In Their Own Words
Our podcasts feature interviews with members of the Deming community, including industry leaders, practitioners, educators, Deming family members, and others who share their stories of transformation and success through innovative management and quality theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Podcast episodes prior to 2022 were hosted, produced, and edited by Tripp Babbitt.
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8 Dimensions of Quality: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 2)
07/08/2024
8 Dimensions of Quality: Misunderstanding Quality (Part 2)
In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss David Garvin's 8 Dimensions of Quality and how they apply in the Deming world. Bill references this article by Garvin: https://hbr.org/1987/11/competing-on-the-eight-dimensions-of-quality TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is the Misunderstanding Quality series, episode two, The Eight Dimensions of Quality. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.4 Bill Bellows: Welcome back, Andrew. Great to see you again. All right, episode two, we're moving right along. So in episode one, which the title I proposed, waiting to see what comes out, the title I proposed was, Quality, Back to the Start. And that was inspired by some lyrics from Coldplay. Anyway, but this is a, it's going back to my start in quality and last time I mentioned discovering Taguchi's work long before I discovered Dr. Deming. In fact, Gipsie Ranney, who is the first president of the Deming Institute, the nonprofit formed by Dr. Deming and his family just before he passed away, and Gipsie became the first president and was on the board when I was on the board for many years. And I spoke with her nearly every day, either driving to work or driving home. And once, she calls me up and she says, "Bill," that was her Tennessee accent, "Bill." 0:01:50.5 BB: She says, "It says on The Deming Institute webpage that you infused Dr. Taguchi's work into Dr. Deming's work," something like that, that I... Something like I infused or introduced or I brought Taguchi's work into Deming's work, and I said, "Yes." I said, "Yeah, that sounds familiar." She says, "Isn't it the other way around?" That I brought Deming's work into Taguchi's work. And I said, "No, Gipsie," I said, "It depends on your starting point. And my starting point was Dr. Taguchi." But I thought it was so cool. She says, "Bill don't you have it? Don't you... " She is like, "Isn't it the other way around?" I said, "No, to me, it was all things Taguchi, then I discovered Dr. Deming." But I was thinking earlier before the podcast, and I walked around putting together how, what I wanna talk about tonight. And I thought, when I discovered Taguchi's work, I looked at everything in terms of an application of Dr. Taguchi's ideas. 0:03:29.7 AS: And one question about Taguchi for those people that don't know him and understand a little bit about him, was he... If I think about where Dr. Deming got at the end of his life, it was about a whole system, the System of Profound Knowledge and a comprehensive way of looking at things. Was Taguchi similar in that way or was he focused in on a couple different areas where he really made his contribution? 0:04:03.9 BB: Narrower than Dr. Deming's work. I mean, if we look at... And thank you for that... If we look at Dr. Deming's work in terms of the System of Profound Knowledge, the elements of systems psychology, variation, theory of knowledge, Taguchi's work is a lot about variation and a lot about systems. And not systems in the sense of Russ Ackoff systems thinking, but variation in the sense of where's the variation coming from looking upstream, what are the causes of that variation that create variation in that product, in that service? 0:04:50.9 BB: And then coupled with that is that, how is that variation impacting elsewhere in the system? So here I am receiving sources of variation. So what I deliver it to you has variation because of what's upstream of me and Taguchi's looking at that coupled with how is that variation impacting you? So those are the systems side, the variation side. Now, is there anything in Deming, in Taguchi's work about psychology and what happens when you're labelling workers and performance appraisals and, no, not at all. 0:05:37.6 AS: Okay, got it. 0:05:38.4 BB: Is there anything in there about theory of knowledge, how do we know that what we know is so? No, but there's a depth of work in variation which compliments very much so what Dr. Deming was doing. So anyway, so no. And so I discovered Taguchi's work, and I mentioned that in the first episode. I discovered his work, became fascinated with it, started looking at his ideas in terms of managing variation to achieve incredible... I mean, improved uniformity to the extent that it's worthwhile to achieve. So we were not striving for the ultimate uniformity, it's just the idea that we can manage the uniformity. And if we... And we'll look at this in more detail later, but for our audience now, if you think of a distribution of the variation in the performance of a product or a service, and you think in terms of... It doesn't have to be a bell-shaped distribution, but you have a distribution and it has an average and it has variation. 0:06:50.4 BB: What Dr. Taguchi's work is about in terms of a very brief, succinct point here in episode two is how might we change the shape of that distribution? How might we make it narrower, if that's a worthwhile adventure? It may be worthwhile to make it wider, not just narrower, but in both cases, we're changing the shape of the distribution and changing the location. So Taguchi's work, Taguchi's Methods, driven by variation comes to me, variation impacts you is how do I change the shape and location of that distribution? So on a regular basis, as I became more fascinated with that, I started thinking about, well, how might I apply Taguchi's ideas to these things that I encountered every day? Well, prior to that before discovering Taguchi's work, when I was a facilitator in problem solving and decision making training, I did the same thing, Andrew. 0:07:52.4 BB: I started looking at, oh, is this a problem? Is this a decision? Is this a situation that needs to be appraised? And so prior to that, what I was thinking about is when I was just a heat transfer analyst working on my Ph.D., I didn't look at how the heat transfer stuff affected all these other aspects of my lives. I didn't think about it when I went into a supermarket, but there was something about the problem solving and decision making that just infatuated me. And I would look at, oh, is Andrew talking about a decision or is Andrew talking about a problem? So I started hearing things. And so when I went into Taguchi's work, it was the same thing. And then shifting into Deming's work, it's the same thing. And I've... There's nothing else that I've studied that I look at things through those lenses. Anyway, so in studying, getting exposed to Taguchi, I mentioned that I had some time away from work, I went out on medical for some reasons and went and bought a book, a bunch of books. 0:09:02.4 BB: And one of the books I bought by David Garvin had come out in 1987, is entitled "The Eight Dimensions of Quality." There's a Harvard Business Review article that I wanna reference in this episode, and I'll put a link to the article. It's a free link. And so when you hear people talk about a quality product or a quality service or quality healthcare. We think in terms of it's quality as things, it's either good quality or bad quality or high quality, or somebody calls it low quality, or we just say it's a quality product. But what does that mean? So what I find is very loosely, we think in terms of categories of quality, good, bad, high, low. What we'll look at in a future episode is what would happen if we thought about quality on a continuum, which I believe Taguchi's work really demonstrates vividly as well as Dr. Deming's work. 0:10:07.4 BB: But even to back up before we talk about the eight dimensions of quality, I wanted to give some background on the word quality. The word quality, and this comes from an article and I'll put a link to this article, I wrote it for the Lean Management Journal a number of years ago, the word quality has Latin roots, beginning as qualitas, T-A-S, coined by the Roman philosopher and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. He later became an adversary of this bad guy named Mark Antony. You've heard of him. Feared by Antony, this guy was feared by Antony because his power of speech led, you know what it led to, Andrew, his power of speech? 0:10:54.5 AS: What? 0:10:54.6 BB: His beheading. 0:10:55.8 AS: Oh my goodness. 0:10:56.5 BB: So for those of you with great powers of speech, watch out for your Mark Antony. But meanwhile, he introduced fellow Romans to the vocabulary of qualitas, quantitas, quantity, humanitas, humanities, essentia, which is, essence, he also is credited with an extensive list of expressions that translate into English today. Difference, infinity, science, morale. Cicero spoke of qualitas with his peers when focusing on the essential nature, character or property of an object. And this is kind of interesting. I mean, you can count how many apples do we have. And again, he came up with the term quantitas for quantity, but he is also talking about the essence of the apples. That's the quality word. And then 2000 years later when writing "The New Economics", Dr. Deming provided his definition and a little bit different. 0:12:05.3 BB: He says, "The problem anywhere is quality. What is quality?" Says the good doctor, "A product or service possesses quality if it helps somebody, it enjoys a good and sustainable market." And I said in the article, "As with Cicero, Deming saw quality as a property." And then some other background on quality before I talk about Garvin, "long after Cicero and well before Deming, quality as a property was a responsibility of guilds." Guilds. I mean, now we have writers guilds, we have actors guilds, and it's kind of cool that these guilds still exist and they are associations of artisans who control the practice of their craft, each with a revered trademark. So here in Los Angeles, we have writers guilds, actors guilds. They were organized as professional societies, just like unions. 0:13:00.2 BB: And these fraternities were developed, and within these fraternities they created standards for high quality. All right. So what is this quality management stuff from David Garvin? So this article was written 37 years ago and reviewing it for tonight's episode and I thought it fit in really, really well. I was reminded of... First time I read this article, 1989, I knew a lot about... Well, I knew, I was excited about Taguchi as I knew a lot about Taguchi, didn't know a lot about Dr. Deming. So I'm now reviewing it years later with a much deeper, broader Deming perspective than at that time. But I do believe, and I would encourage the listeners to get ahold of the article, look at it, if you wanna go into more depth, there's Garvin's book. And doing some research for tonight, I found out that he passed away in 2017, seven or so years ago. 0:14:04.6 BB: He was, I guess from, most of his career and education he was at the Harvard Business School, very well respected there. And so in the article it talks about, again, this, 1987, that's the era of Total Quality Management. That's the era in which Dr. Deming was attracting 2000 people to go to his seminars. 1987 is two years before Six Sigma Quality, two years before “The Machine That Changed The World.” And in the article, he says, "Part of the problem, of course, is that Japanese and European competition have intensified. Not many companies tried to make quality programs work even as they implemented them." This is back when quality was an era of quality circles. He says, "In my view, most of the principles about quality were narrow in scope. They were designed as purely defensive measures to preempt failures or eliminate defects, eliminate red beads." 0:15:10.3 BB: "What managers need now is an aggressive strategy to gain and hold markets with high quality," there we go again, "as a competitive linchpin." All right. So in the article, he has some interesting explanations of... Highlights. In the book is more depth. He talks about Joseph Juran, "Juran's Quality Handbook". Juran observed that quality could be understood in terms of avoidable and unavoidable costs. Dr. Deming talked about the economics. The New Economics, right? But Juran is looking at avoidable, unavailable costs resulting from defects in product failures. That's very traditional quality today. The latter associated with prevention, inspection, sampling, sorting, quality control. And so this is what I found fascinating, is 37 years later, this is still the heavy sense of what quality is all about. Avoiding failure, avoiding defects. 0:16:18.3 BB: Then he talks about Total Quality Control coming from Armand Feigenbaum, who was a big name in the '80s. Again Dr. Deming's work kind of created this big quality movement but it wasn't just Dr. Deming people discovered, they discovered Philip Crosby in a Zero Defects advocacy, Feigenbaum, Juran, sometime later. Again, mid '80s, Dr. Taguchi's name started to be heard. All right. And then the reliability. All right. Now I wanna get into the... Oh, here's, this is good. "In 1961, the Martin Corporation, Martin Company was building Pershing missiles for the US Army. The design of the missile was sound, but Martin found that it could maintain high quality only through massive inspection programs." 0:17:13.0 BB: You know what Dr. Deming would say about inspection? It's after the fact. Sorting the good ones from the bad ones after the fact. No prevention there. But Martin found that it could only do it with inspection. And decided to offer... Again, this is 1961, and this is still the solution today, decided to offer workers incentives to lower the defect rate. And in December, 1961, delivered a Pershing missile to Cape Canaveral with zero discrepancies. Buoyed by this success, Martin's general manager in Florida accepted a challenge issued by the Army's missile command to deliver the first Pershing missile one month ahead of schedule. He went even further, he promised that the missile would be perfect. Perfect. You know what that means, Andrew? 0:18:12.3 AS: Tell us. 0:18:12.8 BB: All good, not bad. 0:18:14.9 AS: All good, not bad. 0:18:15.9 BB: He promised missile would be perfect with no hardware problems or document errors, and that all equipment would be fully operational 10 days after delivering. And so what was neat in going back to this is we still have this mindset that quality is about things being good, not bad. What is bad we call that scrap, we call that rework. That's alive and well today. 0:18:45.0 AS: The proclamations are interesting when you listen to what he's saying, when you're quoting that. 0:18:52.4 BB: Yeah, no, and I remember, 'cause again, I read this recently for the first time in 37 years and I'm going through it. And at the time I was thinking, "Wow, wow, wow, this is a really big deal. This is a really big deal." Now I look at it and say, "This is what we're still talking about today, 37 years later." The absence of defects is the essence of quality. All right. But so I would highly recommend the article. Now we get into what he proposes as eight critical dimensions of quality that can serve as a framework for strategic analysis. And I think even in a Deming environment, I think it's... I think what's really cool about this is it provides a broad view of quality that I think Deming's work fits in very well to, Dr. Taguchi's work fits in very well to, and I think covers a lot of what people call quality. So the first dimension he talks about is performance. 0:20:01.4 BB: And he says, "Of course, performance refers to a product's primary operating characteristics." He says, "For an automobile, performance would include traits like acceleration, handling, cruising speed. For a television, sound and picture clarity." He says "A power shovel in the excavation business that excavates 100 cubic yards per hour will outperform one that excavates 10 cubic yards per hour." So the capacity, that could be miles per gallon, carrying capacity, the resolution of the pixels, that's what he calls performance. Okay. Features is the second dimension of quality. Examples include free drinks on an airplane, but not if you're flying a number of airlines they charge you for those drinks, permanent press cycles on a washing machine, automatic tuners on a color television set. A number of people in our audience won't know what those are, bells and whistles. Features are bells and whistles. 0:21:17.2 BB: There was a time people would say the number of cup holders in your automobile, a feature could be intermittent wipers. So these are features. So again, I mean, so performance is kind of cool. What is the capacity, is it 100 horsepower, 200 horsepower, that's performance. Features, bells and whistles. Okay. Fine. Reliability, now we're talking. The dimension represents the probability of a product malfunctioning or failing within a specified period of time. So your car breaking down, are you gonna drive to work every day and one morning you're gonna go out and it's... That's a reliability issue. Okay. That's... When I think about reliability, that's a Taguchi thing, that's a Deming thing. And looking at time between failures, okay, fine. Reliability comes down to... And if importance for the impact of downtime, if you're looking at engines not working and you're sitting at the gate, that's a reliability issue. The reliability is, it can be repaired, but it's gonna take some time, perhaps. Conformance. All right. 0:22:40.4 AS: Is number four, right? 0:22:42.2 BB: This is number four, a related dimension of quality is conformance or the degree to which a product's design and operating characteristics meet established standards. "This dimension owes to the importance of traditional approaches," it says, "to quality pioneers such as Juran." All products and services involve specifications of some sort. When new designs or models are developed, dimensions are set for parts or purity, these specifications are normally expressed as a target or a center. Now it's starting to sound a little bit like Dr. Taguchi's work, an ideal value, deviance from the center within a specified range. But this approach equates good quality with operating inside the tolerance band. There is little interest in whether the specifications have been met exactly. For the most part, dispersion within specifications is ignored. Ignored. That's balls and strikes, Andrew, balls and strikes. 0:23:51.2 BB: As long as the ball is somewhere in the strike zone, as long as the characteristic is somewhere within requirements, conformance, this gets into what I talk about in terms of the question number one of quality management. Has the requirement been met, the requirement for the performance, the dimension, is it within requirements? And there's only two answers, yes or no. That's conformance. I used to think that the American Society for Quality might be better known as the American Society for the Preservation of Conformance. I find there's a lot of conformance thinking. I'm reminded of, I'm a member of the American Society for Quality as I'm on the Deming Medal Committee, so I have to be a member of ASQ. So I get a daily or every other day newsletter with comments and conformance is a big part of the conversation. Good parts and bad parts, scrap and rework. All right. 0:25:02.3 BB: Conformance is number four. And it's not to say there isn't a place for the conformance, but conformance is then again different from what Dr. Taguchi is talking about. All right. Durability, the measure of a product life. Durability has both...
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Quality, Back to the Start! Misunderstanding Quality (Part 1)
07/01/2024
Quality, Back to the Start! Misunderstanding Quality (Part 1)
Where did your "quality journey" start? In this first episode of a new series on quality, Bill Bellows shares his "origin story," the evolution of his thinking, and why the Deming philosophy is unique. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey in the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is a new series called Misunderstanding Quality, and the topic for today is Quality Management, what century are we in? Bill, take it away. 0:00:35.7 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. [chuckle] All right. 0:00:39.5 AS: Exciting. I'm excited to hear what you've got going on in your mind about this Misunderstanding Quality. 0:00:45.6 BB: Well, first let me say that whether you're new to quality or looking for ideas on quality and quality management, quality improvement, quality management, the aim I have in mind for this podcast series is to improve your ability to manage quality through deepening your appreciation of the Deming philosophy and how to apply it. But specifically, a focus on quality, time after time, which is where most people heard about Deming, was through Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position. For example, the title of his first book. And relative to the title, what came to mind is an anecdote shared with me by two mentors that both spent a good deal of time with Dr. Deming. The first, Gipsie Ranney, who was a professor of statistics at University of Tennessee when she met Dr. Deming, went on to become a senior statistical consultant to GM and the first president of the Deming Institute, when Dr. Deming and his family, shortly before he died, formed a nonprofit called The Deming Institute. Gipsie and I used to speak literally every day, driving to work, driving home, we... "What's up, what's up?" And we always... It was so cool. I wish I had the recordings. Anyway, she once shared that she once asked Dr. Deming, "What do they learn in your seminars? What do attendees learn in your seminars?" To which she said Dr. Deming said, "I know what I said, I don't know what they heard." [laughter] 0:02:26.0 BB: And along those lines, in the same timeframe, Bill Cooper who just turned 90, he and my wife share a birthday. Not the same year. Bill turned 90 last November and he was senior civilian at the US Navy's aircraft overhaul facility in San Diego, known as North Island. So as aircraft carriers are coming into San Diego, which is like the... I think they call it... It's like the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet. So as aircraft carriers are coming back, planes for which the repair work cannot be done on the carriers fly off to North Island. And Bill was in charge of, he said, some 5,000 civilians. And his peer on the military side, Phil Monroe was in charge of all the military people, and they got exposed to Dr. Deming's work in the early '80s, went off, left there, became Deming consultants. Anyway, Bill said he once asked Dr. Demings, says, "What percent of the attendees of your seminars walk away really understanding what you said?" And he said... Bill said Dr. Deming said, "A small percentage." [laughter] 0:03:44.0 BB: And so what I had in mind in this series is... One is, what makes it hard to understand what Dr. Deming is talking about? And so for the listeners, what I'm hoping we can help you understand, what might be some invisible challenges that you're having in your organizations trying to explain this to others. So maybe you think your understanding is pretty good, but like Dr. Deming, maybe people are having a hard time understanding what you're saying. And I know what it's like to be in a room, presenting to people. And I had that same experience. I had one Rocketdyne executive... Rocketdyne was sold a few times. Every time it got sold, our Deming transformation efforts got set back a few years. So when the latest management team came in six, seven years ago, I met with one of the very top people, was explaining... Trying to explain to him for the first time what we had accomplished with some, I thought, absolutely amazing work by managing variation as a system. And he said something like, "So are people rejecting what you're saying?" And I said, "No, that's not it." He says, "So they're accepting what you're saying?" I said, "Well... " he said, "What's the problem?" I said, "What they accepted is not what I said." [laughter] 0:05:19.5 BB: I said, we're not in disagreement, but what they think they heard is... And that's when I found that I've experienced that. So anyway, so I wanted to get some background. So my first exposure to quality circles, and this is like... So I was living in this parallel universe, a heat transfer engineer working on rocket engines, and Quality comes into the organization. And unbeknownst to me, there's this quality movement going on, inspired by Dr. Deming, and we're on this wave. I had no idea. All I know is all of a sudden, we got Quality Circles, quality teams, every department... 0:06:03.8 AS: What year was that, roughly? 0:06:06.1 BB: 1984. 0:06:08.9 AS: Okay. 0:06:10.5 BB: Yeah. And I remember a book I was... I remember there was a pamphlet... You mentioned that. The company was AVCO, A-V-C-O, the Aviation Corporation, which is nearly as old as the Boeing Company. So it was one of the... So, Boeing gets into airplanes, the Wright Brothers get into airplanes, people are... Investors getting in, and AVCO, A-V-C-O, was formed by someone you likely heard of, Averill Harriman, major Wall Street guy at the time. And so anyway, I remember there being an AVCO book on quality circles. As you mentioned, I remember seeing that. And I remember just going along for the ride. I'm new to corporations, I'm just a subject matter expert in gas turbine heat transfer, and we're going to the... We got these things called quality circles, whatever. And I remember our department formed... Our department was a team, we had goals, and I remember going to these quality meetings, and let's say the goal would be that we read an article about heat transfer or something. I was just kind of fumbling with this thing called quality circles. 0:07:28.6 BB: But I remember, looking over the shoulder of the department secretary with a IBM Selectric typewriter, and this is before PCs, so we're using IBM 3270, dumb terminals. And I remember being over near the secretary, Kathy, and she's typing away the weekly activity reports, Friday morning kind of thing. And on a routine basis, I'd be over there and she'd be typing along. And then on the very last page, under the title, "Quality Circles," she would type in "Quality Circles are progressing as planned." [chuckle] 'Cause then these would be distributed to people in the department. So I'm watching her now create the next original. And it dawns on me, two things. One is, it's the very last topic in the meeting, in the weekly minutes, and two is it's the same damn thing every time, "Quality Circles are on plan." And I remember saying to her, "Why don't we just have that printed into the stationary?" [laughter] 0:08:39.5 BB: This is before I knew... For me, quality was just a seven-letter word. I don't know. So this is my exposure. And I remember thinking one of the quality goals we're thinking of in our department is... I think somebody even really brought this up, is we're gonna answer the phone by the second ring. That's gonna be our quality goal. And then, I remember we're negotiating for cleaning services. The floors were a mess. Tile floors, they were just a mess. And I remember in our department, we were lobbying to get better janitorial services, have the things cleaned more often. And next thing, we're negotiating with the VP of Engineering relative to, "Well, if your quality circles are on track, then I'll think about that." And it was just like... So it's some really ugly memories [chuckle] of this whole quality thing. 0:09:34.3 BB: But then I got into... I mentioned on the very first of our previous podcast, getting involved as a problem solving decision-making facilitator. I was hanging out with the HR training people, they had some... Their director of training, our director of training was a very astute guy and he was... I'm convinced, having met many people in that role, he knew what was going on. He knew a lot of the names in quality, not so... He knew of Deming's name, he knew of De Bono's name, Kepner-Tregoe, but he seemed to know his stuff. He's a fun guy to be with. And so, that's likely where I first heard Deming's name and that first book would've been Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, which is... It's almost impenetrable, but I can remember at some point looking at that. 0:10:29.7 BB: But anyway, but in the fall of '87, I started being assigned a taskforce as helping... 'cause now I'm a problem-solving facilitator. But I still don't know... I don't know what quality is. All I know is I get invited to help solve problems. And we were looking at a very bad wear problem, these gears wearing each other out, enormous visibility to the Pentagon, because the tank engines we were making, 120 a month, were being shipped to the tank plant. And then, these tanks with these engines were being sent... The majority of them, sent to Europe. And they were the frontline of defense in Western Europe. This is the Cold War, Andrew. 0:11:17.4 AS: Right. 0:11:19.2 BB: And so the problem that came up was that a couple of these tanks had these gears wear through each other within 50 hours. And I've never been on such a high visibility taskforce because the Generals concern was that every one of those tanks was likely to not operate. And that might be the opportunity for the "Russki's" to launch World War III, because, what a great time, the tanks... If they knew these tanks weren't working. So it was a lot of stress, a lot of pressure. And after months of slow progress, the Army said, "Hey, why don't you guys go look at this Taguchi thing. The transmission people from General Motors who make the tank transmission, anytime they have a snafu like this, they use this Taguchi stuff." So I got assigned the action to go look at that. And I remember, this is pre-internet. And somehow, I did a literature search. I remember it was through something called Nerac, N-E-R-A-C. And out comes these pages. And the thing on Taguchi was... So first of all, who is this Taguchi guy? 0:12:29.0 BB: What is this quality stuff? I don't know. I'm a problem solving guy. And then I remember the first article on reference to Taguchi says, "Quality is the minimum of loss imparted to society by a product after a shipment to the customer." And I thought, "What does that mean?" So I don't know what... I mean, minimum of... I'm thinking... And I thought, "This can't be anything." So anyway, went out to General Motors and got exposed to what they were doing, and a few years later, realized it wasn't exactly Taguchi, but it was... There's some nuances there. But anyway, they exposed me to Design of Experiments and what's known as fractional factorial testing. And coupled with shifting how we look at the measurement process, we solved this problem within weeks, a problem that had been going on for months. So then I got excited about... This Taguchi thing's kind of cool. I'm liking this. And it was a lot more exciting than what I was doing. And I thought, "I think I wanna do this." So the following year, I went to the Taguchi conference. So we had the application and I was so excited, Andrew, that I was turned down for funding. The Army would have paid for me to go to this conference, 'cause the Army, by that point, had invited me to work on at least two problems. 0:13:54.4 BB: Once we solved the first one, when problems came up, the Army literally turned to the program management people at Lycoming and said, "Do a Taguchi study, get Bill Bellows involved." So I was walking on water. I thought it was kind of cool. So I wanted to go to this Taguchi conference, and it was turned down. And they said, "It's not your job." So I told my boss when they told me it was gonna be turned down, I said, "I'm going to this conference." I said, "Whether the company pays for it or not, I am going." So I drove 14 hours each way to Detroit. And in the room are all the US experts on Taguchi's ideas at the time. I didn't know who Deming was at the time. I still didn't know what quality was, but I walked outta there thinking, "This is what I wanna do." And then, where I'm getting to is, a few months later, I was gonna go out on medical I had surgery planned. 0:14:53.1 BB: I was gonna be out for about two months. So my wife and I lived in New Haven, maybe 10 miles north of Yale. And I remember going to the... Again, this is pre-Amazon. I mean, talk about dating ourselves. What century are we in? So I remember going with my wife to the Yale bookstore, the Yale co-op bookstore, and every book they had on quality, I bought. And I'm gonna sit home for two months and read all these books. And I remember buying books. I'm pretty sure I got books about Deming, some about Taguchi, some by Phil Crosby about Zero Defects. Six Sigma Quality entry was a year away. 0:15:35.7 BB: And so I sat down... I got out of the hospital, I'm resting at home, sitting on the couch every day and reading, and also calling the Taguchi people that I had met, I think, at the previous conference. I met some big names. So I'm reading the books, calling them up. And again, these are like my personal professors. And I remember saying to a few of them... What blew me away, and I don't... It somehow dawned on me, I was naive. In the world of engineering, we use... Most of my exposure, at least in heat transfer, we use the same terms the same way. We talk about radiation heat transfer, conduction heat transfer, convection heat transfer. So many of the terms are the same terms, so we can have a conversation. So I'm thinking the same thing applies in quality, that we're all like the heat transfer people. It's easy to communicate 'cause we got the same models. We're using the same words the same way. Then I started thinking, I'm no longer... And this is a real shock. I'm no longer thinking we're using the same words the same way, hence my introduction to misunderstanding quality, [laughter] or I would say, the beginning of a journey to better understand the... I think there are incredible opportunities for people in quality organizations, or people that wanna get into quality. 0:17:08.3 BB: I think it's an ideal opportunity to introduce Deming's ideas. And I say that because everybody else is doing their own thing. Engineering's off designing, Manufacturing's off producing, and Quality has an incredible opportunity to bring together Deming's sense of a systems view of quality. Nobody else has that charter. So my hope is in our conversations, we can help people that are trying to do some things, whether it's jumpstart their continuous improvement program or get their quality program out of what it currently is. In fact... 0:17:52.4 AS: By the way, I wanna... 0:17:55.9 BB: Go ahead, go ahead. 0:17:56.0 AS: I wanna ask a question about that, because what you've mentioned is interesting, that the systems aspect... Is that unique? Would you say that's unique to Deming? I mean, if we think about Taguchi and I think about the Taguchi Method, I'm thinking about a really powerful tool for understanding variation. But explain what you mean by that. 0:18:24.0 BB: A couple of things come to mind when you ask that question. One is the predominant explanation of quality. And if we have time, I wanna talk about that. The term quality, "qualitas," comes from Cicero, a Roman in ancient times. But by and large, in manufacturing, in corporate quality, in corporations, the operational definition, what do we mean by quality? This thing is... What are Quality organizations doing? And what I find they're doing is calling balls and strikes. They're looking at a given quality characteristics, whether it's the fuel economy of an engine, of a gas turbine engine, the performance, the thrust level of a rocket engine, the diameter of a hole, and asking, "Does that characteristic of surface roughness diameter, does it meet a set of requirements?" 0:19:30.4 BB: And the requirements are typically set... There's a lower one and an upper one. We don't say the meeting is gonna start at 10 o'clock, because if you understand variation, we can't get exactly 10. We can't get exactly 1.00 inch thickness for the plate, for the hole diameter. So then, we define quality. Typically, this is what people do in organizations. This is what I... I didn't know anything about this until I started... Well, what are quality people doing? They're asking, "Does this thing meet requirements?" 0:20:07.4 BB: And even towards that end, I remember asking a... I had a coworker who's a quality engineer, I've got many friends who are quality engineers, and this one guy came into a class one day that I was doing, and he's just beating his head against the wall over... I said, "What's...what have you been doing lately." He says, "All I'm doing Bill is dispositioning hardware, dispositioning hardware," which translates to trying to find out why something doesn't meet requirements and coming up with a corrective action, or buying it as is. So either changing the requirements or explaining why we can use it as is. But he's just like, "That's all I'm doing lately. I'm just getting overwhelmed with all this." So I said, "Well, what if overnight, by some miracle, you were to come in, and beginning first thing tomorrow morning, everything meets requirements." And that's the goal of quality in most organizations, is that everything meets requirements. So I said, "If everything beginning tomorrow morning, through some overnight miracle, meets requirements, hence forth, how would your life change?" He says, "I wouldn't have a job." [laughter] 0:21:26.9 BB: I said, "What other changes would you begin to see throughout the day, the coming days?" He says, "My boss's job wouldn't exist." I said, "Okay, keep going, keep going." He says, "Well, the whole organization will have no reason to exist." [laughter] And that's not farfetched. And I throw that out, the challenge to our listeners is, seriously, if everything in the organization beginning tomorrow morning met requirements through some... Dr. Deming would say as you know, by what method? Let's say the method exists, what would change? Now, I'm not saying these people necessarily get laid off. Maybe they get moved elsewhere. Maybe we set our sights higher and try to do things we've never done before, 'cause now everything's gonna be a home run. But that's what I find in corporations, I think, a very extremely commonplace 21st century Andrew explanation of quality is, "Does it meet requirements?" And that goes... And this whole idea of setting requirements, setting a lower and an upper, allowing for variation, that goes back to the early 1700s. And I've also read that it might go back even longer in China. We were talking earlier about China. 0:22:58.2 BB: And so if it goes back longer, all the better. And the point being, fast forward to today, that's largely where we are today, in this early 1700s. Does it meet requirements? Yes or no? And what Dr. Deming is talking about is not acceptability. First of all, he would say there's a place for acceptability. There's a place for meeting requirements, maybe based on the circumstances, all that matters is that it meets requirements. So if...
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Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 6
06/17/2024
Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 6
In the final episode of the goal setting in classrooms series, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the last three of the 10 Key Lessons for implementing Deming in schools. They finish up with the example of Jessica's 4th-grade science class. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode six about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:26.4 John Dues: Hey, Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, for the past handful of episodes or so, we've been talking about organizational goal setting. We covered these four conditions of healthy goal setting and then got into these 10 key lessons for data analysis. And then we've been looking at those 10 key lessons applied to an improvement project. And we've been talking about a project that was completed by Jessica Cutler and she did a Continual Improvement Fellowship with us here at our schools. And if you remember, Jessica was attempting to improve the joy in learning of her students in her fourth grade science class. So last time we looked at lessons five through seven. Today we're gonna look at those final three lessons, eight, nine and ten applied to her project. 0:01:15.7 AS: It's exciting. 0:01:17.1 JD: Yeah. So we'll jump in here. We'll kind of do a description, a refresher of each lesson. And we'll kind of talk about how it was applied to her specific project, and we'll look at some of her data to kind of bring that live for those of the folks that have video. Let's jump in with lesson number eight. So we've talked about this before, but lesson number eight was: more timely data is better for improvement purposes. So we've talked about this a lot. We've talked about something like state testing data. We've said, it can be useful, but it's not super useful for improvement purposes, because we don't get it until the year ends. And students in our case, have already gone on summer vacation by the time that data comes in. And you know that the analogous data probably happens in lots of different sectors where you get data that lags, to the point that it's not really that useful for improvement purposes. 0:02:15.8 JD: So when we're trying to improve something, more frequent data is helpful because then we can sort of see if an intervention that we're trying is having an effect, the intended effect. We can learn that more quickly if we have more frequent data. And so it's, there's not a hard and fast rule, I don't think for how frequently you should be gathering data. It just sort of needs to be in sync with the improvement context. I think that's the important thing. Whether it's daily or a couple times a day or weekly, or monthly, quarterly, whatever, it's gotta be in sync with whatever you're trying to improve. 0:02:50.5 AS: You made me think about a documentary I saw about, how they do brain surgery and how the patient can't be sedated because they're asking the patient questions about, do you feel this and they're testing whether they're getting... They're trying to, let's say, get rid of a piece of a cancerous growth, and they wanna make sure that they're not getting into an area that's gonna damage their brain. And so, the feedback mechanism that they're getting through their tools and the feedback from the patient, it's horrifying to think of the whole thing. 0:03:27.7 JD: Yeah. 0:03:28.3 AS: It's a perfect example of why more timely data is useful for improvement purposes 'cause imagine if you didn't have that information, you knock the patient out, you get the cancerous growth, but who knows what you get in addition to that. 0:03:43.7 JD: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that's certainly an extreme example, [laughter], but I think it's relevant. No matter what our context, that data allows us to understand what's going on, variation, trends, whether our system is stable, unstable, how we should go about improving. So it's not dissimilar from the doctors in that example. 0:04:06.8 AS: And it's indisputable I think, I would argue. But yet many people may not, they may be operating with data that's not timely. And so this is a reminder that we would pretty much always want that timely data. So that's lesson eight. Wow. 0:04:22.6 JD: Lesson eight. Yeah. And let's see how we can, I'll put a visualization on the screen so you can see what Jessica's data look like. All right. So now you can see. We've looked at these charts before. This is Jessica's process behavior chart for joy in science. So just to reorient, you have the joy percentage that students are feeling after a lesson on the x-axis, sorry, on the y-axis. On the x-axis, you have the school dates where they've collected this survey information from students in Jessica's class. 0:04:57.0 AS: Can you put that in Slide Show view? 0:05:00.4 JD: Yeah. I can do that. Yeah. 0:05:02.7 AS: Just it'll make it bigger, so for the... 0:05:06.5 JD: There you go. 0:05:07.8 AS: For the listeners out there, we're looking at a chart of daily, well, let's say it looks like daily data. There's probably weekends that are not in there because class is not on weekends, but it's the ups and downs of a chart that's ranging between a pretty, a relatively narrow range, and these are the scores that are coming from Jessica's surveying of the students each day, I believe. Correct? 0:05:34.2 JD: Yeah. So each day where Jessica is giving a survey to assess the joy in science that students are feeling, then she's averaging all those students together. And then the plot, the dot is the average of all the students sort of assessment of how much joy they felt in a particular science lesson. 0:05:54.7 AS: And that's the average. So for the listeners out there John's got an average line down the middle of these various data points, and then he is also got a red line above and a red line below the, above the highest point and slightly below the lowest point. Maybe you can explain that a little bit more. 0:06:15.4 JD: Yeah. So with Jessica, you remember originally she started plotting on a line chart or a run chart when we just had a few data points just to kind of get a sense of how things are moving so she could talk about it with her class. And over time what's happened is she's now got, at this point in the project, which she started in January, now this is sort of mid-March. And so she's collected two to three data points a week. So she doesn't survey the kids every day just for time sake, but she's getting two, three data points a week. And so by March, she started just a couple months ago, she's got 28 data points. So that sort of goes back to this idea of more timely data is better for improvement. 0:07:00.9 JD: And a lot of times, let's say a school district or a school does actually survey their students about how, what they think of their classes. That might happen at best once a semester or maybe once a year. And so at the end of the year you have one or two data points. So it's really hard to tell sort of what's actually going on. Compared to this, Jessica's got these 28 data points in just about two months or so of school. So she's got 28 data points to work with. And so what her and her students are doing with this data then, one, they can see how it's moving up and down. So we have, the blue dots are all the plotted points, like you said, the green line is the average running sort of through the middle of the data, and then those red lines are our process limits, the upper and lower natural process limits that sort of tell us the bounds of the system. 0:07:50.4 JD: And that's based on the difference in each successive data point. But the most important thing is that as Jessica and her students are looking at this, initially, they're really just studying it and trying to sort of see how things are going from survey to survey. So one of the things that Deming talked about frequently is not tampering with data, which would be if you sort of, you overreact to a single data point. So let's say, a couple of days in, it dips down from where it started and you say, oh my gosh, we gotta change things. And so that's what Deming is talking about. Not tampering, not overreacting to any single data point. Instead look at this whole picture that you get from these 28 data points and then talk about... 0:08:41.5 JD: In Jessica's case she's talking about with her students, what can we learn from this data? What does the variation from point to point look like? If we keep using the system, the fourth grade science system, if we leave it as is, then we'll probably just keep getting data pretty similar to this over time, unless something more substantial changes either in the negative or the positive. So right now they... 0:09:10.1 AS: And I think for the listeners, it's, you can see that there's really no strong pattern that I can see from this. It's just, there's some, sometimes that there's, seems like there's little trends and stuff like that. But I would say that the level of joy in the science classroom is pretty stable. 0:09:32.1 JD: Pretty stable. Yeah. Pretty high. It's bouncing around maybe a 76% average across those two and a half months or so. And so, they, you kind of consider this like the baseline. They've got a good solid baseline understanding of what joy looks like in this fourth grade science classroom. Did that stop sharing on your end? 0:10:00.2 AS: Yep. 0:10:00.2 JD: Okay, great. So that's lesson eight. So clearly she's gathered a lot of data in a pretty short amount of time. It's timely, it's useful, it's usable, it can be studied by her and her students. So we'll switch it to lesson nine now. So now they've got a good amount of data. They got 28 data points. That's plenty of data to work with. So lesson nine is now we wanna clearly label the start date for an intervention directly in her chart. And remember from earlier episodes, not only are we collecting this data, we're actually putting this up on a screen on a smart board in the classroom, and Jessica and her students are studying this data together. They're actually looking at this, this exact chart and she's explaining sort of kind of like we just did to the listeners. She's explaining what the chart means. 0:10:54.2 JD: And so over time, like once a week she's putting this up on the smart board and now kids are getting used to, how do you read this data? What does this mean? What are all these dots? What do these numbers mean? What do these red lines mean? That type of thing. And so now that they've got enough data, now we can start talking about interventions. That's really what lesson nine is about. And the point here is that you want to clearly, explicitly with a literally like a dotted line in the chart to mark on the day that you're gonna try something new. So you insert this dashed vertical line, we'll take a look at it in a second, on the date the intervention started. And then we're also gonna probably label it something simple so we can remember what intervention we tried at that point in time. 0:11:42.7 JD: So what this then allows the team to do is then to very easily see the data that happened before the intervention and the data that happened after the implementation of this intervention or this change idea. And then once we've started this change and we start plotting points after the change has gone into effect, then we can start seeing or start looking for those patterns in the data that we've talked about, those different rules, those three rules that we've talked about across these episodes. And just to refresh, rule one would be if we see a single data point outside of either of the limits, rule two is if we see eight consecutive points on either side of that green average line, and rule three is if we see three out of four dots in a row that are closer to one of the limits than they are to that central line. 0:12:38.3 JD: So that again, those patterns tell us that something significant, mathematically improbable has happened. It's a big enough magnitude in change that you wouldn't have expected it otherwise. And when we see that pattern, we can be reasonably assured that that intervention that we've tried has worked. 0:12:56.0 AS: And let me ask you about the intervention for just a second because I could imagine that if this project was going on, first question is, does Jessica's students are, obviously know that this experiment is going on? 0:13:08.3 JD: Yes. 0:13:09.8 AS: Because they're filling out a survey. And my first question is, do they know that there's an intervention happening? I would expect that it would be yes, because they're gonna feel or see that intervention. Correct? 0:13:25.1 JD: Sure. Yep. 0:13:25.2 AS: That's my first point that I want to think about. And the second point is, let's imagine now that everybody in the classroom has been seeing this chart and they're, everybody's excited and they got a lot of ideas about how they could improve. Jessica probably has a lot of ideas. So the temptation is to say, let's change these three things and see what happens. 0:13:46.5 JD: Yeah. 0:13:47.1 AS: Is it important that we only do one thing at a time or that one intervention at a time or not? So maybe those are two questions I have in my mind. 0:13:58.6 JD: Yeah, so to the first question, are you, you're saying there there might be some type of participant or... 0:14:02.3 AS: Bias. 0:14:03.3 JD: Observer effect like that they want this to happen. That's certainly possible. But speaking to the second question, what intervention do you go with? Do you go with one or you go with multiple? If you remember a couple of episodes ago we talked about, and we actually looked at a fishbone diagram that Jessica and her students that they created and they said, okay, what causes us to have low joy in class? And then they sort of mapped those, they categorized them, and there were different things like technology not working. If you remember, one was like distractions, like other teachers walk into the room during the lesson. And one of them was others like classmates making a lot of noise, making noises during class and distracting me. And so they mapped out different causes. I think they probably came up with like 12 or 15 different causes as possibilities. 0:14:58.7 JD: And they actually voted as a class. Which of these, if we worked on one of these, which would have the biggest impact? So not every kid voted for it, but the majority or the item that the most kids thought would have the biggest impact was if we could somehow stop all the noises basically. So they came up with that as a class, but not, it wasn't everybody's idea. But I think we've also talked about sort of the lessons from David Langford where once kids see that you're gonna actually take this serious, take their ideas serious and start acting on them, they take the project pretty seriously too. So maybe not a perfect answer, but that's sort of what we... 0:15:38.0 AS: I was thinking that, ultimately you could get short-term blips when you do an intervention and then it stabilizes possibly. That's one possibility. And the second thing I thought is, well, I mean ultimately the objective, whether that's an output from a factory, and keeping, improving that output or whether that's the output related to joy in the classroom as an example, you want it to go up and stay up and you want the students to see it and say, wow, look, it's happening. So, yeah. 0:16:11.7 JD: And there's different ways you can handle this. So this joy thing could go up to a certain point. They're like, I don't know if we can get any more joy, like, it's pretty high. And what you could do at that point is say, okay, I'm gonna assign a student to just sort of, every once in a while, we'll keep doing these surveys and we will sort of keep plotting the data, but we're not gonna talk about a lot. I'm just gonna assign this as a student's job to plot the new data points. And we'll kind of, we'll kind of measure it, but we won't keep up with the intervention 'cause we got it to a point that we're pretty happy with. And now as a class we may wanna switch, switch our attention to something else. 0:16:45.2 JD: So we started getting into the winter months and attendance has dipped. Maybe we've been charting that and say, Hey guys, we gotta, gotta kinda work on this. This is gone below sort of a level that's really good for learning. So let's think about as a group how we could come up with some ideas to raise that. So maybe you turn your attention to something else, 'cause you can't pay attention to everything at once. 0:17:07.2 AS: Yeah, and I think I could use an example in my Valuation Master Class Boot Camp where students were asking for more personal feedback and I realized I couldn't really scale this class if I had to get stuck into hundreds of grading basically. And that's when I came up with the concept of feedback Friday, where one student from each team would present and then I would give feedback, I would give a critique and they would be intense and all students would be watching, it would be recorded, and all of a sudden all the issues related to wanting this personal feedback went away. And therefore, once I instituted it on a regular basis, I went on to the next issue and I made sure that I didn't lose the progress that I had made and continue to make feedback Friday better and better. 0:17:56.2 JD: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's great. I'll share my screen so you can kinda see what this looked like in Jessica's class now, what the chart looks like now. So now you see that same chart, that same process behavior chart, exact same one we were just looking at except now you can see this, this dashed vertical line that marks the spot where the intervention was started that we just talked about. And what the kids are actually doing, and Jessica are running a PDSA cycle, a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. That's the experimental cycle in her class. And what they're running that PDSA on is, again, how can we put something in place to reduce the distracting noises. And so what the students actually said is if we get a deduction for making noises, then there will be less noises. And so in the school's sort of management system, a deduction is sort of like a demerit. 0:19:00.0 JD: If you maybe went to a Catholic school or something like that, or some public schools had demerits as well, but basically it's like a minor infraction basically that goes home or that gets communicated to parents at the end of the week. But the kids came up with this so their basic premise is, their plan, their prediction is if there are less noises, we'll be able to enjoy science class. And if we give deductions for these noises, then there'll be less noises. So some people may push back, well, I don't think you should give deductions or something like that, but which, fine, you could have that opinion. But I think the powerful point here is this is, the students created this, it was their idea. And so they're testing that idea to see if it actually has impact. 0:19:44.8 JD: And they're learning to do that test in this scientific thinking way by using the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, and seeing if it actually has an impact on their data. So at the point where they draw this dashed line, let's call that March 19th, we can see a couple of additional data points have been gathered. So you can see the data went up from...
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Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 5
06/11/2024
Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 5
In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz apply lessons five through seven of the 10 Key Lessons for implementing Deming in classrooms. They continue using Jessica's fourth-grade science class as an example to illustrate the concepts in action. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode five about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:23.2 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, like you said, for the past few episodes we've been talking about organizational goal setting. We covered four healthy conditions, or four conditions of healthy goal setting and 10 key lessons for data analysis. And then what we turn to in the last episode is looking at an applied example of the 10 key lessons for data analysis and in action. And, if you remember from last time we were looking at this improvement project from Jessica Cutler, she's a fourth grade science teacher, and she did the improvement fellowship here at United Schools Network, where she learned the tools, the techniques, the philosophies, the processes behind the Deming theory, continual improvement, that type of thing. And in... And in Jessica's specific case, in her fourth grade science class, what she was settled on that she was gonna improve was, the joy in learning of her students. And we looked at lessons one through four through the eyes or through the lens of her project. And today we're gonna look at lessons five through seven. So basically the next, uh, the next three lessons of those 10 key lessons. 0:01:34.8 AS: I can't wait. Let's do it. 0:01:37.3 JD: Let's do it. So lesson number five was: show enough data in your baseline to illustrate the previous level of variation. Right. So the basic idea with this particular lesson is that, you know, let's say we're trying to improve something. We have a data point or maybe a couple data points. We wanna get to a point where we're starting to understand how this particular concept works. In this case, what we're looking at is joy in learning. And there's some different rules for how many data points you should, should have in a typical base baseline. But, you know, a pretty good rule of thumb is, you know, if you can get 12 to 15, that's... That's pretty solid. You can start working with fewer data points in real life. And even if you just have five or six values, that's gonna give you more understanding than just, you know, a single data point, which is often what we're... What we're working with. 0:02:35.6 AS: In, other words, even if you have less data, you can say that this gives some guidance. 0:02:40.9 JD: Yeah. 0:02:41.1 AS: And then you know that the reliability of that may be a little bit less, but it gives you a way... A place to start. 0:02:46.9 JD: A place to start. You're gonna learn more over time, but at least even five or six data points is more than what I typically seen in the typical, let's say, chart where it has last month and this month, right? So even five or six points is a lot more than that. You know, what's... What's typical? So I can kind of show you, I'll share my screen here and we'll take a look at, Jessica's initial run chart. You see that right? 0:03:19.3 AS: We can see it. 0:03:21.2 JD: Awesome. 0:03:22.3 AS: You wanna put it in slideshow? Can we see that? Yeah, there you go. 0:03:24.9 JD: Yeah, I'll do that. 0:03:25.4 AS: Perfect. 0:03:26.3 JD: That works better. So, you know, again, what we're trying to do is show enough data in the baseline to understand what happened prior to whenever we started this improvement effort. And I think I've shared this quote before, but I really love this one from Dr. Donald Berwick, he said "plotting measurements over time turns out in my view to be one of the most powerful things we have for systemic learning." So what... That's what this is all about really, is sort of taking that lesson to heart. So, so you can look at Jessica's run chart for "joy in science." So just to sort of orient you to the chart. We have dates along the bottom. So she started collecting this data on January 4th, and this is for about the first 10 days of data she has collected. So she's collected this data between January 4th and January 24th. So, you know, a few times a week she's giving a survey. You'll remember where she's actually asking your kids, how joyful was this science lesson? 0:04:24.4 JD: Mm-hmm. 0:04:27.2 JD: And so this is a run chart 'cause it's just the data with the median running through the middle, that green line there, the data is the blue lines connected by, or sorry, the blue dots connected by the points and the y axis there along the left is the joy in learning percentage. So out of a hundred percent, sort of what are kids saying? How are kids sort of evaluating each of these science lessons? So we've got 10 data points so far, which is a pretty good start. So it's starting to give Jessica and her science class a decent understanding about, you know, when we, you know, define joy in science and then we start to collect this data, we really don't have any idea what that's gonna look like in practice. But now that she started plotting this data over time, we have a much better sense of what the kids think of the science lessons basically. So on the very first day... 0:05:25.4 AS: And what is the... What is the median amount just for the listeners out there that don't see it? What would be the... Is that 78%? 0:05:33.8 JD: Yeah, about 78%. So that very first day was 77%. The second day was about 68%. And then you sort of see it bounce around that median over the course of that, those 10 days. So some of the points are below the median, some of the points are above the median. 0:05:50.4 AS: And the highest point above is about 83, it looks like roughly around that. 0:05:54.4 JD: Yeah. Around 82, 83%. And one technical point is at the point that it's a run chart we don't have the process limits, those red lines that we've been taking a look at and with a run chart and, you know, fewer data points, we only have 10. It's fairly typical to use the median, just so you know, you can kind of better control for any outlier data points which we really don't have any outliers in this particular case but that's just sort of a technical point. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know what you start to see, you start to get a sense of what this data looks like, you know, and you're gonna keep collecting this data over an additional time period, right? And she hasn't at this point introduced any interventions or any changes. Right now they're just learning about this joy in learning system, really. Right. 0:06:51.8 JD: And so, you know, as she's thinking about this, this really brings us to... To lesson six, which is, you know, what's the goal of data analysis? And this is true in schools and it's true anywhere. We're not just gonna look at the past results, but we're also gonna, you know, probably more importantly, look to the future and hopefully sort of be able to predict what's gonna happen in the future. And, you know, whatever concept that we're looking at. And so as we continue to gather additional data, we can then turn that run chart from those initial 10 points into a process behavior chart. Right. You know, that's a, sort of a, you know, it's the run chart on steroids because not only can we see the variation, which you can see in the run chart, but now because we've added more data, we've added the upper and lower natural process limit, we can also start to characterize the type of variation that we see in that data. 0:08:00.1 AS: So for the listeners, listeners out there, John just switched to a new chart which is just an extension of the prior chart carrying it out for a few more weeks, it looks like, of daily data. And then he's added in a lower and upper natural process limit. 0:08:18.9 JD: Yeah. So we're still, we're still plotting the data for joy in science. So the data is still the blue dots connected by the blue lines now because we have 24 or so data points, the green line, the central line is the average of that data running through the data. And we have enough data to add the upper and lower natural process limit. And so right now we can start to determine do we only have natural variation, those everyday ups and downs, that common cause variation, or do we have some type of exceptional or special cause variation that's outside of what would be expected in this particular system. We can start making... 0:09:00.7 AS: Can you... 0:09:02.2 JD: Go ahead. 0:09:02.8 AS: I was gonna... I was gonna ask you if you can just explain how you calculated the upper and lower natural process limits just so people can understand. Is it max and min or is it standard deviation or what is that? 0:09:18.3 JD: Yeah, basically what's happening is that, so we've plotted the data and then we use that data, we calculate the average, and then we also calculate what the moving range, is what it's called. So we just look at each successive data point and the difference between those two points. And basically there's a formula that you use for the upper and lower natural process limits that takes all of those things into account. So it's not standard deviation, but it's instead using the moving, moving range between each successive data point. 0:09:52.9 AS: In other words, the data that's on this chart will always fall within the natural upper and lower. In other words it's... Or is, will data points fall outside of that? 0:10:05.7 JD: Well, it depends on what kind of system it is. 0:10:07.8 AS: Right. Okay. 0:10:09.8 JD: If it's a stable system, that means all we see is sort of natural ups and downs in the data. And we use those formulas for the process limits. The magnitude of the difference of each successive data point is such that it's not necessarily big or small, it's just based on what you're seeing empirically. It's basically predictable. Right. And if it's not predictable, then we'll see special causes. So we'll see special patterns in the data. So I think maybe last time we talked about the three patterns, or you know, in some episode we talked about the patterns that would suggest there's a special cause that goes to the study. Those three patterns that I use are, is there a single one of these joy in science data points outside of either the upper or lower natural process limit that'd be a special cause. 0:11:05.4 JD: If you see eight data points in a row, either above the central line or below the central line, that's a special cause. And if I see three out of four in a row that are either closer to the upper limit or to the lower limit than they are to that central line, that's a pattern of the data that suggests a special cause. So we don't, in this particular dataset, we don't see any special causes. So now we have... Now we have a very solid baseline set of data. We have 24 data points. And when you're using an average central line and get... Getting technical, once you get to about 17 data points, those upper and lower natural process limits start to solidify, meaning they're not gonna really change too much 'cause you have enough data unless something really significant happens. And then if you're using the median, that solidification happens when you get to about 24 data points. 0:12:07.5 JD: So when you're, you know, when you're getting to 17 to 24 data points in your baseline, you're really getting pretty solid upper and lower national process limits. So, as of this March 1st date, which is the last date in this particular chart, there are 24 data points. So you have a pretty solid baseline set of data. Right now, the upper natural process limit is 95%. That lower limit is sitting at 66%, and then the average running through the middle, that green line is 81%. So this basically tells us that if nothing changes within Jessica's fourth grade science system, her classroom, we can expect the data to bounce around this 81% average and stay within the bounds of the limit. So we would call this a common cause system because we don't see any of those rules that I just talked about for special causes. And that's important. 0:13:07.4 JD: So do we have an unstable system or a stable system? We have a stable system. A stable system means that the data is predictable and unless something happens, you know, and this could be something that happens in the control of the teacher in the class, or it could be out of the control of the teacher in the class, but unless something happens that's significant, this data is just kind of keep humming along like this over the course of March, April, May of this particular school year. Right. So once we get to this point, so we have baseline data we've collected in a run chart, we start to understand how that data is moving up and down. We got some more data and we added the upper and lower natural process limits. Now we can assess not only the variation, but also the stability and the capability of the system, all of those things, those questions can start to be answered now that we have this process behavior chart. 0:14:09.3 JD: And this brings us to the final lesson for today, which is lesson 7, which is the improvement approach depends on the stability of the system under study. So that's why one of the reasons why the process behavior chart is so powerful is because now I have an understanding of what I need to do, like what type of approach I need to take to improve this particular system. Right? So in this particular case, I have a predictable system. And so the only way to bring about meaningful improvement is to fundamentally change this science system, right? 0:14:52.6 JD: The flip side would be if I did see a special cause let's say, it was an unpredictable system. We saw special cause on the low side. I'd wanna study that, what happened on that particular day. Because if I see a special cause, let's say on February 2nd I saw a special cause, let's say I saw a single data point below the lower natural process limit that's so different and unexpected, I'd actually wanna go to her classroom and talk to her in her class and say, okay, what happened on that day? I'm gonna try to remove that special cause. Study of that specific data point is warranted. If you don't see those special causes, then those, even though there are ups and downs, there are increases and decreases. They're within that, you know, the expected bounds of this particular system. Right. 0:15:46.9 AS: And I was gonna say, I can't remember if I got this from Dr. Deming or where it came from, but I know as an analyst in the stock market analyzing tons and tons of data in my career, I always say if something looks like a special cause or looks strange it's probably an error. [laughter] 0:16:03.2 AS: And it could just be for instance, that a student came in and they didn't understand how to fill it out or they refused to fill it out or they filled out the form with a really bizarre thing, or maybe they thought that number 10 was good and number one was bad, but in fact on the survey it was number one that was good and number 10 that was bad. And you find out that, you know, that special cause came from some sort of error. 0:16:26.6 JD: That's certainly possible. That's certainly possible. 0:16:29.5 AS: As opposed to another special cause could be, let's just say that the school had a blackout and all of a sudden the air conditioning went off for half of the class and everybody was just like really frustrated. They were burning hot. It was really a hot day and that special cause could have been a legitimate cause as opposed to let's say an error cause but you know, it causes an extreme, you know response on the survey. 0:16:56.9 JD: Yeah. And the thing is, is yeah, it could be a number of different things. Maybe she tried, maybe she had gotten some feedback about her lessons and maybe even she tried a different lesson design and it was new to her and it just didn't work very well. Maybe she tried to use some new technology or a new activity and it just didn't go well. But you know, if I'm seeing that data show up as a special cause and let's say I'm seeing that the next day or a couple days later, it's still fresh in my mind and I can even go into my chart and label what happened that day. Okay. And I... Now, okay, I'm gonna remove that thing or I'm, you know, if it's a lesson I'm trying, maybe I don't wanna give up on it, but I know I need to improve it 'cause it led to some issues in my classroom, but it's close enough to the time it actually happened that I actually remember what happened on that particular day and I can sort of pinpoint that issue. 0:17:52.9 AS: Yeah. 0:17:54.5 JD: And the data told me it was worth going into studying that particular data point because it was so different than what I had seen previously in this particular 4th grade science system. 0:18:06.5 AS: Makes sense. 0:18:09.9 JD: But in this case, we don't see that, that was a hypothetical. So all we see is sort of the data moving up and down around that green average line. So we have a stable system. So again, that tells me I need to improve the science system itself. There's no special causes to remove. So, the next question I think I would ask, and if you remember one of the data lessons is that we sort of combine the frontline workers, which is the students in this case. We have the manager or the leader, that's the teacher, and then someone with profound knowledge from the Deming lens, that's me, we're bringing these people together and we're saying, okay, you know, we're seeing this hum along this joy in science thing, hum along at sort of like an 81% average. So I think it's a reasonable question to ask, is that good enough? And should we turn our attention to something else. Now, there could be some situations where it's not good enough or some situations where that is good enough. They chose to keep moving to improve that joy in learning. But I think it'd be perfectly reasonable in some context to say, well, you know, sure, maybe we could get a little better here, but maybe it's not worth the effort in that particular area. Maybe we're gonna turn our attention to something else. You know. 0:19:23.7 AS: So you learn something from the chart and that could be... 0:19:26.4 JD: Learn something from the chart. Yeah, yeah. 0:19:27.9 AS: Because when I look at this chart, I just think hard work is ahead. 0:19:31.2 JD: Yeah. Yeah. 0:19:34.7 AS: 'Cause in order to, if you have a stable system with not a lot of extreme... Firefighting is kind of a fun thing, right? When you got special causes, you feel really important. You go out there, you try to figure out what those individual things are, you're the hero. You fix it, you understand it, you see it, whatever. But then when you get a stable system, it's like, oh man, now we got to think about how do we make some substantial changes in the system. It doesn't have to be substantial, but how do we make changes in the system, you know? And then measure whether that has an impact. 0:20:06.4 JD: Yeah. And to your point about fire... Fighting fires, like I didn't know, we had never measured joy in learning like this before, so I didn't know what we were gonna get with Jessica. And so you know what I think you also see here is a pretty well-run...
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How to Test for Understanding: Awaken Your Inner Deming (part 22)
05/22/2024
How to Test for Understanding: Awaken Your Inner Deming (part 22)
How do you know that the learning you and your colleagues are doing is leading to changes in behavior? In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss little tests you can do to see if the transformation you're working toward is really happening. 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunity. Today is episode 22, and the title is, Test for Understanding Transformation. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.7 Bill Bellows: Hey, we've been at this podcast for about a year now, right? 0:00:36.6 AS: It's incredible how long it's been. 0:00:39.8 BB: And in the beginning you said, I've been at this for 30 years, right? 0:00:43.7 AS: Yeah. [laughter] 0:00:46.7 BB: Maybe we should change that to 31. 0:00:48.3 AS: Oh, man, there you go. 0:00:51.2 BB: All right. 0:00:53.0 AS: That reminds me of the joke of the janitor at the exhibition of the dinosaurs and the group of kids was being led through the museum and their guide had to run to the bathroom. And so they were looking at this dinosaur and they asked the janitor, "How old is that dinosaur?" And he said, "Well, that dinosaur is 300,032 years old." "Oh, how do they know it so exactly?" He said, "Well, it was 300,000 when I started working here 30 years ago." [laughter] 0:01:28.8 AS: So there we are. 0:01:31.4 BB: That's great. 0:01:33.3 AS: Thirty-one years. 0:01:34.0 BB: All right, all right, all right. So first thing I wanna say is, as you know and our listeners know, I go back and listen to this podcast and I interact with people that are listening too, and I get some feedback. And in episode 19, I said the Germans were developing jet engines in the late 1940s. No, it turns out the Germans were developing jet engines in the late 1930s and they had a fighter plane with a turbine engine, a developmental engine in the late '30s. They didn't get into full-scale development and production. Production didn't start till the tail end of the war. But anyway, but I was off by a decade. In episode 21, I mentioned that checks were awarded within Rocketdyne for improvement suggestions and individuals who submitted this and it could be for an individual, maybe it was done for two people, three people, I don't know, but they got 10% of the annual savings on a suggestion that was implemented in a one-time lump sum payment. 0:02:36.1 BB: So you got 10% of the savings for one year and I thought, imagine going to the president of the company and let's say I walk into the president's office and you're my attorney. And I walk in and I say, "Hey, Mr. President, I've got a suggestion. You know that suggestion program?" He says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on in, come on in. And who's this guy with you?" "Well that's Andrew Stotz." "And who's Andrew?" "He's my attorney, and he and I have been thinking about what this is worth." "Well, tell me about it." "No, well, before we get into it, we've got this form to sign here." 0:03:10.9 AS: Andrew. 0:03:11.1 BB: "Right? And you wanna see the idea or not? But we don't have to share it." But I thought, imagine people going to great length and really taking advantage of it. Well, a few of us that were involved in our InThinking Roadmap training, what we started to propose is we want a piece of the action, Andrew. So the proposal we had is that, Andrew, if you come to one of our classes, a study session on The New Economics or Managing Variation of a System, we'll have you sign a roster, right? And so if you are ever given a check for big numbers, Andrew, then we're gonna claim that our training contributed to your idea and all we ask is 10%, right? 0:03:58.1 AS: Of your 10%. 0:04:00.9 BB: I mean, I think that's fair, right? But imagine everybody in the organization becoming a profit center. 0:04:08.7 AS: Crazy. 0:04:10.4 BB: That's what you get. All right. 0:04:14.5 AS: And the lesson from that is focus on intrinsic motivation. People wanna make improvements, they wanna contribute. 0:04:23.8 BB: You start... You go down the slippery slope of incentives, which will be part of what we look at later. There's just no end to that. All right? 0:04:31.4 AS: Yeah. 0:04:32.2 BB: So I mentioned in a previous podcast that I had an interaction, met the army's first woman four-star general, and I just wanna give you some more background and interesting things that happened with her relative to this test for understanding transformation. I don't know April, May, 2008, someone on her staff reached out to me and when they first... When the guy got a hold of me, I said... From the Pentagon, he called me, I think it was like 8:00 or 9:00 o'clock at night here. Whatever it was, it was after hours in LA so it was after hours in DC. I remember saying to the guy, "How did you find me?" He says, "There's a lot of stuff on the internet." So he says, "I came across a presentation you did for Goodwill Industries." And he says, "In there you talk about... " He says, "There's some really good stuff in there." 0:05:29.0 BB: And I said, "Like what?" He said, "You have a slide in there about you can minimize loss to society by picking up nails in a parking lot." And that was an example of what I used Dr. Taguchi's work, minimizing loss to society. I said, "Yeah, I remember that slide." He says, "We don't do enough of that in the Army." And he says, "Hey, we've got a conference next week, late notice. The keynote speaker bailed out." And he's calling me on a Monday. The presentation's a week from Wednesday and he says... And also he said that the Army had an initiative called Enterprise Thinking and Enterprise Thinking was part of what we called our effort within Rocketdyne. We used the terms Enterprise Thinking, organizational awareness, and that InThinking personal awareness. We were using those two terms. So he did a search on that, found my name, and he says, "What do you think?" And he says, "We're gonna... " 0:06:24.3 BB: If I agree, we'll have a follow-up vetting call the next day. So he calls me up the next day and it's him and a two-star general. There are three people in the room, all senior officers, and he says, "Okay, so, but tell us what you do." So I shared the last... It sounds funny, is what seems to have been the last straw in their interest was having me speak, was my last straw story. Remember the executive from the European airline and... Right? So I tell that story about my efforts within Rocketdyne and Boeing about this airline executive and how this deeply resonated with this executive of this customer of this company that buys a lot of Boeing airplanes that we focused on the one cause, not the greater system. 0:07:13.2 BB: And within minutes of sharing that story, they started laughing, leading to it a few minutes later to them saying, "you're the one." 0:07:19.2 AS: [laughter] That's very interesting. 0:07:21.3 BB: You're the one. So for our listeners, I'd say, let this be a reminder of how a personal story guided by insights on how Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge can open doors for you. And you can use that story, come up with your own stories, but you just never know when you're gonna be in a situation where you need a really simple story. So as an aside, they contact me, like I mentioned, 10 years later, and I think I shared with you offline that the speaker I was replacing was the great Richard Rumelt, the strategy professor from UCLA, who for whatever reason needed to bail out. And then when this podcast is posted, I'll put a link to the slides of the presentation. 0:08:05.7 BB: It's about 45 minutes long. What was not covered... I went back and looked at it earlier to say, what did I share with them that got them so excited? All I know is it fit into 45 minutes to an hour. What was not covered was the trip reports, whether Red Pen or Blue Pen, Last Straw/All Straw, Me/We organizations. But after it was done, as I'm coming off the stage, General Dunwoody in uniform comes up to me. She was thrilled. Her exact words were, "You hit it." She says, "Bill, you hit it out of the park." And I thought, well, I had help from a lot of people. She then says something to me that I'll never forget. So we're face-to-face, right? Let me just... Right? 0:08:45.1 BB: And she says to me, "Bill, you've got a real challenge on your hands. Bill, you've got a real challenge on your hands." So prompted by that, I held my hand out, my right hand, which is what you do to initiate a handshake, and then she reaches out to shakes my hand and I said, "General Dunwoody, we have a challenge on our hands." [laughter] And she erupted in laughter. And my only regret, even though we went out for drinks for the next couple of hours, but my regret was not having a photo of her and I doing a double high five as she laughed. So then I remained in touch with her for the next six to eight months when she was promoted to four-star and she looked for opportunities to get me to the Pentagon, which she did. And I was trying to get her or somebody on her staff to come to Rocketdyne to learn more about what we're doing. 0:09:38.1 BB: But I say I share this anecdote as an example of a Test for Understanding of a transformation. So what is a TFU, test for understanding? This is something I got exposed to in my Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Decision Making training, which I talked about in one of the first episodes. And in our training to deliver what was then a five-day course, we were coached on how to interact with seminar attendees, including how to answer questions and how to ask questions. And one of the things we got our knuckles wrapped for was saying, are there any questions? Because no one answers that. There is... And if I had said that when I was being certified, I'd have failed. So instead we're coached on how to ask questions or make comments, which serve as a test for someone's understanding of what I presented. 0:10:27.9 BB: For example, for me to reply to General Dunwoody with we have a challenge on our hands was to test her understanding of what I said and her laughter is a response that I could be expecting with something short. As an aside, an appreciation, we've talked about Ackoff's D-I-K-U-W model data, raw data information. You turn that into what, where, when, extent, knowledge. If we convert that to how does something operate looking inside of an automobile, how do the pieces work together? Remember he said understanding is when you look outward 'cause knowledge looking inward, Russ would say, doesn't tell you why the car is designed for four passengers. That comes from looking outward. And then wisdom is what do we do with all this? Well, the Kepner-Tregoe training was Test for Understanding and now that I'm inspired by Ackoff, well in my university classes, I ask "Test for Information" classes. I have them watch videos and say, what company was Russ working for? 0:11:31.1 BB: This anecdote, that's information. Nothing wrong with those questions. I can ask for "Test for Knowledge" questions asking how something operates. So what I don't know is like, why are they called Test for Understanding? They could be Test for Knowledge, Test for Information, Test for Wisdom. And obviously TFI test for information could be true, false, multiple choice and test for knowledge and understanding could be short, but then I want to go deeper. And so what I wanna share is in one of my university courses, I share the following, true, you can't make it up news stories. It says, once upon a time a national airline came in dead last on on-time performance one month even though it had offered its employees everything from cash to pizza to finish first in the US Department of Transportation's monthly rankings. Does that sound like incentives, Andrew? 0:12:33.0 AS: It's all there. 0:12:33.8 BB: If we finish first, pizza parties. Now if they got exposed to Rocketdyne, they'd be handing out checks for $10,000. So in one of the research essays, for a number of the courses, every week, every module, I give them a research essay very similarly, giving them a situation and then what's going on with the questions is having them think about what they've been exposed to so far. And so question one in this assignment is given this account, list five assumptions that were made by the management team of this airline? And so I just wanna share one student's response. He says, "assumption one..." And also let me say this comes from the second of two Deming courses I do. So these students have been exposed to a one, one-semester course prior to this. So this is not intro stuff. This is getting deep into it. 0:13:34.3 BB: And so anyway he says, "assumption one, offering incentives like cash and pizza would motivate employees to prioritize on-time performance." Okay? That's an assumption. "Assumption two, employee morale and satisfaction directly correlate with on-time performance. Assumption three, the issue of on-time performance primarily stems from..." Are you ready? "Employee motivation or effort. The incentives provided were perceived as valuable by employees." And you're gonna love where this goes. "Assumption five, employees have significant control over factors that influence on-time performance such as aircraft maintenance, air traffic control and weather conditions." 0:14:20.2 AS: Good answers. 0:14:23.0 BB: Again, what I think is cool and for our listeners is what you're gonna get in question two, three, four, and five is builds upon a foundation where these students have, for one and a half semesters been exposed to Deming, Taguchi, Ackoff, Gipsie Ranney, Tom Johnson, the System of Profound Knowledge, hours and hours of videos. And so this is my way of Testing their Understanding. And so if you're a university professor, you might find interest in this. If you're within an organization, this could be a sense of how do you know what people are hearing in your explanations of Deming's work or whatever you're trying to bring to your organization? So anyway, I then have them read a blog at a Deming Institute link, and I'll add this blog when this is posted but it's deming.org/the insanity of extrinsic motivation. All right. And they've been exposed to these concepts but I just said, "Hey, go off and read this blog." And it was likely a blog by John Hunter. 0:15:32.0 AS: Yep. 0:15:32.2 BB: All right, question two. All right. Now it gets interesting, is that "in appreciation of Edward de Bono's, "Six Thinking Hats"," which they've been exposed to, "and the Yellow Hat, which is the logical positive, why is this such a great idea? Listen, explain five potential logical, positive benefits of incentives, which would explain why they would be implemented in a ME Organization." And so what's seen is I have them put themselves in a ME Organization, put on the Yellow Hat and think about what would be so exciting about this. And so logical, positive number one. "Incentives can serve as a powerful motivator for individuals within the organization, driving them to achieve higher levels of performance and productivity. When employees are offered rewards for their efforts, they're more likely to be motivated to excel in their roles," Andrew. Logical positive number two, enhanced performance. Explanation, "by tying incentives to specific goals or targets, organizations can encourage employees to focus their efforts on key priorities and objectives. 0:16:46.9 BB: This can lead to improved performance across various aspects of the business, ultimately driving better results." Number three, attraction and retention of talent. Oh, yeah. Explanation, "offering attractive incentives can help organizations attract top talent and retain existing employees. Attractive incentives can serve as a key differentiator for organizations seeking to attract and retain skilled professionals." Now, let me also say, this is an undergraduate class. As I mentioned, this is the second of two that I offer. Many of these students are working full-time or part-time. So this is coming from someone who is working full-time, probably mid to late 20s. So these are not... They're undergraduates but lifewise, they've got a lot of real-world experience. 0:17:44.0 BB: All right. Logical positive four, promotion of innovation and creativity. Explanation, "incentives can encourage employees to think creatively and innovative in their roles. By rewarding innovative ideas and contributions, organizations can foster..." Ready, Andrew? "A culture of creativity and continuous improvement, driving long-term success and competitive advantage." And the last one, positive organizational culture. "Implementing incentives can contribute to a positive organizational culture characterized by recognition, reward and appreciation. When employees feel valued and rewarded for their contributions, they're more likely to feel engaged, satisfied, and committed to the organization." But here's what's really cool about this test for understanding, I get to position them in the framework of a ME Organization with the Yellow Hat. 0:18:40.9 BB: Now question three, in appreciation of Edward de Bono's, "Six Thinking Hats" and the Black Hat, what Edward calls a logical negative, list and explain five potential aspects of incentives, which would explain why they would not be implemented in a WE Organization. And this is coming from the same person. This is why I think it's so, so cool that I wanna share with our listeners. The same person's being forced to look at it both ways. Negative number one, potential for... Ready, Andrew? "Unintended consequences." Oh my God. "Incentives can sometime lead to unintended consequences such as employees focusing solely on tasks that are incentivized while neglecting other important aspects of their roles. This tunnel vision can result in suboptimal outcomes for the organization as a whole." 0:19:30.7 BB: "Number two, risk of eroding intrinsic motivation. Explanation, offering external rewards like incentives can undermine intrinsic motivation leading employees to become less interested in the work and more focused on earning rewards. Number three, creation of unhealthy competition. Explanation, incentives can foster a competitive culture within the organization where employees may prioritize individual success over collaboration and teamwork. This competitive atmosphere can breed..." Ready? "Resentment and distrust among employees." Can you imagine that, Andrew? Resentment and distrust? That seems like it would clash with my previous positive thought, but it really just points out how careful management needs to be. 0:20:19.0 AS: Yes. 0:20:19.2 BB: All right. Cost considerations. "Implementing incentive programs can be costly for organizations, particularly if the rewards offered are substantial or if the program is not carefully managed. Organizations may be hesitant to invest resources and incentives, especially if they're uncertain about the return on investment if budget is of concern." And then number five, "short-term focus over our long-term goals." Explanation, "incentives often improve short-term gains rather than long-term strategic objectives. Employees may prioritize activities that yield immediate results, even if they're not aligned with the organization's broader goals or values." 0:21:02.7 BB: And then question four, here's the kicker. "In appreciation of your evolving understanding of the use of...
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Transparency Among Friends: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 21)
05/07/2024
Transparency Among Friends: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 21)
How can you make lasting change at your organization? Recruit your friends! In this discussion, Bill Bellows lays out his experience recruiting and working with a small group to make big changes in a large company. 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunity. Today is episode 21, and the topic is Transparency. Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.1 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome to our audience. And I wanna thank a handful of people who have reached out to me on LinkedIn and elsewhere to talk about the podcast, what they're getting out of it, and which has been very interesting meeting people from around the world. And that's led me to a couple opening remarks for clarity on some of the things we've discussed in the past. And then we'll get into our feature topic. And so I say, [chuckle] is that in my early years at Rocketdyne, the Rocket Factory, a few of us started to see the synergy of what we were absorbing and integrating from, primarily from Dr. Deming and Taguchi, not just them, there were others. And we're 10 years away from really beginning to see what Russ Ackoff was able to offer us. At one point, there were eight of us. It started off with one, then another, then another. Next thing you know there's eight of us. We were what Barry Bebb and his cloud model would call advocates. Advocates of a change, of a transformation. We've been using that word. And I started to refer to us as the Gang of Eight 'cause this is the early '90's. And I think in China there was a group known as the Gang of Eight. Maybe that was the '80's. And I remember thinking, "Oh, we're like the Gang of Eight." 0:01:54.7 AS: I thought that was a Gang of Four in China, is that the Gang of Four. 0:01:58.9 BB: Well, there was a Gang of Four, then there was a Gang of Eight. There were both. 0:02:02.4 AS: Okay. 0:02:03.1 BB: But anyway, but I remember hearing that word, and then I thought, "Well, so okay, a gang of eight." We started to meet regularly, perhaps every other week, sharing ideas on how to initiate a transformation and how we operated, again, inspired by Deming. So at first we met quietly, we would meet in another building, not wanting to call attention to our efforts, not wanting to be visible for those who might have been adversaries again to borrow from Barry's model. 'Cause Barry's model was, there's, for every advocate there's a few more adversaries. So we were keeping our heads down. And this is before I knew anything about Barry, but I, we were just kind, a little bit paranoid that people would see what we're doing. And so who were the ones that were the adversary? Well, those were promoting rewards and recognition. Those were promoting individual cash incentives for suggestion programs including, as I mentioned a previous podcast, an individual could submit a suggestion award, get up to 10% of the annual savings in a onetime lump sum. They were giving out checks for $10,000, Andrew. And I would kid people, if the company's giving out checks for $10,000, do you think we've got photographs of me receiving a check for 10,000? You betcha. 0:02:03.5 BB: And there it is in the newspaper, me receiving a check, not that me, [chuckle] but somebody receiving a check for $10,000, a big smile with the President. And it's in the newspaper and did that cause issues? Yes. But anyway, it wasn't obvious for some of us that we might have been, sorry, it wasn't obvious for some time that those we might have considered the adversary to our efforts were very likely not meeting to plan how to stall our efforts. [chuckle] Right. And, but it took a while to realize this, so here we are trying to be very discreet, meeting discreetly. And then it, at some time it dawned on me and some of the others that, those of us that were inspired to learn, think, and work together on transformation efforts as we've been exploring these podcasts, we have the benefits of positive synergy. And the adversaries at best operate without synergy as they're not likely to be inclined to do much more than participate in what some at Rocketdyne called, you ready, "Bill Bellows’ Bitch Sessions." [laughter] And they come back from a class with me and they start bitching about me. And then the local people in that area would come by and tell me, and they said, "Anything we can do?" I said, "Yeah," I said, "Ask them what part of Rocketdyne moving in the direction of a Blue Pen Company do they not like." Right? It's just arrrgggggh. 0:02:04.2 BB: And I say, anyway. But once we had more and more results from our efforts, results from applying these ideas with very visible improvements in quality and costs leading to improved profits, it was all the harder for the adversaries to slow our efforts. Again, we were most fortunate to be working on challenges, we had challenges in fighting fires, but we also had challenges in designing hardware that achieved "Snap Fit" status, which translates to dramatically easier to integrate higher performing as well, as we shifted from parts to systems, challenges that required, guess what? A different lens inspired by Dr. Deming. That's, [chuckle] again, listening to the previous podcast, 'cause I thought, "Well, I wanna clarify a few things." Did we have ups and downs, Andrew? Yes, we did. We had days when we're excited, we had days when we were down. But what really worked out well, [chuckle] and the running joke was, there was variation in our excitement. 0:02:04.7 BB: So I may have been down, you'd be up, so you'd lift me up and then when you're down, I lift you up. And so the running joke we had amongst us was, thank God for variation in our moods. Because if we were all depressed at the same time, we'd go off the cliff. [chuckle] But we just took turns as to the ups and the downs. And we're very fortunate to have weekends 'cause that gave us time to not wanna choke some people. So, [chuckle] but come Monday we're relaxed. And then, but another thing that I wanted to point out from things we talked about previous podcasts, years ago, 30, nearly 30 years ago, I met a senior structural analyst from Boeing, Al Viswanathan, who was on the Boeing Commercial side. And he somehow got involved in the commercial side. 0:06:52.1 BB: Well, I don't know if it was the commercial side or military side. Anyway, Boeing had, there were both sides and one side was pro-Deming and the other side was anti-Deming. So he must have been on the defense side. And why would the defense side be pro-Deming? Because the Pentagon was pro-Deming. And so the defense side people would have been watching that. Anyway, Al somehow got involved in studying Deming's work and being a mentor within the organization. And I met him, I know when he worked there, when he retired. Anyway, Al, coming from Al, what I want to share is something he would say relative to Dr. Deming's funnel experiment. There's rule one of the funnel, rule two, rule three, and rule four. So rule one is you have a funnel and you drop marbles from the funnel onto the floor, and you get a pattern of where the marbles lay. 0:07:49.1 BB: And that's called variation. You're holding the funnel, you drop the marble, it lands in a different spot each time. And then rule two is you, if the marble is off a little bit to the right of the target that you're trying to hit, then you move the funnel the other direction. So two and three have to do with compensating. If it doesn't go where you want, then you shift it accordingly. Rule four, remember rule four of the funnel? 0:08:17.4 AS: I don't remember that. 0:08:18.9 BB: And this is... I think it's chapter eight. I know it's in The New Economics. Chapter 8, I'm sorry, rule four of the funnel is wherever the marble lands, position the funnel for the next drop. So in rule one, you keep it where it is and you get a pattern. Rules two and three, you compensate for where it lands. You either go left if it goes right and you compensate. And in compensating, it becomes worse. But what becomes really bad is when you put the funnel in rule four over where the last marble landed, and you end up getting farther and farther from the target leading to, remember the expression Dr. Deming used for that? 0:09:00.9 AS: Well, I remember the word tampering. But it meant when you get way off the target. What was that? 0:09:06.6 BB: He called it going off to the Milky Way. [laughter] And there are computer simulations where if, some people have done, you know, created. 0:09:16.0 AS: You do it in California and you end up in New York. 0:09:17.8 BB: Yep. And you, and you, and you keep getting further and further. Well, so in conversations with Al, and it could have been me and him and Dave Nave, Dick Steele and others, and at some point, Al would say, "How do we know we're not going off to the Milky Way?" Which translates to, how do we know that what we're interpreting from Deming is not getting further and further and further and further away from what he was trying to say? How do we know that we aren't wacky? How do we know? Because we think, "Oh, we're getting, we're understanding this better and better." And what I would say is, how do we know we're not going off to the Milky Way? “Actually,” I say, "We don't know." But part of having a community of people that work closely with Deming, people that know more than me about Dr. Deming's work is you can tap into that community and maybe lessen the chance that we go off to the Milky Way. Now, again, is that a guarantee? No, it's not a guarantee. 0:10:25.9 BB: But I would say, what I appreciate about Al saying that is, it's just a reminder that how do we know that what we're interpreting is true? So we're here, you and I are having these conversations, we're sharing interpretations, lessons learned, are we, is what Dr. Deming would say, "Is this worker training worker?" So, each of us are ignorant, and we think we understand Deming, and we're sharing it with others "well, I know, I know." Now, we can all be right, we can all be going off to the Milky Way. So I just wanted to say that, when I'm talking about diffusion from a point source and getting smarter and smarter and having these conversations within our organization. How do we know we aren't fooling each other? We don't know. 0:11:18.7 AS: I have a couple follow ups here. First of all, the 1991 Washington Post called it the Gang of Eight, as opposed to the Gang of Four, which was before that time, during the Cultural Revolution. And the Gang of Eight included seven men and one woman. And the Gang of Four, of course, included Mao's wife. So there's a little clarification. 0:11:44.6 BB: I wasn't sure if she was part of the four or part of the eight. I knew her name was in there somewhere. 0:11:49.0 AS: And the second thing you talked about the volatility of your feelings, your moods, right. And I just wanted to introduce the concept of volatility in finance, which is that volatility in itself is not bad. What's bad is correlation of volatility. So if all of you are upset on the same day, then it's just an absolute crash. But if one's upset on Monday and another one's happy and productive on Monday, then it starts to balance. And that's what we do in the world of finance is we combine correlation with volatility. And Harry Markowitz got a Nobel Prize in economics for coming up with the concept that risk can be reduced by understanding the correlation between assets and adding a highly risky asset to a Portfolio could, in fact, reduce the risk of the Portfolio overall, if the correlation between that asset and the Portfolio was, let's say negative or very low. 0:12:55.5 BB: Wow what you're talking about is the benefit of not being synchronous, being asynchronous. 0:13:04.2 AS: Correct. 0:13:05.1 BB: So you're up, I'm down, and I'm up, you're down, and then we can get through these periods. And yeah, and that's exactly what we're talking about. But you're right, I'm glad you brought that up because I've heard people talk about that as well. But that's exactly the point we're trying to make is, so for all those who think we ought to shrink variation to zero, I'd say, well, maybe there's value in variation, value in diversity of opinions. And also I have had people in the past say, "Well, so a Blue Pen Company is a bunch of people that go along to go along." I said, "No, it's a bunch of people that have strong disagreements on things and they share those disagreements." 0:13:49.5 BB: Now, at the end of the day by Friday, we've got to make a decision as to releasing this album whatever it is, because we've gotta ship. And we may arm wrestle, we may vote however we're gonna do it. So there can be disagreement. We have the ability to articulate where we're coming from. Borrowed from Edward de Bono, we can use a black hat and I can give you reasons why you don't think it'll work. You can call me on it and say, "Bill, how do I know it's your black hat and not what de Bono would call your red hat, which is my intuition." 0:14:26.4 AS: So if I say it doesn't work, you could say, "Bill, is that you don't feel it'll work or you know it won't work?" And I say, "Andrew, you're right. I have a bad feeling about it." I say, "Well, let's just be honest about it." But again, at the end of the day, we may vote. But we're gonna move forward. And what's not gonna happen is if you decide to take however we decide to make that decision, what there won't be a lot of room for is a bunch of "I told you so." 0:14:58.8 AS: Right. 0:15:00.4 BB: And we just we just dispense with that and just say this time, maybe the idea I had, we'll just have to wait till later and we're just gonna move on. So it's not to say it's a bunch of happiness and we're always in agreement. No, very strong relationships can have very strong disagreements. They just don't result in a civil war. Years ago, when my wife and I got married, she said I was just, it was lucky for me that she liked cats. I said that was non-starters. I said liking cats was a requirement. [laughter] 0:15:44.3 BB: So there's a few things that were non-starters. And if she didn't like cats, I'd have had a hard time with that. But on everything else, there's things we can disagree with. That's okay. All right. So given that I wanna talk about tonight is something that's come up in some other conversations recently. And it's about transparency. And then I have a quote that I've used in the past. I've once in a while attributed to Peter Senge, because I can't remember is actually Robert Fritz, a close associate of Peter Senge. And Fritz's comment is, “It's not what the vision is that is important. It's what the vision does.” And what I like about that is if you have a shared mental model of a Blue Pen Company. And I just began to appreciate how powerful it is that we have a shared vision. And relative to transparency, what I was sharing with some people is the transparency that exists in a Blue Pen Company, a Deming organization, a WE organization, an All-Straw organization and the transparency that which is as simple as me saying to you. 0:17:05.5 BB: Well, I say let's talk about the lack of transparency. I can meet a requirement, as we've talked about, an infinite number of ways to meet any set of requirements. And the letter grade is not A plus. It is not 100. It could be a D minus. I could leave for you the bowling ball on the doorway. And in a non-Deming Organization. I could meet any requirement you give me, Andrew, with the minimal amount of effort. Because all that we're measuring is that it met requirements. And so I give it to you and, and all you do is you look at the measurement and it says, "Yep, the car has gas." You're like, "Hey, I'm excited." 0:17:45.2 BB: Well, the black and white thinking allows me to hide a whole bunch of things. So if I said the car has gas. And you complain because it only has a quarter of a tank, I said, "Andrew. It has gas." But I thought in a Deming organization, I don't think we're gonna play those games. I think we're gonna have a lot more transparency relative to when I meet a set of requirements. Am I gonna leave the bowling ball on the doorway for you unilaterally? I don't think so. Maybe once I learn my lesson because I'm a new hire. I'm bringing something from where I used to work. But I think in a Deming environment, I think the transparency is gonna bring out the best in us. 0:18:33.8 BB: So I just want to throw that, that's part of where I'm coming from with transparency. You know, we don't have this murkiness as to, you know, where are they coming from? And. also we're going to be, you know, as Ackoff was, we're going to go to great lengths to be precise with language, and understand that efficiency is not effectiveness, that management is not leadership. And I think the better we have that clarity, I think that's a trademark of what that environment is about. 0:19:02.2 AS: It's interesting because, you know, the ultimate clarity is doing a run chart or a control chart on a process and seeing the outcome. And that's transparent and clear. And I've done a lot in my own management career by just getting data into a format that people can, you know, go back to and look at and think about. And just the transparency of that data can make a huge difference to the way people interpret what's going on in that unit. 0:19:38.9 BB: You're right. As opposed to the transparency of two data points, quality, I'm sorry, I think I've used this example. You can remind me of, you know, when I was at Rocketdyne once upon a time, and there was a meeting where the safety metrics, number of accidents, per employee in the first quarter was a certain level. Then in the second quarter, it went down. And I mean, the number of accidents per employee went down. Safety got better. And as you know, in this meeting with a bunch of directors and the VP and somebody says to the VP, why is safety improved? And their response was, because “We've let them know safety is important.” Well, who's the we? Who's the they? So, and, but imagine the transparency for somebody hearing that we've let them know. That's a way of saying, so you're, you're believing that because it went down, it's because of things we said, and they're not interested in safety. 0:20:45.3 BB: And then if it goes the other way, we're going to claim what? That they're not listening? So you're right. I mean, the ability, the transparency of looking at a set of data on a control chart and the realization that the process is in control. Then we look at the ups and downs and say, no reason for alarm here. 0:21:12.2 AS: The other thing that I thought relates to transparency is fear. In the sense that what is fear? Fear is, you know, a concern that something is going to happen is about to happen is in the process of happening, or, you know, something's happening to you and you're not being able to see, you know, what's going on. So I was just thinking, you know, another angle on transparency is, you know, reducing fear in an organization by being, you know, let more transparent. 0:21:41.5 BB: Yes. And, and I can even imagine, what's funny is that, a co-worker in my office, once upon a time. And. And she was upset with a decision made by the president at that time was my boss. And so she, so for about two years or so, she reported to me, lovely lady, lovely friend, great friend. So anyway, she was upset. She comes in. Did you...
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Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 4
04/30/2024
Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation: Part 4
Can a 4th grade class decide on an operational definition of "joy in learning"? In part 4 of this series, educator John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss a real-world example of applying Deming in a classroom. This episode covers the first part of the story, with more to come in future episodes! 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode four about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:22.6 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, we've been talking about organizational goal setting last few episodes. A couple episodes ago, we talked about those four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. Then we sort of introduced this idea of trying to stay away from arbitrary and capricious education goals. And then we got into these 10 lessons for data analysis. And so what I thought we could do now is we've got that foundation in place is that we could take a look at an applied example in real classrooms of those 10 key lessons in action to kind of bring those alive. And I ran this project a few years ago with a teacher named Jessica Cutler. She's a fourth grade science teacher in our network. And she was going through something we call a Continual Improvement Fellowship. So we do this sort of internal fellowship where people can learn that sort of way of thinking, the tools, techniques, the theories related to the science of improvement. And then they actually take that right away and apply it to a problem in their classroom or their department or their school, depending on who it is. 0:01:55.0 JD: And so what Jessica was doing, what her project ended up being was she was trying to improve the joy in learning in her fourth grade science class. So it's interesting to see how that sort of project evolved. So I thought we could revisit each of the 10 lessons and how that lesson was applied in Jessica's improvement project. And we'll maybe get through three or four of the lessons today. And then over the course of the next few episodes, kind of get to all 10 lessons and think through how they were... How that went in her improvement project. 0:02:08.1 AS: Sounds like a good plan, practical application. 0:02:12.0 JD: Yeah. I mean, it was interesting too, because she didn't initially sort of consider joy as a possibility. She was thinking like, I'm gonna work on improving test scores or something like that was sort of her initial brainstorm. And then sort of pivoted to this when we kind of talked through what was possible from the Deming philosophy type of standpoint. So it's interesting to see how things evolve. But just to kind of revisit, so we talked through these 10 lessons. Lesson one was "data has no meaning apart from their context." So we talked about these questions that are important, like who collected the data? How was it collected? When was it collected? Where was the data collected? What are the values themselves represent? What's that operational definition for the concept under measurement? Have there been any changes to that operational definition as the project unfolds? And so even with a project with a teacher and her students, all of those questions are relevant. They're still important just because you're dealing with students that doesn't mean anything changes on that front. So it was important for her to sort of think through all of those things as she thought through the start of her project. 0:03:28.9 JD: And what her and her students came up with after they sort of decided that they were gonna focus on joy, they focused on this problem statement. And they were like, well, what do we want science class to look like? 'Cause that was sort of their starting point. And what her and her students...Oh sorry go ahead. 0:03:45.9 AS: One thing you started off talking about her, now you're talking about her students. So she got her students involved in this process. Is that what you're saying? 0:03:56.2 JD: Yeah. So they were working together from the very outset even... 0:04:02.0 AS: As opposed to a teacher talking through this with a principal or something in a faculty room and then thinking of how do I... Okay. 0:04:09.2 JD: Yep. That's right. Yeah. And so what they came up with is the sort of desired future state of science classes. "We are able to stay focused through science, enjoy science class and remain engaged." And so to give some context, what was happening is that she taught science and social studies and it was sort of like a back-to-back class period. And they would do science second. And so by the time they were doing science, sometimes the students were getting off task, disengaged. They weren't as engaged as either the students wanted to be or the teacher wanted them to be in that second lesson. So they, they came up with that as the thing they were gonna focus on. And then because they were gonna focus on joy in learning, they had to define what that meant. So what did joy in learning mean to that fourth grade science class? And what they came up with as a definition, which I really like, is "we wanna have fun learning, finding things we like to learn and have fun completing classwork and activities." So they came up with this operational definition. And keep in mind, these are fourth graders and Jessica's having these conversations like, what's the operational definition? That's not probably typical language you're gonna use with fourth graders. But if you walk them through these things, they actually pick up on it pretty quickly. 0:05:26.1 JD: It's actually pretty cool to see. 0:05:28.1 AS: And to them, a more simpler word sounds like was fun. 0:05:35.0 JD: Yeah, right. They wanted that to be a part of the science learning process. So basically, once they had the operational definition, they had to think through, well, how are we going to measure that concept that we've defined? And what they did was they just developed a simple survey. Jessica did it in Google Forms. just had, really just had two questions. The first question was, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you enjoy science class today? And then there was a second open-ended question that said, what made you enjoy or not enjoy class today? So it was fresh in the kids' minds. So basically, at the end, each kid has a Chromebook in Jessica's science class. She would just sort of share the link to the survey, and the kids would complete that as the closing activity for the lesson. So she would get two things out of it. So 1 to 10, just a real quick sort of numerical quantified value, how much the kids enjoyed science class that day. And then, because it had just happened, the students could say what they did and didn't like about the lesson. Oh, we haven't used computers in a few days. Or it'd be nice if I had a video to help bring this concept alive. Or there's a few words that you use that I don't know the definitions to. Could you add those definitions to the glossary? So just things like that, simple things like that. 0:06:55.9 JD: Right away. And then what Jessica could then do is take that information and actually adjust her lessons as she planned maybe for the next week, she could make those adjustments based on this feedback she was getting from the students. So that's sort of the application of lesson number one. So what are we measuring? How are we gonna measure it? When are we collecting this data? That type of thing. Lesson two, if you remember back from when we covered the lessons was "we don't manage or control the data. The data is the voice of the process," right? 0:07:28.9 JD: So we talked about this ideas that while we don't control the data, we do manage the system and the processes from which the data come, right? So, and this is really key conception of the system's view. You, you say you're going to improve this particular classroom. So that's the system. So you're not necessarily controlling the data. You're not controlling how the kids are evaluating, the numbers that they're putting one through 10 to assess joy in learning, but what the teacher and then the students, because of this project do have control over are the learning processes that are happening throughout science class, right? And so back to your point about you switch from talking about Jessica, the teacher to the students. And then you said "we" that's also a key conception of taking this approach, right? 0:08:24.4 JD: So what I think Deming would say is that when you're going to improve an organization, you have to sort of combine sort of three critical pieces. One thing is you need someone from the outside, from outside the system that has Profound Knowledge. And then that person or persons has to be collaborating with the people working in the system. So those are the students, they're working in the science class system. And, then you that third group or that third person is the manager or managers have that have the authority to work on the system. So in this case, Jessica has the authority to change what's happening in her science class. 0:09:10.2 JD: The students are the workers working in that science system. And then that third part is that person that has the sort of understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge and it's sort of bringing all of these parts together that really is how you begin to transition sort of conventional classrooms to those guided by the Deming quality learning principles, right? 0:09:33.1 JD: So in in the case of Jessica's project, that person that was, that had a System of Profound Knowledge lens was me. So I was sort of acting as an, the outsider, 'cause I'm outside of the science system. But I have this understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge. And I'm working with Jessica as she's working with her students, to sort of bring that lens to the projects. 0:10:00.4 AS: And what's the point of doing all that if she doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to test, if you're gonna if we change this, it's gonna result in something why go and do all this if you're just stuck in a system that you simply cannot change because of government regulation or whatever, maybe. 0:10:17.5 JD: Right. Yeah. So it's bringing all those pieces together. But what I found thinking about the three parts of a team that's working toward organizational improvement, what I've found in the past is, in my experience, whether it's a school improvement team or a district based improvement team, most of them are devoid of at least one parts of one of those components, usually two of those components, 'cause usually students aren't involved. 0:10:45.9 JD: And then in most school systems, there's no one with this outside knowledge, the System of Profound Knowledge lens, right. And I think it's what we're really doing is the students can identify the waste, the inefficiency, the things that aren't going well from their perspective, but we don't often ask them. Or if we do, we do it in a way where it's an end of year survey or an end of semester survey, but this is collecting that feedback in real time and then acting on it. We're not planning to do something next year with this feedback, we're actually planning to do something the next day, or maybe the next week, to adjust the science lessons. 0:11:24.8 AS: And it's one of those two things that come into my mind, what, how do you handle the idea that what's causing the impact on joy in learning could be that the student had a bad night, the night before. And I guess by doing many samples that starts to kind of wash out. And then the other question is since the students know that the teacher could likely make an adjustment, is there any possibility that they could be gaming or playing the system. 0:11:57.1 JD: Well, that's interesting, because I think, well on the first point. I think pretty quickly, my experience with this and David Langford I know you've talked to has echoed this sentiment is you know, he was working with high school students, this is an elementary project but either way. You may get some students that don't take this seriously. At first. And you may get some kind of crazy answers crazy brainstorms or crazy survey submissions, although I don't think Jessica got much of that. 0:12:30.2 JD: But in other projects I've gotten some stuff at the outset that was a little bit off the wall. But like David said to me when I first started this and then it's been my experience since is that kids, once they realize that you're actually gonna act on the feedback, as long as the feedback is in good faith. They actually start to take it seriously, pretty, pretty quickly. And so I think pretty quickly, those sort of types of worries go by the wayside. Now, I will say I did say that the... 0:13:01.1 JD: One of the components that has to be on this improvement team is the person that has the authority to change the system. So at the end of the day, even though we're gathering this input, Jessica's really the person as the teacher of that classroom that has the authority to make the changes to the system based on her judgment or, her professional judgment as a science teacher of what should happen. And so the students certainly offer feedback and inform that process, but ultimately it's Jessica that's gonna determine the changes to the system. 0:13:34.0 AS: I hear David in my ears saying, you know what, Andrew? You don't trust the students? They probably have a more honest, view of what's going on than most adults do. So yes, I hear the voice of David Langford. 0:13:49.2 JD: Yeah. Well, and interestingly, and we'll get into this towards the end, not today, but when we get to some of the other lessons, interestingly, not to give away the story, but, one of the things that was getting kids off track was a lot of noise during class, kids making noises. And they actually came up with this system where they were kind of penalizing each other. This was their own idea. And so, kids know exactly what's going on in class. And so it was interesting to see how they came up with some ideas to rectify that. But yeah, so it was really just bringing together, these three groups or, the group of students and then Jessica and then myself. It's that combination that's really where the power for improvement lies. And again, I, that type of partnership is just not typical in school improvement situations. 0:14:45.7 JD: So that's lesson two, applied. Lesson number three is "plot the dots for any data that incurs in time order." Right? So we've talked about this a lot. The idea behind the primary point of "plot the dots" is that plotting data over time helps us understand variation, and that in turn leads us to take more appropriate action. I think that what we decided to do with Jessica's project is, start plotting the points on a run chart and connect those points with a line, and then it becomes pretty intuitive as we're looking at that data, what joy in learning looks like in this science class. And then once we have enough data, we can turn that run part chart into a process behavior chart and actually add the limits. 0:15:40.2 JD: So, like I said, Jessica, once her and the class determined that what they were going to improve was join in learning, and they defined that concept operationally and created the survey, right away they started gathering this survey data as a part of the project, and usually they would gather the data maybe, two or three times a week across the course of this particular improvement project. So maybe I'll share my screen just so you can see what that initial run chart looked like. So, you have this run chart, and I left this in the spreadsheet so you could see the actual data. So as she began administering these surveys, she would send me the data and then I would create it the run chart for her, start plotting that data so that both of us could sort of see the variation in that survey data over time. And then she could actually take this, she would put this run chart on a slide, and every week or so she would actually show the students what the data looked like. 0:16:49.7 AS: And just to be clear, we've got a chart for those that are listening, we've got a chart that has a blue line and it's going up and down kind of around the level of about 79. So they've got points that are based, that are days. Some days are below that 79 some days are above. But also I'm assuming that those points are the output of all the surveys. So the average answer on that day from the survey as different from the average or median of all the day's output, correct? 0:17:31.1 JD: Yeah, that's right. So this is, the run chart from Jessica's class that's displaying the survey results. And what they're measuring is joy in science class as assessed by the students. 0:17:44.3 AS: On the first day, the students basically said, 75% of the respondents said that they had joy in science. 0:17:51.9 JD: That's right. So in this particular school year, which was two years ago, so we had done some of the project planning before kids went on winter break, and then when they came back from winter break, they were ready to start administering the survey. And we started plotting the dots, charting the data over time. So the X axis for those who are listening are the dates. 0:18:16.2 JD: The, Y axis is the joy in learning, percent of kids that the rating of the kids from one to 10. And then I just turn it into a percent. And so you have the green line, the central line running through is the median. We're using the median 'cause that's fairly typical for a run chart because typically run charts don't have as much data as a process behavior chart. And so, outliers can have a greater impact. So we're using the median to sort of control for that. Although this data's fairly tight. So on day one, like you said on January 4th of this school year 75, the kids sort of rated the joy in learning of that particular lesson as a 75% of 100. And then you sort of see it bounce around. 0:19:04.7 JD: That median of 79. And so what I'm showing is the data from the first 10 surveys that Jessica administered at the end of class. So over the course of 20 days from January 4th through January 24th, she administered that this survey 10 different times. So about two to three times a week. And so we see a high of about 83% joy in learning and a low of 67% joy in learning. And you have about half the points above the median, about half the points below the median. So even though it's only 10 data points, Jessica and her class, and then myself, we were starting to learn about what did joy in learning, joy in science class actually look like? Now that we have this definition and we're measuring it with these surveys and then plotting these data points. So again, she's actually putting this up on, on the, up on the screen so kids can actually see this. And what she said was after the 5th or 6th survey, and she's plotted this and put this up on a screen a few times, the kids are actually getting excited. And they're wanting to see their data. They're wanting to see what the results look like for each survey as she started plotting this. 0:20:30.6 AS: It's funny because I, when I was a loading supervisor at Pepsi, I started putting up the percent correct for each of the loaders in the warehouse. And I didn't make any comment or anything, I just put it up there. And yeah, people are interested when they start seeing numbers, they start thinking, they...
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System of Profound Wisdom: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 20)
04/16/2024
System of Profound Wisdom: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 20)
Dr. Deming developed his philosophy over time and in conversations with others, not in isolation. As learners, we tend to forget that context, but it's important to remember because no one implements Deming in isolation, either. In this conversation, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss how there's no such thing as a purely Deming organization and why that's good. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 20, entitled, System of Profound Wisdom. Bill, take it Away. 0:00:31.6 Bill Bellows: But not just for 30 years. I forgot to say I started when I was 12. 0:00:36.6 AS: Yes. [laughter] Yes. And you've got the hair to prove it. [laughter] 0:00:43.7 BB: All right. Now, actually, I was thinking the proposal and the title, I thought... I mean, System of Profound Wisdom is cool, System of Profound Questions. Either one of those is good. Let's see which title comes out. 0:00:57.6 AS: Yeah. And I think we'll have to also understand that may some listeners that may not even know what System of Profound Knowledge means, they've been listening. They do. But if today's their first episode, we also gotta break that down, just briefly. 0:01:10.9 BB: Yeah. Okay, let's do that. All right. Well, let me give an opening a quote from Dr. Deming from chapter three, and then we can explain this SoPK, System of Profound Knowledge, thing. But in chapter three of Dr. Deming's last book, The New Economics, the last edition, edition three, came out in 2018. And chapter three, Dr. Deming says, "We saw in the last chapter, we are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. Most people imagine that this style has always existed. It is a fixture. Actually, it is a modern invention a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry, are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge to be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." So you wanna... 0:02:15.4 AS: That's good. 0:02:16.7 BB: So let's say something. Let's just say something about SoPK. How would you explain that? 0:02:23.1 AS: Yeah. Well, actually, I wanna talk very briefly about what you just said, because it's just... 0:02:27.1 BB: Oh, sure. 0:02:29.6 AS: At one point, I thought, "It's a system of knowledge." But he just said it was a system of transformation. 0:02:38.7 BB: It's a theory for transformation. 0:02:40.1 AS: A theory for transformation. Okay, got it. I see. And one of the things that I... I look at Toyota so much just 'cause it's so fascinating and how they've survived all these years, the continuity in the business, the continuity and the profitability of the business, the continued march to become the number one auto producer in the world, and having faced all the ups and downs and survived. And I just think that what they have is a learning organization. No matter what the challenge is, they're trying to apply learning tools, like System of Profound Knowledge, like PDSA, to try to figure out how to solve this problem. And I think that many companies, including at times my companies, [chuckle] we sometimes will scramble and we'll lose knowledge and we won't gain knowledge. And so the System of Profound Knowledge, to me, is all about the idea of how do we build a base of knowledge in our business and then build upon that base of knowledge rather than destroy it when the new management comes in or when a new management idea comes in. 0:04:00.7 AS: And that's something I've just been thinking about a lot. Because I do know a company that I've been doing some work with, and they basically threw away a huge amount of work that they did on System of Profound Knowledge and stuff to go with the prevailing system of management, is like going back. And now, they just produced a loss in the first quarter, and I just think, "Interesting. Interesting." 0:04:27.6 BB: Well, a couple things come to mind based on what you said. One is I would propose that Toyota, I'm in agreement of "Toyota's a learning organization." And that'll come up later. I've got some other thoughts on learning organizations. And we know that they were influenced by Dr. Deming. To what degree, I'm not sure of. Shoichiro Toyoda, who is one of the sons of the founder of the Toyota Motor Car Company, was honored with a Deming prize in 1990. And I believe it came from JUSE, as opposed to the American Society for Quality. One or the other. He was honored with a Deming Prize. 0:05:32.0 AS: Yep. 0:05:33.5 BB: Again, I don't know if it's Deming Prize or Deming Medal. But I know he was honored. What's most important, the point I wanna make is, upon receiving it he said, "There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the impact of Dr. Deming on Toyota." But, if I was to look at the Toyota Production System website, Toyota's Toyota Production System website, which I've done numerous times, I'd be hard-pressed to find anything on that page that I could say, "You see this word, Andrew? You see this sentence, Andrew? You see this sentiment? That's Deming." Not at all. Not at all. It's Taiichi Ohno. It's Shigeo Shingo. I'm not saying it's not good, but all those ideas predate Deming going to Japan in 1950. Taiichi Ohno joined Toyota right out of college as an industrial engineer in 1933, I believe. The Japanese Army, I mentioned in a previous episode, in 1942, wanted him to move from Toyota's loom works for making cloth to their automobile works for making Jeeps. This comes from a book that I would highly recommend. Last time we were talking about books. I wanted to read a book, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago. I wanted to read a book about Toyota, but not one written by someone at MIT or university. I didn't wanna read a book written by an academic. I've done that. 0:07:15.1 BB: I wanted to read a book by somebody inside Toyota, get that perspective, that viewpoint. And the book, Against All Odds, the... Wait I'll get the complete title. Against All Odds: The Story of the Toyota Motor Corporation and the Family That Changed it. The first author, Yukiyasu Togo, T-O-G-O, and William Wartman. I have a friend who worked there. Worked... Let me back up. [chuckle] Togo, Mr. Togo, born and raised in Japan, worked for Toyota in Japan, came to the States in the '60s and opened the doors to Toyota Motors, USA. So, he was the first person running that operation in Los Angeles. And it was here for years. I think it's now in Texas. My late friend, Bill Cummings, worked there in marketing. And my friend, Bill, was part of the team that was working on a proposal for a Lexus. And he has amazing stories of Togo. He said, "Any executive... " And I don't know how high that... What range, from factory manager, VPs. But he said the executives there had their use, free use, they had a company car. And he said Togo drove a Celica. Not a Celica. He drove a... What's their base model? Not a... 0:08:56.2 AS: A Corolla? 0:08:57.7 BB: Corolla. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. He drove a Corolla. He didn't drive... And I said, "Why did he drive a Corolla?" Because it was their biggest selling car, and he wanted to know what most people were experiencing. He could have been driving the highest level cars they had at the time. Again, this is before a Lexus. And so in this book, it talks about the history of Toyota, Taiichi Ohno coming in, Shigeo Shingo's contributions, and the influence of Dr. Deming. And there's a really fascinating account how in 1950, a young manager, Shoichiro Toyoda, was confronted with a challenge that they couldn't repair the cars as fast as they could sell them. This is post-war Japan. They found a car with phenomenal market success. Prior to that, they were trying to sell taxicabs, 'cause people could not... I mean, buying a car as a family was not an option. But by 1950, it was beginning to be the case. And the challenge that Shoichiro Toyoda faced was improving the quality, 'cause they couldn't fix them as fast as they could sell them. And yet, so I have no doubt that that young manager, who would go on to become the chairman, whatever the titles are, no doubt he was influenced by Dr. Deming. But I don't know what that means. 0:10:23.4 BB: That does not... The Toyota Production System is not Deming. And that's as evidenced by this talk about eliminating waste. And those are not Deming concepts. But I believe, back to your point, that his work helped create a foundation for learning. But I would also propose, Andrew, that everything I've read and studied quite a bit about the Toyota Production System, Lean, The Machine That Changed The World, nothing in there explains reliability. To me, reliability is how parts come together, work together. 'Cause as we've talked, a bunch of parts that meet print and meet print all over the place could have different levels of reliability, because meeting requirements, as we've talked in earlier episodes, ain't all it's cracked up to be. So I firmly believe... And I also mentioned to you, I sat for 14 hours flying home from Japan with a young engineer who worked for Toyota, and they do manage variation as Dr. Taguchi proposed. That is not revealed. But there's definitely something going on. But I would also say that I think the trouble they ran into was trying to be the number one car maker, and now they're back to the model of, "If we are good at what we do, then that will follow." 0:11:56.8 BB: And I'm gonna talk later about Tom Johnson's book, just to reinforce that, 'cause Tom, a former professor of management at Portland State University, has visited Toyota plants numerous times back before people found out how popular it was. But what I want to get into is... What we've been talking about the last couple episodes is Dr. Deming uses this term, transformation. And as I shared an article last time by John Kotter, the classic leadership professor, former, he's retired, at the University... Oh, sorry, Harvard Business School. And what he's talking about for transformation is, I don't think, [chuckle] maybe a little bit of crossover with what Dr. Deming is talking about. What we talked about last time is, Deming's transformation is a personal thing that we hear the world differently, see the world differently. We ask different questions. And that's not what Kotter is talking about. And it's not to dismiss all that what Kotter is talking about, but just because we're talking about transformation doesn't mean we mean the same thing. 0:13:10.6 BB: And likewise, we can talk about a Deming organization and a non-Deming organization. What teamwork means in both is different. In a Deming organization, we understand performance is caused by the system, not the workers taken individually. And as a result of that, we're not going to see performance appraisals, which are measures of individuals. Whereas in a non-Deming organization, we're going to see performance appraisals, KPIs flow down to individuals. [chuckle] The other thing I had in my notes is, are there really two types of organizations? No, that's just a model. [chuckle] So, really, it's a continuum of organizations. And going back to George Box, all models are wrong, some are useful. But we talked earlier, you mentioned the learning organization. Well, I'm sure, Andrew, that we have both worked in non-Deming organizations, and we have seen, and we have seen people as learners in a non-Deming organization, but what are they learning? [chuckle] It could be learning to tell the boss what they want to hear. They could be learning to hide information that could cause pain. [chuckle] Those organizations are filled with learners, but it's about learning that makes things worse. It's like digging the pit deeper. What Deming is talking about is learning that improves how the organization operates, and as a result, improves profit. In a non-Deming organization, that learning is actually destroying profit. 0:14:51.8 BB: All right. And early, spoke... Russ, Russ and Dr. Deming spoke for about three hours in 1992. It got condensed down to a volume 21 of The Deming Library, for which our viewers, if you're a subscriber to DemingNEXT, you can watch it in its entirety. All the Deming videos produced by Clare Crawford-Mason are in that. You can see excerpts of volume 21, which is... Believe is theory of a system of education, and it's Russ Ackoff and Dr. Deming for a half hour. So you can find excerpts of that on The Deming Institute's YouTube channel. 0:15:37.0 BB: And what I wanted to bring up is in there, Russ explains to Dr. Deming the DIKUW model that we've spoken about in previous episodes, where D is data. That's raw numbers, Russ would say. I is information. When we turn those raw numbers into distances and times and weights, Russ would say that information is what the newspaper writer writes, who did what to whom. Knowledge, the K, could be someone's explanation as to how these things happened. U, understanding. Understanding is when you step back and look at the container. Russ would say that knowledge, knowledge is what you're using in developing to take apart a car or to take apart a washing machine and see how all these things work together. But understanding is needed to explain why the driver sits on the left versus the right, why the car is designed for a family of four, why the washing machine is designed for a factor of four. That's not inside it. That's the understanding looking outward piece that Russ would also refer to as synthesis. And then the W, that's the wisdom piece. What do I do with all this stuff? And what Russ is talking about is part of wisdom is doing the right things right. So, I wanted to touch upon in this episode is why did Dr. Deming refer to his system as the System of Profound Knowledge? Why not the System of Profound Understanding? Why not the System of Profound Wisdom? And I think, had he lived longer, maybe he would have expanded. Maybe he would have had... 0:17:28.4 BB: And I think that's the case. I think it's... 'Cause I just think... And this is what's so interesting, is, if you look at Dr. Deming's work in isolation and not go off and look at other's work, such as Tom Johnson or Russ, you can start asking questions like this. 0:17:45.7 AS: One thing I was going to interject is that I took my first Deming seminar in 1989, I believe, or 1990. And then I took my second one with Dr. Deming in 1992. And then soon after that, I moved to Thailand and kind of went into a different life, teaching finance and then working in the stock market. And then we set up our factory here for coffee business. But it wasn't until another 10 years, maybe 15 years, that I reignited my flame for what Dr. Deming was doing. And that's when I wrote my book about Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. And what I, so, I was revisiting the material that had impacted me so much. And I found this new topic called System of Profound Knowledge. I never heard of that. And I realized that, it really fully fledged came out in 1993, The New Economics, which I didn't get. I only had Out of the Crisis. 0:18:49.9 BB: '93. 0:18:49.9 AS: Yeah. And so that just was fascinating to go back to what was already, the oldest teacher I ever had in my life at '92, leave it, come back 10, 15 years later and find out, wait a minute, he added on even more in his final book. 0:19:10.4 BB: Well, Joyce Orsini, who was recruited by Fordham University at the encouragement of Dr. Deming, or the suggestion of Dr. Deming to lead their Deming Scholars MBA program in 1990. Professor Marta Mooney, professor of accounting, who I had the great fortune of meeting several times, was very inspired by Dr. Deming's work. And was able to get his permission to have an MBA program in his name called the Deming Scholars MBA program. And when she asked him for a recommendation, "Who should lead this program?" It was Joyce Orsini, who at the time I think was a vice president at a bank in New York. I'm not sure, possibly in human resources, but I know she was in New York as a vice president. 0:20:10.0 BB: And I believe she had finished her PhD under Dr. Deming at NYU by that time. And the reason I bring up Joyce's name, I met her after Dr. Deming had died. Nancy Mann, who is running a company called Quality Enhancement Seminars with, a, at the beginning one product, Dr. Deming's 4-Day seminar, when Dr. Deming died, and I had mentioned, I was at his last seminar in December '93, she continued offering 4-day seminars. And I met her later that year when she was paired with Ron Moen and they were together presenting it, and others were paired presenting it. And at one point, as I got to know Joyce, she said, "His last five years were borrowed time." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "He started working on the book in 19'" evidently the '87, '88 timeframe, he started to articulate these words, Profound Knowledge. 0:21:11.0 BB: And I know he had, on a regular basis, he had dinner engagements with friends including Claire Crawford-Mason and her husband. And Claire has some amazing stories of Deming coming by with these ideas. And she said, once she said, "What is this?" And he is, she took out a napkin, a discretely, wrote down the, "an understanding of the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Difference between understanding special causes versus common causes." And she just wrote all this stuff down, typed it up. When he showed up the next week, she greeted him at the door and said, and she said, he said, This is Claire. And Claire said, he said, "What's that?" He says, "Well, I took notes last week." 0:21:54.2 BB: And he says, "I can do better." [chuckle] And so week by week by week. And as he interacted with the people around him, he whittled it down. And I'm guessing it put it into some, there's a technique for grouping things, you, where on post-it notes and you come up with four categories and these things all go over here. There's one of the elements of that, one of the 16 had to, or 18 or so, had to do with Dr. Taguchi's loss function. So that could have gone into the, maybe the variation piece, maybe the systems piece. But Joyce said, basically he was frustrated that the 14 Points were essentially kind of a cookbook where you saw things like, "cease dependence on inspection" interpreted as "get rid of the inspectors." And so he knew and I’d say, guided by his own production of a system mindset, he knew that what he was articulating and the feedback were inconsistent. 0:23:01.9 BB: And I've gotta keep trying. And she said, "His last five years on borrowed time as he was dying of cancer, was just trying to get this message out." So I first got exposed to it 19, spring of '90 when I saw him speaking in Connecticut. And I was all about Taguchi expecting him to, I didn't know what to expect, but I knew what I was seeing and hearing from Dr. Taguchi when I heard Dr. Deming talk about Red Beads. I don't know anything about that, common cause and special cause, I didn't know anything about that. And so for me, it was just a bunch of stuff, and I just tucked it away. But when the book came out in '93, then it really made sense. But I just had to see a lot of the prevailing style of management in the role I had as an improvement specialist, become, [chuckle] a firefighter or a fireman helping people out. 0:24:01.5 AS: I noticed as I've gotten older...
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Transforming How We Think: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 19)
04/09/2024
Transforming How We Think: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 19)
What happens if you transform HOW you think? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss the problem of thinking in one dimension at a time (as we were taught in school) and its impact on our ability to solve problems. BONUS: Book recommendations to broaden your understanding of Deming and more. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, well, episode 19, Transforming How we Think. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.9 Bill Bellows: And good evening, Andrew. 0:00:35.8 AS: Good evening. 0:00:36.2 BB: And, but just as a point of clarity, I view it as transforming how we think about our thinking. And that's what I've been focusing on for the, since the mid, the early '90s is not how we think, but what is our awareness of our thinking, and I think that ties in well with SoPK. So first in late breaking news, I am seeing with new eyes, Andrew. Literally, I've got new monofocal lenses in both eyes. The left eye three weeks ago, the right eye, a week ago. I was told about five years ago, eventually I'll have to have cataract surgery. And I spoke with a few friends who had it done, and they said, oh, it's easy. And what was so amazing was it was easier than they said. It was. 0:01:41.0 BB: But one neighbor who's had it done, and kind of a sad note is he claims, and I've not double checked this, he's a sharp guy. He claims 80% of the world's population would benefit from cataract surgery that they don't have access to and eventually go blind. And I don't know, I can believe, and he is in fact he's quoted me twice on that. But I am literally seeing with new eyes. The grays are now, shades of gray, are now shades of blue. When I look at the sky. My depth perception's a whole lot better. And so it ties in well with all this vision therapy stuff. So. 0:02:36.8 AS: Aren't you glad that those machines are high quality and the operations that they do are high quality? 0:02:41.6 BB: Oh, yeah. 0:02:42.4 AS: Just one little mistake on that one. And, that's... 0:02:46.2 BB: Well, and I'm signing the documents and there's a little bit of a flutter when I'm signing, in terms of the liability. And one friend's mom had a bad cataract procedure, so it doesn't always go. And I shared this with Kevin. Kevin's had the same, as likewise had the procedure done. And we shared the anxieties and then it worked out well. But yeah when I signed that form that there was in the event, and I thought, whoa, that'd be, anyway, it worked. All right, so where I want to pick up in episode 19 is where we left off with episode 18. And there near the end, I referenced from Dr. Deming. He says Dr. Deming says in chapter three of The New Economics, and he says, "we saw in the last chapter that we're living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. Most people imagine this style has always existed. It is a fixture. Actually," he said, "it's a modern invention, a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation..." 0:04:03.0 BB: You remember that word from last time? Okay. "Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge will be introduced in the next chapter. To be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." So I've got some bullet points and I want to get into the additional chapters and references from The New Economics on Dr. Deming's use of the term transformation. 'Cause I think what he's talking about... SoPK is a theory for transformation. So I think it's just not enough to talk about SoPK without understanding how does that fit in with what Dr. Deming's talking about? 0:04:49.0 AS: And for the listeners who come out of the blue here, SoPK stands for the System of Profound Knowledge. 0:04:56.1 BB: Yes. And system then gets into elements and the four elements that Dr. Deming proposed in The New Economics, going back to the late '80s when he started to put these thoughts together. We need to think about the elements of Profound Knowledge are looking at things as a system and understanding of variation and appreciation of psychology. That's the people aspect. And then theory of knowledge, which gets into what he would explain as how do we know that what we know is so. So the one thing I wanted to bring up on the System of Profound Knowledge is conversations with Dick Steele. And a neat way of looking at the System of Profound Knowledge is to say, well, what if we were to look at some data points, one element, we look at variation, and we see some data the output of a process. 0:06:00.0 BB: We see it go up and down. Well, if that's the only element we have, then we can't ask what caused that, 'cause that's the upstream system. Well, that's the system piece. We cannot talk about what does this variation do downstream? That's the system piece. We cannot talk about how might we change that. That might get into the theory of knowledge or would get into the aspect of the theory of knowledge and some theories as to how we can go about changing the average, changing the amount of variation. And then what that leads us immediately to is, where do those ideas come from but people. 0:06:44.7 BB: So it's kind of, I think it's interesting. So Dr. Deming says the elements, but it's as connected to each other. So what I explain to the students in my courses is, in the beginning, and I remember when I'm looking at this, I'm looking at the elements. I'm thinking, okay, that variation, that's the Control Chart stuff. Common causes, special causes, well, it also includes variation in people. Oh, now we're talking about the people stuff. And then, so I find it interesting is it is easy to look at them as separate, but then in time they meld together really well. So it's not to say that we shouldn't start out looking at things as the elements 'cause I think that's what our education system does. In fact, there's a great documentary I watched a few years ago with Gregory Bateson, who was born in 1900 or so, passed away in the 1980s. 0:07:52.6 BB: And when I ask people have you ever heard of Gregory Bateson? They say, no. I say, well, have you heard of Margaret Mead? Yeah. Well, they were married once upon a time. That was her, he was her first husband. And so Bateson gives a lecture in this documentary that his daughter produced. And he says, and he is at a podium. You don't see the audience. You just see he's at a lectern. And he says, you may think that there's such a thing as psychology, which is separate from anthropology, which is separate from English, which is separate from... And he goes on to imply that they really aren't separate. But then he says, "Well, think what you want." 0:08:38.1 AS: Think what you want. 0:08:39.7 AS: And I thought that's what the education system does. It has us believe that these things are all separate. And so that's what's kind of neat. Yeah. And, but again, I think when you go to school, you're learning about history, then you learn about math. But one thing I noticed later on, many years later was the history people never talked about, if they talked about the philosopher who was well known in mathematics, we didn't hear that mathematics piece, nor in the math class did we hear about this person as a historical figure. We just learned about... And so the education system kind of blocks all that out. And then years later when we're outta school, we can read and see how all this stuff comes together and it does come together. So the one big thing I wanna say is that, is I think it's neat to look at something with just one of those elements and then say, how far does it go before you need the others to really start to do something? 0:09:47.0 BB: And that gets into the interactions. And by interactions, I mean that when you're talking about variation and you're thinking about people are different, how they feel is different, how they respond is different. Now you're talking about the interaction between psychology, at least that's one explanation of the interaction between people amd psychology. I wanna share next an anecdote. I was at a UCLA presentation. A friend of mine turned me on to these maybe once a month kind of deal to be an invited speaker. 70 people in the room. And these were typically professors from other universities, authors, and there is one story I wanna share is a woman who had written a book on why really smart kids don't test well in secondary schools. And there were a good number of people there. 0:10:45.6 BB: And I'm listening to all this through my Deming lens, and she's talking about how kids do on the exams. That goes back to an earlier podcast. How did you do on the exam? And so I'm listening to all this and she's drawing conclusions that these students are really smart, but they freak out. And then how might they individually perform better? As if the greatest cause by them all by themselves. And so afterwards, I went up and stood in line and I had a question for her that I deliberately did not want to ask in front of the entire room. 'Cause I wanted her undivided attention, and I really wanted to see where she'd come with this. 'Cause perhaps it could lead to an ongoing discussion. So I went up and introduced myself and I think I said something like, are you familiar with W. Edwards Deming? And I believe she said she was. I think she was a psychologist by background. And then I moved into the... Essentially the essence of what if the grades are caused by the system and not the student taken separately, which she acknowledged. She's like, yeah, that makes sense. And I remember saying to her, "Well then how might that change your conclusions?" 0:12:11.2 BB: And so I throw that as an example of... Deming's saying you could be an expert in, you know, you just look at something. Actually, when that comes to mind is Deming is saying something like shouldn't a psychologist know something about variation? Well, shouldn't a psychologist know something about systems? And I didn't maintain a relationship with her, but it was just other things to do. Next I wanna share a story. And I wrote this up in an article. Then when this is posted... 0:12:49.0 BB: Typically these are posted on LinkedIn. Then I'll put a link into the article. And it's a classic story that Russ Ackoff was very fond of saying, and I heard the story told quite a few times before I started to think about it a little bit differently. So the story is he was working for General Electric back in the 1960s. He is in a very high level meeting. And in the room is this, the then CEO of GE, Reginald Jones and all of the senior VPs of General Electric are in the room. And Russ... I'm guessing he was doing, I know Russ did a lot of work with Anheuser-Busch, and he did a lot of work with GE. So Russ says he is in the room. There's maybe a dozen of these senior VPs of plastics of all the different GE divisions. 0:13:41.2 BB: And there's, Russ said there's one of them that was relatively new in a senior VP position, now over plastics or over lighting or whatever it was. And at one point he gets up. And one by one he raises a question with each of his peers. Something like, "Andrew, I noticed last year you installed a new software system." And you would say, "yeah, yep, yep." And I said, "I noticed you went with..." Let's say Apple, "you went with Apple Software", and you're like, "yeah," "that's what I thought. Yeah, you went with Apple." And then you might say something like, "why do you ask?" And he says, "well, the rest of us use Microsoft products. And it just seems kind of odd that you would go off and buy something different." 0:14:41.0 BB: And the point, and Russ didn't get into these details, the essence was every single one of them he'd figured out over the last year had made a decision, pretty high level decision that that senior VP felt was good for that division, but not good for General Electric. And Russ said what got his attention was, he wasn't sitting in that room hearing those conversations and he hears one decision then another, now he's got a whole list. So Russ says, he goes around the room and calls out every single one of his peers. So, and Russ shared this in one phone call, the Ongoing Discussions that I've mentioned. And people said, Russ, do you have that documented? And he is like, well, I don't think I have that any anymore. But somebody else asking. 0:15:35.3 BB: And then no sooner was the call over I had some friends call me up, said, "Bill, can you ask Russ if you have that, if he can get a copy of that? It's probably on his shelf. You're in his office". I said to one friend. I said, "so you'd be surprised that a member of Parliament does what's best for his district and not what's best for the United Kingdom. You think, you'd be surprised that a congressman from Los Angeles is gonna do what's best for Los Angeles, not what's best for the country. 0:16:07.2 BB: So you're telling me you're surprised by that?" Well, "no, no, no." I said, "well then why do you have to have the documentation?" So that's one aspect of it. So I heard that story again and again. And so finally it, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. So I said, "Russ, on that story, you being in the room with GE?" He says, yeah. He says, I know you don't have the documentation, I said, "but what happened after this guy called them all out? How did that go down?" He says, "one of the peers looks at this guy and says, so what's your point?" 0:16:42.3 BB: And the meeting moved on. And I wrote that for an article for the Lean Management Journal called, "You Laugh, It Happens". And when I look at that through the lens of the System of Profound Knowledge, is that surprising that that goes on? No, not at all. I wanna reference a couple books that I don't think I've mentioned at all. And I share these because for the Deming enthusiasts, these books have some brilliant examples of in different arenas that I think you absolutely love and you can use in your classes, use in your education, whatever. All fairly recent. The first one is "The Tyranny of Metrics" written by a historian. He is an American University historian, Jerry Mueller, and he has, I mean, Dr. Deming would just love this. Oh, bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Thank you. 0:17:48.4 AS: Yep. There it is. "The Tyranny of Metrics". 0:17:50.1 BB: Right? 0:17:50.7 AS: Yep. 0:17:51.3 BB: Right. Is that a great one? 0:17:53.2 AS: That's a great book. And you can follow him on Twitter also. He does do a lot of posts there. 0:18:00.4 BB: Now I reached out to him 'cause I relished the book 'cause the stories were just, you just can't make up all those stories. I mean the story that I shared with Russ is nothing in comparison to what Muller has in the book. I just don't believe that Muller has a solution that can... I don't think, I think the only thing missing from the book is if he had an understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge, he'd have a far better proposal as to what to do. 0:18:31.8 AS: Yeah. I read that and I felt similar that there was something that was missing there. It was, it was great stories as you say, but how do we connect that? How do we apply that? And what's the root cause here? And how do we, this, there was just... That was missing from it. And maybe that should be his next book. 0:18:53.9 BB: Oh, enormously. But it's worth reading regardless. 0:18:57.3 AS: Yeah. Agreed. 0:19:00.1 BB: But I was, I was, I wasn't surprised. I'd say this. He honestly tried to offer a proposal, but I just looked at it and said, Professor Muller, you would just love it. In fact, I believe I reached out to him. I don't know that I heard from him. Alright, that's one book. 0:19:17.1 AS: That reminds me of what Dr. Deming said. "How would they know?" 0:19:21.3 BB: Exactly. Exactly. 0:19:22.4 AS: So if he hadn't been exposed to the System of Profound Knowledge... 0:19:25.3 BB: Oh, no. No, no, no. 0:19:25.7 AS: Then it would be hard to pull it all together. Yep. Okay. 0:19:28.8 BB: Yeah. So the next book, which is somewhere behind you in your bookshelf, is "The End of Average" by Todd... 0:19:36.8 AS: Actually, I don't think I have that one. 0:19:39.4 BB: By Todd Rose, who's a research fellow at Harvard. It's a riveting book. Oh, Andrew, you would absolutely love it. Just, he goes back ages. I mean, hundreds of hundreds of years and looks at how lost we became... How lost civilizations were dealing with trying to make, deal with averages. And the book opens with the most riveting story. And I started reading this and immediately I started thinking, "Okay, okay, okay, okay." And I figured it out. So in the opening paragraph, he says, In one day in 1949, there were 17 military planes crashed. In one day. 17 military planes crashed in one day. And this was... It would have been after the Air Force separated from the Army Air Corps. And so I started thinking, okay, late '40s, planes are going faster. The US industry has German technology, and... Because the Germans had jet engines in the late '40s. So I'm thinking it's about speed. It's about something about speed, something about speed. And there's more and more planes flying. 0:21:06.6 BB: So they grounded the fleet. They had a major investigation, brought in this young guy as a data researcher. And he passed away a few years ago, I did some research with him recently. And what he found was the cockpits were designed, you're writing, Andrew, for the average size pilots. Everything in the cockpit was fixed for the average arm length, the average hand length, the average finger length, the average height, the... Everything about... All these measurements on the torso, the cockpit had, everything was fixed. And that's exactly what I thought was going on. As the planes are going faster and faster, reaction times need to be faster and faster. And they're not. So his research was, they went off and measured thousands of pilots and found out that there was no pilot met the average. 0:22:11.2 AS: Oh, God. 0:22:11.3 BB: And the conclusion was... And again, until the plane started flying faster, that was not an issue. And that's what I was thinking with all my training in problem solving, decision making, what is going on there? What is going on there? And that's what changes the... I mean, the speed was accelerating, but compounded by the fixed geometry. So the solution by the government Pentagon, to the contractors was, add flexibility to the cockpit, allow the seat to move up and down, and then the auto industry picked up on that evidently. And so this is one example of how a fixation on average and a number of other stories outside of engineering it's just fascinating. 0:23:01.4 AS: Let me just summarize. The End of Average by Todd Rose. And it was published in about 2016. It's got a 4.5 out of 5 review on Amazon with 1,000 ratings and has a very high for Goodreads review of about 4.1. So I'm definitely getting that one. I don't have it and I'm buying it. 0:23:22.1 BB: Yeah. And it's again, he, I believe in there he offers what we should do instead, which again, I think would be, benefit from an understanding of SoPK. And so, again, for the Deming enthusiast, there is stuff in those two books, which you'll just love. And the third book came out at, I think, 2020 during the pandemic, The Tyranny of...
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Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 3
04/02/2024
Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 3
In part 3 of this series, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about the final 5 lessons for data analysis in education. Dive into this discussion to learn more about why data analysis is essential and how to do it right. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 23 and we're talking about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:30.8 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, in this first episode of this four-part series, we talked about why goal setting is often an act of desperation. And if you remember early on, I sort of proposed those four conditions that organizations should understand about their systems prior to ever setting a goal. Those four were capability, variation, stability, and then by what method are you going to improve your system? And then in the last episode, I introduced the first five lessons of the 10 key lessons for data analysis. And remember, these lessons were set up to avoid what I call these arbitrary and capricious education goals, which are basically unreasonable goals without consideration of those four things, the system capability, variation, and stability, and then not having a method. So, it might be helpful just to recap those first five lessons. I'll just list them out and folks that want to hear the details can listen to the last episode. 0:01:31.8 JD: But lesson one was data have no meaning apart from their context. So, we've got to contextualize the data. Lesson two was we don't manage or control the data. The data is the voice of the process. So, it's sort of, you know, the data over time shows us what's happening and we don't really have control over that data. We do have control under that underlying process. Lesson three was plot the dots for any data that occurs in time order. So, take it out of a two-point comparison or take it out of a spreadsheet and put it on a line chart that shows the data over time. Lesson four was two or three data points are not a trend. So again, get beyond the typical two-point limited comparison this month and last month, this year and last year, this same month, last year, those types of things, this week, last week. 0:02:25.6 JD: And then lesson five was, show enough data in your baseline to illustrate the previous level of variation. So, we want to get a sense of how the data is changing over time and we need a baseline amount of data, whether that's 12 points, 15 points, 20 points, there's sort of different takes on that. But somewhere in that 12-to-20-point range is really the amount of data we want to have in our baseline. So, we understand how it's moving up and down over time sort of naturally. Sort of at the outset of those two episodes, we also talked about centering the process behavior charts, like the ones we viewed in many of our episodes. And we put those in the center because it's a great tool for looking at data over time, just like we've been talking about. 0:03:11.4 JD: And I think when we use this methodology, and when you start to fully grasp the methodology, you start to be able to understand messages that are actually contained in the data. You can differentiate between those actual special events, those special causes, and just those everyday up and downs, what we've called common causes. And in so doing, we can understand the difference between reacting to noise and understanding actual signals of significance in that data. And so, I think that's a sort of a good primer to then get into lessons six through 10. 0:03:51.2 AS: Can't wait. 0:03:53.3 JD: Cool. We'll jump in then. 0:03:56.1 AS: Yeah. I'm just thinking about my goal setting and how much this helps me think about how to improve my goal setting. And I think one of the biggest ones that's missing that we talked about before is by what method. And many people think that they're setting strategy, when in fact, they're just setting stretch targets with nothing under it. And they achieve it by luck or are baffled why they don't achieve it. And then they lash out at their employees. 0:04:31.4 JD: Yeah, there was really... I mean, that goes back to one of those four conditions of setting goal capability. You have to understand how capable your system is before you can set, it's fine to set a stretch goal, but it has to be within the bounds of the system. Otherwise, it's just maybe not an uncertainty, but a mathematical improbability. That's not good. Like you're saying, it's not a good way to operate if you're a worker in that system. So, lesson six then, to continue the lessons. 0:05:06.8 JD: So, lesson six is "the goal of data analysis in schools is not just to look at past results, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to look forward and predict what is likely to occur in the future," right? So that's why centering the process behavior charts is so important, because they allow you to interpret data that takes variation into account, allows you to classify the data into the routine or common cause variation or the exceptional, that's the special cause variation, and allows us to turn our focus to that underlying or the behavior of the underlying system that produced the results. And it's this focus on the system and its processes that's then the basis for working towards continual improvement. 0:06:00.6 AS: And I was just thinking about number six, the goal is to predict what is likely to occur in the future. And I was just thinking, and what's likely to occur in the future is exactly what's happening now, or the trend that's happening, unless we change something in the system, I guess. 0:06:16.4 JD: Yeah. And that's why just setting the stretch goal is often disconnected from any type of reality, because we have this idea that somehow something magical is going to happen in the future that didn't happen in the past. And nothing magical is going to happen unless we are intentional about doing something differently to bring about that change. 0:06:39.5 AS: And that's a great lesson for the listeners and the viewers. It's like, have you been just setting stretch targets and pushing people to achieve these stretch targets? And not really understanding that your role is to understand that you're going to get the same result unless you start to look at how do we improve the method, the system, that type of thing. 0:07:05.0 JD: Yeah. And usually when you have those stretch goals, you've looked at what happened last year, and then you base the stretch goal on last year. But perhaps, you're seeing, for the last three or four years, the data has been steadily decreasing, right? And you can't realize that if you haven't charted that over the last three or four years, hopefully beyond that. So, you have no idea or it could have been trending positively, and you may under shoot your stretch goal because you missed a trend that was already in motion because of something that happened in the past. 0:07:44.8 AS: You made a chart for me, a run chart on my intake for my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp. And we've been working on our marketing, and I presented it to the team and we talked about that's the capability of our system based upon for me to say, I want 500 students when we've been only getting 50 is just ridiculous. And that helped us all to see that if we are going to go to the next level of where we want to be, we've got to change what we're doing, the method that we're getting there, the system that we're running and what we're operating to get there or else we're going to continue to get this output. And so if the goal is to predict what is likely to occur in the future, if we don't make any changes, it's probably going to continue to be like it is in that control chart. 0:08:42.8 JD: Yeah. And that example is, in a nutshell, the System of Profound Knowledge in action in an organization where you're understanding variation in something that's important to you, enrollment in your course. You're doing that analysis with the team. So, there's the psychological component and you're saying, well, what's our theory of knowledge? So, what's our theory for how we're going to bring about some type of improvement? And so, now you're going to run probably something like a PDSA. And so now you have all those lenses of the System of Profound Knowledge that you're bringing together to work on that problem. And that's all it is really in a nutshell. 0:09:22.2 AS: Yeah. And the solution's not necessarily right there. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not. And we've got to iterate. Okay. Should we be doing marketing in-house or should we be doing it out using an outsourced service? What if we improve and increase the volume of our marketing? What effect would that have? What if we decrease the... What if we change to this method or that method? Those are all things that we are in the process of testing. I think the hardest thing in business, in my opinion, with this is to test one thing at a time. 0:09:58.5 JD: Yeah. 0:09:58.7 AS: I just, we I want to test everything. 0:10:00.4 JD: Yeah. Yeah. I read in the Toyota Kata that I think we've talked about before here, which talks about Toyota's improvement process. I read this in the book, I don't know if this is totally always true, but basically they focus on single factor experiments for that reason, even in a place as complex and as full of engineers as Toyota, they largely focus on single factor experiments. They can actually tell what it is that brought about the change. I mean, I'm sure they do other more complicated things. They would have to write a design of experiments and those types of things, but by and large, their improvement process, the Toyota Kata, is focused on single factor experiments for that reason. 0:10:48.1 AS: And what's that movie, the sniper movie where they say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast or something like that, like slow down to speed up. I want to go fast and do all of these tests, but the fact is I'm not learning as much from that. And by slowing down and doing single factor experiment to try to think, how do we influence the future is fascinating. 0:11:20.9 JD: Yeah, absolutely. 0:11:22.4 AS: All right. What about seven? 0:11:23.2 JD: Lesson seven. So "the improvement approach depends on the stability of the system under study," and there's really two parts to this. But what approach am I going to take if the system is producing predictable results and it's performing pretty consistently, it's stable, there's only common cause variation. And then what happens if you have an unpredictable system? So two different approaches, depending on what type of system you're looking at in terms of stability. So you know the one thing to recognize in thinking about something like single factor experiments, it's a waste of time to explain noise or explain common cause variation in this stable system, because there's no simple single root cause for that type of variation. There's thousands or tens of thousands of variables that are impacting almost any metric. And you can't really isolate that down to a single cause. 0:12:17.5 JD: So instead we don't, we don't try to do that in a common cause system that needs improvement. Instead, if the results are unsatisfactory, what we do is work on improvements and changes to the system, right? We don't try to identify a single factor that's the problem. So what we do then is we work to improve a common cause processor system by working on the design of that actual system including inputs, throughputs that are a part of that. And to your point, you sort of have to, based on your content knowledge of that area, or maybe you have to bring in a subject matter expert and you sort of start to think about what's going to make the biggest difference. And then you start testing those things one at a time, basically. That's sort of the approach. And then if you're working in an unpredictable system and that unpredictable system is unpredictable because it has special causes in your data, then it's really a waste of time to try to improve that particular system until it's stable again. And so the way you do that is at that point, there is something so different about the special cause data that you try to identify that single cause or two of those data points. And then when you've identified, you study it, and then you try to remove that specific special cause. And if you've identified the right thing, what happens then is it becomes a stable system at that point, right? 0:13:51.9 AS: I was thinking that it's no sense in trying to race your boat if you've got a hole in it. You got to fix the special cause, the hole, and then focus on, okay, how do we improve the speed of this boat? 0:14:06.5 JD: And the key is recognizing the difference between these two roadmaps towards improvement. And I think in education for sure, there's a lot of confusion, a lot of wasted effort, because there's really no knowledge of this approach to data analysis. And so people do their own things. There's a mismatch between the type of variation that's present and the type of improvement effort that's trying to be undertaken. I think the most typical thing is there's a common cause system, and people think they can identify a single thing to improve. And then they spend a lot of time and money on that thing. And then it doesn't get better over time because it was the wrong approach in the first place. 0:14:55.9 AS: Number eight. 0:14:57.6 JD: Number eight. So, number eight is, "more timely data is better for improvement purposes." So we've talked about state testing data a lot. It's only available once per year. Results often come after students have gone on summer vacation. So, it's not super helpful. So, we really want more frequent data so that we can understand if some type of intervention that we're putting in place has an effect. I think what the most important thing is, the frequency of the data collection needs to be in sync with the improvement context. So, it's not always that you need daily data or weekly data or monthly data, or quarterly data, whatever it is. It's just it has to be in sync with the type of improvement context you're trying to bring about. And no matter what that frequency of collection, the other big thing to keep in mind is don't overreact to any single data point, which is, again, I see that over and over again in my work. I think ultimately the data allows us to understand the variation and the trends within our system, whether that system is stable or unstable, and then what type of improvement effort would be most effective. And, again, in my experience, just those simple things are almost never happening in schools. Probably in most sectors. 0:16:25.9 AS: Can you explain a little bit more about in sync with the improvement process? Like, maybe you have an example of that so people can understand. 0:16:34.2 JD: Well, yeah. So, you mean the frequency of data collection? 0:16:39.0 AS: Yeah. And you're saying, yeah, this idea of like, what would be out of sync? 0:16:44.7 JD: Well, one, you need to... A lot of times what happens is there might be a system in place for collecting some type of data. Let's say, like, attendance. They report attendance, student attendance on the annual school report card. So, you get that attendance rate, but that's like the state test scores. Like, it's not that helpful to get that on the report card after the year has concluded. But the data is actually available to us in our student information system. And so, we could actually pull that in a different frequency and chart it ourselves and not wait on the state testing date or the state attendance report card has attendance... 0:17:27.5 AS: Because attendance is happening on a daily basis. 0:17:31.0 JD: Happening on a daily basis. So, if we wanted to, daily would be pretty frequent, but if we did collect the data daily, we certainly can do that. We could see, that could help us see patterns in data on certain days of the week. That could be something that goes into our theory for why our attendance is lower than we'd want it to. You could do it weekly if the daily collection is too onerous on whoever's being tasked with doing that. I think weekly data pretty quickly, would take you 12 weeks. But in 12 weeks, you have a pretty good baseline of what attendance is looking like across this particular school year. So I think when you're talking about improvement efforts, I think something daily, something weekly, I think that's the target so that you can actually try some interventions along the way. And... 0:18:29.3 AS: And get feedback. 0:18:31.1 JD: And get feedback. Yeah, yeah. And you could also peg it to something that's further out. And you could see over time if those interventions that are impacting more short-term data collection are actually impacting stuff on the longer term as well. 0:18:49.1 AS: And I guess it depends also on what is the priority of this. Let's say that attendance is not a big issue at your particular school. Therefore, we look at it on a monthly basis and we look to see if something's significance happening. But otherwise, we've got to focus over on another idea. And if, if, if attendance becomes an issue, we may go back to daily and say, is it a particular day of the week? Or is it something, what can we learn from that data? 0:19:20.0 JD: Yep, that's exactly right. And then the next step would be in lesson nine, you then, and this is why the charts are so important, then you can clearly label the start date for an intervention directly on the chart. So, what you want to do is, once you've chosen an intervention or a change idea, you clearly mark that in your process behavior chart. I just use a dashed vertical line on the date the intervention is started and also put a simple label that captures the essence of that intervention. So, that's right on the chart. So, I can remember what I tried or started on that particular day. And then that allows the team to easily see, because you're going to continue adding your data points, the stuff that comes after the dotted line, it becomes pretty apparent based on the trends you're seeing in the data, if that intervention is then working, right? 0:20:21.2 JD: If it's attendance, I may try, I do a weekly call to parents to tell them what their individual child's attendance rate is. And then we can see once we started making those weekly calls over the next few weeks, does that seem to be having an impact on attendance rates? And then I can actually see too, we've talked about the patterns in the data, there's certain patterns I'm looking for to see if there's a significant enough change in that pattern to say, yeah, this is a signal that this thing is actually working. So, it's not just because it increased, that attendance rate could go up, but that in and of itself isn't enough. I want to see a signal. And by signal, I mean a specific pattern in the data, a point outside the limits. 0:21:17.3 JD: I want to see eight points in a row in the case of attendance above the central line or I want to see three out of four that are closer to a limit, the upper limit, than they are to that central line. And again, we've talked about this before, those patterns are so mathematically improbable that I can be pretty reasonably assured if you see them that an actual change has occurred in my data. And because I've drawn this dotted line, I...
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Organizations are Holograms: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 18)
03/26/2024
Organizations are Holograms: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 18)
In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss seeing organizations as holograms—3D images. Holograms show all parts from different views at once. Learn how using the lens of the System of Profound Knowledge lets you see the problems and opportunities for transformation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas, to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, which we call Episode 18, is, Wouldn't It Be Nice? Bill take it away. 0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: Wouldn't it be nice if [chuckle] we were older and we wouldn't have to wait so long? Okay. So Episode 18, greetings, Andrew. So as I mentioned in the past, I like to go back and listen to the past previous podcasts and as well as hear from people and their feedback on them. And I have a few points of clarity on the last one, and then we'll get into today's feature. So the last one which we refer to as Diffusion From a Point Source. And I talked about being in a bathtub, you start off at room temperature water and, or you fill the bath and you went and got distracted and came back, and now it's not warm enough, so you crank up, let's add some more water, and you feel that heat coming towards you from the... And then the diffusion equation is about how that, all the water ends up about the same temperature, and then you turn off the water and you drop back to room temperature. 0:01:41.1 BB: But another aspect of the point source that I wanted to clarify is, is if you have in the bathtub some, a source of energy, a heat source, which is not, you know, is different than the source of the water coming out of the faucet. But imagine you've got a little generator in there pumping out heat, then the bathtub, depending on the temperature of that, the amount of energy being released, then the bathtub is going to get warmer, warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer, and what keeps it going back to room temperature is how much energy is coming out of that. And that's what I was referring to as what it takes to maintain a transformation either individually within an organization, is something which continues to churn. Else you end up by the world we're in, you're watching the news, you're hearing about some accident and people are looking for the singular source, or they're looking at two points in a row, a downturn or upturn and looking at two data points to draw a conclusion. So there's all these everyday reminders of how, of the prevailing system of management at work in terms of how people are treated, how we manage systems. And our challenge is, how do you fight that? 0:03:14.7 BB: And so even within your organization, if you're trying to get people excited by Deming's works, what you have to appreciate is when they go home, the rest of their lives, they're being immersed in a culture of blame of individuals, not the system, and that's part of what we have to deal with. So I just want to mention that what I meant by that source term is, what does it take individually that we can do within our organizations to try to keep things going and not get sucked back down, knowing you've got all this normality around us that we're trying to move beyond. So the next thing I want to talk about is transformation. [chuckle] And then as that leads into, Wouldn't It Be Nice. And I was looking at The New Economics, my Kindle version, and found out that there were 73 references to transform in The New Economics, 73. And the first one is in the forward written by our good friend Kevin Cahill, and in there Kevin references, this is in the 3rd edition of The New Economics, which is the white cover if you have it in print. And it came out 2018. In there, Kevin references Out of the Crisis. And Kevin says, "The aim of the book," again, Out of the Crisis, "was clearly stated in the preface." 0:04:48.1 BB: This from Dr. Deming now, "The aim of this book is transformation of the style of American management, transformation of American style of management is not a job of reconstruction nor is it revision, it requires a whole new structure from foundation upward. The aim of this book is to supply the direction." Okay? Now back to Kevin, then Kevin says, "Out of the Crisis supplies direction for any and all types of organizations, while many people focused on its application in manufacturing, it was a call to action for every organization from education, to healthcare, to non-profits and startups of all sizes." Okay. So now we get to the preface for The New Economics. And so this is from Dr. Deming, what I just shared with you is Kevin quoting his grandfather. So now going back to 1993, the 1st edition, Dr. Deming said, "The route to transformation is what I call Profound Knowledge. The System of Profound Knowledge is composed of four parts all related to each other, appreciation for system, knowledge about variation, theory of knowledge, psychology. The aim of this book is to start the reader on the road to knowledge and to create a yearning for more knowledge." He adds to that, 0:06:07.3 BB: "What we need is cooperation and transformation... " there’s that transformation word again. "To a new style of management, the route to transformation is what I call Profound Knowledge. The System of Profound Knowledge is composed of four parts all related to each other." And I'll just pause here and I, just thinking of a friend a couple years ago is inviting me to go to his company and do an in-house program. And he wanted to know how I would start the program, would I open up with the System of Profound Knowledge? I said, "No." I said I would build up to that, and he says, "Well, why not just start with it?" I said, "Because it's a solution to a problem you don't know you have." I said, "I would rather first give a sense of the nature..." now, and he said, "Well, how are we going to start?" And I said, "I'm going to start with the Trip Report, having people compare the ME versus the WE or the All Straw versus the Last Straw. And then use Profound Knowledge as a means by which to understand how you go from one to the other." I said, "But without that understanding of the problem we face... " again, it's an elegant... [chuckle] Every time, the System of Profound Knowledge is an elegant solution to a problem you don't know you have. So I look at it as, let's first create a sense of the problem/opportunity. Okay. 0:07:38.0 BB: So we're going to come back to transformation, but now I want to go back to the title, Wouldn't It Be Nice. And what I'll do is, when this is posted on the institute webpage, I'll put a link to an article I wrote in September, 2015 for the Lean Management Journal, entitled, Wouldn't It be nice. And that article includes in the opening, it says, "My appreciation of Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys has grown significantly in the past month," okay, and this was written in 2015, "after viewing the Brian Wilson Biopic “Love and Mercy," which for you, Andrew, and everyone listening, it's a fascinating, fascinating film. And it got me turned on to Brian Wilson and all these things about the Beach Boys I really underestimated. All right, so then I wrote, "Through this blast from my past, I was reminded of another Beach Boys classic, Wouldn't It Be Nice. And the yearning "wouldn't it be nice if we were older then we wouldn't have to wait so long." And then I closed the opening with, "And reflecting on this adolescent wishfulness, I propose a wishfulness that organizations, public and private and even governments, improve their understanding of variation in how it impacts the systems they design, they produce and they operate." 0:09:00.7 BB: And so when I was going back and looking at that, 'cause I was thinking about transformation in this article, and I thought the transformation I talked about last time was the transformation... We talked about the transformation going from an observer, me as a professor used a student, I'm an observer of your learning versus a participant, and that's just a systems perspective. What Dr. Deming is talking about is not just how we look at systems, but the transformation involves how we look at variation. Do we move past two data points and look at variation in the context of common causes and special causes? A transformation of how we engage people, do we engage them with carrots and sticks? Do we understand when we blame them as the willing workers, what that creates in our organizations? And then the last element of Profound Knowledge, theory of knowledge. How do we know that what we know is so? And so I was just looking back at that article, and the article was written about, what if we had a better understanding of variation as one element of a transformation? And what I wanted to highlight today is talk more about transformation, but also look at transformation from not just one aspect of the System of Profound Knowledge, all of them. 0:10:32.2 BB: And it may well be, we're going to need another episode to go through this. But the next topic I want to do as we go down this path. Some time ago somebody made reference to a hologram, and I have seen holographic pictures, and so I went back and I was trying to think, why did that strike me? What about this hologram got my attention? And I started to remind myself of it. And Kevin and I were in Idaho a few months ago meeting with an audience. And I was again reminded by this hologram thing, because people were saying, "How come people in operations are so antiquated?" And I said, "Well, it's not just operations, it's more than that." So first, holograms, so what is a hologram? So I found a dictionary definition. "It's a three-dimensional image produced by a pattern of interference produced by a split coherent beam of radiation, such as a laser." That's for the physicists in the room. 0:11:38.5 AS: I'm not sure if that helped me but... 0:11:40.6 BB: [laughter] But I also found on a website, the Institute for the Advancement of Service, and the website is, www.showanotherway.org. And there I found something I think it's a little bit easier to digest. And the text says, if you turn a photograph over and you see a blank white surface," so far so good. "A photograph shows the image only on the front, thus only from one side, a hologram is a three-dimensional image created by interacting light sources, it shows the same image from all angles regardless of how it's being viewed. When a hologram is divided into pieces, the text says, each part still contains the entire image within it, although each new image is from a slightly different perspective." And then, again, from this website, and this leads us into the transformation piece, is "how does a concept of a hologram apply to organizational structures?" And I thought, "Okay. Now we're getting some place." "Because when people come together, share a vision for an organization, each person has his or her own unique perspective of the whole." I said, "Okay." "Each shares responsibility for the whole, not just his or her piece, but the component pieces aren't identical, each represents the whole picture from a different point of view.” 0:13:08.0 BB: “When we add up the pieces, the image of the whole does not change fundamentally, but rather the image becomes more intense. When more people share the common vision, the vision may not change fundamentally, but it becomes more alive, more real in a sense of the mental reality that people can truly imagine achieving." And to me, what I say is, the role of the ME/WE Trip Report is in part to create a common mental model, a common 3D view of an organization. But depending on who you're talking with in an organization, they see only one aspect of it, they see what it means in finance, they see what it means in HR, they see what it means in, from engineering. And the beauty of, what I have found is, is when you look at organizations from Dr. Deming's perspective, we're able to appreciate that these views are different, but it is the same thing we're looking at. So the next thing I want to get into of the work we're doing at Rocketdyne, working harder in a ME organization at a non-Deming company, working harder is the mantra, working smarter, as you and I have talked about, is what does that mean? Think about things from a Deming perspective. What does that mean? So what you get is a lot of working harder. And in which case, you have KPIs and we're working harder to achieve these KPIs. 0:14:46.9 BB: Well, I was very fortunate, Rocketdyne in the mid '90s, the Air Force came up with a brand new program for a next generation rocket with a set of KPIs that a few of us believed were impossible. Now what's the relevance of that? As long as, my theory is, as long as a non-Deming organization can achieve the KPI in how it currently operates, then just get out of the way. And they will work harder, a lot of brute force will be done to meet those KPIs. And Dr. Deming would remind us, anyone can accomplish anything if they don't count the cost. So, I mean, it will destroy people's lives and marriages and all that, but as long as those KPIs are met, just get out of the way. Well, what I loved about the Air Force requirement, was I was convinced that it couldn't be met. And part of the challenge was to convince executives at Rocketdyne that we can't get there from here. And that then, what I thought was, "This is our moment." We, so again, if you're in an organization and everything can be done, how the organization currently operates, then I say try to find something that can't be done with the current system. It can't be done in the schedule, it can't be done at the cost, but if it can be done by the current system, then that's not your opening. But for us, it was the opening. So the Air Force in the mid '90s had a couple billion dollars to develop a next generation series of rockets. 0:16:30.7 BB: And so we're, nowadays we think of SpaceX launching rockets. Well, this is the mid '90s, which is 20 years or so before SpaceX. And so the requirement was, that everything in the entire rocket, everything in the entire rocket, that's a lot of parts including the engine. Everything had to meet requirements, everything had to be a White Bead, no Red Beads. In the past, if there were Red Beads, which the Air Force accepted, and we know you get Red Beads, we know how you get Red Beads. And if they have Red Beads, then you would get paid to repair them, extra. And a friend of mine who was the brainchild of the effort within the Air Force to eliminate the purchase of Red Beads, he said, "The entire rocket will not have Red Beads." And when I heard of that I thought, "ME organizations don't know how to do that." They just, all they know how to do is create Red Beads. And the strategy we had already developed was, if we look at the variation in the White Beads, as you and I have talked about, then that's a great means to prevent White Beads, Red Beads in the first place, let alone improve integration. So we started getting senior management on board with things we have done to explain to them, here's a strategy, as we heard this flow down from the Air Force. 0:18:04.6 BB: Well, the existing system, how bad it was, was... And I learned this from the brain, this Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force who pushed this incredible KPI, which was, everything must meet requirements. And it translated to something called "No Material Review Board, where a material review board in the industry, in the aerospace industry, is a situation where you've got a Red Bead that may be a very expensive Red Bead that the contractor wants to sell the Air Force, but it doesn't meet requirements. And then the contractor gets together with the Air Force and they schmooze over it, and what Lieutenant Colonel Ciscel explained is, you've got the contractor that really wants to sell that, even though something is not quite right. And what makes it work for the Air Force is when the contractor says, "Well, the bad thing about not using this is, it's going to take a couple of months to have a new one." And that time delay starts to bug the Air Force. Next thing you know that white, that Red Bead starts to look pretty good. But worse than that, what Dave explained is, he said, it's like going to the car dealership and finding that beautiful car you want. Then I, the sales person, tell you, "Andrew, okay, we're going to have it for you tomorrow, all ready to go." 0:19:36.0 BB: And then you come back the next day and I say... And you say, "Well, where's my new car?" And I say, "Well, Andrew, I told you we were going to wash it and wax it. Yeah, well, when we put it through the car wash we scratched it." And you're like, "You scratched it." And I say, "Well, yeah but we buffed out that and we're only going to charge you a little bit more for that. We're going to charge you for this and this and this." And they said, "That's what the Air Force does." And so what he was pushing for in the mid '90s was to get rid of all of that inspired by, you're ready Andrew? Inspired by his undergraduate education that the Air Force paid for when he was an officer, and he learned about Dr. Deming's work on control charts. And so when I heard that I thought, "We've got a requirement that can't be met." This is the, this is our means, our opening for initiating a transformation. 'Cause working harder, convincing the executives was, we can't get there from here. But boy, if you can get there from here, get out of the way. So now I'm going to go back to chapter two of The New Economics. Dr. Deming says, "Somehow the theory for transformation that's been mostly applied in the shop floor, everyone knows about statistical control of quality, this is important, but the shop floor is only a small part of the total. Anyone could be a 100% successful." 0:20:54.1 BB: Well, what I want to share there in terms of the situation we were dealing with in the mid '90s, if we started to talk to the executives about statistical control of quality, control charts, common causes and special causes. Well, as soon as we started to talk about the process being "in control," to the majority of our executives that translated to "everything met requirements." And so our starting point was just for that, just what does "in control" mean? And it was just so amazing how that got translated to meets requirements. And we're like, "No, no, no. We need to have the process in control, understand common cause variation and control charts and, let alone being on target." But that was our starting point, was just trying to get these ideas across on the shop floor. And chapter three... I've got a couple of things from each chapter, at least from some of the opening chapters. We'll cover the rest later. Dr. Deming says in chapter three, "We saw in the last chapter that we are living under the tyranny of the revealing style of management. Most people imagine that this style has always existed, it is a fixture. Actually, it is a modern invention, a trap that has led us into decline. Transformation is required. Education and government, along with industry, are also in need of transformation. The System of Profound Knowledge to be introduced in the next chapter is a theory for transformation." 0:22:25.5 BB: And this is what we're trying to do with this NO MRB initiative, we are just trying to get executives to realize that if we keep doing what we're doing, we're not going to be able to achieve this goal. What I'll also say is, there was such a commercial demand for space at that time, that the Air Force didn't have to...
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Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 2
03/19/2024
Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 2
Do you struggle to meet your goals or targets? Find out how you can change your thinking about goals and your process for setting them so you can keep moving forward. In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss the first five of John's 10 Key Lessons for Data Analysis. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode two of four in a mini-series on why goal setting is often an act of desperation. John, take it away. 0:00:32.3 John Dues: Hey, Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, in that last episode, that first episode in this mini-series, we talked about why goal setting is often an act of desperation and I basically proposed these four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. So it's not the goals in and of themselves that are bad, but it's with this important understanding that's often lacking. So those four things that organizations should understand, one, what's the capability of a system under study? So that's the first thing, how capable is the system or the process? The second thing is what's the variation within that system or process under study? So that's the second thing we talked about last time. The third thing is understanding if that system or process is stable. And then the fourth thing was, if we know all of those things, by what method are we going to approach improvement after we set the goal, basically? So you gotta have those four things, understanding the capability of the system, the variation of the system, the stability of the system, and then by what method, prior to setting a goal. And so I think I've mentioned this before, but absent of an understanding of those conditions, what I see is goals that are, what I call it, arbitrary and capricious. 0:01:48.8 JD: That's a legal characterization. You look that up in the law dictionary. And it basically says that an "arbitrary and capricious law is willful and unreasonable action without consideration or in disregard of facts or law." So I'm just now taking that same characterization from a legal world and applying it to educational organizations and accountability systems, and I just switched it to "a willful and unreasonable goal without consideration or in disregard of system capability, variability, and/or stability." And we see these all over the place for education organizations, for schools, school districts, teachers, that type of thing. 0:02:31.6 JD: And so what I tried to do in the book and tried to do here in my work in Columbus is develop some sort of countermeasures to that type of goal setting and develop the 10 key lessons for data analysis. An antidote to the arbitrary and capricious goals seen throughout our sector. And this process behavior chart tool, looking at data in that format is central to these lessons. So what I thought we would do in this episode and the next is outline those 10 key lessons. So five today and then do another five in the next episode. And in the fourth episode of the series, what we would do is then apply those examples to a real life improvement project from one of our schools. It's helpful, I think too, to sort of, to understand the origin of the key lessons. So there's the lessons that I'll outline are really derived from three primary sources. 0:03:36.0 JD: So the first two come from Dr. Donald Wheeler, who I've mentioned on here before, a lot of Deming folks will, of course, have heard of Dr. Wheeler, who's a statistician in Tennessee, a colleague of Dr. Deming when Dr. Deming was alive and then has carried on that work to this day. The two books, two really great books that he wrote, one is called Understanding Variation, a thin little book, a good primer, a good place to start. And then he's got a thicker textbook called Making Sense of Data, where you get in really into the technical side of using process behavior charts. So I'd highly recommend those. And then the third resource is a book from a gentleman, an engineer named Mark Graban called Measures of Success. And I really like his book because he has applied it, the process behavior chart methodology, to his work and he's really done it in a very contemporary way. So he's got some really nice color-coded charts in the Measures of Success book and I think they're really easy to understand with modern examples, like traffic on my website, for example, in a process behavior chart, really easy to understand modern example. But all three of the books, all three of the resources are built on the foundation of Dr. Deming's work. They're, you know, Graban and Wheeler are fairly similar and I think Graban would say he's a student of Wheeler. 0:05:00.4 JD: He learned of this mindset, this approach to data analysis by finding a Donald Wheeler book on his own dad's bookshelf when he was in college and starting down that path as a young engineer to study this stuff. And basically what I've done is take the information from those three resources and make some modifications so they can be understood by educators, basically. I think it's also worth noting again that process behavior chart methodology is right in the center of this, really for three reasons. One, when you plot your data that way, you can start to understand messages in your data, I think that's really important. Second, you can then start to differentiate between special and common causes, special and common causes, translate that into regular language. I can translate between something that I should pay attention to and something that's not significant basically in my data. And then in so doing, I know the difference between when I'm reacting to noise versus when I'm reacting to signals in my data, so I think that's really important. So the process behavior chart is at the center of all this. So we'll go through five of these lessons, one by one, I'll outline the lesson and then give a little context for why I think that particular lesson is important. 0:06:25.4 AS: That sounds like a plan. So capability, variation, stability and method. You've talked about Donald Wheeler, excellent book on Understanding Variation, that's the one I've seen. And of course, Mark Graban's book, Measures of Success, very well rated on Amazon and a podcaster himself, too. 0:06:49.6 JD: Yeah. And if I was a person studying this and wanting to get into process behavior charts and really knowing how to look at data the right way, I would read Understanding Variation first because it's a good primer, but it's fairly easy to understand. And then I would read Measures of Success 'cause it's got those practical applications now that I have a little bit of a baseline, and then if I wanna go deep into the technical stuff, the Making Sense of Data, that's the textbook that drives everything home. Yeah. So we'll dive into the lesson then. 0:07:19.5 AS: Let's do it. 0:07:20.0 JD: Yeah. Okay. So the first lesson, and I've talked about this in various episodes before, but lesson one, the very first lesson is, "data have no meaning apart from their context." So this seems commonsensical, but I see this all the time where these things aren't taken care of. And what I'm talking about is answering some basic questions. So for anyone looking at my data, they should be able to answer some basic questions, very simply, anybody that looks at my data. First thing is who collected the data? That should be apparent. How were the data collected? When were the data collected? Where were the data collected? And then what do these values represent? So oftentimes I see data either in a chart or in some type of visualization and almost none of those things are known from looking at the data, all important questions. 0:08:18.6 JD: The second question would be, well, that first set goes together. The second question is what's the operational definition of the concept being measured? So we have to be on the same page about what it is exactly being measured in this data that I've collected. I also wanna know how were the values of any computed data derived from the raw inputs? That's important. And then the last thing is, have there been any changes made over time that impact the data set? For example, perhaps the operational definition has changed over time for some reason. Maybe there's been a change in formula being used to compute the data. 0:09:05.4 JD: So an example would be, from my world, high school graduation rates. You know, 20 years ago there was one definition of how you calculated a high school graduation rate, now there's a different definition. So when you compare those two sets of data, you've gotta be careful because you're actually, you're actually working from different definitions and I think that happens all the time. More recently here in Ohio, what it means to be proficient on a state test, that definition changed about 10 years ago. And so if you look at test results from 2024 and try to compare them to 2014, you're really comparing apples and oranges 'cause there's two different definitions of proficiency, but no one remembers those things a decade later. So you have... 0:09:52.3 AS: And then a chart will be presented where the different methodologies are shown as one line that says... 0:10:00.8 JD: Yes. 0:10:00.8 AS: That no one's differentiated the fact that at this point it changed. 0:10:04.6 JD: Yeah, at this point it changed. So first lesson, data have no meaning apart from their context. Second lesson is we don't manage or control the data, the data is the voice of the process. What we control is the system and the processes from which the data come. There's a difference there. Right? So I think this is one of the key conceptions of that system's view, that system's thinking in an organization. When we wanna make improvements in our schools, we need a few things in place. We need the people working in the system. So that would be the students for us, they're working in the system, people that have the authority to work on the system, so that'd be teachers if we're talking about an individual classroom, at the school building level, maybe we're talking about the principal. And those two things are, at least the teacher principal thing is usually in place, the students being a part of improvement projects, definitely less so, but maybe there are places where that's happening. But the third thing is someone with an understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge, I'd say that's almost always lacking in the education sector, at least. And I think the reason the System of Profound Knowledge becomes important, 'cause that's really the theoretical foundation for all the things that we're talking about when we're looking at data in this way. 0:11:38.8 JD: If you lack that conception, then it's hard to bring about any improvement, because you don't understand how to look at that data, how to interpret that data, you don't understand how to run a plan-do-study-act cycle. Because what you're gonna ultimately have to do is change some process in your system and there's some knowledge that you're gonna need to be able to do that, and that's, that third component of an improvement team has to be in place to do that. But I think the most important thing is that we're not in control of the data, we're in control of the processes that ultimately lead to the data. It's a distinction, maybe a fine distinction, but I think it's an important one. 0:12:17.5 AS: The idea of the System of Profound Knowledge and understanding what to do with the data and really understanding the whole thing, I was just thinking what would... An analogy I was thinking about is rain. Everybody understands rain as it comes out of the sky, but not everybody understands how to use that to make a pond, to make an aqueduct, to feed a farm, to, whatever that is. And so having that big picture is key, so, okay. So number... 0:12:57.8 JD: Yeah. Well, and a part of that is something really simple is constantly understanding data is the voice of the process. And so when you're looking at data, what often happens is I'm gonna walk into a meeting with my boss, and I'm looking for some data point, maybe we just got some type of performance data back or survey results or something. I'm gonna pick one of those items where the plot, where the dot from last time has improved when we look at it this time, and I take that and say, "Look how we've improved in this thing." And you need someone to say, "Well, wait a second, while there is a difference between those data points, if I look at the last 12, things are just moving up and down." And there's gotta be someone in the room that constantly points back to that, constantly. And that's where that person with the Profound Knowledge is helpful in improvement work. 0:13:54.5 AS: So the voice of the process is a great way of phrasing it that's been used for a while now and I think it's really good. I remember when I worked at Pepsi as a young supervisor, I saw some problem on the production line and I raised it to the maintenance guys. And they kept coming and fixing it and it would break and they'd fix it and it would break, and I basically got mad at him and I was like, "What the hell?" And he's like, "Bosses won't pay for the things that I need to fix this permanently, so get used to it constantly breaking down." 0:14:33.4 JD: And that's the best I can do. 0:14:34.0 AS: That's the voice of the system, here's what I can produce with what you've given me to produce. 0:14:40.8 JD: Yep. Yep. Yeah. Those guys had a very keen understanding of the system, no doubt in that example. Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of thing happens all the time, I think. That was lesson two. Lesson three is plot the dots for any data that incurs in time order. So a lot of people in this world know Dr. Donald Berwick, he started the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He was a student of Dr. Deming's, he's done a lot of work in this area. He has a great quote where he says, "Plotting measurements over time turns out, in my view, to be one of the most powerful things we have for systemic learning." And that's what really plot the dots is all about, it's all about turning your data into a visualization that you can learn from. And the National Health Service in England has this #plotthedots. And I think the whole point is that plotting the dots, plotting the data over time helps us understand variation and it leads us to take more appropriate action when we do that. So whether it's a run chart or a process behavior chart, just connecting the consecutive data points with a line makes analysis far more intuitive than if we store that data in a table. 0:16:03.6 AS: Yeah. And I was thinking about if you're a runner and you wanna compete in a marathon, plotting the dots like that is so valuable because you can see when changes happen. For instance, let's just say one night you didn't eat and then you ran the next morning and then your performance was better. Was it just a noise variation or is there something that we can learn from that? And then just watching things over time just give you ideas about what... Of potential impacts of what something could do to change that. 0:16:42.0 JD: Yeah. And we can start with a simple run chart, it doesn't have the limits, it's just a line chart. And then once we have enough of the data collected, enough plotted dots, then we can turn it into the process behavior chart. 0:16:56.3 AS: Some people don't even want to see that, John, like when we looked at your weight chart, remember that? 0:17:03.0 JD: I do remember that. Yeah. 0:17:04.0 AS: So for the people out there that really wanna let's say, control your weight, put a dot plot chart on your wall and measure it each day and just the awareness of doing that is huge. 0:17:18.7 JD: Yep. It is huge. It really is huge. And that works for any data that occurs over time, so almost everything that we're interested in improving occurs in some type of time order, time sequence. So these charts are appropriate for a wide array of data. But the bottom line is that... Oh, yeah, sorry, go ahead. 0:17:33.5 AS: The bottom line? 0:17:35.0 JD: Well, I was just saying the bottom line, whether you're using a run chart or a process behavior chart, it's always gonna tell us more than a list or a table of numbers, basically. 0:17:44.5 AS: I was gonna explain this, a situation I had when I was head of research at a research firm, a broker here in Thailand. I, my goal was to get more output from the analysts, they needed to write more and we needed to get more out. So what I did and I had already learned so much about Deming and stuff at that time. So what I did is I just made a chart showing each person's, what each person wrote each week, and it was a run chart in that sense where people could see over time what they wrote and they could see what other people were writing. And I purposely made no comments on this chart and I'd never really discussed it, I just put it up and updated it every week. And one of the staff that worked for me, an analyst, a really smart Thai woman asked, she said, she went to... She said, "I wanna see you in your office." I was like, "Oh, shit, I'm in trouble." And so she came to my office and said, "You know I went to, so this was maybe six months after I had put that chart up, she said, "I went out to lunch with my counterpart, my competitor, and she's writing research just like me on the same sector, and she asked me how many research reports do you write in a week, and I told her my number, and she was like, "Oh my God, that's a huge number." 0:19:16.6 AS: And she said, "Oh, I didn't really even think about it. But okay." And then she says, "What is Andrew's goal or target for you?" And she had naturally had thought that I had set a target of that amount, that's where she said, "I think I really figured you out." And I was like, "Well, what do you mean?" She said, "You just put that chart up there and you didn't give us any goal, but you knew that we were looking at it, and then it would provide us information and incentive and excitement, and the fact that you said nothing about it, got us to probably a higher level of production than if you had said, "I want everybody to read my reports." 0:19:57.9 JD: Right. Yeah, that's great. 0:20:01.0 AS: The magic of data. What's number four? 0:20:02.4 JD: The magic of data. Number four, so two or three data points are not a trend. So the first thing is, as soon as you've decided to collect some set of data, plot the dots, that should start right away. And again, this really includes all data that we're interested in improving in schools. And I know before I understood this way of thinking, this way of data analysis, I often relied on just comparing two points, that's the most common form of data analysis. What did last month look like, what does month look like? What did last year look like, what does this year look like? What did last week look like, what does this week look like? So that limited comparison is the most typical form of data analysis, especially when you're talking about something like management reports or board reports, revenue over time, those types of things. What was revenue last January? That type of thing. But the problem with looking at just two or three data points is that it tells you nothing about trends, it also doesn't tell you anything about how the data varies naturally. 0:21:17.5 JD: I remember looking at...
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Transformation is Never Complete: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 17)
03/12/2024
Transformation is Never Complete: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 17)
In The New Economics, Deming said “The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life…” (3rd edition, page 63) But are we ever completely transformed? Discover why Bill Bellows believes that transformation is an ongoing process and how you can keep your learning journey going. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. And the topic for today is, in this episode 17, Diffusion from a Point Source. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.6 Bill Bellows: And the title coincidentally, was the focus of my Master's thesis. We'll look at that later. 0:00:37.1 AS: It wasn't a rock and roll song. Yes, correct. 0:00:39.9 BB: No, not a rock and roll. [chuckle] Actually, Diffusion from a Point Source. Was that Mick Jagger or Keith Richards? Maybe it was Taylor. Maybe it was Taylor Swift. Okay. So some opening remarks, and then we'll get to today's feature. And I mentioned in the past, I go back and listen to the podcast, read through the transcripts, and it's very much like “Production Viewed as a System” - is to talk with people that have listened to it, listened to it myself and ask, have I... Are there holes in the explanation? Can I add some more clarity to it? The process I use for these podcasts is, some title comes to mind. I've got a long list that we started with at the very beginning, and then some other topics come up for any of a variety of reasons. 0:01:35.3 BB: And we'll have a title, have an outline, but then as we get involved in the conversation, something I say leads to something that you say leads to something that's not on the list. And sometimes some of those ad-libs, I go back and listen to and say, "Well, I don't know that sounded right. I just wanna add a little bit more clarity". Another thing I wanna say at the outset for those listening, is [chuckle] there is... Somebody posted somewhere on social media that one of the sessions was a total waste of time to listen to which I think is unfortunate. But what I like to say is, where I'm coming from to support The Deming Institute, as your ambition is as well, is to help individuals in respective organizations learn about Dr. Deming's ideas, try to apply them, deepen their understanding, explain them to others, and that's the target audience. 0:02:48.0 BB: So, for those who find that boring, well maybe this is not the podcast for you. And so, and the other thing I wanna say along those lines is, for the majority of my time at Rocketdyne, I had the responsibility of being a transformation agent or transformation person was part of my job. Now, I was brought in, I didn't have that job to begin with. The job I had to begin with was to lead the effort to provide training, facilitation of applications of Dr. Taguchi's ideas. And what I've shared in these podcasts is a lot of what I was doing early on was helping people put out fires. 0:03:38.2 BB: And that's not what Dr. Taguchi's ideas are about. His ideas are about improving the robustness of the performance of a product or service. Whereby what robustness Dr. Taguchi means is "it performs as an athlete incredibly well in spite of differing weather conditions." So the ability of a marathoner to run very consistent fast times in spite of the weather, in spite of the altitude. And so you're getting consistently high, or consistently faster and faster times. That's what Dr. Taguchi meant by, means by, his work means by "robustness." 0:04:16.2 BB: And what I was doing was using tools and techniques associated with his ideas to fight fires. And then, I got frustrated by that. And that led me to Dr. Deming's work, led me to revisit Dr. Deming's work. I had met him in 1990 and The New Economics came out in '93, and I had a couple of years of this frustration. The exciting thing was solving, getting involved, working with some really exciting people, and solving some very high visibility issues. But it wasn't breaking in as much as I would've liked into the, into the robustness piece. And when I came across Deming's work, I started to understand, it gave me a lot of food for thought as to why that might be the case. Now what is meant by transformation? And Dr. Deming uses that term, an individual transformed. 0:05:07.8 BB: And I had asked people that were close to him like, what is his operational definition of transformation? And when I explained it to them, I said, this is what I think he means this. And typically people say that's, they agree with that. And so my simple explanation of what I think Deming meant by transformation is as simple as, me saying to you, the professor to the student, “Andrew, how did you do on the exam?” Whereas I've said in the past, that makes me an observer of your learning to changing the question to how are, how did we do on the exam, where I become a participant? So I look at, so to me, the transformation Deming's talking about is that I no longer look around at things and see myself as separate from them. I look at myself as connected to them, and others being transformed or likewise seeing themselves as integral to what's going on, not watching it go by. Another reason I wanna bring that transformation agent piece up is part of my job, not part of my job, so I went from being mostly about Taguchi's work to mostly about Deming's work because I felt it was far more vital to focus on what Deming's talking about, the transform, how the organization and transform how the individuals operate. Another thing I wanna say there is what I think is interesting, if you look at the forward to Out of the Crisis and The New Economics. 0:06:48.1 BB: In Out of the Crisis, which I think was 1986 or so timeframe, Deming talked about the aim of this book is to help transform organizations. And then in The New Economics, he talks about the aim of this book is to help transform individuals. So he went through, he's shifted his focus from I'm trying to help organizations to I'm trying to help individuals. And that's what I'm hoping to do, interacting with you in these podcasts. So, on the one hand, I'd say to those listening, I don't know what your role is. If you're a transformation agent, that's one role. You may be an individual contributor, a senior software person, a marketing person, which means your job title does not include transforming the organization. 0:07:37.8 BB: So, what does that mean? It means some of what we're talking about may not apply to you. You may be personally excited about the Trip Report and, but it may not be your job to hold seminars within your respective organizations and go off and explain that to people. You may alienate people who think that's their job. So, I just wanna say, ask people, to be careful about what your role is in your organization. I've mentored many people and I'm used to going in and being the transformation person. And, one person I was working with, and she was all excited to wanna go share the Me-We Trip Report with her peers in this company doing software. And I said, "You can't do that". And she's like, "Well, why?" I said, "It's not your job". I said, "One is if you call a meeting to talk about transformation of the organization, or you get into that territory. I said, you're stepping on the toes of people who have that responsibility, perhaps. Or somebody's gonna say, wait, I thought we paid you to be a software engineer. Now you're over here. So, now you sound like you're astray, you're a loose cannon". 0:08:56.8 BB: Now I said, to this person, I said, now if you... There may be a place for you to say, "Hey, I wanna show you this neat solution.” If you think they're interested, ideally they ask you to show you how you did that. So, I think there's a difference when it comes to implementing these ideas, I would just advise some caution to people to not overstep their bounds and what it means to bring these ideas to the organization. So, I just wanted to say that. 0:09:32.4 AS: Yep. I just wanted to highlight the word transformation for a second. And the dictionary definition says, "transformation is a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. A transformation is an extreme radical change." And that's interesting, 'cause they say in form or appearance that you could have someone do a facelift that dramatically changes their face and the way they appear. But, has it been an internal transformation? Maybe, maybe not. 0:10:10.9 BB: Well, what's funny is, I mentioned that in previous podcasts, 'cause once a month for 17 years, I hosted an Ongoing Discussion where there'd be... I could have you on as a Thought Leader on a topic near and dear to you. And we send the announcement out and people would call in and it took a few years for Russ to agree to do it. And then, he eventually did, and he did it every January. Typically people would, every month be somebody different. But once I saw Russ's excitement by it, then I said, "Russ, every January we're gonna have you", we did it for four years, and every January I'd fly out to Philadelphia and be with him. So, the last time I did it with him, we were in his apartment. We were sitting pretty close together over the small desk. And in the sessions, the term transformation came up. So, the last session ends, we did four one-hour sessions over two days. The last session ends. And I turned off my recorder. And I said, "Russ, it just dawned on me that you and Deming, you and Dr. Deming both talk about transformation". 0:11:26.8 BB: And I said, "Dr. Deming talks about a personal transformation - I see the world differently.” And Russ looks at transformation as an attribute of a solution. That “we used to do it this way, now we do it this way.” And so, his is not transformation of an individual, but transformation of a solution. And I said, I just... I threw it out as I just, "You both used the word, but you use it differently". And I said something like, now I was waiting to see what he would say with that. And he looks at me and he says, "I see no value in that conversation", which followed by "let's go get lunch." [laughter] 0:12:22.8 AS: Exactly. 0:12:24.0 BB: And so I thought, oh, I was really looking forward to exploring that space with him. And I shared that conversation with one of his peers later that night. And he said, "He said that?" I said, "Not only did he say that", he said, "You know what? I really wasn't surprised". 'Cause Russ was... It seemed to be a little bit too abstract for him. Anyway, but it's, but he would've put it, "What is this transformation stuff?" 0:12:51.0 AS: That, it's interesting because sometimes we talk about the why isn't Deming more widely accepted and that type of thing. And I think one of the things is that he's driving for transformation versus I think majority of people are providing information and here's how you do Lean, here's how you do this, here's how you do statistics or whatever, and here's all the information. And then you use that to to make better decisions. I think Dr. Deming was never about being better in our decisions but about how do we transform the way we think. 0:13:33.9 BB: Yes. 0:13:34.8 AS: And also the second part is that the idea of shifting from transforming an organization to transforming an individual. I guess an organization doesn't transform unless the leadership has already transformed or is in a process of transformation. So, therefore targeting the individuals for trying to help them get a transformation ended up being the most important or first step, I'm guessing. 0:14:00.2 BB: Oh yeah. No, I thought it was just so neat to see that shift. I don't know if we've talked that much in these podcasts about transformation. I'll have to go back and check. But what we were doing within Rocketdyne to help differentiate, 'cause language is so important. What do we mean by transform? Because it's a very casually used term and I was trying to, you know, with colleagues at Rocketdyne trying to differentiate what Deming's use of that term. 'Cause we liked the term but the challenge became if we used it did it adopt a meaning that he didn't have in mind in which case we're off to the Milky Way. 0:14:48.8 BB: But what we did was try to differentiate physical change from mental, a physical shift from a mental shift. I guess to me a big part of what he is talking about is going from seeing parts to seeing systems to seeing things as being connected to start thinking about as Edgar Schein would as Peter Senge quoted Peter Schein, Peter Senge quoted Edgar Schein, "Culture are the assumptions we cannot see". 0:15:21.5 BB: And, so I was focusing on is we talk about, there's culture, culture comes from the assumptions. The assumptions come from beliefs and that's associated with our thinking. And that's the space that I think has... is the space to be to really believe, to really implement what Dr. Deming's talking about for all those benefits we've been talking about. And so the word, so in the training we were doing in our InThinking Roadmap, we differentiated reforming and we said "reforming is a physical change. Giving things a new name, adding more steps to the process. It's change you can, it's rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." And there's nothing wrong. You can move people together to be closer physically but that doesn't move them together mentally. So, there's a sense of we want everyone to be in the same room physically but they're... But you can hear they're in separate rooms mentally. 0:16:22.7 BB: And we've talked about this in a Me Organization I hand off something which is good to you and if it's not good, you give it back to me. If it is good, you say thank you and I'm separated. I am physically and mentally separated and there's nothing wrong with being physically separated I have to hand off to you. But how about an environment where I am mentally, we are mentally connected because we're thinking together. So if you come back to me and say, "Bill I'm having trouble getting these things together". And I say, "Well, hey I can, I..." not only do I understand that I caused that but I can possibly do something about that. That's the mental transformation piece. So there's... I look at it as there's nothing wrong. I look at it as there's a place for transforming, reforming, moving things to be closer, minimizing number of steps. Nothing wrong with that. But that's not what Deming was talking about. He was talking about transforming which is a change of how we see the world. How we hear the world. 0:17:25.3 AS: Yeah. And when I look at the System of Profound Knowledge and we look at Appreciation for a System, look at Knowledge about Variation and Understanding the Theory of Knowledge and then Psychology, I would say the one you mentioned about Appreciation of a System is the one that brings true transformation because we are taught to look so narrowly. And when we start to look at the bigger system it just blows your mind. 0:17:58.9 BB: Well, it's...it... No, I absolutely agree. I can remember in the early ‘90s I had met Dr. Deming once and I thought that's fascinating. And, I put it aside and got buried in the Taguchi stuff and then began to see the issues as I had mentioned in previous podcasts as well as today. And I started thinking there's, there's something missing. And, in the Taguchi school it was, we need more tools, more advanced tools. That's not about transformation. There's nothing in Taguchi's work that was about the transformation that Deming's talking about. And I'm not aware of that mindset. Well, I've not come across that mindset in many places. I don't see it in all the...a lot of the traditional improvement techniques whether it's Lean or Six Sigma or Operational Excellence. I don't see that, that focus. I agree. 0:19:07.6 AS: And, I bought this book Guide to Quality Control by Kaoru Ishikawa. 0:19:11.2 BB: Yep, yep. 0:19:12.6 AS: I got it in 1990. And, but it's a great example of, the objective wasn't a transformation. The objective was understand these tools and maybe that leads to a transformation, maybe not. That wasn't what he was aiming for. He was saying, "Here's the tools and here's how you can apply them". 0:19:32.2 BB: Well, I used to debate with some co-workers and his, one co-worker in particular. And his mindset was, focus on the tools, and the language, in the conversation we're having, his theory was, "Get people to apply the tools and the transformation will eventually happen". I had the same thought. 0:20:00.1 AS: If that was the case, we'd all be transformed already because we're all applying tools every day. 0:20:04.7 BB: And 'cause we, I had heard a comment, I was at a Taguchi conference and I heard a comment. And as soon as I got back to my office, and this gentleman we're both at work really, really early, we'd go down and get coffee at a quarter to six, go back and sit in his office for a couple hours and just have some great, great, great conversations. And I shared with him, I was at a Taguchi conference and somebody said, the reference was, "You wait for the... " It was something, "The journey begins after the transformation starts". And as soon as I said that, he said, "I think it's the other way around", that the transformation happens after. And I thought to myself, I knew you'd say that, because that was his attitude. Get 'em to use the tools, get 'em to use the tools, get 'em to use the tools. And I kept looking at it as, no, that does not. Yeah. I mean it doesn't mean you don't do it, you don't do something. But I think when you begin to see the world and hear the world differently as we're trying to convey, to me that's when the rubber really begins to hit the road. That's when you move. And again, as we talked, there's nothing wrong with tools and techniques, but tools and techniques are guided by your understanding of the system and the other things. And it's just not enough to be a tool head. 0:21:48.7 BB: Other things I wanted, oh, okay. [laughter] So let's go back the cloud model from number 16. And what I did not reference again, 'cause I went back and looked at it and there's what we shared, but what I wanted to add to it was, one is the idea learned from Barry Bebb that you're an individual contributor trying to get ideas up to the cloud, the cloud being the executives in their meeting space, and the idea of handing off to somebody above you. And then the idea that that transfer is going to take a few times from person to person to get someone in the cloud transformed with an appreciation. And relative to Deming's work, it involved the transformation. 0:22:34.9 BB: If it involves trying to get Dr. Taguchi's up to the cloud, ideas to the cloud, manner involve what we're talking about relative to Deming's work, fine. But the other aspect that I then neglected to mention is what Barry's talking about is, is once it gets to the cloud, then what rains down on the organization is the beginning of, in our case, transforming the organization. That's the raining down. So the cloud is not just that place on high that things get up to, but the idea of a cycle that things then start to flow down. And so, I mentioned, you know, I got back from that very first meeting with Barry and went into my boss's boss's office and that I had had that meeting, and little did I know what I was gonna learn from Barry. 0:23:26.8 BB: And learning from Barry, you either go back to... You have to be in your...
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Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 1
03/05/2024
Goal Setting Is Often An Act of Desperation: Part 1
Did Dr. Deming forbid setting goals? Dive into this discussion about healthy goal setting, learn why your process matters, and the four things you need to understand before you start on goals. This episode is the first in a 4-part series about goal setting. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 21 and we're talking about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:26.9 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, 'tis the season for resolutions, I suppose, so I thought we could talk about organizational goal setting and sort of doing that through a Deming lens. And I was thinking about, at a recent district leadership team meeting, I put the following quote up on a slide. I said, "Goal setting is often an act of desperation." You got to watch people's faces when they see that. And to give some context, we're sort of updating our strategic plan at United Schools Network and my point in putting that on the slide as a part of strategic planning was to start a discussion on sort of what I think is healthy goal setting and how that's not typical to what I've seen across my career in schools, education organizations. 0:01:22.4 JD: And I wanted to provide a framework for the team so that anyone that's setting a goal as a part of the strategic planning process sort of had this sort of mindset as we're going through the goal setting process. I think that the typical reaction to that quote, at least in my experience, has been something like, "But I thought that goal setting was something that highly effective people or highly effective organizations do." And my basic argument is that I think that that's the intention, but it's rarely the case, whether that's individuals or organizations. And there's these, what I've come to sort of frame as four conditions that have to be met during the goal setting process. And without those, you kind of get fluff for a goal setting, probably more likely just completely disconnected from reality. I think... Yeah, go ahead. 0:02:22.5 AS: I just wanted to talk to everybody out there that's listening and viewing. I mean, I'm sure you're going through goal setting all the time and as we talk about, it's the beginning of the year right now, this is actually, we're recording this in mid-January of 2024. So it's like I've been working on what's our vision? What's our mission? What's our values? Where are we going? What is our goal? What is our long term goal? What is our short term goal? And I don't know about you guys, but for me, it gets a little confusing and round in circles sometimes and overwhelming, and then this whole idea about, that goal setting is often an act of desperation. It's like I've been working on this stuff for recently over the last week or so and then I just heard you say that and I was like, "Oh, I'm really interested to learn more." So let's go through those four conditions. 0:03:18.5 JD: Yeah, I'll get to those in a second. But I... So I'm not saying don't set goals necessarily. And people have that same reaction typically to that statement, but it's goal setting is often an act of desperation. So it's not the goal in and of themselves, but generally it's the process that you go about and the lack of sort of logic behind the goals that I'm talking about. And I know on these podcasts, many of my examples have sort of I've been banging on like State Department accountability systems and stuff like that. I'm going to continue to do that today but I think the same sort of errors happen at the school system level, at the individual school building level, at the individual teacher or principal level, it's just the stakes are higher when you're talking about states and countries, systems of education. 0:04:11.8 JD: But what I've seen is over the last two decades, certainly post-No Child Left Behind, what it seems like is that there's often these goals set and they're sort of, the targets are sort of chosen out of thin air. And then there's this whole accountability system built around those goals and then in the case of states, we then rate and rank school systems or schools based on how they perform in relation to those goals. And again, the same type of thing is happening at the school system level, at the school level but probably the state accountability systems is what most educators are familiar with when I'm talking about goals. And in Ohio, like a lot of states, we give state tests, we give them third through eighth grade. 0:04:58.5 JD: They take reading and math every year, third through eighth grade in Ohio and you have to hit this 80% benchmark in terms of the percent of kids that are proficient in your school to meet the state standard. So the first question is, why not 60%? Why not 95%? Why not 85%? Why not 82.5%? Just random, you know? And my hunch is, the first problem is that that benchmark for passage rates, if you asked 100 people at the State Department or 100 people working in public school systems in Ohio, I'm not sure if anybody could give you that answer, why 80%? So the first problem is that that target itself is chosen arbitrarily and without sort of a deep consideration. And so that's sort of where the fork initially comes... 0:05:58.3 AS: And I would say that if I look at that 80%, it's like below that and you would seem like you're really underachieving, and above that, it's like, let's be realistic here of what the system can produce. 0:06:11.6 JD: Well, it's a B, it's a B minus. You know, that's familiar, a C, you're not allowed to bring home a C, but a B is okay. So, I mean, my guess is, I don't know where that particular target came from, but my guess is it's something maybe not too far off from, "well, it's sort of a B minus" in the typical grading scale in the United States. 0:06:32.4 AS: Probably came just the way we just discussed it. 0:06:35.1 JD: I would not be entirely surprised. So a lot of the problem with goal setting and when I'm saying act of desperation, it has to do with that arbitrary nature of the goal in and of itself. And so what I've sort of told the team here is that let's put forth some conditions that came up, I mentioned four, that we should understand prior to ever setting a goal. So the first thing we want to understand is what I call the "capability of the system" under study. So in this case, we've talked about third grade reading because that's such an important time period in a student's life. 0:07:13.4 JD: The states, lots of states put a lot of emphasis on it. In Ohio, there's a third grade reading guarantee that exists in other states as well. So we'll kind of look at data in that realm. So the first one, what's the capability of that third grade reading system? The second condition is we have to understand the variation that that system produces. So what are the ups and downs in the data? What are the patterns in the data? So capability, variation is the second condition. The third condition is, is the system that we're studying, is the data stable? When we look at the patterns of the data over time, is there predictability to it? 0:08:01.8 JD: Is there stability to that data or is it all over the place? And then the third thing or sorry, the fourth thing we want is a logical answer to the question, "by what method?" So let's take sort of a deeper look at each of those four conditions, kind of unpack those a little bit. We'll use third grade reading state testing data. I have some data on a chart, but I'll share my screen in a second for those that are viewing the data. And then for those that are only listening, I'll sort of narrate what we're looking at so you'll still get some value out of the description. So you see my screen now? 0:08:42.5 AS: Yep. 0:08:43.3 JD: Okay, cool. So we've looked at these charts before in previous episodes. It's been a while. So this is what some people call a control chart. I call it a process behavior chart because it's literally a description, a visual description of a process unfolding over time. 0:09:01.7 AS: And maybe I'll just describe it. At the title it says, Ohio Third Grade Reading State Testing Proficiency Levels. On the y-axis is the percent proficiency ranging from, of course, zero to 100. And on the x-axis, we have seven school years going from the 2015 to 2016 school year all the way to 2022 to 2023 school year. And then most importantly, we have points, that's a blue line here, but the points that are showing the movement of third grade reading state proficiency levels year by year or school year by school year. Continue. 0:09:51.1 JD: Yep, that's right. That's a good description. So those blue dots are the percent of third graders that are proficient each testing year. And to give you some context, in Ohio about 125,000 third graders take that state reading test each year. One thing you'll notice is that there is no data for 2019-'20. That's because we give the test in the spring of a school year. So in the spring of 2020, schools were shut down due to the pandemic so there was no state test. So we missed one year of testing, but that's really not, that's not really pertinent to this discussion. So the other thing you'll see on here is the green line is the average of the data running through there. 0:10:38.4 JD: And those red lines that are on either side of the data are, some people call them control limits, I call them the lower and upper natural process limit. And they're based on a statistical calculation. They're not where I want the lines to be, they're where they are based on the data. And for those watching, the data points are 54.9% proficient in '15 -'16. The next year in '16 -'17, 63.8% of the third graders were proficient. In '17 -'18, 61.2% were proficient. In '18 -'19, 66.7% were proficient. In 2021, er, 2020 -'21, kind of dipped down to 51.9%. Then in '21 -'22, 59.8% of the third graders were proficient. And then in our most recent year, 62.3% of kids were proficient. 0:11:35.3 AS: So out of all those points, let's just say a high of about roughly 70% and a low of a little bit higher than 50%. 0:11:45.5 JD: Yeah. Yep. Yep. So the low was like, I think 59%. I can look back. Low was 54.9%, the high was 66.7%. 0:11:57.5 AS: Okay. 0:12:00.3 JD: And that works out to about an average of 60% across that seven-year time period. 0:12:08.3 AS: And when we talked about the 80%, is that 80% related to these test results? 0:12:13.7 JD: Sure. Yep. 0:12:13.8 AS: This is what the state is saying it should be? 0:12:18.1 JD: So the state says that in any individual school building, in any individual school system, and so as a result, in the state as a whole, 80% of third graders should meet the proficiency benchmark, basically. So in the state, on average, across the state, when you look at all the third graders, 80% of the kids are not at proficiency. It's lower than that year in and year out across the last seven years. And I should say I picked the starting point as 2015-'16, that was the first year of a brand new test. So it's really a new testing system as of that year. And then it stayed pretty consistent in terms of what the kids are being asked to do. Prior to that, the test was a different format. So it was sort of like a different system. 0:13:04.6 AS: And this is from all schools, so it's Ohio, it's not your school? 0:13:09.6 JD: Right. So this is all Ohio public schools. 0:13:12.9 AS: Okay. 0:13:13.9 JD: Yep. Which are required to give the state test once a year. So, like I said, beginning with this spring 2016 testing season, Ohio began administering this new state test, which is why I started with 2015- '16. And that's where the data starts. So again, schools need to have at least 80% of their students score proficient or higher in each tested area, including reading. So what we're doing here is sort of looking at that first condition. We're trying to figure out what's the capability of this third grade reading testing system. And when I say system, I'm literally talking about everything that could impact third grade reading test scores. 0:14:00.4 JD: Now, I mean, you could almost make an infinite list, but I'm talking about the actual students in Ohio public schools, the third graders themselves, their teachers, the various reading curricula that's being used in schools, technology related to reading programming, supplemental materials, the schools themselves, how the schools themselves are organized. And you can go on and on about any number of in-school and out-of-school variables that might impact a third graders performance on a state test. 0:14:37.2 AS: And I think about resources like between schools and parents and teachers and administrators, everybody's putting forward... Putting forth resources to try to get to this. 0:14:46.9 JD: Yep. The reading standards themselves, the reading test, that's all a part of the third grade reading system. And basically, for those that are viewing the video or heard the description, the capability is outlined in the process behavior chart. I mean, that's literally what the process behavior chart doing. It's, it's, it's visualizing the capability of that third grade reading system. So one thing that's pretty clear when you look at this seven years worth of data is that it's very unlikely that the state of Ohio is incapable of hitting that 80% mark. Now, seven years of data is not 20 years of data, but we, in none of the seven years that have occurred have we gotten anywhere close to that 80% mark. So that's one thing we can see. 0:15:39.9 AS: Sorry, what was the conclusion that you just said? 0:15:42.8 JD: Well, we're, we can see from the data here, even though it's only seven data points, which is something to work with, but it's not 20 data points, it's not 25 data points but it's pretty likely that the third grade reading system, that we're incapable as a state of hitting 80%... 0:16:00.9 AS: Okay, so the capability of the system, the goal of the, of the state representatives that set the 80% seems to be slightly outside of the capability of the system. 0:16:14.4 JD: I'd say more than slightly. 0:16:15.8 AS: More than slightly. 0kay. 0:16:16.9 JD: Yeah, I'd say it likely... I would go as far to say, I try to talk scientifically so it's, we are likely incapable of hitting that 80% mark as a state. 0:16:26.5 AS: Okay. Got it. 0:16:27.7 JD: Not impossible. 0:16:29.0 AS: That's point number one. 0:16:30.5 JD: Yeah, well, and these red natural process limits actually tell us what we could expect from this particular system based on what we've seen so far. So those process limits, kind of way to think about them is as you get more data points, especially as you get 20, 24 data points, they sort of start to solidify. So an individual data point has less of an impact on the limits. So I would call them a little bit soft right now, an individual data point kind of could have an outsized impact because we don't have tons of data but what these red lines are telling us is that our reading system, this third grade reading system is capable of hitting rates somewhere between 41%, where that lower line is, and 79%, where that upper line is. 0:17:19.8 JD: That's why I say that the 80% is unlikely, rather than impossible. It's technically within the capabilities of this system as illustrated by this process behavior chart. But based on the way the limits are constructed, the limits come from the data itself, how the data, not only the magnitude of the individual data points, but it's also taking into account the point to point variation. So time is an important factor in that formula that's used to calculate the limits. And so based on how the limit is constructed, there's about a 3 in 1000 chance that we would hit that 80% mark. So that's why I say... 0:18:03.4 AS: So you're saying there's a chance? [laughter] 0:18:06.5 JD: Very unlikely, very unlikely, right? So that's capability, that, this, that's sort of looking at the chart and talking about how capable is our system. The next thing we want to look at... Well, the last thing you could say is that that 60% average across those seven years is a pretty good descriptor, especially as you look at where the dots fall, some above, some below, that's a pretty good descriptor of the overall capability of the system, that's 60% proficiency. 0:18:37.6 AS: Right. 0:18:39.3 JD: So the second thing we'll take a look at is using the chart to understand the variation in our system. So again, we have seven data points. We just mentioned that they're bouncing around this average of 60%. And actually with seven data points, you have three that are below the line and four that are above. So about as even as you could be between how many points are below the line, how many points are above the line. So if you describe the year to year test results starting back in '15-'16, they increase and then decrease and then increase and then decrease and then increase and then increase again, a little bit in that last of the seven years. 0:19:27.8 JD: So when you look at the data, there's no sort of signals in those patterns that indicate that the increases or decreases are of significance. So in the Deming language, probably most people aren't familiar with the "common cause" language, but basically it's just saying that the thousands of variables that impact these test results are part of a common cause system. Just like, they're bouncing around, but the bouncing around is not meaningful. But what actually happens is, you know, inevitably when people describe these results, they'll pick two years. Let's say they look at, well, let's even say they look at the last three years and people will say, "Oh, we've increased the third grade reading test scores 'cause they went up a little bit from 2021 to 2022 to 2023." 0:20:19.5 JD: But again, the increases are meaningless when you're viewing this through the sort of understanding variation, knowledge about variation Deming lens. So, but again, even though seven data points isn't a lot of data, it's pretty clear from what we see so far that that, setting that 80% goal, holding schools and school systems accountable from a state perspective, it's not having any impact on the outcome of this third grade reading system. So that's what I mean to connect back to this goal setting is often an act of desperation. It's a hope and a dream that 80% of kids in this system are gonna meet this proficiency standard. It's just not happening by setting a goal. 0:21:10.2 AS: Right. 0:21:15.4 JD: The third thing is looking at stability. So we want to know if the results are predictable in this particular system. So the thing to think about here is if the system is in fact predictable, it means that the results are sort of performing as consistently as the system is capable of making it. And this Ohio third grade reading system is in fact a stable system. So based on these results so far, we can reasonably expect that future results will continue to bounce around this current average. That's just what's gonna happen. So the results might be a little bit below the average, maybe they'll remain a little bit above the average, but in all likelihood, unless something else of significance changes, this is what we can expect from this system....
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Get Off Of My Cloud: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 16)
02/20/2024
Get Off Of My Cloud: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 16)
"The Cloud" is a metaphor for the top level of corporate authority - the CEO, CFO, CTO and maybe some Vice President positions. And if you're trying to transform an organization, your ideas need to penetrate the Cloud - but how? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about influencing others with the aim of transformation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 16, and the title is, Get Off of My Cloud. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.5 Bill Bellows: Hey. Hey, hey. [laughter] Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, get Off of My Cloud. Yeah. Alright, so here we are, 2024. So before we get to the Cloud, some opening remarks. And in particular looking at session 15, which is soon to be released. And one thing I... What I tell people is, what's exciting about understanding Deming's work is how revealing, how you see the world differently, and Dr. Deming used the metaphor of a lens. But it's not only what you see, but what you hear. 0:01:19.5 AS: Right. 0:01:22.3 BB: And, and I tell people I can go into an organization and within a few minutes between what I see and what I hear, I can get a pretty good sense, is it a ME or WE organization. And we think back to the comment I shared in episode 15 where the Boeing executive said, "Let's be honest," to the room full of 300 plus internal audit people who just do great, great work. 0:01:54.4 BB: I mean, if they didn't do great work, why would they be there? Everyone in our organization does great work, otherwise, why would they be around? But when they said to them, "Let's be honest, we don't make the airplanes." And I thought, that's right up there with my wife saying to me, "Look at what your son did." 0:02:22.4 BB: My son? Or is it, look at what our son did. Another giveaway expression is, we're gonna do a root cause analysis or RRCA, which is Relentless Root Cause Analysis. Well, every, and from a Deming perspective, instead of talking about a root cause, we can say there's root causes, and there's... They're dozens, hundreds of root causes, or sorry, common causes, common causes. And then every now and then there's a special cause. 0:03:01.0 BB: But even when a special cause appears so does a bunch of common causes. So from a Deming perspective there's never a root cause. So I... One poke I have for people that like to think in terms of root cause, 'cause they have this sense of, you can explain everything by a series of connected root causes. This cause leads... It's like the five whys. That this leads to this leads to this. But it's always, this leads to that, this leads to, and it's singular strands. And I think of it like a strand of spaghetti and everything is along some pathway. And I thought, no, that's not the model Deming had in mind. Deming had in mind a multitude of strands that are all woven together that you can't... What comes out is a bunch of contributions, not just one thing. So my poke at people like to believe in root cause phenomenon is, "If life can be explained by a series of root causes, then why do you need two parents? Why isn't it a single parent?" Sorry. 0:04:18.9 BB: I just finished the fifth cohort at Cal State Northridge in a eight-week class as part of an 18-month program where the students, we start with about 30, by the time it gets to me there may be 24 or so. And one course after another, after another, it's a very rigorous program. And I do a class called Seminar in Quality Management. And I love at the beginning of the course when I ask them about, if all the beads are red, if all the red beads are eliminated, can improvement, can still go on to, all those things we've talked about in this program. And I have them write essays on it, and it's so neat to see where they are in the beginning and where they are at the end. 0:05:07.1 BB: And in the beginning they'll be talking about human error. And so every time I see human error, I just write back, is it human error or is it system error? And one student in the class commented at the end of the course of what she learned, she said, No one had ever pointed that out to her. And she distinctly remembers the very first time I said that it was like, but wait a minute. And then it made more and more sense and I thought, yeah, I mean not... Is there such a thing as a human error? Well, Deming would say that 94 plus percent comes from the system. Another cute story, I used to host a monthly conference call for 17 years, every month for 17 years. 0:06:02.0 AS: Wow. 0:06:02.8 BB: And featured on the call was a thought leader, Russ Ackoff did it four years in a row. He became the January thought leader. And generally it was random, different people. But then when it got to Russ, it was every January Russ did it. And I would go out and stay with him and be in the room with him and the distribution list was at one point in time, 5000 people around the world, that I had somehow interacted with. And the announcement would go off out every month, and it would say, this month's ongoing discussion with thought leaders, is Andrew Stotz, Andrew's gonna talk on this topic. Please find attached his thought piece. You can join us. And there were four opportunities to call in on 12 to one and one to two on the last Thursday and Friday of the month. And there was four different opportunities for the audience to engage with Andrew, and it wasn't a presentation by you. The protocol was they would read the article, then they would say to you, Andrew, on page five, you said this can you clarify? So I said to them, it's not a presentation, it's a conversation. 0:07:08.9 BB: So a friend had in mind, somebody that he worked with as a thought leader. I said, okay, let me, She'd just written a book. And the book title was along the lines of Think Like a Champion, so I read the book and it's sports stories, all these sports stories. Turns out she has an advanced degree in sports psychology and she was hired by his company as a coach. And throughout the book, her story is about people contacting her, I need help with this. I need help with this. I need help with this. A lot of these people are in sales, I need help, I need help with this. So I read the book cover to cover, and I started to notice a pattern. It was all individuals. I need help, I need help. And so when I got on the phone with her and the role of the phone call was to talk about the book, talk about the phone call, let her know what the overall strategy of what we're trying to do with these calls, promote a word as of Deming's work and working together, all that stuff. 0:08:20.6 BB: And then with that, see if that fit, what if she felt, in fact, what I had in mind was that there's things in there she could contribute, but there's things in there that might be slippery. So I shared with her that I had a friend who was a high school coach for the Valencia Vikings and I bumped to him one day in a park. And he's walking towards me and he is wearing a T-shirt, and across the top are the letters V-K-N-G-S. So I'm looking at the letters and I said, I don't get it. To which the author says, there's no I in team, and that's what it was V-K-N-G-S. And so she beat me to the punchline. So I said, so you're aware of that story? 0:09:15.0 BB: She says, oh yeah. I said, "Your book is filled with sports stories." She says, "Yes." I said, "Did you ever consider that story for the book?" She says, "it really wouldn't fit." I said, "that's right." I said, "that is it, it doesn't." I said, "'cause your book is all about the I and not about the team." So at the end of the call, I said you know, when I got your book, I said the cover was revealing. And this is what I find, going back to language. You can be in a meeting and you can hear how people think, which then leads to how they act and you can't separate, you can hear that. So I said, "I looked at title of your book," which is something like, Think Like A Champion. And I said, "as soon as I saw that title," I thought. But I said, well I told her, "I said, there's a lot of good stuff in here." I said, "but, and I'm not saying everyone hears what I hear, but I don't want you to be caught short on that." She said okay. So then I said the title was kind of a giveaway of what the book was really about. She said, "well, what would've been a more appropriate title?" I said, "Think Like a Contributor." 0:10:34.5 BB: And so we are within our respective organizations, we're one of many contributors, we don't do it all by ourself, we contribute to the results and we talked last time about... Sorry. 0:10:47.1 AS: And that's an interesting point because that's a, maybe a difference between let's say American style thinking and Japanese style thinking, where Japanese may see themselves clearly as a contributor in a system. Whereas Americans, we like to think of ourselves as a unique person that fits into a certain place in this world. 0:11:08.9 BB: And I won the game, I won the game and I made it happen. And, um, but sure, and I've heard that about Japanese management, that it's more like, I am humbled and honored to be your executive and there's a real... And it comes across that it's not just talk, there's a real sense of humility and honor to be in this position as opposed to a sense of I'm the smartest guy in the room. 0:11:39.4 AS: Servant Leader. 0:11:41.4 BB: Yes, very much so. So, next thing I wanna bring up is, we talked last time about Myron Tribus's his comment, management works on the system, people work in the system, and the theme was making a difference from where you are and I mentioned that this gentleman came in, was one of our classes, and he wanted to, how often I met with our president. And I said, not very often. He said, oh, it's really important, you gotta go meet with him. And I said, "well what if I spent time talking with senior people at NASA or senior people in the Pentagon," which I did. And a mistake I made, a minor perhaps a minor error that somebody may or may not have caught. So I said, that I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to speak at the Army's largest annual logistics conference back in the 2000s. And the invite came from a senior officer on the staff of General Anne Dunwoody, who went on to become the Army's first woman, Four Star General, and so in the podcast number 15 I said, I was invited and spoke with the Army's first Four Star General, it was the Army's first woman Four Star general. 0:12:57.2 BB: So this is a clarification. I also talk about how pragmatism is being practical, but I think is, if you're trying to introduce these ideas into your respective organizations making a difference where you are, I think it's important to realize that everyone is acting as if they're being practical. And if practical means work on things that are bad to make them good and stopping, that’s their, that to them is practical. Now, from a Deming perspective to not work on things that are good, to make them better to improve integration - that is practical, but it might not be practical where you are. And I mentioned, I had a Lean Management journal article that talked about that, and I couldn't remember the title. The title is Profits, Pragmatism, and the Possibilities of Possessing Other Eyes. I told you I like alliteration. 0:13:56.6 AS: Alliteration. 0:13:57.5 BB: Alright, so what is an application? We start where you are. And I would say an application, first of all, relative to an application, it's thinking, can I do this by myself? Do I need help? Do I see opportunities to reduce losses? And it's one thing to see opportunities to do something. It's a whole 'nother thing to realize that the timing might not be right. I may not have the support that I need. I may not have the funding that I need. There could be other priorities. So when I would tell people I was mentoring to see opportunities is a really big thing, whatever those are. An opportunity to shift from managing actions to managing interactions and realizing that addition doesn't work, that things are not adding up and you're realizing, holy cow, there's some opportunities for synergy here. There's opportunities to work on things which are going well to prevent the red beads, work on things that are well to improve integration. 0:15:05.3 BB: There could be opportunities to stop doing incentives within your sphere of influence, to stop handing out awards to your people on your staff. Had a friend who just became a manager years ago and I had been mentoring him and within a few weeks of him being manager in operations, he came to me and he said that somebody on his team helped him do something and he gave him a $10 lunch coupon. I didn't say anything, I just let it pass. A couple weeks later, he comes to me and he says the same guy helped him again and then reached out his hand, he says, “Where’s my coupon?” I said, “I was waiting to see how long that would take.” And Andrew, that happened 25 years ago, if I was to have breakfast with him tomorrow, it would come up. Every time we meet, which is not that often, he lives a lot too far. 0:16:05.5 BB: And it was just so cool how, as I said let’s just see how this goes. So the idea is that what can you do from where you are to not pass on the pain? And so it may be flowing down to you, but maybe you, if you’ve got a team, can stop it from where you are. Maybe. Maybe you can’t. I mentioned Jim Albaugh, who went on to become CEO of Boeing Commercial, CEO of Boeing Defense. He was my boss for a number of years at the beginning of his doing these amazing things. And one day after we had some really stellar applications of Taguchi’s ideas with Deming’s improving integration, the hammers went away and things came together. Performance, we had an incredible advances in engine performance and integration. It was really cool. So he was really thrilled by all that. So I go, I would meet with him once a month and I’d poke him. 0:17:10.0 BB: So one day I went in and I said, “I wanna bring something to your attention.” And he looks at me with this smile. And I said, “I wanna put something on the table. And I’m not saying you’ve gotta do it now, but don’t ever tell me I didn’t bring it to your attention.” And he is like, “okay, Bill, what?” [chuckle] I said, “we’ve got to get rid of incentives, rewards and recognition and performance appraisals.” And then he just rolls his eyes. I said, I says, “I know you can’t do this.” And I said, “but these are ankle weights on how fast we can run as an organization.” But I knew that was... I mean, he was, at the time he was a VP, even when he was CEO, he can’t get rid of those. Those are such an institution. But I just wanted to go on record with him. I just chose the moment to go on record with him knowing the limits, but I wanted to be upfront and honest with him that if I don’t go to those events, this is why. 0:18:18.8 BB: And so it’s just making a difference from where you are and sometimes you speak up, sometimes you just keep your mouth shut. Another thing I encourage people I mentor is, if you’re out managing interactions and things are improving, you’ve improved integration. Is that, my advice to them is go about it quietly be the change you wanna see in your organization. Be the change you wanna see in the world, to quote Gandhi, I said, but unless your boss asks you how that happened, don’t explain it to them. 0:18:53.2 BB: I said, if they ask you how did you know how to do that, that’s your opportunity. But if you’re not asked that, I mean, in other words, don’t do it expecting to be asked for what, you know, to be complimented. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. Use it as a learning experience. Be deliberate about it if you’re gonna go off and do it. But if you’re doing it to get praise, you’ve missed the whole point. If you’re doing it to get your boss’s attention, you’ve missed the whole point. What I tell people is, do it’ And maybe at some point in time, they say, ’'ve noticed a pattern. Tell me how you do this. ’I've got a manager I work with, with a client, was asking me about how to praise someone. And I said, one is, there’s nothing wrong with one-on-one in the office saying, your contributions were enormous. I said, do’'t ever imply without you, we could not have done this. You’re a contributor. But I said, more important than that is, ask them, how did you know how to do that? Where else could we apply this? 0:20:07.4 BB: I said, I think that is far more, I think being asked those questions are far more thrilling than a pat on the back. Back in ‘93, it was '92, I was nominated to be an engineer of the year at the Rocketdyne, which is a really big deal. I was one of a dozen finalists. And the vice president of engineering invited everyone into his office to ask us a bunch of questions. And he used our answers for the engineer of the year dinner. And what I found out from the others is, he never asked any of us, how can your work, what is your vision, Andrew, for how your work can impact the organization? And I thought that, that never came up. And I would have been thrilled, my whole interest in going through this, 'cause I knew at that time about awards and recognition, but my hope was that, that could create visibility and help me further the cause. 0:21:13.8 AS: Make an impact. 0:21:14.8 BB: This is... But another thing I would say is, I have my knuckles rapped this way a few times. And when I would try to explain to the executives how we achieve these solutions. And once one of the VPs, my VP, his comment to me was, he was watching me, he came by to see the slides I was gonna use. And he says, Bill, don't be tutorial with us. And I thought, oh, man. So what I tell people is, a staff meeting is not the time. This is really important. If you're trying to explain in a staff meeting how you accomplish something, what makes it bad is, even if you're invited, a staff meeting is not a classroom. When I walk into a classroom as the instructor, I walk in, and I know what my role is, and everybody else knows what their role is. But when you walk into a staff meeting, and you're about to present something you did, if it comes across as being tutorial, what makes that offending is, who appointed you to be the professor? But if you have a separate meeting and, but it's just these nuances, can really get in the way, which leads to tonight's feature, the Cloud Model... 0:22:42.6 AS: Before you go to tonight's feature, I'd like to go back in time to November of 1965. It was a tumultuous year. In fact, it was February of 1965 that Malcolm X was assassinated in America. 1963, November, John F. Kennedy Jr. Was assassinated. America was going through a lot of turmoil, and the Rolling Stones were the bad boys of rock and roll. In November of 1965, I was four months old, so I don't remember this personally, but the Rolling Stones came out with a song, and it was called Get Off Of My Cloud. And I just wanted to put it in context, because for us older guys, we know that this lyrics, Get Off Of My Cloud, is referring to this song where they're oftentimes saying, "hey, hey, you, you, get Off Of my Cloud." So with that introduction, tell us why you named it, this episode, Get Off Of My Cloud. 0:23:44.3 BB: Well, you're not gonna believe how apropos that, that intro was. Oh, this is so cool....
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Commit to Transformation: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 20)
02/13/2024
Commit to Transformation: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 20)
What does it mean to "commit" to transformation? What does "transformation" mean? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss Point 14 of Dr. Deming's 14 Points for Management - with John's interpretations for educators. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 20, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.1 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, we're on principle 14 today, which is Commit to Transformation. So I'll just start by outlining the principle itself. So Commit to Transformation - "clearly define top management's commitment to continual improvement of quality and its obligation to implement the 14 principles, plan and take action to put everyone in the organization to work to accomplish the transformation. Transformation is everyone's job. Start with education for all and positions of leadership." So, basically, we've been through these 14 principles, and the final one is, put it into action, basically. So I think a good place to start is just remembering or recalling what does Deming mean by transformation? And he's saying transformation is a change in state from one thing to another. So we're going from one thing to something completely new, and there's these 14 principles that help us get us there. 0:01:34.9 JD: And of course, when Deming was talking, he was talking about the prevailing system of management and changing into this new system of management and about this sort of, older version, this prevailing style from 30 years ago, which still is the prevailing style today. He said something that was really interesting. He said, it's a modern invention that cedes competition between people, teams, departments, students, schools, universities. And so when... What he is really saying is that when you transform your organization, you work together as a system. And he is advocating for cooperation and transformation. And I think of course, people are gonna say, yes, absolutely, we need to cooperate. And that's, that's the way that everybody wins. But in reality, I think that's not always what's happening in organizations because I think what you need in order to go about this switch is what Deming called Profound Knowledge. 0:02:41.5 JD: And most people don't have an understanding of, of what that is. So what happens I think is that the prevailing style of management, it's rooted in those management myths we've talked about before we started the principles. And it's sort of this false foundation for your organization. But that's where I think most people, people are. And so part of this commitment is then if we're gonna commit to transformation, there's some things that leaders have to realize, and then there's some steps you have to take if you're gonna sort of go down this path. I think the things that you have to realize as a leader, and these are things that are true for me as I continue this process and my organization is number one, there's gonna be a struggle. There's gonna be this struggle over every one of the 14 principles because it's so different from what we're doing today. 0:03:39.1 JD: I think another thing we're gonna have to realize is that this can't be one or two people at your organization. The entire leadership structure at your organization, it's gonna have to be educated in this new way of thinking, and then you're gonna have to bring along the entire organization. And this can be a challenge because if you are the person doing this at your organization, you very well may be fairly new to this new way of thinking, this new philosophy yourself, unless you've brought in someone externally to help you through this. And even if you do that probably for a good portion of the time, you're gonna have to be leading this before you may be feeling like an expert yourself. And that was definitely true in my case. But I think the emphasis in this initial introduction is that you gotta get that system's view and you have to help people understand the theory of variation. 0:04:43.0 JD: So that has to be sort of initial part of that introduction. And then of course, you have to take your organizational context into account and so how this sort of rolls out or plays out, it's certainly gonna vary by size of organization, by organizational type. But the good thing is, is regardless of size or type of organization, industry, sector, whatever, Dr. Deming offered several steps to get started in this process. So I think maybe as a start to how you commit to the transformation, if you wanna go down this route, it might be helpful to sort of outline those steps first. 0:05:24.8 AS: Definitely. And it just, the idea of everybody, being committed to the transformation, like this isn't something where you can say, well, maintenance department doesn't wanna do it. [chuckle] 0:05:36.4 JD: Right. 0:05:38.3 AS: Or the third grade teachers don't wanna do it, but the sixth grade do. So that's... Of course things can start in kind of piecemeal as they they go, but it is a true transformation. The other thing that's interesting is if you have a situation where you have been through a transformation as a unit at a school or as a company, it's also possible that a new person could come in and destroy that transformation real fast. And I have an example of a company that I've experience with where they had implemented the Deming principles to an extreme level, and the CEO resigned eventually. He was older, a new one came in and he said, I'm not in that school, I'm not in that camp. I got a new idea. I got a different idea. And it went right back to the prevailing system of management. 0:06:35.9 JD: Wow. That's really interesting. On the first point, I think, you're not necessarily gonna get all the departments or everybody at once. Obviously it's gonna be a process. On the second point, I think that actually is a good segue into step one because basically what he says, and I've translate this for education environment or education audience, but he basically says the school board and the superintendent have to study the 14 principles. Understand them, agree on a strategic direction, and then make a deliberate decision to adopt and implement the new philosophy, so why bring this up now? As I follow on to your comment there is that it seems to me that well, assuming that this was a company that had a board, then what that board should have done is include something about the System of Profound Knowledge and the job description for the new CEO. That's interesting that they didn't make that a point of emphasis. 0:07:41.5 AS: I think what's fascinating to me about it is that I think on the one hand, cooperation and working together and not living in an environment of fear is kind of our normal state, I would argue, but society just pushes us in so many different ways, that all of a sudden you find yourself in a very different state. And another example of that is how KPIs have taken Thailand in particular by storm, and now all of a sudden you have people who have been very cooperative in the way that they work together, all of a sudden pitted against each other, and it's so painful for them, because it's not the way that they naturally operate. 0:08:33.5 JD: Interesting. 0:08:35.3 AS: And so yeah, it's just... I think you gotta work. And I guess the thing you're saying about the board is that you really gotta work to make sure that this is something precious, and you could lose it in a blink of an eye if you don't... 0:08:52.4 JD: Yeah, yeah, and I'm not hiring a CEO obviously, but I have started including... I don't use System of Profound Knowledge, I don't use that terminology when I write job descriptions for people on my team, but what I do say is, what we're looking for is someone that can think in systems, understand variation and data, run small experiments to find out what works and do that with sort of like while working with people in a cooperative fashion, so I've sort of incorporated the four elements of the System of Profound Knowledge in the job descriptions for people that I'm hiring on my team, so then when I actually do use System of Profound Knowledge, describe the elements once they're on board, it's not a surprise 'cause it was a part of that hiring process. And part of that, even the job description itself, but step one basically is so that, you know, if you do have it at your organization, it includes both board and sort of the senior leadership being bought into that philosophy and that's not a guarantee, but at least if both components have that then if that CEO moves on, maybe it's more likely to continue on in your organization. 0:10:10.4 JD: That's step one. Step two is interesting, Deming basically said that the board and the senior leader or the school board and the superintendent in my case, must feel he said a "burning satisfaction", sorry, "burning dissatisfaction" with past procedures and a strong desire to transform their management approach, so it's almost like you almost have to be hitting your head against the wall, you have to be looking for something, because what he goes on to say is that you have to have the courage to break with tradition, even to the point of exile among peers, as you're going through this transformation process, because from an outsider looking in, if you're adopting the Deming philosophy, much of the stuff is gonna look so different that people are gonna be asking you, what exactly are you doing? And this has happened repeatedly. Not, not, I don't think that to that extent that I've been exiled, but for sure people will be like, well, I don't understand why you're just not setting a goal, just tell people what the goal is and then let them get out of the way and let them achieve it. That's not the approach with the Deming philosophy. So you have to... 0:11:33.2 JD: Again, for me, it wasn't exile, but constant pushback, questioning, why are you saying this, why are you operating in this way? I don't get it, why don't we just tell departments what their goals are and let them all meet them, those types of things, the typical way of operating, and it does take a lot of time and energy to explain that, but that's a part of the process. 0:11:55.1 AS: It reminds me of working with alcoholics and drug addicts, generally, they don't turn around until they've hit a bottom. 0:12:04.8 JD: Yeah. Yeah. [overlapping conversation] 0:12:05.4 AS: And they have a burning desire. 0:12:05.6 JD: Learning to satisfaction. I think that's right, and I think from the standpoint of someone that's really motivated to look for something new, look for a different way of doing things, that's not all together a bad thing, that they've sort of hit rock bottom. Step three is, again, it seems common-sensical. But even here, even as I was going through this, it was sort of a reminder of a number of things that I need to do on a regular basis, and one of the things he said in step three is that once that sort of senior leadership team, the board, the superintendent, whatever that make up is that your organization is that then you have to go out and explain, whether it's through community meetings or seminars or whatever to sort of a critical mass school system staff, he said, students, parents, why you're going on this transformation, why you're... This change is necessary. And then actually educating your people across the organization, what is this philosophy, what is the System of Profound Knowledge? What are the 14 principles? What are the typical ways that we work? Why are those management myths don't work. 0:13:36.4 JD: You gotta go out and do all of these things. It's gonna be a completely new language, a completely new operating for most people, and it has to be a part of the process, bringing people along and this... I think this isn't an overnight process, obviously. Deming said no instant pudding. He generally said, I think transformation was a five to 10 year process, depending on the size of your organization, but I've definitely found that to be true. There's fits and starts, there are some things that you seem to be able to sort of put in place pretty quickly, and then there's other things where there's a couple steps forward, a couple steps back, and you gotta bring people along, people turn over, you gotta re-educate those types of things. So it's a process. It's definitely a process. 0:14:27.4 AS: I was thinking about. I can't remember whether I heard Dr. Deming said that or whether it's somebody, or I read it or somebody told me, but that somebody asked him, "How long has this transformation take?" And he said, "Well, it can take as long as 10 years or as short as 10 years." 0:14:49.8 JD: [laughter] Yeah, so no matter what. It's a significant amount of time. There's no doubt about it. Step four, he basically says that every job and every activity within the school system or your organization is a part of this process that can be improved. And he talks about using flow diagrams for important processes within your organization so that people can see that this is about optimizing that whole system, and not the individual stages. But he really wanted people to see visually, even if it's just a simple sort of flow diagram, how one stage connects to other stages for us, maybe it's the teaching and learning process going from kindergarten to first to second to third grade. 0:15:37.3 JD: That again, seems obvious that that should be how the system works, what I think is less typical and common is actually doing activities from a systems thinking lens, where you are making sure people understand that the kindergarten teacher is also serving the first grade teaching team in addition to the students and families in their classroom and simple things like we have two elementary schools, two middle schools, do the middle school principals leave their school at some point and go to the elementary schools on their side of town and introduce themselves to the fifth graders, so things as simple as that is what I'm talking about. 0:16:28.8 JD: There are lots of other things. For sure. But how often does that happen? In some places, it may be fairly typical, in other places, it's not happening at all, but in the case, even where it's happening, do you explain why it is that you're doing this activity. Are people making that connection that they're part of a bigger system. I once consulted at a very small rural school district here in Ohio, and when we talked about systems, they just had two buildings, they had a sort of an elementary building and then a seven through twelve building. And talking to people, they said, I've never been to the high school - an elementary teacher, I've never been to the high school. And so people may say, Well, that seems strange. But when you were in the school system, it is very difficult sometimes to get out, so you actually have to make it... The leader has, or the leaders have to facilitate this, bring this about... There has to be some coordination of efforts, so that's step four. I think step five is you have to teach and then utilize the Plan-Do-Study Act cycle. You have to use it as a procedure to learn how to improve the organization's processes. 0:17:48.1 JD: I think that we've talked to your... And the Deming community is familiar with the Plan-Do-Study Act cycle, PDSA cycle, but most people aren't. Most people don't have this... Some people might call it sort of like a scientific thinking approach to testing ideas and see if they work, but most people don't approach change like that. They just try something, there's no system for collecting data, a lot of times it's just sort of a mass implementation, there's no process for testing on a small scale, seeing if it works, getting feedback on a short time frame, like a week or two weeks or three weeks, and then trying that next test. So that's, that's in terms of putting the Deming philosophy into action, I think that's a critical part using the PDSA cycle. 0:18:44.0 AS: Yeah, I'm just thinking about my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, and we're just about to start our round 13. And so having taught it 12 times before, but part of our PDSA, part of our process of understanding the cycle is that, at the end of every bootcamp, every single student gives us their recommendations for improvement. And we do it through a survey where they're all excited at that moment in time, because they're at the end of the process, but they've gotta go through the survey. And they give some great ideas, and then we capture all that into a document, and then we go through it and we see there's some ideas that just seem like obvious we should have implemented that a long time ago, or we knew. And then, so we say, okay, how do we implement this? But then there's others that are also a question. Right now, one of the ideas is to do one of our class sessions per week as a live session. 0:19:52.4 AS: And it's the feedback session where students get feedback, and in that case, people from outside can watch it. And it has some benefits. There's a marketing angle to it for us, but also, there is the excitement of showcasing your work and all that. But on the other hand, it could be terrifying and it could be that it doesn't do what we think. So in the end, we asked what is it that we think we would want from this as an outcome? And then we said, why don't we just try it one night in week four? And so we've set up that we're gonna do it on one night, we're gonna prep them ahead of time, and we're gonna see how it goes. And if it produces the effect that we want, which is, we think it's gonna up the intensity in, all of that, that it's gonna work. But if not, then we'll abandon it. And so that's a little bit of our little PDSA thinking on how do we test out an idea and see the result of it? 0:21:00.5 JD: Yeah, I love that. I love that because it's not... We're gonna just do this new thing in our course. We got this feedback, we're gonna just do it. We're gonna actually test it on a very short cycle, one session and get the feedback back right away to see if this works. And if it does, we're gonna do more of it. And what's likely gonna happen is you're probably gonna learn something, and you're probably gonna have to sort of change the approach a little bit, and you're gonna do it again and again and again until this is... Assuming the feedback is positive, then you'll do more and more of it. And, you know, if it doesn't work, then you'll learn that in a very quick, easy fashion and you'll know not to do, you know, more of that thing in your course. 0:21:44.2 JD: So I think that's the exact type of thinking that Deming was trying to get us to do, to improve our organizations, versus this sort of plan, plan, plan. We're planning these grand changes, then we put them in place, and then they don't work out like we thought, and then all of a sudden, we've had this significant investment in time and/or resources and sunk costs. And maybe we even keep doing it because we feel like we can't make a change at that point. So that sounds... 0:22:12.1 AS: Iterate, iterate. 0:22:12.2 JD: Iterate. Yep. Small, small, small test of change. So that was step five is use the PDSA cycle. Step six I really love, he says, Deming says, "Transformation is everyone's job." So no matter who you are in the school...
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Start Where You Are: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 15)
02/06/2024
Start Where You Are: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 15)
In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about where and how to start using your new knowledge when you're learning Deming. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today in episode 15 is Start Where You Are. Bill, take it away. 0:00:25.0 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And for our audience, you may notice there's a different background. This is not a green screen. This is actually a bedroom at my in-laws in upstate New York. Hey, Andrew, I've been listening to some of the podcasts, and I've collected some data on each of them. Would you like to see it? 0:00:53.0 AS: Yeah, definitely. 0:00:54.2 BB: I've got a control chart, I've got a control chart for each of the 14 sessions for how many times I say, holy cow. 0:01:02.9 AS: Holy moly. 0:01:04.4 BB: In each episode. Yeah, and the process is stable. [laughter] So I say holy cow, I think the average is 2.2, and the upper control limit is... I'm just kidding. 0:01:25.4 AS: You're a sick man. 0:01:27.7 BB: But I think outside of this podcast, I don't know if I use that expression. And I don't know where it comes from, I just, it must be... 0:01:37.7 AS: Did you grow up around cows? You said you're near where you grew up. 0:01:44.4 BB: Yeah, I am staying at my wife's sister's place. And my wife's father, when I met her, had cows in his backyard. And we used to chase the cows. When they got out, we would chase them. And let me tell you, they move fast. [laughter] And I came down several times, severe cases of poison ivy, trying to herd this one cow that was always escaping. And I thought, oh, I'll tell my father, let me go out and I can scare this cow back. Now, no the cow got the best of me. I got covered with mud and went home with poison ivy. Those things, they move fast. So that's my only personal experience with cows. [laughter] 0:02:33.5 AS: Did the cows ever go to a nearby church? 0:02:38.9 BB: No. 0:02:39.2 AS: To become holy. 0:02:40.1 BB: That's a good point? I don't... Yeah, how do those words tie together? I don't know. 0:02:43.4 AS: I don't know. 0:02:45.4 BB: I have to go find out who I got that from. So what I thought we'd talk about today is this, Start Where You Are, Start Where You Are. And first share where I... One context for that expression was the first time I saw Russ Ackoff speak, well, first where I met Russ. I had seen him speak before at a Deming conference, but I didn't get a chance to talk with him. But I saw him a few years later, and he was doing a one-day program in Los Angeles as part of a management series that he would do around the country. And there are about, I don't know, 150 people in the room, 25-30 from across Boeing sites in Southern California that I had invited. And at the end of the day, with about an hour to go, Russ says, okay, I'm going to give you a break. I'm going to give you time to formulate some questions and we'll spend the last hour discussing wherever you want to go. Well, I took the time to go up to Russ and ask him a couple of questions. I had met him earlier in the day. He knew that most people in the audience were there from across Boeing and that I had arranged them. 0:04:06.3 BB: And so I had a chance to talk with him. So I went up and said, I said I've got two questions for you that are not relevant to the audience, but I'd like to ask you one-on-one. He said, sure, go ahead. Well, no, I said knowing that you've known Dr. Deming for, since the early '50s, I said, over that period of time, what do you think he would say he learned from you that would stand out? And vice versa, what did you learn from him over those years that you would say stands out? And he looks at me and he says, well, I don't, I don't know what he learned from me. Then he says, then he answers the question and he says, he says, I think Ed, and he liked to say Ed, 'cause he liked to brag that, yeah, everybody calls him Dr. Deming. I call him Ed. I've known him since 1950. 0:05:05.2 BB: But Russ, by the comparison, if I ever introduced him to you as Dr. Ackoff, he would say, Andrew, call me Russ. So he says, relative to what he learned, what Dr. Deming learned from him, first he says, "well, I don't know what he learned from me. But I think his understanding of systems is very implicit and I helped him develop a better explicit understanding." And I think that makes a lot of sense. I think Dr. Deming's understanding of systems is a lot of what he talks about in The New Economics is what he learned from Russ. It's a very, I think you know when Dr. Deming shared the Production as a Viewed as a System that flow diagram in 1950, he always talks about systems, what comes around, goes around. But Russ was a master at systems from an academic perspective, and that was not Dr. Deming's forte. Now, when it comes to variation, that was Dr. Deming's academic forte. And that's where I would find Russ's understanding of variation, I would find to be very implicit, whereas Deming's was explicit. But anyway, he said he thought it gave him a better understanding of systems, that it was very implicit, very intuitive, and it helped him develop a better, a more academic sense of it. So I said, okay, so what did he learn... What did you learn from him? And he says, "well, I never gave that much thought to the whole quality movement.” 0:06:38.7 BB: “But he... I got a better, a warmer feeling of it." Russ would talk about quality of work life, and there's parallels with what Russ has talks about quality of work life that resemble Dr. Deming's work very well. And I'll give you one short story which ties in well with the Deming philosophy. Russ says he was at an Alcoa plant once upon a time, and he happened to be there on a day in which two workers were honored on stage in front of a bunch of coworkers with an award. Now, we both know what Dr. Deming thinks about giving people awards. So, but the fun part of the story is, Russ says he went up to these two guys afterwards, after they came down off the stage and he says, hey. And he says, and Russ was so precise with language. I mean, he walks up to these two guys and he says, ready Andrew? He says to them, I caught them at their point of maximum puffery. I mean, have you ever heard anyone use the word puffery... 0:07:56.7 AS: No. 0:07:57.1 BB: In a sentence? So he says, I walk up to these two guys and I said, I caught them at their point of maximum puffy. Right? And then he punctures them with the following question. "For how long have you two known about that idea that you were awarded for?" And they looked down at their feet and he said, "Come on, for, for how long have you had that idea before you shared it with management?" And they said, "20 years." And then Russ says, why did you wait so long to share it? And Russ says, he says to him, "Those sons of bitches never asked." 0:08:51.8 BB: And so, and Russ would talk about that as a quality of work life issue. Now, I've heard him tell that story many times, and I once asked him, I said, so what was the idea they came up with? And he said they would take these four foot wide rolls of aluminum foil off a machine, and these are the types of rolls that get used to make aluminum cans. And the roll may be, you know, so it's four foot tall. It's a, it could be easily a foot in outer diameter. And he said when they, when they're taken off a machine, they stand them on the concrete floor. And then to move them, the workers would tilt them back a little bit and then roll them. 0:09:43.9 AS: Which damages... 0:09:47.0 BB: The edge. 0:09:47.7 AS: Yeah. 0:09:47.8 BB: Exactly. So their idea was to, instead of putting them on a the concrete floor, to put them on a piece of plywood. So, what Russ saw was, which very much resembles a... The prevailing system of management where you're gonna wait 20 years before somebody asks you a question, until there's a program, until there's an award, then I'll come forward. All right, so let's go back to the audience. So I went up and asked Russ those questions, and now he is fielding questions from the audience. And one question really struck me and he says, Dr. Deming, not Dr. Deming, the guy says, "Dr. Ackoff," he said, "what you're talking about all day makes a lot of sense. And most organizations have little understanding of it, where you're just talking about, you know, managing interactions, the system, whatnot." He says, "but don't we have to wait for senior management to get on board before we do something with it? 0:10:54.2 BB: Don't we have to wait?" Right. And I'm listening to this, and I don't know what Russ is gonna say, but I'm hearing where the guy's coming from. And Russ turns right at him and he says, "Andrew, John, Sally, you have to start where you are." And I told him later, I said, I could've run up and given him a big hug, because if you're gonna sit back and wait for your management to get on board, you know how long that's gonna take? And so I just love that perspective of starting where you are. Now, let's flip to Dr. Deming, and a great quote that I like to use with students and clients with his work is "The smaller the system, the easier to manage. The bigger the system, the more complicated, but the more opportunities." Right? Now we'll go back to Russ. 0:11:54.0 BB: Russ would say, if you're a school teacher, like our daughter's an eighth grade teacher, start in your classroom. Why? Because you're not gonna start at the elementary school level or the junior high's, that's bigger than you. You're not gonna smart start smaller than that because then that's minimizing what your impact could be, but start where you are and then expand. Now, what that also means is it may be that when you start where you are, as you expand the size of the system, you might need to go back and change what you did now that you're looking at a bigger system. 0:12:37.8 BB: And so that's a great likelihood that what is optimum for you in the classroom may not be optimum when you're starting to think about the elementary school. But even if you start at the elementary school, what is optimum may not be optimum if you have the school district. So there's, no matter where you start, there needs to be an appreciation that in hindsight, what you did before may not be what's best for the bigger system. And the same thing applies when you're talking about integration. You know, Dr. Taguchi's loss function and the ideal value of a given characteristic, well, what I tell people is the ideal value depends upon the size of the system. And so if I'm designing two things to come together and I'm looking at the clearance between them, well, there's a clearance that makes it easy for these two things to come together if you're Andrew doing assembly. But let's say downstream of you is somebody who's using that product, you know, where that clearance is important, so the clearance that makes it easy to go together may not be the clearance that improves the functionality. 0:14:00.2 BB: And that will always be the case that you, that what is optimum where you are, may not be optimum when you expand the size of the system. So you have a few choices. One is, don't do anything. You know, for fear of making it worse, do nothing. Or, run a small scale experiment, use the PDSA model, try some things. But, that is still not a guarantee. 'Cause that small scale experiment still could be with me in my classroom and I run that experiment for a month, two months, three months. 0:14:44.4 BB: So even if I use that model, I can't know everything. And that's the... I mean, those are the complications of viewing things as a system, is to know that the system is not closed, it's open. I met a professor years ago at a conference and he had a model in his presentation that was very much a closed system. You know, they're working within this model, looking at these factors and these factors and these factors. And he went up after us. And I said, yeah, there's factors outside of that system. And he says, "Well, yeah, but we're just looking at this in scope." I said, "You have to frame it to a given size, but you know there's always the possibility that what's outside [chuckle] that you're not including, could haunt you for some time to come." And I didn't get the impression... I mean, it was almost like in engineering we talk about a free body diagram where you take whatever is your list you're looking at and you draw a line around it and you say, "That's the system I'm analyzing." 0:15:58.1 BB: But there's always a system which is bigger than that. And then again, bigger. So no matter where you start, again, and I look at the options are, if you're fearful of not including everything, well, then you're gonna do nothing. And that's easily what Deming and Ackoff were not saying. What they're saying is start where you are. Run experiments. Now, what I expect to be the beauty of a Deming-based organization, a "we" organization, is flexibility. 0:16:29.9 BB: And the flexibility is when things don't go as planned and we learn something, that we have the ability to reflect, note what we've learned, share it with as many people that we think could... would benefit from that. Get back on the horse and try again. I've worked with groups who were quite willing to do that. I worked with groups that were quite... They wouldn't get back on the horse. We were running some experiments dealing with hole machining of some small drills, you know, like on the order of a 16th of an inch, very small. And the experiment was, let's say eight... Seven different factors at two values each, eight experiments. And I don't know, they might've been machining in each experiment, 10 holes, say. And I wanted them to measure diameter of the top and the bottom of each hole, something like that. 0:17:29.3 BB: And I get the data prior to meeting with them. They sent me the data and I had enough experience running fractional factorial experimentation using Doctor Taguchi's ideas that upon first blush looking at the data, I either get a warm feeling or I get a queasy feeling. So in this case, I get a queasy feeling and there's... I'm looking at the data and immediately I knew this is... But I didn't know why. I just knew that, I'm not... And I'm wondering how am I gonna say this to them in the meeting? 'cause they're all excited. For a couple of them it wasn't their first study; they had done this before with great success. So I'm in the meeting and I'm listening and then one of them says, you know, in the experiment we're looking at starting each experiment with a new drill. And the experiments we're looking at different speeds of the drill, different cutting fluids, different parameters associated with machining these holes. And one of them says, they didn't... In hindsight, they didn't use a brand new drill for each experiment. So now I'm thinking, okay, say some more. 0:18:50.0 BB: Well, the drills we used in the experiment had all been used before and were resharpened to be like new, I mean, not new, but like new. And I said, "So say more." And then he said, "Well, when they looked at them under the microscope, the very tip of the drill was not in the center of the drill." 'Cause if you look at a drill, there's a cutting edge on the very top, you can say that near the left side or the right side. And those two cutting edges weren't the same length. So when the drill is cutting, it's not... The hole is not gonna be round, it's gonna have an oblong... So now I'm thinking, kind of explains the data. So he says, one of them say, "Can we salvage the data?" 0:19:45.3 BB: I said, no. And they said, why not? I said, because the assumption we had was that that the drills were reasonably the same. I mean, of course, even eight brand new drills are not identical, but now what you're telling me is the biggest source of variation is in the drills that we thought were the same. And that is wiping out the variation that we introduced. That's the issue, is that the signal coming from the drills that we didn't ask for is bigger than what we asked for. "So you mean we have to run all the experiments again?" 0:20:26.9 BB: And now they're, and I said, well, let me ask you this. So here's the good news. The good news is we didn't spend more time than we did on this experiment. That's the good news. I said, the good news is, we now know that the sharpening process needs to be relooked at. And as it turned out, probably the biggest thing we learned in the experiment, was that it ain't worth resharpening the drills. At that size, throw them away. But what I was hoping is that they would get back on the horse and go back to what we originally planned to do with eight brand new drills. It never happened. But we learned something, but what we learned is not what we had planned to learn. And that gets me to what I would tell people, is if you don't look, you won't find. But then you have to be willing to take the existing system and what is... 0:21:39.3 BB: Do anything, but that just means it stays the way... So if you don't look, you won't find. And if you do look, there's no guarantee. So that was a situation where I was very bummed. And every time, I mean, what I, one of the things I learned early on was preparing management and the team for such situations. 0:22:02.6 BB: That everybody was expecting, you know, a grand slam every single time. I said, no, that's not the way it works. In the real world, you try, you fail, you try, you fail, you learn, hey, you learn what we did here is that the sharpening process doesn't make sense. Had another experiment where, and I don't know which is, which was the bigger disappointment, but in the other one, there were 18 experiments with a lot of hard work, oh my God, and incredible precision as to how each of 1080 holes would be machines. So there were 1080 holes in a ring that was about eight feet in diameter. So there are holes about three tenths of an inch in this ring. The holes were all numbered one through 1080. Every hole had a different recipe. Somehow, the machinist wasn't informed of that. 0:23:08.5 BB: And the manufacturing engineer went to a meeting and he came back only to find out that the instructions, so machinists didn't know. And I said, "So, so what'd you learn?" He said "I learned not to go away to a meeting." So these things happen. Another thing I say in terms of starting where you are, my boss at one time knew I was involved in half a dozen to a dozen different Taguchi studies. And he calls me in one day and he says, "So how many studies are you working on?" I said, half a dozen to a dozen. He said, "Which of them is gonna have the biggest improvement?" 0:23:55.8 BB: So like the biggest... So I said, "So you mean like the biggest percent gain?" He says, "Yeah, which one's gonna have the biggest percent gain?" I said, "I guarantee you that we'll be smarter about everyone after we're done, I guarantee you that." He says, "But which one's gonna have the biggest percent improvement?" 0:24:17.2 BB: I looked straight at him, I said, if I knew the answer to that question, would I be working here? I'd be doing what you do, Andrew, I mean, financial forecasting. But he's like, "Well, don't give me that." I said, "I don't know which is gonna have the biggest gain, but I know we're going to be smarter. And I know all the things we try that...
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Go Beyond Skills Training: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 19)
01/30/2024
Go Beyond Skills Training: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 19)
What's the difference between education and training? Why is the distinction important? How does the Deming lens offer a new perspective on teacher effectiveness? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about why it's important to go beyond skills training and encourage education for personal growth. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: Here we go. My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 19 and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.2 John Dues: Andrew, good to be back. Yeah, principle 13 today, Institute a Vigorous Program of Education. I'll just start by reading the Principle, "Institute a vigorous program of education and encourage self-improvement for everyone. The school system needs not just good people, but people that are improving with education. Advances in teaching and learning processes will have their roots in knowledge." It's interesting, when I was reading about sort of this particular principle, Dr. Deming took this actually pretty far when he was asked where would you draw the line? And he basically said, I would allow any educational pursuits that people are interested in. So that was his sort of take on this particular principle. But I think it's maybe the first thing is to differentiate between training and education. When he was talking about those things, we talked about instituting training on the job back when we talked about principle six, and he basically said the training is for a skill and a skill is something that's finite because it ends when performance has reached a stable state for a person when thinking about that particular skill. 0:01:51.3 JD: The differentiator with Principle 13 is that it's focused on education and it's meant for growth. And in the Deming philosophy, this is sort of a never ending process of education. So skills, so training is focused on skills, whereas education is focused on knowledge and theory. And this is really an important distinction in my mind, and you need both, training and education are complimentary components I think of an effective school system or really an effective organization in general. So I think, I mean, obviously training is important. It's something that's necessary, especially when you come into a new job. We have lots of new teachers that come to us 'cause we're a relatively young organization. And it's pretty typical for these new teachers to come even if they majored in education many times, they don't have sort of the basic classroom management skills, the basic lesson planning skills, the basic lesson delivery skills that they need to be successful in the classroom. 0:03:00.9 JD: So we have a training program, and in the absence of that training program the teachers would probably flounder or it would take a lot longer time to get their legs under them. So training is important, but we have to sort of shorten that runway. So we have to be good at training 'cause we're like a relatively young organization and we have students that come to us on average that are below grade level. And so they can't wait a long time for these sort of teachers to get up to speed. And I think we've talked about the fact that we have this sort of three week training program before the school year starts for new teachers for that reason. And so training is obviously important, very important. But I think what I've sort of come to appreciate is this idea of... And Deming stressed this, that leaders, systems leaders understand this idea of a stable system. 0:04:00.7 JD: One of the things that he said was that "The performance of anyone that can learn a skill will come to a stable state upon which further lessons will not bring improvement of performance." And this for me, reading Deming at this point in my career was really an interesting revelation because for many years I had heard sort of policymakers, education reform types sort of lament the fact that teachers improvement largely levels off in about year five of their career. Now, there has been some more recent longitudinal teacher research in terms of effectiveness over time. And basically people have found that that's not quite true. And that teaching experience is positively correlated with student achievement gains sort of across the teacher's career. But it's definitely true that the gains and effectiveness are steepest in those initial years. 0:04:55.2 JD: And so when you put those two ideas together that there's sort of this leveling off in about year five with Deming's sort of concept of stable systems, it really sort of dawned on me that it was this perfect explanation for this phenomenon. When a teacher is in their first five years there's a lot of foundational skills like the things I was talking about, like lesson planning, lesson delivery, classroom management, those basic things. There's sort of this period of rapid improvement or growth, and then it sort of levels off after you get the basics of how to be a teacher. And then after that happens, you have this... The potential for improvement sort of lies within the organization, within the system itself and not in the individual. So this really lined up with this thing I had heard for a long time, even though I think sort of it was misinterpreted. 0:05:52.0 JD: And I think a lot of those people that were talking about teacher skills leveling off after five years, they didn't have this lens of a stable system. They didn't have that part of it. And so they were saying, well, teachers aren't improving. Well, it really wasn't the teachers not improving. It was the fact that most of the capacity, like we've talked about here for improvement lies within the system itself and not the individuals. And I would also make the argument that this is not just educators, that this is other sectors as well, healthcare or whatever that thing is. 0:06:27.0 AS: Yeah. I mean, a good way of imagining that is a person who knows nothing that has the prerequisites, the education or whatever's necessary to get the job. And they know nothing about teaching and about the school system or anything that you can just imagine that so much of the initial phase is just understanding how the system, how they operate within that system to do certain tasks, which can be a process of trying to understand all of that. But then it's like they become, it's like entering the stream and then they become the stream floating down the river where everybody's kind of doing the same thing. And then you realize, okay, by this time now their, their, the amount that they can improve has been hit for some specific tasks and things like that. And then all of a sudden their output is a function of the system. 0:07:23.0 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And I think where this can really go off the rails is when people don't understand the stable state of systems. I think that, and I think a lot of the educators from reformers were sort of talking about it as if teachers were kind of replaceable because they didn't improve after those initial five years, especially 10 years ago that was sort of the common way people talked about this. And you could then sort of the next step is to draw the conclusion that experienced educators aren't that important since that improvement sort of levels off pretty early in their career. But I think that is the completely wrong conclusion to draw. I think experienced teachers are incredibly important because of the stability they provide a school. They can provide mentorship to inexperienced teachers, they have longstanding relationships with families as multiple students come through the system. 0:08:25.0 JD: That stability is really important for all those reasons, which are hopefully fairly obvious to anybody that's worked in a school. But I think even maybe more importantly is this idea that once teachers have that baseline level of knowledge and skills, they can run a classroom, they can deliver a well-planned lesson. The reason that it then becomes important for improvement to have those folks is because once those basic things are in place, now we can actually start to work on the system where the real potential for improvement lies. And I think that was a point that was missed or glossed over in a lot of those conversations about education reform and this idea of the teacher skills leveling off after year five. 0:09:23.8 AS: Mm-hmm. One of the the things about education that I have a story that's... I guess one of the conclusions is that the next level of improvement of the system oftentimes comes from outside the system. And that's where education takes the mind into another space. 0:09:40.9 JD: Yeah. 0:09:49.2 AS: From that other space, they're getting knowledge and theories of what's going on out there. And I had an example, John, that was... When I was the head of research at Citibank, and I had been head of research before taking care of a team of analysts, and analysts are always late in their reports, they're writing long reports about whether to buy or sell a company. They're trying to gather as much information, talk to the company, things get delayed. They set their deadlines and then they... The job of a head of research is juggling those delays so that the sales team and the clients need an idea day. And it's always the case that you're juggling around and okay, we don't have something this day, let's make something up with what we've got. Okay, this guy couldn't produce on that day, but he's gonna come in on Monday. So I felt pretty good about my skills at managing that process. And then I got a job at the number one foreign, the number one broker, let's say, or investment bank at that time in Asia called CLSA. And when I talked to them, I asked them how do you handle the flow and how bad is it here [chuckle] with the analysts being late? And they said, the analysts are never late. 0:11:13.3 AS: And I was like, that's impossible. My whole career it's been about handling the analysts being late. And they said, no, analysts are never late here. And I was like, how are you doing that? And they're like, well, we have a three week plan ahead. Everybody knows it. You know your day. There is no excuse, there's no shifting, there's nothing, it has to be delivered on that day. So it's up to you to kind of bring your project to a head so that you're ready to present on that day. And if you have some kind of major setback or problem, talk to another person and switch the day with them and sort it out. And every single day we had great stuff coming out. And I would've never, I mean, I was operating at a certain level thinking I was really knocking it out of the park, 'cause I was accommodating. I was careful, I was thoughtful. I understood the pressures that people were feeling. I was doing my best, but I didn't have a knowledge that it could be a very different way of doing it. And that's where I think about going outside of your own system to observe and learn and see. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, [laughter] Okay. And that's where I feel like what you're talking about, about the education aspect is really the most amazing part. 0:12:33.2 JD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That actually... I hadn't planned to talk about this, but I've been reading recently about the... Called the... Well, there's a book called Toyota Kata and Kata is from martial arts. It's the various movements that you have to do sort of repeated deliberate practice so you can sort of, they become ingrained in your muscle memory. Well, the same idea is in place in Toyota. They call... Well, they don't, but the author called it... They don't call... They don't have a name for it, but he sort of observed it and gave it the Improvement Kata name Mike Rother. Yeah, there it is. Yep. There it is. That one. And one of the things that was interesting, and it kind of reminded me of this as you were talking, is that part of the improvement kata is there's a sort of a target that's aligned with the organization's vision that guides anything that the folks in the organization are working towards. 0:13:27.0 JD: And so there's always a target condition. There's an understanding of sort of where each individual is and the departments are. And they're always setting a new target on the way to that sort of vision target and running these experiments all the time. And they constantly set those targets so that they are ambitious but within reach. And then they're coached on the way repeatedly. And in that way they're sort of always moving forward the organization. And so I think of when you've changed investment banks and you're at this new bank and they're saying, Hey, this thing is possible, it's possible to do this. Here's the way we do that. Here's how we work towards that. And so you can imagine a place like Toyota being so successful, because if everybody has got this mindset, this scientific thinking where they're constantly moving towards a target and there's a method for doing so, [chuckle] that is an incredible education right there if you're an employee working in an environment like that. So that just made me think of the Toyota Kata. 0:14:41.4 AS: Yeah. And it's a great example of how reading books is part of education because you're getting exposed to new ideas and exploring and thinking about things. And that's where, well, think about the repetition in let's say a martial arts as an example. And when Dr. Deming talks about opening up education to everything for everybody, there's something to learn in almost everything out there. Like if it is about... What is it about those repetitions and why is that important and could that benefit our business? And he talked about painting and other things, you know? Like education very widely can bring you new ideas that can come back to improve your system. 0:15:27.3 JD: Yeah. And I think you have to invest in that sort of broader education, 'cause it's sort of an investment in the future, you know? Especially right now, things are changing fast. And you could have the best training program in the world, but if you are not also sort of looking out for what's next beyond that, to adapt to whatever's changing in your environment... A good example is this, we have a much better understanding of cognitive science than we did 20 years ago. And so if we didn't adapt... If we didn't sort of learn that and then adapt that and sort of include that learning in our training system that we're gonna start falling behind pretty quickly. And I think this can get... This may be part of the most important responsibility of a leader on the learning front. 0:16:28.5 JD: Because what I also see is that education leaders are often getting enticed by many, many fads that sort of come along. And so how to sort of actually latch onto something that represents a potential advantage, that's a real important skillset to have. And I don't think... That's a key... I think a key function of systems leaders is sort of to know what to let go of or what not to latch onto at all and what to sort of sink resources into because if you're gonna go do these educational pursuits, you're obviously gonna have to sink time and money resources into these things. And so being able to differentiate between what is good and what is bad is a real key skill. 0:17:22.6 AS: And one of the things about Toyota is it's like the ultimate Asian family business. And although it's now a big public company, the largest automaker in the world, and the family's ownings in the company is relatively low, it still has the influence of the family. And I was thinking about another huge company that I know of in Thailand here that shifted its focus away from, let's say, Deming in this case, to when a new CEO came in, he said, well, there's a different way and this is my way. And one of the things that's interesting about what Toyota's done, you know, Toyota gets a lot of blame for being slow to progress and stubborn and all of that, but man, they have built a machine and a... You just can't change the direction of that quickly, you really nurture what has been developed and how do you not just throw away. I was presenting to my students last night in my finance class here at Sasin School of Management in Thailand and I was showing them the DuPont Analysis in the world of finances where you break down the return on equity of a company. And I explained why they call it the DuPont Analysis, and that's because the DuPont company bought shares in General Motors in 20- or 1912 or something like that and they instituted this method of financial controls on General Motors. And I said to my students in passing, General Motors has been going bankrupt since 1912. [laughter] 0:19:00.9 AS: And it's like every... It's not a cumulative level of learning. And that's where I feel like Toyota, what Toyota has achieved is a cumulative learning process. 0:19:16.9 JD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, and it's a part of their DNA. I think certainly there have been challenges as they've grown across Europe and the United States and the world really. And a lot of the challenges that I understand is because people... That improvement Kata is sort of combined with a coaching Kata, like an approach to coaching and managers at different levels coach folks that are sort of a level down from them. And everybody in the organization, especially early, had sort of this mentor-mentee relationship. And so part of the challenge with growth was the fact that there are only so many of these folks that are grounded in this scientific thinking in the coaching part of this. And so that was a challenge as they grew, you know, in California and Kentucky and other places across the world. 0:20:17.9 JD: They had to build this coaching capacity across all of these new production facilities and other types of facilities across the world. So... But I think that what I really like about this principle...I, you know, if push came to shove, I started this by talking about Deming would basically allow almost anything when it came to allowable educational pursuits. And I think I would be much closer to that than I would be to limit those things. I think that is a really... That's a good sort of approach to take as a leader. I think here where I am at United Schools Network, one of the things that I was able to do was go take an improvement advisor course which required significant resources and time and money at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. 0:21:19.6 JD: And so someone could look at that very easily and say, well, why are you an educator going to a healthcare organization? And I think it's one of those things where people maybe don't realize that the Deming philosophy and some of the continual improvement stuff, it's sector agnostic. And so when you can learn the philosophy, the methods, the techniques, you can bring them back to your own organization. So I think had I not gone down this path to study Deming, I wouldn't have made it to IHI and then bring this stuff back to my organization. I think it's benefited our organization in lots of ways, even though that might not have been immediately apparent to folks, you know, initially. 0:22:09.8 AS: So how would we wrap this up for the listeners to make sure that they truly understand the idea of vigorous education, self-improvement, this type of stuff? 0:22:14.0 JD: Yeah. I mean, for me the main point is that systems leaders should really encourage...
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Remove Barriers To Joy In Learning: Deming in Schools Case Study (part 18)
01/23/2024
Remove Barriers To Joy In Learning: Deming in Schools Case Study (part 18)
How do grading systems, teacher ratings, school rankings, and other programs like those create barriers to learning? Should we eliminate them entirely, or do they have their place? John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about how to preserve joy in learning. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 18, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:31.3 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. In this episode, we're doing the 12th principle. So we're on 12 of 14, remove barriers to joy in work and learning. So that's a certainly a concept that we've talked about, but I'll start by just reading the principle. "Principle 12, remove barriers that rob educators and students of their right to joy in work and learning. This means working to abolish the system of grading student performance, the annual rating of staff and accountability rating systems for schools and school systems. The responsibility of all educational leaders must change from sheer numbers to quality." There's two really great quotes I like from Deming. One on joy in learning where he says, "Our schools must preserve and nurture the yearning for learning that everyone is born with. Joy in learning comes not so much from what is learned, but from learning." 0:01:24.4 JD: And then for joy in work, he says, "Joy in the job comes not so much from the result, the product, but from contribution to optimization of the system in which everybody wins." So he is saying basically the same thing in those two quotes, but he is talking about the contributions to the process is where the joy comes from, not necessarily the outcome. And so much of the time, we're focused on the outcome, be it the work product in a work setting or the test scores perhaps in a, in a school setting. But he's really talking about what is that process that you're contributing to? And, and you know, how do you feel because of that, those contributions you're making? I think whether you're talking about joy in work or joy in learning, sort of unifying theme in principle 12 as it's, this concern with the pride of workmanship, whether that's the workmanship of making a product or in the learning that you're doing or something you're doing as a result of that learning, like a report or a poem that you've written or whatever. 0:02:31.6 JD: And so I think as a result, it's barriers that get in the way of joy in work and learning. And you know, maybe one of the most important obstacles to improvement of the quality of our education systems in the United States. And you know, just like, sort of, it says in the outline of the principle, there's really sort of three levels that these barriers exist at. You got the students and the grading of students. And then you have oftentimes some type of rating system, evaluation system for teachers, for principals, perhaps sometimes those rating systems use test scores or other similar metrics. And then that third level is, you have the actual schools or school districts themselves that are being rated within these state accountability systems. So you sort of have, you know, these three levels. And then there's this common problem at all three levels, regardless of which one. And that's basically this thing that we've talked about repeatedly, where you under-appreciate the contribution of the system to the performance of the people, whether you're talking about students, teachers or, or you know, school systems. So I thought that's where we could focus today. 0:03:49.8 AS: Yeah, you know it strikes right at the heart of everything that we believe, as particularly as Americans, but certainly spreading that around the world, that it's all about measuring, ranking, tracking. You know, when a parent puts a kid in school, what do they want to know? What was their grades? When a student's in trouble, it's 'cause of grades. And what a student wants to know, like everybody wants to know and rely on grades. So it's just so, it's so difficult. You know, I was talking with someone else talking about why Dr. Deming's philosophy hasn't been adopted as as widely as you'd hope. And I think it's part of, it's just because it's just sacred, the sacred heart of everything that we believe. And if you can measure it, you can track it, you can feed that back and give it to people and show them where they are and you deserve where you are based upon your efforts, and you've gotta move yourself from there. That is so ingrained. And I'm just curious, like what's the hope from your side that this can be seen. I think it can be seen if you stop and look, but it's so hard to implement. 0:05:18.7 JD: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think one thing that can be confusing is obviously Deming was a statistician. So he is, has no problem with using data to improve the quality of our schools or even an individual lesson that a teacher delivers, gathering some data on how students are doing and tracking that over time. There's no problem with that. There's no problem with that I don't think at the school level either. I think the problem comes in when you create a reward and sanction system around that data. And I think that's, Deming actually think he indicated that, that system of reward or sanction on the other side is one of the main constraints from being able to develop this win-win culture. Whatever level of the system that you're talking about, that student level, the educator level, or the school and system level. They're, all those grading systems are really reward and sanction systems. And I think when you take the data and use it in that way, that's when I think Deming is talking about the real problems, the manipulation, you know, the competition for top spots that leads to all kinds of strange behaviors, those types of things. That's really where he's focusing most of his attention. 0:06:49.1 AS: And if you had no constraints from governments or other outsiders and you were setting up a new school right now with zero constraints, the only thing was absolutely optimizing the learning of young people. How would you handle this - grading? How would you handle all of this? Would you do it in a different way? Would you just do it and de-emphasize it and say, oh, well, it's not so critical? It's just information feedback, or would you teach them how to use that data like Deming may, or like how he uses data? Or would you say, no, that's just that there's no redeeming benefit, if we're not required to do it, then we wouldn't do it? 0:07:43.4 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think it'd be some combination of the things that you mentioned. I mean, on just from a practical sense, Demings certainly understood that we live within the world that we live within. And so if that hypothetical school that you're talking about is a public school and I was in Ohio, I would obviously give the state test and take whatever data I could use and use that in a positive way that I can. So I'm gonna do the thing that I'm caught on to do as a educator in a public school system. So I wouldn't opt out or anything like that. I think in terms of how I set up internal systems, I think, ..GAP. Yeah, I thought a lot about this but I haven't maybe put to paper exactly how I would do it. 0:08:36.2 JD: I think...I certainly would use assessments. I certainly would track how students are doing on standards. I would involve students in doing so they could track that over time. In terms of grading, I don't know exactly what I would do. I would definitely de-emphasize that to the extent that I possibly could so that the emphasis is on the learning and not on the grades. That would be a key sort of guiding principle. There's certain things that I think are outlandish that schools do, where they do pep rallies or pep rallies or something like that to, as the buildup to state testing comes, I find those things ridiculous. So I would stay away from doing anything like that. Kind of how we've treated state tests in the past, even prior to discovering Deming was matter of fact. 0:09:47.2 JD: Like, this is something we're preparing for, we're gonna do our best. We're gonna try our hardest, we're gonna learn from the experience, we're gonna work hard on it, and then we're gonna move on. You know, that's the type of mentality we had. In terms of like the mindset of the school I led, there was a poster in the hallway that said, you get it wrong and then you get it right. So that was the mindset is, we learn from our mistakes. We talked about creating a culture of air in our classrooms so that students felt, you know, safe, I guess is the word I would use to, or willing to call out when they didn't understand something, or they did make a mistake, and then we work together to rectify that. So that's a little bit a long-winded answer. I don't have it all worked out. I have some ideas, but I think overall using data is fine. I think it's, when you get into the rating and the ranking, that's where the problems and the rewards and the sanctions, I think that's where the problems generally come from. 0:10:50.8 AS: Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of unconstrained in my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, because I'm not under any, there's no supervision of what I'm doing by anybody. It's just me trying to make a better experience for the students. And the idea of grading never really came into my process. It's interesting, John, that one guy who was a student of mine, he graduated and then I hired him to work with me to take care of the other students. One of the first things he did was come up with a matrix and a grading system, [laughter] just because that's what he knew. And now he uses that system and he has little points that he gives. That system doesn't have any connection to whether you're gonna pass the class or not, or there's no ranking or anything related to it. It's just that, okay, you only got six points out of 10, which means you haven't really done the assignment. He's clearly defined what are the things that you need to have done? And then he goes through and says, did you do them? So it's definitely a, I think it's a good feedback mechanism. 0:12:08.4 JD: Yeah. 0:12:10.2 AS: But, you know, whether it's valuable. I think what I'm trying to do is create the experience that young people are learning how to value a company through the process of learning and discovery and, and discussion and, and, and going online and going through my material, asking me questions, and then demonstrating, showing different things. And then they're slowly putting those pieces together. And I can also see that it takes time. You know, it can't all happen in one week. We have six weeks and where they're at at the end of the six weeks is so much further along than where they were at the beginning. But I guess my point would be if I was completely unconstrained, which I am, it's just that it wouldn't be pro or con grades and ranking, it wouldn't even really exist because it's not a core part of learning. Core part of learning is providing the environment, the excitement, keeping people on track, helping them see, okay, here's what you gotta do now, see if you can do it. You know? 0:13:18.8 JD: Yeah. And I think what I was gonna do today is bring this alive. You know, we've talked about grading of students and even the performance appraisals in some of the past episodes. So what I thought we would do here is, sort of, focus on why grading schools could also be you know, a barrier to joy in work, how this might play out. So I think generally most people are now familiar with, because in the public school system, we've had various types of rating systems. You know, each state has their own. And I think it's, what's important here is to look at examine if the ratings help the public differentiate between schools that are doing a good job of educating kids and those that are not, because that's the point. 0:14:09.7 JD: Right? At least one of the points. And on its face, it sounds simple, you know, up until this year, Ohio has like an A through F grading system for schools, and there are sub components and you get an overall grade A to F. Right? And so it sounds simple. Schools with more A's are better schools, except for it's not that simple when you go beyond like a surface level analysis. So I thought it'd be helpful to just zoom in on two schools located here in Columbus. One's called Jones Middle School. It's in the Upper Arlington School District, which is close by. And then Columbus Collegiate Academy, I'll call it CCA, it's also a one of our middle schools. Both the schools serve grades six through eight. They're less than 10 miles apart here in Columbus. 0:15:03.6 JD: So they're geographically proximate. And this analysis comes from an article I wrote in 2020. So it's from a few years ago. So the results are a few years old, but you know, I think they're fairly representative of how the schools have performed over the last decade or school or so. So let's start with just the grades that the schools received. So the schools get an overall grade. Jones Middle School has an A, CCA has a B, so you know, fairly close there, but Jones outpaces. And then there's the achievement grade. And that's basically looking at all the kids' test scores, how they do overall. Jones gets a B, CCA gets a D, right? So Jones has quite a bit better performance. And then there's a progress category. So how much progress did the kids make during that particular school year? 0:15:57.9 JD: How much growth did they make? Now this is interesting now, CCA gets an A and Jones got a B. So just to recap, the overall grade for Jones was A, achievement B, progress B, for CCA overall, B achievement D, progress A. So basically a higher percentage of students at Jones begin year on grade level 'cause they have that higher achievement grade, but they don't grow as much as the students at CCA once they're there. This difference between achievement and progress grades becomes even more interesting as you start to factor in not only the school characteristics, but also the neighborhood characteristics. So let's talk about inside the school just to start with. So in terms of student population, Jones and CCA are pretty similar in terms of students with disabilities. So those kids with special education needs tend to, as a general rule score lower on standardized tests. 0:17:02.9 JD: So those populations are roughly equal, but 100% of the kids at CCA are economically disadvantaged as defined by the state. At Jones, just 2.4% of the kids are economically disadvantaged. When you look at other report card measures such as attendance, chronic absenteeism, Jones has much better rates. So 97 plus percent attendance rate, just 2% of their kids are chronically absent. At CCA 93% attendance rate, 21% of the kids are chronically absent. But when you start to look at these, some of these metrics framed in terms of the poverty rates in the community surrounding CCA, these numbers start to take on a different meeting. And I think what they're, especially things like chronic absenteeism, that's all the rage right now, attendance, I think what you start to need to understand is these are indicators of inequity, housing instability, neighborhood violence, lack of access to healthcare. 0:18:15.5 JD: I think they're more an indicator of those types of things than they are of school performance. So as you start to think about things in those ways, what you realize is that the students at CCA are just as capable as the students at Jones, but they face sometimes overwhelming obstacles related to poverty. It's also interesting to take a look outside the schoolhouse. So the median family income in the census tract where Jones is located is $184,000. So the median family income in that neighborhood, so it's a pretty affluent area. In the neighborhood surrounding CCA in that census tract, the median family income is just over $20,000. So we're talking about an order, orders of magnitude higher family income in upper Arlington than in the neighborhood that CCA sits in. And then there's all types of factors. Some grounded in historical reasons that relate to this, but they're also compounded by funding disparities. So the per pupil revenue at CCA for this year is $10,600. In Upper Arlington, it's nearly $17,000... 0:19:35.0 JD: This Jones Middle School has almost no students living in poverty, yet gets $6,000 more in additional revenue per student than the students that attend CCA. So think of the implications of that. 0:19:52.3 AS: When you say they get more revenue, you mean the state or the government's providing them more money per student? 0:20:00.1 JD: Yes, all in. From all sources. So when you look at what the federal government provides, the state government, and then local funding sources. When you look at all those sources combined, this more affluent middle school gets $6,000 more students, dollars per student. 0:20:14.5 AS: Obviously, it's not based upon need. Is that based upon the grade or some other? 0:20:19.0 JD: Well, it's because the funding is heavily influenced by local property taxes. And because of the affluence of... 0:20:26.7 AS: They have the resources. 0:20:28.2 JD: They have the resources. And in Ohio, charter schools don't have access to local money. So that explains most of the gap. Most of the gap. But back to my point, when you think about CCA, having kids with more challenges, less money per student, less resources to pay for a facility, to pay teachers a competitive salary, extracurricular activities, all those types of things that we want to equalize are highly inequitable between those two schools. So then you start to ask yourself, well, what are the report card grades measuring exactly? Are those grades on those state report cards a fair representation of what's happening inside the school? Or can a significant portion of those grades be attributed to this larger context in which the school sits? And I think that's where you sort of put on this systems thinking lens and realize that, sure, what teachers and the principal is doing inside the schools, they are certainly making contributions to those state report cards. But you cannot ignore what is going on outside those schools and those neighborhoods when you're thinking about these grades. 0:21:54.1 JD: And so if you're sort of thinking about... Like a formula that would sort of lead to the school's results and you just... Let's just call it A+B+C+D+E=71, where 71 is the score that the school gets. Let's just call it that. And let's call the school's contribution letter F. A, B, C, D, A+B+D+C... Or A+B+C+D+E+F=71. The school's contribution is F. Well, that equation cannot be solved unless you know the values of A through E or at least some of those values. But what we try to do with this state report card system is that we assign this value to F, the contribution of the school, with no knowledge of the effects of these other variables. 0:22:57.3 AS: So it's, in other words, the contribution of the school is 100%. You mean you're responsible for your results? Is that what it means? 0:23:04.4 JD: Well, right. So if you're going to give me... If you're going to give CCA Main Street a D in achievement, that means the only thing that contributed to that grade was the school. But there's all those things that we talked about. Some, sort of, when you look at the variables A, B, C, D,...
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Eliminate Management by Extremes: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 14)
01/16/2024
Eliminate Management by Extremes: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 14)
Many businesses equate "manager" with "leader," excluding potential leaders from across the organization. In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about leadership in Deming organizations - with a great story about senior "leaders" making a huge error in judgment at a conference of auditors. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, episode number 14, is Beyond Management by Extremes. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.7 Bill: Number 14 already, Andrew. 0:00:32.0 AS: Incredible. 0:00:32.6 Bill: It's a good thing we skipped number 13. That's an unlucky number. [laughter] 0:00:37.0 AS: Not in Thailand. It's a lucky number. [laughter] 0:00:40.6 Bill: No, we didn't skip number 13. This is 14. 0:00:42.1 AS: Yes, we didn't. 0:00:43.5 Bill: Alright, so I just enjoy going back and listening to all of our podcasts, once, twice, three times. And then I talk with friends who are listening to them. And so I'd like to start off with some opening comments and then we'll get into tonight's feature, today's feature. 0:01:00.9 AS: So let's just, to refresh people's memory, episode 13, which we just previously did, was Integration Excellence, part two. 0:01:09.2 Bill: Yes. And that's what we called it. [laughter] So... [laughter] So last week I... When we thought about getting together, but I had the wrong time, and it worked out well in my schedule. Last week, Andrew, I did three presentations. A two-hour lecture for Cal State Northridge, which is part of a master's degree program, where I do a class in quality management. That was Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I did a one-hour presentation with one hour of conversation afterwards with the Chartered Quality Institute, which is kind of like the American Society for Quality in the UK, and this... So this was several hundred people from the UK and also the Caribbean chapter from Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica. And so there's a bunch there. And then on Thursday morning I did a three hour session for a group in Rotterdam, which was really early for me and late afternoon for them. 0:02:25.4 Bill: And in all three, I covered similar material for all three groups, which included the trip report that we've done on the ME Versus WE, how did you do on the exam? How did we do? And so it was really neat to present that to the three. And in each case, when I threw out the question, "how did you do on the exam?" And then explained as I did one of our earlier podcasts that if you've got a long list of inputs, which includes - the woman I was talking to and, 'cause I said to her, the question is how did you draw on the exam? What are the inputs? And she said, the inputs are, my energy, my enthusiasm, my commitment that she got stuck. And I said, have other students helped you? And she said, yes, other students have helped you. I said, that's another input. 0:03:17.3 Bill: I said, given that input, how many can you see? And she said, oh my gosh. She said, my professor, my parents, my brother. And then all of a sudden there was this long list of inputs that she couldn't see. And so I explained that to the people and then say, "if you've got that long list of inputs and the original question is, how did you do on the exam? Does that long list of inputs change the question or are you okay with that question?" And what I look for is, and what we've talked about is, does the whole idea, how did we do on the exam jump out at you? No, it doesn't jump out. So, in each case, I said, here's the situation, might you reframe the question? And in all three situations, most of them that I asked said, there's essentially nothing wrong with the question. And if they did restate the question, they kept the "you," "do you think you could have done better?" Do you think... And that's what's so cool is that they just hold onto the you. Well, and for one of the groups it came a... It was kind of like what I was saying was semantics. 0:04:32.6 Bill: And I said this is not semantics. I said, there's a big difference between somebody, you know referring to our kids as my son and my daughter and our son and our daughter. And this, "my," is singular ownership, "our" is joint ownership. And so what I was trying to explain is that, saying “How did you do versus how did we do?” is the difference between being an observer of your learning if you were the student, Andrew and a participant. Those are not... Those are enormous differences. It's not, just, it's not just a simple change in pronouns. And so when I... And when I got to next, I was at a meeting years ago, I was at the annual, you ready Andrew? I was at Boeing's Annual Auditor's Conference. 0:05:40.5 AS: Sounds exciting. 0:05:41.4 Bill: 1999. So I got invited to be a speaker, Andrew at Boeing's Annual All Auditors Conference. Right? So I'm thinking going into this, that these are a bunch of people that don't feel valued. Because it's not like I get a phone call and I say, hold on, hold on. Hey Andrew, I got good news. And you say, you're a coworker, what's the good news? Annual... Andrew, we're gonna be audited next week! [laughter] 0:06:10.2 Bill: You're like, "Holy cow. Hold on, lemme go tell everybody." So I thought going into this meeting is, these are a bunch of people that don't feel valued. I'm an auditor at least that was, so that was my theory going into this, so it's a Monday afternoon gathering with a dinner and then all day the next, all day for a couple days. So the opening speaker, speaker on Monday night was the senior executive of a big Boeing division, it might have been Boeing defense let's say. And my theory was first of all, you got a bunch of people that don't feel valued and I came away from the three days thinking there's a whole lot going on in audit whether it's financial audit, data integrity audit, quality audit, these are necessary roles. And so I came out of it with great respect for that whole organization otherwise would think right, but I'm thinking this executive is going to come in, going to do the Friday, Monday night presentation and I'm thinking it's like they drew straws and they say well okay I'll go, I'll go up there and talk with them. 0:07:22.8 Bill: Within minutes of him speaking I'm thinking this guy's excited to be here. So I'm thinking he's going to kind of phone it in, now I'm watching this I'm thinking he is, he is really engaged with the audience. He's talking about, the future role of the audit organization being partners and all this and he's talking, I mean he's giving them an enormous bear hug and I'm thinking this is not what I thought and again and so... I'm still thinking he's either a really good actor or he really wants to be here. Then my theory was and I thought, holy cow, now I get it. How many people in the room Andrew would it take to leave the room with their nose out of joint and shut down the F18 program by noon tomorrow? How many people would it take? 0:08:21.3 AS: Not many, one. 0:08:22.9 Bill: Right, so then I'm thinking these, he needs these people to love him, because if he disrespects them, it's a bad day. So I went from thinking why would you want to be here if you were here, then I'm thinking, oh no. Now I'm thinking this is brilliant so then I look at the program and I'm thinking which other executives have figured out how valuable this is and I see the next day at lunch is Boeing Commercials I'm thinking they figured it out but the organization I was within was Boeing Space and they weren't on the program so I contacted a friend that was connected high up in Boeing Space, I said we've got to be in this program, right? So the program ending, it ended nice and I'm thinking wow, wow. So then just prior to lunch the next day is the number two guy for Boeing Commercial. Not the number one. The Monday night guy was the number one. The number one guy for Boeing Commercial at the time was Alan Mulally, it wasn't Alan Mulally, it was his number two person. 0:09:33.7 Bill: So he's up on stage, he's up on stage, he's up on stage. And he's talking to the audience and in parallel Jim Albaugh who at the time was CEO of Boeing Commercial, no Boeing Space and none of Jim's people were there, Jim wasn't there. Jim a couple weeks prior he had asked me to get with his speech writer at a presentation he was doing and he wanted some words in there about investment thinking and all the things we've been talking about in this. He said get with him and put some of that stuff in there put there some of that stuff in there. I said okay. So as I'm listening to the number two guy speak there's a lot of "we" and "you" but who's the we? And who's the you? So I'm making notes to myself to tell Jim don't say "you." Say "we" and make the "we" inclusive, 'cause the guy on stage is, the you and the we and the you and the we, and I said no no stay away from "you" focus on we but make sure they understand that "we" is all of us, right? 0:10:35.1 Bill: So this is what's going through my head and I'm writing it all down, writing it all down and then this guy says and I'll paraphrase. I wish I had the exact words and the paraphrase is pretty close to what he said as judged by what the audience heard, right? So when I heard the comment and I'm thinking to myself, you said what? Then I look around the room and I thought he did. Here's what he said again the paraphrase is: he made reference to those within Boeing that do the real work, and he said it in a way that was present company excluded right? Right, so I hear him say 'cause I'm getting, I'm making literally I'm making notes to myself and then I hear that comment and I'm like, did you just say what I thought you said? And I look around the room with 300 people and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, you did and I'm seeing I am seeing people irate, you see the body language, right? 0:11:44.3 Bill: And I thought wow, how could you say that? So then the lunch speaker was Harry Stonecipher, the chief operating officer. And he was up, walking around the stage. I don't think he knew anything about what happened prior so he's up there talking, okay. After Harry we're getting back to the program and the guy running the entire event is now up on stage and he's very deliberately he's got a, he's got a piece of paper rolled up, he's walking around on stage, "yeah Scott misspoke no doubt about it. He misspoke, I hear you." I hear you, you are ready Andrew? You are ready, you are ready? 0:12:36.8 AS: Give it to me. 0:12:37.4 Bill: And then he says then he says "But let's be honest we don't make the airplanes." And I thought, really? And as soon as he said that, I had this vision of 250,000 employees, which was about the employment at the time. And so as soon as he said that, I just imagined being at the Everett facility, which is huge, where all the twin-aisle plants are made. And I had this vision of 250,000 people in the building. And the CEO Phil Condit says on the microphone, "Okay, I'd like all of you who make the airplanes to move to the west end of the building." 0:13:26.4 AS: And everybody else. 0:13:27.4 Bill: And it's what you get, is all the flight line mechanics move all the way over there. And then you show up and somebody looks at you and they don't see any grease on your hand, and they say, "ahhh you don't make the airplanes." And you say, "you see that tool in your hand? Who do you think ordered it?" And so this "we" and the "you" stuff, how did "you" do? How did "we" do? It was just, it was... 0:14:00.3 AS: He wasn't deliberately setting up the auditors to be pissed and then to be really, really tough on the rest of the organization. I'm teasing with that. 0:14:12.7 Bill: It was, it is just, I shared that with you and our audience as how uniting language can be and how divisive language can be. And so how did we do, how did you do, and what, with just, this is what I find fascinating is - these words bring people together. What I love, I love watching politicians or State Department people speak and 'cause what dawned on me is they are very deliberate on, I mean they to great lengths to not be divisive. 0:14:57.1 Bill: That's their job. And so they introduce people in alphabetical order, countries in alphabetical order. But they, and I thought, what a neat way of not inferring that the first one I list is the most important one and I just thought there's a just an art of diplomacy. And that's what, to me, that's what diplomacy is, is that the art of uniting, not dividing. 0:15:25.7 Bill: Alright. So now I wanna get into, in the three different groups last week we were doing the trip report and we got down to the hallway conversations and the ME Organization versus a WE Organization. And then a question I asked him was, who are the managers in a ME Organization and what do they do? And you got, those are the ones that set the KPIs. Mark the KPIs, beat you up, sit in their office. Okay. Who are the managers in the ME Organization? What do they do? Who are the managers in a WE Organization? And what do they do? 0:16:01.8 Bill: They are mentors. They're out there on the shop floor, they're working with people. People work for managers in a ME Organization. They work with managers in a WE Organization. So I get that and I think "Okay, pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good." And then I follow with "Who are the leaders in a ME Organization and what do they do?" 0:16:26.4 Bill: And what's really cool is you get the same answers as the managers. And that's when I started noticing in a ME Organization, we'll refer to the senior leadership team, the senior management team, and we're talking about the same group of people. And I said, what we've just said is that manager and leader are the same. And then I say to people, so what is that message in a ME Organization? The message is, if you're not a manager, Andrew, then you're not a leader. Which means what? Which means you have permission to wait for direction. 0:17:12.5 Bill: Boeing had a leadership center in St. Louis. It was called the Boeing BLC, the Boeing Leadership Center. Yeah, Boeing Leadership Center. And in order to go there, you had to be a manager. You either had to be a first level manager, you would take frontline leadership, a middle manager, which I was, which is leading from the middle or an executive. But the model... So then I think part of the confusion is in a ME Organization, on the one hand we say, our managers are our leaders. If you're not a manager, wait for the direction, wait to be told. 0:17:49.7 Bill: But then we said, we want our managers to be leaders. But that's the ME Organization. In a WE Organization, in a Deming organization, I think of leadership is the ability to bring forth a new order of things, a new order of designing hardware, a new order of designing software, a new order of marketing, we're talking earlier and the ability to create a new order of things and the ability to create a path for others to follow. 0:18:20.6 Bill: And so then in a WE Organization, it's like show and tell. When we were in elementary school, you go in and say, I have discovered this. And I thought, in a WE Organization, everyone has the ability to be a leader on something within their realm. And why would you, why would you make leadership incl...exclusive, which is the ME Organization. And when I tell companies that I consult for I said, when you make leadership exclusive in a ME Organization, to me, that's a kiss of death 'cause you're telling a few people, you're in charge and you're telling everyone else, you're inferring that everyone else, you wait for direction, again. 0:19:09.0 Bill: And I'm not proposing, everyone's all over the place doing it. No. There's got, this is not chaos. And if I have an idea on something and it's not my assigned responsibility, then I know to reach out to you because you're the marketing guy and I just throw the marketing idea to you and then you do with it what you want. But I look at leadership in a WE Organization as being inclusive. And then we get into this idea of, driving...driving change. 0:19:38.0 AS: Let me just ask you about that. Would this really be down to the core principle of Appreciation of a System? That somebody who appreciates a system knows that there's all kinds of components to that system? 0:19:55.5 Bill: Yes, yes. 0:19:55.6 AS: And that you can't say, oh, well this system really is only the people that are working on the production line, when in fact we know that there's all kinds of people working in that system. If I think about my coffee business as an example, we have a hundred employees and not all of them are working on production. And some are moving paperwork and making phone calls and others are out in the field. So an appreciation of a system brings you to the "we" rather than.... 0:20:23.0 Bill: Yes. 0:20:23.5 AS: And a person who gets up and says about me, or, tries to identify that there's a certain number of people that are really driving the performance of this company are, they just have no appreciation for a system. 0:20:39.1 Bill: They have a narrow, a narrow view, a narrow view. So what you just said triggered another thought. But, um, the thing I wanted to add to this, in a ME Organization, it's about driving change. And we've talked about this in prior podcast. I go to, you put a gun to your head and I say, I want this KPI by Friday, Andrew. And you're like, yes, sir. And then I said to people in the past is, if driving change is the mantra of a ME Organization, like you're driving cattle driving, driving, and which is not an endearing concept. It is, it is, this is the where we're going. And I say to people, so what would you call it if driving is the ME construct, what is, what's the language of a WE Organization? And people will be wondering "ah," I say "lead, lead, lead." And if we like where you're going, we will follow. That's you creating the path that we will follow. 0:20:40.0 Bill: So I just wanna throw that out. But the other thing you mentioned about the metrics and the design of the organization and the thinking that, these are the critical people. At lunch with an old friend today, and I was sharing with her I taught a course at Northwestern's Business School, Kellogg Business School in the late '90s. And Kellogg then, and today is the number one or number two business school in the country. And I had a friend who was a student there in..., they liked what I was saying. So they hired me to teach a five week course for four years. And I presented, these ideas to them and it was pretty cool. I was, what was exciting is one of them told me that, what I was sharing with them about Deming, you are ready Andrew? contradicted what they were learning in their other classes. 0:22:46.2 AS: Huh. Funny that. 0:22:48.7 Bill: Yep. And so I did that for four years. There were three classes in quality. One was the use of control of charts, mine was called Quality Management, or TQM or something like that. And so there were roughly 80 students in the program, and they had to take two of the three, five week courses. So I got two out three students in the program. Then after four years, they waived the requirement. And so nobody signed up. And so I, um, after, right after 9/11 was when this happened, they invited me back because the person I was working with really liked what the...
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Does Competition Create Wins? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 14)
01/09/2024
Does Competition Create Wins? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 14)
Who wins when teams and team members compete with each other? In this final episode in the Role of a Manager in Education series, David Langford and Andrew Stotz discuss why cooperation beats competition, particularly in schools. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. And we're talking about the 14th of these different 14 items. And this one I want to read out, it is, "He understands the benefits of cooperation and the losses from competition between people and between groups." We decided to title this one: "Do you think you're winning from competition?" David, take it away. 0:00:53.7 David Langford: That sounds great. Great. It's good to be back again, Andrew. 0:01:00.4 AS: Yeah. 0:01:00.6 DL: Yeah. This is a great point, and it really is the basis for Deming's philosophy about everything that he brought to management and it got people to think differently. When I would give seminars with educators around the world and stuff, and we'd start talking about the differences between competition and cooperation, I'd often get people speaking very strongly that, "Competition is the way the world works and you have to have competition to get people to do stuff. And sports teams are always competing." And when you start to think about it, sports teams that, that usually have a sole focus of just beating the, the other team, generally don't have multi-year winning streaks, [chuckle] because you're not building a program, you're not building a whole philosophy, a whole basis to how you do things. 0:02:06.0 DL: And I've made it a point to really listen to all kinds of interviews with coaches over time. And one common theme I usually hear over and over and over from really good teams is they'll talk about the next game that they're playing. They don't talk so much about, "We're gonna beat these people." They talk about, "This will be a really good test for us." Or they'll say something about, "We're probably gonna really learn a lot this weekend [chuckle] at this game." Well, to me, those are really good coaches because they're lowering the fear level, they're lowering the anxiety. And the better we... The irony of this statement, this point number 14, is the better you cooperate, the better you compete. [chuckle] 0:03:04.0 DL: And when you're not doing that, you potentially could just go down in flames. And the same thing happens in a classroom. If you set up a classroom so everybody's competing against each other, or what Deming called the artificial scarcity of top marks, you'll end up with a whole bunch of people that are just basically at each other's throats, not cooperating, not getting along. You'll have all kinds of discipline problems and behavior problems and things that are going on in classrooms like that because it's all just set up on a competition level. So grading on a curve is a scarcity, artificial scarcity of top marks. So if there can only be three top marks or three A's or whatever it might be in this class, and people that are actually struggling in the class and actually trying to learn, they're gonna quickly learn, "There's no point in me actually trying because there's no way I'm ever going to get to that point. There's only gonna be three people that are gonna get the A." 0:04:14.2 DL: And that's the biggest thing about this, is getting to the point where you're understanding the losses of setting up artificial competition for, whether it be grades or points on a soccer field, or whatever it might be. Deming often used the analogy of the difference between a bowling team and a orchestra in terms of cooperation. So people that go bowling, they're generally just out for your own score and whatever you're trying to work through, and it's not really a team activity. Even if you're on a bowling team, it's still... You're just doing your own thing and doing your own score. 0:05:07.8 DL: So they have a very low level of interdependence in that environment. But I used to be a band teacher and orchestra leader and things like that. And so when Deming used the analogy of an orchestra about that being the pinnacle of interrelationships, it really struck home for me that like he said, "A 1OO people in an orchestra or a band, they're not there to compete [chuckle] who can play the loudest or who could play the biggest solo or... " Right? 'Cause that'd be a terrible thing to listen to if you went to a concert like that. 0:05:47.3 DL: But the reason we give people standing ovations, is because we recognize the interdependence and the cooperation it takes to reach a pinnacle performance. Even in a very small group, maybe just three or four people in a band or something, it takes a tremendous amount of cooperation to get to that level of performance. And just imagine some of our famous rock bands and stuff, if everybody on the stage was competing against each other, it would sound terrible. [chuckle] 0:06:24.9 AS: Yeah. It's interesting about the orchestra concept. I like to talk... When I'm speaking to audiences about Deming's teaching, I say, "Imagine that we have a new generation of leaders that are KPI managers, and they sit down with every person in the orchestra and say, 'You've got a KPI, we've got a limited pool of bonus here, and we're gonna distribute it amongst all the players based upon who was the A players, and C players you're going to get zero.' And so now you need to think about what is your contribution here. And then you pull up... The curtain goes up and you rise up and everybody claps. And then everybody in the orchestra stands up and plays to their best ability." 0:07:03.6 DL: Yeah. You'd have chaos. [laughter] 0:07:07.5 AS: It's interesting in this one that he sees the need to highlight that it's... He's talking about competition between people and between groups. Why did he have the need to say that rather than just competition in general? 0:07:25.1 DL: He did talk about competition in general a lot. He also talked about... He made statements like, "It's really good to have a good competitor." And that seems like it's the opposite of what this statement is about, but I think there's a difference between competition and comparison. So if you have another company, another school, another grade level. So let's say I'm a fourth grade teacher in an elementary school or something, and there's maybe three other fourth grade teachers in that same building. Well, I'm not trying to compete to [chuckle] win in that situation, I'm actually trying to cooperate. And the more that we all three cooperate together, share ideas, maybe even share kids and make a very fluid situation, everybody wins. The number of people that get to higher and higher and higher levels of performance increases and increases and increases. 0:08:35.9 DL: You may never get to a 100% of the people learning a 100% of the material a 100% of the time, but you're gonna get closer and closer and closer, the higher, the more that you cooperate. And the more that you set up competition, we're not talking about games, Deming talked about the difference between games that everybody knows it's a game. You go to a soccer game, everybody knows this is a game. We even call them games. [chuckle] 0:09:07.8 AS: Games. 0:09:09.4 DL: Something we can play, but that's not real life. And that's why I always try to explain to teachers that you can't set up your classroom as a game, because really what you're doing is teaching life and death situations. Somebody that can't learn to add is gonna have a tough, tough time in the rest of their life. So we can't just reduce it down to a simple game, or do this and you get a lolly or an M&M or a piece of candy or something. And we often have teachers that would say things like, "Oh, well, kids like that." "Okay. Well, I like that." [chuckle] But don't tie it to something so critical as performing well on fractions, [chuckle] that if you do really well on this, then you're gonna get a prize or you're gonna get something out of that. I remember, 'cause we're talking about the orchestra thing, as a band teacher, I had to learn the hard way when I was teaching young kids how to play, say, "Look, you need to be practicing 20 minutes a night. And that's the firm rule, is just you need to be doing that." 0:10:23.9 DL: Well, it was really pretty foolish on my part because they have a system too, and they have all kinds of things going on in their lives, that was what was happening. And when I really pushed it really hard, and they'd get little cards that they'd have to fill out how many times they'd practice, and their parents had to sign it and all this stuff. Well, what I found out is I had a bunch of kids cheating, writing down times even though they didn't practice. Some of them would even forge their parents' signatures, [chuckle] all kinds of stuff. And it's really easy to blame the individual and say, "Wow, look how ineffective kids these are. If I can get some better kids, we'd have a better program here." 0:11:05.7 DL: But after learning about Deming and studying all this, I made just one simple change. I just gave them a little run chart and I said, "All I want you to do is just mark down how many minutes a night you practice, that's it. And all you have to do is just, I don't care if it's one minute or no minutes, or whatever it might be, you just put that on this chart." And then we would turn that into a little run chart for a whole week's performance. And lo and behold, the average number of minutes per night that kids were practicing just went up and up and up because they wanted to see their chart get better. [chuckle] It's a human phenomenon that Deming tapped into, that people want to improve. And when they could just see the number of minutes going up. 0:12:00.5 DL: And I'd have really good conversations with them and sit down and say, "Hey. Well, how do you feel about that? Look at this. Look at your chart?" And you didn't have to have anybody verify it or anything else, but it was just you keeping track of your own performance within that. And then when we come together as a group, that's our time to optimize the situation. And Deming talked a lot about that. Sometimes people or groups would have to be sub-optimized, they may not be working to their full potential, so that the whole group or the whole system will work more efficiently. That's a hard concept to get somehow. But again, back to the orchestra thing, there's a lot of people in an orchestra when you play a piece that they're sub-optimized, [chuckle] they're just playing one little part of the whole big piece. [chuckle] 0:12:57.7 AS: Yeah. The cymbals. [vocalization] 0:12:57.9 DL: Yeah. 0:13:00.8 AS: There's a moment. 0:13:02.7 DL: But it's necessary. [chuckle] 0:13:04.7 AS: There's a moment. T And just because the cymbals guy is sitting there and not participating, as long as he's contributing that moment, that's really performance in that sense. There's a quote that I like by what Dr. Deming said that's somewhat related to this, and I see this in my work with companies here in Thailand. And that is, "A company could put a top man or woman at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together." 0:13:40.1 DL: Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. [chuckle] 0:13:43.4 AS: Yeah. I think that really says it all, as to what... 0:13:46.2 DL: Yeah. That's what he is getting at here. The more you cooperate, the better you're gonna compete, even though competition was not... Were really never your goal to start with. 0:13:57.9 AS: Yeah. 0:13:58.9 DL: Well, this made me think about when I was a high school teacher, and I tapped into how much the students really loved learning about Deming and everything. And we started going out and doing presentations actually, and going to the universities, corporations, all kinds of places to do presentations. And every person that did a presentation had to have like four or five people that were helping them, making sure that their video was working and making sure that the sound was right and all kinds of things. And the idea being so that they could concentrate on their presentation. And I'll never forget, we were at a state department somewhere, and somebody at the end got up and said, "The information you shared with us and everything is very [chuckle] profound and very wonderful, but the real show was the high degree of cooperation going on amongst all the students as things were happening." So somebody just didn't get up and do their thing and then just go sit down in a corner somewhere and just wait, everybody had an interrelated job to help people put on a really good performance, basically. 0:15:15.5 AS: Well, what a great way to end our discussion on the role of managers of people. And this was 14 items that Dr. Deming talked about in his book, The New Economics. And this final one, I think really stands out to me, and that is the idea of today, starting right now, stop pitting individuals and groups against each other and start figuring out how we can get people cooperating and how we can coordinate effort, because the coordination and the cooperation is where the real value is created and the real experience is created, whether that's in a classroom, whether that's on a factory floor, or whether that's in an office. All of those spaces, the idea of cooperation is so valuable for performance and getting the most out of people, but also, gosh, it makes it a happier day. [laughter] 0:16:17.8 DL: Absolutely. And not just limited to businesses and organizations, family works the same way. I have five children and I used to always tell people in my seminars, "How do I go about figuring out who amongst them is the greatest child?" [laughter] 0:16:38.0 AS: Child of the month. 0:16:38.1 DL: Yeah. And out of five kids, what? Two or three of them were gonna be below average probably. [chuckle] And so, if you start thinking about it that way, you start thinking about, "Oh, we wouldn't wanna do that." But I had the opportunity to take our family to Europe, we went to Singapore, we went to all kinds of places. And I remember when we went to Singapore to visit relatives there, we had 15 pieces of luggage [laughter] that we flew with for the seven people that were all going on this trip. Well, no one person can be responsible for all that, it has to be an interrelated related system. And everybody's working for the common aim of to pull this off and make sure that we can go on another trip. And it's really enjoyable and everybody had fun. And so... That's my final comment. 0:17:32.0 AS: Well, let's wrap it up there. David. On behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host Andrews Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."
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The Unhurried Conversation: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 13)
12/26/2023
The Unhurried Conversation: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 13)
What are unhurried conversations, and why should managers prioritize them? In this episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz talk about the kinds of conversations managers should be having with their team members. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today, we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. In the third edition, that's page 86. And in the second edition, that's page 125. So we are talking about item number 13, and in that point, I wanna read it to you. It says, "Number 13, he will hold an informal unhurried conversation with every one of his people at least once a year, not for judgment, merely to listen. The purpose would be development of understanding of his people, their aims, hopes and fears. The meeting will be spontaneous, not planned ahead." We're calling today's conversation the unhurried conversation. David, take it away. 0:01:17.5 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again. So always fun to discuss these points and talk about the depth of what it means and how to work through that. So once again, this all sounds really simple. You know, hey, just have this unhurried conversation with people at least once a year. When I talked to Dr. Deming about this years ago, he was recommending more like once a quarter, if you can do that, to work that through. But what are we really talking about? So in this world of managing with data and KPIs, key performance indicators and, you know, holding people's feet to the fire and really making them toe the line and all that kinda stuff, Deming is sort of just pretty much kind of the opposite. Those things all have their place and time, but that's not the kind of conversation that he's hinting at here or he's talking about here. 0:02:24.4 DL: I find it really interesting that he says, you know, it shouldn't be... The meeting will be spontaneous and not planned ahead. And so what he's getting at is that you're not, you're now coming in with an agenda for what you wanna hear from somebody. And on the opposite side, as an employee or somebody that you're working with, they're not prepared with some kind of an agenda where they're telling you what they think they... Where they're telling you what they think you want to hear, kind of thing. And I think that's what he is talking about why it needs to be spontaneous. He also goes deeper and he talks about, you know, find out people's aims and hopes and their fears and what's happening. And I was just thinking about that movie The Intern where the guy is hired in the company and he is 80 years old, and so they're doing the interview with him. And this young kid asked him the question, where do you see yourself in five years? I think, he looks at it and says, "You mean when I'm 85?" So, different... 0:03:47.4 AS: Dead. 0:03:48.1 DL: Yeah. Different points of life, different ways to think about it. So yeah. But he's just talking about, hey, just set up a time, be spontaneous, come in, sit down with somebody, and just not necessarily talking about business. Right? What are your hopes and fears and where do you see us going? And do you think we're on the right track? And... 0:04:13.2 AS: I'm curious, why do you think that... I mean, in some ways it seems like such an obvious thing. Why do you think he even needed to say this? 0:04:18.7 DL: Because it's not happening and it's even even worse today, I think, than in Deming's time in the 1990s when all this, all the computer technology, KPIs, all that stuff was just coming into being. Well, nowadays, it's sort of just a way of life to have all that kind of stuff. And I, I hate the phrase about being data managed or managing with data or data-driven. That's what it is. Well, we're a data-driven school district, and we make all of our decisions. Well, there's a lot of problems with that, just the word "driven" kind of drives people a little bit crazy about stuff. And really, the data is just there just to be informed. So you could still make informed good decisions, but I think Deming even talked about if you just make decisions just based on the data, you're probably gonna go out of business because you're not really paying attention to the people and what's really going on in the organization, what's happening and that type of thing. 0:05:34.4 DL: So it can also be really intimidating if you're the boss, and you're just popping in and saying, hey, you got a few minutes, you wanna sit and talk for a while? Because especially if you're in an organization where you've always... Or your predecessor, or you've always had an agenda for that meeting, it can be somewhat threatening for people. I know when I was a superintendent and I tried to do this with the principals that I was working with and stuff, and one of them, I'll never forget, she was just, she was just shaking the whole time. And I just had to say just, let's just sit here a minute and just calm down and what are you so nervous about? And just get to know her and everything else. Well, always before, the person before that had been the boss had come in and only time you had a meeting was when something was wrong. 0:06:42.7 DL: And she was gonna get ripped into. And so her fear was super great like that. Also found teachers just the same way that when as a new superintendent, I'd walk into their classroom just... I just wanted to sit and watch what's going on and maybe help out or participate or do whatever. And they'd just be almost shaking in their boots that the boss came in today. And what I found out is that it wasn't until at least six or seven months of doing that just spontaneously popping in, observing, watching what's happening, et cetera. Maybe chatting with them a little bit afterwards or doing something like that, that pretty soon that started to go away and people started to sort of function on a normal level. So one of Deming's 14 points in Out of the Crisis was pretty simple, drive out fear. 0:07:42.8 DL: And I think that's also what he's alluding to here is, here's a way that you can drive out fear, you know? And at the same time, just really get to know people. I've done a lot of study with neuroscience and the science of how do we actually think and et cetera. And there's a lot of that in neuroscience as well, that if you have a very fearful situation, you actually downshift and your brain actually shuts down. It goes into the survival mode of... And you're not gonna think creatively about a different option. You're simply trying to find out, what do I have to do to get out of this situation? And I think that's a lot of what Deming's talking about here is, hey, you gotta have these meetings and spontaneous and make it a joyful experience and just talk to people about what they wanted to have happen. 0:08:41.3 DL: Other thing I'll never forget in his seminars, he used to talk about this point or these points and stuff, and he said the purpose of the conversation is not for me to find out how you're doing. He said, I wanna know how I'm doing. And I remember the first time as a superintendent, sitting down with people and say, tell me about how I'm doing. They would look at me just kind of blankly like, what? Yeah. Well, how do you think I am doing with this job? And what do you think I need to be doing differently? And I always found those conversations really interesting, and again, it wasn't until like the second or third time having conversations with people that they actually started to tell you stuff that was useful. Because they don't wanna tell you something and then you end up firing them. So they have to have trust that you really do wanna find out how to improve, how to get better, so. 0:09:48.8 AS: Yeah, it's interesting. When I worked for Pepsi, when I first got out of university, it was three years I worked at Pepsi, and I would say we probably never had one company outing that I could remember. And in Thailand, I remember when I worked at one of my first jobs as a broker, and I was an analyst, and there was a questionnaire passed around, this was 25 years ago, that was questionnaire passed around, "Would you like to wear a company uniform to work?" And I said, well, obviously no. I was like, yeah, no. 0:10:27.9 AS: And then, I was stunned to see the results that majority of people said yes. And that's when I realized like, what Thais value in work is the comradery and the connection and the closeness. And they appreciate the relationship. And so therefore, you also have outings and things that we do and parties and go bowling or go hiking. And those things are where some of these unhurried conversations happen. Oh, well, yeah, this is what's going on at my home and with my family, and this is why I'm struggling and all that. And so what I realized in American culture, it's just not that common. You go into work, work's work. 0:11:14.4 DL: Yeah. So I'd say my last comment on this is that it's really not so much about work. I mean, it is work related, and obviously, there's an employee employer relationship going on, et cetera, but it's more about what you just talked about, really getting to know somebody, really getting to understand them. And again, back to neuroscience, I used to advise teachers all the time to try to do the same thing or at least do an exercise with kids. What's your aim? And have kids actually set aims and hopes and fears? And if you can do that very same thing. Where do you aim to be? And et cetera. Because if you have a second grader who wants to be an astronaut, and soon as you find that out, well, there's all kinds of ways you can tie everything that they're learning to eventually becoming an astronaut. And suddenly, everything that they're learning becomes relevant, and relevance is the key. 0:12:20.3 AS: Yeah. And the next year, they may say they want to become such and such, and then take that and run with it. You know? One of the last thing I would say about this that I always say when my students are giving their final presentations in my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, is I say, okay, now the last thing I want to tell you before you present is we're on the same team. Which I'm trying to convey to them that although I'm gonna critique you and I'm gonna challenge you and all that, we're here together for the same purpose. 0:12:54.6 DL: Yeah. I'm gonna give you feedback, but yeah, we're both here to accomplish the same aim, so. 0:13:01.4 AS: Yeah. So I love the unhurried conversation. So any last thing you wanna add to this before we wrap up? 0:13:08.9 DL: No, that's pretty much it. So I think we don't wanna make it too much out of it. I mean, it is on face value, it is pretty much what it says, have these conversations and understand who people are. And you'll find out that pays off in multiple ways down the road. 0:13:29.7 AS: So I'll wrap up by just saying to the listeners and the viewers out there, start today. Start today to have an unhurried conversation that's not connected to performance, compensation, company goals. It's an unhurried conversation to have two human beings sit down and take an interest in each other. And that's really the challenge I think that we got from this discussion. David, 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. 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.
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Eliminate Arbitrary Numerical Targets: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 17)
12/19/2023
Eliminate Arbitrary Numerical Targets: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 17)
Quotas, arbitrary targets, work standards with numerical goals - these don't seem to apply to schools. But, as John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss, quotas show up a lot in classrooms, causing harm and preventing improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 17, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:34.3 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah we've been working our way through these 14 Principles for Systems Transformation. Last week or last episode we did eliminate slogans and exhortations. And so we're on to principle 11, which is Eliminate Arbitrary Numerical Targets. So I'll start with the overview. So principle 11, eliminate arbitrary numerical targets in the form of work standards that prescribe quotas for teachers and numerical roles for people in management, substitute leadership in order to achieve continual improvement of quality and productivity. And the first thing I wanted to start with was just this really powerful Deming quote on quotas. In Out of the Crisis, he said, "A quota is a fortress against improvement of quality and productivity totally incompatible with never-ending improvement." I just love that quote because it's just such a forceful pushback in the other direction. It's a fortress against improvement. There's really no gray area there in that quote. 0:01:43.0 AS: It's not a fort, it's not a barrier, it is a fortress. 0:01:48.2 JD: Fortress. It kind of brings together a mental image in your mind when you hear fortress, a fortress against quality, a fortress against improvement. So why did he say that? One of the things that's interesting is, especially thinking about work standards that prescribe some type of quota for teachers, it's like, well, when you think of a quota, you typically think of a worker and some type of production facility. And that, of course, is largely what Deming was talking about with his Point 11 'cause he was doing a lot of work in manufacturing and that type of setting. However it does, like all of this stuff, it translates into education. And, you know, so that's why I decided to keep Principle 11 'cause it does show up in different ways in the classroom setting. And I think examples are really good because when I initially read this quote and I was thinking, well, how do quotas show up in a classroom setting? 0:02:40.5 JD: And I thought of one that really stood out from when I was a principal here at one of our middle schools here in Columbus, at United Schools Network. We, we had this quota of sorts for homework. So in the middle school where I was, teachers had to assign homework nightly in their classes to students. And they had to grade two to three of those assignments a week and then return the graded assignments to students within 24 hours. And as I stopped and read this particular principle, and I thought about how it applied to my time as a principal, I really learned that that was the wrong approach. And as you start to think about that and reflect on it, you start to think about why Deming said quotas are a fortress against improvement. And there's this... 0:03:31.5 AS: And before you go... Before you go on, I just wanna highlight how normal that sounds. 0:03:38.4 JD: Very normal. Yeah. Very normal. 0:03:39.8 AS: And anybody here, like the first thing I'm gonna do or the first thing I do when I take over as principal is I'm gonna require that there's a minimum amount of this, and it has to be da, da, da, da, da. And it just seems like it is the responsible thing to do as a manager. 0:03:56.4 JD: Yeah. And there was a noble premise behind the quota, and that was that students needed frequent feedback on their work in order to learn. That was the premise, right? So it was this work standard, it was well-intentioned, but like a lot of these things that Deming talks about and quotas are no different, is the actual effect was that teachers spent less time giving feedback and more time grading this high volume of work. So this is what happens when you have a quota, is the focus became meeting the quota, grading the two to three assignments per week, rather than giving that quality feedback to students. So in this case, this sort of numerical target for graded assignments, then superseded the quality of the feedback. And this is, this is what happens, I think, generally speaking, with quotas and practice. 0:04:56.3 JD: And so when you step back and you think about that particular quota, you say, well, what was the teacher's job? Was it grading two to three homework assignments per week or was it giving students quality feedback? And it really couldn't be both. It couldn't be both those things. So then I started thinking about, well, what would've been a better approach? You know, had I had the Deming lens when I was a principal, I think the thing that I would've done is start with, well, let's come up with a sort of a well articulated aim for why we give homework. And included in that process, or included was, developing a process so that students received timely and high quality feedback 'cause that's really what this was about. So I think that sort of brings to mind substituting leadership, that second part of the principle. 0:05:58.4 JD: And in this case, I think, you know what I should have done is replace those work standards or that quota with some type of a better understanding of the job of the teacher. So, you know, I think in doing that, then I also... Leads to higher quality work-life for teachers. I would say, in thinking about this homework example, time spent grading homework was probably the number one complaint that I got from teachers. And this better approach to the two, three, assignments per week quota would've been to work with teachers to design a better system. Like how could we design a system that would give them the time to deliver high quality feedback to students on a timely basis? That was really the aim. And that's really where I should have concentrated my time as a principal. But again, I didn't have that Deming lens 10 years ago when I was serving as a, as a principal in our network. And reading the Deming stuff, it was very quickly like, oh, aha. Like, here's how I should have been thinking about this. Rather than being so hyper-focused on: you gotta grade those two to three assignments every single week. 0:07:29.9 AS: I like the word substitute leadership, you know, and Dr. Deming said that a lot. And the best way that I've kind of tried to explain it, and it just happened recently, where a client of mine was talking about having what they would consider to be underperforming staff. And they were older. They'd been with the company for a long time, and like the mindset is not there. And so their idea was to use KPIs as a way of basically catching these people out and then eventually firing them from the company. I'm making it kinda crude, but that's kind of the way it came across. 0:08:09.7 AS: Yeah. 0:08:10.1 JD: And I was like, wait a minute, let's just get down to the meat of this. The fact is, is that you hired these people [laughter] and you led these people for 20 years, who's responsible for this? And then I said, look, don't substitute leadership... Don't substitute KPI for leadership 'cause people say, so if I don't have KPIs or I don't have this, how am I gonna manage the people who aren't performing? I'm like, you know the people who aren't performing, they're probably in the wrong job. They may be in the wrong company, they may be the wrong thing, I don't know, but you need to talk to them and work it out and figure out a solution, that's leadership. But hiding behind some sort of quota or target and thinking that that's gonna solve the problem, no, that's why we need leadership. 0:09:06.4 AS: Yeah. And knowing the staff that I was working with at the time, the group of teachers, I am sure I am 100% sure that we as a group could have come up with a way, a better way to do our feedback system than the way it was set up. I have, I have no doubt. If we said, look, this actually isn't really working that well for teachers the time it's taking just to grade the homework. The kids, the students are, do they really need homework every single night? And when they're getting these papers back in the morning, do they have any time to actually look at whatever feedback is provided? Sometimes it was pretty minimal. Sometimes there was, depending on the teacher and the assignment, sometimes there was some feedback there. But are we giving kids time to look at that and actually learn from that feedback in any way? And so, again, you know, well-intentioned as it was, the volume superseded the, you know, the quality of the feedback. So I can think of all types of ways that I would sort of redo that system in retrospect with a clear aim is where I would start, what's the aim of this? Whether it's homework or classwork or whatever it is. 0:10:23.9 AS: And with technology now too, it's just such, it's gotten a lot easier. Such as give the students a five question online quiz that tests the topic that you taught that day. Then accumulate the data and understand what was the hardest one or two questions. Then in the first 10 minutes of class or five minutes of class, say, okay, last night's assignment, the hardest question was number three. And now I'm gonna randomly select one person to tell me how did you answer number three? And then let's have a discussion on that. And then that way you're getting feedback. It's the same thing I did with Feedback Friday just 'cause you were talking about feedback. Where everybody wanted, they requested in my Valuation masterclass bootcamp, they requested more feedback and I designed Feedback Friday where I gave them the exact assignment, then a certain number of them will present their work, the ones who volunteer in this case, and then they present their work on Friday. And then I give feedback that everybody witnesses and can learn from. 0:11:44.8 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think there's so many different ways, like what you're describing to set up the practice, to set up the feedback system, to have students pair up or someone present their work or you know, there's all types of better ways that would would've saved a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of headache. There were many, many ways we could have redesigned that system. 0:12:06.4 AS: And why use the word arbitrary? You've said eliminate arbitrary numerical targets. We've talked about the numerical aspect of it, but why do you say arbitrary? 0:12:19.5 JD: Yeah. I wrote an article that actually called them arbitrary and capricious goals. So not just arbitrary, but also capricious, but yeah. 0:12:26.8 AS: What does capricious mean? How would you define it? 0:12:28.4 JD: Well, it's sort of the same as arbitrary. It's sort of like without any sort of grounding in logic or reality. [laughter] Flippant, sort of, I think I have that right. You can fact check me on that definition. But that's actually a perfect segue into that 'cause there's that second part of the principle that talks about also eliminating numerical goals for people and management. So not just teachers, but also school or network leaders. And we've talked a lot about, and across the series about various types of targets that exist in education. But I think it's still worth discussing a few points. Like what does arbitrary mean in this setting? 0:13:07.2 AS: And capricious means "given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior." [laughter] 0:13:12.5 JD: Yeah, and I think in that article I've used capricious because in education, you know that the targets are changing so often, especially associated with test scores or other sort of parts of state accountability systems. One year it's some type of label, another year it's letter grades that schools are rated on. Now in Ohio we're given star ratings. So they've gone away from A to F and now it's schools get rated based on a five star system. And so that's what I mean by capricious. It's just... 0:13:42.4 AS: So five is A? 0:13:44.5 JD: Five is good. Yeah, five is good. Five is an A, I suppose. If there's a difference between a star, a five star and an A, I don't know, [laughter], but that's the new thing here in the Buckeye state. Yeah, but so back to the management. I think, well one thing I think when you're talking about teams or departments or a school or the whole organization, I think they should have an aim. So I think that's really important. But by aim, I'm talking about some type of clear purpose statement, but that's not so specific in detail that it stifles initiatives, that's one part. And I think a clear aim statement sort of in that spirit is something very different from a numerical goal. So that's one part of it. I think another part, and I'm getting to the arbitrary part, is that so many times that internal goals either set for management or set by management of an organization are basically a burlesque,you know, if they don't include a method. 0:14:52.8 JD: And that's what I've seen so often where, we've sat down to create a scorecard or whatever, or we see these things imposed on us from some type of organization that holds us accountable like the state department is, we have these goals, like increased student attendance rates by 10% or increase math scores by 5%. And the thing is, is part of the arbitrary is that sort of natural variation in those attendance rates or in those test scores are viewed as a success if they're going in the direction of good, but fluctuations in the other direction sort of send everybody scurrying around looking for explanations. And we end up sort of writing fiction to explain away or to explain causality when there's not actually causality there. And I've been just as guilty. We're gonna improve test scores by 10% next year without some clear plan. 0:15:53.7 JD: But then what Deming would say is, if we can do it next year with no plan, why didn't we do it this year? [laughter] And why did we stop at 10%? Why not just make it 20%? That's again part of the arbitrary. Now there is a caveat and Deming I think makes this caveat Out of the Crisis that's important. And that's when... When we are setting numerical targets or talking about numerical targets that he categorized as, he called them, facts of life. Meaning, they're just sort of plain statements of fact with respect to survival. So a good example would be, for a school would be, unless student enrollment improves by 10% next year, the school will have to shut down. But that's not arbitrary, that's a fact of life. 0:16:43.3 JD: If we don't get the revenue associated with increase in enrollment, then we're gonna have to shut down. That's not an arbitrary target. That's something sort of something, you know, altogether different that we should pay attention to. But I think getting to this idea of arbitrary, I would probably characterize it this way, and this is probably the main point of principle 11 for leaders is that they have to understand system capability. And that's often what's sort of missing from the understanding when these arbitrary targets are set. So if the system is stable, you'll get what the system will deliver. If the system is unstable, then there's no way to predict capability. So I think it's fine for organizations and individuals to have goals, but the problem is so often just like what you zeroed in on is they're arbitrary. 0:17:50.8 JD: And that's been my experience during the vast majority of my career is, why is this target set at 80%? And then no one can really tell you why that was picked as the target. For whatever the thing is, I just picked 80%, sometimes it's 75%, sometimes it's 80%, sometimes it's 90%. But I think that type of goal setting is really inevitable when as a sector, we have really no understanding of the theory of systems, we have no understanding of the theory of variation. And so without that understanding, what we tend to do is blame individuals working within school systems instead of working to improve the system itself. And I think that's really the key for me and why I'm so zeroed in on the Deming philosophy 'cause it does offer this other way. And so thinking back to system capability and before we as leaders set goals, there's really four kind of things that I've tried to focus on. And one of them is: what is the capability of the system or process under study? 0:19:13.3 JD: And when I say what is the capability, the easiest way to think about this is, if I display my data, let's say it's third grade reading state test scores. By capability, what I mean is, if I've look at the last dozen years of those third grade test scores, there's gonna be an average. And that average of those twelve years is basically the capability of my system. So I'm not just looking at last year or even the last two years, I'm looking at a dozen or more data points preferably, to see how capable that particular system is. So that's sort of the first thing I'm gonna look at is, what's the capability of that particular system or process over time? The second thing I'm going to do is ask, what's the variation within that system? So we've talked about the process behavior chart a lot. I do think I'm sort of in the Donald Wheeler camp and thinking that that is the most important tool. And so it's very easy using a process behavior chart because I have the limits, the upper and lower limit. 0:20:29.8 JD: And however wide or narrow those limits are, that's gonna tell me the variation I can expect in that particular system over time. The tighter those limits are, the less variation, the higher the quality, or at least the higher the predictability of that system or process. The third thing I am gonna wanna know is, is that particular system or process stable over time? Do I see any signals in the patterns in the data that would say that this is a stable system and therefore it's predictable or is it unstable and therefore it's unpredictable? So that's the third thing I'm gonna ask. And then once I've answered those questions, the last thing I'm gonna say is, do I have a logical answer in thinking about whatever goal we're setting to the question by what method? And so I think if you don't have that sort of picture in your head, the goals that we set are sort of arbitrary and capricious. If we are setting a goal, we can answer those four questions, then the goal is probably reasonable, logical, and grounded in some type of understanding of our systems. That's what I think Deming meant when he talked about arbitrary targets or arbitrary goals. 0:21:58.1 AS: So let me review that for the listeners out there. Number one, what's the capability of the system? Number two, what's the variation of the system and understanding a process behavior chart? Is the system, number three, is the system stable over time? Is it predictable? And number four, do I have a logical answer to the question by what method? And what you get from that is that, clearly if you can answer those questions, you understand your system pretty well. And therefore it's less likely you're gonna come up with an arbitrary goal. You're gonna go to the, say, here's what I think we can do with a deeper understanding of the system. But if you have a bureaucrat from the state education...
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Integration and the Taguchi Loss Function: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 13)
12/05/2023
Integration and the Taguchi Loss Function: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 13)
Should we strive to better understand what happens "downstream" to our defect-free work? No matter the setting, if our work meets requirements and we pass it on, are we responsible for how well it integrates into a bigger system? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz expand on the interaction between variation and systems and why Dr. Deming regarded Genichi Taguchi’s Quality Loss Function as “a better description of the world.” 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 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, in episode 13, Integration Excellence, part two. Bill, take it away. 0:00:31.4 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. Always a pleasure to connect with you. Alright. 0:00:40.1 AS: Mine too. 0:00:40.1 BB: [laughter] In episode 12, I thought it was great. We shared perspectives on the human side of integration, what it means to be connected, to be synchronous, to feel included, to feel connected, to feel included or connected when something good happens where you're like, well, I was part of that, or to feel separated is when something bad happens. And, we somehow have the ability to not feel associated with that. I pass the puck to you and you hit the slapshot, it goes into the stands, off the goalkeeper. Y'know, girl gets hit in the head and you feel bad, but I go home and I can sleep. And so why is that? And so anyway, but I thought, and listening to it, and I thought it was a lot of fun to look at the human side of feeling connected or feeling separated. And what I wanted to get into tonight, and perhaps in another episode as well, is the physical side of connections. 0:01:46.5 BB: One thing I wanted, and I got a couple anecdotes. I had a woman in class at Rocketdyne years ago, and she said, "Bill, in our organization, we have compassion for one another." And I said, "Compassion is not enough." And, and so you, Andrew, could be in final assembly at this Ford plant, where you're banging things together with a rubber mallet 'cause they're not quite snap fit, and you're banging them together. I mean they all meet print perhaps, but where they are within the requirements is all over the place, and you're having to bring them together. That's called integration. And so when this woman said, in our organization we have compassion for one another, I said, well, that's like me saying, "Andrew, I feel really bad that you're, I can't believe, Andrew go home. You can bang that together tomorrow. You've been banging it together all day." And what I said to her is that "compassion is not enough." 0:02:54.7 BB: When I feel connected to what you're doing, when I begin to understand that the parts you're banging together meet requirements, but how they meet requirements is causing you the issue. Now, the compassion plus my sense of connection, now we're talking. But short of that, what I think is we have organizations where as she would say, we might feel bad for others. And it means I hear about your injuries and your ergonomic training because of all this, but I don't, until I feel associated with that, I just feel bad. But feeling bad is not enough. But I like that, that sentiment. But what I wanna look at tonight is a greater sense of Dr. Taguchi's so called Loss Function and look at more why we should feel more connected to what's happening downstream. So I wanted to throw that out. [chuckle] On the topic of variation, I just started a new cohort with Cal State Northridge University. And this is my, fifth year in the program doing an eight week class in, seminar in quality management. And the cohort model is, anywhere between two dozen and 30 some students that start, the ones I'm getting started a year ago. 0:04:23.5 BB: And they have class after class after class after class. Then a year into the program they get to meet for eight weeks so then onto other professors in the program. So I was showing them, first quarter, second quarter data points from an incident that happened at Rocketdyne years ago. And I was in a staff meeting and the vertical axis is number of accidents per employee. And the horizontal axis is quarter one, quarter two. So the quarter one data point is there, and I don't have the original data, the original data doesn't matter. But what I say to the students is, imagine we've got the first quarter data, what would you expect for the second quarter data? And what's funny is a number of them said, it should be lower. And I said, "Well, based on what?" And it's like, said "Well, we're gonna go off and study what went wrong and we're gonna improve the process." 0:05:20.6 BB: And I said, "Okay, that's all right." So then, I said, "I'll accept that, that's a possibility." Well, then I showed them the actual second data point was lower than the first, which in the meeting I was in, led to the question from one of the senior managers to one of the more, let's say the vice president of operations, "Hey, Andrew, why is safety improved?" To which the executive said, "Because we've let them know safety is important." And so I asked him, "So what do you hear in that?" And we went around and we went around and we went around. It's not the only time it has happened that what they're not hearing is the separation that "we" have let "them" this this. And so in part, I think with my Deming perspective finely tuned. I pick up on those things. And they're not picking on it picking up on it yet which is which is fine. And then but I kept asking, kept asking, kept asking. And then one person said, "Well maybe we need to look for a pattern." I said, "Oh brilliant. What if we've got this run chart of all this extra data?" So then I got them to buy into how easy it is to take two data points draw conclusion up and down. That's called variation. And so it was neat to... The first conversation with them on the topic of variation was really cool. And there's so much more to follow. Well then it, what I wanted to follow with this once upon a time our son when he was in third grade this is 20-some years ago invited me to come to his class. 0:07:07.6 BB: And I don't recall why other than he said, Can you come talk to the class? And I said, Okay fine. So my biggest concern was that the teacher wouldn't know I was coming but she knew I was coming so it was good. So I walk in talked with her briefly and I said I've got some things I'd like to do. She's like oh, I didn't wanna monopolize. But she said okay why don't you show your video? I said I got a video of rocket engines blah blah blah. And then I've got a little exercise I wanna do. Okay we'll do the video then we'll do some reading. So we're doing the reading. And so I'm helping her with the reading. And then what I noticed is now and then a word would come up and she'd write the word on the whiteboard and ask the students if they understood the word. So I clued in, I cued in on that. So when it got to me I wrote the word theory on the whiteboard. This is third graders Andrew, third graders. [chuckle] And I said do any of you know what a theory is? And a one of the girls Shelby whose name I'll never forget, she raises her hand and she says a theory is a prediction of the future. Third grade Andrew third grade! [chuckle] right? Now... 0:08:18.8 AS: And you know what they'd say now they'd say Ethereum is a type of cryptocurrency. [chuckle] Oh Ethereum. No no "theory" not "Ethereum." [laughter] 0:08:30.2 BB: You're right. You're right. 0:08:31.6 AS: Okay. That's a great answer. 0:08:33.9 BB: Well oh but what I tell my students is I didn't correct her. I didn't say well technically a theory is a prediction of the future with a chance of being wrong. But we'll just, I just, oh we'll just stop with that. So I invited her to the front of the room. So she comes to the front of the room and I brought with me this little plastic bag with half a dozen marbles in it. And the bag was also a holes from a three hole punch, little dots of paper. So I held the marble up and I said Shelby I'm going to drop the marble from this height predict where it will land. And what I tell students is she was able to predict where it would land without any data. 0:09:18.3 BB: So she predicts the first data point, the marble lands someplace else. I marked the spot with a marble. I then said okay Shelby I'm gonna drop it the second time. Where will it land? And I'll ask people in class so where do you think she predicted, exactly the same spot of the first drop [chuckle] Exactly right. That's what we do as adults. And so we went through this cycle again and again. And and finally after about 10 drops where these you know 10 different dots on the floor I said Shelby where's it gonna land? And she drew a circle, she said somewhere in here which is kind of like a control limit you know kind of thing. 0:09:55.9 BB: So the one thing I'll say is and I'm sure you've heard people say well you can't predict the future. No, as Dr. Deming would say [chuckle] you know he gave the example you might recall of how will I go home? I'm gonna take a bus. Will the bus... I'm gonna take the train. Will the train arrive? And so I'd ask adults in the class that says how many drove here today? All the hands go up. And I said so at the end of the day will you walk in the direction of where you left your car? Yes. What is your theory? It's still there. [chuckle] Is that a guarantee? No! [chuckle] So I throw that out as a predictions and her sense of variation and this sense of a third grader not acknowledging, I mean one understanding having some sense of a theory, not a lot of understanding of variation but I don't think that's unique to third graders. 0:10:51.8 BB: So that brings us to...there's variation. We can look at the variation in the Red Beads. Okay the Red Beads are caused by the system not the workers taken separately. Then we got into variation and things that are good. And when I introduced the students to last night in class is, I asked them "So how often do you go to meetings where you work to discuss things that are good and going well?" And I get the standard answer, "rarely." I said, "Well, why is that?" "Well 'cause we got, we're focusing on the bad." They said, "to make it good." "Well why do we focus on the bad to make it good? Why don't we focus on the good?" "Well the good is good." And we went around the room, went around the room online and and I said "what's the likelihood that we could prevent bad from happening by focusing on the good while it's good?" And it's like, "...interesting." And so where that leads us to is, is two aspects of looking at things that are good. 0:11:57.1 BB: One is the better we understand the variation of things that are good whether that's on a run chart or a control chart. My theory is we could prevent bad from happening by keeping track of the bad. Whether it's your pulse, your weight, [chuckle] how much gas is in your car. And so there's if we focus, if we pay attention to the good with some frequency you know every second, every hour, once a month, whatever it is, we could prevent an accumulation of damage to an appliance at home. Another aspect to focusing on things that are good is that it can improve integration which is boom, here we are. And that integration that I mentioned last time that understanding integration could be looking at candidates for a new hire and looking for who is the best fit because there's degrees of fit. Fit is not absolute. Last time we talked about reflections of an engineer who is worried that his hardware on the space shuttle main engine may have contributed to the disaster of the second... Of the Columbia space shuttle blowing up in reentry. Well let me share another story from a coworker at Rocketdyne. 0:13:19.8 BB: And this guy's father worked at Rocketdyne in the '60s. So in 1999, 30 years after the lunar landing, there's news teams, you know, from the local TV stations and television. It's 30 year anniversary of the Lunar Landing. And Rocketdyne was known for the Apollo engines that get the vehicle off the ground, as well as the engines that got the, Orbiter off the moon. So there's an article in the newspaper a couple days later, and this coworker is quoted and he says, "Boy, I would've loved... My father worked here back in the '60s, just to be a fly on the wall would be so cool. Oh my gosh, it'd be so cool." And the article ends with him saying how exciting it is to feel like you're part of something big. That's what we talked about last time. 0:14:09.8 BB: And I used to use that quote from him on a regular basis because it, the article was about something that happened at Rocketdyne. Then I would share that this is a quote from a coworker. And after quoting him for several years, it dawned on me, I've never met this guy, so I call him up one day and he answers and I say, "Hi, this Bill Bellows." And he laughs a little bit. And I said, "have we ever met?" And he says, "No, no, no," he said, "But you quote me in your class." And I said, "Well, I apologize for never calling you sooner." I said, "I do quote you." And I said, "Let me share with you the quote." I said, "you feel how exciting it is to feel like you're part of something big?" To which he says, "I wish I still felt that way." [chuckle] And I said, "can I quote you on that?" And so you can join an organization with this sense of being connected, but then depending on how the organization is running and you're blamed for the Red Beads, that you may lose that feeling. 0:15:15.6 BB: And on another anecdote, it's pretty cool. Our daughter, when she was in fourth grade, was in a class, they were studying water systems. And the class assignment was to look at a, they had an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper with a picture of a kitchen sink on it, like a 3D view of a sink with a pipe out and a pipe in. And the assignment was, we're about to study water systems. How does the water get to the sink, where's the water go? 0:15:47.2 BB: And so my wife and I were there for the open house and there were 20 of these on the wall colored with crayons showing all these different interpretations of water coming in, water going out. And I was fascinated by that. And eventually got copies of them and the teacher wasn't sure what I was doing with them. Well, I turned them into laminated posters. And so I gave one to our daughter one day. I said, take this to Mrs. Howe so she sees what we're doing. And so the following weekend I bumped into this woman at a soccer field, but she wasn't dressed like a teacher. She's dressed in a hoodie. And she says to me, "Allison shared with me the posters." And I'm looking at her thinking, "how do I know who you are?" She pulls the hood back. She says "I'm Allison's fourth grade..." Oh! I, her comment was when Allison shared with me how you're using those posters, handing them out, and people are inspired by them. And she says, "I cried." So that you get that emotion for free Andrew. [chuckle] Right. And that's all the integration stuff. 0:16:58.5 BB: Now let's talk about Dr. Taguchi and his Loss Function. So, um, the Taguchi Loss Function says Dr. Deming in Out of the Crisis is a better view of the world. The Taguchi Loss Function is a better view of the world. Dr. Taguchi says following... 0:17:15.3 AS: Wait a minute. I was confused on that. You're saying Deming is saying that Taguchi is better, or Taguchi is saying Deming's better? 0:17:22.3 BB: Dr. Deming in The New... In Out of the Crisis, Dr. Deming wrote "the Taguchi Loss Function is a better view of the world." 0:17:30.3 AS: Okay, got it. 0:17:34.5 BB: And that's what amongst the things that I read into Deming's work and I thought, boy, that's quite an endorsement. Dr. Taguchi is known for saying quality is the minimum of loss imparted to society, to the society by a product after shipping to the customer. So what does that mean? And we'll come back to that. Deming met Dr. Taguchi in the 1950s. There's a, at least once, there's photos I've seen in Deming's archives of the two of them on stage at a big statistical conference in India, and I know they met in September, 1960 at the Deming Prize ceremony where Dr. Taguchi was honored with what's known as the Deming Prize in Literature. There's Deming prizes for corporations, and there's also Deming prizes for individuals. 0:18:35.0 BB: And Taguchi won it 1960 for his work on the, on his, this quality-loss function concept. 1960. So then in 1983, Larry Sullivan, a Ford executive, was on a study mission to Japan, and he wrote an article about this for the American Society for Quality in 1983 the title of the article is “Variability Reduction: A New Approach to Quality,” so if any of our listeners are ASQ members, well I'm sure you can find a copy of it. The Variability Reduction: A New Approach to Quality. Well, Andrew in 1983, Sullivan's article, 23 years after Taguchi's awarded this Deming Prize in literature, I'm convinced that's the first time Taguchi's Loss Function was heard about in the States. 23 years later. And in this article, Sullivan says, he says, "In March of 1982, I was part of a group from Ford that visited Japan, we studied quality systems out of variety of suppliers," this is ostensibly the first time the auto industry in the States is sending people to Japan. 0:19:52.8 BB: Right so 1980, summer of 1980 is the Deming documentary Why Japan? If Japan Can, Why Can't We? And so here Ford is in 1982, sending a team over. I know it was the late '80s, I believe, when Boeing sent executives over. So then in this article, he says, "The most important thing we learned, right, in this study mission, is that quality in these companies means something different than what it means in the US. That it's a totally different discipline." And so this is like the beginnings of people hearing about Dr. Deming in 1980. They're now hearing about Dr. Taguchi's work through Larry Sullivan. And it turns out Larry Sullivan and Dr. Taguchi became business partners and set up Dr Taguchi's consulting company in the States, which still exists. So they became fast friends and I've met the two of them many times. 0:20:53.6 BB: What Taguchi is saying is, is when it comes to things coming together, we talked about integration, whether that's combining, mixing, joining, weaving, this is the synchronicity. So in sports, we're talking about not, not where I am on the field, but where I am relative to the others, in music, and we're talking earlier about music and I've, I've played a musical instrument one time, Andrew with a group and I was with a, hockey band on a road trip when I was in college. And the cymbal player, they were missing, so they asked me to bang the cymbal, "you want me to do what?" 0:21:36.9 AS: When we signal you. 0:21:39.4 BB: So I'm boom! and what I didn't realize is I'm controlling the pace, like being in is like, okay, slow down, slow down. And I and a former student last year in the Cal State Northridge class who plays with one of the Beach Boys, and I went to watch her in the play and I was asking about these speakers, which are on stage, facing the players. And I said, so what are those about? She said, "Those help us stay synchronized." I said, "what do you mean?" She says, "the speakers next to me," she's the keyboard player. She said, "What I'm listening to in those speakers is the drumbeat. I need to make sure that I am playing synchronous with a drummer." And then what about the others? "Well, the others have their own...
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Pitfalls of Slogans and Targets: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 16)
11/28/2023
Pitfalls of Slogans and Targets: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 16)
Slogans and exhortations don't work to motivate people. Targets usually encourage manipulation or cheating. John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss how these three strategies can hinder improvement, frustrate teachers and students, and even cause nationwide scandals. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 16, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. And today we're gonna be talking about principle 10 "eliminates slogans, exhortations, and targets." John, take it away. 0:00:37.1 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, we've been talking about these 14 principles for educational systems transformation for a number of episodes now. I think one, one important thing to point out, and I think we've mentioned this multiple times now, but really the aim in terms of what we're hoping the listeners get out of hearing about all these principles is really about how they all work together, as a system themselves. So, we started with create constancy of purpose. We've talked about a number of other things, like work continually on the system, adopt and institute leadership, drive out fear. Last time we talked about break down barriers. We're gonna talk about eliminating slogans and targets this time, which is principle 10. But really, as you start to listen to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and now 10, what should start to become clear is how all of these things work together. 0:01:34.5 JD: If you are operating as a leader, for example, within sort of the Deming philosophy, one of the things you are gonna do is eliminate these slogans. So all these principles shouldn't be studied in isolation. We study them together, see how they all work together. But let me just start by just reading principle 10 so you have the full picture. So principle 10 is "eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students that ask for perfect performance and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system, and thus lie beyond the power of teachers and students." So really what we're talking about is, what's wrong with slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students, because these things are, pervasive, I think. 0:02:29.5 JD: We've seen them, we've seen the posters on the walls with the various slogans. And, of course targets are everywhere in our educational systems. In my mind the main problem is that they're directed at the wrong people. The basic premise is that teachers and students could sort of simply put in more effort, and in doing so, they could improve quality productivity, anything else that's desirable in our education systems. But the main thing is that, that doesn't take into account that most of the trouble we see within our schools are actually coming from the system. And I think we've talked about this quote is probably one of Deming's most well-known quotes, but he said, "Most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportion, something like this, 94% belong to the system, which is the responsibility of management, 6% is special." And that's more like, can be sort of tagged or pinned to individual students or individual educators working within the system. So I think that's a really important thing to revisit 'cause it sort of is at the heart of all of these, all of these principles. 0:03:47.7 AS: It's interesting, like, maybe you could give some examples of what type of, slogans or targets or exhortations that you've seen, in your career and what's going on in education these days. 0:04:06.5 JD: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna give an example here, kind of walk through an example in a second. But there, they're really everywhere, I mean, to varying degrees probably in different places. But, one, that one that sticks out in terms of, a target is when I first started my career in 2001, I was a teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. And No Child Left Behind had just come out. And, basically as they, as the leadership at the school sort of presented what was in this legislation, you know, they would always put up a just chart that basically said, a certain percentage of students are expected to be proficient across the country on state tests. And that, that percentage would increase over time starting in 2001 when the legislation was rolled out. And by the 2013, '14 school year, the way the tables were laid out is that 100% of students would be proficient in reading and math across the country in third through eighth grade. And of course, that didn't come to fruition. There's no chance that that ever would be the case. And it was also the case that there was really no methods attached to that target. So that's a really good example of a target that was sort of pulled out of the sky. And, basically, over the course of a dozen years, it was supposed to sort of, so somehow magically come to be. 0:05:38.2 AS: That's great. The idea of 100%. I mean, like what fool would say that, you would have 100% of anything. I mean, you just can't get anything to that point. But one question I have about that, I suspect that in those types of cases, it just gets swept under the rug and nobody's looking at that number the way that they looked at it back then, but maybe, maybe they do look at it. But my question would be that No Child Left Behind if we were able to objectively measure the improvement that was caused by that, or a devolution, like did, if it was, what was the starting point, for No Child Left Behind? 0:06:26.0 JD: Well, so, it, that would vary by district. If I remember right, I think the, the target early in the 20000s was something like in the 50 or 60%, something like that, right? And then it would... 0:06:40.3 AS: Right, so let's say 50 to 60%. And I wonder at the end of that period of 2013, if we could objectively compare and calculate that number, what would be your estimate of where it would be if it was 50 to 60 originally, where do you think it was at the end of 2013? 0:07:00.0 JD: 50% to 60%. 0:07:02.4 AS: So no improvement? 0:07:02.5 JD: No. I mean... 0:07:02.5 AS: Incredible. 0:07:04.2 JD: That could vary a little bit by time and place, but it's a little bit even hard to pin down because, the way that the test was constructed in 2001 in Georgia, for example, would be different than the way the test was constructed by 2013-14. So even, even the test itself had changed, the standards had changed, a number of things had changed over time. Also, for folks that know much, about what was going on in Atlanta by, by 2013-14, the superintendent, who would've been the superintendent from about 2001 until, I don't know, 2010 or something, she was actually charged under the RICO statute for sort of, yeah, I don't know if that was warranted or not. I think it was unprecedented, that's for sure. But there was a cheating scandal that was systematic from superintendent to principals down to even teachers. That was pretty pervasive because there was a lot of, in Atlanta at least, there was a lot of monetary incentives tied to the test score improvements. And so I know that it did result in a number of people being charged with various crimes, including the superintendent and number of principals. 0:08:18.3 AS: That's incredible. 0:08:20.6 JD: Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. 0:08:22.8 AS: Yeah. And there was a trial, there was a trial, I'm looking here on the internet. The trial began on September, in September of 2014 in Fulton County Superior Court. 0:08:32.3 JD: Yeah. Right around that time. 0:08:33.7 AS: Incredible. 0:08:33.8 JD: And so I was gone from Atlanta by that time. So I don't know all the details, but I have read a little bit about it, and I think, again, because there's these targets, that's certainly not an excuse for systematically cheating on these tests for sure. But, a byproduct of some of these testing regimens and some of the monetary incentive systems that were put in place was, cheating did happen in, in a number of places in the United States. Especially at the height of when the scrutiny was highest on these test results. So again, it's not, that shouldn't be the expectation even in a system where there's a lot of focus, certainly, but it was a byproduct. So you, you would wanna ask the question, why did that, why did that happen? 0:09:20.5 AS: Yeah. 0:09:21.9 JD: I mean, I think, yeah, go ahead. 0:09:25.2 AS: I was just gonna say that I also wanted to talk about, we were talking before we went on about the word "exhortation," which is kind of an, an old word, kind of a, and so I was looking it up on the dictionary. It says, "an address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something," and they use an example of "no amount of exhortation had any effect." And then I thought about, one of the questions I always ask students when I start my class, is "who's responsible?" And I want the listeners and the viewers to think about this answer to this question. Who's responsible for students being on time to class, the student or the teacher? And of course, the majority of students are gonna say the student. And if I ask the teachers, of course they're gonna say, student, it's personal responsibility. And most of the listeners and viewers would probably say the same. And then I want to explain a situation that I do every time I start my class. My class starts at 01:00 PM in this particular semester. And as soon as the door, as soon as 01:00 PM came, I just locked the door and I started teaching. 0:10:39.8 JD: And this is university setting? 0:10:40.7 AS: This is at university. 0:10:44.0 JD: Yeah. 0:10:44.6 AS: And when I did that, the university students, some of them had the, they were outside and kind of knocking on the door or no, wondering if they can come in. And I didn't let them in until after five or 10 minutes of teaching. And then I let, I went out and talked to them a little bit about, being on time and, please, be on time to my class or else I'm gonna lock the door and you're not gonna be able to come back in. And so I did that a couple times until all the students, I have 80 students in that class, and they all were in. And the next time that I, had my class, 100% of the students were on time. They were in there and ready to go. In fact, I had a funny case, John, I was, I was visiting a client of mine, which is north of the city of Bangkok. And I told my client, I gotta get outta here now because if I'm late to my class, my students are gonna lock me out. 0:11:32.7 JD: They're gonna lock you out. Yeah. [laughter] 0:11:33.0 AS: But the point of the story is for the listeners and the viewers out there, if you said that the students are responsible for being on time, but I've just presented a case where the teacher changed something about the way that the, the class was done. That changed the outcome of the students. Can you still say that it is the students, and in fact, if you were to, to listen, if you went, we went to a, a high school or university and we sat down with all the teachers that would they be saying no amount of exhortation had any effect on the students being on time. These guys are just irresponsible. 0:12:17.4 JD: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting 'cause I think, David Langford, on one of the episodes he did, talked about the problem of kids being, or students being late to class. And in that particular scenario as a high school, and, when you ask the kids, why were you late? They said, "well, the teacher doesn't start until five or seven minutes into the period anyway, so why, why do I need to come on time?" So, there is some truth to thinking about who, who is creating the system, what is that system? What types of behaviors does that system encourage? That's certainly a good way to sort of analyze each, each situation. 0:12:53.7 AS: Yeah. I mean, it makes you think, and I think what David highlights too is like, what's the priority here? And, where do we want, is it so important that someone's gonna be there at exactly this moment or does it matter if it's five minutes before, five minutes after? And I think that there's, there's an interesting discussion on that. 0:13:13.1 JD: Yeah. 0:13:13.8 AS: And for the listeners and the viewers out there, you're gonna make up your own mind. But I think that the key thing is that what you're saying when you talk about 94% of, the output or the result of something is the result of the system. And that helps us to focus beyond just, putting the pressure on students or administrators or educators or employees. 0:13:36.1 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, one of the tools that I've talked about repeatedly and I'm a very big fan of is, is the process behavior chart or what some people call a control chart. And the reason for that is because when you use that chart, you can then tell what problems are coming from the system itself, and that's the responsibility of management and what problems are coming from other causes and may take some other types of sort of approaches. I think just knowing that is a really important sort of upfront step when you're considering that 94%, 6% problem. You can actually tell what's coming from the system, and then there's one approach and what's coming from special, special causes. And then there's another approach to, to improvement. And I suspect that, you know, when you chart data in this way over time, the vast majority of systems are stable, but unsatisfactory. 0:14:38.5 JD: And I think that's probably where things like, targets, exhortations, these slogans when you have a stable but defective system, that's the point where, these exhortations, et cetera are particularly pernicious, you know? I think, goal setting seems like a good idea, but it's really useless in that type of situation. It's really often an active desperation actually, when you set a goal in a stable but defective system. So I was gonna sort of talk you through a, through an example of how this, perhaps, could show up. 0:15:23.6 AS: Yep. 0:15:26.2 JD: We... This is going back a couple years, but as the pandemic rolled out, and I think we've talked about this data before, but we were really closely charting and paying attention to: are kids engaged in remote learning? And again, this example's from the pandemic, but this can come from any data that that's important to you. And almost all of this data unfolds over time. But we were looking at, how, how engaged are kids in remote learning? And it was really important for us to first define engagement. And so for us, this question always comes up, what do you mean by engagement? For us, this meant, kids did a remote lesson with the teacher and then they had a practice set in math. So what percent of the kids completed that full practice set? 0:16:17.6 JD: And basically when we, when we charted this, what we see, we did this for, about five weeks. We charted the data. So we had about 24 days worth of data. This was eighth grade math. And the first day 62% of the kids were engaged the second day, 67, the third day, 75%, fourth day, 84%, and then down to 77%. And then the next day, 71%, the next day, 58%, the next day 74%. So you can kind of get the picture here that this data was sort of bouncing around. And when we took that out to 24 days, that first day was 67%, the 24 day was 68%. And then sort of, we looked at the average over those 24 days, it was about 67%, a high of, 84%, a low of 49%. But when you put this on a process behavior chart, what you see is it's a stable system. 0:17:17.3 JD: Meaning there are these ups and downs, some are above that 67% average, some are below it. When we look at sort of the natural process limits. So those are sort of the boundaries of the system based on the magnitude of the variability over time, it was sort of suggesting with this system, we could expect a low of 42% engagement, a high of 91% engagement, but mostly it's bouncing around this average. Now if imagine, that you're this eighth grade math teacher and the principal comes and says, this engagement data is not high enough, we're gonna create these posters across the school, we're gonna start this campaign. You can almost picture this in different places, right? And it says these posters say 100%... 0:18:06.3 AS: Graphic design. 0:18:07.0 JD: Yeah, that design, you have this poster and it says "100% engaged. We can achieve it if you believe it." Right? And you can almost imagine these posters going up in a school, and it's just this sort of proclamation. But when you look at the data, it's just a stable system. And what we can expect is this, these data points bouncing around the 67% average. School, the school leadership wants higher engagement rates. They want fewer days with the low rates. But the problem with a poster or a target or exportation is that you're, you're basically asking the teacher to do what they're unable to do. And we do this in all types of settings, all types of, work settings, not just, not just in education. If you look at this particular system, the upper limit's at 91%. So basically the... 0:19:10.0 JD: The system's not capable of achieving 100% remote learning engagement, and so basically the effect is then fear and mistrust towards leadership, and I think, you know, when you look at this remote learning engagement data, that's probably what happened to a lot of people, but if we go back to that No Child Left Behind example, the Federal Government, 'cause that's who is setting the proficiency targets, for No Child Left Behind, its federal legislation, teachers knew, principles knew that in many places, the system that was in place for education was not capable of hitting those targets, it just... 0:19:50.1 JD: It wasn't in the capability of the system, and then so if you are an individual operating within that system, you're trying to navigate that, you're gonna try to hit that target no matter what, and then in some places, they chose to do things that went as far as cheating, because they were trying to hit that target. Now, I'm not absolving those individual educators of responsibility, but it was that system that they were operating in that sort of caused that behavior to then happen. You know the worst case scenario is people did, the adults did cheat. And I'm sure there were other things that were happening in other places that didn't rise to the level of cheating, but I think we've talked about it before, there's really only three options in response to data that's not satisfactory. You can improve the system. That's the ideal. That's what we're talking about here. That's what we're going for here. You can sort of... What do you wanna call it? It's not as far as cheating, but you can sort of... 0:21:02.6 AS: Manipulate or... 0:21:04.4 JD: Manipulate the data in some way, or you can manipulate the system in some way, and that's I think what we were seeing. So the worst case scenario in Atlanta, they manipulated the data. But I think in many places, this idea of manipulating the system is less clear, but what happened in many places, and I think we've actually talked about this, that there was this over-emphasis on reading and math at the expense of other types of academics, and that's a manipulation of the system. That's not cheating necessarily, but...
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Integration Excellence: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 12)
11/21/2023
Integration Excellence: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 12)
What does it mean that people feel connected and included when something good happens yet dissociate when something bad happens? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss the human side of integration. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, in today's episode, number 12, is Integration Excellence. Bill, take it away. 0:00:32.2 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. So before we talk about integration excellence, I wanted to throw out a couple thoughts. And listening to the podcast, I was reminded that when I share examples, there are times when I mention companies by name, and there's times I don't. And my hope is that people in those organizations don't feel offended. So what I found with students is, if I use the name, there's the risk of someone in the class having worked for that company who feels offended. If I don't use the name, then there's a sense that I'm making the stories up. [chuckle] So I just want to say I um... But there are... What I find is that most organizations are run with what Dr. Deming would refer to as a prevailing style of management, in which case examples such as replacing the cardstock paper with regular paper, and all organizations have those types of stuff. So I just want anyone to feel offended by that. 0:01:40.1 AS: Well, we can make an announcement. 0:01:43.3 BB: Go ahead. 0:01:45.3 AS: Remember those shows that we used to watch that says the names have been changed to protect... but here we're going to say the names have been changed to protect the guilty, [chuckle] not the innocent. 0:01:57.3 BB: Well, there are some stories, I can't share the names for a number of reasons, but they're all the same. Anyway, next thing I wanted to share is, again, on a recurring theme, we talked in the past about red pen companies and blue pen companies, or me and we, or last straw and all straw. And I was recently in... I was in the Netherlands last week doing a class live session for a group that I'm just starting to work with, and we did a physical simulation, a live experiential thing that built upon all the ideas we're talking about here. And I had the group do the trip report, looking at blue pen companies and red pen companies, or however you want to look at the contrast. 0:03:00.1 BB: And we talked about what are the hallway conversations in both organizations? And another was, what are the survival skills in both organizations? And the fairly straightforward survival skills in a last straw organizations are, be really good at shifting blame, be really good at hiding errors, hoarding information is power. And I look at, what are survival skills in a blue pen company or an all straw organization? That's sharing knowledge as power as opposed to hoarding it, it's sharing it. And so we got into those, all those, the usuals. And then I said to them, "Okay, so imagine we are, here we are in a last straw organization, I'm the president of the company and we're in a Friday afternoon staff meeting. 0:03:56.7 BB: And because it's a last straw organization, that means you work for me." I said, "If it was an all straw organization, you would work, and people always say with,": I said, exactly, it's with versus for, but it's a last straw organization. So you work for me. I walk in to the end of the week staff meeting. I apologize for running late. And then I turned to you and say, "I just got off the phone with a customer. I need to know who's responsible for last week's shipment." And then I turned to you, Andrew, and I say, "Andrew, was it you?" And you say, "No, it was Joe." [chuckle] And then I go to Joe and I say, "Joe, according to Andrew, it was you. And he says, "No, no, no, it was Sally." 0:04:44.6 BB: And then I'll go to Sally and actually I won't go to Sally. I'll then go to somebody next to Sally and I say, "It sounds like Sally was involved in this. Can anyone corroborate that?" Then someone else raised their hand and said, "Okay." 'Cause in the olden days, we went by one witness, but nowadays we need two witnesses. Okay, so we've got two witnesses. So, okay, Sally. So then I turned to Sally and I say, "I need you in the front of the room right now." And they're like, "Right now you want me to come?" "Yeah, I want you to come to the front of the room in front of the entire class." 0:05:18.0 BB: And I've had times people get really anxious. I've had times when people walk up on stage and they're like, "You want me to... " "Yeah, I want you up here right now." And they stand alongside me and I say, "So Sally, I understand you're responsible for last week's shipment." And she's like, "Uhhh, yes." And I say, "I just want to thank you. The customer has never seen such high quality before." [chuckle] And then there's this great sigh of relief. And I turn to the audience and I say, "Meet your new boss, same as your old boss." And then kid them that this is a point of time where Andrew says, "Oh, well, I provided the packing tape... " 0:06:00.6 AS: Yeah, I was involved. 0:06:00.7 BB: "That allowed that to happen." And then somebody else says, "And I licked the stamp and put it on... " So what you get is, in a last straw organization, what you have is failure is an orphan, as John F. Kennedy would say, and success has many fathers. So what I point out to them is survival skill in a last straw organization is now and then it might be good news. So when everybody else is playing duck and cover, that might be your opportunity to ask for a little bit more information and find out something good happened. Now you raise your hand, you get promoted because you're now the one who was responsible for this. And then the others then realize, "Well, wait a minute, I played too." And so what I find interesting is in organization is, we don't know if we were connected until we know it's good news or bad news. 0:06:55.2 BB: So what you get is situational association. And that leads me to a real story. I was mentoring a young engineer who worked in the Space Shuttle Management Program at Rocketdyne and I was, had been away, I was in England for about a week. And so I was just getting back to work. And on the day I landed in England, I landed at 9 o'clock in the morning. So it was middle of the night back in Texas. And so I walked in, my friend, Alan Wendlandt picked me up at the airport as usual. We went back to his home, walked in the front door and his wife's in tears because the Columbia shuttle had blown up on re-entry. 0:07:46.9 BB: And so back in the States, people are, yes, middle of the night. So I get back to work the following week. There's an engineer I met with regularly and he comes into my office and he tells me that, you know, what it was like. I said, "So... " I wasn't there. It was the first time I was at Rocketdyne when a disaster happened. Back in '86, I worked in Connecticut, wasn't on the program, wasn't at Rocketdyne. So it was interesting that, so I said, "What was it like?" And he said, "Everyone got a phone call. Everybody goes to their station and we follow this protocol." And I said, "So what was the protocol?" He said, "Every component, team, every component team in the space shuttle and men engine goes through their hardware, looking to see, could they have done something?" 0:08:39.5 BB: 'Cause he said, the early indications were it could have been a spark in the engine cavity, the rear, and that could have led to, led to, led to. I said, "So what'd you do?" He said, "Well, we each went through our planning." And he said, he in particular was thinking, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. We recently came up with a new version of one component. I hope we followed the new process." And he's panicking. He said he was feeling a lot of anxiety over this. Yeah, at first, until he goes in and he's thinking, "Oh my God, oh my God, did we follow the new process?" 'Cause if not, that could have been a contributor. So he found out that he did follow the new process. Which means what, Andrew? 0:09:29.7 AS: He feels relief. 0:09:31.9 BB: A huge sigh of relief, because he followed the process, he's no longer associated. And that's what I started thinking is, we go through life and there's times we feel connected and there's times we dissociate. And I asked a psychologist friend years ago, and I said, is that how we survive? We have the ability to feel connected sometimes and other times we dissociate. There was a hockey game in the National Hockey League in the early '90s where on a shot off the goalkeeper, the puck went into the stands and hit a teenage girl. She would, eventually into a coma, died a few days later. And so I have the headline and the headline says, "Player Distraught Over Death of Girl." 0:10:29.5 BB: And so I would show people that headline and say, "Which player is distraught over the death of the girl?" And people say, "Well, it's the guy who hit the slap shot…was the one feeling distraught." And I thought, why not the goalkeeper? Why doesn't the goalkeeper feel distraught? What about the person who passed the puck to the one who took the slap shot? How do they feel? And so this is this last straw mindset that, and I think psychologically we go through life and if we were that last straw, we feel all this weight. And if we're dissociated somehow, we don't feel it. Well, integration is about understanding how things come together. 0:11:14.7 BB: And in the world of integration, there is no separation. It's it’s understanding that there's many contributions to the performance of a system. And I used to ask students, "If I gave you a 10 minutes to list all the people who contributed to who you are, would you miss some people?" "Yes." And then once you come up with a list, could you measure their contribution? And measuring it means that number, if you take all those numbers, like 10% from your mother, 10% from your father, X%, you add them all up to 100. There's no such thing. So in the world of integration that I wanna get into with Dr. Taguchi's work, it's about understanding that things are connected as in an all straw mindset. They are not separate. Okay? 0:12:10.2 BB: So then next I wanna get into, I've taken, I've been fortunate to take some training in the Lean manufacturing, Lean management, Lean thinking, whatever you call it. And it's not uncommon, there'll be simulations where there's a bunch of parts to put together a car, or you're building something out of Legos. And there's a model, you need so many rectangular Legos of this size, so many square ones and you... And, you know, we're creating a flow, putting all these things together. And I've been in situations, university classes where the students are doing that and they're doing that ahead of me presenting something to them. And I remember one time, they're putting, you know, these cars together, they had four wheels and a little motor and a windshield, and they're putting it all together, this assembly line. 0:13:02.6 BB: And I participated in that. And then when it came my turn, I held up a tire. And I said, what is this? And they said, "It's a tire." And what is this?" That's a tire." I said, "Are they the same?" And they're like, "Yeah, they're the same." I said, "Well, actually they're not." If you understand variation, and no two snowflakes are the same, then no two tires are the same. And so I say that because we get stuck in this model of: if the parts are good, which means they conform to a set of requirements, then the sense is because they're good, when we pass them onto the next station, then they all come together, just like that, with no effort. 0:13:48.9 BB: And I say, sometimes that's the case. There could be degrees of effort, but this model that says, because they're good, they fit. And then we treat good as it's good or it's bad, which is black and white. It fits or it doesn't. And then the model we have is because they are good, all the things that are good are equally good, and then they fit equally well. And that's just not the case. And an everyday example would be going to a supermarket and sorting through the fruit. And I would ask students or attendees of a seminar to say, if I told you all the fruit in the supermarket was bruised or otherwise physically damaged, would you sort through it? And there'd be people that say yes, and then people say, no, I don't sort. 0:14:35.8 BB: Well, I point out is the reason we sort through the fruit is because there are different ripenesses of the bananas or the oranges different levels of juiciness. And our needs depend upon either something very juicy or very ripe or something green or something that's gonna be ripe later. What is that? That is saying that we're looking at the integration as we're going to use those oranges and integrate them into our breakfast by making orange juice out of them or taking the banana and turn it into a smoothie. So the bananas and the oranges don't exist in isolation. We have a sense of how we're going to use them. And then we have a sense of how much variation do we want or more so within a set of requirements, we're looking for something in particular and we're looking for a particular parking spot. We're saying there's all these parking spots and we're looking for the one with the most shade because there's degrees of shade. When it comes to hiring... 0:15:39.5 AS: Bananas is a good example because if I'm just gonna buy the banana to eat it, it needs to be reasonably ripe. If I'm gonna buy it to put in a smoothie, it's less critical that it's ripe. 0:15:52.3 BB: That's right. Yes, exactly. And what we're saying is that your integration of that banana depends upon its use. Since you have in mind I'm making banana bread, what does that mean? I want one which is very soft, it doesn't really matter because I'm not eating it as I'm out cycling. Then when it comes to what I've also shared with students, you'll say, well, is there a place for meeting requirements? And that's all. I said, yeah, there's a place for meeting requirements and that's all we need. And then there's a place for going to the next step and saying, I want the juiciest one, I want the freshest one, I want a parking spot which is furthest away from the door, closest to the door. And the same thing happens with staffing. 0:16:37.3 BB: We hire, we're looking to fill a position in our organization, we post something on LinkedIn and we put down the requirements we want and we go from 20 people down to three people. We invite them in for an interview. And what are we looking for? We're looking for, on paper we're saying these people are relatively…on paper, they are the same. The reason we're inviting them in is we want to know what is the degree of fit of each of these people into our organization? And what we're saying is fit is not absolute on a scale from zero to infinity, where are these people on that scale? And our judgment is which one fits in best. 0:17:18.7 BB: I'd say the same thing goes in when you're dating, thinking about marriage or thinking about a long-term relationship even with a supplier, you're looking for degrees of fit. And that's where Dr. Taguchi's loss function comes in. What he's saying is, is all these things meet requirements but depending on how the requirements are met from the very minimum to the very maximum, chances are there's a place in there which has the best integration. And that could be it goes together the easiest. And then, and then in terms of integration excellence, what I want to speak to is shifting from the model that things are good, then they fit. And then when you turn the thing on, it works. That we think about an alternate model, which is there's degrees of good, which leads to degrees of fit, which leads to degrees of performance. And an advantage of that model is it allows for improvement. The model of good equals fit equals works. How do you improve once you get everything good? And that goes back to a far earlier conversation we had over the red beads and the white beads. And of all the beads are red or gone, we're stuck with the white beads. 0:18:39.0 BB: Can we continually improve? Yeah, when you begin to think about improving integration, what we've also spoken about, Andrew, is, you know, we ended a conversation, you said, "So what's the aha moment for people listening?" And I said, "Would you like your organization to be known for products or services that integrate incredibly well in terms of how they perform in the use, as used by a customer, whether their customers are using it exactly or next immediately, or it gets plugged into their system. And do you wanna have... " The reputation that I find... Well, the reason I buy Toyotas is they tend to last very long. And I associate that with their appreciation of Dr. Taguchi's work, which supposedly goes back to the '50s, that they are looking at the parts as a system, how they work together and looking, not just meeting requirements minimally or maximally, but trying to find out where in the requirements of the associated parts should you be for this entire system to come together easily on a scale from zero to infinity and perform incredibly reliably. Andrew, you're gonna say? 0:20:01.0 AS: There's a couple of things. The first one, when you talked about the act of separation that people go through when blame's being tossed around, as an example, let's say, but it's happening all the time. What I was just thinking about is that act of separation is in their mind only. 0:20:20.5 BB: Yes, absolutely. 0:20:21.6 AS: Just because, just because you declare separation doesn't mean that there's not integration of the system. You're just denying it, running away from it. And the other thing I was thinking about about Toyota, it's a very interesting situation with Toyota because the company's being totally beat up for not having electric vehicles to the level that the market wants them to have, the investors want. And when you go against the, the EV crowd, the people that want this for climate or whatever reason, you're gonna get beat up. And they really have been attacked. And to the point that their share price went down seriously low. But when you listen to the CEO of Toyota, he's trying to speak in a system thinking way. 0:21:13.2 AS: He's trying to develop hydrogen as a possible solution. He's got hybrids. Yes, he hasn't moved as fast on the EV, but he also sees other problems. And he sees the research and development that they're doing, which they've just recently announced that they've got some fast charging and long mileage EV vehicle. And so he's trying to manage this whole system. Whereas take a weak manager or a manager, maybe he just... The CEO came in for the last five years or so at Ford or at GM or wherever. And they're like, "Hey, the market says EV, let's go." And then without thinking about the whole system, they end up losing billions of dollars in EV. Whereas now I think that what I've seen with Toyota, and the reason why I'm talking about this is because I've been working with students in my valuation masterclass. 0:22:10.5 AS: They're valuing Toyota and some say it's a buy, some it's a sell, some are beating them up just like the crowd is on EVs, but others are seeing, some, that integration. But ultimately the job of a manager, I guess, is to figure out, I like the degrees of fit. That is such a great thing of how it's good enough. Like Taguchi's loss function was...
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Do You Listen to Speak or Listen to Learn? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 12)
11/14/2023
Do You Listen to Speak or Listen to Learn? Role of a Manager in Education (Part 12)
Listening to understand and learn is often harder than not-really-listening because you're thinking about what to say. Dr. Deming emphasized learning and was excited about ideas he heard from others every day. In this episode, David Langford and Andrew Stotz talk about why and how managers, including teachers, should listen to staff or students. 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 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 going through Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discuss in New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. In the third edition, that's page 86. In the second edition, that's page 125. And we're talking about point number 12 and that is "he listens and learns without passing judgment on him that he listens to." And we decided to title this one, Do You Listen to Speak or Listen to Learn? David, take it away. 0:00:56.8 David P. Langford: Yeah. Well, thanks. It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, I was just, I was just thinking that when I was at Deming's conferences and a couple of times sat with him either after the end of the day or even at lunchtime, etc. Or just watching him interact with other people, it was often pretty amazing that he'd be chatting with somebody and then he'd pull out these little notebooks and he's all of a sudden just writing down something that somebody told him or that somebody said or... And later in the day, a lot of times he'd pull out the notebook and say to somebody, "Look what I learned today." And I was always just so impressed with that. And I don't know how many four-day conferences I was at with him, at least half a dozen, and always the same, always swan with that little notebook, always writing stuff down. 0:02:02.9 DL: And so this point comes to mind about how special that made you feel that here you have the master of the third industrial revolution, writing down what, what you say, people that he doesn't really know that well or something, but just a point that somebody made and how important that was to him and to keep track of that. And a lot of times I think we've lost that skill. And I like the title of this session because a lot of times when people are having even casual conversations, they're not really listening to what the person is saying. They're thinking about what they're going to say next or how they're going to respond to a point that was made. And when I really started taking these points to heart and thinking about it, even as a classroom teacher, I began to realize that I really wasn't listening to my students. I was preparing to talk at them. [laughter] I remember... 0:03:16.0 AS: And they were preparing to be talked at. 0:03:18.6 DL: Yeah. They're ready to take notes, and you know, but they weren't ready to think and offer opinions and to go through that whole process of working through it. I'll never forget my friend Dr. Myron Tribus, he was a professor at Dartmouth, I think in the engineering school. And for some reason, his whole lecture that he was going to do one day was just either lost or something just before he was ready to walk out in his classroom of 200 kids, students that he was working with and everything. And he thought, "Oh my God, what am I going to do? I don't have my notes. I don't have all this stuff and everything else." Anyway, he just started asking them questions and put them into groups and had the groups discuss things and then come back and pose questions and debate each other and talk and work through. And he told me he'd never had so many students on the way out of classes. "Wow, that was the best class we've ever had." [laughter] 0:04:21.7 AS: Such a great, a great opportunity when you come unprepared, but you've got a group of people in front of you with all kinds of opportunities to pull out discussions. 0:04:37.3 DL: It's sort of like, are you prepared to be unprepared? [laughter] So there's a difference, there's incompetence where you just come in and you don't know what you're doing and, you know, you're lost, or you're prepared, this is a plan that you're going to come in and actually listen to people and present and go through things. I remember even in a high school class that I had, one of the most successful things we did is, I may have told you this story before, but anyway, the library would get all the newspapers and then after a day they're no good. And so coming into class, I would just get all the newspapers from the previous day. And the challenge for the students was to go quickly through the newspapers and pick out relevant events happening around the world and be prepared to discuss that in small groups and stuff. At first, I just thought of it as an activity. And it turned into be so profound that students really thought deeply about stuff. 0:05:43.1 DL: And then they would take Deming principles and apply that to that situation, whether you're talking about world wars, or you're talking about the economics or business or education or whatever it might be. And I remember even just a few years ago, a student of mine, 35 years ago, ran into me and said, "I still remember doing that. I still remember those discussions going through." And most of the time, I was just sitting and listening to them discuss about things. And maybe I'd ask a few questions now and then about things or try to get them to think differently about something. But it was, there were no right or wrong answers, it was just getting people to think. 0:06:30.9 AS: There's so many different things going on in my head as you're talking about this. The first thing is I was thinking... I was thinking about three things. The first is, in order to achieve what he's talking about, first, you have to stop talking. And the second thing is what I've learned over the years is, the best way to stop, the next thing you have to do is stop thinking, because my mind's racing to think about what am I going to say next. And the best way to stop thinking is to take notes of what the person is saying, from my experience. Yesterday, I went to visit a, a prospective client, and I asked him to tell me about his pain that he's feeling in his business and why he's asked me to come. And I have in my notebook here, I've got it all listed out. And then I went back and I read them back to him. And it was kind of funny because I said, "Unfortunately, I just don't think this is enough pain." [laughter] But I don't think I could have said that if I hadn't really understood what his pain was. And so, we had a further conversation going deeper. 0:07:42.5 AS: But then the third part that Dr. Deming is talking about is not passing judgment. Wait a minute. Come on. I'm all about judgment. I know what's right. I formed my beliefs over many years. And you can also say that Dr. Deming passed some pretty tough judgment, you know. So, I'm just curious, as I think about those three things, how do you put that all together in your mind? 0:08:09.2 DL: Well, I was just thinking about one of the conferences that we were at. He always had an education day after one of his conferences. And so, there'd be educators from all over the state would come to his one-day conference. And I'll never forget the room was filled with like 300 school administrators, principals, some teachers, et cetera. And then there was a time to ask Dr. Deming questions. And this fairly young man got up and described the high school that he was a principal of, and there were 52 different languages spoken, and the gang violence that he was dealing with, and all just really detailed and clear. And he had data, and he really understood what was going on. He says, "So Dr. Deming, I need your advice about what, where I should go from here, what I should do." And Dr. Deming is sitting up on this big stage. He's probably 89 years old at the time, and he's got his arms folded, and he looks down, and he looks up at the ceiling. 0:09:14.1 DL: The silence is just deafening with 300 people there. And started to think, well, maybe he didn't hear the question or realize he's supposed to [laughter] he's supposed to answer or something. And finally, the guy couldn't stand it anymore at the microphone. He says, "Well, Dr. Deming, do you have an answer to my question?" And Dr. Deming said, "It's not the answer that's important. It's the question. And you've got that right." [laughter] Next question. [laughter] And there was just this ripple in the audience, like, "What does that mean? Oh, my gosh." Yeah. So when you're able to actually ask the right questions, then you're probably on the right track of figuring out what to do yourself. It's the people that aren't listening and aren't thinking about what is the next question? Or what question should I be answering? 0:10:10.3 AS: And what do you think about when he says... Now, we have to understand that, we're talking about managing your people here. So it's not like he's talking about when you're going out and speaking in the public necessarily, but he's talking about how you're developing your people and interacting with your people. And he's saying, without passing judgment. And I guess the first thing he said, if the way you interact with the people that you manage is to pass judgment on them, you're probably going to lose trust right away. And we've already seen that trust was number 10. So I guess what he's trying to say is, you know, listen and accept what you hear. I don't know. 0:10:55.2 DL: Yeah, I think what I've often taught teachers a lot is to learn to be comfortable with silence, too. You think you're the leader of people so you have to fill all the silence all the time. And you may ask a question, and then you have to just wait. And I'll never forget when I was working with Alaska Native students in Alaska, high school students, read a study that said the average time it takes for an Anglo Saxon teacher to ask a question and then answer their own question is like three seconds. You know, not really listening at all. The average wait time, response time for Alaska Native students was something like 20 seconds. So, here you have all these teachers that have come in from the outside that are starting to work with Alaska Native kids. And they, I remember vividly teachers saying, "Well, these kids just don't respond. They just don't talk. They just don't." Well, give them time. [laughter] It's not in their culture just to respond instantly every time you ask a question or like a game show host or something like that of how many questions can we get through in one hour or something. 0:12:19.3 DL: And I just noticed for myself that I had to do little things like learn to put my hand on my watch, while I, as a cue just ask... I asked somebody a question just to wait until I got that response. And sure enough, when I would wait, I would get really good thought out well...good responses. I didn't wait and I get just cheap answers that people are trying to give you what they think you want to hear. 0:12:53.8 AS: I just thought about how being a podcast host has helped me a lot in listening because, I'm doing two things, one is I'm shutting up. And there's so many times that I feel like, you know I think my discussions with you are a little bit different from my discussions I do on my other podcasts where here I think there's a lot more... We're going back and forth on a lot of things, which I really enjoy. But still, it's just, it's a lesson in being quiet. And what you just said reminded me of something I always said to people that came to Thailand, either managers or teachers, and I said, "Just because Thai people don't respond to your question doesn't mean they don't have an opinion." And I think it's the same thing as what you're saying. And therefore, you've got to use different ways. So in the case of Thailand, one of the ways you do that is you have... And I just saw a presentation recently by a Thai person and they messed up themselves because what they did is they asked the audience, "Raise your hand and ask a question." 0:14:05.0 AS: Which they knew that that's not how Thai people respond. They're not so brave as to do that. But luckily, that person also had a little venue that they could type in a question. And instead of in, they could have saved time by just not even saying, "Shout out your question," they could have just said, "Go to the app, type in your question now." And then people would have really... Eventually they got it. But it was just interesting to see even a native person not really realizing the way people respond. 0:14:39.4 DL: I just know, even in my own family have five children. Well, my wife and I have five children. [laughter] But when they were really little, by the time we got to probably the third one, we had to sort of just hold back the older kids, because we found out that they were just filling in all the blanks for the little ones that couldn't answer or couldn't answer incomplete sentences, or they were actually just completing their thoughts for them and things and just had to explain to them, "Look, you just have to wait and let them formulate an answer and let them talk, let them speak." Because they didn't realize that they didn't have that problem when they were that age. [laughter] They just had parents that were just doting on them and there weren't any other children around. So. 0:15:31.6 AS: Let the process happen. 0:15:33.8 DL: Yeah, it worked out really well because then we'd have fantastic dinner conversations in which all five of them at different ages could enter in and talk about it and enjoy experiences. 0:15:48.3 AS: One other thing I recently did in one of my classes that maybe I would talk about because there's an aspect of listening to it. Originally, this is my ethics in finance class, and it's a 15 hour class. And I can teach for 15 hours on the ethics material, but after COVID happened, it's like, why not just put it all on video. And so what I'm teaching is exactly mirrored to what's in the videos. So now what I did is I told the students, "Look, you're responsible for going through this material. I'm going to carry you through a portion of it. But from day one, I'm telling you, it's all in the videos. And then there's practice questions and things like that." So now what I do is I did... Originally, what I did is I taught for half the three hour session I would teach and then I would have them do case studies. But I realized that I wasn't happy with what the case studies were bringing out and so I switched it to debates. 0:16:47.4 AS: And now I give them topics and they have teams that debate. And I still had the problem that the audience wasn't participating or asking really great questions, it's almost like, it's the other team. So I required all teams to submit one, let's say two arguments with some sort of link to some evidence and two arguments against linked to some evidence, and they all have to submit that by Monday. And then I release that to the whole group, so that the teams that were preparing for Wednesday can see even wider view before they get up on stage. But the key thing is that what's happened now is that I don't have to ask any questions at the end. So I'm just listening. And it's fantastic, because the audience now, they've got good questions. And I just feel like when you talk about listening for me to be able to spend the second half of the class, I don't say anything. 0:17:44.3 DL: Yeah, so it seems like such a simple point. But I think when you really think about it, there's just a lot of depth there and reasoning. And you also made me think about, because you were referring back to the one of the previous points to and trust and stuff, but all of Deming's work was always an interrelationship of parts to the whole. So whether you're talking about the 14 points in his New Eco... Or the Out of the Crisis book, or you're talking about these 14 items for managers or whatever it might be. I was always so impressed that he always saw these things as an interrelated parts to the whole. So it's not like, "Hey, if you just start listening and just do this, then everything is just going to be great." Well, that's a piece of the puzzle, that's not the whole puzzle. 0:18:31.0 AS: It's a progression. Well, is there anything that you would add in wrapping up about listen and learn without passing judgment on the person that you're listening to? 0:18:46.5 DL: I think, I think the last thing is that as a manager of people, whether it's a teacher in a classroom or whatever it might be, you have to actually formally make time to do that. And I know that's really hard to do, but you think of a normal like classroom teacher, like K through 12 classroom teacher, maybe you have 30 kids in a class, how are you going to set up a system so that you're actually getting some time to listen and learn from individual students? And that's really hard to do. It can be done if you think about, "Okay, well, I got 25 kids, if I set up a time to listen to five a day, by the end of the week, I've actually got some one-on-one time with everybody involved with that." Or we've talked about too, in moving to small groups or even whole group kinds of sessions. But the whole point is that you are listening, and think how proud it makes people that you are listening. 0:19:56.3 DL: That's why I told that story about Dr. Deming, because I always felt really proud that he was really listening to what I was trying to say or explain or ask a question about. 0:20:07.9 AS: Yeah, I can't help but add to that, that I do one-on-ones with every one of my students in the Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp. Now, it's a 70% pass rate. So, I don't do those until the end of the course, but people line up video meetings, and we do it virtually because it's kind of, it's easier. But what I have is I have a series of about eight questions that I ask them. And then what I do is I just get them on the line and I say, "Okay, let's look at your first question I asked you, and here's your answer." And I read it back, and then I say, "Tell me more about that." It's incredible. 0:20:47.2 DL: And you have to be real quiet and listen. [laughter] 0:20:51.1 AS: Just tell me more about that. That's all you have to do. And I think that's what your last wrap up there just reminded me. And I think for all the listeners and the viewers out there, you know, "tell me more about that." Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. 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."
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How to Break Down Barriers: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 15)
11/07/2023
How to Break Down Barriers: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 15)
Most people agree: teamwork and collaboration generate greater results than isolation and silos. So why do we let barriers get in the way? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about barriers to collaboration and how to break them down. 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 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 15, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:34.9 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. So we're talking about these 14 Principles for educational system transformation, like you said, I think last episode we talked about Drive Out Fear, so this episode I thought we'd focus on that next Principle, which is Break Down Barriers. So Principle nine, break down barriers. The way I have this framed is "to break down barriers between departments and grade levels and develop strategies for increasing cooperation among groups and individuals, everyone must work as a team to foresee problems in the production and use of high quality learning experiences" in the case of schools. I was looking back through some notes, and I just happened to come across a quote from Out of the Crisis that I thought was a good quote to sort of start off with, in that book, Deming said "Teamwork is risky business. He that works to help other people may not have as much production to show for the annual rating as he would if he worked alone." And I think what this does for me is really illustrate how big a job breaking down barriers is, because everybody's gonna say, yes, I'm for working as a team. Everybody's gonna say I'm for cooperation. 0:01:58.9 JD: But when the rubber meets the road, you know what actually happens? And I think that quote is a good one, too, because it very clearly connects back to Drive Out Fear. Right. 'Cause what are you going to do once you break down the barriers? What's the behavior that you hope to see? And, you know, the behavior that you hope to see is only possible if you also drive out fear, which I think is, you know, showing that there's this connection between all of these Principles, there are these mutually supporting guiding principles. 0:02:36.3 AS: One thing that's just popping in my head is if you didn't incentivize people, let's think of young people, maybe. Would people naturally be, you know, helpful and doing teamwork? We know that, you know, the annual ratings and those types of things can incentivize being, you know, selfish and not, not working across the organization. But I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that? 0:03:06.8 JD: Yeah, I think... If, if, are you using incentives as a pejorative in this context? 0:03:13.9 AS: Yes. 0:03:16.6 JD: Yeah, I think you have to look at the system that you've set up and the behaviors that result, and then sort of step back and see that whole picture, what is it that... What's the behavior that you're causing by the system you've set up? So I think... That's the major point I think. 0:03:34.0 AS: I'm just thinking about like when someone's young and, you know, they're just living a normal life, they're out with their friends, they're playing in the woods, when I was young, you know, those types of things. Are they naturally helping each other and, you know, naturally want to help or are they naturally selfish? 0:03:53.0 JD: Well, yeah, I think that's a good question. I think that would probably depend a lot on the context. I think, you know, if you're generally talking about young kids, there's probably a sort of a natural inclination to cooperation that's sort of, I think maybe stomped out, extinguished, as you encounter the various systems that are in place in schools, in work settings, those types of things. So, I think, yeah, I mean, I think I would probably lean that way, that there's a natural inclination to cooperation that sort of, is depressed, you know, through the various work and school systems that we've set up. You know, that's a generalization, obviously, but I would probably concur with that. Yeah. 0:04:39.8 AS: You talked about departments and grade levels, and when I think about breaking down barriers, I always think about departments. But maybe you could explain breaking down barriers between grade levels too. 0:04:54.3 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think a grade level team in a school system can be very similar to a department in a business. I mean, obviously I'm working in a school system. And so, there are departments, there's, you know, operations folks, there's HR folks, there are the academic folks and so forth and so on. But there's also these grade level teams where, you know, oftentimes in a school, teachers work most closely with the four or five other teachers on their grade level team. That's a pretty common setup. And so, you know, just like you could sort of optimize the finance department at the expense of the operations department. Same thing, you could do that with the sixth-grade team versus the seventh-grade team versus the eighth-grade team in that same way in the school system. Yep. Yeah. 0:05:47.9 AS: And what's the hardest part about breaking down barriers in school environment? It's, at first, I think that, you know, everybody's overloaded. They're trying to get their stuff done. You know, like, I'm curious what you've experienced there. 0:06:05.0 JD: Well, you know, I mean, I think with any school, I see schools as sort of a complex system, lots of interdependent parts, I think especially so in schools that are located in, you know, high poverty areas, because in addition to the regular stuff of school, you're often sort of also coordinating any number of partners, providers, counselors, you know, healthcare providers even, that are coming from oftentimes outside your system, and, you know, there's all these programs and things that you're trying to coordinate on top of just normal school. So that's sort of an added challenge to coordination in my setting. I think in general, one of the big challenges is that whether you're in a high poverty or low poverty setting, there is a lot of coordination that happens in schools. But teachers are with kids all day. And so, when there is coordination that needs to happen amongst the adult teams, when do you do that? You know, there's only a few options where you can get everybody, you know, together that's, you know, before school, after school or perhaps, you know, you set aside days that are specifically for that where the kids aren't in the building. So I think that's a major challenge in a lot of... 0:07:22.2 AS: Which I would assume everybody would love a 6:00 AM meeting before school. 0:07:24.8 JD: Yeah. I mean, we try not to do too much of that anymore. But we used to do that, you know, not infrequently for certain things. And one of the things we actually did here at United Schools Network where I work, it's been almost a decade now. We reorganized our school day, so that kids used to come at 7:30 and now we have a lot of those sort of adult type meetings, grade level team meetings, building leadership team meetings. Those happen in that 7:30 to 8:30 hour now. So, we did sort of change our system, shortened our day a little bit in recognition of the fact that we need some time to coordinate all the work that's going on during the school day. 0:08:04.5 AS: What are the school hours now? 0:08:06.7 JD: For kids, 8:40 to 4:00 basically, and then adults come an hour earlier. 0:08:16.4 AS: Right. I don't know if you read that, the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, I think it is. 0:08:24.4 JD: No. 0:08:25.7 AS: It's an excellent book that I mean, I highly recommend it for everybody because it really shows the importance. I didn't really wanna read it because I felt like I don't need, I don't need to know why we sleep. I need to know how to sleep more. But once you literally understand why we sleep, you realize, okay, that's the impetus for starting to sleep more. But they had some research that they talked about how, you know, basically there's morning people and then there's evening people, you know, or let's say morning and not morning. And they talked about different schools and outcomes, and they talked about how the problem that schools could be facing is that by forcing non morning people to get into class at an early time they're hurting the performance of those people, those kids substantially, and they had research showing that. And I have always felt like everybody should be a morning person. Come on! That book changed my mind. 0:09:26.8 JD: Yeah, I've heard this argument made before and it went into our decision-making sort of praxis when we decided to change our day. We sort of have it backwards. We, you know, elementary kids often go to school around 8:30 or 9:00, and high school and middle school kids often go to school in a lot of places at 7:20, 7:30. And they're generally the kids that need to sort of more sleep. But, you know, thinking of systems, it's very hard to change because it's tied to transportation systems. It's tied to athletic systems and practices and stuff like that. And so, it's a very hard thing to sort of reshape those systems for all those reasons, for sure. 0:10:12.0 AS: I'm wondering if you could give advice to the listeners or viewers about, they're facing, let's say, somebody facing a lot of barriers in their school. And they don't really know where to start. Maybe you could give some ideas about ways to start and kind of your own experience and, you know, any guidance that you would give. 0:10:37.8 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think that one good starting point in the process is just to stop and think about the question, you know, what exactly is being produced by a school system. So, I think that's something to get clear on because I think a lot of people would instinctually say students, that's what's being produced. But I think if you stop and think about it, that's not quite right. Rather, I think what the aim of a school system is, is to produce high quality learning, not the students themselves. And knowledge and skills is what's being produced by a school system. And I think when you sort of look at your system in the same way that Deming would, you know, we don't have a graphic here, but for those that have seen it, you know, you sort of have, you know, inputs into your system and then you have all these processes that you sort of undertake, you know, while kids are with you. And then, you know, kids go out and are going to other places. In our case, they're going to high schools or, you know, for K-12 systems, they're going into the military or to higher education, to jobs, those types of things. And so, I think it's, you know, be very clear about what it is that you're producing. You're not producing the students themselves. You're producing these high-quality learning processes. Then how do you bring that to fruition? 0:12:07.9 JD: I mean, I think, in thinking through that aim and how to accomplish it, I think just like we were talking about the departments and the grade levels, school systems are organized functionally, and that's for efficiency, just like businesses, you know? But what we really need to think about is how to operate cross-functionally. So that would be one thing is how to set up cross-functional teams. And you know, this is for that simple reason that we've talked about repeatedly that we don't operate cross-functionally, and we just sort of operate in our silos. We make that silo as good as it can be. Oftentimes that can come at an expense to the system as a whole. So that's one thing I think of. You know, I think of...when you think about improving your system, I think one thing to think about off the top of your, sort of at the outset of any improvement effort is what's the boundary of the system that you're talking about. Are you just talking about your school system, which sort of the school system start and stop sort of at some arbitrary geographic boundaries. 0:13:35.4 JD: So, are you talking about improving the educational system in a city or in a single school building or a single school district? So, I was thinking of a couple of examples. You know, one sort of within a system and then would be between systems. But within a system, often there's a, you know, you have general education, students in general education, and then you have students that are spending some amount of their time in special education within that same school system. So, I think, you know, if you're talking about defining your system as that, that school system, you know, I think no matter what, it's you know, what's the aim of that system? Because we're required to have these special education services within our school systems, all of us. And, I think what often happens is actually two parallel systems get created. And, you know, there's specialized staff, there's a language that goes with special education. There's a whole list of compliance items and laws. 0:14:46.9 JD: And, you know, if you make one or the other really good, general education or special education, are you actually making the system as a whole worse? I don't know the answer to that question, but there's a whole lot of questions to answer. You know, do the special education students get the same curriculum? Do they get the same testing system? Are they operating under the same academic standards? I don't have the answers, you know, and that can vary by situation. All I'm saying is, wow we've created two separate education systems, and what happens when we try to improve one corner of the system like special education, does that actually make the whole system? Are we serving the kids well that are getting those services? I think there's a whole lot of questions happen... So I think just looking at that, how those systems talk to each other is another sort of step you can take. 0:15:41.4 AS: Yeah. And I guess the other thing, going back to what you've talked about before, about the aim of the system, and you've talked just briefly here about it right now, but the idea is that if you can, maybe one of the first steps besides setting up a cross-functional team is to say, why don't we talk about what's the aim? Because if we can get to that point of what's the aim of what we're doing, chances are that will be the first kind of guiding light as to why we should break out of our silos or break down the barriers. 0:16:17.6 JD: Yeah, what's the purpose? I mean, is the purpose of special education a temporary set of supports that then leads the child back into more and more general education services? Or is that not, not the purpose? I mean, I think clarifying that in your system is really important. Another example. You know, this would be more like, sort of thinking of a larger system, not just your school system, but in a lot of places we have a traditional public school system, like in a city, like a big urban system. And then we have a public charter school system, which is a lot of times not its own district, but a series of small networks or maybe even single, single buildings. And again, I step back and say, well, what's the aim? Is it to make the system of education better in that particular city, in my case, you know, in Columbus? Or are we just trying to optimize our little corner? Are we thinking about these different pockets? We've often you know, speaking from experience, we've often been an afterthought when it comes to transportation systems or funding or facilities. And a lot of times, I don't think it's nefarious. It's just like literally there is not a representative around the table when decisions are made. And these systems were set up not, you know, originally weren't taking public charter schools into account. So there literally is no one thinking about how the needs might be a bit different in that particular type of system. 0:18:02.8 JD: And then, of course, because there's limited resources, there can be a lot of sort of, you know, people at each other. And that, that was a revelation of sorts or a mindset shift of sorts for me not to think of, you know, other school systems as competition, but really in looking at the Deming approach, it's win-win. Like if we have any chance of creating, you know, a successful system of education, especially in areas where things aren't working so well, like in a lot of core, core cities. I mean, the only way that we're going to do that is through cooperation, working together, having a shared aim. Those types of things. So, I think breaking down those barriers, whether they're internal, your own system, in a lot of cases there's a lot of barriers in place. Or it's between systems. I think that's, you know, at least as important, maybe more important, I don't know. And so that's the best... 0:19:01.1 AS: Your mic was fading out there. So, what was the last thing you said? 0:19:05.4 JD: Yeah, I said, breaking down those barriers between the systems is just as important as breaking down the barriers within your own system. Probably more important in a lot of ways. And I think that's the, you know, part of the power that I see in the Deming philosophy is this framing of win-win. You know, I used to think of other school systems as competition. Now I think of, well, how can we work together to create this system of, you know, of education that works for kids? Yeah, those are a couple, you know, thoughts. 0:19:41.4 AS: I'll tell a story to wrap up and then ask you to do a final summary. But you just, just my mind went back to like, when I was younger and how I was in some special education classes or, you know, I was just in trouble. But my story, my story is that by the time I was 17, I was addicted to drugs and alcohol. And I went into a treatment center in Minnesota called Fairview Deaconess Hospital. And then four days after I got out, I started getting high again. And then I went to Baton Rouge General Hospital. My parents bought me a one-way ticket to, on a bus, on a Greyhound bus to go there from Cleveland. I left from Akron bus station, and, and somehow I got clean at that time. That was September 15th, 1982. And I've been clean since then. So 41 years now. And I went to a long term treatment center that was in Solon, Ohio at the time. It's moved now, but outside of Cleveland called New Directions and I was there for seven months. But, so I had a real challenge with addiction in high school and prior to high school. 0:20:50.7 AS: But why this is interesting about coming back to my special education was that back when I was in third grade or so, I just knew I was in a lot of trouble, and I was just not an easy kid to handle, like a lot of kids, I had a lot of energy. My mom came to live with me seven years ago and she brought, you know, we brought some of her personal effects and stuff. And she had a little, a notebook that she gave me that was the notebook she kept of all my medical journals of my whole life where she wrote down things. And what I found in that notebook a couple of years ago was that the doctors started giving me Ritalin at the age of seven. And I had forgotten completely about that. But I don't know whether it was three years, five years, whatever. But I was on Ritalin from a young age and it was, you know, because okay, I was, you know, not cooperating probably and all that. And so I needed special help or whatever. But I started wondering, I wonder what role that had in my...
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In Search of Excellence: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 11)
10/31/2023
In Search of Excellence: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 11)
What's the difference between Compliance Excellence and Contextual Excellence? Is one better than the other? Which one does a Deming organization pursue? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about the variety of types of excellence, and why they matter. 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 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 11: In Search of Excellence. Bill, go ahead, take it away. 0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: All right. So, as I've been doing for the last few episodes, I like to go back to the prior episode. Because I listen to these again and again and again. Oh, there's other things I wanna say. [laughter] Remember the title of the last session, Andrew? 0:00:46.1 AS: Well, that depends. [laughter] The title was, It Depends. 0:00:50.7 BB: Alright. Alright. So you know I'm fond of that phrase. So I wanna... I thought of after, you know, in the last couple weeks is, I took a class in program management at a big university in Greater Los Angeles. I mean, it could have been anywhere, but it was in Los Angeles, and there were 25, 30 people in the room, maybe more, from around the world coming into this university. It was a three day program, you know, like, $1,800. $1800. I had just joined a department called The Program Management Office, and I thought, I should go find out what program management is it all about? I had some ideas, but I thought, "I want to go take a real class on this." The class was presented by an aerospace veteran in project management. He had been involved in major programs with Hughes, installing, you know, working on airports around the world and other DOD stuff. 0:01:48.6 BB: And I mean, he was, he was a very interesting guy. I got there early every day looking, I was hoping there'd be an opportunity I could start a conversation with him, have lunch with him, that never happened. But three days long. And so, on the second day, he threw out a question to the audience, and people are sitting in a... It's kind of an amphitheater, with the rows were kind of curved. So he throws out a question to the audience and the guy in the front row answers, "it depends." [laughter] And the instructor very deliberately walked from the front of the room, a good 15 feet without saying anything, just walked right at that person in the front row, you know, all at the same level, gets right in his face and says the following, Andrew, are you ready? 0:02:47.6 AS: I'm ready. 0:02:48.6 BB: He says, "Are you an attorney?" [laughter] And I thought to myself, "All of that for the answer, "it depends," really?" And so, [laughter] later that afternoon, somebody asked the instructor a question, "Hey, what if you're in a situation where you gotta deal with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this, this, this, this, this, how would you handle that?" 0:03:17.3 AS: And for the listeners out there, you know the punchline here, come on, give it to me. What did he say? 0:03:23.5 BB: No, here's what he said. He said, "Well, if it involves this, I would do this. If it involves that, I would do that." And so, what did I say, Andrew? 0:03:42.6 AS: What did you say? What do you mean? 0:03:44.7 BB: I bit my tongue. 0:03:45.9 AS: Oh, you didn't say anything when he said that? 0:03:48.6 BB: Because what he just said was, "it depends." 0:03:50.4 AS: “It depends” in another way. 0:03:52.8 BB: Yeah. He found another way to say “it depends.” So it was also... 0:03:56.0 AS: He sounded kind of smart, you know, well, let's just narrow it down to two potential options. 0:04:00.8 BB: “Are you an attorney?” Yeah. But he still... What he was still saying was, it depends on the situation. 0:04:09.3 AS: Yep. 0:04:09.8 BB: And I just thought... I mean... And not that I didn't mind that answer, but I was just dumbstruck as to why he was so emphatic in challenging this answer, "it depends"? And I just thought, again, I never went up and asked, but I just thought, I wasn't sure it was gonna go anywhere. So anyway, so I wanted to throw that out. Going back a couple episodes, I wanna talk about metrics and KPIs and point out that there's nothing wrong, I mean, we're not saying KPIs are bad. What we're talking about is, when KPIs are used as goals and in a way that unnecessarily drives the organization in different directions, but if a KPI is just a metric of how we're doing in sales, that's one thing. 0:05:03.7 BB: But if the metric is, I want sales to be this number, and I go to people in procurement and say, "I want you to cut back on procurement," you know, we can end up with a conflict. You know, I had a woman in class once who worked for a gym, health club. And her job was to sell memberships and get on the phone every day, sell memberships, sell memberships, sell memberships. And she told her boss, she says, "Now, if I do a really good job, lines will form if we don't get more equipment. So, while I'm doing this, shouldn't we be working on that?" And her boss' attitude was, "You keep working on that and don't worry about that." So what she realized, it was just a revolving door of replacing old people with new people. They were just managing the parts in isolation. But another thing I think we had agreement on, you know, also had agreement on KPIs is it's... We're not saying there's anything wrong with metrics, but in organizations where we've worked, we've seen people drive change with, "give everybody a KPI." 0:06:17.5 BB: We could have great ignorance of variation. We have... Leading to dissolution of, just increased separation of organization. What I'm also reminded of is a quote that Dr. Deming used to use of his statistician colleague, Lloyd Nelson, who said, "the most important numbers used to manage an organization are unknown and unknowable." And one example from when I worked for Boeing is a good friend of mine was at the Boeing Leadership Center and there was a big emphasis at that time on what's called the Economic Profit Calculator. Making sure that business decisions close. They were not gonna build the next generation airplane unless they've got all the sales lined up and you have to have closure and closure within some timeframe, and that person came out. 0:07:12.4 BB: That was the big driving change in that era. Well, right after that presentation by somebody senior, the Chief Operating Officer, Harry Stonecipher presented. And what was near and dear to Harry at that point was something he started when McDonald Douglas was separate from Boeing, then Boeing bought McDonald Douglas, and he was really big on an education program that allowed anyone to pursue any degree, all reimbursed. So if he wanted an AS degree, a Master's degree, a law degree, not only were they paying for the degrees, but there were people getting a Bachelor's and then getting a Master's in Science and a MBA, so he just go at it, go at it. And he's very proud of that. 0:08:00.5 BB: So, my friend Tim is listening to all this and he says, "This afternoon, we heard from so and so in finance about Boeing business decisions needing to fit into this Economic Profit Calculator, how does your education reimbursement program fit into that model?" And his answer was, I thought really profound, he said, "there are some things you just do." And to me that fits in with Deming saying, you can’t measure the price of education. We brought an instructor in, we had you away for so many hours... 0:08:34.6 AS: You can measure the cost. 0:08:36.1 BB: And so, we can put some numbers on it. But what are the benefits? The benefits show up in the future. So I really admire that Stonecipher's answer was, I think very much in keeping with Deming is, we're gonna spend money on education. So, I just wanna throw that out for in terms of metrics and what not. 0:08:52.9 AS: And I would just throw in my thoughts on KPIs, which has gotten stronger and stronger over the years, and that is that, I really think people should stop KPIs. And the reason why is, because I think they've gotten to the point where it's just so misused and so, people are so reliant on it. Now, I know that that's an extreme view and so... But I say it to also challenge people to think about it, but if you can't stop the KPIs, then I would say the most important thing from my perspective, is make sure that compensation is not linked to the KPIs. Which of course, people will come back and say, that's the whole point of KPIs. [laughter] 0:09:44.4 BB: Exactly. 0:09:44.5 AS: And if you remove compensation connection to KPI, and instead of that, you use coaching and working with your team, and you have metrics of what you want to achieve as a company, as an organization, as a department, and you look at those metrics... Nothing wrong with that, but it's when you bring in the personal, particularly the personal incentive or the division incentive that can then sub-optimize... Can optimize a part of the organization, either an individual or a department, and therefore, sub-optimize the total. 0:10:22.0 BB: Oh, yeah. If you tie those metrics... Yeah and that becomes the... What makes them sinister, when you provide that incentive that... And I'm sure we've both seen people given incentives and they're not gonna leave, what I tell people is, they're not gonna leave a penny on the table, whether it's get rid of that division, lay off so many people, they are going to achieve that metric, because there's money on the table and in the way of that problem. 0:10:55.2 AS: And for those people who are listening or viewing, who feel like, "My God, what would I do if I don't have KPIs, because that's kind of the way we've been managing?" The first thing is, I would say is that, if you know that... So first, talk to your staff, because once you go out and talk to the people in the company, you realize that almost nobody is in favor of KPIs, because they're being manipulated in many ways and they all see it. But if you know in your heart that it's not the right thing to do, my argument is, don't wait to stop doing the wrong thing until you know what the right thing is. You know? Stop... "I don't wanna stop beating my child, because I don't know the other way to do it." [laughter] No. Stop beating your child today, that would be a first step. Don't worry about what it is you're gonna do next. Anyways, that's enough on KPIs. 0:12:00.4 BB: You've reminded me of a story that's coming to me, but it's not coming in loud and clear, so I made a note, I'll share it next time 'cause you're gonna love it. I wanna give an example of what, of what, of what a narrow focus on KPIs can do. Just a couple of little ones, that are, you just can't make these up. In 1999, while at Rocketdyne, there was a focus on reducing costs. And this is, all organizations have these stories. And this is one I use to talk about in class all the time. So I don't think anyone's gonna be offended. Hopefully they'll laugh more than be offended by it. 0:12:37.9 BB: So there's a big focus across the company of reducing cost. Reducing cost. What do people do in a non-Deming organization? They look at cost in isolation. Where I wanna reduce the cost of this, not look at how it affects the others. And so, at that point of time, again, we're talking over 20 years ago, all the documentation to make every space shuttle main engine was on, was on paper. Every page used to fabricate the engines on paper. And there were page by page instructions of manufacturing to do this, do this, line by line by line, and on every line it might say, torque this bolt to 55 inch pounds, and it was stamped by me, the mechanic, and by you the inspector. Boom, boom, boom. 0:13:28.2 BB: So if NASA ever wants to know, was that bolt torqued on that engine on... And we have all the documentation. Guess how many pages of documentation there are? Nowadays it's likely all electronic, but in that day it was all paper. Guess how many pages of documentation for every single space shuttle main engine of which they're on the order of 18 made? Take a wild guess. 0:13:55.9 AS: Gosh. I'm just thinking thousands. 0:14:00.5 BB: 18,000 pages of documentation. So Andrew, that's like, 60 3-Ring Binders and I mean, 300 pages in a 3-Ring Binder, right? So imagine every engine's got 60 3-Ring Binders. So in 1999, all the pages in those books are on card stock heavy... Card stock paper, heavyweight paper, right? And why is that, Andrew? Because these are a storage document, right? So, I kid you not, one week I'm doing a class, you know talking about paradigms of variation and all the things we've been talking about. And somewhere in the conversation, somebody mentions that the card stock paper was replaced by lighter weight photocopy paper. And then, the person mentioned that, shared that, as a result of that, in the use of these 3-Ring Binders, the pages were falling out. [laughter] 0:15:05.4 BB: And when I... And then the person went on to say... 0:15:07.1 AS: Oh, that's okay. 0:15:09.3 BB: Oh, no. Hold on, Andrew. So, as a focus on reducing costs, the heavy card stock paper is replaced by a lighter weight paper. The pages are falling out. So when I asked the guy, what are we doing with it? And the answer was, we're putting hole reinforcement circles on the pages to put them back in the binder. 0:15:34.2 AS: Absolutely. 0:15:35.1 BB: Right? And so, for those who don't know, hole reinforcement circles are little circles about the size of a, of a cheerio that get put on either side of the sheet of paper... 0:15:46.9 AS: With adhesive on the back of it. 0:15:48.1 BB: And it's a heavy cloth to keep it from pulling up. So, I mentioned that a couple of days later to some colleagues and they looked at me like I was from Mars. They're like, no, I mean, you've got some great stories, Bill, but they weren't buying the story. So the following week in class, [chuckle] I said, Hey, last week somebody mentioned, anybody know anything about that? And the guy in the front row, not only does he nod and say, yeah, he pulls out of his box a roll... Pulls out of his pocket a roll of like, 300 of these. And I said, so, this is really going on. He says, Bill, I go through a box of these a day. 0:16:29.9 AS: Oh, my God. 0:16:34.5 BB: So when you focus on the cost of the paper and forget that the paper is actually a storage document, not just a sheet of paper, you end up with hole reinforcement circles as a solution. Now... 0:16:46.1 AS: And the cost of the circle, the reinforcement, hole reinforcement adhesives that you put on and the cost of the labor that's spending time doing that by these high value added people. 0:17:04.6 BB: Well, and I also realized, if the space shuttle is on the pad and ready to go, fueled, if you're in that window and something comes up and somebody in NASA calls up Rocketdyne and says, we need to know for the second engine in that vehicle, if this work was done? If this work is done? If you delay the launch, if you're in the window, the vehicle was fueled, it's like a million dollars a day. So imagine going to the binder and the phone call back is, we can't find that sheet of paper. So this is... 0:17:46.8 AS: That was on page 47. I've got 46. 0:17:52.7 BB: We've got 40... 0:17:53.3 AS: And I got 48. 0:17:55.5 BB: So, but I use that. Okay, well, pre-pandemic, I was doing some training in New Zealand at a university. I needed to staple... I needed... [chuckle] I needed to staple these documents together. And so, the instructor who was hosting us, said, "What do you need?" I said, I need staples. So he goes to his office, comes back five minutes later, gives me a couple reams of staples and I go to put them in the stapler. And he says, "You're using these?" I said, “yeah, I'm using them.” He said, “wait.” He says, "Let me go get the good staples." I said, [chuckle] “what do you mean?” He says, "The university buys us really cheap staples. So all of us in the faculty keep a private stash of good staples. Let me go get the good staples." Right? 0:18:48.8 BB: You can't make up... Right? This is little stuff. All right. So now I wanna get to what Dr. Deming said last time I used a quote from Dr. Deming about it would be important for people to work together. And what I share in some of my seminars is an Aesop fable, from Aesop the Greek fablist. So we're talking like, 500, 600 BC and the particular fable I referenced is the four oxen and the lion. Are you familiar with that one? 0:19:23.7 AS: No. 0:19:25.1 BB: Okay. Well, I came across this, because I was doing some research on the expression "United we stand divided we fall." And I'm thinking united, divided, I'm thinking Abraham Lincoln, Civil War and to come up with, no, that's the punchline for Aesop's Fable about the four oxen and the lion. And the storyline goes that these four oxen would stand looking outward with their tails connected. That's the united we stand, they looked outward and the lion would circle them, but the lion couldn't do very much, because we're protecting one another. And then when the oxen broke rank, the lion jumped in and ate them. So the united we stand divided we fall. So the reason I use that is, I'm not proclaiming that Dr. Deming is the one who figured out the importance of teamwork. [laughter] I think that was figured out a long time ago. I look at what Dr. Deming's work is about - is helping us understand what are the obstacles to what I think we all really want. But I don't think he... So when he references teamwork, that's an old concept. That's why I like to use the Aesop fable, as it goes back a long way. 0:20:41.3 AS: Yeah. 0:20:42.2 BB: All right. But in terms of division, I'm gonna share from Russ Ackoff one of the many things I learned from him and that is that the adjective in front of the word "problem" is divisive. And so, when I worked in Connecticut for the jet engine company, we're making 120 tank engines a month, 1500 horsepower $300,000 each. And at least once a year there'd be an issue. We gotta stop production. Which would lead to the conclusion that it's a design problem in which case manufacturing did what, Andrew? 0:21:24.5 AS: Not sure. 0:21:25.1 BB: Breathed a huge sigh of relief. 0:21:26.7 AS: Not our problem. 0:21:28.4 BB: Or if it's not a design problem, it could be a manufacturing problem, in which case engineering said... And the engineering people felt slighted, because the president of the company was a manufacturing person. And so, what I saw was, yeah, as soon as you define the problem from that vantage point, then it's stuck on someone. And everybody else just says, whew! Thankful it wasn't us this time. So, I wanna share from Russ, what if we aren't so divisive? 0:22:02.4 BB: So Russ has a really neat story going back to, could be the '60s and you'll know by the punchline the timeframe. So at that point in time he was invited to GE's Appliance Center in Kentucky and he brought a graduate student with him. And he said, in the room, in the center of the room of this conference table, they're discussing this issue they're having. And around the perimeter of the room are all the major appliances that GE is selling at the time from refrigerators, freezers, stoves, washing machines, dryers, they're around the perimeter. And the issue they're facing is,...
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Drive Out Fear: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 14)
10/24/2023
Drive Out Fear: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 14)
What causes fear in an organization? How is fear hurting employee morale, productivity, and overall performance? What great things can happen when you remove fear? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about fear, and how managers can get rid of it. 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 14, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away. 0:00:32.9 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, we've been talking about these principles. We've sort of shifted from the myths to the principles that, you know, especially education systems leaders can use to guide their transformation work. I think we're up to Principle 8 today, and most recently I think last time we did, "institute training on the job" and "adopt and institute leadership." So we'll move on to Principle 8, which is "Drive Out Fear." So I'll start with just reading the principle verbatim from the book. So Principle 8: "Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the school system. No one can perform their best unless they feel secure to express ideas, ask questions, and make mistakes." So I think maybe for me, when you look at the 14 principles, I haven't done this analysis, but I would venture a wager that Dr. Deming spent more time on this particular principle and related topics than any of the other ones. 0:01:44.6 JD: He discussed it numerous times in Out of the Crisis, numerous times in The New Economics. And one of the quotes that really stands out for me on this topic was in Out of the Crisis where Deming said, "Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures." And I don't think that... I don't think people sort of fully appreciate just how much sort of... "Writing fiction" is sort of how I've framed this in the past in one of our earlier episodes, but just sort of how much made-up data there is in every organization. And that can be wrong figures in the form of qualitative descriptions of important work, it can be quantitative data. But in either case, it makes it nearly impossible to improve our organizations. Because how would you even know where to start improvement if the figures and the descriptions of the work are inaccurate? So that'd be a good topic for today. 0:02:53.3 AS: Sometimes this one about fear is, sometimes it's easy for people to understand and sometimes it's hard. You know, like, when you think about fear, you can think about physical fear like, "Well, okay, am I in physical danger here?" Like, what are we talking about? Or, "Am I in fear that I'm gonna lose my job?" And some people may think that that's a good thing. And one of the first things I want to just think about is, what are the specific things in a school or in a school environment that causes people to be fearful? Maybe we could identify what you see, because you've talked about the outcome of fear is made-up data, wrong figures. It's all kinds of outcomes from fear, but what are the sources of fear? 0:03:47.2 JD: Yeah. Well, one thing I think of is you certainly can have sort of a tyrannical boss or manager. That certainly exists where there's actual fear, they yell, they threaten, passive-aggressive, those types of things. So that certainly can exist. 0:04:05.4 AS: Yep. 0:04:05.9 JD: I've definitely witnessed that in my almost 25 years in terms of career, you're gonna witness things like that. But I think more often what I'm talking about is sort of more subtle versions of fear that permeate throughout organizations. So sources, there can be different sources. I think they can come internally from some of the systems and processes you've set up in your own school or school system. Some of them are external, so, I mean, a go-to source of fear for a lot of people is, "How do my kids that I'm teaching perform on the state test?" That can be a source of fear, for sure. There is sort of internal to your system. I think the fear... I think a lot of people have sort of apprehension when the principal comes to your classroom to observe your class, and then there's sort of the ratings and rankings that go with a typical performance evaluation. So I think that can be another source of fear in a school system. And there's probably many other sort of versions of that. But I was thinking of... 0:05:25.4 JD: A lot of times when you hear people talk about driving out fear, you sort of get the negative stories. I think, not related to schools, but I think of a classic example of fear in the form of an unwillingness to speak up and say something is the Challenger space shuttle explosion. I think that's a classic sort of example of where people did see issues along the way and really nobody spoke up. So I think that's a sort of a classic example. But I was thinking of... And I was thinking about driving out fear in my own organization. At United Schools Network, one of the anecdotes in the book that I tell is actually a sort of a more positive example. So I was gonna maybe share that and talk about some of the details there. And it's sort of a combination of Appreciation for a System and Driving Out Fear, sort of working together. 0:06:32.0 JD: But I'm going back to the summer of 2013. So I was a school director or principal at that time of a middle school. And to put that in context, we were grades six through eight. I was entering my sort of fifth year leading Columbus Collegiate Academy. It's a fully built out middle school, six, seven, eight, serving the East Side of Columbus. And I was sitting in my office with my colleague, her name's Kathryn Anstaett. She was the principal on the other side of town. Kathryn and I had a working relationship because she previously had served on my team as a teacher and then as sort of an assistant principal for curriculum and instruction. So we knew each other well. And then she had been tapped to lead our new middle school on the West Side. And she had just wrapped up that first year. It was growing from just serving sixth grade, and now they gonna serve sixth and seventh grade for the 2013-14 school year. 0:07:37.1 JD: And just like today, 10 years ago, sort of similar, limited pool of prospective teaching candidates. And sometimes Kathryn and I, we would interview a person and we'd both want to hire that same teacher. And we had come to the sort of agreement where across the hiring season, for us, the fairest approach was just to alternate turns. So Kathryn would get first choice on a particular set of interviews, and then I would get first choice on the next set. But on this particular day, we both wanted to hire this same reading teacher, and it was my turn in that rotation. Kathryn and I were sitting and looking at both school's staff rosters, and we literally said, "In order to sort of make a decision that's best for the system, this hire should really go to Kathryn." I wanted the person, I needed the person, but I also had this capable group of reading and writing teachers, despite the one teacher opening, but she was just building this new team. So she really needed a really outstanding reading teacher. 0:08:53.4 JD: And I think thinking through this sort of whole system's lens gave my turn to Kathryn. And I think it's important to say here, I actually hadn't heard of the Deming philosophy at this point. I hadn't been exposed to this idea for appreciation for a system, but really the decision making was pretty simple. Kathryn and I were colleagues, we were on a small team working to build this new network of schools, and one of the best ways to sort of bring that network to fruition was to, you know, allow her to hire this particular teacher for her school across town. 0:09:31.4 AS: Now where this connects with Drive Out Fear is that there were a number of things in place that sort of gave me the confidence as a school director or principal to make this decision. I was employee Number 2 in our organization, so I was sort of on that founding team. That gave me some, I guess, some standing in the organization. By this time I had been there for five years, and I was pretty well established as a leader. I had a close working relationship with our staff. I had a close working relationship with our founder and superintendent. But even in that context, if I was being honest, this sort of whole system thinking was not easy because we're still a relatively young organization. We're just five years old. Really the question for a startup in its fifth year is still survival. Are we gonna survive as an organization? And there was a lot of pressure on me as a school leader to achieve high test scores and really establish the reputation of the school as a strong option on the East Side of the city. 0:10:44.9 JD: And thankfully, I had the backing of my superintendent, I had the backing of our board to make this decision, but I was fearful. I was fearful because it is very possible that even with that support, what would happen if I had been held accountable for our reading results, let's say, after this decision had been made? Unless I reminded people a year from now when kids take the state test and they get their scores back, they might not even remember that, "Hey, remember when we had sort of collaborated and made this decision?" They're likely, and some organizations are gonna come to me and say, "Hey, John, what's up with the reading scores?" That's not actually what happened, but that certainly was a plausible possibility. 0:11:40.7 JD: But my point is, and I think most organizations, it is really hard to make decisions like that. Was I fearful of my boss? No, of course not, not in this situation. Was I fearful of my colleague across town? No. Of the board? No. But in the back of my mind, I'm sitting there thinking, "I'm gonna make this decision. I really wanted this teacher. It was actually my turn. But I think it's the best thing for the whole system if this particular teacher goes across town and helps this new school." 0:12:18.0 JD: I think I feel better today making that decision 'cause we've more explicitly made the Deming philosophy and these 14 principles a part of our system. However, I can imagine, for many people sitting there thinking if they're a school leader, could you make this same decision in the absence of having these principles in place beforehand? So I thought that was a good example of Drive Out Fear. Again, with all these things in place, even with all those things in place, a startup early employee close relationship with the superintendent, board, I was still sort of wondering if I should make that decision as a young leader. 0:13:04.8 AS: So it's interesting because I was thinking about, what is the source of fear? The source of fear is that we are personally going to be injured. If we think about the source of physical fear of an animal or of a human when we're in a dangerous situation, it's that we're gonna personally be injured. Now you could also extend that to the family. If you are a pride of lions or you're a group of animals and the mother or father instinctively knows to try to protect itself but also its family. But it's this, it's the ultimate selfishness for survival. And that's where... One of the things I was thinking about when you were talking is like, why does Deming use this word "fear?" I mean, it's a pretty intense word. It is something that's visceral. 0:14:00.2 JD: Yeah. 0:14:00.3 AS: You know, to be fearful is a scary thing. And...But what you're describing is the idea that if we don't think about the business or the school or the education as a system, then what we're gonna be doing is everybody for themselves. 0:14:24.0 JD: Yeah. 0:14:24.6 AS: Protecting themselves and rewarding the protection of themselves and their areas. And when you view things as a system, then you have to give space for people to do the not necessarily natural thing. I mean, it's strange to say "not natural" 'cause I also think that people want to work together. People do not wanna be pitted against other people. Nobody wants that. Nobody has that as a natural instinct. If that instinct to be pitted against other people is in someone, it's quite possible it's in them because of something that maybe happened in their past where they realized, "To survive in this situation, I've gotta be pitted against other people and gotta overcome that." But I would say that people naturally wanna work together, and it's like we come in and we put in structures that we think are good management, but actually cause people to be pitted against each other. 0:15:28.9 JD: Yeah. I think you have to draw this out a lot of times in terms of... Because I think a natural reaction for someone listening to this, for some people, some leaders may say, "There's no fear in my organization. I'm a good guy," or, "I'm nice," those types of things. But as soon as I would hear a leader say that, that would be a dark pink flag, if not a red flag for me. Because there is, without a doubt, there is fear in every single organization. Now, the level of that fear is gonna vary based on the culture at that particular organization. But there is some form of fear in every organization. If you've ever sat in a meeting and you have withheld a thought that you think that was important to share because you are afraid of what the response is gonna be from the people in that room or a person in that room, then there is fear in that particular organization. 0:16:30.8 JD: And I think a lot of it has to do with people are making judgements all the time based on the system that they are living in. They observe what happens to other people that make similar decisions or behave in a similar way. So that's why something like Appreciation for a System and Driving Out Fear, these things have to work in concert with each other, right? Because if I was gonna be held accountable at all costs, if the board and the superintendent that I were reporting to in that situation, that hiring situation, were solely focused on management-by-results or management-by-objective, and I had this let's say a performance evaluation tied to that, I'm not sure even in retrospect if I would've made the same decision. 'Cause all those things have to work together to facilitate the individual's being willing to collaborate like this. The system has to facilitate it. I think that's sort of the point that all these principles have to work together hand in hand in order to bring something like Drive Out Fear to fruition. 0:17:45.9 AS: And I think one of the hardest things for people that are new to this thinking is that almost everything that we do drives in fear. 0:17:55.4 JD: Yeah. [chuckle] 0:17:57.2 JD: It's "I want results. We're about accountability around here." And there's plenty of schools I'm sure that put up a sign like "Personal Accountability," and, "We want measurable results and I don't want to hear excuses and you're not responsible for another department. You're responsible for your department." And it's just everything that we are given, and everything... We are rugged individualists, particularly in the American sense. That's kind of the foundation. So to come and say, "I'm not so concerned about your individual, I'm concerned about your contribution to the whole team," it just doesn't happen that much. 0:18:41.0 JD: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing you have to do as leaders is recognize that fear is present in your organization, and then the next step is sort of figuring out the pervasiveness or severity of that fear. And a lot of that's, again, determined by the culture of your organization. But I think it is a natural byproduct. If you're doing anything that's the management-by-objective, management-by-results, performance appraisal, rating and ranking; if you are doing any form of those things, then there's no doubt that fear is pervasive in your organization. Because you're incentivizing people to optimize their individual classroom or their corner of the organization, whether that's classroom, grade level, an individual school building within a system, a department within the system, whatever it is; you are optimizing that behavior versus optimizing the aim of the the total organization. 0:19:39.0 AS: And the last part of this that I just wanted to think about was, when someone first hears this and then they start seeing the connection between personally incentivizing people through performance appraisals and merit pay and these types of things related to individual performance, the first question is, what do I do instead? I got performance appraisals and I've got pay for performance and I got beliefs about accountability and all that. And maybe a good way to wrap up this Drive Out Fear is kind of, what are some steps that you can do instead of or in replacement of or maybe you don't even necessarily have to replace something? What are your thoughts about how you can help somebody who's just coming aware of all this stuff but is a little bit overwhelmed because they're used to the traditional structures? 0:20:39.0 JD: Yeah. That's a good question. I think one thing is this idea of you have to... If you are a management or a leader or set of leaders, you have to stop blaming employees and looking at problems as systems problems instead of problems of individuals sort of serving in the system. So that may be one of the hardest things is that, then if that's true, which I think it is, then faults of the system are the responsibility then of management 'cause they're the ones that have the authority to design the system, redesign the system, change the system. I think that there has to be some type of concrete mechanism by which, in a school system whether it's teachers or students, that they can ask questions and offer suggestions for improvement. There has to be that mechanism in place. 0:21:31.7 JD: It doesn't mean that every suggestion necessarily leads to a change in the system, but there has to be a system in place that elicits those suggestions, and then some type of follow up. "I heard this. I studied it with you. We're not gonna make this change but here's the reason why." Or, "We looked into this. We studied it together over time. We gathered some data and this is actually a really good idea and we're gonna change that." So one very concrete, small thing that I do for every improvement team and every committee I lead in an organization, there's always sort of a meeting tracker document. And one of the tabs within that is just a Google Sheet. Each meeting is on a tab. One of the tabs is always a parking lot, where that every member of that committee or every member of that improvement team can drop in suggestions for improvement all along so we could make improvements in real time if we need to. So that's one very simple thing that I do. And then I also have a written record and for committees that I lead year in and year out, I just constantly, continually improve them over time based on those suggestions. So that's one concrete thing. 0:22:44.7 JD: A bigger thing for management, I think, is because things get hard when you get into a time crunch or a high stress situation, it is easy to sort of make decisions based on, "It is just easier short term to do this." So ahead of that, what I would strongly suggest is have a written set of guiding principles. That's why I like the 14 principles so much because they are a concrete...
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