Hmm, well, what do you think is the answer?" Now, in a way, I was playing a little bit of a trick 'cause I was deflecting the fact that I didn't have an answer. But I said, "What do you think? Okay, what do you think?" And then we started to construct and answer to that as best we could. And it took a lot of pressure off me because I realized that that discussion was a fine discussion to be had in the classroom around a topic that I wasn't exactly sure how to answer. 0:02:37.9 JD: Yeah, I think all of us try to hide our weaknesses, especially early on. We gain experience, it gets more comfortable to say, "I don't know," which is a fine thing to do as a experienced classroom teacher as well. And I'm thinking about in this context involving students, probably the best ideas for improvement are living right there with them, just like even if you didn't know the answer in your early classrooms, that sort of elicited a discussion that maybe was richer than it would have been otherwise. So I think, yeah in either case, involving students is a real sort of key to this improvement process, whether it's a single teacher in front of a classroom of college students in your case, or in my case, where we're trying to improve our system of schools. 0:03:30.7 AS: In my Valuation Master Class Boot Camp, which is like an online course, I have so much more flexibility than you have in high school. But I found one of the students was just really engaging and really supportive of the other students, so I hired him. And I said, "Why don't you become student experience? That's... Your job is about bringing that great student experience." And then whenever I kick off the Valuation Master Class Bootcamp, I ask prior graduates to come and speak and tell the students, give them some advice, and tell about the transformation that they went through in that course. So on the first day of class, they're inspired and encouraged, and then throughout the class, they've got a prior student guiding them and helping them get through where he knows are the most difficult parts. But you don't have that kind of flexibility, I would guess in your setting. Tell us more about that. 0:04:30.2 JD: Yeah, I think well, one I think that example that you just told is outstanding, and I actually think... I think it's a little bit of a misnomer. There are a lot of regulations, there are a lot of handcuffs on... To certain things in terms of what we can do and what we can't do. But actually we have fairly wide latitude. We're a small public charter school network, so we maybe even have more latitude than the typical traditional public school. We have the latitude of a district, so we're making decisions for district of schools, basically. And we're small, we're pretty nimble. We think innovation is pretty important. We think continual learning is important, and we put some processes in place to elicit that. Where there can be some roadblocks here and there, I think one of my jobs is actually find a way around those roadblocks, if they're in service of our mission and in service of helping students be educated at a higher level. 0:05:29.4 AS: So what I do is I ask the students at the end of the whole course, I say, "Tell me what you learned. What is the number-one thing that you took away," that type of thing. And I'm putting them in a pretty intense situation for six intense weeks, but then they've got a record of that, they've thought through that. And then when they come back, then they can share, "Here's what I went through, and here's my advice on how to get through it." And it is an idea in a school to say, having a list of the people who made it through the class on the wall. 0:06:03.4 AS: And then another idea is to find one or two students that would say... Come back and talk to the students to say, "Okay, this class is about American history, and the one thing that just lit me on fire is the story of Philip Sheridan when he was attacking... The US cavalry, was attacking the southern cavalry, and how he knocked out Jeb Stuart, and it just got me reading all this stuff from blah, blah, blah, blah, and then... " So, of course, that's big brainstorming, but that's an idea. 0:06:33.5 JD: Yeah, I think that... You said a six-week course. What you're describing is essentially that Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, so I could see a scenario where in your six-week course where you run a PDSA on how are we gonna improve the class. And at the end, when you get to that act, you sort of decide with the class... What should I focus on for the next PDSA with the next class. And so in that way, you'd sort of be... Assuming you're re-teaching this class on an ongoing basis, you'd be sort of continually improving, and that's really the sort of... We talked about the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, the PDSA cycle, the last couple sessions, that's really what it is. It's where you leave off at the end of that cycle and you decide what you're gonna do next, feeds into that second cycle of improvement. So whether you called it that or not, it sounds like you're basically running PDSAs with the finance classes that you're teaching. 0:07:34.6 AS: Yeah. In fact, at the end of the class, I ask them another question, which is, what could we do to improve? And... [chuckle] 0:07:43.3 JD: It's perfect. 0:07:45.5 AS: So the question... The problem that I faced was that the students said I want more one-on-one feedback, that they submit their assignment and they just get pass/fail or a grade and they don't get the feedback that they wanted. And really, I have to say, I was kind of upset about this reply because I felt like, "I can't do it, it's too many students," and my goal is to grow it so that I've got 100 or 500 students. How am I gonna scale it if it's about personal feedback? So we talked about it a lot for the next Boot Camp that came up, because we had seen this complaint coming up, and we came up with this idea. And I said, "Maybe... " And this... Part of this is talking to people like you and David Langford and others, maybe we need to do more work on clarifying the assignment. And so we went back and I said, "Look, every week we need to make it super clear on Monday what's the assignment for the week." 0:08:48.3 AS: And we even provided them kind of a score card of the way we're gonna look at it. "Did you do this? If you did that, you get a point. Did you do that? Did you check your grammar," whatever. And so we got much more clear, and then what we decided to do was to say, "Look, the teams will meet in the week, they always meet once a week, and they need to pick one or two people to present that on Friday." And then what we had is, we had the students present their work, just the best of the best, and I would say not the best of the best, but the ones that shows... Said, "I'm ready and I can do that," and then myself and my team gave them feedback after they presented, and said, "Okay, see that? Try to fix that. Make sure that you don't... " And then once we did that, what I then did is I took notes throughout those and recorded those, and then I improved again the description of the assignments and the common mistakes that people made. And so the next time that we did it, the next launch of the Valuation Master Class Bootcamp, we now had an even more clear focus on what you've got to do by the end of this week. 0:10:00.1 AS: And then finally, what I did is I called it Feedback Friday. And I said, "A whole week, we're working on a bunch of stuff but the end result is on Feedback Friday. One person, two people from your team is gonna present and you're gonna get critiqued and see how you do, and everybody's gonna watch that, it's gonna be recorded. Anybody can go through that." So we've been doing Feedback Friday now for three bootcamps and I would say all of the complaints related to feedback and not enough personal feedback are gone. And it wasn't through personal feedback that we resolved the issue of not getting enough personal feedback. 0:10:35.0 JD: Yeah. Well, that's a PDSA cycle for sure. Another thing I think of is what you... Sounds like you did over time as you iterated this class, and how you gave feedback, you actually found the actual root cause that was causing the problem. And the third thing I was thinking of, 'cause you talked about complaints, one thing we can do is overreact to complaints. So that's another thing that you could do is put the complaints on a process behavior chart, and if you get to a certain number, that might sort of signal that you have an issue. Otherwise, there may be an acceptable level... Number of complaints and... Or a third level analysis is, it's a stable number of complaints but the number is not acceptable to you as the instructor and so you wanna go about improving the whole system. It sounds like that's exactly what you did, sort of what we've talked about the last couple sessions, is you chart something, whether it's quantitative or qualitative data, you're keeping track of that, and then you're tagging it to this structured improvement process. And, yeah, it sounds like you're running the PDSA cycles for the class. It's pretty cool. 0:11:57.1 AS: That's a comforting message for the listeners and the viewers because what it tells you is that you don't have to be super official and have all of the tools that we learn from Dr. Deming's teachings that... First, is to start with the thought process. And my first thought process is, "I want my Valuation Master Class Bootcamp to be the best course in the world." That's all I want, just the best in the world, so I'm constantly wanting to improve. The second thing, I do not ever focus on competitors because my course is just so different, and all I focus on is the students. The third thing is I'm getting feedback on a consistent basis from the student about what they like and what it's worth to them. Because I also ask them, "Now that you understand exactly what's in the Valuation Master Class Bootcamp, what is the price that you think I should charge for this?" And my goal is that that price continues to rise as the perception of the value of the course rises. So I'm getting feedback, and then I'm looking at that feedback and I'm trying to identify what I think is the most important feedback that we've got to somehow resolve. 0:13:13.3 AS: And then I'm coming up with a theory that how, "Okay, wait a minute, if we clarify more about what we want, maybe that's gonna help, but even if we clarified our assignment, it wouldn't have helped the feedback. They still could have had the same problem of, "We're not getting any feedback." But then it was the idea of coming up with the Feedback Friday and really naming it. And that's what I've learned from the world of marketing and all that, is that you've got to name something and repeat it. And so all of that is... And then I keep wanting to repeat that process, which is why I love doing the bootcamp 'cause it's six weeks, every 10 weeks or so I do it again, and that gives us a perfect opportunity. And that's what teachers are doing, they're doing again and again, right? 0:13:53.9 JD: Yeah, yeah, and it makes me think... I'm obviously living in a different world than you in terms of who the students are and who the customer is. But we... In our network of schools, we have two elementary schools, two middle schools, and a lot of your description makes me think of this first ever PDSA cycle we ran a few years ago when we were working on an improvement project we called Eighth Grade On Track, which is just like what it sounds. How do we make sure that our eighth graders are on track to go to high school? We don't have a high school in our network, but we have a high school placement process. One of the things that parents expect of us is that their child is well-prepared to go to a good academically-oriented high school once they leave us, and, of course, high schools are also expecting that from us. So the parents are the customer expecting certain things from our schools. The high schools that we feed into are expecting certain things from our schools. So of course we can't fulfill our mission, we can't be an important part of that sort of education system, if we're not preparing our students to leave us as eighth graders and matriculate into a solid high school. 0:15:09.4 JD: And I remember working through, what does it mean to be on track in eighth grade to predict that you're gonna go on and be on track and do well in high school? One of the interesting things that, as I was reading some research out of the University of Chicago on this, was that when you look at students in middle school, you see grades start to drop that's actually a leading indicator of things to come in high school, which makes a lot of sense, 'cause if you start to experience academic issues in middle school, high school is a little harder, academically, plus some of the supports that are in place in elementary and middle school start to drop away so that makes perfect sense. Bs drop to Ds in middle school, and Ds drop to Fs in high school. And, man, if you're off track, even in your ninth grade year, students have a lot of trouble bouncing back from that. So I remember there was a student I was working with named James and this exact thing happened. 0:16:19.4 JD: I was looking at his grades, I was looking at his GPA, his attendance, his discipline record in sixth grade and everything was on track. In seventh grade, it was mostly on track. Things were looking pretty good. And then all of a sudden, here we are in the first trimester of eighth grade, and his reading grade dropped from a B in seventh grade all the way down to a D in that first trimester. In a lot of places, that's not gonna... Especially if the rest of his grades are pretty good, good attendance, he never was in trouble, he's not gonna get on a lot of people's radar. But we have this on-track system in place, so once we saw that data, our team, we said, "Wait a second, James was on track in sixth grade, on track in seventh grade, and now all of a sudden, he's off track in eighth grade," and we started asking why. So we're adults, we're sitting around the table in a conference room, "Why is James off track? Why is he off track in eighth grade? Well, his B in seventh grade dropped to a D." 0:17:25.8 JD: "Well, why is that? Why did that grade drop from B to D?" We're looking at his scores, and he's got pretty high reading test scores in his class. And then we look at his homework grade. His home grade's really low in his eighth grade reading class. And so then we asked this next question, "Why is James' eighth grade reading homework grade low?" And then we get stuck, and this goes back to this whole point of this episode, which is students are the improvement secret weapon. So we're sitting around this table and we say, "How do we figure this out? Why is his reading grade and homework grade, low? Let's go get it. Let's go get it." [chuckle] 0:18:10.5 AS: And for the people who are working in a manufacturing company listening to this, it's like sitting in your office above the factory... 0:18:19.1 JD: Exactly. 0:18:19.9 AS: And looking at the chart and thinking, "I wonder why this is happening." 0:18:24.0 JD: "Why this happening?" Yeah. So this is when the conversation gets really interesting. We had never done this before. We go get James on the spot from his eighth grade classroom and say, "Hey, we're doing this thing where we're just trying to figure out what's going on with your grades." 0:18:40.0 JD: We're asking some "why" questions. We're basically using the 5 why tool, we have a piece of chart paper and listing these things out, and so now we've invited him into the room, we just say, "Why is your reading homework grade low?" And he says, "Well, I really do the easier less-time-consuming homework first, math and science and history are fairly easy for me. So I do those first." A pretty typical answer from an eighth grade boy, and so what he's basically saying is he does his reading homework last, "Well, why do you do your reading homework last?" 0:19:28.9 JD: "Well, I don't like doing my reading homework, it's too much work." "Why do you dislike doing your reading homework?" "It's too much work. It takes too much time. I wait to the last possible moment." And we said, "Well, what is the last possible moment mean?" And he said, "Well, I usually not only do it last, I do it on the bus ride to school in the morning." It's dark. It's bumpy. That's the worst possible place to do the hardest homework, but that's what he's doing 'cause he does wanna get it done, he wants to turn in something, but he's not putting any type of effort, so now what we've uncovered is, why is it exactly that his homework grade is low? 0:20:02.9 JD: Now, if I was just an administrator sitting in my office, I could see that D and say, "James needs to go to after school tutoring," or "James needs to do this," or "James news to do that." But none of that, like what you were talking about with the student complaints in your class, none of that would have been the actual root cause of James' reading homework problem. So then we said, "Okay, now we know what the problem is, what are we gonna do about it?" 0:20:35.6 JD: And I had just learned about this Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle thing, and I said, "Well, let's sit down and write... Literally write out a simple PDSA with James." And the basic question was, if we could do reading homework first, could we raise that homework grade to at least a 70%? So we kinda looked at what his... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26445519

The End of Perfection: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 4) 05/16/2023

The End of Perfection: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 4) What's the difference between "perfect" and "that will work?" We use them interchangeably all the time. In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss what "perfect" means and why it's standing in the way of innovation and improvement at work and at home. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 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. The topic for today is The End of Perfection. Bill take it away. 0:00:29.0 Bill Bellows: The finish line of perfection. [laughter] Andrew, here we are, session four. And welcome to our audience. 0:00:39.7 AS: Yeah. 0:00:43.0 BB: And the end of perfection is a topic of a number of presentations that I've done for The Deming Institute and for others. Part of the reason it's on our list is a focus, is that I come across people who are improvement specialists, continuous improvement zealots, specialists, professionals who speak in terms of striving for perfection. And I just start sort of become... Actually, for some time now I've been bothered by that concept, but so let me just say, if I walk into a hardware store where you work, Andrew, and I'm looking for a bolt or something, some tool, something for some project I'm working on, and I'm just hoping you have it. And I come up to you and you say, How can you help me? And I say, I'm looking for this, and you bring me over. And again, I'm just praying that you've got it. And you say, Is this what you're looking for? And I say, perfect. Oh man, I am so excited. I don't have to run across town. You've got what I'm looking for. Perfect. 0:01:52.8 AS: So easily pleased. 0:01:55.5 BB: Yeah, but when I say perfect, what I'm saying is that's exactly what I'm looking for. I'm not saying it's the best saw blade ever known to man, beyond which they'll never be a better one. So I look in terms of casually, I hear the reference, the context of perfection being exactly what I'm looking for versus as lean professionals will use it and other continuous improvement professionals use it, they're implying perfect means you can't go past that point. It's a... And so what it means, Andrew, is that continuous improvement stops at perfection. 0:02:46.5 AS: There's an event horizon. 0:02:49.4 BB: And that I have a problem with. And so what I like to say that people is... Again, I don't have a problem with... I walk into the hardware, I would call it lower case perfect, small p, not capital P. Capital P, I don't believe exist, or I would say to people, you can't believe in continuous improvement and capital P perfection. And people will say, "Well, Bill, but we're... When Toyota's striving in pursuit of perfection, they're implying that, we'll never get there." I say, I don't believe there exists. And I said, it's like getting in the car saying, are we there yet? Are we there yet? So I would say a mindset of capital P perfection is the antithesis of continuous improvement. 0:03:41.2 BB: And why is that important? 'Cause I think there are incredible opportunities for improvement in any organization. I'm not saying they're all worthwhile to pursue, they have to be worthwhile, meaning the benefits from it have to offset the investment of time and energy, so I'm not saying we should improve everything in the organization. And that mind set exist. That is alive and well, that we can improve everything, we can improve everything. I say, when... People don't improve every aspect of their home, they improve bathrooms and kitchens, 'cause that's the highest return. And so likewise, we have a... I think there are people out there in their personal lives of a very pragmatic sense of we don't improve everything. So I think that's understood, but I think there's some confusion. So there, I just wanna say that capital P perfection, I challenge what that means, but where I wanna go next is how that mindset comes about and how prevalent it is. And in a future session, we're gonna talk more about this, but I just wanna hit the word perfection today. I gave some examples of where that thinking comes from. So we were talking earlier of, that Dr. Deming's Red Bead Experiment, and we appreciate, Andrew and I appreciate there are people in the audience that are wondering Red Bead Experiment, what is that all about? Another is saying, I've got a red bead kit right here in my office. 0:05:11.6 AS: Exactly. 0:05:14.3 BB: In fact, I've got a red bead kit right... Two kits right behind me. 0:05:18.0 AS: So for those people that don't know, Red Bead Experiment, we have that on The Deming Institute website. You just type in Deming Red Bead Experiment, and you can get there. There's videos also on the YouTube channel and in DemingNEXT, so there's a lot of resources and of course, there's also other people that are doing it. But for those people that know it, we've decided we're not gonna go through all the details of it, but rather talk about it. 0:05:44.1 BB: Yeah, so as a refresher for those who are familiar with it, and again, if this is brand new to you, then the suggestion is you pause here, go watch the videos on Deming Institute's web page and then come back and join us. But for those who are familiar with it, Dr. Deming, came up with this. I think someone at Hewlett-Packard exposed it to them him in the early '80s, and the way Dr. Deming had run the Red Bead Experiment as it's called, is he'd have a bowl with roughly 4000 beads that are you used to make a necklace, very small beads, maybe an 8th of an inch in diameter. And then the bowl would be mostly small white beads, and then roughly 20% red. Same diameter, roughly, again, about an 8th of an inch, and he would start off by having the beads, the mixture, and one bowl poured into another to mix them up and then pour them back into the other bowl, and then he'd have willing workers from the audience one at a time come up and put a paddle in. And the paddle is maybe the size of a 3 inch by 5 inch pad. And he put a paddle in with small holes. In those holes, the beads would collect. And in a given paddle, there would be 50 divots for the beads to collect, and so the workers with Dr. Deming's instructions would put the paddle in, shake it a little bit, remove the paddle, go to inspector number one, who would count how many red beads are in the paddle, go to inspector number two, count how many red beads, and then they'd be announced, the total is 13 red beads. 0:07:37.2 BB: Andrew, dismissed. Next worker. And so he would go through and have one worker at a time, go through this four or five times, each time being, say, a day of production. So what are red beads? What's implied in... Again, there's a chapter in The New Economics on the Red Bead experiment. The implications is red bead are defects, things the customer doesn't want, the customer wants white beads. So what are the red beads? Things that don't meet requirements: scrap, rework, defects. And if we go back to last our previous sessions, the difference between white beads and red beads is, question one, white beads meet requirements, they are good. Red beads don't meet requirements, they are bad. And so in the Red Bead experiment, Dr. Deming would go through and collect data from four workers, perhaps four times each, and the data being a spreadsheet, and then he looked row by row and point out there's highs and lows in the number of red beads in he'd start...Dr. Deming as the manager of this white bead factory, would start to berate the workers who created more red beads as if they did it all by themselves. And so the punch line, the reminder punch line for those who have seen this before, what Dr. Deming, what he was doing was blaming the workers for the red beads. 0:09:04.8 BB: And the workers had no choice but to think that they were causing the white beads. And so one of the big takeaways for people in the Deming community who really love the Bed Bead experiment is that the red beads are not caused by the workers, they are caused by the system, which includes the supplier of the red beads and the white beads, the instructions, the bowl, the paddle, the worker, the instructions. And you don't blame the workers separately, and so that becomes a really big takeaway. Well, where I would like to go with this beyond that, what I like doing in an audience or a class in a university class is we'll get to the point of collecting the red bead data, the number of red beads per day per worker, and we'll move it from a control... From a run chart to a control chart. We'll will calculate control elements, we'll talk about common cause variation, and the idea that the system is most likely not gonna produce special causes because the system is semi-closed, unless there's an earthquake and the paddle is broken or something like that. 0:10:18.0 BB: Well, the question I'd like to ask people is, now we appreciate that the red beads are caused by the workers... Are caused by the system which includes workers. But what I like to ask is, is your understanding of the Deming philosophy that the objective everywhere in the organization is to strive to eliminate all the red beads everywhere in the system, which can include going to suppliers, no longer buying them, working with their suppliers? And so I just like to ask people this, and I've had a couple of hundred people in the room and I'd just say, is that what you think where Dr. Deming is talking about, that the objective, one, is to understand that red beads are caused by the system, not the worker, but then we go the next step and say, let's strive to eliminate all the white beads everywhere, and if we do achieve that, are we done? 0:11:10.8 AS: Right. Wipe out all red beads everywhere? 0:11:12.8 BB: I'm sorry. Wipe out all the red beads everywhere? Are we done? Have we achieve perfection? And people will say... Or I'd say, but simultaneously Dr. Deming told us about the value proposition of continuous improvement. So then I'll say to the audience, do we stop at a 100% white beads, or can we improve? And if we can improve, what does that mean? And then we get, we can make them faster. I say, Okay, fine. We can make them cheaper. I say fine. I said, but can we make them better? And then people will say, "Well, we can make them faster," and I I'd say fine, we can make them cheaper, and I'd I say fine. And we're going around, around, and they'll say, everything can be improved. And I say, well, but how do you improve the white beads once they're all white? And people will say, you can always have a better mouse trap. Then I'll hold up the beads, and I say, I'm not talking about a better mouse trap, I'm saying, these beads, you can't get any... So what I love about the red bead experiment is, it's not a mouse trap with springs and wires, it's a really simple... It's just a bead. 0:12:24.4 BB: We've got white ones and red ones, how can you make the white beads better once they're all white? Now they're stumped. They are stumped, and they are... And when I lead them to... And this is the part of the Red Bead experiment that I enjoy is this piece, and the punch line is, it comes from what I learned from Dr. Taguchi is that the white beads are not uniformly white, they actually have different shades of white, which is question two, they have different diameters, which is question two, different weights, and point out that you can continuously improve the white beads once you understand that there's, questions two, that there's degrees of white degrees of diameters and things like that. And the idea being that in order to understand why that variation matters, now we get to what we look at the end of module three is we have to look at how the beads are used. 0:13:33.9 AS: And just to summarize, question one is, does it meet requirements, I think is right? 0:13:38.6 BB: Yes. Question one is does it meet requirements? Is it white or is it red. Well, it's white. 0:13:45.0 AS: Yep. So that was a fine... 0:13:48.1 BB: Good question. 0:13:49.5 AS: That was a definite or yes or no answer, as you said. So... 0:13:54.7 BB: Absolutely. That is a question one, does it meet requirements. Yes or no. Black and white thinking, we also talked about it. Question two is, there's shades of grey. And in this case, there's shades of white, there's shade... They're different diameters. And now we begin to understand, again, that the impact of different diameters and different shades shows up in how they're used, in terms of how they're used to make a necklace or however they're being used by the person downstream. And so at the end of module three, we talked about what are the types of things we could do at the end of module three to help people begin to understand the implications for Dr. Deming's work. And is go downstream and see how your work is being used. So instead of striving to make sure all you send downstream is white beads, not red beads... Again, I'm not underestimating the value proposition of getting to that point. But what I'm saying is, that's not perfection. Actually, if you look at it as perfection, then we say we are done, now let's go elsewhere, get all the red beads done and get the white. So the strategy is to... I think the overall strategy is, what's the best use of our time? Is it going from some red to all white, or is it going from all white to then look at the variation in the white, which is then looking at what are the opportunities for improving the organization by looking at how the beads are used? 0:15:28.4 AS: And if we think about this, it made me think like, let's just say that somebody's implementing Deming's teachings, and they've done a lot of great work to get down to that point of, let's say eliminating red beads, we've rooted out the red beads, and there is a huge gain there for the organization, for the customer, for costs and all of that. So you could even say that in some ways, that that's what they call the low-hanging fruit, but what's fascinating that you've talked about is going through the looking glass to the other side, and now you go to the step further where you have... It seems like it's incrementally not worth it, in some cases, because it's just tinkering around with something that's pretty close enough, but yet, if you go deeper to that, it's very possible that you reach a level of precision that brings an exponential improvement, not only in the system, but also in the outcome and also in the competitive position relative to your peers. 0:16:38.4 BB: A few things on what you just said, one, is... And I really like the metaphor you're using, and I like to say that people is that you have no idea what's on the other side of the doorway. So question one is getting to the point of, we want all the beads to be white, and then we're done. That's perfection. And so what I'm saying, there's more, there's more, and the more is going through the doorway and beginning to look at how are the beads used and what opportunities are there. But right, there's this economic sense of diminishing returns and measuring returns. I'd tell you, the excitement you're hearing is that I've seen so many situations where the gains are so significant for such a small additional effort, that I no longer... This idea that we run out of opportunities for improving. Nonsense, absolutely nonsense. What I say to people is, if you don't look, you won't find. If you do look, there's no guarantee, but also, as I said, there's three things, One is get to the doorway and move through the doorway and look at the variation in the white beads, and that gets us beyond perfection into the world of continuous... 0:18:06.8 BB: For the time, we'll call it continuous improvement. In a later session, we'll switch to continuous investment. And the reason I call it that investment is that it has to be worthwhile. We don't improve to improve, we improve because the gain we get in the marketplace, economically, market share, has to be more than what we're putting into the effort. It's gotta be worthwhile. But the other thing I wanna say is, I've seen people strive to make things... Well, just, I will save this for later. There's a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to everything being good. And again, which is why we've been talking for four sessions now about question one and question two, and the idea that I've not seen anywhere in quality management, let alone management, period, an appreciation of question two, whether it's program management, have the requirements for that task been done? In program management, they'll talk about red, yellow, green, green is good. We passed the floor. What does green mean? Mean green is good. So even in the world of program management, I see the same mindset of striving for everything being good, missing opportunities to manage the variation of things that are good to improve integration. And ultimately, everything has to integrate. 0:19:46.0 AS: Yeah, it's making me think a lot about the idea of once you get through the doorway, through the looking glass to the other side, that you're now really investigating what's happening further on down, and you may even find that the requirements, that the setting actually can be improved, then maybe they didn't even come with improved requirements 'cause they thought, Well, you can't even meet the requirements I've given you, so forget it. But then you just see that opportunities start to open up. And I think the other thing that... 0:20:21.6 AS: I remember a light bulb going off in my head about the Plan-Do-Study-Act, and thinking about it a lot and thinking about if you were to do a Plan-Do-Study-Act on one particular operation in a business, and let's say that you did it properly where you did it, you learn new information and you incorporate that information into the training manual for the people that are working in that operation, then you do another Plan-Do-Study-Act, and then you again, improve and then codify that in training. Then you do it again, and then you codify that in the training, so that you're never going back, number one, so you're never making prior mistakes, and you're bringing your operation to a higher and higher and higher level. Let's say you go through 10 iterations of that. The fact is that you've got all kinds of different improvements that have happened, but the biggest improvement is you have acquired knowledge in your company that your competitor doesn't have. 0:21:26.9 BB: Well, and let me add to that. Again, in the world of: if you don't look, you won't find, and if you do look, there's no guarantee, I've seen many a PDSA effort lead us in a direction we were not expecting, which can be disheartening. And essentially what you're discovering is not what you plan to discover. [chuckle] And I've seen people kind of fall off the horse because we discover something in the experiment... We discover something in the PDSA process which we never knew about, which turns out to be vital information, but because it wasn't what we were looking for, there's a disappointment more than a chagrin, of "darn." It's like we're using this piece of equipment, and we're trying to improve the equipment and in the process, we find out there's something wrong with how it's plugged in. Well, now, we know that. And so I've seen PDSA efforts result in great improvements, I've also seen the result and great learning. What do I mean by learning? From Russ Ackoff. Russ would say, learning is what happens when things don't go as planned. And what does that mean? It means there's financial... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26604573

Learning to Learn: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 4) 05/09/2023

Learning to Learn: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 4) Dr. Deming encouraged lifelong learning for everyone, but particularly for managers and leaders. In this episode, David and Andrew talk about Deming's fourth point in his list for The Role of the Manager of People After the Transformation: "He is an unceasing learner. He encourages his people to study. He provides when possible and feasible seminars and courses for advancement of learning. He encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined." 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 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. The topic for today is Learning to Learn. And just as a reminder, we're going through the section of The New Economics third edition, it starts on page 86 for those who want to follow on, and for those who have the second edition, it starts on page 125, and the title of the list that we're going through is called Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. And we are now talking about the fourth point on this list, which reads as follows: He is an unceasing learner. He encourages his people to study. He provides when possible and feasible seminars and courses for advancement of learning. He encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined. David, take it away. 0:01:16.8 David Langford: Yes, good to be back, Andrew. So I always have to caution people, Dr. Deming wasn't into all the pronouns and everything that we use today, so he just means everyone. So if you're a manager... Yeah. So all of these points I, over the years, have taken to heart, and even as a classroom teacher I started figuring out, "Where do I start? What do I do?" Once I have been to a Deming seminar everybody wants to know, "What do you do Monday morning?" And these are really good places to begin, and you certainly can't do them all at once. It's sort of an inter-related system, and so when you start concentrating, you're always wondering, "Well, what do I do next as a manager?" Go back to one of these points to say, "Okay, have I done anything about that?" And so when you think about your role as a manager and if you think about yourself as a teacher, you're a manager, you're administrator, you're a manager, he's talking about... Anyway, if you're a parent, you're a manager of a family, right. And so you wanna think about it in those terms all the time. 0:02:31.2 DL: I never forgot even the very first seminar or the very first time I ever got to talk to Deming, and he was really interested in talking to me because there weren't very many educators at the time talking with him, and he was an educator. He was taught at New York University for 40 years, so I was really interested in talking to him about education and we were just chatting about the application of his thinking and theories to education. And while we're talking, he says, "Just a moment," and he pulls out this little notebook and he starts writing down what we were talking about. And I was just like, "Dr. Deming's writing down something I said, or we said, or we were talking about or whatever." And then come to find out his whole life he kept these little notebooks and sometimes if you were around them at the end of the day and people would be talking, he'd pull out his notebook and he'd say to people, "Look what I learned today." And that was just - flabbergasted about that, and not only is this guy 90, 91, 92 years old, but he was actually living this point every single day of his life. He was consulting... 0:03:48.8 AS: Yeah. And you can realize that when you read his work too, because he's always highlighting, someone said in a seminar or so and so said this, and that you now picture, he's taking a note and then later he's put in into his book. 0:04:03.2 DL: Yeah. When you're at the seminars, you hear him say, I'm eternally grateful to so and so for this point, or the Taguchi loss function, or all these amazing economical ways of thinking and management and all those kinds of things. He's really great at giving credit like that, but he was also very great at explaining that, hey, he'd learn something new. Even at his age, 90 years old, he was still learning things that were new to him. 0:04:35.3 DL: I was living in Alaska, at the time we were remodeling a house built in 1898. I happened to find a box of photographic plates in the attic, and when I was cleaning out stuff and everything, and these were late 1800s, and they were photographic plates on glass. The wedding that had taken place at the house that we then owned and we were remodeling, so that was pretty cool. As I was looking at the box, it said if you find any defect, anything... I can't remember exactly the wording on it but, "If you find anything wrong with these photographic plates, please contact us at this address, and also please add the box number of photographic plates, so we may find the person guilty of making the error and remove them." [laughter] 0:05:41.6 AS: What? [laughter] 0:05:41.6 AS: They're terminated. 0:05:44.4 DL: "Thereby improving the quality of our product." And this is... I'm not gonna say the name of the company, but it was a major company at the time, and I was so blown away by this so I took the box, took the plates out. I took the box to Dr. Deming at one of the seminars and brought it up to him and said, "I have a gift for you," and he said, "You do?" And I said, "Yes," and I told him where I found it, and I said, "I think you will really enjoy this label." And he read it and his mouth dropped open. He said, "Oh my god." I said, "I'm gonna give it to you as a gift." And he said, "Oh no, this is too valuable for you to give it to me." And then... So he made somebody go down and make a copy of it and turn it into an overhead thing, and he started using this at seminars because it was exactly everything that he was reversing in management thinking at the time, for the next 100 years he was reversing that thinking. 0:06:50.0 AS: It was just to put some context... 0:06:52.8 DL: And I was always so proud of that that I was one of those people that said... 0:06:57.3 AS: Look at this. 0:06:57.8 DL: Thanks to David Langford for this. That was my big contribution. 0:07:01.7 AS: There you go. And for the listeners out there who... To put this in a frame of reference, back in those days, the way that we presented, and I didn't so much 'cause I was pretty young when I went to my first Deming seminar, is that we had acetates or meaning transparent pieces of A4 or letterhead paper, letter paper, the size of that, it was just a clear plastic thing and then you would write on it, and then you would put it onto a screen which would then project up on to a wall. And so it was either that or we had rollers where you could roll the acetate across, so you'd write a little bit and then you'd roll it, and so that was the way that he did his presentations in those days. 0:07:46.5 DL: Yes. He was constantly rolling forward, rolling backwards and drawing right on the screen and working through, so... He was well-known for being very, I'm going to say, curt, but very direct, very short with people. When they asked a question, like people would line up at different points in time and get ready to ask him a question, somebody would come up and ask a question, and he'd say something like, "We already covered that this morning. Where were you, in the parking lot? Next question." 0:08:23.2 AS: Yeah, which is kinda scary for people in the audience. 0:08:25.4 DL: Yeah. Well, a lot of people viewed that as, "Oh well, he's not really interested in people learning about things." But no, it's just the opposite. If you are trying to ask a question simply to discredit him or to take him down in front of, or make yourself look better in front of other people, or things like that, he had no time for you and he would openly say, "I don't have time for this. I'm 90 years old or 92 years old. I don't... " 0:08:57.0 AS: I'm on a mission. 0:08:58.7 DL: "I don't have much time left and I don't have time to waste on you." And he wouldn't ever say that... 0:09:00.7 AS: But he would... 0:09:01.7 DL: But he would cut people off, for sure. 0:09:04.8 AS: And I remember that I felt pretty safe as a young guy with pretty innocent questions coming to him. I felt like he was very welcoming to the majority of people. But there was a certain thing that either someone that completely missed what was going on and he could get a little bit annoyed with that, or if it was someone at a senior level that should know this and they don't know it and, "I'm gonna make sure you never forget this interaction." And I remember the one that I remember from being in the seminar was when someone got up and said, "Since you're the father of TQM, I wanted to ask you a question about X, Y, Z." And Dr. Deming looked at him and he says, "What is TQM?" 0:09:48.7 DL: Yeah. He knew full well. 0:09:50.9 AS: And he goes, "Wait, wait, what? Wait, what? I don't understand 'cause I didn't know what he meant." 0:09:56.4 DL: Yeah. Well, not only was he an avid learner like that himself, he wanted everybody else to be like that too. You wanna do continually questioning, continually trying to understand, continually learning, apply, thinking on a level that most people were never taught to think on that level. 0:10:19.3 AS: I wanted to ask you a question about this from a bigger picture perspective, and that is to say that you're a learning company or you're an unceasing learner or we're into learning and all that. It's such an easy thing to say. 0:10:36.9 DL: Cliche. 0:10:39.4 AS: Yeah, it's cliche, yes. But it feels good to be able to say, we're a learning organization. We're trying to learn. But the fact is, is that he's... The reason why he's raising this is maybe most people really are learning or they're not a learning organization. Can you put it in that framework before we get into a little bit more detail on it? 0:10:58.8 DL: Yeah, absolutely. I thought the first time I went to see Deming, I was a year out from getting my Master's degree, right. And so I'm thinking, well, yeah, I'm a learner, right? I got my Master's degree and like you have a whole bookshelf behind you, yet people just listening can't see it, but you have a ton of books behind you, and I might have an entire library here myself, etcetera. And so I'm a learner, but at that time, I suddenly had this realization in probably the very first four-day seminar, I had never read anything that wasn't assigned to me. I've been going through school my whole life or being a teacher myself and teaching a curriculum or dictating what other people should read based on that curriculum, but I'd been... I don't know, probably since I was a little kid that I just went to a library and looked around and just picked out a book I wanted to read. And that started really my journey of thinking, "Okay, I have to be just learning all the time, I have to be reading all the time and thinking all the time," and have never forgotten that. And so that also causes you to have a very open mind about things. 0:12:23.7 DL: In the politically charged realm that we are now, there are so many people that you can't even talk about the opposite point of view. It's just a complete shut down of, "No, I'm not gonna talk... I'm not even gonna talk about that." I think Deming would just be shocked and dismayed about that, that if you can't argue with your boss he's not worth working for. 0:12:53.8 AS: Yeah. And also as a person that's lived outside of the US for many years and look back at the US, I realize that the collision of ideas and opinions is actually the whole process of learning. 0:13:09.0 DL: That's the whole point. Yes. 0:13:10.5 AS: That is how... That is kind of the history of how we've acquired new knowledge. 0:13:18.9 DL: Quickly and move a society for it or a business forward or whatever it might be. And so what he's talking about here in a company or a school, etcetera, if you're not constantly encouraging people to think and to learn and to understand, you're gonna become stagnant or not only stagnant, you're gonna go backwards, and I think about things. 0:13:44.1 AS: Can you explain this again? Going back to the big picture. I bet you that if you and I did a survey of top US companies that are successful, or the companies they're gonna all say... They're gonna all say, we're a learning organization. 0:13:58.5 DL: Right. 0:13:58.6 AS: And I just want to understand... 0:14:00.5 DL: When I started this journey, yeah, I studied Toyota because Deming had done a lot of work with Toyota and everything at the time. And one of the things I learned from one of the managers there, I said, "Well, how much time do you spend in training and development of employees?" And he said, "20% of the time." He said, "We're hoping to get to 40% of the time." "What? You mean 20% to 40% of the time you're actually training, developing people, giving them information, etcetera, instead of actually producing their products?" That didn't make any sense. So I went back to my school, I did an analysis, how much time did we actually spend with our staff and faculty in training, and it came up to be like 5% of the school year was actually spent in us training them in new concepts or ways to think, etcetera. 0:15:00.5 AS: And it's a great point... 0:15:03.8 DL: And I thought how much time do we spend training the students in thinking? 0:15:09.6 AS: Yeah. 0:15:10.4 DL: Well, zero. 0:15:10.6 AS: Yeah. It's a great point to stop for a moment for the listeners and the viewers to ask yourself, how many hours, what percent of the time, of the week, of the month, of the year do you spend or does your school or your firm spend in learning and training, in both training and education? I bet you it's not 20%. 0:15:39.5 DL: Well, the students that I was working with, these were just high school kids, and so we were going through these points and we're having this discussion, and I showed them the data, and they said, "Well, when do we get to learn?" And... "So what are you talking about? You're going to school." And they said, "No. You're learning all this stuff about Deming and discussing it and watching videos and everything. When do we get to do that?" And I realized I wasn't doing that with students, and so I put them to work because the teachers all said, "Oh, we don't have time for that. We're already crammed. We can't get through the curriculum. We don't have time for anything like that," and so I put the students to work to come up with a new master schedule and then come back and present it to the staff, and they came up with two... I think it was 60 or 90-minute sessions per week that they wanted to come together and just and learn, and it was just an amazing way to think about it. 0:16:42.7 DL: So one of those sessions I had each week with the entire student body, and basically I'd show them a Deming film or I'd show them something new or something that's happening in education, and I'd put them into groups and have them discuss about it, and what do you think about that and how could that be applied here, and what should we do differently? And then the other session was a session where they wanted to go anywhere that they needed to go in the building to get help and catch up on anything they needed to catch up on. And this is totally a foreign concept because we were constantly following every kid down, "Where are you going? You're going to the bathroom. Here's a bathroom pass and you're gonna go here and... " What? We're going to actually trust these kids to do stuff? So it took us probably a whole year to convince the staff, the administration and everybody that, "Okay, well, let's at least try this." Right. 0:17:41.0 DL: So the first time we ran a session like that where the students could go any... They could go to the science room, they could go to the computer lab, any place they needed to go to learn and catch up and get help or work or however they wanted to do, but they just had to be learning during that hour session. Well, the principal went around and actually counted kids in all these rooms and everything else, and lo and behold found out there were like 10 kids that took off and went to town. Right. So he calls an emergency meeting after that day and says to the whole staff, "We can't keep doing this. We got 10 kids that took off and just blew the whole thing off, and so we gotta change the whole master schedule and redo it and everything, and we gotta start over again." And I'll never forget 'cause we're just sitting there, sort of stunned. Trying to think, "Well, okay, now what are we gonna do? And then we're gonna have to redo everything." 0:18:46.0 DL: And all of a sudden, the science teacher said, "You know, in my room, I must have had 60 kids doing science, and he said, I'd say a majority of them weren't even doing stuff that was assigned to Science class. They were exploring all kinds of new concepts, asking me questions about all kinds of things in Science." And English teacher said, "We were having the greatest discussion about applied Romeo and Juliet to modern issues." She said, "I never had time for that in my classroom, but a whole bunch of us just ended up sitting around and we just started talking about the application of these things in a modern society." And almost every single teacher said the same thing. And then finally somebody said, "Well, how many students we have?" And I think at the time we had about 300 students, so 10 of them left. That means 290 students were actually engaged in learning and doing exactly what we want them to do, and we wanna throw this out because of special causes. And that's when I realized, oh, special and common cause - people are getting it. Our training is actually seeping into the terminology and the way of thinking about people. So we didn't throw it out and we kept it, and within a few weeks there wasn't anybody gone, because the kids that had took off came back. 0:20:19.3 AS: They got it out of their system. 0:20:21.5 DL: While the other kids said, we're talking about the great time they had, and not only that they were catching up on work that they didn't have time to normally, and all kinds of other things that went on. It even happenened in sports, a whole bunch of them went to the gym and just worked on basketball techniques, and even the PE teacher was amazed that I just had all these kids in their learning and wanting to know about, "How do you do a shot and how do you do this and how do you make this happen?" And teachers were just sort of dumbfounded about this, that students would actually learn on their own without being given a grade or forced to do something. 0:21:01.9 AS: And what I wanted to also think about is the idea that if we read the 14 points and trying to understand what Dr. Deming is telling us, there's this, number one, constancy of purpose, there's this real focus on improvement, there's a focus on the customer, not the competitor, to try to improve what you're delivering to the customer, and then you combine this focus on learning and training. You bring these things together and in some way, it's almost like you've created kind of a tunnel vision that's between your company and the customer and your company and the suppliers, and it's this obsession on these things. And at first, it's hard to understand, but as you start to see this obsession you realize this type of focus can... And because you're learning, everything you're gaining it's taking you to another level and another level, and then you're applying it for your customer, for your student, for your school,... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26522595

Building Knowledge Through Predictions: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 4) 05/02/2023

Building Knowledge Through Predictions: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 4) In this episode (part 4 of the series), John and Andrew continue their discussion from part 3. They talk about how to use data charting in combination with the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle to gain the knowledge managers need to lead effectively. 0:00:00.1 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 am 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 Prediction is a Measure of Knowledge. And John, to you and the listeners, I have to apologize. I'm a bit froggy today, but John, take it away. 0:00:30.9 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew, it's great to be back. I thought what we could do is sort of build off, what we were talking about in the last episode. We sort of left off with sort of an introduction to process behavior charts and importance of charting your data over time. And sort of the idea this time is that, like you said at the outset is prediction is a measure of knowledge and prediction is a big part of improvement. So I thought we'd get into that. What role prediction plays in improvement, how it factors in and how we can use our chart in combination with another powerful tool, the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle to bring about improvement in our organizations. 0:01:15.1 AS: And when you say that prediction is a measure of knowledge, you're saying that prediction is a measure of how much you know about a system, or how would you describe that in more simple terms that for someone who may not understand that, that they could understand? 0:01:31.4 JD: Yeah, it took me a while to understand this. I think, basically the accuracy of your prediction about any system or process is an observable measure of knowledge. So when you can make a prediction about how a system or a process, and I use those words interchangeably, is gonna perform the closer that that sort of initial theory is, that initial prediction is to what actually happens in reality, the more you know about that system or process. So when I say prediction is a measure of knowledge, that's what I'm talking about is, you make a prediction about how something's gonna perform. The closer that prediction is to how it actually performs, the more you know about that system or process. 0:02:19.1 AS: I was just thinking about a parent who understands their kid very well can oftentimes predict their response to a situation. But if you brought a new kid into that house that the parent didn't know anything about their history, their background, the way they react, that the parent doesn't really have anything to go on to predict except maybe general knowledge of kids and specific knowledge of their own kid. How could that relate to what you're saying that prediction is a measure of knowledge? 0:02:52.3 JD: Well, I think that's a great analogy. One of the things that Dr. Deming said that it took me some time to understand was that knowledge has temporal spread - just a few words, but really causes some deep thinking. And I think what he meant was, your understanding, your knowledge of some topic or system or process or your kid has temporal spread. So that understanding sort of increases as you have increased interaction with that system process or in this analogy, your own kid. So when you replace a parent who knows their kid well with some other person that doesn't know that kid as well, they haven't had that sort of, that that same, that shared time together. So there's that, they don't have that same understanding. It's gonna take time for that understanding to build. I think the same thing happens when we're trying to change a system or a process or improve it or implementing a new idea in our system or process. And so the prediction at the outset is probably gonna be off. Right, and then over time, hopefully as we learn about that system or process or kid in this instance, that that prediction is gonna get better and better, as we learn over time, basically. I think. 0:04:15.8 AS: Yeah, it's interesting because saying the words temporal spread kind of gives way to the idea that Dr. Deming was educated in 1910, 1915, in speaking, reading, writing. And then he also, he said things, that his objective wasn't to just completely simplify. And I think that the messages that he was bringing were difficult to simplify, but you could say that, "improves over time" is what temporal spread may mean. Right? Okay. Let's keep going on this. This is interesting. 0:04:55.0 JD: Yeah, I think, maybe it'd be helpful if I share my screen and we can sort of connect the dots from last time to... 0:05:00.8 AS: Yep. And for the listeners out there, we'll walk you through what John's showing on his screen in just a moment. All right. Now we can see a chart on his screen. 0:05:11.7 JD: Yeah, I think, so we see a process behavior chart sort of orient, the watchers and then even the listeners. So the chart is a process behavior chart. That terminology can be a little bit confusing. Some people would call this a control chart, some people would call it a Shewhart chart, my sort of preferred terminology is process behavior chart because it's literally charting some process over time. So the example I used last time was charting my own weight. So you can use, you can chart personal items, you can also obviously chart things that are important to you in your organization. But the main thing is pull numbers out of a spreadsheet. That's what we talked about last time. Pull numbers out of the table instead plot that same data over time. So you can see how it varies naturally, perhaps, or how it varies in, special ways over time. So the, for the watchers, the blue dots are individual data points. The dates are running along the X-axis of the chart. And so you can see those moving up and down over time as I weigh myself every morning. Then we have the green line. 0:06:30.6 AS: At the beginning of the chart, we see those individual data points hovering around maybe 179 to 80, something like that. 0:06:41.8 JD: Yeah. Bouncing around in the 180, 178, 176 range. And then... 0:06:48.8 AS: And just for the international listener, John is not 180 kilograms [laughter], he's 180 pounds. Okay. Continue. 0:06:56.8 JD: That's right, that's right. On the Y-axis, we have weight in pounds. And so in addition to the blue dots and we've added a green line that is the average over time. And then we have sort of the last component of the process behavior chart, we have the red lines, which are the upper and lower natural process limits, or some people call them control limits sort of are the bounds of this particular system at a given point in time. And so, as we watch this data unfold, we can see that it does move up and down in different ways, in different patterns, but it's far more illustrative than if I was just looking at that table of numbers. So when I do this daily, I don't wanna overreact to any single data point. Instead, what I'm trying to do is get a sense of how this data is performing over time, right? So I can see this unfold over the course of days and then weeks and then months and all along, my knowledge of my weight system is increasing. 0:08:09.7 JD: Even if you don't know anything about process behavior charts, you could do this on a simple line chart or run chart without the limits, and you'd still learn much more than what you would with that table of numbers. But with the addition of the red lines, the natural process limits, what I am doing is sort of saying based on some simple mathematical calculations, that these are the bounds of my system that I would expect because of the data empirically based on the actual dots on the chart, these are the bounds of my system. And if a point would happen to fall outside of those red lines, I know something special has happened because it's so mathematically improbable that it's not to be expected. And there's a few other patterns in the data too that you can look for besides a single point outside of one of those red lines. 0:09:08.4 JD: But I'm looking for those patterns to see if something special has happened or I'm seeing if my data is sort of generally bouncing around between those red lines. And in either case, there are different approaches to trying to improve that, improve that data over time. And one other thing that I like to do, I always make my data blue, my average line green and my process, my natural process limits red. And then whenever I do this internally with data from our own organization, whether it's attendance data or test data or financial data, whatever the data is, I always use that same pattern. So people get used to seeing these colors and they associate blue with data, green with the average and red with the limits. 0:10:00.7 AS: So tell us more about, I mean, one of the things before we even talk about PDSA, what's happening here is that the upper limit and the lower limit at two points in this chart shift down. So you're, if you didn't change the upper and lower limit and you just had your, that standard one across the whole chart, then it probably starts to lose its value because the process that you're describing is going back in time to such an extent that things were different. Tell us about why you've made this adjustment. 0:10:46.0 JD: Yeah, I'd say if the natural process limits, so the red lines sort of stay in the same spot. So if I don't see those special patterns, basically what I can assume is that that system is, despite the fact that the data is bouncing around a little bit naturally, that, there's nothing sort of significant that's happened either in terms of my weight system getting worse, or in this case I want to get better. Obviously, I wanna lose a little bit of weight. If I don't see those patterns in the data, then nothing has changed. So if I'm trying something new to bring that weight down and I don't see any of those special patterns that tell me to adjust the natural process limits, that means what I'm doing is not having an effect. Right. So there's one, you wanna know what reality is for whatever the thing is that you're talking about. 0:11:37.7 JD: So on the very first day, you can see, when I weighed myself, it was like something like 182 pounds or something like that. And I could say I weigh 182 pounds, but that's not really reality, except that I weighed 182 pounds on the morning of November 28th when I recorded that data. But the very next day it goes down a little bit and then it goes down quite a bit that third day, and then it bounces back up, and then back down, and then back up and then back down a little bit. And that's the real sort of reality. And I don't really weigh 182, I'd probably weigh somewhere closer to that average of 179 across those first two weeks or so. Right? But I don't know that until I've collected, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 data points, what my reality is. 0:12:30.0 JD: And that's why this charting is so important. It helps me understand reality in a much more accurate way. So when we're trying to improve, I think, in this case, I decided to gather data on a daily basis. And I think when that's sort of another important consideration, when you're doing improvement work and charting, you wanna gather data in a rhythm that matches whatever it is, whatever that metric is that you're concerned with, you want that, you want the data to be gathered in a way that matches that metric. But in general, more frequent is better, as long as you're not overreacting, like I said earlier, to any single data point. Instead, you wanna gather data, you wanna have those 15, 20 data points, see the patterns, and then start to look for changes in those patterns. The three that I happen to look for are, a single point outside the natural process limits, or I'll look for eight consecutive points, either above or below that average line, or I'll look for three or four points that are closer to the red line than they are to that average line. 0:13:41.4 JD: Any of those three patterns emerge. I know something has changed, and I'll go ahead and shift the limits. If I know, when I'm looking for those patterns, I wanna know why that change has happened. So sometimes when I see a pattern, and if I don't have an explanation for why that data shifted, even though it shifted in a way that was mathematically unexpected, sometimes in those instances, I won't shift my limits. So I generally will only shift when I see a pattern and I can sort of pinpoint a reason for that, for that shift. 0:14:18.4 AS: And when you say shift, you're saying shift your upper and lower process limit? 0:14:20.0 JD: Yeah. I shift the limits at the point where I saw one of those special patterns begin, basically. 0:14:29.6 AS: Okay. All right. Keep going. So you got PDSA on there now. 0:14:32.9 JD: Yeah, so I think, when I think about continual improvement, there's a lot of different tools we can use and a lot of tools that are valuable, especially when you sort of facilitate an improvement team, a group of people working together, especially because those various tools can help you visualize what people are thinking. But if I had to boil continual improvement down to two tools, it'd be the process behavior chart combined with the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So sort of the theory of variation is the process behavior chart, and then what Deming would call the theory of knowledge, the PDSA or Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle is a key component of that theory of knowledge part of the system of profound knowledge. So you can see on my chart, I have three cycles that I've gone through so far. 0:15:24.6 JD: So I've basically run three experiments to try to bring the weight down. So PDSA cycle one, then I made a slight adjustment based on what I learned adjusted after about 30 days, I ran another Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, ran that for another 30 days to see how it'll impact my weight. And then I've started a third cycle, and I've been running that now for about 45, 50 days. So the idea is, you run a, basically a structured simple, it doesn't have to be overly complex, simple experiment. And then you see if what you're doing is working, and in this case it's resulted in two, two shifts or two patterns of data that tell me that that actual improvement has happened. Not that I just decreased my weight, but it decreased to such an extent that it showed up as a mathematically unlikely pattern in my data. 0:16:33.3 AS: Well, I think all of us who wanna reduce our weight, kind of wonder, what did you do that caused your weight to fall and be consistently lower? 0:16:47.5 JD: Yeah, [laughter] that's a good question. I mean, pretty simply, mostly I focused on what I was eating. I sort of cut out the sort of typical culprits, the extra carbs, the processed food, and the sugar and focused mainly on meat and vegetables, across all three meals. And I added a little bit of exercise, there's a little more detail to it than that, but that's the basic, the gist of it. But the thing was, I wrote it down in a template, a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle template. So I had a simple plan written down. I had the dates during which I was gonna do this, and then I was gathering the data and charting it every morning to see how the experiment was working. And then after 30 days or so, I would study it a little more closely, revise the plan, and then sort of keep going with it. So it's not, certainly not rocket science, but it's a powerful method when you combine these two things. And again, you can do this for just about anything, any data that occurs over time in your organization, you can run these same experiments. 0:17:58.5 AS: So the power of the chart is that it gives you feedback to try to see if your prediction came true? 0:18:10.7 JD: Yeah. And you have the historical results. And then you can also look to see, again, if those special patterns emerge that tell you that actual improvement happened, verse, an insignificant, in this case, decline in weight. 0:18:29.0 AS: And what's interesting is after PDSA number three, you've gotten your weight down to an average of let's say 172, 173, something like that. 0:18:38.1 JD: Yep. That's right. 0:18:39.6 AS: And it's just kind of bouncing around tightly, somewhat within that level. 0:18:47.0 JD: Yeah, I mean, basically what you see is you'll see three or even sometimes four, or even close to five days in a row where it's below that average line. And so you're saying, "Oh, I'm getting close to being able to shift again." And then what actually happens is the weekend [laughter] So I'm way more disciplined during the week when I have to go to work and those types of things. And then, but you can learn from that. You can learn that that's what's showing up in the pattern. And I've also gotten to a point where it's gonna be harder. Those first five eight pounds are much easier. And then, from there, depending on what you wanna do goal-wise, it could be harder, it could require a sort of a slightly different plan because PDSA one, two, and three are all variations of each other. There wasn't a lot of change from each of the cycles, but there was some learning that happened. 0:19:35.1 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I mean, that's a good point to maybe go little deeper into the PDSA cycle. So I mean, I think, for me, it took some time to sort of understand the PDSA cycle, even though it's, again, it's a relatively simple tool, and I think it's just one of those where you just need to do it, and over time you're gonna learn. So I think the first thing, you make a plan, you do it, you carry out the plan, you study what happened, and then at the end you act and you decide what to do. And I think really, the most powerful part for me was this realization that during the plan phase of the PDSA, it is absolutely imperative that you make a prediction. 0:20:29.0 JD: And if I'm doing team-based work, I have everybody on the team make their own prediction independently. We actually record that prediction in the PDSA cycle. And then during the study phase, we compare the data that actually was produced from that system or process, and we go back and compare it to what we predicted. And the difference between those two things is the learning that drives the next cycle, basically. So it's this iterative process. So you're, you don't just run one PDSA cycle, you basically run it until you've brought about an amount of improvement on that system or process that's acceptable, not, and then you may turn your attention to some other metric in your organization that's important to you. 0:21:22.0 AS: So I think what's important about this is that what he's describing is the way to acquire knowledge within an organization. But many times we see organizations lose the knowledge that they had. And I think that brings us to the concept of training and making sure everybody understands how we're improving the system based upon the knowledge that we gain. And if you can hold that, then the next time that we wanna try to improve the system, hopefully we go to another level, and then we hold that other level through training and making sure that everybody understands the knowledge that has been acquired in the system. And once we feel comfortable with that, then we go to the next level. And let's say that we do that 10 times in a particular process. That means that we've acquired, at 10 different points in time, we've acquired additional knowledge about the system. 0:22:23.2 AS: Now since I'm a finance guy, I like to bring that into finance terms and say, and that's how you build a... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26356812

Why Variation Matters: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 3) 04/25/2023

Why Variation Matters: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 3) In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss variation, the impossibility of true interchangeability and why we need to apply "shades of gray" thinking at work. Bill shares the key question that will take your organization beyond "meets specifications" and help improve your processes, so you can delight your customers. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 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 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 20th century quality, Bill take it away. 0:00:28.2 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. So the running joke on the 20th century quality is we could have said 19th century, and sadly it's still 21st century. And what do I mean by that? In our second episode, we've talked about the two questions of quality management. Question one, does this characteristic, does this product, does this thing meet requirements? There's only two answers. That's 19th century quality, that's 20th century quality, and by and large, that's 21st century quality. And my hope is that our conversation inspires people to move into question two, which opened opportunities for as you're talking about opportunities for investment, opportunities for doing amazing things, when we get out of the black and white of question one into the shades of gray, of question two. That's, that's so... 0:01:26.5 AS: So what century are we in now? 0:01:29.1 BB: I think the 21st. 0:01:30.5 AS: 21st. My goodness. People always get, I always get confused. We're in the two thousands, but that's a 21st century. And 19th century is the 1800s. 0:01:46.7 BB: Well... 0:01:47.5 AS: 20th century would then be from 1900s until 2000 or 1999. 0:01:54.3 BB: The... And just for some more clarity, and I was doing some research earlier today, but there's a great tie between question one and 19th century 20th centuries still: question number one, does this meet requirements? A lot of that ties back to this whole concept of interchangeable parts. Which is not what we do in the garage when we're in the garage building something - that's 21st century quality, because we design it, we buy the stuff again, whether you're building something in the kitchen, in the backyard, and we put it all together with a 21st century, a Deming-Taguchi approach to quality, which means we're not looking at the parts in isolation we're looking at how they come together, the idea of interchangeable parts, and the... A name that I usually find as being the father of this concept of interchangeable parts. People talk about Eli Whitney. 0:03:02.3 BB: But Eli Whitney heard about interchangeable parts from the first American to hear about this concept, who was Thomas Jefferson. And he heard about it when he was US Ambassador to France, in 1802 timeframe, he was Jeff, he was George Washington's ambassador to France. And while there he came across a Frenchman by the name of Andre Blanc, B-L-A-N-C. And Blanc is considered the... Not the father of interchangeable parts. There's a French general in the 1770s had this idea of you're in the battlefield, you've got all these broken weapon systems and I can't cobble together this cannon with these wheels to be able to continue fighting the battle because they're all crafts built with craftsmanship, which means these things don't come together. So this general had the idea, and I like to tell people, Blanc is the one who got the marching orders to go put this concept into practice. And so he's given credit for being the one to work through the details. 0:04:17.1 BB: And what I was reading earlier tonight I've done other reading on this before, but it was, Jefferson went to a presentation by Blanc, heard about the ideas. Jefferson wrote a letter to John Jay and I don't know exactly, I, John Jay's name, I... Name I've heard before. I don't know exactly what his role was in government. But he wrote a letter back that there's this thing, this guy Blanc, this concept of interchangeable parts. And as the story goes, Jefferson offered Blanc the opportunity to come to the States 'cause Jefferson saw this, not just on the battlefield, the ability to repair weapons quickly, quickly, quickly, but what this means to a growing society. And Blanc had no interest. And so Jefferson took the idea, gave it to Whitney. Whitney gets credit for the first contract with Congress ever for a product with interchangeable parts, which turned out to be rifles. And it took on the order of 20 years for him to figure out how to do that. But in the process, he was working on the design protocol, the quality system, which is 18th century quality, which is looking at all these parts, giving them requirements. And that's what we do today. 0:05:39.8 AS: So the US Congress kind of funded that research and development basically. 0:05:44.3 BB: Well, there's a fun story and [chuckle] is it a true story? It has the making of a true story 'cause he figured Jefferson is the, you know, the godfather of this movement. And the story is in the early 1800s John Adams is president and Jefferson goes to the Oval Office with Whitney to give John Adams an update on this thing called interchangeable parts. And so he brings in Whitney, you know, this is, you know, Mr. President, okay, this is Eli Whitney. And evidently Whitney comes in with two rifles and Jefferson says, okay, make me proud. And he takes the rifles apart and he moves the parts from one to the other and shows them this is what we're working on. And evidently Adams is blown away by the whole thing. Well, the punchline is that Jefferson working with Whitney's, hoodwinked Adams because the parts were handcrafted to be identical. What took another 18 or so years was his effort to create the tooling to mass-produce these, not hand-file them. It took some time. It took some time. But Whitney gets all that credit, but it goes back to Blanc. And also, in the very same timeframe, I've read of incredible efforts by the British in using this for pulleys and warships. And so this was going on elsewhere. 0:07:24.6 BB: What I've also heard... And I'll just throw out, I don't wanna go there. But I've heard accounts that the Chinese centuries before were looking at this. If somebody's thinking, "Well, was it them or... " I don't know. And so in the Google searches I was doing about an hour ago, I didn't find anything on China. But the important thing for our conversation is the idea of taking a product, breaking it into parts, giving the parts requirements, and having this sense of, "All these springs meet requirements. They're all good," which is question one. "All the bars are good, and we can interchange them." What I also say is that the concept behind question number one, saying that all these things that make requirements are good, all the barrels are good, all the locks are good, I would define that as absolute interchangeability, meaning the sense that any one of these can be put together with anyone else, and I could take any doctor, any of this, and I can absolutely plug and play. And what that ignores is variation. From a Deming perspective, which is question two, when you realize that all these parts that meet requirements have variation, that means they're relatively interchangeable, but they're not absolutely interchangeable. 0:09:01.2 AS: Which makes me think about the before interchangeability, which we're so familiar with in this modern world. Before... 0:09:08.4 BB: Everything is. 0:09:09.3 AS: Interchangeability, there was craftsmanship, whereas the difference is in those parts of a shoe, even though they may... My uncle and myself got the same shoe, there are some unique differences to those exact same shoes that the craftsman's not trying to get rid of. They're part of what... It's not a pressure that the craftsman feels. 0:09:33.7 BB: Well, handcrafted is expensive. These are handcrafted, a handcrafted guitar, a handcrafted... There's a place down the street where they... Essentially, it's handcrafted car wash, by hand. In the early days, handcrafted was the only thing. Then we went to interchangeable. And so we could have handcrafted truck, handcrafted this. But the point I wanted to make for our audience is question one does it meet requirements. There is a sense of absolute interchangeability, that I could replace this doctor with this doctor because they're both board-certified, this engineer with this engineer. It's like in the world of computers and software, it's this idea of plug and play. "I can take this one out, plug this one and just move on." And we have that sense of everyone in the organization is relatively interchangeable. The idea of interchangeability from a Deming perspective is workers are treated as interchangeable, products are treated as interchangeable, and what's missing is a sense of differences, that the people are actually different. They're not... And that's what we... The running joke we used to have with friends is that we've got... People are making parts that are interchangeable, and we're treating the people as if they are interchangeable. 0:11:03.5 BB: And that mindset of interchangeability is alive and well. Now, another thing just throw out, just for those that might not be familiar with this conversation, is that when requirements are set and I just like to say to people is, "Can a company go to a supplier and say, 'We want this part to be exactly 1-inch thick'?" And they'll say, "Yeah, we can pull that out." And I say, "Well, technically, no." 'Cause what exactly does 1 inch mean? Does it mean 1.000 inches? Does it mean we're gonna have that thickness all the way around the table? And what that is ignoring is variation. Even if I measure it and it's exactly 1.000 all the way around, well, when I ship it to your company, Andrew, and you measure it, are you gonna get the same value? And if you get a different value, does that mean I can't sell it to you? What we do is we take the 1.00 and we say, "Plus or minus some small number." We can say, "10 plus or minus 1/16 of an inch." And then we get into the world of requirements where there's a maximum and a minimum. And now what we're saying is good, which is question number one, is everything in between. And my explanation is, if we didn't allow for that wiggle room, we couldn't have commerce because we're not acknowledging variation. 0:12:49.3 BB: And that goes back to... Again, it goes back to Whitney and Blanc is a sense of, "We're gonna put bounds on it, anywhere in between." In the world of American football, that saying... Or international soccer, "Anywhere within the net is a goal. Anywhere within." What's missing from that is if, is what happens if we're at different values within that range, what, where does that, what do the differences in meeting requirements mean? And what I point out is the differences in how we meet requirements shows up when you take the thing from me and try to do something with it. 0:13:37.9 AS: So it's related to the application that it's being used in. 0:13:43.6 BB: And I don't... A question that I like to ask that I don't, I'm not sure if we've gotten into in the first or second session is, I'll ask people, what do you call the person that graduates last in their class in medical school? Doctor. They meet the requirements. So does the first person in class. Well, they, that's from a question one perspective, those two doctors are absolutely interchangeable. I need a doctor. Well, what I ask is, is there a difference between those two doctors? And if there is a difference, when does that difference appear? And that's what you're talking about. From a question two perspective, the difference between those two doctors shows up when they walk into your room. They know when they're providing the whatever procedure you need, when they interact with you and your family, when they interact with other professionals at the hospital. The difference between any two things that meets requirements shows up when they, when all these things come together. And my excitement over Deming's work is he learned about that from Dr. Taguchi, who I learned it from. 0:14:47.1 BB: And what Dr. Deming did was integrate that sense of understanding variation and systems with the psychology of theory of knowledge of the system of profound knowledge. And that's provides an incredible theory by which to run organizations. That's the potential of 21st century quality that I hope we can inspire. 0:15:08.7 AS: And if I kind of try to piece together what you're putting out there, I think the first thing you're saying is that absolute interchangeability doesn't exist. 0:15:18.7 BB: No, no. 0:15:18.8 AS: Because nothing can be perfectly interchangeable. The other thing... 0:15:22.5 BB: If no two snowflakes are the same, if twins aren't identical, then you can't have absolute, absolute interchangeability. If you understand variation, it can't be. 0:15:32.9 AS: Okay, so then the next thing is that because we can't have absolute interchangeability, we need to understand some parameters or requirements and of what we need for this application. And then the other part of that is to understand that then there's variation even within, once you've set those parameters or requirements, there's going to be variations within that. Help me to continue to understand this. 0:16:06.4 BB: Well, first, let me give you an example outside of manufacturing just to make it easier to understand. So one is you put out a job search that you're looking to hire someone with these skills and 10 people meet the requirements. And does a given company take those 10 people and say, "Okay, put their names in a box, we're going to randomly pull them out?" I don't think so. We narrow it down. We take the ones that meet requirements. We call them up. We do an interview. What are we doing? We're sorting amongst things that meet requirements. Why? Because they aren't absolutely interchangeable. 0:16:50.3 AS: But when we're sorting amongst those, we're sorting, as you just described it, we're sorting by different characteristics like from the way they respond to something, or. 0:16:58.3 BB: Well, we're saying these... So we're saying these 10 people all meet the requirements of number of years of experience, a bachelor's degree, this and this. But now what we're doing is seeing through phone call, likely the scenario would be we're going to interview them by phone and get it down to three, bring the three in. What we're looking for is, what we're saying is those 10 are different. They all meet requirements, but they're different. And what we're looking for eventually is which one's the best fit. Why? Because fit is relative, not absolute. If fit was absolute, we would just roll the dice and say they're all the same. It doesn't matter. No, we don't do that. And like I say, I kid people, "Is that how we find a spouse? We just go to some dating app. We end up with three people. We say, this one?" No. We're looking for which is the best fit. 0:17:52.9 BB: So this idea of understanding fit as relative is an everyday thing. All the parking spots meet requirements, which is the best fit for what I'm doing that day? That's what we're talking about. And I mean, aside from manufacturing, it's the same concept. We're saying all the fruit is not the same. I want one which is about this juiciness. These applicants are not the same. What we're looking for is which is the best fit into the system of the product or the service or the company. 0:18:29.7 AS: And this discussion helps people to think about the idea that it's kind of nonsense just to think that by defining something kind of loosely, like I want this one inch long, as an example, that there's just so many flaws to that, that it's not the best way to do it. We need to understand more. What does it take away from this? 0:18:58.6 BB: Well, let me say this, because I don't want to make it complicated, but there's a time and a place for absolute interchangeability and moving on. We go to McDonald's, that's how they make their food. We're just saying, okay, I mean, I'm not saying absolute interchangeability, get rid of it. What I'm saying is use absolute interchangeability where it's not worth doing more than that. And then where it makes sense, whether it comes to staffing, a relative... And even in every feature of a product that you make, not every aspect of it has the same fit issue. So the big thing is, where fit is most difficult, or most important, that's where you apply the meaning of question two. So if it's not worth the effort, then you don't do it because the strategy is the amount of time I put into sorting the things that are good has to pay for itself. 0:20:06.9 BB: So I go through all that trouble when it comes to who I wanna date, who I wanna marry, where we're gonna have the reception, where we're gonna go on vacation, alright? But it doesn't mean we apply that same degree of effort everywhere. Again, when you're selecting a doctor, you might wanna go to that extent. When you're selecting an attorney, but the idea is that you can, as we've talked prior, is become aware that's it's a choice. Do we focus on question one, which is absolutely interchangeability. It's a very simple model. Does the application... Is it worth any more time than that? No. Then that's the way to go versus question two. Let it be a choice. 0:20:49.5 AS: So let's wrap it up by thinking about the listener here and saying, okay, they're gonna go back into their job after listening to this. And what part... What can they do with this knowledge? Let's say an exercise at work or a way of thinking about how this can help them in their everyday job. 0:21:11.2 BB: I think the big thing is, and it's very straightforward, I don't know how much work it takes, but pay attention to how people use what you give them whether it's data you're handing off in a spreadsheet. Last week I met with our CPA who does our taxes year after year. And for my business, I give him a spreadsheet with a bunch of different columns and rows, and every year I add a couple more columns and a couple more rows. And I cut and paste and put it into a PDF file and send it to him. And I was talking with him last week and I said," You know, Mike, I can put that in a spreadsheet. It's a little bit more work for me." Because I said, "How legible is that fine print?" And he said, "It would be helpful if you did that." I said, "Boom, I can do that. I'm gonna do that." But if I didn't know, I would keep sending it to him, and he's squinting, squinting, squinting. 0:22:14.1 BB: And that's exactly what I'm talking about, is pay attention to how people use your work. It's as simple as that. Going around the corner and just asking for more clarity 'cause then the question is, "Is it possible that with a little bit more effort, I could save you a lot more effort?" [laughter] And that's what we're looking for. And relative to our accountant, it's not that hard for me to cut and paste and send him a different spreadsheet. That's a few seconds, and I think I could save him a lot more than a few seconds. So that's... The big punchline is in the world of interchangeable parts, I just say, "Hey, this is good. It meets requirements." Now what I'm paying attention to is, "What if I put a little bit more effort in this, can I make your life easier?" And that's the essence of teamwork. 0:23:11.8 AS: Yep. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap it up, Bill. On behalf of everyone at the Deming... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26604381

Optimizing Diversity: The Role of the Manager in Education (Part 3) 04/18/2023

Optimizing Diversity: The Role of the Manager in Education (Part 3) In this third discussion in a series on the Role of a Manager, David and Andrew discuss how a manager should view, and treat, people. Deming wrote, “It’s just not ranking people, it is instead recognition of differences between people and an intent to put everybody in position for development.” David applies this to education: literally looking at how to support everyone with limited resources. 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 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, and before we get started, David, I have to apologize my voice, I got a little bit hoarse. The topic for today is Optimizing Diversity. David, take it away. 0:00:28.7 David P. Langford: Well, you've been talking too much, Andrew. So we've been working in this section in Dr. Deming's book, The New Economics, and we've talking about the role of the manager, and the reason we're doing that is because I often get asked all the time, well where do we begin, and what do we do and how do we start stuff? And people get fired up about Deming concepts, and then they wanna know what to do next, and so that's why we've been talking about this about the role of a manager in a system and studying the aim of systems so on and so forth. 0:01:06.5 DL: So this is point number three, and I will just take a stab at just reading it. First off in Deming's words, so he says "A manager of people understands that people are different from each other. He tries to create for everyone interest and challenge and joy in work, tries to optimize the family background, education, skills, hopes and abilities of everyone. It's just not ranking people, it is instead recognition of differences between people and an intent to put everybody in position for development." So in today's lingo lingo, we would call that diversity, and there's lots of different diversity, of course, there's diversity in cultures, there's difference in languages, there's diversity of thought. There's lots of different ways to think about this. 0:02:01.9 DL: And I really like what Deming is talking about here. He said... He's talking about, what's your role as a manager? And so in this podcast, we're always talking about what are these things mean in education, obviously, Deming was talking mostly to corporate managers and people like that in business, but he was also an educator himself, so I always applied all these things to education in the same way. So as a teacher, you are a manager of people in a classroom, and when that group comes into the classroom, your job is to optimize the ability of them to work together, and that's what Deming is talking about here. And so there's lots of ways to do that. One of the ways that I picked up on a concept that was in Lean management called huddles, in which the Lean managers are taught to have a huddle with your employees first thing in the morning, well I transferred that into education and taught teachers all over the world have a huddle first thing in the morning. I just read a local research paper that came in on the web the other day, and a teacher was talking about the value of morning meetings. 0:03:28.5 DL: Well, call it whatever you want, but a huddle is just that basically, you just get everybody together. And it works fantastic, even kindergarten, whatever it might be, and get a chance to optimize their diversity. What happened over the weekend? What was memorable or not memorable. Does anybody have anything they wanna talk about? Something that happened that maybe you need support with or you don't have to say anything, but if you wanna say something, you can. And I've always found those things just to be amazingly helpful to everybody, because once somebody in the group knows that somebody else is hurting in some way throughout the day, they can do little tiny things, and kids have amazing hearts and will help people if they know that they need help. Another way that I've taught people to optimize the diversity through the classroom or problems and issues that people have is an exercise called fear and a hat, and with fear and a hat you get people to write down what are their fears, and works really great, like when you're trying to form a group, like in the beginning of the year, maybe even like day one, what are your fears about this year and what's happening or this class or just anything. You don't have to put your name on it. 0:04:58.8 DL: In fact, we don't want you to put your name on it and then just drop it in this hat, and everybody drops it in a hat and then you rummage them around and you pull one out. I've had kids put in things like, well, I don't know how to swim, and I'm afraid that other people are gonna find that out, and I'll get ridiculed for it. And these are high school kids. And so all we do is get in the huddle and just say, Okay, this... If you had a friend that had this fear or you had this fear, what advice could you give them about how to operate or what to do. And amazingly, kids come up with just fantastic ideas about how they could help somebody else, or sometimes kids will say things like, well, you could tell somebody else, you could tell somebody that you don't know how to swim, and so maybe they could help make accommodations for you or help you work through that, or you could take a swimming class and learn. It's never too late to learn how to swim. 0:06:03.8 DL: I have a good friend in Texas said she started taking a swimming class when she was, I think, 55 years old. Never learned how to swim really had convinced herself she doesn't know how to swim, and she started taking the class and lo and behold, she actually learned how to swim. You can overcome problems at any stage in your life, and when I read this point that Deming's making is that your job as the teacher/manager in that class, is to find out what is the diversity that you're dealing with in that class, and then learn how to optimize it within the group, because chances are the next group that comes in next year, you're probably gonna have somewhat the same diversity of thought and culture, you don't often get radically different groups in communities, you pretty much get the same kinds of kids coming through a system, unless they come from outside the country or outside the state, etcetera. And that diversity or those differences between people is something to be celebrated, not to be looked down on. And... Yeah, so I just found that to me, that's what Deming is talking about, is your job as the manager is to understand all these things about people, and then learn how to optimize that. And he goes further about... Go ahead what? 0:07:43.2 AS: At the end of that sentence. At the end of that whole section, he says, in an attempt and an attempt to put everybody in position for development. What... Is he talking personal development, is he talking development of the organization. What does he mean knowing that next section, he's gonna talk about learning, life-long learning and coaching and things like that, what do you think he meant by this word development? 0:08:10.1 DL: I think just that, that the development of the person. I've had students in classes that I didn't hear this one girl I had in class she didn't make a sound, didn't ever... You'd call on her she just look down at her desk. So I quickly learned, I can't really do that, I can't single her out, she was so embarrassed about that, and it was finally about January or February, one year, about six months into the school year, she was in a group, and they were going around the group and you could either participate or just say pass, and she couldn't even say pass. She would... It would just get to be her turn and all the kids just knew, Okay, well, we just waited a little bit here and then we're just gonna go on because she's not gonna say anything, and I'll never forget that it got to be her turn and all of a sudden, she looked up and she said, in the softest voice. Well, I think that... Around the kids and they were just like, everybody froze and it was like, oh my God, she speaks. And don't say anything, don't do anything, don't intimidate her in any way or she'll never speak again. 0:09:24.8 DL: But this was a girl that two weeks later, I had her giving a multimedia presentation in front of corporate heads at Motorola Corporation, and I'll never forget at the end of that that one of the managers came up to me and said, "Where do you get these kids?" Well, there's no way that he could see a nine months process in place, and this child had come in, and in many cases, sometimes people would have just written her off, but just gradually, tiny little challenges and getting the group to understand that their job was to support people that... You're always gonna have an issue or a problem going on. Well, that all came from this point, number three, of Deming's right here. 0:10:17.1 DL: And so when I would take students out to do presentations, we would talk about this very point, and everybody had a job of supporting everybody else. So when somebody got up to do a presentation, there was somebody running their video, there was somebody running this, there was somebody making sure their sound was correct, there was somebody who was doing this. And every time a student got up, there was this huge support network, and I will not forget, I went to a major state department, education state department at a capital in the US, and these kids gave a presentation, and I had just tons of people in education department, coming up to me saying the same thing, "Where do you get these people." And I thought, wow, you don't really even know the background of these students, some of them, we had to take them downtown and show them a stop light and go over the rules of the stop light, they'd never seen one before in high school, and these are the very same kids that are giving this presentation in front of all these people. So... 0:11:26.4 DL: To me, that's what he's talking about here, is getting everybody to work together, challenging them different levels, giving them experiences where they're learning new things and working together, but you're actually... You're creating a team, you're creating an interactive team, and it's a conscious effort that you're doing that, it just doesn't happen organically or by itself, it's a conscious effort that every day you're thinking about how can I optimize this team and move people forward? And if you do that and you think like that, pretty soon you have this amazing team of people. 0:12:10.2 DL: So I remember, I think in one of the videos that The Deming Library, there's a superintendent that I worked with in Texas for years, and he was talking about. People would come to his district and experience being around his staff, big staff, 3000 teachers in his district, and invariably superintendent from outside the district would say to him, "Where do you get these people?" Even in a system that big, and the first couple of times that would happen, he would just look at them kind of blankly and just say, "Well, I get them the same place you do, but I guess we just go about working together differently and thinking about supporting each other differently." 0:12:58.5 DL: The other thing I found out that through this process is that you have to be very patient because whether you're talking about students in a classroom whether you're talking about employees or entire student body or whatever it might be, you have to be patient that they're gonna come around over time, if given the right amount of support and challenge through that process. And be very cognizant of the small little ways that people are actually are moving forward and they are learning and they are feeling like they're supported, because if you don't have a very supportive classroom, you're not gonna get kids to take risks. You don't get kids to take risks, they're not gonna learn new things, they're not gonna try new things, and basically the only ones that achieve in an environment like that are the ones that really didn't need to be in the class in the first place, probably they could already aced everything that you are gonna have them do in that class, but you have to always remember that your job is to optimize the system and as... Get as many of these people to the highest level possible in the time that you have to work with them. 0:14:14.4 DL: And people that do that are very profound, and that's why Deming calls it Profound Knowledge, because when you see people like that, you are truly amazed that this can go on, so... 0:14:29.0 AS: One last thing for me is, why did he need to write this point, it seems so obvious that we should be trying to get the most out of everybody and get the uniqueness out of each person and bring that into value to our system, to our customer. I'm just curious, why isn't this being done? 0:14:56.1 DL: He's saying that, this is not about ranking people, so if you think your job is to rank people, you're not gonna be thinking like this, you're not gonna be thinking that, oh no, my job is not just to find out the weak ones and get rid of them or the people who can't do what they need to do, my job is to develop everybody as quickly as possible, giving them new opportunities and being supported within that organization. When you do that, you get amazing creativity at the same time. Because creativity gets shut down any time people feel intimidating... Intimidated, those kinds of things. This is also where bullying comes in, so if you're setting up the classroom where you're more concerned about ranking and rating people and grading people, then you are about optimizing the whole... Everybody's learning in that class. You're really opening it up for bullying and all kinds of things that go on. I've run into so many examples of parents telling me that all of a sudden their child was doing really good the year before, and all of a sudden this year, they're in a class and they just... They wanna quit, they wanna give up, they wanna get out, whatever it might be, and people wanna blame it on bullying, but you have to realize that 98-99% of the bullying is systemic. 0:16:33.8 DL: So the degree to which you have that going on in your organization, you need to be thinking about, okay, what am I doing that's actually encouraging bullying. And when you're grading people to 1/1000 of a point and ranking them and holding people up as being superior to other people, and things like that you're gonna get bullying, because the only way to exceed an organization that's like that is to put somebody else down. If I tear somebody else down, then somehow psychologically, that makes me look better, kind of thing, or even to the point of I'm gonna get rid of them 'cause they're a threat to my ranking and what I look like. And so... It's deep, it's profound. That's what the word profound means is deep. When you think about it in an organization, the last point I would wanna make about this is that because he's talking about your role as a manager, well, if you take this on as that, this is your job, I will guarantee you, you will be happier. You'll come every day, when you meet those students, you're just much happier about being with them because you're supporting them, but they're supporting too. They're supporting you as well. 0:18:01.5 DL: I used to do low ropes course training, and some of you may have heard of things like trust falls and things like that, where you fall back and somebody catches you, but we did a lot of those kinds of things with teachers and students to get teachers to learn to trust their students, and I'll never forget, I was in a middle school one time and I had taught all the teachers about how to run certain events and said, okay, well, here's how you do the first trust fall and then you can go all the way up to having somebody stand on a table and have all the students lined up behind them, and then they have to really trust and fall back and have the students catch him. Well, I was just kinda going around to all the groups, making sure everybody was safe and they were doing things correctly, etcetera, and I came by this one group in the cafeteria and this pretty veteran lady a teacher, she was really great at getting all her students that were in the group to do this trust fall and they well, clap and they were all happy about catching somebody and supporting them and stuff, and then this one little girl turns to her and she said, now is your turn. 0:19:12.0 DL: What this teacher came up with, oh, well, it's this, I'm too old to this, I can't do that, and they just let her go on with all these excuses, and finally one of the little middle school kids said, "Oh, but you have to." And you could just see the blood drain out of her face, but everything was... She had to step up on this step and then step up onto the table every time she would make an incremental leap in performance, kids would cheer like crazy. And she finally did it, it took a long time, but she finally crossed her arms and closed her eyes and fell back in those middle school kids caught her. 0:19:58.2 DL: And she burst into tears. And she told me later, she said, "You know, when I hit those kids hands my first thought was, in 20 years of experience, I had never really trusted my students with anything." And I thought, oh that was amazing. And I checked in with her a months later and a year later, and everything she said my whole life changed because of that kind of experience. So either you lead and you do these kinds of things to optimize the group and the diversity of the group that you have then and teach people to work together and support each other, or you end up leaving them up to their own devices, and then you end up managing the behavior that it produces all the time, because I can tell you that teachers that work in this kind of environment and really work diligently to optimize the diversity within their classrooms, they're not dealing with behavior problems, they're not dealing with bullying, they're not dealing with all the kinds of things that a lot of teachers think that that's their job. I'm supposed to keep track of all that and punish people that are doing it and etcetera. And Deming would say, well, you don't know what your job is. 0:21:23.2 AS: Well, let's wrap it up by thinking about optimizing diversity with the idea that the objective of a manager is really to get the most out of people and to get them to work as a team, and I think about it in the business world, it's the same thing and bullying that happens in schools, goes into the business world, and when you start ranking people, you start... And you have a scarce reward, you know, it just turns into pitting people against each other. You've talked about a couple of tools, one of them is the huddles, which is one way a morning meeting or a huddle, a very short morning meeting to check in with everybody and the value of that, and the second tool you talked about was "fear and a hat" and anonymously putting fear into a hat and then discussing those, sharing those in a group. You talked about the importance of supporting each other and working together to overcome challenges, and ultimately the idea of getting the most out of people and out of the system is also about creativity and getting that creativity, you never know where things will go. Is there anything you would add to that, wrap up? 0:22:38.1 DL: No, I think that's done well with that, except the final thing we talk a lot about... Deming talking about people have a... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26334927

Making Data Meaningful: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 3) 04/11/2023

Making Data Meaningful: Deming in Schools Case Study with John Dues (Part 3) Education is often touted as data- or evidence-driven. But in this discussion, John Dues contends that educational data is often fiction, given how easy it is to distort, both via the inputs and outputs and through manipulation. 0:00:02.6 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 the educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Data is Meaningless Without Context. John, take it away. 0:00:28.3 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. I'm thinking a lot about educational data, and I think about how it's often presented, and I think so often, what we're actually doing with our educational data is what I call writing fiction, which is taking a lot of liberties with the data that comes into our system, whether it's state testing data or some other type of data that gets reported out to the public, and we often sort of manipulate that data or distort that data in a way that paints our organization or our school system or our state in a positive light, and I think we do that sometimes at the detriment of actually working to improve those organizations or those systems because we spend so much time trying to paint this positive picture instead of just putting the data out there. 0:01:26.3 AS: And it's interesting you talked... One of the interesting things about what you're saying is that it could be accurate and good data, but it's just the context or the structure of how it's presented makes it meaningless. 0:01:39.9 JD: Yeah, we try so hard to sort of paint it in this positive light to make it look like we're doing a good job. Everybody wants to do a good job, but I think we often do that at the detriment of our systems. 0:01:54.7 AS: One of the things that made me think about it, in the financial world, we have a code of ethics, and that is basically that... Particularly for CFA charter holders, financial analysts, that you have to present a complete picture of your performance. So if you have 10 customers that you're managing their money and one of them, you really bombed out and you decide you're gonna do the average of the nine that you did well on and then go out to your clients and say, "This is my performance," that's a very... You have an obligation to accurately represent your performance. And when I think about it in all the charts and graphs that people are making in education all around, I would say that most people probably are just, I would call it CYA, cover your ass type of charts [laughter] of, "How do we make this look good?" 0:02:43.9 JD: Yeah, I think... I read somewhere that there's sort of three ways you can respond to your data. You can actually work to improve the system, which would be a positive, and then the other two ways are two forms of a negative, one is you could distort the system itself, or you could actually distort the data. And a lot of times, there's not sort of a nefarious motivation underneath that distortion, but there's sort of, again, this desire to paint your organization or your system in this positive light. So sometimes they're straight up unethical behavior or cheating, but most of the time, that's not what I'm seeing and that's actually not what I'm talking about here today. It's more of this sort of taking liberties, writing fiction. "Okay, we declined from two years ago, but it's up from last year." Those types of sort of distortions of the data that I think are fairly common in education sector, probably all sectors too, so. 0:03:49.9 JD: I think... Maybe I'll share my screen for the folks that have video and I'll talk through it for the listeners that don't have video, but one of the things I often think of and focus on is state testing data, because so many people are looking at that data all the way from State Departments of Education, the school system, the individual schools, the individual teachers and classrooms with their students, and then of course, families get these state testing reports as well. 0:04:23.8 JD: And a handful of years ago, I was looking at one of these reports from the Ohio Department of Education and sort of picture this fancy, glossy, colorful PDF. It's got this big headline on it, it says, "Ohio students continue to show improved achievement in academic content areas." Then it's got a table with all the state tests, all the different grade levels, and three columns for three different years of data. And then in the last column, there's these up green arrows for where there's been improvement from year over year and then these red down arrows for where there's been a decline, and I was thinking to myself, "Well, in some of these areas, one, some of the percentage changes are so small that just on that... In that realm, they're sort of meaningless, like fifth grade science goes from 68.3% in one year and it goes up to 68.5% in another year. That's essentially a rounding error when you're talking about 100,000 or so students that are taking the test. I think calling that improvement is a stretch at best. 0:05:39.0 JD: And then I was focusing on third grade reading specifically because that's such a critical area. In Ohio, there's actually a third grade reading guarantee, so if you don't pass the test, there's the potential there that you could get held back in third grade, so there's a lot of focus on that data. So I was reading on in that state education department document. It said, "Well, third grade did see this decrease this year, but when you look back two years, it actually had... Third graders actually had an increase of proficiency." So again, you actually have a decline from this previous school year to the more recent school year in this document, and they're still making this claim because if you go back two years versus this most recent year, you do see improvement, and so you start to think to yourself, "Well, what is improvement? Do we have a definition of improvement? And if so, what has to be present?" 0:06:43.4 JD: And a few years ago, I came across this definition in sort of a seminal work in our area called The Improvement Guide, and the author sort of outlined a definition for improvement, and it sort of has these three components, and this made a lot of sense to me. If you're gonna claim improvement, you have to, one, alter how work or activity is done or the makeup of a tool. So you had to change something. Basically change something about the work you're doing. That change had to produce these visible positive differences in results relative to historical norms, and then the third thing is it had to have a lasting impact. And so when I go back and I think about that state testing data or really any type of data, you start to ask this question, Is this really improvement, or again, is this writing fiction? Is this not really improvement, but we're twisting the numbers to sort of fit our narrative? 0:07:45.0 JD: So when we think about that state testing data, do we have knowledge for how worker activity has been altered systematically. And if I can't point to that, then how am I gonna take the so-called improvement and bring it to other places in the state that may not have had those same improvements? Do I have these visible positive differences in results going back and comparing to historical norms, not just last year or even two years ago, but five or six or eight or 10 years worth of data. And then have I been able to sustain that improvement? Has there been a lasting impact? Have I been able to hold the gains? And if I haven't been able to do those three things, point to what we change compared to historical norms and then sustain that improvement, I would argue that we haven't really brought about improvement. We can't claim that we've improved our system. 0:08:46.9 AS: It's interesting. Before we go on the numbers that you were showing, roughly, the average there is something like 60%. What's the 40? That 60% is what? And that means 40% is not that. 0:09:07.7 JD: Yeah, I'll go back. So when you're thinking about state test scores, most states have some type of threshold, like we have this goal that X percent of our students are gonna be considered proficient on any given test. So in Ohio, that threshold is 80%. So the state says, in order to meet the benchmark, any given school needs to have 80% of its students, let's say, on third grade reading test have to meet this proficiency standard. And so what we saw in this particular data is that in the 2015-16 school year, 54.9% of the kids met that proficiency threshold. The following year in '16-17, 63.8% of the kids met that threshold, and then in the most recent year in this particular testing document in '17-18 61.2% of the kids were proficient. So just about 40... 0:10:04.8 AS: So even if it was a sizable increase, it wasn't just statistically insignificant, it's still roughly 40% of the students aren't proficient. No matter even what the government says about what's the minimum standard, it would be hard to really argue too much about improvement when you're so low. [chuckle] 0:10:32.8 JD: That's right, yeah. And that's what you often see in these types of these documents. So 40%, a significant minority of students are not proficient on the third grade reading test, and 60% are, and there's these incremental increases and decreases depending on the year that you're looking at. 0:10:54.6 AS: It's like the Titanic heading for an iceberg and you say, "I've turned the ship one degree, but we're still gonna hit the iceberg." 0:11:01.9 JD: But we're still gonna hit, yep, yep. [chuckle] 0:11:04.3 AS: Alright, keep going. 0:11:06.0 JD: Yeah. So I think what's really important thinking about data in context, when you start actually stepping back and saying, "Okay, let's look at third grade reading over the course of 16 or 17 years versus three years," this very different story emerges. Part of that story is that context, so what has changed about Ohio's third grade state reading system over the course of those years? So if you go back all the way back to the 2003-2004 school year, you see Ohio is giving a particular test called the Ohio Achievement test, and you see as that's administered each year for six or seven or eight years, the results are sort of bouncing around this average, somewhere in the neighborhood of 77-78%. Then you have a change in about the 2011-12 school year. Now, we're given this test called the Ohio Achievement Assessment, but it's pretty similar, just the name has changed, the test itself is still the same, and you see basically these very similar results. And then all of a sudden, you sort of fast forward to the 14-15 school year. Anybody that's an educator from back in that time period, they'll sort of recognize that now we're getting these new common core standards, these more rigorous college and career-aligned standards, we start giving these new tests. 0:12:38.7 JD: So Ohio switches to the PARCC Test for the '14-15 school year for one year, and even then, the test itself changed pretty significantly in terms of format, but you still see pretty similar results that you've seen for the past 11, 12, 13 years. Then all of a sudden, that next school year, that 2015-16 school year, so that's the first year from that testing document, you see the results drop off a cliff and you start thinking, "Well, what happened to third graders?" 0:13:11.7 AS: Right. From, let's just say about 77 down to the next data point is 55. 0:13:18.6 JD: Yeah, just under 55% now. So you have this just about a 20, 22% drop in one school year. Now, the test did change again. Now it's called The Ohio State Test, it was called the PARCC Test, but the test itself, the format itself isn't probably what brought about that precipitous drop. Instead, what's happened is the legislature in Ohio has changed what it means to be proficient on the test. So basically, each sort of proficiency level has a cut score, and the cut score has increased for an individual child to be considered efficient. So the kids are no different in '14-15 than the new crop of third graders are in '15-16, but what has changed is what you need to do to be called proficient, and so because of that change, you see this huge drop in test scores along with this new test, and then over the course of the next three years, you sort of see an increased in test scores, and then a decrease in test scores, and then an increase in test scores, and then a decrease in test scores. And the Department of Education is claiming that there's improvement happening, but really what's happened is a whole new system has been created. You really change that third grade reading state testing system into this brand new system, whereas the average had been bouncing around 77% or so. Now you sort of have this new average bouncing around that 60% mark. 0:14:56.9 JD: And again, the kids are no different from those previous years, it's just the test and what you need to do to be considered proficient has changed. And the problem is, is that if you don't look at data like this, if you don't sort of... 0:15:11.5 AS: As a run chart or as a continuum of genuine information that's coming out of the system as measured by some measurement style. 0:15:21.0 JD: Yeah, and annotate it with point to the year that the new test goes into effect, point to the year that the definition of proficiency has changed, point to the year that schools had to switch from paper and pencil test to computer-based test because just a year or two or three after, those sort of memories become really fuzzy, that context becomes very fuzzy and you start to forget, "What year did we switch to computer test? What year did the standard switch? What year did the proficiency cut score switch?" And so if you don't have that sort of running record, that gets completely disconnected, the data gets disconnected from the context, and then you're likely not to make sound decisions because of that lack of context. 0:16:09.2 AS: And maybe I'll raise a few points here about the chart that we're looking at, and this chart is fascinating to me. The first thing that I think about, as a financial analyst in the stock market, basically, if anything is wrong in my chart and in my data and then I put my money down on that, it's gonna get taken from me in the stock market. And I have to really be very rigorous in how I'm looking at data. 0:16:39.1 AS: And when I look at this, I just think this is just so full of so many different ways that could go wrong in the way that things are measured, the way people are incentivized, those types of things. And the other thing that you realize is what you're showing here is that it's a description of the system. It's trying to describe things that are going on, and you're trying to describe certain points, which you can't do in charts that are... Bar charts and things like that. A line chart or a continuous point chart or a run chart really illustrates that. But also I think... I just realized that so much of almost every bit of charting is meaningless or just... Or is even giving you a wrong signal. There's so many things that I think about that and I'm just curious, 'cause you also said something before to me about how maybe people just don't pay much attention to it and then they just accept it for what it says and they don't go and look at the data, think about it and go into more detail. Those are some of the things that come out of my head as I'm looking at this, but what else do you want us to take away from this? 0:17:58.0 JD: Yeah, I think one thing, without the context and the annotations on a line chart or a run chart, data shown over time, you do forget. That's one thing. That's just human nature. You're gonna forget. I'm not gonna remember what happened 10 years ago in my testing system. I'm probably not gonna remember what happened five or even three years ago. The second thing I would say is that the vast majority of data that gets presented is in a table or a spreadsheet, and that data is usually what I would call limited comparison, so this year's data compared to last year's data or this month data compared to the same month last year. And so we're usually trying to draw conclusions with just two or maybe three data points, and that gets even worse when we sort of layer sort of a color-coded stoplight type system where we label certain data red and certain data yellow and certain data green and then we look for the red and the green data, even though the differences between those two, the scales that we use to to assign those colors is often arbitrary and meaningless. 0:19:11.0 AS: One last thing I would add to it, and I think you're gonna show us a good, an example of a good use of data, but also you have to ask the question, Are the people who are preparing this data incentivized to produce a particular outcome, and when you understand the incentives involved, it helps you also understand where it could go wrong. 0:19:33.2 JD: Well, I think that's exactly right. I think what happens oftentimes is the state testing data is a part of an a accountability system, and the point of an accountability system is to sort the good from the bad and to issue sanctions and rewards, and we sort of point to that data and say, Well, your scores are low, you need to improve. And so we sort of conflate this idea of accountability data or accountability goals and improvement goals, and those are really two different things, and so you brought up sort of this idea of CYA or cover your ass type stuff, and when we point towards accountability data, that's what people are gonna do because they are being held accountable for this data, they're gonna cover their ass. If we're truly using data for improvement, there's a completely different mindset. For one, the data tends to be local and well-known to the people that are using it, and if there's not sort of sanctions tied to it, then there is this ability to be more honest and candid about that data because we're using it for improvement purposes rather than using it for accountability purposes. 0:20:51.9 AS: Okay, that's great, great description. Alright, keep going. What do you wanna show us next? 0:20:56.8 JD: Yeah, I think this last chart. And so for the listeners, I've taken the five most recent years of third grade reading test data and put it in an actual process behavior chart, or some people call them control charts, and the advantage here is like the run chart, we're seeing data over time, we're seeing the variation, we're seeing the data move up and down over time, but with the process behavior chart, we're adding these upper and lower natural process limits or some people call them control limits and define, sort of, predict the future of what's gonna happen in this particular system, as long as things move along at the current steady state, and so remember, I was gonna say, just remember in that third grade reading data, and they sort of said, "Well, we improved, and then we did decline this most recent year, but if you look back two years, it's actually an improvement," but actually what you see is, if you play that out over five years, you see the data increase and then decrease, and then increase and then decrease, and that's a very sort of common occurrence with this type of data where there's this natural variation, it becomes obvious when you plot the dots over time, and you really see what is happening with this data is it's just sort of moving about an average, about a 60% proficiency rate. 0:22:35.1 JD: Some... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26334759

Meeting Requirements Is Not Enough: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 2) 04/04/2023

Meeting Requirements Is Not Enough: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 2) What is quality? Does it mean always meeting specifications? What if the calculus for specifications means little and tells managers almost nothing about the process or its potential for improvement? Dr. Bill Bellows discusses the negative consequences of this kind of black-and-white thinking and what to do about it. 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 am 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: What is quality? Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.5 Bill Bellows: Thank you Andrew. That question brings me back literally 30 plus years. I was at home studying on leave from work. I got a bunch of books on quality. I bought every book on quality I could find at the Yale Bookstore. I started reading them. And I'm reading Phil Crosby, I'm reading Six Sigma Quality, I'm reading Genichi Taguchi, I'm reading Deming. And I, naively, am thinking that quality means the same to all of them. As a heat transfer engineer, in the world of engineering, heat transfer engineers have a common language, they use common terms, so I naively thought everyone in the world of quality has the same explanation of quality. And I'm looking through these books. I had met some seasoned experts in the field. I started calling them and saying... I remember talking one guy and I said, "I don't think these books are the same." And he laughed. He said, "Bill, you're onto something." 0:01:24.0 BB: Well, the traditional way of looking at quality in most organizations gets me to what I now refer to as question number one and that is, Does something meet requirements? Does the task meet requirements? Does the dimensions meet requirements? Does the product meet requirements? And, Andrew, there's only two answers to that question, yes or no. That's how most organizations look at quality. Boeing's advanced quality system... How do I know? I worked for a company that was owned by Boeing for nine years. Boeing's advanced quality system, which is no different than anyone else's quality system, is question one, Does is meet requirements? Yes or no. 0:02:08.5 AS: Is that like go/no-go? 0:02:11.4 BB: That's go/no-go. It's black and white thinking, Andrew. It meets requirements or it doesn't. Question two is, How many ways are there for this thing to meet requirements? And there when I tell people if you take into account decimal places, an infinite number of answers, I have somebody laugh and say, "Infinite?" And I say, "Okay, 463." But the idea is there's variation in how you meet requirements. And so going back to the question "What about quality?" what I began to see is that most quality thinkers are thinking question one. I had been exposed in that same timeframe to Dr. Taguchi and his thinking is more about question two. And what got me really excited by Dr. Deming's work when I saw The New Economics is that I realized that his quality focus was also question two and that's what got me really, really curious. But the big thing was, holy cow, we've got different explanations of quality. 0:03:15.0 AS: And can I ask you a question about this? When you talk about how many ways are there for this to meet the requirements, are you saying how many methods are there to get there or how many outcomes are in the range of what is quality? 0:03:31.6 BB: What I'm saying is question one is, Does your car have gas? Yes or no. 0:03:38.2 AS: Yep. Yes it does. 0:03:39.3 BB: Question two is, How much gas is in the car? Is it a quarter of a tank, an eighth of a tank, a sixteenth of a tank, a full tank? So there's a lot of different answers. And that's what I mean the infinity is, there's a lot of degradations from empty to full and that's a much different question than, "Does the car have gas?" Now, why is that important? What I began to realize when I started my first job as a quality professional after leaving engineering and joining Rocketdyne as a quality professional, people were coming to me because things were broken, which was like out of gas. And the exciting thing was I got to work and help them solve it but the pattern I started to notice is that most often when people came to me, it was because the process, the product was out of gas. 0:04:42.5 BB: And I began to realize that if we operated with a gas gauge mindset and not a black and white mindset, we could have seen these just as you would driving a car. You see you're on E. Yes, I have gas but being on E and being full. But the people in the organization weren't equipped to think that way and that's when I began to get very excited by Dr. Deming's work and after learning about Taguchi's work 'cause they both helped me realize that most organizations view quality from question one. Is this good or bad? And then what we do is we leave ourselves open to running out of gas 'cause we can't see the trouble coming. 0:05:24.7 AS: I was just thinking about when I worked at Pepsi in our factory in Torrance, California, many years ago. There was a group of maintenance engineers that worked on the production line and all that. But there was one guy, he could solve any problem and he would come in and solve every problem. And he took great pride in that and everybody saw him as the problem solver. But when you think about it, it just perpetuated the system. 0:05:49.0 BB: Yes. 0:05:50.9 AS: And so who was the hero was the guy that can come in and fix it. "I'm the fixer." 0:05:55.9 BB: Well, and to that point, I came into a new organization, very excited to move across the country with the family, a lot of excitement moving into this new career, and I could not have been happier working on problems. That's the good news. But then I began to see that the customer was getting frustrated with this pattern and that was leading us to lose business. And now I'm thinking, yeah, I'm excited being called in to be the hero but I'm thinking this is a lousy way to run the company. We ought to be preventing these problems. And I just thought, here I am using sophisticated techniques from Dr. Taguchi when all we needed was a simple gas gauge to see trouble coming. And so, yeah, I was happy being the hero for a while but the more I understood where Deming was coming from, the more I realized it would be nothing but selfish to maintain that system. 0:07:02.0 AS: Yeah, because when you say selfish it's because you're kind of the hero saving the day, fixing. 0:07:06.1 BB: I'm loving it. 0:07:07.4 AS: Yeah. 0:07:08.2 BB: I'm receiving awards. I'm going to NASA headquarters, presenting solutions. You get priority. People get out of your way. You're working on very high-visibility issues. But what I was thinking was, "Holy cow. We could prevent these problems from happening in the first place." Not all problems, Andrew, 'cause I can't know everywhere to put a gas gauge. But now you have to start to think about where is that an issue. So if the light bulb in the kitchen burns out, okay, I can deal with that. But there's other situations where I don't wanna deal. I don't want the car to run out of gas. So then you start to think about, Where does the variation in good, which is question two, cause me heartache? And when is it just go get another light bulb? And this led me to become aware, to start to think about our thinking patterns. Are we thinking black and white, good and bad? Or are we understanding, which is question one, two answers? 0:08:12.6 BB: Question two is viewing things on a continuum, shades of gray. And, holy cow, how about we start asking how much gas is in the car, not, "Do we have gas?" And so I would go in to audiences, big audiences within Rocketdyne, within Boeing and suppliers and what not. And again, I mention Boeing. Rocketdyne was owned by Boeing. Most companies around the world that I've interfaced with think the same way. It's the same pattern. A standard question I have asked at lunch time presentations, "How much time do you spend every day discussing parts that are good, that arrive on time?" I've had 110 people in the room laugh, just emerge in laughter. That's what they do. And so that's when I became aware this is not just a Boeing thing, not just a Rocketdyne thing. This is a very elementary way of operating, even in our personal lives at home. 0:09:09.6 AS: Describe that again. Describe that. You talked about talking to the people in the factory and asking them. Tell us an example of that or kind of help us understand more about what you're saying there. 0:09:21.3 BB: Well, when I would ask audiences, "How much time do you spend discussing parts that are good, that arrive on time?" And they'll say, "Very little." And I say, "Why is that?" And the standard answer is, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." But then I say to them, "Hold that thought. What if you use that thinking to drive your car, what would happen?" "We'd run out of gas." "What if you use that thinking relative... " I said, "If you use that mode of thinking, when would you put gas in the car?" "When it runs out." "When would you call the plumber? When would you go to the doctor?" And the idea is I think we are unnecessarily in a mode, we're putting ourselves in a mode of being reactive without realizing we have a choice to be proactive. The gas gauge gives us a choice. 0:10:11.3 BB: Lacking the gas gauge, we slip back to, "Well, it's working, it's working, it's working." And then we get into the rut of spending precious time focusing on the past to find out why we had the problem and simultaneously what we're gonna do is blame the driver of the car, which creates a mess within the organization. And next thing you know, people become reticent. When I look at the System of Profound Knowledge, I look at the variation piece. Lacking this awareness, Andrew, we don't see variation in good. We wait for bad to happen. We then blame whoever is close to it because we don't understand the system. And then you tie those together, we create this rut that I think many organizations are stuck in. 0:11:01.8 AS: So it sounds like, if I was to think about what you're saying, a lot of this is about the idea of becoming proactive? But I know that that's a tiny part of the puzzle but that sounds like that's one part of it. Tell me more about that. 0:11:18.9 BB: Well, I'm not suggesting that being proactive is better than being reactive. What I'm suggesting is that being reactive is a choice and being proactive is a choice. I don't think there's anything wrong with being reactive if we've planned it that way. So the light bulb in our kitchen when it goes out, we'll replace it. 0:11:42.5 AS: It's just not worth putting an inventory together and having to deal with all of that. 0:11:46.2 BB: All of that, and in that regard... 0:11:47.2 AS: It's just down the street. 0:11:49.0 BB: Well, good point, Andrew. Depending on how far the store is, I'll carry a few bulbs, right? But the idea is that if I'm going to be reactive then I need that spare. If I'm going to be proactive, then I get out of that rut of waiting for the crisis and I get to save that time, whether it's waiting for the heart attack, being on top of my health. Paying attention to the plumbing system and hearing that it's beginning to slow down and, well, keep using it, keep using it. Next thing you know, Sunday night at midnight, your spouse says, "The toilet's backed up." You're thinking, "Well, there goes Monday." That's at home, and I see the same thing at work. 0:12:32.0 AS: Yep. What I was thinking about was some experience that I... When I teach finance and I teach people about the balance sheet, the accounts receivable and the accounts payable and, specifically, give credit terms to companies and you have inventory in your factory, what I like to tell them is that giving credit terms is a choice. 0:12:52.3 BB: That's right. 0:12:53.2 AS: And they say, "No, it's not a choice. I have to do it. The customer demands it and my competitors do it." And I always say, "That doesn't mean it's not a choice. You're now making the choice to just follow what your competitor is doing." 0:13:07.3 BB: That's right. 0:13:08.7 AS: And what Dr. Deming talked about too is the idea of focusing on your customer, not your competitor. And then I started to talk to them and then I show them some companies that have no inventory or some companies that have no accounts receivable. And then they start thinking, "How do they do that?" And then we start discussing it and I show there is some interesting ways to do this, or thinking about accounts receivable from a strategic perspective. So I have a company that I show my students that has massive inventory. This is bad in the world of finance, for sure, in the world of business. But they have a 50% gross profit margin versus 25% for their nearest competitor. What do they do? They hold the inventory of their customers on the site of their customer. The customer only receives the inventory when the guy takes it out of the bin and then puts it into the production process. So on the one hand, their inventory's super high but on the other hand, they're making a huge profit from it. And I'm telling people that you gotta think differently about these things and not just think that it has to be done this way. What are your thoughts on that? 0:14:30.9 BB: Andrew, what you're saying fits in very well. We get stuck in these ruts of thinking "always". Inventory is always bad. It's always better to be... Why would I be proactive? I think that's a brilliant example of the value proposition of choosing. Choosing. A big thing I've seen in the industry going back 30 some years is what people call a single piece flow. We don't want a batch. Batching is bad. And so I went through a couple of days of training and the big theme of this training was a single piece flow. We're gonna make one at a time. One at a time. We're gonna process one at a time. One at a time. So then I thought, well, wait a minute. So we have this cleaning tank that can handle thousands of parts in this tray that go into the solution. So now that I've taken this training, Andrew, now I'm being told, no, I'm gonna clean one bolt at a time, one bolt at a time, without understanding there's a place for lots of bolts and there's a place for one. And so what you're getting is we get stuck in these solutions that don't quite make sense when you begin to look at things as a system, which is what you're talking about. 0:15:50.6 AS: Yeah. And this is where, when I went through the intro, it's how you help people become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from the biggest opportunities and I think that this really is what we're talking about. 0:16:07.7 BB: Absolutely. And it's understanding choices; the choice to be proactive, the choice to be reactive. And I also use the analogy of I say it's like, Andrew, you got to the end of the road, you made a right hand turn. You're like, "Yeah, I made it right-hand turn." Well, the right hand turn is being reactive. You made a right-hand turn, Andrew. Why didn't you turn left? "There's no left-hand turn." I say, "No, Andrew. There is a left-hand turn but it's in your blind spot." And so we have these ruts, as you're describing, these ruts of "inventory is bad" and all these other things. And as, I forget, Deming quotes... I think it's Will Rogers who used this quote and Deming has a quote similar to it in the beginning of chapter one, "I'd rather know less than so much that ain't so." [laughter] 0:17:03.9 AS: Yes. And that's where I would say what's interesting about this discussion is it kinda reminds me that so much of my behavior in this life was shaped from when I was a young guy learning and studying Deming's teaching. And then you start to see it come into your thinking like this idea of teaching finance in a way that helps people open up their mind to a different way of thinking about it. And then I show them a company that's massively profitable because they made a choice to hold all the inventory of all their customers. 0:17:39.3 BB: With an appreciation of a greater system. 0:17:42.0 AS: Yeah. And Bill, I'd like to tell you a funny story of my uncle, Uncle Ham. He was in the military, he was logistics, retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was in Germany and he ran this huge base and logistics on it. And he said the Commanding General was coming the next week so they got everything ready and they really spit shine the whole place. The Commanding General comes through the whole place and they reach, finally, the parking lot were all the trucks and tanks and everything are out there. And then they were standing there in front of this row of trucks that was really long. And he said, "Well, sir, how was it? What did you think?" And he says, "Ham, it was excellent except for one thing." And he says, "What's that?" And he looked down the front of the vehicles, as he could see all the vehicles lined up, and he said, "Next time I come, could you line them up in a row so that the front of each of them lines up." And then Ham said... He got the General, he said, "Well, can you walk with me over here." And he walked up to the back of him and he saw that they were lined up in the back but they were of different lengths. So Ham said, "Sir, would you like them lined up in the back or in the front? But you can't have both." [laughter] 0:19:05.8 BB: No, it's a choice. 0:19:09.3 AS: Yeah. I just love that and I think I'm gonna summarize what we've just talked about because I think there's a lot to that. So let me go through a few points and then maybe you can add any final bits to it. What you were talking about was the idea that when you first got into the quality movement, you started realizing that people had different ideas of what quality was but ultimately you came down to this, the idea that most people had was, Does this meet requirements? This is kind of a yes or no answer. It's a black or white. No shades of gray. And then the second part you talked about another question, which is, How many ways are there to meet requirements? 0:19:50.3 AS: And you also talked a bit about how people kept coming to you with things that were broken and how you can be a hero putting out fires all day long but you didn't really advance the business as opposed to starting to prevent problems and see how we can fix things rather than saying if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And then finally, we've wrapped this session up by what I think is the most powerful point of the session, which is that being reactive or proactive is a choice. And you're trying to help people see that just doing it the standard way, they're making a choice and there are consequences to that choice and it may be the right choice. But once you become aware of your thinking, that you have choices on every single thing, then it starts to open up people's minds. What would you add to that summary? 0:20:43.7 BB: A couple of things. One, what I didn't mention that I think is worthwhile pointing out is what did Dr. Deming mean by quality. So I mentioned the traditional quality, Bill Crosby, most others, is quality is conformance. It meets requirements, yes or no. So what I didn't mention is how did Dr. Deming define quality. In The New Economics, Dr. Deming says, "A product or a service possesses quality if it helps someone and enjoys a sustainable market." So what I think is really neat about that is, and that's more about question two which I'll get back to,... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26334576

Fostering Cooperation: The Role of a Manager in Education (Part 2) 03/28/2023

Fostering Cooperation: The Role of a Manager in Education (Part 2) In this episode, Andrew and David discuss how managers can help people to see themselves as components in a system, working with those before and after them in the process of educating children - for the benefit of all. This podcast series is inspired by chapter 6 in The New Economics, Andrew and David apply Dr. Deming's 14 points for "the role of a manager of people after transformation" to the world of education. (Note: this is not about Deming's 14 Points for Management.) 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 am 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's topic is cooperation with proceeding stages in education. And ladies and gentlemen, we are going through a checklist or a list that Dr. Deming put in his The New Economics book on page 86 of the third edition, or page 125 of the second edition. And the title of this list is Role of a Manager of People. 0:00:45.4 AS: This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. The first point on the list, which we previously talked about was, number one, a manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. He explains the aims of the system, he teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims. And today we will be talking about number two. He helps his people to see themselves as components in a system to work in cooperation with preceeding stages and with following stages toward optimization of the efforts of all stages toward achievement of the aim. David, take it away. 0:01:26.7 David Langford: There you go. If you understand that, then the podcast is over. [laughter] So yeah, I think the profound nature of Deming's work was his ability to take these simple concepts and just state them. And for me, working in education, people, they start to get the philosophy and they start to understand Deming, et cetera, and they always wanna know where to start or what to do. Well, here you go. These are all steps of what to do, where to start. So the last podcast we were talking about the development of an aim. And so you... The first question you have to decide is, do I have an aim of the system? And is that being communicated? And we talked a lot about that going through that. So the second point actually feeds on that, and remember this whole section is the role of the manager of people, see, what are you doing with the people in the system? 0:02:25.7 DL: And so this whole point is about understanding a systems' perspective in any organization. But in education, it's really clear. And we've said several times that the product of education is the learning itself. It's not students. And I think people really get screwed up on that, when they start to think about that, "We're producing students." No, you're not. Yes, students are going through the process, but they're gaining a level of learning that's gonna, that's getting them closer and closer to the aim of the system, right? And so those things are measurable, and then you can begin to understand those. So what he is talking about here in step number two is... Often when I work with educators, no matter what level, university, K through 12, whatever it might be, I'll throw out the idea that, let's say you're a 10th grade math teacher. 0:03:32.8 DL: What's the one thing you could be doing this year that would significantly increase the performance of your students next year? And a lot of times people say, you know, better technology and they'll go through this whole list of all these kinds of things they could do. But that's what Deming is talking about here. You could keep right on doing the same curriculum, the same thing you've done for 15 years, but if you start working with preceding stages, where did these students learn math before they got to you? Right? And so if you're a 10th grade math teacher, one of the best things you could do is start working with the ninth grade math teachers. Like going over, what are they doing, how are they teaching it? What's happening? How are they going through stuff? 0:04:22.4 DL: And you're actually preventing your own problems. Later in The New Economics, Deming talks about that prevention is the key to quality. And that's what he is talking about here. If I am going upstream in the process, so to speak, and preventing my own problems, right? I could actually just keep doing the exact same thing I've always done. I'm gonna get better results because I'm now preventing problems that I used to have to work with all the time. And some people say, well, you know, our students are coming from outside of our organization and I don't have the chance to do that. Well, you sort of think of a class that you're teaching as a system in and of itself. 0:05:06.7 DL: So what I could do is the first week of school is not gonna be, you know, really getting to the subject at all, right? I'm gonna become my own preceding stage [laughter], I'm gonna make sure that all these students have the same base knowledge that I need them to have in order for the rest of my teaching, the rest of my curriculum to actually work really well. That might take a week, it might take two weeks, but it'd be worth it to you [chuckle] to go back and do that rather than just keep on doing the same thing and expecting a different result and then putting pressure on people to make, sort of make them think it's their fault that they're not achieving. 0:05:48.9 AS: One question I have just because I'm not familiar with education so much, more business, if I think about business and I think about the preceding stages. You've got a manager in that department and he's got his own motivations, or she got their motivations, they've got their KPIs, and they've got all these things that are preventing cooperation. But it must not be true in education, David, when people are so dedicated to helping young people, it must be that the ninth grade math teacher is absolutely ready and willing to cooperate with the 10th grade math teacher. Wouldn't that be? 0:06:25.4 DL: Oh, when I started working with schools I often would have teachers come up to me at breaks and stuff and say, you know, I taught with this guy across the hall for 11 years, and I can't tell you anything that he does over there, or she does over there. The silo mechanisms of, you know, close my door, do my thing and don't communicate was just rampant. And it's still largely that way. And especially in a lot of universities, just people working in silos, you know, the college of business has no idea what the College of Education is doing and vice versa and so on and so forth. And you begin to break down those barriers. Deming talks about that later too. But you break down those barriers between departments, you start to see everybody wins. Student are better trained. The whole system seems to work together. 0:07:24.6 DL: I remember when we first started having visitors come to our high school where we'd been working with Dr. Deming and trying to implement these things for several years, after about three or four days, I'd have people that were visiting would say, you know, everybody here seems to know what everybody else is doing. And I'd say, isn't that the way it is in your school? And they said, no, I have no idea what other people are doing. And so I had to really start to think about, well, what had we done? Well, one of the things we'd done was we kept reiterating this point, right? Work with preceding stages, understand what's going on. 0:08:08.3 DL: We actually formally set up time where you could actually get together as a department or get together and look at a whole curriculum throughout the entire system. Now, some districts have over the last 30, 40 years, you know, they'll have a K through 12 curriculum alignment, right? And that's getting towards this point so that we're all working in preceding stages. So I don't have fourth graders, fourth grade teachers spending time doing stuff that has already been done in second or third grade, right? And the kids are just going, you know, they might be really dutiful kids and they just don't say anything, but they're just bored out of their minds because they already did this, right? 0:08:54.7 AS: When you were speaking, it made me realize the importance of step number one, about identifying the aim and getting everybody on board with that aim and communicating that and helping people see their role in that aim. Otherwise, there's like no incentive for people, oh, why are we having another meeting to talk about this? You know, what's the point? Well, when the aim is clear, all of a sudden the intrinsic motivation just explodes. 0:09:19.0 DL: Yeah. I mean, my own children is a good example. Remember one of my kids came to me and said, you know, dad, this is the third year we've done an insect collection in science. So were they really good at collecting insects by the end of the three years? Well, yeah, but they could have had a much higher knowledge about insects or something else that was going on rather than just this mundane project of going out and collecting insects and categorizing them. 0:09:51.4 AS: One of the questions I have, there's two points to this that I was thinking about. One is kind of the academic freedom of a teacher to be able to, you know, particularly in a university, they want to feel like I can do and say what I want. The second one is that they're so damn busy trying to prepare their lectures that it's hard. David, cooperation is difficult to bring a system to optimization. You realize like one of the reasons why people don't do it is it's just hard. It's way more coordination. Tell me your thoughts on that. 0:10:24.2 DL: You just described why Deming calls it Profound Knowledge, so the places that it is happening, right? Or making it, making sure that it's important. Setting aside time, talking about specifically how we can do that. You get a new professor in, you got economics 101 and Economics 102, right? So are they aligned? And the benefit in the end is for the students, right? Because they're not going through the very same thing that they just went through in economics 101, right? And the students will recognize things like, wow, these people are actually really working together. They really understand what's going on. 0:11:11.2 DL: And if I'm teaching economics 201 and I can constantly refer back to now when you took 101, I know that you went through this exercise and you went through this and you had this kind of experience, and this is how we're gonna build on that in 201 and... Right? So that's what Deming is talking is about here, is that if I carve out that time to work with preceding stages, the benefit is for me and my students and my classes and, in that, everybody wins, right? Because as a professor, I can go on to a higher level knowledge with the assurance that these students had this level of knowledge and mastered it before they got to my class. And that's the whole idea basically about why we've set up classes like 101, 201, 301, right? That's supposed to be the philosophy, really understanding that. 0:12:12.6 DL: And I'd say most departments or school districts, they loosely sort of do that. But from experience, if you consciously put in the effort to align curriculums, communicate with the preceding stages you get a huge benefit out of that that's just unbelievable. And Deming goes on to say, you know, and the following stages, right? So let's say we're using this example of Economics 101 and 201 or whatever you might be, right? And then some of those students are gonna go on to 301. Well, I would wanna know that my students were much more prepared going to the next stage. So how am I gonna do that? Well, I'm gonna start talking to the teacher in the next stage and saying, hey, how are my students doing? And were they prepared to come into your class or not prepared or, you know, what's happening? 0:13:18.7 AS: I was thinking about how one of the... I had a discussion with someone this past week, and it's a guy my age, you know, young and healthy and happy. [laughter] And getting close to 60. And he said, young people these days, you know, blah, blah, blah and all that. And I said to him, I said, you know, I think basically the young people these days realize they've kind of been let down by us and we've done all kinds of, you know, whether it's safety or whether it's education or whether it's, you know, whatever. There's so many things where I think that they just don't trust it. And then we go to online learning and all of a sudden all of these adults are giving us these super boring presentations. And it's like, we are not delivering to young people. 0:14:10.4 AS: And then, oh, add on 32 trillion in debt. Oh, by the way, you gotta pay that also. And the streets are, you know, cities are on fire and all of that. And then you just think, yeah. Part of what's happening is that when we incentivize teachers to optimize their classroom, that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna do their KPIs and they're gonna focus on that, and they're not gonna be thinking about how are these kids going through this process and getting to a result that we want? And yeah, you just made me think about that, but I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? 0:14:45.6 DL: Well, Deming talks about in the last sentence, that work with preceding and following stages for the optimization and efforts of all stages towards achievement of the aim. So what are you trying to accomplish with the achievement of this aim? I'm working with a college of business now, and through the pandemic, almost all the classes went online and now students are graduating and going to work and stuff. And what are employers saying? These people aren't trained as well. 0:15:20.4 AS: The communication skills. 0:15:22.5 DL: Yeah. The university is struggling because they know this online thing doesn't work as well, but they're struggling with, how do we change this? Because the following stages are telling you the learning that these people are coming out with is not the same as it used to be. We used to be able to depend on the quality of the students coming through the system. And now we can't depend on them. Well, that's dangerous because that could lead employers to say, okay, we're no longer going to hire people from this university. We're gonna go to some other university and look for places. So I always think about, you know, Deming is talking about the system, but how big of a system are we talking about, right? Could be talking about a whole university as a system, and the more I can get the entire university to talk to each other, work together, align curriculums, right? Well, who wins in the end? Well, students going out into the world, right? 0:16:24.8 DL: And they get to employers and employers start to realize, wow, I never knew that I needed somebody with this kind of knowledge. And so, who's first on your list to hire next year? I want more of these. Very simple example, the first couple of years that I was leading classes and teaching my high school students about this, well, in Alaska, the popular summer job is what they call the slime line. So working in fish plants, salmon processing plants on the line where fish comes through and you have to process them and gut them and take their heads off and do all this kind of stuff. So we didn't tell students about anything, but after about two years, I got some phone calls from these canneries, managers in these canneries and they said, hey, do you have any more of these students? And so I called them back up to talk to them about what was happening. 0:17:31.5 DL: And they said, well, we found out that every place there were students from your high school that were on the slime line, productivity improved. And sure enough, they started talking to these kids and they said, well, we took this to heart. And one kid said, all I did was I just said to the guy next to me, when you pass that fish to me, it'd be really helpful if you just turned it like this. And then all I have to do is do this. And then he said to the guy next to him, he said, what do you want me to do? What would be most helpful for you? And that guy says, well, that girl says, oh, well turn it like this or do this, and then this would happen. 0:18:14.2 DL: Just that, that's a very simple example. But employers loved it, [laughter] because productivity started to go up. One student said, yeah, it actually got to be more fun because I put a chart up behind me and how many fish we were processing per hour. And it sort of became a game to see if we could increase not only the quality of what we were doing, but the number of fish that we were processing per hour. Well, you might say, well, you know, yeah. What's the big deal about that? Well, guess what? Those canneries wanna hire those people again next summer. [laughter], you got a guaranteed job if you wanna come back. 0:18:50.6 AS: It's interesting because when you actually ask that question, or when you ask someone, hey, would you mind when when you send it over to me, could you put it in this way? People would be like, I never even knew that you needed it that way. 0:19:06.2 DL: Yeah. Or you'd find out that people have been ticked off at you for some cases years because you just keep on doing the same darn thing, but nothing ever changes because that person never doesn't ever say anything to you, and you never asked. You have to be proactive in all this too, going to the following stages and saying, hey, what could I be doing differently that would be significantly helpful for you? 0:19:36.6 AS: Yeah. Also, you reminded me of a story, when I was head of research in a research team here in Thailand, I had about five analysts. And our objective is to write high quality, big reports. I hired the best analysts. They know exactly what they need to do. They love doing it. And what I did is I put up on the wall a bar, a stacked bar chart showing each person's output each week. And what I did is I just put it up on the wall. I didn't explain it. I didn't, you know, I just looked at it occasionally, I went back to my office and and I didn't, I mean, I never really explained or said anything. And then one time one of the younger analysts came to me and she said, I think I've just figured you out. And I was like, what do you mean? And she said, I had lunch with a counterpart, like at another, a competitor, and she covers the same sector. 0:20:30.2 AS: And she asked me, how many reports did you do last month? And I said, you know, meaning my employee said, I did, I don't know, 10. And she's like, oh my God, how did you do 10? And she said, how many did you do? And she said, well, I did three, and there's similar style reports. And she's like, well, what's Andrew's target for you? And that's when she looked at me and she said, I realize you never set a target. You just put that information up on the wall. And it got all of us looking at it and thinking about it. And then I realized that I was producing 10 reports compared to my competitor was producing three. And that just made me think of that when you were talking about putting that up on the wall. 0:21:15.4 DL: The genius of Deming, Dr. Deming is when he went into manufacturing plants. And here you have a manufacturing plant where this person is stuck doing the same thing all day long. Right? Well, from early studies, from Hawthorne studies back in the 1920s and thirties, what did we... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26158314

Growing Businesses in Kenya: Interview with Justin Macharia 03/21/2023

Growing Businesses in Kenya: Interview with Justin Macharia Andrew talks to Justin Marcharia, Round Table Training Africa's Managing Director, about his collaboration with The Deming Institute. His goal is to help new and small businesses in East Africa use the Deming philosophy to grow in sustainable ways. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: Hello. 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 here with featured guest Justin Macharia. Justin, are you ready to share your Deming journey? 0:00:17.2 Justin Macharia: Oh, yeah, I'm ready. 0:00:19.5 AS: I'm excited to learn... I mean there are so many things that I would like to ask you about your Deming journey and where your Deming journey is and all of that. But let me introduce you to the audience. Justin Macharia is the managing director of Round Table Training Africa Limited. Justin has been working with the Deming Institute over the past couple of years to enable DemingNEXT access into a number of East African countries through his organization. It's gonna be beneficial I think for all of our listeners to learn about this partnership and the impact that we think the Deming Institute can have in East Africa. And also, it's a great opportunity for you, Justin, to share why you think that Deming is important part of development in your part of the world and why you see the opportunity as kind of first time opportunity to enable businesses to learn and apply the Deming method. So maybe you can just talk a little bit about what you're doing first, and then we'll get into your Deming journey. 0:01:29.9 JM: Thank you Andrew. Yeah, so Deming Institute in Africa, basically East Africa, that's Nairobi, Kenya started off in the year 2020. And we've walked the journey with Kevin and Tim. And basically what we've... We've found that there was an opportunity to instill best practices in manufacturing, hospitality, and any other organizations that are moving from either raw production or the value chain addition. So what inspired us into getting into and partnering with Deming was basically the... We have a lots of trainings, consultants in our area, but however we found that they were lacking in terms of the depth and the philosophy and the models and tools. So what happens is, basically is we reached out to the Deming Institute and we did a presentation and asked if we could partner with them. And of course we had to give a little bit of background about ourselves. 0:02:34.9 JM: And what is basically happening in East Africa right now is... 'cause East Africa is be in in agribusiness, but agribusiness is on only probably small scale to large scale and mostly of the cash crops for export. But more and more now people are getting into value addition and processing. And that comes with a lot of systems, processes and management skills that are required for that. Apart from that, there's a lot of manufacturing going on and it's probably sometimes ad hoc and learning on the job which can... It can be very expensive and a little mistakes and system and processes or a lack of there of. So that has actually created the need and the appreciation and like probably Andrew had mentioned that, just a little bit earlier, is that everybody knows Deming, anybody who is in a management course, 'cause they always talk about Deming at some point during the introduction as the gurus of quality management. So the take up has been gradual and slow, but we're getting somewhere with it right now. 0:03:42.3 AS: And maybe for the listeners out there I'll explain about, what the Deming Institute is doing with DemingNEXT and trying to get, obviously all the video material that's available about Dr. Deming's teaching, but also providing all the resources necessary for training. So for those that are listening that think, God, I really wanna get more training into my company related to Deming. Well, the Deming Institute has made so much of that available through DemingNEXT. So I think that's an important message to everybody out there, is that it is a resource not only for your own personal development, but how you can bring some of that training into your company or any company that you're interacting with. Maybe you just tell us briefly about what your expectation is or what you expect to be doing with that material and with your own material and how are you doing that training. And maybe just tell us a little bit about that. 0:04:39.9 JM: Well, thanks Andrew. So what the DemingNEXT actually offers a lot of resources like you mentioned. There are PDFs, there are case studies. Because as much as we train a local organization, it's always good to give them a case study of basically where it has worked before, the successes because the industry and the verticals, probably is it the service industry, is it the telecommunication, we find 'cause somebody believes in the credibility of a process by basically seeing it has worked before with somebody else. And this what... The challenges they went through. So it shortens the learning curve because you don't have to go through the mistakes they did. They share with their case studies. And this improves like what Deming talks a lot about is the continuous improvement. 0:05:30.0 JM: Continuous improvement. So you progressively improve as you go on, get the feedback from the customers, feedback from the system itself. And this has really helped in terms of... The resources that are online on DemingNEXT has really helped in fortifying what the facilitators are actually telling and teaching the participants. 0:05:52.7 AS: Fantastic. So for all the listeners and viewers out there, make sure that you go to DemingNEXT to understand what resources are available and if you are in East Africa what's the website, your website that they could go to to learn more about what you guys are doing? 0:06:09.8 JM: Well, yeah, thanks. Our website is www.roundtabletraining.co.ke. There you'll find a wide array of programs and also the links to the Deming resources as well. 0:06:24.5 AS: Fantastic. So tell us about... You know, now it is time for some of the fun stuff where we talk about your Deming journey. And as you and I talked about before we turned on the mic, the recorder, you're early in your Deming journey. You've started recently and you're learning. And I know there's plenty of listeners that are early in their Deming journey. And I know there's some old timers also that are listening that are like, okay, so what's it like? So maybe you can tell us about the story about how you first came to understand and learn about Dr. Deming's teachings. And what was it that hooked you that made you think, I want to bring this training to other people? 0:07:02.6 JM: Thank you. Yeah, so my journey basically, my career has been spanning over 20 years, actually about 23 years. But actually within my career I have interacted with so many training institutions from ICT to management and leadership. However, there's always something lacking in them. There's always something I was feeling we're not giving them the depth and the case studies and proven models, things that have worked. So that's basically around 2020. Basically around the COVID time. 0:08:25.7 JM: I went actually searching and interacted with... I saw Deming. I saw... There is a Deming Institute in the US and we decided, okay, let's approach them because we know about Deming and Dr. Deming's philosophies. It's been trained and taught. But what really caught me and I remember and many people remember is the PDSA cycle, the PDSA that one... Everybody knows about that cycle. So when we reached out and they actually said, all right, we can give it a try. And hence we started off the journey in East Africa like that. So the PDSA and appreciation of systems and all that, those are the ones that basically caught us on teaching. 0:08:27.9 AS: And maybe we can talk a little bit about what's happening in Africa for I know a lot of listeners they may not really know all the stuff that's going on in your part of the world in East Africa. And I know Kenya is going through a lot of growth these days. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about what's going on there in particular in relation to business and development. You mentioned the idea of being a resources exporter and trying to add more value to that. Yeah, maybe walk us through a little bit about what's happening in the economy of Kenya. 0:09:01.1 JM: So Kenya is very strategically positioned in Africa. It's basically the gateway of the East and Central Africa region which covers the DRC, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan. So the economy is basically very robust especially in the... Recently the financial market, the mobile banking. Maybe some of you have heard of the mobile banking actually was actually birthed in Kenya with something called M-Pesa. So the service industry apart from the Agro and the traditional products that have been traditionally produced. 0:09:44.7 JM: There is hospitality, tourism. I know you've heard of the big five safaris. So tourism is really huge in East Africa. Not only Kenya, but Uganda, Tanzania as well. So with that is the traditional ways of commerce and the GDP relies heavily on that. However, the service and the technology has been growing recently. And thanks to the internet there is are a lot of resources as well. People are either going to school or they are self-teaching themselves. So a lot to offer from this point of view in terms of tourism, Agro-business, service, telecommunication and all that. So it's a great place to be. 0:10:32.8 AS: I'm curious, I've lived in Asia almost the majority of my life, let's say the last 30 years. And as I look back at America, I see a reason, one of the reasons why Deming has a hard time is that people are so individually focused. Like individual, they want individual compensation. They want individual rewards. They do not wanna be part of a system so much and all of that. And you can see that compares to let's say Japan where they really value being part of that system and society. They do not want the individual rewards the way that it's done. And you see every country is different. And I'm just curious, what are the motivations that drive, what are the things that drive people there that the way people think about business and doing business so that we can then understand what part of Deming is most appealing? 0:11:28.0 JM: Oh yeah, so yeah, actually it's a... I can say probably East Africa and Kenya has a lot to borrow from Japan 'cause people do get a lot of value by coming together and they value that. So there are these things we call Chamas, is like coming together maybe 10 people pulling resources and getting to a certain business investment. So it's really big all the way from the ground up we call it table banking. It could be from, let's say ladies coming together. So it's a big thing. So but what normally lacks in moving it... The transition to growth is what is normally the difficult part. They could get to point... From point A to point B but managing the growth, the change by instilling processes, systems that will enable them to grow and scale up now becomes a challenge. 0:12:28.0 JM: Hence that's why DemingNEXT and also the membership. The membership which we are also... Introduced to the market which we have individual membership for DemingNEXT and the corporate membership is what we actually been proposing to even these what I call the Chamas basically pull in and learn from the rest of the world how processes and they're very simple processes actually, DemingNEXT, actually has very simple way of breaking things up to people. So that kind of people come together in terms of business and investment but the growth trajectory is what that lacks and that's why DemingNEXT has come with this philosophies to push guys and help people move to the next level. 0:13:11.3 AS: Yeah moving to the next level is interesting 'cause I know when I moved to Thailand Justin I went out I taught a Just-In-Time inventory management class in 1992 and at that time the Japanese had really come to Thailand and producing cars. So I took my students out to a Toyota factory and I remember that the guy, the Japanese guy said I have to apologize that most of our managers are Japanese. In the beginning we just have a lot of training that we've been doing and over years you know it will grow where we'll have more of the Thai people in management. And then what you see now is when you visit Toyota and you realize wow that they've really done a huge amount of training. And many of the Thai staff that started at a low level have moved up into management and you know carrying on. 0:14:02.8 AS: So I can imagine that part of what you're talking about is that transition to just developing the core skills and then slowly developing into management and how to manage that business or your own businesses better and better. I guess that's kind of the transition that you're talking about. Would that be right? 0:14:21.2 JM: Oh yes yes. Because what is normally said managers normally they're not appointed. They grow into the position. So as they grow into the position there are some skills that we may lack in terms of managing the teams. And I like what Dr. Deming's philosophy of the psychology the soft skills part of it and relying on the process and not the big stick approach. So yeah it really helps especially new managers to fit into the role and get the rest to follow and emulate the good practices. 0:14:56.6 AS: Tell us something about let's say the characteristics of people there. And I'll give you an example. In Thailand, obviously in America if you raise your voice and you shout and you yell and say I want this and that, it... People, nobody likes that but they don't mind that, it's not a big deal. But in Thailand you never raise your voice and you just would never do that. Or else it would be people just wouldn't buy into that. And maybe tell us one characteristic that you see in Kenya that is part of the characteristic of the workforce or the way people feel socially like something that maybe an American as an example may come and think that they're bringing their culture but in fact they're not very sensitive to let's say some feeling or way that people do their... They live their lives and they think about things. Maybe you can give us some example. 0:15:51.8 JM: Alright yeah. So basically like sometimes it is very common with Kenya and of course it's spread a little bit across the region as well is appreciation the soft skills. It's continuous, celebrating small successes as well. So the populace, the employees would like to feel appreciated in the workplace. Otherwise if it's like over reliant on the processing and the system like okay it was part of your job you don't need a pat on your back. That kind a thing sometimes like oh a little pat would've helped. So it gives a smile to people. So it is the same with thank you did a good job. Even though it was part of the job. It's something that the populace really appreciate. So sometimes when you get maybe some probably managers from a different place and it is none of that it creates the silos and people pull out a little bit and it becomes an eight to five job. They're not enjoying it. It's like okay I'm just doing my job. But that's what I can actually think about right now. 0:17:00.5 AS: Yeah it's a great point and it obviously people around the world want intrinsic, they wanna feel that they're contributing to the value. And I think different societies have different need for that. I would say for Thais, they don't have as strong of a need for that but everybody likes to know when I'm contributing to the success of the organization and the role that I'm playing. So that's definitely and I'm guessing that people you know a lot of times when you look at Thailand's got an agricultural history, America has an agricultural history but it didn't last for very long because it turned into kind of in commercial and industrial agriculture. But when you look at countries that just have such a foundation in agriculture you have to work together or else in harvesting in planting villages work together in Thailand. Is that part of the history and part of the culture there? Or what's it like as far as teamwork versus individual work? 0:18:00.8 AS: Teamwork has actually been part of the culture. Because let's talk about the "Good old days" is when you're going to the farm you would go as a team. If you are ploughing, you'll plough as a team, harvesting you'll harvest as a team. So that's the same thing that has come down the generations. And even at work even though you are in the service sector you'll decide okay let's get together and let's do this. Let's get together and do this investment or let's do this team building. So it has carried on the generations and the only time maybe individualism comes and it's silos and like corporate politics, some groupings form within the organization. But that is... A good manager will know how to break the silos and to get people communicating again. So when Deming as well it gives... Has multiple courses that you can basically custom-make to break the silos which is a very popular one especially engagement, emotional intelligence and all that. 0:19:05.1 AS: Yeah. And in fact, what you learn is that the natural state of things is people don't want silos, they don't wanna be put up against each other like that. 0:19:14.8 JM: True, True. 0:19:16.5 AS: And so by breaking that... I'll tell you a funny story, when I was first working in an investment bank in Thailand, it was 1994 maybe at that time, and the Human Resource sent around a memo or a survey and they asked us to just tick what we thought and... The question was, "Would you like to have a company uniform that you would wear to work?" 0:19:41.8 AS: Now, as an American, I was like, "What? Why would I want that?" I'm an individual, I got my clothes, I don't need that. And so I just thought, nobody would answer yes to that, and then the next day then Human Resources said, "Well, it was unanimous, everybody wants a uniform, and we're gonna be working on getting those uniforms for everyone." And I was like, "Okay." I really didn't understand that about Thai people versus American people, and it just is a funny story about the idea that people wanna belong, and it's interesting that it's... In America, it really is like that individual and independent, which has it's value for sure. But that feeling of belonging, I think, is what I really like about the Deming content and what... The message of Dr. Deming. And it makes me think about... One of the questions that I like to ask is why Deming? Why now? And I'm curious, what would you answer to that, 'cause some people would say, "Oh, it's the old stuff and it's been around for a while, and there's new philosophies and new books and all that." but why would you say Justin, Why Deming? Why now? 0:20:56.1 JM: Yeah, Why Deming? Why now? Is really simple because we are in a transformational transitionary period for East Africans, and a lot of things have probably been done a little bit ad hoc, you're learning on the job, which is, we all know is costly, it's costly to learn on the job. So Deming philosophy brings forth a lot of tools and methodologies that you can basically move to the next level using international best practices. So basically what we know is a lot of tools of Deming also have been adopted in different ways, there are probably some software, have actually been designed and the background is basically the Deming philosophy, you know the PBC cycle, is it variations,... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26171856

Applying SoPK: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 2) 03/14/2023

Applying SoPK: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 2) Most people come into education familiar with classroom management and curriculum, but the concept of Profound Knowledge changes the way you view the entire field and your part in it. In the second episode of the Deming in Schools Case Study, Andrew and John talk about applying the System of Profound Knowledge to education. 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 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 applying Deming's system of profound knowledge in education. John, take it away. 0:00:26.8 John Dues: Andrew, it's great to be back. And excited to talk about this. One of the things I was talking about after... Thinking about after our last conversation was a moment I had where I realized as I worked with some senior leaders here is we have these two buckets of knowledge, one bucket I would call subject matter knowledge, and we talked about this a little bit last time, by subject matter, I don't mean knowing, reading or social studies or writing, but I mean the things that you need to know in your field, so for us it's classroom management, how to deliver a lesson, how to design a curriculum, those types of things, and that's always sort of been a part of my work and gained proficiency in that bucket over time, but what I realized in studying Deming is there's this whole other bucket or type of knowledge, what Deming called Profound Knowledge and that was missing across most of my career, and it was a revelation to understand that, "Hey, we need both of these things together to have any chance at improving our schools." 0:01:35.4 AS: It's interesting because the whole focus in most of education is to become a subject matter expert, and that's what's rewarded, that's what we're doing. And this whole way of, how do we see the world? Is such a unique thing. Maybe you can just go through a little bit on the system of profound knowledge as when you first came to it, and what does it mean to you? 0:02:04.4 JD: Yeah, I've been studying it for a handful of years now. Increasingly, it became this sort of foundational philosophy, and it really changed how I view the world, honestly, it wasn't only sort of in my work, although that's sort of where I started thinking most about Deming's ideas. It changed also sort of how I thought about my personal life, family, my own kids in school and their experience in school, so I had a profound impact on just about everything I was doing in my life, that's pretty foundational to discover a philosophy like this... 0:02:51.3 AS: Yeah, that's... I remember when I first understand... For me, it was variation and randomness that really kind of hit me because I was also working in the stock market, and I could see that there was a lot of randomness in the movement of stock prices, and then it was like all of a sudden, what I learned from the randomness aspect and the variation aspect was just like, it's like there's carpeting that we're walking on that nobody even realizes it's underlying everything, and it is this randomness, and we are trained to reject randomness because we're rugged individualists who are setting our own path and it's up to us to make a difference. And that type of thinking basically has to reject the role of randomness, so I know what you're saying about... That started to change the way I viewed the world. Continue on. 0:03:54.2 JD: I think building off what you're saying, there's a variation component to that, and that was sort of an entry point for me too as I read Donald Wheeler's Understanding Variation, which is sort of completely changed how I looked at numbers and data in our work here in schools, but I also think of what I'm hearing in what you're saying is complex systems, and so I think there was sort of an appreciation for systems thinking prior to Deming, but not in the same way, but I think for a lot of folks it's if we do A to B then C is gonna happen. And that's just not how things sort of unfolded in a complex system, be it schools or a company or a society or whatever you may be looking at, if you do A, then that may impact B, C, D, E, F, G in a certain way, and the outcome is gonna be impacted by all of those things, all of those changes, and I think that's sort of... You can start to see that when you start to understand variation, and then that other component, or first component of Deming's Profound Knowledge is Appreciation for a System. 0:05:07.4 JD: And I think that's sort of what he's getting at, that it's really hard to find causal links between things and if we're gonna search for those, then we need to appreciate our organizations as a system, how all of the departments or all of the grade levels in the case of a school are working together or not, and how something you do in one part of that system can impact positively or negatively, other parts of the system, even if what you did in the part of the system was a positive for that part of the system, they can actually destroy the system, and so all of these things were revelations or at least confirmations of things that maybe were in the back of my mind, before I had this understanding in writing from studying Deming's philosophy. 0:06:00.7 AS: And for the listeners or the viewers who aren't familiar with the System of Profound Knowledge, maybe you can just review the four points of it or the four parts, a little bit more. 0:06:12.2 JD: Yeah, System of Profound Knowledge. So four components, Appreciation for a System, Knowledge about Variation, Theory of knowledge and Psychology, and he called them a System of Profound Knowledge because the four components work together, that's the system part. And Profound Knowledge, what I learned over time, is that, what he meant by that is just sort of the deep understanding that comes through viewing your organization through the lens of Profound Knowledge, so when you bring those four things together, you get a different view of your organization, than without Profound Knowledge. And without Profound Knowledge, you are often misled, you often don't know when to react or not to react to something that's going on in your organization or system, with Profound Knowledge you now have a management philosophy by which to interpret that data that comes streaming at you, no matter what industry you're in, and gives you a way to map out how to react or again, not to react to that data. 0:07:18.8 AS: It makes me think there's a saying in Thai language about a frog under a coconut, and when you lift up the coconut, the frog kind of wants the coconut back on because that's their world. And I think about when you really come across the System of Profound Knowledge and you understand it, it's like that coconut comes off and you realize, Oh my God, I am part of a much bigger system, and all of a sudden things just open up and what was your experience when you first kind of started really realizing how this all works together. 0:08:00.3 JD: Well, maybe unlike the frog, I didn't wanna unsee it or I didn't want to be recovered, however, there certainly was... Well one, it took time for me to sort of understand what exactly Dr. Deming was saying, and I'm still trying to understand that fully, but the hardest thing was probably talking to people, really smart people, about Profound Knowledge and maybe them not sort of seeing the importance of it or the same level of importance that I thought that they should see or where we'll talk about it, it would be well-received, but then people would turn around and sort of revert back to the old way of thinking. And for me, it was just realizing that this just takes repeated practice, because it is really a completely new way of thinking. 0:09:00.9 JD: It's a completely new way to look at data or your systems, it's a completely new way to think about how do you bring new ideas to your organization, how do you test those ideas, it's really getting away from simple things like setting a goal without a method, it's appreciating the psychology of introducing changes to your organization. I found people are generally very open to new things, what they're not open to is being sort of yanked about constantly when we try this thing and that thing, and education has the same sort of problem in this area that other sectors like healthcare do, where the frontline people, teachers in our case, nurses in the case of healthcare where they're often being pulled this way and that with new initiatives to the point they get this initiative fatigue will wear people out and burn people out and then they leave because each leader comes in with their own pet idea and it's not grounded in this sort of solid philosophical foundation. 0:10:13.3 AS: One of the things that's interesting about the system of profound knowledge is that it can be a bit overwhelming for someone who's first coming upon it because it's like, Oh my God, there's a much bigger aim, and one of the reasons why we don't think in a systems way and why we do think silos is because it's easier, and so for some people it can feel like, Oh God, this is just overwhelming, and I'm just curious what your perspectives are on that, either for yourself or the people that you're working with there, and how do we make sure that you don't get overwhelmed by it? 0:10:57.6 JD: Yeah, it's a challenge because I originally came to the Deming Institute website and the profound knowledge page and went away because it didn't make sense to me initially, and it was two years later when I came back, and not that it was sort of some divine revelation, but I slowly, over time, it started to sink in, something caught my attention that this was worthy of study. So one thing I read, Dr. Deming said, you don't need to be eminent in all four areas or even any one of the four areas, but it does require serious study, so you're not gonna understand it in a day or a week or a month. I would also say anybody that gets serious about studying this philosophy, I would highly recommend reaching out to somebody that is further along in their understanding, and that's sort of a turning point, I think I mentioned in the last episode. Reaching out to Kelly Allen, who turned me on to David Langford that accelerated my learning, 'cause I could ask specific questions, and David could give me specific applications of Deming's ideas in schools, and that certainly helped to clarify a lot of things for me. 0:12:08.3 JD: So that's something I would highly recommend, but I would read widely, watch the videos, you can go to a four-day or sorry, two and half day seminar that the Institute does, and then reaching out to someone that is further along is something I'd highly recommend. 0:12:27.1 AS: Yeah, great advice. And just this podcast already is a starting point for the listeners out there. 0:12:33.2 JD: Yep, absolutely. 0:12:34.8 AS: One of the things that I say to my students in my valuation master class, they come to my class because it's like, Andrew, you got 30 years of experience as a financial analyst, and you were voted number one and you... This and that, and I really wanna learn from you. And when I come into class, I announce a couple of the things... And one of the things is I say, You Are Always Wrong. And I call it YAAW. And I try to help the students understand it, in the world of finance, there is no precision, like in the world of physics or the law of gravity or something like that, that you're always going to be wrong and therefore don't freak out over that. Understand that it's a system. The second thing that I tell the students, and this one I think really gets them, they don't really figure it out until the end, and that is in my class and in the world of finance, what I teach is, if I'm successful as a teacher in this specific area that I'm teaching, if you feel less confident when you finish my course, I've succeeded. 0:13:48.7 AS: And I think that students freak out because of I'm here to be more confident Andrew, and what I'm exposing them to is that it's a constant... We're walking on quick sand. We're operating in a world where even in the world of finance, just observing the world of finance, observing market prices and stuff can influence actions that we're taking in the market... Can influence market prices. So the complexity level is so high. 0:14:27.1 JD: Yeah, yeah, one of the things that makes me think of is sort of a... I don't know if I'd call it paradox, but one of the early places that I went even prior to sort of coming across, Deming's work is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and they have it as their mission to bring the science of improvement to the education sector. And they have an annual Improvement Summit. The first time I went, I realized that they had this footer on all of their materials and it said, "Probably wrong, definitely incomplete." And that was a really great entry way into the science of improvement because that's the mentality you need when you start any type of improvement work, improvement project in your organization, and I sort of stole that idea and stuck it on all our materials. 0:15:27.8 JD: And I think the reaction from a lot of people first is similar to how you're describing the reaction of your students is that, wait a second, aren't you supposed to be an expert, don't you know what you're talking about? And I said, "No, that's not what this is about." This is about humbling yourself, realizing the complexity of the organizations that we're working in, and that at the outset of any improvement project, that there are gonna be things that you discover along the way that were completely unknown at the start, and so if you don't take that mindset and you rush in and you're sure of yourself, then you are set up for failure from the beginning, in my opinion. 0:16:09.7 AS: So if we go back to the title of this episode, Applying Deming's System of Profound Knowledge in Education, part of it is it starts to open you up beyond subject matter, and also it starts to help you understand that there's just a much more, a bigger world out there of influences that are driving us, and I think one of the things that's interesting about that is it... Young managers in the world of business are seeming to latch on to KPIs and feeling like it is a simple solution, we just define everybody's KPI, we nail them with it, we repeat it to them, we have them write it out in their goals and we measure it, and if they don't achieve it. Boom. And what Deming is teaching is just the opposite, that when you understand the system of profound knowledge, you understand that optimizing the output of any organization is a much more complex reality than just putting a KPI and a number on it. 0:17:18.8 JD: Yeah, I think of a colleague of a contemporary of Dr. Deming, who is still doing great work, Dr. Donald Wheeler said something to the effect of goal setting, KPI setting, goal setting is often an act of desperation, meaning like you don't know what else to do, so you set a goal, you don't have a method, you don't have a theory for how to improve, so you set this goal and then say something to the effect of, "I don't care how you get it done. Just get it done." Right, and then all hell breaks loose. And what do you think he's talking about is, if you don't understand the capability of your system, if you don't understand whatever area you're talking about, whatever area that KPI is in, if you don't understand how that data is varying over time, if you don't understand if there are just common causes, there are special causes in that data, you have no idea how to react nor do you know what your system was capable of the first place. 0:18:26.1 JD: That's sort of one of the sessions I led with leadership team here, and everybody kind of looks and says, Well, aren't we supposed to set goals? and there's really nothing wrong with setting goals in and of themselves, but we often set them in ways that are completely detached from reality, both in the magnitude of improvement that we're expecting and is a lack of understanding of how that same data has performed over time. 0:18:52.5 AS: Yeah, and it reminds me of Dr. Deming's statement of 'by what method?' 0:18:56.2 JD: By what method, yeah. 0:18:58.9 AS: So for, in wrapping up our discussion, I wanna go back and review some of what we've just talked about, so we're talking about applying the system of profound knowledge in education, and what you've talked about is the idea of coming into education, most people are very familiar with subject matter knowledge about classroom management and curriculum management and all that, but what was missing when you started your journey was this concept of Profound Knowledge, and once you started to understand it, it changed the way that you viewed the world, and then we just briefly talked about the idea, I wrote down something which was "probably wrong, definitely incomplete", and I would say that there are plenty of places where they think "definitely right. Probably complete." [laughter] 0:19:47.3 AS: And then you just mentioned the idea of setting goals, and I think Deming is not against goals, it's that goal is just one measure, I would say, if you set goals for individuals that incentivize them individually, you've created a big problem of competition, but most importantly, I think what you're saying is the idea of just setting a goal like, We wanna increase test scores by X or in my business, I want revenue growth to be up by 20% next year, the question really becomes by what method is there anything else that you would add to wrap up our discussion? 0:20:28.2 JD: Yeah, I think goals or quotas, especially if you're optimizing one part of the system, very likely to destroy the system as a whole, or at least sub-optimize it make it worse. I think Deming said something to the fact of quotas can be a fortress against improvement. Right. I think he was exactly right, because people start to do all kinds of weird things when you start to set quotas or goals, especially again, if they're incentivized as an individual, whether that's an individual worker or an individual department, things start to sort of happen in the opposite of what you wanted to happen when you do things like set goals, without that appreciation for the capability of the system in the first place, or an understanding of the data or an idea for how to improve, because it's like, well, if our goal... If we're gonna set a goal to increase test scores, let's say by 10% next year, why don't we do it this year? If we knew how to do that, what were we waiting on, why do we think we can do it next year, if we couldn't do it this year... 0:21:33.8 AS: Great points. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming; people are entitled to joy in work. /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26145924

From Taguchi to Deming: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 1) 03/06/2023

From Taguchi to Deming: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 1) In this, the first in a series of episodes on Awakening Your Inner Deming, Andrew talks with Dr. Bill Bellows about his journey. He started with Taguchi, read his way through other quality "gurus", and finally found Deming in unexpected places - solving big problems in space shuttles along the way! 0:00:02.1 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 here with featured guest Bill Bellows. Bill, are you ready to share your Deming journey? 0:00:15.7 Bill Bellows: I am ready. I've got my seatbelt on, crash protection devices. I'm ready to go, Andrew. [chuckle] 0:00:23.3 AS: And I am ready indeed. So let me introduce you to the audience. Bill's a 35+ year specialist in the field of quality and engineering management. In addition to adjunct professor roles, he is president of InThinking Services, partnering with clients to facilitate the understanding and application of the Deming philosophy. So, Bill, can you tell us a bit about how you first came to even learn about the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and what hooked you? 0:00:57.8 BB: Well, I was minding my own business. No. Actually, I finished my graduate studies in 1983 and went to work in the aerospace industry with a sense that I wasn't gonna... [chuckle] I wasn't quite sure I was gonna like it. I greatly enjoyed what I was doing in the field in graduate school, and the work I was to be doing in industry was very similar. So I felt okay, but it didn't take long before I just didn't like it. And I found myself teaching some college classes and then wondering what I wanted to do. And it took about... Two years after I was working at this company, I took a class in problem solving and decision making. A one-week class. And I loved it. I started looking at everything through this lens of a model for decision making, a model for problem solving. 0:02:13.4 BB: And shortly thereafter, I was approached by the training director of the company. We were growing leaps and bounds in terms of business and employment. And this guy came in and was really cool in terms of bringing us what he thought was some really professional development training. And he knew I was excited by this one-week course. And he said, "Bill, how'd you like to be the person in engineering trained in that and to teach this course?" And I was like, "Yeah. Yeah. Sign me up." So I went away for a two-week train the trainer, very intensive training. And what was interesting is I was the only one in the room, two dozen people that wasn't an HR and wasn't a trainer. I didn't know how to train... I was gung ho on the material, but I did not know what it was like to get in front of an audience. And in fact, the instructors used to kid me that I was almost afraid to move beyond the podium. I just wanted to hide behind it. 0:03:17.0 BB: And so I came out of that having been... I have to we prepare for the next day, five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Next thing you know, we're preparing these one hour long teachers. And I love... I liked it. And then back at work, the plan was that, given this role as the auxiliary instructor for this material, when people in engineering, my organization, have a need for this training to be used, I'd be called upon. And that was really cool. It got me associated with people I wasn't working with, and it was a much more exciting than what I was doing. And Lo and behold, the guy in training, the director says, "Hey, you know this... " He mentioned Deming's name, and I was a sponge. And I really respected what he was doing. And he gave me... He introduced me to Deming's work. And I remember, I think it was Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position. And I looked at that and I thought, "Okay." 0:04:30.4 BB: But then going back to the problem, we'll come back to that. That was my exposure to Dr. Deming's name. But in parallel, I was working on a very big problem on the... On our number one product, which were gas turbine engines, you could think of as jet engines, for applications in the US Army's battle tank. And we were making 120 of these a month. And I mean, it was a big, big... It was the biggest business of the company. And once or so a year, there'd be a major crisis. We can't ship hardware and the Army would come in and say, "Stop production until you solve this." And I had been dragged into some of those before. And that kind of got me in the realm of, "Hey, why don't you go off and take this training?" So now I'm not sitting in the back of the room. Now I'm in the front of the room but leading the facilitation of these techniques for problem... Mostly problem solving. What is a problem? The car won't start. It used to work. 0:05:38.5 BB: And so we're working on one big problem. And it was... It had incredible relevance relative... This is the height of the Cold War, Andrew. This is '87, '88 timeframe. And there was reason to believe by the Army that the majority of the battle tanks had a problem. And those tanks were the front line of defense of the allied forces in Europe. And so, we were running tests 24/7 trying to solve this, solve this, solve this, solve this, solve this, and we weren't going anywhere. And at one of the meetings, once a month, somebody had to go explain to the army, essentially our lack of progress. At one of those meetings, somebody said General Motors makes the transmissions for the tanks, and whenever they have an issue like this, they use this thing called Taguchi methods. So we're gonna contact General Motors and ask for their help and you're gonna send somebody then in Indianapolis to find out what it is and is it relevant. 0:06:49.8 BB: And so I go to this meeting and I learn about these goings-on, and I turn to the manager of the tank engine program. And I said, "So who's gonna go to Indianapolis?" And he said, "You are." And I looked at him dumbfounded and I said, "Why me?" He says, "You're the problem-solving guy." He says, "I want you to go." And Andrew, I had no interest in going. I was looking for reasons why it made no sense. And in the back of my mind anytime I get into a situation where I'm not happy with whatever it is, I look for something positive to make it appeasing. And believe it or not, I didn't wanna go to Indianapolis, but I thought, but I can go to the Indy 500 Museum, which a neighbor did years ago, and if nothing else, I can go to the Indy museum. And that's really what I was looking forward to, is going to the Indy museum 'cause I thought this meeting was just gonna be a waste of time. 0:07:49.7 BB: And I go into the meeting and I'm... And this is what hooked me on Taguchi then we'll come back to Deming. I go into the meeting and there were these transmission division's top people in Taguchi methods. Well, their senior people, their top most person had recently left the transmission division to go work for a new part of GM called the Saturn Corporation. And I'm thinking, holy cow, your top Taguchi guy is at Saturn, which I knew about. So now I'm thinking, 'cause prior to going out, I did a literature search. We didn't have the internet and I pulled up a bunch of stuff and it was just a mishmash. But when he said, "Our top guy who wrote this book... " and he showed me the book, "went to the Saturn Corporation," I'm thinking, now my ears are perking up. 0:08:56.4 BB: And then he says the other thing that's funny here. They brought in their chief transmission designer and he looked at the drawings of the parts that were failing in the engine. And he says, "This looks like a German design." I don't know anything about design, but he looks at the drawings and he says, "This looks like a German design." And I said, "It is a German design." In fact, I said, "The people who designed this engine designed the very first German jet engine in the late '30s for Hitler." I said, "It's the same team of people." And so anyway, he looked at it and he had some ideas, but that wasn't why I was there. But then the other two guys were there, and the first question they asked me is, "How do you come up with ideas for what's wrong with this tank engine?" I said, "Everyone's got an idea." And I said, "And what if that doesn't work?" He says, "Here's what we do. Somebody comes up with an idea and every idea we come up with, we write it down and we go run a 10-hour test at a thousand bucks an hour, which I thought was expensive. 0:10:01.5 BB: And then at the end of the test, we decide to go forward or not. Are we onto something or not? And he said, "What if it's not?" And I said, "Well, then somebody's always got an idea, somebody's always got an idea. We're running test, we're running test. Well, why are we here?" Because we're running through ideas, running through ideas, and we ain't finding anything. So then he says, "What do you measure?" And it's so funny. I don't know anything about gears other than the gears have teeth. I'm a heat transfer guy. [chuckle] So I said, "After each test, somebody goes to the manager in the gear group and shows them the gears that contact each other," and he holds 'em up and he says, they look good or they look bad. He says, "How does he do that?' I says, "He just looks at 'em." He says, "He doesn't measure anything?" I said, "No, he just holds them up to the light and he says, that looks worn, or that doesn't look worn." 0:11:01.3 BB: And I said, "Based on that decision, we run the next test." Well, he says, "Here's our first piece of advice." He said, "Stop thinking of it as being it's worn or it's not." He said, "It's really shades of grey." And he says, "What I want you to do is measure each tooth on each gear before and after." He said, "You're throwing away a lot of information based on this measurement." And I thought, okay, okay. And I said, how do you do it? Blah, blah, blah. And I went back about a week later based on what he shared with me and we put together a test plan that solved that problem in about two weeks later. And so now I'm all over Taguchi's work, I am all over Taguchi's work, all over Taguchi's work, and it became my next look. 0:11:49.0 AS: What does Taguchi have to do with just measuring versus eyeballing something? 0:11:54.9 BB: Well, that's a good question. I'd say Taguchi's work in that situation was the use of fractional factorial testing, but the issue was that we were treating the data as black and white, which is, in terms of statistics, it is a poor way of doing things, but that's... It wasn't... 0:12:19.0 AS: So either you accept or reject as opposed to measuring? 0:12:22.1 BB: Yeah. And I was... I took an undergraduate class in statistics and I just... It wasn't a field I didn't know that much about. So I just bought into it and he just brought it to my attention, and I said, okay, and it kind of makes sense where he's coming from, but the... So really, the biggest thing that came out of the meeting was not so much... It was driven by you gotta look at this Taguchi guy and it was a combination of running tests using Taguchi's ideas, which would've included using variable data and not... What was it called? Category data. And so that, it was just incredible. This was a problem that was going on with incredible high visibility at the Pentagon, and it got us out of a big jam. And we just couldn't, the answer was right in front of us, but we couldn't see it based on not so much the testing method, the evaluation method. So then that got me in love with Dr. Taguchi's work, so... 0:13:40.4 AS: Let's stop there for a second and think about the listeners for a second, and the viewers. How would you describe the lesson that you learned from that experience? 0:13:56.2 BB: I say a really big lesson is that a simple shift in our thinking, kind of like putting on glasses allowed us to see what we couldn't see that was right in front of us. 0:14:11.7 AS: And it happened by you going outside of the organization also, it sounds like. 0:14:15.7 BB: Oh inside... Oh, the organization. See, I had no reason to challenge the organization. These were the gear people. I'm a heat transfer person, so I don't challenge the gear people. What is that all about? That's why I'm just going along with the guy says, "What do you measure?" I said, again, I was out of my element relative to how organizations operate, out of my element relative to... Now I just looked at that and say, they're the experts. Why would I... I mean, [chuckle] I was just gullible. And I don't think that's uncommon. Where I worked, I found that there were fields in which everyone was an expert. And then there were fields in which... Meaning that if you... Where I worked in Connecticut, if you had some skill with statistics, people would get outta your way and they would just treat you like you walked on water, even though you were full of it. They just bowed to Andrew because you... 0:15:33.2 BB: And so I think it was something like that. I just didn't... And again, I don't think that's uncommon in organizations. But to your point, in fact, back to your point, when I walked away from that very first meeting, and here's what was cool is, it was the two of them, the designer left the room and were in a small conference room. And here I am with two instructors and me, two instructors and one student. I had a ball. And I'm taking notes and I'm writing everything down. And I'm asking this one, asking this one, asking this one, asking this one. And the plan was I would come back in a week, take the ideas, go back, talk to the experts. Well, one of the things we did when we went back is we threw out everything we thought we knew about those experiments because every decision we had made was based on this premise of look and hold a part up to the light. 0:16:27.6 BB: So I said, all this testing is meaningless. So now we've gotta go back to the original list and go forward 'cause typically you'd think, like with Edison, you try this, try this, try this. You don't go backwards. We went backwards based on what you're talking about is that I lost trust in everything we thought we knew. So we went back to the original list, which was... And the original list was what a bunch of recent design changes. So we went back to that list that had been tested, and using a shifting from black and white data to continuum data, we discovered what no one else could see. And it just jumped right out. It was just so damn obvious what was going on, but we couldn't see it. And so that got me intrigued in Taguchi's work. I was then on a mission to learn everything I could. And I then began to see my role in the organization as the facilitator of training that I was doing, and then training in this and helping the organization on applications. 0:17:41.9 BB: And it didn't take long. We were solving some pretty big problems after that. And the VP of engineering liked what was going on. And I went to one day and I said, "I'd like a job," I said, "There's incredible opportunities for us to use this, and I'd like to be the person leading that effort." And he smiled, and... "Andrew, this is the height of TQM, this is 1988. TQM is huge." And he's kinda nodding to me. And sometime thereafter I told him, I said, well what is I brought the Taguchi people in from Detroit to do a big seminar, $30,000. And I'm in charge of bringing them in. I'm in charge of who's coming to this. I remember I went to the HR training guy and I said, "Who do I invite to this training? This is out of my league." And he gave me incredible advice, and I'm sure you've heard before, he said, "It's easier to ask... " He said, "It's easier to apologize than ask permission." 0:18:48.5 BB: He said, "You are in charge of the whole damn thing." He said, "You invite who you think needs to be there." And I was like, whoa, [laughter] And I said, when did he had to tell me that. And I had so many from engineering, so many from operations, so many from procurement, invited the people in, took the course, we were able to as part of the course show what we had done and we were on a roll. And eventually I went to the VP of engineering and I said, "This is what I wanna do." And I even... In a nice way, he and I got along really well and I said, "The job I want, I've shared with you," and I said, "And I really hope it comes to be." I said, "But if it doesn't come to be, it will be because I found that job elsewhere." [laughter] 0:19:44.0 BB: "So if I come to you and say I'm leaving, this is why." 0:19:50.0 AS: It's for that job. 0:19:50.6 BB: This is why. And then in the very same time frame that I'm out looking, looking, looking, looking, looking 'cause it would... Did not appear to be coming. And then I heard about Deming again and I heard that he was speaking about an hour away from where I worked. And at that point, I had taken an introduction to Taguchi's course, an advanced course where I drove to Detroit and self-funded a week's vacation. I was intense. And I hear about Deming speaking in the area and I thought, "Being a student of quality, I need to go find out what this is all about." So I... 0:20:28.0 AS: And what year is that and what city was it that that was happening in? 0:20:34.8 BB: Dr. Deming was speaking in February of 1990 in Danbury, Connecticut at Western Connecticut State University, and he spoke three times that day. I was there for all three and I have videotapes from the inviter, the professor. He shared with me two of the three videotapes, and one of them, the evening lecture about an hour and a half long I believe is on YouTube. I can get you that information to the link and... But Dr. Deming spoke for about an hour to the faculty, an hour to the students, and what was so cool is I attended with two colleagues from a graduate school who were in transition and I said, "Hey, there's this Deming guy appearing." He was about... He was appearing about midway between where these classmates were. So they drove and got there and I got there and we're driving around campus trying to find where this is. And what's so cool was we found the building, and found this auditorium which was empty, and as soon as we find the room, we turn, and there's Dr. Deming getting out of a limo. [chuckle] 0:21:49.9 BB: And it's about noon time, and he's with his host and all in there, and I guess they went off for lunch. So we're in the room before any... So when we found the room, we see this guy that looks like Dr. Deming. So, okay, this is the right place. So we just kind of made ourselves at home there, kind of sat. Found the place where we wouldn't be sitting kind of in the back, and he came in and started speaking, and he was entertaining. But so much of what he was saying, he was using a language that was nowhere near anything I had learned from Dr. Taguchi, who in my opinion, I was just in love with Taguchi's work. So I'm looking at Deming by comparison, I'm thinking that doesn't fit what I know from Taguchi. That doesn't fit, that doesn't fit, that doesn't fit. [laughter] So he gave pretty much the same presentation to the students and the faculty and then a little bit longer in the evening. And so much of what he said was interesting. 0:23:02.6 BB: And some of it is entertaining, I mean, entertaining in the sense that I could tell it was a joke. I mean, some of his jokes are in the context of his work and I wouldn't laugh at that 'cause I don't understand the context, but others were, so it was interesting. And then a few days later, the two guys who went with me, who lived in my hometown, I went to see them and a third classmate who got his MBA when we were getting Masters in Engineering, he showed up and he knew of Deming and he said, "So what'd you learn?" And the thing that stood out more than anything else, I said, "I don't quite... " [chuckle] I said, "I don't understand the majority of what he said." I said, "But what did stand out... " I told this classmate, I said, "I've never heard anyone speak ill... /episode/index/show/deminginstitute/id/26144262

In Their Own Words

TOPICS