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 here with featured guest Travis Timmons. Travis, are you ready to tell us about your Deming journey?

0:00:19.7 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, thanks for having me. And yeah, very excited to share our journey and how impactful it's been on both our company, but also me personally and my family. So, super excited to kind of share where we started before Deming and where we're at today. So I'll just dive right in if that sounds like a good...

0:00:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think just for the audience here, I'll just mention that Travis is physical therapist, founder and president of Fitness Matters in Columbus, Ohio, going on his 27th year of business. And you know, you and I have had some discussions. You've had a lot of great things that you've written and we've gone through and I think it's really an exciting story, particularly for a small mid sized business owner who's just frustrated as hell that things aren't going the way that they want. And I think your frustration a long time ago was a driving force. So I'm excited for you to share your story. So yeah, take it away.

0:01:22.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, very excited. Yeah, 2000 is when we started, January 2000. So coming up on 27 years, as you mentioned, do physical therapy and wellness. And the first 10 years I was in business, pretty good at being a physical therapist. Started my own business and had no idea how to run a business. I knew a lot about physical therapy, but just kind of shooting from the hip in regard to business. Spent about a decade struggling, frustrated. We were growing, but growing slowly, growing chaotically. No process, it was just a, it was a heavy burden, to be honest with you. We were growing, but it was kind of Herculean effort on my part.

0:02:10.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm just curious how you were feeling at that time. Like there's gotta be a better way or this is the way business is and I just gotta muscle through this or how were you feeling at the time?

0:02:21.0 Travis Timmons: I was feeling frustrated and isolated. Didn't quite know where to turn. Yeah, I guess that's how, and just a burden. Didn't want to let the team down, I did not want the business to fail. I knew we had something different to offer. Just really had no idea how to scale that in a professional way. And along the journey was very fortunate to have a client who had a very successful business, took me under his wing. Ray Crook is his name. Started mentoring me and as luck would have it, he was familiar with Dr. Deming and a very long story short, after several meetings with him over time, some mentoring, I'd read the book along the way, the E-Myth Revisited and had some learnings from that book that really jumped out at me and came to the conclusion, both with reading that book and some feedback from Ray of basically, hey, it's time to grow up and turn this into a real business. If you're going to do this, let's do it right. And at that, around that time he introduced me to Kelly Allen with the Deming Institute. And you know, so we were 10 years into some chaos, had really no process, just would try stuff, see if it stuck or didn't.

0:03:43.5 Travis Timmons: If that didn't work, didn't really have any way to measure if stuff was working well. So really just a lot of chaos. And became introduced to Deming through Kelly Allen about 10 to 11 years into our journey and man, was that a breath of fresh air in terms of like having a direction to go in. After a few meetings with Kelly, him getting a better understanding of what was important to me, I think him just really understanding that I was serious about wanting to turn our organization into a large, professionally run and well run organization that would have a positive impact on people's lives, both team members and clients. I think he kind of, I think that we were so bad off he took pity on me to begin with, just to be honest with you, and he was like, man, this guy needs a lot of help. He could do some good in the world with what the services they have to offer. But if he doesn't figure out how to run a business professionally, they're never going to scale.

0:04:44.0 Andrew Stotz: And it's interesting that you reached out. I mean, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that situation and they really don't, either they don't reach out or they're afraid to reach out or you know, maybe they think there's no solution or nobody's going to help me. And you know, certainly when you're small, you also don't have huge budgets to hire people to come in and fix your business. You know, I'm just curious, like what drove you to even reach out?

0:05:09.8 Travis Timmons: I think I was fortunate enough to, A, have the mentor with Ray. And then secondly, have always been a believer in you got to check your ego at the door and know that you don't know everything. I think I've seen Business owners that are afraid to admit they don't know everything and so they keep things insulated and that just doesn't get you anywhere.

0:05:35.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

0:05:36.3 Travis Timmons: So I just was fortunate kind of how I was raised as arrogance isn't a good thing, so check your ego at the door and learn from, learn from people smarter than you. And so I kind of took that fully at heart and like, all right, I have no idea how to run a business. I need to learn how to do that from really smart people. Read a lot of business books over the years, but the Deming philosophy, when I was introduced to that at the two and a half day seminar, went to that. I got to the Deming two and a half day in, I think that was 2013. So I was 13 years into the entire journey by the time I had met with Kelly, done some learning. And then at a time where the Deming two and a half day was offered in Ohio to where I could get to it, to your point earlier, budget plays into things for small businesses. So I was able to drive to that one and that two and a half day seminar just opened my eyes up to things that I knew in my heart but had no idea how to make that happen.

0:06:46.2 Travis Timmons: And what I mean by that, Andrew, is one of the key things I took away from that first two and a half day is Deming's belief that roughly 96% of issues within an organization are not people issues, but they're process and system issues. And that aligned with my worldview of if you hire good people, which we did, they show up every day wanting to do a good job as long as they have a good system and process to work within something that's professionally put together. So that was takeaway number one that really resonated with me. And the person responsible for said system is me. There's no passing the buck as the owner. And that resonated with me. It's a big responsibility to own a business in terms of the people and clients you're responsible for. And there's no passing the buck. You're responsible for the system at the end of the day.

0:07:42.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I remember when I was 24 attending Deming seminar, when I was working for Pepsi, and it was a little bit different situation than yours. I could see, though, the same thing resonated with me. I could see that people were hemmed in by the system. And even though many people in the factory had really good intentions and they wanted to do a better job, they literally couldn't because they didn't have the tools or the budget or the this or the that. And a lot of times it's easy for senior management, particularly in a big company, to say figure it out, your job is to figure it out. But that only goes so far and there's eventually a point of exasperation for people working in a company that, like, I just, there's a limit here and I'm not going to kill myself trying to do something that I can't change. And so it just, I was coming from a very different perspective as an employee in a huge company versus you at a perspective of, this is my company, I set the rules.

0:08:46.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah, can do whatever we want. And you mentioned something there. It reminds me of a quote from that first two and a half day, and it still sticks with me a decade and a half later. Almost a lot of businesses complain about the term. We have a lot of dead wood in terms of employees. And the quote, I remember Kelly sharing this, it's like, well, did you hire dead wood? Because if you did, that's on you. Or did you hire live wood and kill it and that's on you from your standpoint of, from a system. And I'm like, man, 100% true. And I hired, I had good people on our team, but we didn't have good processes to keep from killing that live wood I would say. So, yeah. And to your point on budget, yeah, I had and still do have quite a bit different budget than Pepsi. Right. So one of the other things that jumped out at me early on that made Deming very approachable and something I could engage with very easily as a small business owner was the concept of PDSAs, the Plan-Do-Study-Act.

0:09:58.5 Travis Timmons: That was a game changer for us because I was like, all right, I don't have to hire a big business consultant. We don't have to hire or pay for a bunch of software. There's very simple things we can do via the Plan, Do Study Act PDSA method that we can create systems or improve upon systems and those little experimental ways and not have to bet the farm. You know, you see a lot of businesses that try to go through these huge transformative activities, bring in a new software to fix all their problems. Things that are very expensive with no real way of understanding what their aim is, what their theory is, or even if it'll work. So, yeah, your comment on budget there, I think, is what makes Deming so approachable for any size organization, but the budget's really not a limit from the PDSA standpoint. So those were some of my key takeaways very early on on my first two and a half day Deming, it was an eye opener and just really resonated with how, how I saw the world in terms of from a human level. Just had zero idea as a physical therapist with no business training on how to implement and run a professional organization.

0:11:13.8 Travis Timmons: So as things evolved, kind of went from the kind of the term chaos to process. So after that two and a half day, I went back to our team, which was small at the time. I think we had, we were a very small company at the time. I think we had 10 employees, nine or 10 team members at the time and just presented to them like, hey, this is going to be how we run our organization. There's this thing I heard about this guy called Dr. Deming. Some of it's going to seem a little odd, but this is how we're going to do things. And just started out early on, like just with PDSA, educated them on what that meant and we're all going to work on things together. So immediately it started enforcing a culture of improvement and collaboration and voice. Rather than Travis just coming up with random ideas, we worked on them together, made the system visible and then put some experiments in place. I talked to them about operational definition. That was a new term to me and gave them some examples. We wanted every client to have a good visit with us.

0:12:29.2 Travis Timmons: What in the heck does a good visit mean? Right. We didn't have an operational definition of that, so we created an operational definition of this is a good visit at Fitness Matters. So those were some fun things early on.

0:12:42.3 Andrew Stotz: I'm curious. There's two things, the first one is for someone that really doesn't know anything about PDSA, the Plan, Do, Study, Act process or cycle. Could you give an example either of one that you did early on or one that you think is the best illustration of the application of PDSA so people can understand what you're saying, because I know it's a big part of what one of the, let's say, tools that you've used in your process.

0:13:10.1 Travis Timmons: Yeah, one of the early on ones we did that was fun to do with the team because it changed our pricing model for our private pay team. Quick example, like we do personal training and Pilates muscle activation technique. Traditionally in that world, people buy those visits one at a time or you'll buy a package of 10 or 20 at a time at a discounted rate, volume, volume pricing, right. So we had that, we had 10 pack and 20 pack of personal training. We had a 10 pack and 20 pack of Pilates, same for muscle activation technique. And we had clients that would do sometimes all three of those services, but for them to be able to optimize their discount, they had to buy a 20 pack of Pilates, a 20 pack of personal training, and then the same with muscle activation technique. So after learning some things with Dr. Deming at the two and a half day that Kelly presented at, it's like we got to be easier to do business with. Be easy to do business with and how can we do that? So our PDSA was how can we change our pricing model on the private pay services to be easier to do business with and optimize how clients can move in our system freely.

0:14:25.9 Travis Timmons: So part of the concept of PDSA is you trial it, you put your whole theory together of what you think will be true. How are you going to study it? How long are you going to try it? So we had four clients that we knew well, that we told them, we're trying this new pricing model. Would you be willing to experiment on this with us? So we didn't roll it out company wide. We just tried it with a small segment, and we called it Fitness Matters Dollars and the do the Fitness Matters Dollars package. Then the client could use that discounted bundle of money for any of our services. So the discount applied to any of the services they did rather than having to buy a bunch of different packages. So the beauty of it is you can try it small. Had we gotten it wrong, we could have thrown it out and only five clients would have experienced the error. And they knew they were part of an experiment and they were happy to help us improve. It was a big win. That was 12 years ago. That's still how we do our pricing today.

0:15:29.1 Travis Timmons: It makes it very easy for clients to optimize their health within our system and not have to spend a bunch of money with us and have a lot of monetary resistance moving about our system. So that's one example that comes to mind.

0:15:41.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a good one. And I think if you think about, let's say an accountant may say, well, but wait a minute, the cost of three different services is different and that's the idea of how do we simplify this for the client, and that's interesting. Now, did you write it down, did you go to a Whiteboard. How did you actually go through that process?

0:16:02.9 Travis Timmons: Oh, that's 13 years ago. You're testing my...

0:16:06.5 Andrew Stotz: Oh, well, you can think about a current one, too.

0:16:09.6 Travis Timmons: 12 years ago. Yeah. When we're doing a current one, we'll get together as a team. Like, we're having our annual team off-site the end of January. And we'll come up, we try to come away with three, maybe four PDSAs as a team, and we'll write it up on the whiteboard. What's the problem we're trying to solve? Another key quote I've learned from Kelly Allen over the years is "the problem named, is the problem solved." So we want to make sure we're naming the right problem first. What really is the problem? So we talk about that through our entire company so that I'm getting feedback from all pieces of the system and then we'll map it out. Sometimes we'll do fishbone charts to look where in the process are we trying to do an experiment? And then there's the PDSA kind of chart that we'll use for bigger ones so we can study it. What's our aim? What's our theory? What do we think is going to happen with this experiment? How long are we going to study it, and what's our expected outcome? So part of the PDSA magic, as you know, is what are you trying to accomplish by what method, in what time frame, and what do you think is going to happen so you can go back and test your theory after you've studied it? So, yeah, sometimes we, if it's something bigger system-wide, we put it down on paper. We have a PDF that's fillable for each new PDSA.

0:17:35.5 Andrew Stotz: And for some people listening, they may think, well, I mean, isn't that what business does? I mean like owner comes up with an idea and says, yeah, I think we could try this and see what happens. Right. And ultimately everybody's kind of poking in the dark in business. We're not given a manual nobody really knows what we're doing. What's the difference between the way that you are poking in the dark, trying to hey, let's try this, let's try that compared to the PDSA.

0:18:08.5 Travis Timmons: I don't think I learned that till my second Deming two and a half day. So the second time I went, I took some senior team members with me so we could get more eyes around what in the world is this Deming person, who is Dr. Deming? What's this System of Profound Knowledge? To answer your question, I think the realization I had that I didn't have before, kind of going down the Deming journey is I didn't view our business as an entire system. I lacked that awareness of system view versus pieces and parts view. Pre-Deming, there's a problem over here and you go chase that fire and then another problem pop up over here, and to your point like there's lots of books out there on how to solve problems or you know, you hear like there's books out there on ownership thinking. And you know, it's like, well, do you have a culture and a system and by what method do you give people the ability to have that ownership thinking? Yeah, I think that's was the big aha of looking at the entire system. Whereas previously I was looking at it in silos and only trying to solve problems when a fire arose rather than system operationally efficient, trying to get efficient and optimizing the entire system. So that was probably one of the big aha's for me. Didn't happen day one. But as I got to understand Deming more, the system view of how it all has to be working together for optimization just changes your lens totally.

0:19:51.5 Andrew Stotz: So you've talked about PDSA, you've talked about operational definitions, you've talked about systems thinking, three core principles. One last thing on PDSA is like, I wonder what percent of the total value of doing PDSA comes from doing PDSA. In other words, the actual part of forcing yourself to get people in a room to discuss what's the problem, the Fishbone diagram, think about what's our aim, what's our theory, what's our hypothesis? Let's write that down. How are we going to study that? How we know if our hypothesis was true and you know, that type of thing. And sometimes I, after listening to you, I was thinking it, I suspect that a large amount of the final benefit you get from a PDSA is really front end loaded in all the work that you do to set it up.

0:20:48.3 Travis Timmons: Yeah, yeah. Going back to your comment earlier Andrew, on when you were at Pepsi, if I heard you correctly, you didn't really have the ability to share voice or to have an impact on the system. I think you're spot on, the PDSA itself, a couple things, number one as a small business owner, you got to check your ego at the door. Your team sees stuff happening that you don't have visibility on and they're probably going to have better ideas on how to fix it than you might if you're removed from it a step or two. And then the culture of like, oh, Travis is going to listen to my ideas. I find value in that. And then when we implement a change, like nobody likes change. Right? But when you've worked on it collectively as a team and you're ready to move forward with it, that's a game changer. You're not pushing a string at that point. Everybody's leaning in because they understand they're part of the solution and you're allowing that. Where a lot of businesses are top down, command and control, that doesn't usually work very well. So yeah, I think you're spot on, Andrew.

0:22:02.5 Travis Timmons: I think that so much happens with the PDSA process from a culture and team involvement. And if you don't have that, you're going to have a hard time retaining team members, in my opinion.

0:22:16.9 Andrew Stotz: So you look like a pretty relaxed guy compared to probably what you were like many years ago when this all was going on. Maybe take us through. Okay, so you're implementing these things and what's happening, what changes are happening, what transformation is going on with you and with your organization?

0:22:36.9 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so it's a multi-year process that we went through. Still a lot of work, you know, it's not like, hey, this just solves every problem. It just changes all the lenses you look through and you have a by what method path. Here's how we are going to think about our business. So that got rid of a lot of confusion for me. I knew how we were going to go from this size business to my, we had a BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goal from Good to Great. We wanted to have four facilities. At the time I went through Deming, we had one. We wanted to have four facilities or more to see if we could replicate our high level of care, team member engagement, all those things. So we were working, I was working just as many hours then. It just was not frustrating, it was exciting. It was a lot of collaboration that was energizing and everything as we scaled got easier. I was not going to be able to scale our business with what I was doing because had I scaled it, the headaches would have just been out of control. The loss of revenue, like there would have just been so much inefficiency on our organization.

0:24:00.4 Travis Timmons: So I would say for that next from 2013 through 2018, we got really locked in. So we spent about, I was a little conservative at the time. I was also in Army National Guard, so had a trip across the pond and just wasn't quite at a point where I could financially roll the dice and start multiplying locations and stuff like that. But around 2018, 2019, we got to the point where the team knew Deming well. I felt like we put a lot of systems, processes in place that were replicatable and I'm like, all right, here comes a real big PDSA. We're going to go get another clinic, we're going to go do another location, and we're going to test it. So that was a big PDSA. A lot of the ones we had done up to that were small. At some point you got to go a little bigger. And we were very confident in our model. So we acquired a practice in our town and like, hey, 80% of what they do is what we do, 20% is not Deming and service lines and stuff like that. So our theory, our PDSA, was can we acquire and put Fitness Matters, culture and process in place and grow?

0:25:26.3 Travis Timmons: And we did. We were very successful with that. I had team member retention with that. You know, a lot of times when you buy out another business kind of, people head for the doors, including the owner. That owner is still working with us six years later, then we started growing. It's like, all right, here we go. We can do another one. We can do another one. Put leadership in place at each location that understand Deming. We have our processes written down. We have operational definitions written down. People know what PDSA is. If they're new to our team, it takes them about six months to figure out what all these acronyms mean. So now we're going quicker since, you know, since in the last four years, as an example, we've tripled our physical therapy volume and doubled our private pay wellness volume. And in the service line, that's fairly fast growth. Probably not fast in the IT world, but in the service line growth in a very competitive market with how physical therapy and referrals work. There aren't many private practices left out there because it's so competitive where we're thriving.

0:26:41.4 Andrew Stotz: It seems like a hard business. It seems like a hard business to scale because there's this personal aspect, there's this interaction. You know, think about the exact opposite. I don't know, let's say Instagram or whatever. There's zero personal interaction. It can scale to billions. What are the constraints to growth that you feel in your business.

0:27:03.3 Travis Timmons: So constraints are reimbursement from health insurance, referrals from physicians, because health care is consolidating. So a health care system buys up smaller organizations, physicians, and then they have physical therapy within those systems and then they're highly encouraged to refer their physical therapy in-house. So that's a big challenge for us. So we don't, we're not owned by physicians. So we have to, we have to be the best at what we do for physicians and clients to want to choose us. So one of the things Dr. Deming really big on at quality, right. You have to continually have a system that has improving quality as you grow. And the way we grow is we have our outcomes. So how well a patient does at the end of a plan of care is roughly 35% higher than national average. We're 35% above the competition because of our processes, our system, our clients, how we look at integrating our clients from the first visit, the first phone call, follow-on visits, the entire, again, thinking back to that system conversation. And I think a lot of businesses, if they haven't been exposed to Deming, they miss that very critical piece of, if your sales isn't aligned with your implementation, isn't aligned with your billing process, anywhere along that service line, going through that fishbone, if it's all not good, like we could give excellent physical therapy care, but if we have a horrible billing system, we lose clients, end of story. If we have a horrible process of answering the phone to schedule evaluations, we're out of business.

0:29:00.0 Travis Timmons: Could have the best physical therapists in the world. So, yeah, that's what it's allowed us to do from a scaling and fun standpoint. And kind of now almost 27 years in we're at a point where, one of the litmus tests I had, like, if we do this well, if we really are all-in on Deming and it's system process definitions and we have it mapped out, this should run without Travis. And I see a lot of business owners are the choke point. Like they want to be the problem solver for everything. Everything has to flow through them, slow stuff down. You're not getting all of the information from your team that could solve problems so much quicker. So one of my litmus tests early on was like, if this really works well, the business should run without me present certainly for weeks and weeks at a time. And we're there. So that's why I look Relaxed now. I didn't look this relaxed a decade ago. So, it's fun, it's fun.

0:30:11.5 Andrew Stotz: I was looking for my Out of the Crisis book, but I went online and I wanted to highlight two of the 14 points because it's something that you mentioned about improving your process and all of that. And the first one is the first point and you know, it's the first point for a reason. And number one is "create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and provide jobs." And number five is "improve constantly and forever, the system of production and service to improve quality and productivity and thus constantly decrease costs." So how do you embody that in your business, this, because when I first read the "constancy of purpose," I originally thought it meant pick your direction and stay constant with that. But then I started to realize, no, no, it's about how are we improving our product and service.

0:31:18.9 Travis Timmons: Yeah. So if you're not evolving with, technology is everywhere. Right. So if you're not paying attention to that within how it impacts your business and constantly trying to optimize how technology interfaces with your business, you're in trouble. So, like, we're right now getting ready to, I'd say once a year we do something fairly large within technology. Next year we're going to probably be changing our documentation software because there's a newer one out there that instead of having four different softwares we have to interface with, there'll be one. So that cuts down on rework, that cuts down on learning time for a new team member. There's less resistance for clients to understand how scheduling and billing work. So I don't know if I'm answering your question, Andrew, but I think from a standpoint of, I think it was Jack Welch I heard say years ago in an interview, "there's two ways a business is going. You're either growing or you're dying." And that resonated with me, there's no sitting still because if you do, you're going to get run over. So that's always looking through, can we make it easier to schedule?

0:32:40.0 Travis Timmons: Like right now we don't offer online scheduling for physical therapy. We will in 2026. And if we don't figure that out, it could be a reason that we would eventually go out of business. So I just looked through that mindset. There's always somebody coming after you.

0:32:58.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, yeah, that's...

0:33:00.3 Travis Timmons: Complacency doesn't work.

0:33:01.3 Andrew Stotz: I like to think about when I was young and I took a break and I stood still. I was standing on the flat ground, no problem. But now with my 87 year old mother, if she goes one day, two days, three days without movement, she's going backwards and it's harder to catch back up. And I start to realize she's operating on a plane that has been slanted against her. And eventually the slant will win against all of us. But in the world of business if you think, well it's not about growing or dying, well, there's someone out there trying to take your business by providing a better product or service. And that's just the reality that actually is invigorating to know that, and as Dr. Deming said to have a great competitor is such a valuable thing. If you're just poking around and you're doing okay in market you're probably not going to improve as much. So that the focus on improvement is something that I just find really fascinating. There's another question that I have which is these days, way I look at like the job of leadership is that it's like imagine a very strong magnet ahead of you and you're constantly pulled to that magnet.

0:34:37.7 Andrew Stotz: That magnet is the average, the consensus what everybody's doing. And you can't help but feel that force. And if you don't realize that you're being affected by that force, you're just being pulled into it. And what I mean by that is if you say, well, what if we tried something different, a different way of doing something and then you go to customers, no, sorry, your competitor does this. If you don't do that, I'm not going to give you the business. And so you're naturally drawn towards the center or towards consensus, but what you're doing is trying to pull your business and yourself and your thinking and your team away from that and saying there's a different way. And how hard is that?

0:35:24.4 Travis Timmons: It's hard. You have to have a different lens. Comment earlier, the problem named is the problem solved. One of the things, I love that analogy. I've never heard it described that way. In physical therapy it's very common for a physical therapist to have two or three patients scheduled at the same time because the problem that was named by most organizations is poor arrival rate. And if you have holes in your schedule you're not getting paid. So they look at that as a revenue loss. So to answer your question, that's where our industry is. Like you got a double, triple book or you're going to have lower revenue. Well, what that does is it increases, in my opinion, increases the likelihood that people are not going to come because they're going to have a bad experience, they're going to have poor outcomes. Physicians are going to stop referring because their patients aren't getting better. So problem named is the problem solved? And we pulled, I like that magnet. I'm going to use that one. But pulled away and said, no, if we provide one on one care at a very high level and the entire system works well for the patient, they're going to show up, they're going to continue to show up.

0:36:49.0 Travis Timmons: They're going to be happy to pay for the service we're offering because it's going to be exceptional. And because they show up, they're going to get better. And because they get better, they're going to go tell their doctor and then more doctors are going to refer to us. And that's thinking much differently. So that gets to the problem name, problem solved. Or using your magnet example, we are like, physicians come and talk to us all the time. They're like, are you really only seeing the patients one-on-one? Are you really doing that? Because nobody else says they can do that. It's like, yes, we are. That's exactly how we're doing it. And that's why you're here talking to us right now. Because it's so much different. You can't, there's some things that are just immeasurable. Like Dr. Deming talks about that quite a bit. We don't have to market, we don't spend... I shouldn't say, we don't have to market. We don't spend nearly the amount of money on marketing that our competitors do because we have physicians saying, hey, what's different over there? That's invisible. Right? That's invisible.

0:37:56.9 Andrew Stotz: And they weren't saying that in the beginning, but over the time they got that...

0:38:01.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah, yeah. It's a process, but you know, like the flywheel. We use that flywheel example. And now it's like, we're having a hard time hiring enough team members to keep up with the growth. One of the other thing's, "joy in work." Dr. Deming talks about joy in work a lot. And that's to your question earlier about continual improvement and jobs. So we exist, there's a lot of burnout in healthcare. You can't hardly open a business article.

0:38:37.7 Andrew Stotz: Seems paradoxical.

0:38:40.4 Travis Timmons: But it's because two and three patients at a time burdened with administrative stuff. So we also exist because, man, it's so fun when you have a team member join you from one of those other organizations and we've had eight new team members we've hired since July. And I have what I call a fresh eyes lunch with them a month in. And every one of them has said, my spouse can't believe how much happier and more enjoyable I am to be around. If that doesn't motivate you to want to continue to grow, I don't know what does. So that's the joy in work piece that Dr. Deming talked about a lot.

0:39:24.6 Andrew Stotz: And let's now talk about one other thing, which is I was just talking, I gave a speech last night in Bangkok to some business owners and then we had a dinner out and I was explaining to them that like, there's a disease that's come from America, not from Wuhan, China, in this case. It's come America, it's spread all across Thailand. And you really have to be careful with this disease. It's a deadly disease. And I said, and particularly Thailand, where there's harmony. People enjoy working together. They want a fun environment, they want to make friends at work. It's a little, it's very different from a US work environment where it's like, go there, deliver, go home, separate lives. That's not the way Thai people see work. And the disease is, the disease of individual KPIs and saying everybody, by optimizing each individual, we are optimizing the whole. And I'm trying to get them to realize like, there's another way. And I'm curious I'm sure if you're getting people from the bigger institutions and stuff, they're being KPI'd to death. And how do you, how do you manage the idea that I don't want to optimize the individual, I want to optimize the whole system, but yet I also want employees to know they gotta do a good job. So how do you manage that?

0:41:03.2 Travis Timmons: It's hard when somebody comes, because you're right, there's a lot of PTSD. I've got an example from today. So we turned on, within our system, there's a net promoter score that can be sent out to patients automatically after their first couple visits with us. And we turn it off and on from time to time just to get the voice of the customer, right. I think Dr. Deming talks about the voice of the customer and who all. So it's like, hey, we haven't done that in a while. We're going to turn it back on. And there were several therapists that were like, wait a minute, you're scoring me? And then if I get a low score, I'm in trouble. So we have to spend a lot of time educating the team on some of that old head trash. It's like, no, this is to study the system and where we can improve either improving our operational definition, whatever it is, give the team member tools on how to handle a difficult client. But to your point, you have, people's brains are so wired in the way you just described. So part of it is we, we let them know up front, like, here's why we don't have employee of the month at Fitness Matters.

0:42:15.4 Travis Timmons: Here's why we don't have the parking lot for employee of the month at Fitness. Like, all of those rewards, how all of the negative unintended consequences that can go along with that. Like even giving an individual an award in a group setting. Like, we had a team who's one of my clinic directors, the business she came from before, they had like a WWE, like the heavyweight wrestling, big champion belt. They had one of those. And each week somebody would give the belt to whoever they thought was the best employee that week. And she didn't get it for like two months in a row. And she was crushed. She's like, people don't like me. So it's fun to talk about the negative unintended consequences of the individual reward, the individual competitions. We could talk for an hour about motivating via monetary motivation. That's probably a whole nother podcast. But to answer your question, we have to make it very known why we don't do those things. Because as much as people hate some of that stuff, they also expect it. Yeah, why don't, why don't we have employee of the month? You mean I'm not going to get in trouble if I get a low net promoter score from one patient?

0:43:34.3 Travis Timmons: It's like, no, we know we hire good people. We know you do your best job every day. They could be upset because their billing didn't go correctly. So we just need to know. So I don't know if that answers your question, but it's a big thing because you do have to still track KPIs or you're out of business. Like, you do have to know what's going on within your system to measure it. It's just that concept of we all are responsible for the output of the system and the system has to produce exceptional results.

0:44:06.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, yeah.

0:44:07.9 Travis Timmons: And we have to have a weight by what method. We have to have a system to create whether you're doing plumbing, electrical work. Like if you're going to scale a business, you have to have a repeatable product that can scale.

0:44:23.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And one of the answers to that too is if you believe 94% of the problems come from the system, then even when an employee is identified as having a bad net promoter score, then the question is, does the 94% apply in that situation? Well, generally yes. And so let's dig in. I have some people that ask me like my, one of the guys last night at this event works for a bank and they have put KPIs into everything. And he was saying, I just can't escape. But another guy was like, well, I have my own business and I can do what I want. I've implemented KPIs, but what should I do? I said the first step in disentangling yourself from this individual KPI situation is just to disconnect compensation to the KPI. So just right there, there's still incentive for the employee to do something bad for the organization to do their best. But when you remove that compensation aspect, you've really taken away a huge part of the incentive. So even if you have to keep KPIs, take away the tie to compensation and then they say, well, that's the whole reason why we're supposed to do it is have the tie to compensation.

0:45:44.5 Andrew Stotz: And I said, yes, it's a little bit of a circular references cannot be resolved.

0:45:49.7 Travis Timmons: Right. Yeah. And I think we even give examples to the team as much as we can around why we don't do those type of things. Here's what would happen. And most people have worked in organizations when you point it out to them. So again, Dr. Deming talks about making the system visible. Point it out to them. If I bonused you like you see this, this used to be a thing at car dealerships. When you're buying a car, hey, you're going to get a call to rate your experience with me. If you don't give me a 10, it's going to impact my pay. And you're like, what? So we talk about that like hey, the net promoter score. If we did the same thing here and bonused you on every 10, then you're going to be bothering your patients to fill that survey out. Or if you're afraid they're going to give you low score, you're not going to, you're going to encourage them not to do it. And then me as the owner, I'm not going to hear about system breakdowns. So to answer your, I think it's an important thing that a lot of businesses like number one, don't tie compensation to your KPIs.

0:46:58.3 Travis Timmons: Like just, it's an output of the system and then explaining it to them and giving examples over time because their brains even though they hated it, like we don't do performance reviews, annual performance review. And people hate them. And I still get asked like hey, when are you doing my annual performance review? It's like do you want to do one? Well no.

0:47:21.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. We dropped performance appraisals in 2016 in my coffee business here in Thailand and we never looked back. We didn't come up with any particular stunning replacement. We just knew it was bad and we were willing to just walk away from what was bad. I want to wrap up and just get into the... What are the, let's talk about kind of extrinsic versus intrinsic. There's some external factors that we can say this Deming implementation provided these benefits to our company and then there's this internal or intrinsic benefits that you're getting. Maybe you can go through some of those benefits of where you're at now, what you're able to do now and we'll close it on that note of kind of what's the hope for somebody that's stuck in the situation. They're the entrepreneurial seizure, they're the technician, they're great at physical therapy, they start their physical therapy business and they're just scaling chaos basically. Tell us about, give us hope.

0:48:37.8 Travis Timmons: Yeah, no, happy to, the reason I have had the opportunity to speak in a lot of different settings about Dr. Deming and the reason I do it is because it's brought so much joy to me personally and to a ever growing team. It's having a positive impact on lives and the more I can do that, that gets to the intrinsic motivation. So the joy in work, there's a lot of bad organizations out there that just suck the life out of people. So that's my intrinsic motivation at this stage of the game of if Fitness Matters is bigger, so more jobs, there's more people having a positive experience in life and our outcomes being 35% higher, our community is getting healthier. So that's the intrinsic motivation at this stage. It's fun. I know again, we're not perfect. So continuous improvement to our conversation earlier. But the intrinsic motivation is the busier Fitness Matters gets, the busier Fitness Matters gets because of high outcomes and it's positive experience for more people in life. Extrinsically, I guess that gets to community outcomes. So that's intrinsic and extrinsic. You know, extrinsically, if you get this figured out, it's very easy to scale a business.

0:50:06.0 Andrew Stotz: And tell us about your scale, where are you at or where are your averages versus national averages? You know, what have you accomplished that's driving that external factors, let's call it.

0:50:19.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah. So a couple things. One, externally, a practice like ours nationally on average is growing at 9% to 10%. We're currently clipping along at 25% to 30%. So you know, that flywheel effect and chaos is no longer there. So we have process, so it's easier to scale. The other extrinsic piece is because of our outcomes and continuing scale, we're able to negotiate better rates with our insurance companies to reinforce our strong desire to keep one-on-one care model. So Deming talks about who all is part of your system. So insurance companies are part of our system and we don't have a lot of control over them. But because our data is so powerful externally, we have been able to negotiate higher rates than most of our competitors because our data speaks for itself.

0:51:23.2 Andrew Stotz: Faster growth, the ability to negotiate better terms because you're delivering better product and service generally means higher profit margins.

0:51:34.2 Travis Timmons: Yes.

0:51:34.6 Andrew Stotz: Fast growth with higher profit margins generally means you're generating more cash and you're no longer in cash crisis all the time and you have resources to decide, okay, now we want to expand or we want to invest or whatever.

0:51:50.9 Travis Timmons: Right.

0:51:51.4 Andrew Stotz: Is that...

0:51:51.9 Travis Timmons: Yeah, the cash crunch was real those first 10 years. So yeah, to your point, when you get to the other side of that and process is a big part of that so you're having a whole counting process, but yeah, you get to that size. But yeah, the intrinsic piece, one of the reasons I talk about Deming as much as I can. I've got two sons that are in college. My hope is there's more companies in the world today than there were 10 years ago that know about Deming, because that means there's a higher likelihood that my boys will work at a Deming company. And just seeing what a lot of companies do to people, we as owners have a big responsibility, I feel, we have a big responsibility to have a positive impact on our employees. And you're, as an owner, are responsible for that, in my opinion. And if you get it right, man, is it fun to look in the mirror or sit down with a team member or their spouse and be proud of, be proud of what you built. That's at the end of the day, the intrinsic motivation.

0:52:57.9 Travis Timmons: If you can be proud of what your product is and proud of the impact you're having on your team to where you're not sucking the life out of them, but actually intrinsically motivating them. There's not much else you can accomplish in business that was worth more than that, in my opinion.

0:53:18.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, wonderful. That's a great way to end it. What's the likelihood that our children are going to be working in a Deming company? Well, that's the whole reason why we are here talking about it. So, Travis, I want to say on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you for this discussion and of course, for listeners out there and viewers, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and I believe it's probably one of Travis's too people are entitled to joy in work.

0:53:56.0 Travis Timmons: Love it. Love it. Thank you, Andrew.

0:53:58.0 Andrew Stotz: Yep.

How do we really know when improvement has happened inside a school or organization? In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz unpack a clear, three-part definition of improvement and show why evidence, method, and sustained results matter far more than year-to-year comparisons. Their discussion offers a practical lens for leaders who want to distinguish true progress from noise and build changes that last.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is, How To Define Improvement. John, take it away.

0:00:23.3 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, I think this is really interesting. Apologies on the front end. I'm a little bit under the weather, so I may sound a little raspy today. But you know, one of the things that's really interesting is there's lots of claims of improvement. In my world, there's lots of claims of school im- improvement. I would even go as far as to say that those claims are like a dime a dozen, something like that. And the reason I say that is not to be mean or anything, but you know, I think that a lot of these claims, they're not grounded any kind of reasonable evidence. And I think sort of even beyond that, that claims are often made without a logical definition of improvement. So I thought in this episode we could talk about a three-part definition that makes it really easy to tell when improvement has occurred and just as importantly, when it hasn't.

0:01:21.9 Andrew Stotz: Exciting.

0:01:23.2 John Dues: Yeah. When I talk about this, I always like to start with a challenge. So, you know, if I'm in a workshop, I'll say, you know, get out a piece of paper and a pen so the listeners could do this as well and think about, you know, the successful improvement efforts that you've led throughout your career. So in my world, maybe it's increase in state test scores or maybe you improved student enrollment in your school. Maybe you did a better job at retaining the teachers in your school. It could be any number of things. Maybe it's decreasing student office referrals or decreasing chronic absenteeism rates in your school or your school system, which are two things on everybody's mind coming out of the pandemic especially. And I tell people, just create a list of those instances. And I give them a few minutes usually. And typically, people come up with eight, nine, 10 or so instances of improvement, whether that's teacher in their own classroom or principal in their school, or a superintendent thinking about the whole system. Then I say to them, now what I want you to do is pause and think, what does it mean to improve?

0:02:46.7 John Dues: What do you mean by that? And that really brings us to this important question. What is improvement? You know, and this was... Full disclosure, when I started thinking about this, I stumbled across the definition in a book I'll show you here in a second. But when I stumbled across this, you know, there was some conviction. And I think that probably a lot of educational leaders or just, you know, leaders in general would say, actually, I never really thought about that. I don't have an answer for this seemingly simple question. And like I said, I didn't have an answer to that question when I really thought about it, when I stumbled across the definition, probably for the majority of my career, maybe the first 20 years or so, if I'm at year 25. So, yeah, the first two decades, I would not have had a clear answer for that simple question. Now, I turn to this seminal work in the field of improvement science called The Improvement Guide. I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with this. And I'll share my screen so people can see the book and kind of share an interesting story about the book. And, you know, when you're... Can you see my screen all right now?

0:04:06.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep.

0:04:08.1 John Dues: So you can see, if you're just listening, you can see the covers of two books. So on the left, a lot of people will recognize The Improvement Guide. But there's an arrow up there. It says, second edition. And a lot of people will recognize that book. Probably less people. Maybe some people that have been doing improvement work for maybe three decades will know this other book, the first edition of The Improvement Guide. It's this purple book on the right, if you're watching. But there's this interesting anecdote that I actually think I might have heard maybe on your podcast when some of the authors were on. And almost as soon as they wrote this first edition, this purple edition, they got this note from this professor in Brazil, and it said, I know you guys are really big into improvement, and you're really big on operational definitions, but you've written this whole book on improvement, and nowhere in the book have you defined what you mean by improvement. So, you know, talk about a swing and a miss.

0:05:15.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And just for listeners out there, you can go to the podcast.deming.org and you can search for quality as an organizational strategy with Cliff Norman and Dave Williams. We didn't talk about The Improvement Guide specifically, but definitely it's worth listening to those two.

0:05:33.3 John Dues: Yeah, and I think... So any of us that feel bad when we come to realize, like, how obvious that question is when we've made claims of improvement and don't have a definition. So even these guys that were writing a whole guide about how to do improvement missed as well. You know, and it's pretty obvious when you think about it that The Improvement Guide, that a book like that should have a clear definition for the central concept. That's right in the title. But it should be just as obvious to leaders that they also need a definition of improvement. And that definition should really precede any improvement claims then. So I thought it'd be interesting to take a look at the definition that the authors came up with in their improved second edition.

0:06:20.9 Andrew Stotz: Improvement in their improvement.

0:06:24.4 John Dues: Improvement in their improvement guide. Right. And the definition is really easy to follow. It's got three parts, and now I've adopted it into my own improvement work. But what they've said is improvement is "a change that alters how work is done or the makeup of a tool that produces visible positive differences relative to historical norms and relevant measures and it's sustained into the future." So we can kind of break that three parts of the definition down now. So in part one of the definition, what you have to be able to do is point to a change that was made that led to better results. You know, that could be a new tool you're using, a new approach, a new framework, maybe it's a new staff role, but something has to change, a new method, something has to change in what you're doing. So that's sort of part one of the definition. Part two is performance improved after the change compared to past results. So that also should be fairly obvious. So you did something different. You noted when you started this new thing, and at some point in relative proximity to when you tried that new thing, the data improved.

0:07:54.2 John Dues: You know, it went up. If that's the direction of good or, you know, if it's like chronic absenteeism or office referrals, you want it to go down. But you see that in the data after you've made this change, that's part two. And then part three is that improvement after the change was sustained into the future. So it wasn't just a temporary thing because you were paying a lot of attention to it, but you made the change. The data improved over time after you did this new thing, and then it kept going into the future.

0:08:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Which is the hardest part, by the way.

0:08:30.1 John Dues: The hardest part, I'd say too. Assuming you could bring about improvement, then sustaining it into the future, especially as you maybe take your eye off it a little bit, and then work on something else, that's very, very difficult.

0:08:43.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, the initial seizure that you get into of making change can be really powerful compared to the energy, you know, devoted to sustaining it.

0:08:55.9 John Dues: Yeah.

0:08:56.3 Andrew Stotz: And you could also argue, if something's not easily sustained, was it really an improvement?

0:09:02.8 John Dues: Right. I think that's just right. And, you know, what I do in the workshop then is then after I go over the definition, I ask people, now, think back to your list of successful improvement projects. You know, and for the listeners, if you pause, then you created your own list and then you heard that definition. Then I just asked the participants, would you revise your answer after reading this definition of improvement? And ask people, okay, now how many things, how many items are on that list? And a lot of people, if they're being honest, are left with none, actually. You know, because this definition sets a really high bar. But I think it is the right bar if you're actually interested in improving outcomes in your school, in my case, or in your organization. And I think what you often run up against is, this is kind of a simplified version of most improvement claims. But in my world, you hear claims, something like, you know, our state test scores improved. Right. The translation is, this school's or this year scores are higher than last year's scores.

0:10:25.8 John Dues: But that claim falls really short of that definition. Well, okay, the scores are better than last year. Well, what did you do to make them better? Also, a single data point is probably not enough to back that claim up. Let's instead turn to an example that meets the definition, and it'll help you understand how powerful this can be in practice. So, you know, let's suppose that you've been working to increase some student outcome measure. Let's say we gather it on a monthly basis, whatever this thing is. So now I'm going to show you a visual that has some data plotted over time. And the three parts of the definition of improvement have been labeled right on that chart. And having this visual is very, very powerful. This is when this definition really clicked. So I'll go ahead and share my screen again with you. All right. Can you see that chart?

0:11:35.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep.

0:11:36.9 John Dues: Okay, great. So first off, if you're watching that, you can just see very quickly that the claim of improvement has been substantiated with evidence. So for the people that are just listening, we have some data plotted over time for the first 15 months and it's kind of traveling along around an 80% average. And then all of a sudden that data shifts up substantially to now it's humming along at about a 91, 92% average. And it's much harder to sort of internalize this without being able to see it. But I'll do my best to explain it. So the first thing was, part one. There's a clear point in time where a change was introduced. So that's labeled as part one. Right in between month 15 and 16, there's an arrow there on the chart where some change was made. If this is a teacher's data, maybe they made some type of change to how they were instructing the class.

0:12:55.3 Andrew Stotz: In research, sometimes we'll call that time zero.

0:13:00.6 John Dues: Time zero, absolutely. And then second again, there's this clear difference in results after the change was introduced as compared to historical results. So that's part two. So there's this positive, visible difference relative to historical norms. Now, you know, this is an example for illustration purposes and I wanted to make it very clear, like this delineation, this definition. But in reality, you know, if you're a teacher trying this new method, for example, it might be that even if the method is successful, you're not maybe going to see the results immediately. Right. But this illustrates, what you're hoping to see. And it makes it very clear. And then part three on here, that improvement was sustained in the future. So you see the bump in scores in this, whatever this outcome is in this hypothetical in month 16. But it wasn't just months 16 and 17, it carried forth for another 15 months at this much higher level. So you can very quickly start to see there's this profound difference between most improvement claims and one supported by this three part definition. It makes it very simple. When do we introduce something new? And then what does the data look like over time after an initial baseline period?

0:14:36.9 Andrew Stotz: It reminds me of something I often say to people, which is, do you ever make the same mistake twice in your business? And of course, everybody says yes. And I ask them, imagine if you never made the same mistake twice, how would that change the outcome of your business? And then we have a discussion about that. But the point is that most people just live in a world where they never are able to really sustain improved performance. They just fall back to the same things. And this chart is a good way of understanding, have we truly sustained improved performance?

0:15:24.4 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. And you have to have a method. You know, that's why Deming would frequently say, you can't just have a goal. You have to be able to answer the question by what method? So that's why part one of this definition was calling out whatever change was introduced. Because in this system, in that baseline period from month one through 15, while there are some ups and downs in that data, it's really just bouncing around that 80% average. And if you don't change something in that system, then you're very likely just to keep getting those same results over time. Some fundamental change has to be introduced so you have a stable system, but it's not satisfactory. So you got to change something. And then you're going to keep gathering the data to see if that change had an impact. So again, it's not rocket science. And it was pretty intuitive to see that definition in that improvement guide. And then actually this sort of chart I'm showing you with a three part definition combined with a control chart or a process behavior chart, I saw this in their latest book called Quality as an Organizational Strategy.

0:16:42.0 John Dues: And when I saw the visualization of the improvement definition, which was only in like text form in The Improvement Guide, then it all just clicked. Oh, this is so obvious what this definition actually means and how you could tell if something has improved or not. So I think anybody that's doing improvement work, you know, whether you're in schools or some other type of organization, and whether you're the superintendent of the entire system, the principal of the building or the teacher in a classroom, all of you can use this. A student could use this, an athlete could use this. This definition, it doesn't really matter. It's sector agnostic and can be applied, you know, pretty widely against different contexts. But it makes it very clear how to tell when things are getting better, how to tell if, you know, maybe things are going the other direction or if they're just staying the same. Makes it very, very clear.

0:17:36.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, it's a great thought exercise that you started with that, you know, got me thinking and I'm sure for the listeners and the viewers got them thinking, like, what changed? Where have we really improved? And one of the hard things in business, and I'm sure it's the same in teaching, is that ultimately personalities and ultimately it's about the people, whether that's business or teaching. And one of the things that you can say about people that's commonly said, whether it's true or not, I'll leave you to think about that. And that is people don't change.

0:18:19.8 John Dues: People don't like to change.

0:18:21.1 Andrew Stotz: They don't like to change. And I would argue that they rarely change.

0:18:25.9 John Dues: Yeah, yeah, no, I would agree with that.

0:18:28.5 Andrew Stotz: I mean, the whole mission of life is to get to a point where you don't have to change. That is the human body, the human mind is just like trying to get to that point.

0:18:42.6 John Dues: Yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

0:18:45.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And then you die.

0:18:50.1 John Dues: Yeah.

0:18:51.3 Andrew Stotz: But it just gets me thinking too, about... And for everybody, here we are at the... We're discussing this on the 9th of December. So we're getting near the end of the year, thinking about what we're trying to do next year and all that. And in my coffee business, as an example, we've had our shares of ups and downs, but we've tried to right the ship as far as making sure that we've got the right balance of profitability, the right number of staff, cash flow and a buildup of cash so that we have the resources to go after markets. And the question is, that I always have in my mind is, how do we prevent ourselves from slipping back into some old habits of maybe spending on marketing and sales and then not getting the delivery of that, and therefore the costs go up, but the revenues don't follow? How do we ensure that the improvements that we're making right now aren't just lost six months from now? And this starts to give me some ideas that I'm thinking about.

0:20:00.5 John Dues: Yeah. I mean, and once you get that improvement, like, how do you sustain it? How do you have the discipline to do that?

0:20:09.1 Andrew Stotz: Well, I think the first thing that this raises is, are we clearly measuring, first, whether the improvement happened?

0:20:19.3 John Dues: Yeah.

0:20:19.7 Andrew Stotz: And second, whether it was sustained?

0:20:22.8 John Dues: Yeah. And even before that, you know, just having a baseline. Most people have the data somewhere, but they haven't plotted it like this so it's clear what the typical performance is currently, a lot of people don't even take that step. You know, it's just last year, this year. Last month. This month.

0:20:39.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, that's good point. That's a good point. That's something you pointed out to me a long time ago about looking at, you know, my enrollments in Valuation Masterclass Boot Camp and saying, well, you need to understand, you know, what's the system you're operating in, and therefore, you've got to understand what that system can produce before you start thinking about, you know, what's your next steps.

0:21:01.6 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. And like I said in the middle of this episode, you know, this is a very high bar. This is not easy to accomplish. It takes discipline. It takes continual improvement. Dr. Deming talked about he liked using continual versus continuous because a lot of this would be discontinuous. You know, you have a focus, you may be improving an area, then you have to change your focus. But you can't keep your eye totally off this other thing. Like you were just saying, you have to kind of keep your eye on multiple things to keep an organization going. And that's part of the challenge of running an organization for sure. Be it a coffee business or a school.

0:21:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. It's interesting that we're talking about the definition of improvement long after we talked about the method of improvement, like PDSA.

0:21:50.5 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. And that's probably the best method I've come across. So, you know, in this visual that we're looking at, for people that can see it, you know, part one, a change was introduced. The most powerful tool that I found thus far is the PDSA cycle. That's where you would document the change. And again, this is for illustrative purposes, but in reality you probably have to run multiple cycles and kind of learn your way to a better system rather than you're probably not going to see this. Now, there are some things where you may see this start improvement between month 15 and month 16, but the reality is, in most situations that's going to take multiple rounds of PSAs and where there's sort of a gradual improvement over time. Again, you know, there are some things where you could see an improvement like this, but most stuff, it just takes sustained effort over time and continual learning and continual improvement type stuff.

0:22:51.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, this really helps me, and I'm sure for the listeners and the viewers to put PDSA in a very clear spot, which is, it's the tool for sustained improvement. Because you could imagine that in this chart where we have time zero and we have the past, let's say that's our starting point. We don't have any future data, but let's imagine that according to PDSA, we decided that we would try out and test out one particular method. And we find after testing it, no improvement, no change. Okay, that wasn't what we expected. Now we got to go back and adjust and then run the PDSA again. And then let's say we do that again and we find very little improvement. Okay, that wasn't what we expected. And our goal is to really try to get to a higher level of improvement. And let's say the third round, we get to a point where we get, oh, now this has sustained, you know this has produced improvement way beyond the others. The question is, can it be sustained? And that also has to do with the constraints of the system.

0:24:01.0 Andrew Stotz: Because if you don't have the proper, let's say, electricity, steady electricity supply, or you have problems with employees coming and going, bad training or whatever, you may find that you did make an initial improvement, but you weren't able to sustain it, so you couldn't really call it an improvement, it was more like a test.

0:24:24.0 John Dues: Yeah, yeah. These are all things that make improvement work so challenging, especially in a complex organization. Very, very challenging. No doubt. But I think this is probably a good place to wrap up and summarize. But I think just having this clear definition for the concept of improvement, I think there's sort of these three big ideas that I think from this episode that can put you on the right track. I think one is just recognizing now kind of being listening for this in your organization that most improvement claims lack evidence. So when you hear somebody in your organization make a claim, this went up, or this got better, or that got better, you know, ask for some evidence. How do you know? Let me see. Show me what you're seeing. How do you know this is improvement? So I'd call that sort of big idea one is, this idea that you need evidence.

0:25:27.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. The other thing I would take away from it, too, is actually in the process, you end up narrowing in on one thing. That chart is about one specific outcome.

0:25:42.6 John Dues: Yeah.

0:25:43.6 Andrew Stotz: And once you get so narrow to one specific outcome and you're tracking it and following it, it gets you more focused. And I think that to really get sustained improvement, you have to focus. And it's so easy to be distracted by the 15 things that need to be improved that you see as you walk down the hall in a school every day or as you... But in the end, true improvement is really hard. You can't improve 15 things. You can probably only improve one right now.

0:26:13.2 John Dues: Yeah, you gotta have a focus area for sure. What's the most important thing or the most important few things? Yeah. So the big idea one is, you know, from what I've seen, most of these improvement claims lack evidence. You need evidence. The second big idea is very simple. You know, you have to have this definition, and it's got to precede any improvement claims. Whatever your definition is, that this is the one I would use, this is the one I do use. But you know, before you can make a claim, you have to have a definition that clearly outlines when the thing has happened and when it hasn't. And in my mind, big idea three, is use this three part definition because it makes it so easy to tell when things have improved again and when things haven't. Yeah, after you apply these three big ideas, you know, I think you'll be able to answer the question, have we improved with conviction. You know, it makes it very, very straightforward. I like very straightforward things. And this is very straightforward.

0:27:14.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Most improvement claims lack evidence. John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, Win-Win W. Edwards Deming; the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with my favorite quote from Dr. Deming, and that is that people are entitled to joy in work.

What was it like to learn from Dr. Deming himself -- a decade before his name became legend in U.S. business circles? In this deeply personal episode, William Scherkenbach shares with host Andrew Stotz what it was like to sit in Deming's classroom in 1972, join him for late-night chats at the Cosmos Club, and help ignite transformational change at Ford and GM. Learn how Deming's teachings shaped a lifetime of purpose, and why Scherkenbach, now in his 80th year, is stepping back into the arena with lessons still burning bright.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm here with featured guest William Scherkenbach, and he is known as one of the men who has spent a huge amount of time with Dr. Deming, as he mentioned to me previously, starting from 1972, over a thousand meetings and many other activities that he's been involved in. So, Bill, welcome to the show. Why don't you give us a little background about you?

0:00:39.5 William Scherkenbach: Oh, okay. Good to be here, Andrew. Well, I'm going to start with, since it's about Deming, in '72, I was newly married in April, but had been accepted to NYU Graduate School of Business, and I don't know, I never found out who wrote the course syllabus, but whoever did wrote something that it sounded like a darn interesting course, sampling, manufacturing. I was a protocol officer at the United Nations at the time and was going to night school at the New York University Graduate School of Business. So, I said, this sounds like a good course, interesting course. Had no idea who Dr. Deming was, and I walked into the first class, and there was an old, I'm 26, so he was 72 in 1972, and he was one of the first, one of the only old person who didn't say, I used to be, and I don't want to stereotype all of my peers now that I'm 79, but hopefully I don't fall into the, well, I used to be and what happened. But he did tell, I mean, statistics can be a very technical subject, and the way he taught it, I had courses in some theory of sampling, which was one of his books.

0:02:52.2 William Scherkenbach: He had three, I said three courses. The other course that I took was based on his lectures in Japan in 1950, and in fact, two of them. The third course was an extension of that. So, he was, he would teach the statistics, but he was able to tell the history of the people behind all of the thoughts and the formulas and approaches, and I found that extremely, extremely interesting. And he handed out tons of papers and material, and it was just a very, very good experience. I know he had, and he had, in my opinion, a great sense of humor, but then statisticians, what's our status? Yeah, we're like accountants, in any event. .

0:04:12.2 Andrew Stotz: Why was he teaching? I mean, at 72, most men, you know, maybe women also, but most of us are like, it's the twilight of our years, and we now know he had 30 more years to go, but why was he teaching? And also, what's interesting is when I think about Deming, I think about his overall system of what he's teaching, whereas it's interesting to think about how he taught one relatively narrow subject.

0:04:43.7 William Scherkenbach: I'll get to that as to why I think he was teaching. But yeah, back then there were no 14 Points, no glimmer of Profound Knowledge. It was, not theoretical statistics, but applied statistics with a theory behind it. And he still was really expanding on Shewhart 's work with the difference between enumerative and analytic. He used his own. Now, why he was teaching, years later, probably 1987, so yeah, a bunch of years later, when I was at Ford and I had attended at the time, I attended a senior executive week-long get-together in order to get constancy of purpose or more continuity in the senior executive group. One of the people we brought in was Dr. Peter Kastenbaum. And I found as I attended his lecture in that week-long meeting, he was a student of CI Lewis. And CI Lewis, Deming learned about from Walter Shewhart and his work in the epistemology theory of knowledge. And in any event, Deming, when he was asked, and at the time it was still in the '30s, I think, when he was at the School of Agriculture, or the agriculture department, and bringing in Shewhart, he had tried to get CI Lewis to come talk. And CI said, I would love to, but I have a commitment to my students. And so I can't adjust my schedule.

0:07:33.9 William Scherkenbach: And the students, the people who wanted to learn were sacred. And I think that had a huge impact on Dr. Deming. I mean, he spoke about it a lot. And the way, you know, in a lot of the videos that Clare Crawford-Mason did, lovingly called the old curmudgeon. But for students, he had the greatest empathy and charity for, he just didn't suffer fools gladly. If you showed him that you weren't willing to learn, he took great joy in letting them know where they, where they stood.

0:08:43.1 Andrew Stotz: And one of the things when I went into my first Deming seminar in 1990, so now we're fast forwarding 30 years from when you first met him. It was almost like there was a safe harbor for workers, for young people, for people with open minds. I mean, I didn't, I watched as he didn't suffer fools, but I'm just curious, when you go back to 1972 in those classes, I'm assuming that he was pretty gentle with the students, encouraging them and all that was...

0:09:19.0 William Scherkenbach: Oh, absolutely. In my experience, I mean, if you were by, you know, in a student in graduate school, even though the graduate school of business in New York, down on 90 Church Street, Wall Street area, there were very few people going directly from your bachelor's to the master's program. And so these were people that had probably 10 years experience in business doing stuff. And yet by going to the class, absolutely were willing to learn, listen to different points of view, which is absolutely crucial. As you progress with theory of knowledge to be able to get different perspectives on whatever it is you're trying to look at.

0:10:23.2 Andrew Stotz: I would like to continue on this period of time just because it's a snapshot we don't get that often or that easily. You mentioned CI Lewis, a man who lived from about 1880 to about the year I was born, around 1964-65, and he was known for his understanding and discussion about logic and things like that. But why was CI Lewis someone that was interesting to Dr. Deming? What was the connection from your perspective?

0:10:59.6 William Scherkenbach: Well, my understanding is Shewhart referred to him, and Lewis was a professor at Harvard, and he was in the Peirce, I believe it's called. It looks like Peirce, but it's Peirce School of, or Chair of Philosophy, and Charles Sanders Peirce was a huge, huge influence in epistemology. And so that whole chain of thought or train of thought interested Deming, but it really was, he was introduced to it by Walter Shewhart. 

0:11:48.3 Andrew Stotz: There's a famous quote, I believe, by Deming about CI Lewis and his book Mind and the World Order.

0:11:56.0 William Scherkenbach: Mind and the World Order, yeah.

0:11:59.9 Andrew Stotz: Deming said he had to read it six times before he fully understood and could apply its insights. And sometimes I think maybe Dr. Deming was truly inspired by that because when I think about his work, I'm still reading it and rereading it. And just listening to the video that you did many years ago with Tim talking about reduced variation, reduced variation, what he was talking about. Sometimes when we see the big picture, there's many different components of Deming's teachings. But if you had to bring it down to kind of its core, you know, he mentioned on that video that I just watched this morning, he mentioned reduced variation, and that will get you lower costs, happier customers, more jobs. How would you say, after you've looked at it from so many different angles over so many different years, how would you say you would sum up Dr. Deming's message to the world?

0:13:01.5 William Scherkenbach: Well, that's a difficult thing to sum up. Back then, when we did the video, which was in the early '80s, maybe '84, again, he had his 14 Points by then, but he hadn't, it hadn't really, the Profound Knowledge part of that wasn't there. Now, he had used what Shewhart said, and he had read, tried to read CI Lewis, and when he spoke about the connection between theory and questions, that's what he got from Shewhart and, well, and from Lewis, and a bunch of other pragmatist philosophers. So, he, you know, he was influenced by it, and, well, that's all I can say.

0:14:27.5 Andrew Stotz: So, let's go back in time. So, you're sitting in this classroom, you're intrigued, inspired. How did the relationship go at, towards the end of the class, and then as you finished that class, how did you guys keep in touch, and how did the relationship develop?

0:14:51.0 William Scherkenbach: Well, that is an interesting story. I usually am, well, I am introverted. So I had, after I moved from New York, I got a job at Booz Allen and Hamilton in Washington, DC. So in '74, when I got the degree from NYU, we moved to Silver Spring. And obviously, he's lived on Butterworth Place since there was a Butterworth Place. So we were able to, one of the things, and this is, well, I will say it, one of his advice to me, although he gave everyone an A, I later kidded him, he didn't remember that he gave me a B. No, he gave me an A. In any event, but one of his piece of advice was, you really don't need to join ASQC. You know more about quality than any of those inspectors. And so he had learned from the '50s in the past 20 years from the 50s that inspection wasn't going to do it. Well, I didn't take his advice, and I joined ASQC, and I was reading...

0:16:36.1 Andrew Stotz:Which for those who don't know is the American Society for...

0:16:41.6 William Scherkenbach: Quality Control, back then, now it's just the American Society for Quality. I had recommended when we did a big recommendations and forecasts for the year 2000 that quality, it should be the Society for Quality worldwide, but it's ASQ now. Let's see.

0:17:07.7 Andrew Stotz: So he recommended you don't join and you didn't follow his recommendation. 

0:17:12.1 William Scherkenbach: I don't join, and I read an article, and it was by a professor in Virginia Tech, and he was showing a c-chart and the data were in control, and his recommendations were to penalize the people that were high and reward the people that were low, which is even back then, Dr. Deming was absolutely on track with that. If your process is in control, it doesn't make any sense to rank order or think that any of them are sufficiently different to reward or penalize. And I had never done this, but it was, I wrote a letter to quality progress. I sent a copy to Dr. Deming, and he said, "By golly, you're right on, that's great." And so I think it probably was '75, yeah, 1975. So I had been a year or so out, and he started inviting me over to his place at Butterworth, and we would go to the Cosmos Club. And that was a logistical challenge because at the time he had, well, his garage was a separate, not attached, it was in the backyard and emptied onto an alley. And he had a huge Lincoln Continental, the ones with the doors that opened from the center.

0:19:29.0 William Scherkenbach: And he would get in and drive and then park it in back of the club and someone would watch over it. But those were some good memories. So that was my introduction to keep contact with him. As I said, I had never done that. I don't think I've written a letter to an editor ever again.

0:20:04.8 Andrew Stotz: And you're mentioning about Butterworth, which is in DC.

0:20:12.6 William Scherkenbach: Butterworth Place, yeah.

0:20:14.7 Andrew Stotz: And Butterworth Place where he had his consulting business, which he ran, I believe, out of his basement.

0:20:18.3 William Scherkenbach: Out of the basement, yep, yep, yep.

0:20:21.2 Andrew Stotz: And just out of curiosity, what was it like when you first went to his home? Here, you had met him as your teacher, you respected him, you'd been away for a little bit, he invited you over. What was that like on your first walk into his home?

0:20:38.5 William Scherkenbach: Well, went down the side, the entrance to the basement was on the side of the house, and Seal had her desk set up right by the door. And then, I don't know if you can see, this is neat compared to his desk. It was filled with books and papers, but he knew where everything was. But it was a very cordial atmosphere.

0:21:25.2 Andrew Stotz: So when you mentioned Cecelia Kilian, is that her name, who was his assistant at the time?

0:21:36.3 William Scherkenbach: Yes, yes.

0:21:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay, so you...

0:21:38.8 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. For Jeepers. I don't know how long, but it had to be 50 years or so. So I don't, I mean, back in the '70s, I don't know of any other. He might have had, well, okay. He, yeah.

0:22:01.1 Andrew Stotz: I think it's about 40 or 50 years. So that's an incredible relationship he had with her. And I believe she wrote something. I think I have one of her, a book that she wrote that described his life. I can't remember that one right now but...

0:22:14.2 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. A lot of, yeah, it contained a lot of...

0:22:16.6 Andrew Stotz: The World of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, I think was the name of it, yeah.

0:22:20.6 William Scherkenbach: Okay. It contained a lot of his diaries on a number of his visits to Japan and elsewhere.

0:22:32.1 Andrew Stotz: So for some of us, when we go into our professor's offices, we see it stacked full of papers, but they've been sitting there for years. And we know that the professor just doesn't really do much with it. It's just all sitting there. Why did he have so much stuff on it? Was it incoming stuff that was coming to him? Was it something he was writing? Something he was reading? What was it that was coming in and out of his desk?

0:22:55.7 William Scherkenbach: A combination of stuff. I don't know. I mean, he was constantly writing, dictating to seal, but writing and reading. He got a, I mean, as the decades proceeded out of into the '80s, after '82, the NBC white or the '80, the NBC white paper calls were coming in from all over, all over the world. So yeah, a lot of people sending him stuff.

0:23:35.8 Andrew Stotz: I remember seeing him pulling out little scraps of paper at the seminar where he was taking notes and things like that at '90. So I could imagine he was just prolific at jotting things down. And when you read what he wrote, he really is assembling a lot of the notes and things that he's heard from different people. You can really capture that.

0:23:59.0 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. He didn't have an identic memory, but he took notes and quite, you know, and what he would do at the end of the day before retiring, he'd review the notes and commit them to memory as best he could. So he, yeah, very definitely. I mean, we would, you know, and well, okay. We're still in the early days before Ford and GM, but.

0:24:37.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I want to, if I shoot forward to '90, '92, when I studied with him, I was impressed with his energy at his age and he was just on a mission. And when I hear about your discussion about the class and at that time, it's like he was forming his, you know, System of Profound Knowledge, his 14 Points. When do you think it really became a mission for him to help, let's say American industry?

0:25:09.0 William Scherkenbach: Oh, well, I think it was a mission when Ford began its relationship with him. The ability of a large corporation, as well, and Ford at the same time Pontiac, the Pontiac division, not the whole GM, but Pontiac, was learning as well. But the attachment to Ford was that you had Don Peterson at the time was president of Ford, and he was intellectually curious, and he and Deming were on the same frequency. Now, I don't want to jump ahead, but if anyone has, well, you've read my second book there, you'll know that I have mentioned that the way to change is physical, logical, and emotional. And when you look at the gurus back then, there was Deming, who was the logical guru. You had Phil Crosby, who was the emotional guru. You go to the flag and the wine and cheese party, and Deming would say, "No," and Joe Juran, who was interested in focusing on the physical organization, you report to me kind of a thing. And so each of these behemoths were passing each other in the night with the greatest respect. But, but, and so they had their constituents. The challenge is to be able to broaden the appeal. 

0:27:33.8 Andrew Stotz: So we've gone through '72, and then now '75, you've written your piece, and he's brought you into the fold. You're starting to spend some time with him. I believe it was about 1981 or so when he started working with Ford. And at that time, the quality director, I think, was Larry Moore at the time. And of course, you mentioned Donald Peterson. Maybe you can help us now understand from your own perspective of what you were doing between that time and how you saw that happening.

0:28:13.4 William Scherkenbach: Well, I had, my career was, after Booz Allen, mostly in the quality reliability area. I went from Booz Allen and Hamilton to, I moved to Columbia, Maryland, because I can fondly remember my grandfather in Ironwood, Michigan, worked at the Oliver Mine. There's a lot of iron ore mines up in the UP. ANd he would, and his work, once he got out of the mines later on, was he would cut across the backyard, and his office was right there. And so he would walk home for lunch and take a nap and walk back. And I thought that really was a good style of life. So Columbia, Maryland, was designed by Rouse to be a live-in, work-in community. And so we were gonna, we moved to Columbia, and there was a consulting firm called Hitman Associates, and their specialty was energy and environmental consulting. So did a bunch of that, worked my way up to a vice president. And so, but in '81, Deming said, you know, Ford really is interested. He was convinced, and again, it's déjà vu, he spoke about, when he spoke fondly about his lectures in Japan in 1950 and onward, that he was, he was very concerned that top management needed to be there, because he had seen all the excitement at Stanford during the war, and it died out afterwards, because management wasn't involved.

0:30:42.8 Andrew Stotz: What do you mean by that? What do you mean by the excitement at Stanford? You mean people working together for the efforts of the war, or was there a particular thing that was happening at Stanford?

0:30:51.7 William Scherkenbach: Well, they were, he attributed it to the lack of management support. I mean, they learned SPC. We were able to improve quality of war material or whatever, whoever attended the Stanford courses. But he saw the same thing in Japan and was lucky to, and I'm not sure if it was Ishikawa. I'm just not sure, but he was able to get someone to make the call after a few of the seminars for the engineers to make the call to the top management to attend the next batch. And he was able, he was able to do that. And that he thought was very helpful. I, I, gave them a leg up on whatever steps were next. I'm reminded of a quote from, I think it was Lao Tzu. And he said that someone asked him, "Well, you talk to the king, why or the emperor, why are things so screwed up?" And he said, "Well, I get to talk to him an hour a week and the rest of the time his ears are filled with a bunch of crap." Or whatever the Chinese equivalent of that is. And he said, "Of course the king isn't going to be able to act correctly." Yeah, there are a lot of things that impacted any company that he helped.

0:33:07.6 Andrew Stotz: It's interesting because I believe that, I think it was Kenichi Koyanagi.

0:33:15.8 William Scherkenbach: Koyanagi, yes, it was.

0:33:17.8 Andrew Stotz: And it was in 1950 and he had a series of lectures that he did a series of times. But it's interesting that, you know, that seemed like it should have catapulted him, but then to go to where you met him in 1972 and all that, he still hadn't really made his impact in America. And that's, to me, that's a little bit interesting.

0:33:44.4 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, and quite, my take, I mean, you could tell even in '72 and '3 in classes, he was very frustrated that he wasn't being listened to. I mean, he had, his business was expert testimony in statistical design of surveys. He did road truck, truck transport studies to be able to help the interstate commerce commission. And made periodic trips back to Japan, well known in Japan, but frustrated that no one really knew about him or wasn't listening to him in the US. And that was, I mean, for years, that was my, my aim. And that is to help him be known for turning America around, not just Japan. But it's usually difficult. I mean, we did a great job at Ford and GM and a bunch of companies, but it's all dissipated.

0:35:25.9 Andrew Stotz: It's interesting because it's not like he just went as a guest and gave a couple of guest lectures. He did about 35 lectures in 1950. About 28 or almost 30 of them were to engineers and technical staff. And then about seven of them were to top level executives. And, you know, one of the quotes he said at the time from those lectures was, "the problem is at the top, quality is made in the boardroom." So just going back, that's 1950, then you meet him in 1970, then in '72, then you start to build this relationship. You've talked about Booz Allen Hamilton. Tell us more about how it progressed into working more with him, in particular Ford and that thing that started in, let's say, 1981 with Ford.

0:36:22.0 William Scherkenbach: Well, again, he was very enthusiastic about Ford because Peterson was very receptive to this, his approach. And again, it's, I think the British philosopher Johnson said, "there's nothing like the prospect of being hung in the morning to heighten a man's senses." So he, Ford had lost a couple billion bucks. They hadn't cashed in like Chrysler. GM lost a bunch too, but that, and Japan had lost a war. So does it take a significant emotional, logical, or physical event? For some folks it does. So he was very encouraged about what he was seeing at Ford. And he had recommended that Ford hire someone to be there full time to coordinate, manage, if you will. And I was one of the people he recommended and I was the one that Ford hired. So I came in as Director of Statistical Methods and Process Improvement. And they set it up outside, as Deming said, they set it up outside the quality. Larry Moore was the Director of Quality and I was Director of Statistical Methods. And that's the way it was set up.

0:38:08.0 Andrew Stotz: Were you surprised when you received that call? How did you feel when you got that call to say, "Why don't you go over there and do this job at Ford?"

0:38:18.6 William Scherkenbach: Oh, extremely, extremely happy. Yeah. Yeah.

0:38:23.1 Andrew Stotz: And so did you, did you move to Michigan or what did you do?

0:38:27.7 Andrew Stotz: I'm sorry?

0:38:29.4 Andrew Stotz: Did you move or what happened next as you took that job?

0:38:32.0 William Scherkenbach: Oh yeah, we were living in Columbia. We moved the family to the Detroit area and ended up getting a house in Northville, which is a Northwest suburb of Detroit.

0:38:49.9 Andrew Stotz: And how long were you at Ford?

0:38:53.8 William Scherkenbach: About five and a half years. And I left Ford because Deming thought that GM needed my help. Things were going well. I mean, had a great, great bunch of associates, Pete Chessa, Ed Baker, Narendra Sheth, and a bunch of, a bunch of other folks. Ed Baker took the directorship when I left. That was my, well, I recommended a number of them, but yeah, he followed on. Deming thought that there was a good organization set up. And me being a glutton for punishment went to, well, not really. A bunch of great, great people in GM, but it's, they were, each of the general managers managed a billion dollar business and a lot of, difficult to get the silos to communicate. And it really, there was not much cooperation, a lot of backstabbing.

0:40:25.0 Andrew Stotz: And how did Dr. Deming take this project on? And what was the relationship between him and, you know, let's say Donald Peterson, who was the running the company and all the people that he had involved, like yourself, and you mentioned about Ed Baker and other people, I guess, Sandy Munro and others that were there. And just curious, and Larry Moore, how did he approach that? That's a huge organization and he's coming in right at the top. What was his approach to handling that?

0:41:02.1 S2  Well, my approach was based on his recommendation that the Director of Statistical Methods should report directly to the president or the chairman, the president typically. And so based on that, I figured that what I would, how we would organize the office, my associates would each be assigned to a key vice president to be their alter ego. So we did it in a, on a divisional level. And that worked, I think, very well. The difficulty was trying to match personalities and expertise to the particular vice president. Ed Baker had very good relations with the Latin American organization, and, and he and Harry Hannett, Harold Hannett helped a lot in developing administrative applications as well. And so we sort of came up with a matrix of organization and discipline. We needed someone for finance and engineering and manufacturing, supply chain, and was able to matrix the office associates in to be able to be on site with those people to get stuff, to get stuff done.

0:43:09.5 Andrew Stotz: And what was your message at that time, and what was Dr. Deming's message? Because as we know, his message has come together very strongly after that. But at that point, it's not like he had the 14 Points that he could give them Out of the Crisis or you could give them your books that you had done. So what was like the guiding philosophy or the main things that you guys were trying to get across?

0:43:35.9 William Scherkenbach: Well, I mean, he had given in, I think, Quality, Productivity, Competitive Position back in the late '70s, and he was doing it through George Washington University, even though Myron Tribus at MIT published it. But it was a series of lectures, and he didn't really, even in the later 70s, didn't have the, the, the 14 Points. And so those came a couple years later, his thinking through, and Profound Knowledge didn't come until much later over a number of discussions of folks. But the, I mean, the key, I mean, my opinion of why it all dropped out is we dropped the ball in not working with the board. And at Ford, we didn't, weren't able to influence the Ford family. And so Peterson retires and Red Poling, a finance guy, steps in and, and everything slowly disintegrates. At least not disintegrates, well, yes. I mean, what was important under Peterson was different. But that happens in any company. A new CEO comes on board or is elected, and they've got their priorities based, as Deming would say, on their evaluation system. What's their, how are they compensated?

0:45:46.8 William Scherkenbach: And so we just didn't spend the time there nor at GM with how do you elect or select your next CEO? And so smaller companies have a better, I would think, well, I don't know. I would imagine smaller companies have a better time of that, especially closely held and family held companies. You could, if you can reach the family, you should be able to get some continuity there.

0:46:23.5 Andrew Stotz: So Donald Peterson stepped down early 1995. And when did you guys make or when did you make your transition from Ford to GM?

0:46:38.5 William Scherkenbach: '88.

0:46:39.6 Andrew Stotz: Okay, so you continued at Ford.

0:46:42.1 William Scherkenbach: The end of '88, yeah, and I left GM in '93, the year Dr. Deming died later. But I had left in, in, well, in order to help him better.

0:47:07.8 Andrew Stotz: And let's now talk about the transition over to General Motors that you made. And where did that come from? Was it Dr. Deming that was recommending it or someone from General Motors? Or what...

0:47:21.4 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, Deming spoke with them and spoke with me. And I was a willing worker to be able to go where he thought I could be most helpful.

0:47:41.9 Andrew Stotz: And was he exasperated or frustrated that for the changes that happened in '95 when Peterson stepped down, he started to see the writing on the wall? Or was he still hopeful?

0:47:55.4 William Scherkenbach: No, Deming died in '93, so he didn't see any of that.

0:47:58.9 Andrew Stotz: No, no, what I mean is when Peterson stepped down, it was about '85. And then you remain at Ford until '88.

0:48:08.0 William Scherkenbach: No, Peterson didn't step down in '85. I mean, he was still there when I left.

0:48:14.0 Andrew Stotz: So he was still chairman at the time.

0:48:17.3 William Scherkenbach: Yeah.

0:48:17.6 Andrew Stotz: Maybe I'm meaning he stepped down from president. So my mistake on that.

0:48:20.3 William Scherkenbach: Oh, but he was there.

0:48:24.3 Andrew Stotz: So when did it start...

0:48:25.9 William Scherkenbach: True. I mean, true, he was still there when Deming had died.

0:48:31.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, okay. So did the whole team leave Ford and go to GM or was it just you that went?

0:48:39.1 William Scherkenbach: Oh, just me. Just me.

0:48:42.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay. And then.

0:48:44.0 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, because we had set up something that Deming was very pleased with. And so they were, everyone was working together and helping one another.

0:48:59.5 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So then you went to General Motors. What did you do different? What was different in your role? What did you learn from Ford that you now brought to GM? What went right? What went wrong? What was your experience with GM at that time?

0:49:16.5 William Scherkenbach: Well, I've got a, let's see. Remember Bill Hoagland was the person, Hoagland managed Pontiac when Deming helped Pontiac and Ron Moen was involved in the Pontiac. But Bill Hoagland was in one of the reorganizations at GM was head of, he was group, group vice president for Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac. And so I went over and directly reported to him and each of the, I mean, Wendy Coles was in, Gypsy Rainey, although Gypsy was temporary, worked for powertrain and Pontiac and still, but powertrain was where a lot of the expertise was and emphasis was, and then Buick and Cadillac and so, and Oldsmobile. So we, and in addition to that, General Motors had a corporate-wide effort in cooperation with the UAW called the Quality Network. And I was appointed a member of that, of that and, and helped them a lot and as well as the corporate quality office, but focused on Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac.

0:51:18.6 Andrew Stotz: And then tell us about what was your next step in your own personal journey? And then let's now get into how you got more involved with Deming and his teachings and the like.

0:51:32.8 William Scherkenbach: Well, I mean, he would be at GM two and three days a month, and then every quarter he'd be here for, just like Ford, for a four-day seminar. And while at Ford and at GM, I took uh vacation to help him as he gave seminars and met people throughout the world. Even when he was probably 84, 85, I can remember, well, one of the, he always, not always, but he would schedule seminars in England over the Fourth of July because the English don't celebrate that, although he said perhaps they should, but right after the Ascot races. And so he would do four-day seminars. And on one case, we had one series of weeks, the week before Fourth of July, we did a four-day seminar in the US and then went to London to do another four-day seminar. And he went to South Africa for the next four-day seminar with Heero Hacquebord. I didn't go, but I went down to Brazil and I was dragging with that, with that schedule. So he was able to relish and enjoy the helping others. I mean, enjoy triggers a memory. We were at helping powertrain and Gypsy was there, Dr. Gypsy Rainey. 

0:53:59.2 William Scherkenbach: And she, we were talking and goofing around and he started being cross at us. And Gypsy said, "Well, aren't we supposed to be having fun?" And Deming said, "I'm having fun." "You guys straighten out." Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, yeah.

0:54:40.6 Andrew Stotz: And for the typical person to imagine a man at the age of 80, 85, traveling around the world. And it's not like you're traveling on vacation in London, you're walking into a room full of people, your energy is up, you're going and it's not like he's giving a keynote speech for an hour, give us a picture of his energy.

0:55:09.5 William Scherkenbach: And over in London, it was brutal because the hotel, I forget what hotel we're in. When he started there, I think it was Dr. Bernard that he wanted to help. And Bernard wasn't available. So he recommended Henry Neave. And so Henry was a good student, a quick learner. So he helped on a few of them. And I can still remember, I mean, the air, it was 4th of July in London and the humidity was there. There's no air conditioning in the hotel. I could remember Henry, please forgive me, but Henry is sitting in his doorway, sitting on a trash can, doing some notes in his skivvies. And it was hot and humid and awful. But so it reminded Deming a lot of the lectures in Japan in 1950, where he was sweating by 8 AM in the morning. So, yeah.

0:56:30.6 Andrew Stotz: What was it that kept him going? Why was he doing this?

0:56:39.5 William Scherkenbach: I think he, again, I don't know. I never asked him that. He was very, to me, he was on a mission. He wanted to be able to help people live better, okay, and take joy in what they do. And so he was, and I think that was the driving thing. And as long as he had the stamina, he was, he was in, in, in heaven.

0:57:21.1 Andrew Stotz: So let's keep progressing now, and let's move forward towards the latter part of Dr. Deming's life, where we're talking about 1990, 1988, 1990, 1992. What changed in your relationship and your involvement with what he was doing, and what changes did you see in the way he was talking about? You had observed him back in 1972, so here he is in 1990, a very, very different man in some ways, but very similar. How did you observe that?

0:57:56.6 William Scherkenbach: Well, toward the end, it was, I mean, it was, it was not, not pleasant to see him up there with oxygen up his nose, and it just, there had to have been a better way. But Nancy Mann was running those seminars, and they did their best to make life comfortable, but there had to have been a better way to, but I don't know what it was. He obviously wanted to continue to do it, and he had help doing it, but I don't know how effective the last year of seminars were.

0:59:01.1 Andrew Stotz: Well, I mean, I would say in some ways they were very effective, because I attended in 1990 and 1992, and I even took a picture, and I had a picture, and in the background of the picture of him is a nurse, and for me, I just was blown away and knocked out. And I think that one of the things for the listeners and the viewers is to ask yourself, we're all busy doing our work, and we're doing a lot of activities, and we're accomplishing things, but for what purpose, for what mission? And I think that that's what I gained from him is that because he had a mission to help, as you said, make the world a better place, make people have a better life in their job, and help people wake up, that mission really drove him.

0:59:57.8 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, and it, it really did. But for me personally, it was just not pleasant to see him suffering. 

1:00:09.6 Andrew Stotz: And was he in pain? Was he just exhausted? What was it like behind the scenes when he'd come off stage and take a break?

1:00:18.7 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, yeah.

1:00:20.8 Andrew Stotz: And would he take naps or?

1:00:23.2 William Scherkenbach: In the early days, we'd go to, well, at Ford and GM, we would go out to dinner just about every night and talk and enjoy the conversation. We'd, my wife Mary Ellen, went many, many times. He enjoyed Northville, some of the restaurants there, and enjoyed the Deming martinis after the meetings at the Cosmos Club. So very, very much he enjoyed that, that time off the podium. So, but he couldn't do that in the, in the later years.

1:01:28.7 Andrew Stotz: And let's now try to understand the progression as you progress away from General Motors and did other things. How did your career progress in those years until when you retired or to where you are now? Maybe give us a picture of that.

1:01:51.4 William Scherkenbach: I tried to help. I've developed my view on how to operationalize change, worked for, was vice president of a company in Taiwan, spent a couple of, and before that had helped Dell, and would spend probably ending up a couple of years in PRC and Taiwan, and growing and learning to learn, in my opinion, there's too much generalization of, well, Asians or Chinese or whatever. There are many, many subgroups, and so change has to be bespoke. What will work for one person won't work for another. For instance, trying to talk to a number of Chinese executives saying, drive out fear, and they will, oh, there's no fear here. It's respect. And so, yeah. But that was their sincere belief that what they were doing wasn't instilling fear. But it broadened my perspective on what to do. And then probably 10 years ago, my wife started to come down with Alzheimer's, and while we lived in Austin, Texas, and that I've spent, she died three years ago, but that was pretty much all-consuming. That's where I focused. And now it's been three years. I'm looking, and I'm a year younger than Deming when he started, although he was 79 when he was interviewed for the 1980 White Paper.

1:04:36.3 William Scherkenbach: So I'm in my 80th year. So, and I'm feeling good, and I also would like to help people.

1:04:46.6 Andrew Stotz: And I've noticed on your LinkedIn, you've started bringing out interesting papers and transcripts and so many different things that you've been coming out. What is your goal? What is your mission?

1:05:02.3 William Scherkenbach: Well, I also would like to take the next step and contribute to help the improvement, not just the US, but any organization that shows they're serious for wanting to, wanting to improve. On the hope, and again, it's hope, as Deming said, that to be able to light a few bonfires that would turn into prairie fires that might consume more and more companies. And so you've got to light the match somewhere. And I just don't know. Again, I've been out of it for a number of years, but I just don't know. I know there is no big company besides, well, but even Toyota. I can remember Deming and I were in California and had dinner. Toyoda-san and his wife invited Deming and me to a dinner. And just, I was blown away with what he understood responsibilities were. I don't know, although I do have a Toyota Prius plug-in, which is perfect because I'm getting 99 miles a gallon because during my, doing shopping and whatever here in Pensacola, I never use gas. It goes 50 miles without needing to plug in.

1:07:00.6 William Scherkenbach: And so I do my stuff. But when I drive to Texas or Michigan, Michigan mostly to see the family, it's there. But all over, it's a wonderful vehicle. So maybe they're the only company in the world that, but I don't know. I haven't sat down with their executive.

1:07:26.4 Andrew Stotz: And behind me, I have two of your books, and I just want to talk briefly about them and give some advice for people. The first one is The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity: Roadmaps and Roadblocks, and the second one is Deming's Road to Continual Improvement. Maybe you could just give some context of someone who's not read these books and they're new to the philosophy and all that. How do these books, how can they help them?

1:07:58.8 William Scherkenbach: Well, the first book, Deming asked me to write in, I think it was '84. And I don't remember the first edition, but it might be '85, we got it out. But he asked me to write it, and because he thought I would, I could reach a different audience, and he liked it so much, they handed it out in a number of his seminars for a number of years. So.

1:08:40.7 Andrew Stotz: And there's my original version of it. I'm holding up my... 

1:08:47.0 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, that's a later version.

1:08:49.7 Andrew Stotz: And it says the first printing was '86, I think it said, and then I got a 1991 version, which maybe I got it at one of the, I'm sure I got it at one of the seminars, and I've had it, and I've got marks on it and all that. And Deming on the back of it said, "this book will supplement and enhance my own works in teaching. Mr. Scherkenbach's masterful understanding of a system, of a process, of a stable system, and of an unstable system are obvious and effective in his work as well as in his teaching." And I know that on Deming's Road to Continual Improvement, you do a good amount of discussion at the beginning about the difference between a process and a system to try to help people understand those types of things. How should a reader, where should they start?

1:09:42.8 William Scherkenbach: Well, not with chapter six, as in CI Lewis, but well, I don't know what... I don't remember what chapter six is. As I said, the first book, and a lot of people after that did it, is essentially not regurgitating, but saying in a little bit different words about Deming's 14 Points. What I did on the first book is arrange them in the order that I think, and groupings that I think the 14 Points could be understood better. The second book was, the first half was reviewing the Deming philosophy, and the second half is how you would go about and get it done. And that's where the physiological, emotional, and all of my studies on operationalizing anything.

1:10:55.4 Andrew Stotz: And in chapter three on page 98, you talk about physical barriers, and you talk about physical, logical, emotional. You mentioned a little bit of that when you talked about the different gurus out there in quality, but this was a good quote. It says, Dr. Deming writes about the golfer who cannot improve his game because he's already in the state of statistical control. He points out that you have only one chance to train a person. Someone whose skill level is in statistical control will find great difficulty improving his skills.

1:11:32.1 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, well, you're old enough to know the Fosbury Flop. I mean, for all high jumpers did the straddle in jumping and made some great records, but many of them had difficulty converting their straddle to the Fosbury Flop to go over backwards head first. And that's what got you better performance. So anything, whether it's golf or any skill, if you've got to change somehow, you've got to be able to change the system, which is whether you're in production or whether it's a skill. If you're in control, that's your opportunity to impact the system to get better.

1:12:40.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and this was Dick Fosbury in 1968, Mexico City Olympics, where he basically went in and blew everybody away by going in and flipping over backwards when everybody else was straddling or scissors or something like that. And this is a great story.

1:12:57.0 William Scherkenbach: You can't do that.

[laughter]

1:12:58.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and it's a great story of something on the outside. An outsider came in and changed the system rather than an existing person within it. And that made me think about when you talked about Ford and having an outsider helping in the different departments. You know, what extent does that reflect the way that we learn? You know, can we learn internally, or do we need outside advice and influence to make the big changes?

1:13:29.7 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. I mean, we had a swim coach, Higgins, at the Naval Academy, and he was known for, again, following in Olympic swimming. And I'm probably going to get the strokes wrong, but there was no such thing as a butterfly stroke. And he used it in swimming the breaststroke, and supposedly the only criteria was recovery had to be underwater with two hands. But I'm screwing up the story, I'm sure, but Higgins rewrote, rewrote the book by doing something a little bit different or drastically different.

1:14:25.4 Andrew Stotz: I'd like to wrap up this fascinating discovery, or journey of discovery of you and your relationship also with Dr. Deming. Let's wrap it up by talking about kind of your final memories of the last days of Dr. Deming and how you kind of put that all in context for your own life. And having this man come in your life and bring you into your life, I'm curious, towards the end of his life, how did you process his passing as well as his contribution to your life?

1:15:08.1 William Scherkenbach: That's, that's difficult and personal. I, he was a great mentor, a great friend, a great teacher, a great person, and with, on a mission with a name and impacted me. I was very, very lucky to be able to, when I look back on it, to recognize, to sign up for his courses, and then the next thing was writing that letter to the editor and fostering that relationship. Very, very, very difficult. But, I mean, he outlived a bunch of folks that he was greatly influenced by, and the mission continues.

1:16:34.1 Andrew Stotz: And if Dr. Deming was looking down from heaven and he saw that you're kind of reentering the fray after, you know, your struggles as you've described with your wife and the loss of your wife, what would he say to you now? What would he say as your teacher over all those years?

1:16:56.3 William Scherkenbach: Do your best.

1:16:59.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, wonderful.

1:17:01.4 William Scherkenbach: He knows, but he knows I know what to do. So, you need to know what to do and then to do the best. But I was, I mean, he was very, he received, and I forget the year, but he was at Ford and he got a call from Cel that his wife was not doing well. And so we, I immediately canceled everything and got him to the airport and he got to spend that last night with his wife. And he was very, very appreciative. So I'm sure he was helping, helping me deal with my wife.

1:17:56.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute and myself personally, I want to thank you for this discussion and opening up you know, your journey with Dr. Deming. I feel like I understand Dr. Deming more, but I also understand you more. And I really appreciate that. And for the listeners out there, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And also let me give you, the listeners and viewers, the resources. First, we have Bill's book, which you can get online, The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity. We have Deming's Road to Continual Improvement, which Bill wrote. But I think even more importantly is go to his LinkedIn. He's on LinkedIn as William Scherkenbach and his tagline is helping individuals and organizations learn, have fun, and make a difference. So if you want to learn, have fun, and make a difference, send him a message. And I think you'll find that it's incredibly engaging. Are there any final words that you want to share with the listeners and the viewers?

1:19:08.9 William Scherkenbach: I appreciate your questions. In thinking about this interview, we barely scratched the surface. There are a ton of other stories, but we can save that for another time.

1:19:26.1 Andrew Stotz: Something tells me we're going to have some fun and continue to have fun in these discussions. So I really appreciate it and it's great to get to know you. Ladies and gentlemen.

1:19:36.7 William Scherkenbach: Thank you, Andrew.

1:19:37.7 Andrew Stotz: You're welcome. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is that "people are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Andrew and David discuss how managers can help people to see themselves as components in a system, working with those before and after them in the process of educating children - for the benefit of all.

This podcast series is inspired by chapter 6 in The New Economics, Andrew and David apply Dr. Deming's 14 points for "the role of a manager of people after transformation" to the world of education. (Note: this is not about Deming's 14 Points for Management.)

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is cooperation with proceeding stages in education. And ladies and gentlemen, we are going through a checklist or a list that Dr. Deming put in his The New Economics book on page 86 of the third edition, or page 125 of the second edition. And the title of this list is Role of a Manager of People.

0:00:45.4 AS: This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. The first point on the list, which we previously talked about was, number one, a manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. He explains the aims of the system, he teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims. And today we will be talking about number two. He helps his people to see themselves as components in a system to work in cooperation with preceeding stages and with following stages toward optimization of the efforts of all stages toward achievement of the aim. David, take it away.

0:01:26.7 David Langford: There you go. If you understand that, then the podcast is over. [laughter] So yeah, I think the profound nature of Deming's work was his ability to take these simple concepts and just state them. And for me, working in education, people, they start to get the philosophy and they start to understand Deming, et cetera, and they always wanna know where to start or what to do. Well, here you go. These are all steps of what to do, where to start. So the last podcast we were talking about the development of an aim. And so you... The first question you have to decide is, do I have an aim of the system? And is that being communicated? And we talked a lot about that going through that. So the second point actually feeds on that, and remember this whole section is the role of the manager of people, see, what are you doing with the people in the system?

0:02:25.7 DL: And so this whole point is about understanding a systems' perspective in any organization. But in education, it's really clear. And we've said several times that the product of education is the learning itself. It's not students. And I think people really get screwed up on that, when they start to think about that, "We're producing students." No, you're not. Yes, students are going through the process, but they're gaining a level of learning that's gonna, that's getting them closer and closer to the aim of the system, right? And so those things are measurable, and then you can begin to understand those. So what he is talking about here in step number two is... Often when I work with educators, no matter what level, university, K through 12, whatever it might be, I'll throw out the idea that, let's say you're a 10th grade math teacher.

0:03:32.8 DL: What's the one thing you could be doing this year that would significantly increase the performance of your students next year? And a lot of times people say, you know, better technology and they'll go through this whole list of all these kinds of things they could do. But that's what Deming is talking about here. You could keep right on doing the same curriculum, the same thing you've done for 15 years, but if you start working with preceding stages, where did these students learn math before they got to you? Right? And so if you're a 10th grade math teacher, one of the best things you could do is start working with the ninth grade math teachers. Like going over, what are they doing, how are they teaching it? What's happening? How are they going through stuff?

0:04:22.4 DL: And you're actually preventing your own problems. Later in The New Economics, Deming talks about that prevention is the key to quality. And that's what he is talking about here. If I am going upstream in the process, so to speak, and preventing my own problems, right? I could actually just keep doing the exact same thing I've always done. I'm gonna get better results because I'm now preventing problems that I used to have to work with all the time. And some people say, well, you know, our students are coming from outside of our organization and I don't have the chance to do that. Well, you sort of think of a class that you're teaching as a system in and of itself.

0:05:06.7 DL: So what I could do is the first week of school is not gonna be, you know, really getting to the subject at all, right? I'm gonna become my own preceding stage [laughter], I'm gonna make sure that all these students have the same base knowledge that I need them to have in order for the rest of my teaching, the rest of my curriculum to actually work really well. That might take a week, it might take two weeks, but it'd be worth it to you [chuckle] to go back and do that rather than just keep on doing the same thing and expecting a different result and then putting pressure on people to make, sort of make them think it's their fault that they're not achieving.

0:05:48.9 AS: One question I have just because I'm not familiar with education so much, more business, if I think about business and I think about the preceding stages. You've got a manager in that department and he's got his own motivations, or she got their motivations, they've got their KPIs, and they've got all these things that are preventing cooperation. But it must not be true in education, David, when people are so dedicated to helping young people, it must be that the ninth grade math teacher is absolutely ready and willing to cooperate with the 10th grade math teacher. Wouldn't that be?

0:06:25.4 DL: Oh, when I started working with schools I often would have teachers come up to me at breaks and stuff and say, you know, I taught with this guy across the hall for 11 years, and I can't tell you anything that he does over there, or she does over there. The silo mechanisms of, you know, close my door, do my thing and don't communicate was just rampant. And it's still largely that way. And especially in a lot of universities, just people working in silos, you know, the college of business has no idea what the College of Education is doing and vice versa and so on and so forth. And you begin to break down those barriers. Deming talks about that later too. But you break down those barriers between departments, you start to see everybody wins. Student are better trained. The whole system seems to work together.

0:07:24.6 DL: I remember when we first started having visitors come to our high school where we'd been working with Dr. Deming and trying to implement these things for several years, after about three or four days, I'd have people that were visiting would say, you know, everybody here seems to know what everybody else is doing. And I'd say, isn't that the way it is in your school? And they said, no, I have no idea what other people are doing. And so I had to really start to think about, well, what had we done? Well, one of the things we'd done was we kept reiterating this point, right? Work with preceding stages, understand what's going on.

0:08:08.3 DL: We actually formally set up time where you could actually get together as a department or get together and look at a whole curriculum throughout the entire system. Now, some districts have over the last 30, 40 years, you know, they'll have a K through 12 curriculum alignment, right? And that's getting towards this point so that we're all working in preceding stages. So I don't have fourth graders, fourth grade teachers spending time doing stuff that has already been done in second or third grade, right? And the kids are just going, you know, they might be really dutiful kids and they just don't say anything, but they're just bored out of their minds because they already did this, right?

0:08:54.7 AS: When you were speaking, it made me realize the importance of step number one, about identifying the aim and getting everybody on board with that aim and communicating that and helping people see their role in that aim. Otherwise, there's like no incentive for people, oh, why are we having another meeting to talk about this? You know, what's the point? Well, when the aim is clear, all of a sudden the intrinsic motivation just explodes.

0:09:19.0 DL: Yeah. I mean, my own children is a good example. Remember one of my kids came to me and said, you know, dad, this is the third year we've done an insect collection in science. So were they really good at collecting insects by the end of the three years? Well, yeah, but they could have had a much higher knowledge about insects or something else that was going on rather than just this mundane project of going out and collecting insects and categorizing them.

0:09:51.4 AS: One of the questions I have, there's two points to this that I was thinking about. One is kind of the academic freedom of a teacher to be able to, you know, particularly in a university, they want to feel like I can do and say what I want. The second one is that they're so damn busy trying to prepare their lectures that it's hard. David, cooperation is difficult to bring a system to optimization. You realize like one of the reasons why people don't do it is it's just hard. It's way more coordination. Tell me your thoughts on that.

0:10:24.2 DL: You just described why Deming calls it Profound Knowledge, so the places that it is happening, right? Or making it, making sure that it's important. Setting aside time, talking about specifically how we can do that. You get a new professor in, you got economics 101 and Economics 102, right? So are they aligned? And the benefit in the end is for the students, right? Because they're not going through the very same thing that they just went through in economics 101, right? And the students will recognize things like, wow, these people are actually really working together. They really understand what's going on.

0:11:11.2 DL: And if I'm teaching economics 201 and I can constantly refer back to now when you took 101, I know that you went through this exercise and you went through this and you had this kind of experience, and this is how we're gonna build on that in 201 and... Right? So that's what Deming is talking is about here, is that if I carve out that time to work with preceding stages, the benefit is for me and my students and my classes and, in that, everybody wins, right? Because as a professor, I can go on to a higher level knowledge with the assurance that these students had this level of knowledge and mastered it before they got to my class. And that's the whole idea basically about why we've set up classes like 101, 201, 301, right? That's supposed to be the philosophy, really understanding that.

0:12:12.6 DL: And I'd say most departments or school districts, they loosely sort of do that. But from experience, if you consciously put in the effort to align curriculums, communicate with the preceding stages you get a huge benefit out of that that's just unbelievable. And Deming goes on to say, you know, and the following stages, right? So let's say we're using this example of Economics 101 and 201 or whatever you might be, right? And then some of those students are gonna go on to 301. Well, I would wanna know that my students were much more prepared going to the next stage. So how am I gonna do that? Well, I'm gonna start talking to the teacher in the next stage and saying, hey, how are my students doing? And were they prepared to come into your class or not prepared or, you know, what's happening?

0:13:18.7 AS: I was thinking about how one of the... I had a discussion with someone this past week, and it's a guy my age, you know, young and healthy and happy. [laughter] And getting close to 60. And he said, young people these days, you know, blah, blah, blah and all that. And I said to him, I said, you know, I think basically the young people these days realize they've kind of been let down by us and we've done all kinds of, you know, whether it's safety or whether it's education or whether it's, you know, whatever. There's so many things where I think that they just don't trust it. And then we go to online learning and all of a sudden all of these adults are giving us these super boring presentations. And it's like, we are not delivering to young people.

0:14:10.4 AS: And then, oh, add on 32 trillion in debt. Oh, by the way, you gotta pay that also. And the streets are, you know, cities are on fire and all of that. And then you just think, yeah. Part of what's happening is that when we incentivize teachers to optimize their classroom, that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna do their KPIs and they're gonna focus on that, and they're not gonna be thinking about how are these kids going through this process and getting to a result that we want? And yeah, you just made me think about that, but I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?

0:14:45.6 DL: Well, Deming talks about in the last sentence, that work with preceding and following stages for the optimization and efforts of all stages towards achievement of the aim. So what are you trying to accomplish with the achievement of this aim? I'm working with a college of business now, and through the pandemic, almost all the classes went online and now students are graduating and going to work and stuff. And what are employers saying? These people aren't trained as well.

0:15:20.4 AS: The communication skills.

0:15:22.5 DL: Yeah. The university is struggling because they know this online thing doesn't work as well, but they're struggling with, how do we change this? Because the following stages are telling you the learning that these people are coming out with is not the same as it used to be. We used to be able to depend on the quality of the students coming through the system. And now we can't depend on them. Well, that's dangerous because that could lead employers to say, okay, we're no longer going to hire people from this university. We're gonna go to some other university and look for places. So I always think about, you know, Deming is talking about the system, but how big of a system are we talking about, right? Could be talking about a whole university as a system, and the more I can get the entire university to talk to each other, work together, align curriculums, right? Well, who wins in the end? Well, students going out into the world, right?

0:16:24.8 DL: And they get to employers and employers start to realize, wow, I never knew that I needed somebody with this kind of knowledge. And so, who's first on your list to hire next year? I want more of these. Very simple example, the first couple of years that I was leading classes and teaching my high school students about this, well, in Alaska, the popular summer job is what they call the slime line. So working in fish plants, salmon processing plants on the line where fish comes through and you have to process them and gut them and take their heads off and do all this kind of stuff. So we didn't tell students about anything, but after about two years, I got some phone calls from these canneries, managers in these canneries and they said, hey, do you have any more of these students? And so I called them back up to talk to them about what was happening.

0:17:31.5 DL: And they said, well, we found out that every place there were students from your high school that were on the slime line, productivity improved. And sure enough, they started talking to these kids and they said, well, we took this to heart. And one kid said, all I did was I just said to the guy next to me, when you pass that fish to me, it'd be really helpful if you just turned it like this. And then all I have to do is do this. And then he said to the guy next to him, he said, what do you want me to do? What would be most helpful for you? And that guy says, well, that girl says, oh, well turn it like this or do this, and then this would happen.

0:18:14.2 DL: Just that, that's a very simple example. But employers loved it, [laughter] because productivity started to go up. One student said, yeah, it actually got to be more fun because I put a chart up behind me and how many fish we were processing per hour. And it sort of became a game to see if we could increase not only the quality of what we were doing, but the number of fish that we were processing per hour. Well, you might say, well, you know, yeah. What's the big deal about that? Well, guess what? Those canneries wanna hire those people again next summer. [laughter], you got a guaranteed job if you wanna come back.

0:18:50.6 AS: It's interesting because when you actually ask that question, or when you ask someone, hey, would you mind when when you send it over to me, could you put it in this way? People would be like, I never even knew that you needed it that way.

0:19:06.2 DL: Yeah. Or you'd find out that people have been ticked off at you for some cases years because you just keep on doing the same darn thing, but nothing ever changes because that person never doesn't ever say anything to you, and you never asked. You have to be proactive in all this too, going to the following stages and saying, hey, what could I be doing differently that would be significantly helpful for you?

0:19:36.6 AS: Yeah. Also, you reminded me of a story, when I was head of research in a research team here in Thailand, I had about five analysts. And our objective is to write high quality, big reports. I hired the best analysts. They know exactly what they need to do. They love doing it. And what I did is I put up on the wall a bar, a stacked bar chart showing each person's output each week. And what I did is I just put it up on the wall. I didn't explain it. I didn't, you know, I just looked at it occasionally, I went back to my office and and I didn't, I mean, I never really explained or said anything. And then one time one of the younger analysts came to me and she said, I think I've just figured you out. And I was like, what do you mean? And she said, I had lunch with a counterpart, like at another, a competitor, and she covers the same sector.

0:20:30.2 AS: And she asked me, how many reports did you do last month? And I said, you know, meaning my employee said, I did, I don't know, 10. And she's like, oh my God, how did you do 10? And she said, how many did you do? And she said, well, I did three, and there's similar style reports. And she's like, well, what's Andrew's target for you? And that's when she looked at me and she said, I realize you never set a target. You just put that information up on the wall. And it got all of us looking at it and thinking about it. And then I realized that I was producing 10 reports compared to my competitor was producing three. And that just made me think of that when you were talking about putting that up on the wall.

0:21:15.4 DL: The genius of Deming, Dr. Deming is when he went into manufacturing plants. And here you have a manufacturing plant where this person is stuck doing the same thing all day long. Right? Well, from early studies, from Hawthorne studies back in the 1920s and thirties, what did we try to do? Well, we gotta motivate these people, right? So, let's turn up the heat. Let's turn down the heat, let's play music for them. Let's do this, let's try. And what they found out is everything that they did actually, productivity worked, but they couldn't figure out what was it for a while.

0:21:52.5 DL: But, in the end, what was really happening is employees were perceiving that that management cared. And so they were trying to do stuff to make things better, but the genius of Deming was he just said, put people to work improving their own process and taught them how to do that, how to do a PDSA, and how to look at improving their own process. And it actually work started to be enjoyable. And that's what we're trying to do. And yes, you gotta do stuff. I've had teachers, especially math teachers tell me, well, not everything can be fun. Sometimes math is just hard. Well, maybe in your class, but I'm sure there are places that people make...

0:22:45.1 AS: How about if you just smile?

0:22:45.5 DL: Yeah. Make math really fun. And kids look forward to coming every day and being a part of it and learning the next level of what they're doing. And change the situation, you get a different result, rather than what we've always been taught to do is we leave the situation alone, but then we manage the behavior, it produces either good or bad. You know, we reward the good and try to get rid of the bad, which is a classic example of what Deming said don't do.

0:23:15.3 AS: So, let me wrap it up by asking a question and then I'll review kind of what we talked about. Based upon this discussion, if I was taking over at let's say a high school or something like that, and I thought about this specific lesson of what we're talking about today, I made the aim clear, everybody knows, and now I'm thinking about it. Would it make sense to say, alright, what I really want is I want each teacher to know the one proceeding stage and the one... What would you call that? The stage after.

0:23:51.1 DL: Following stages.

0:23:52.4 AS: The following stage and the previous stage. And therefore, what I just wanna do is start a discussion where they have to have kind of like a regular meeting or some way to get them together to talk and just focus on one step behind and in front. And if you did that, it's like the whole place would be on fire with conversation. Would that be a good place to start with this?

0:24:16.3 DL: Yeah, absolutely. You start with the largest system over which you have influence. And it depends on what your job is. If you're just hired as a teacher in a system and you realize these people don't talk to each other, they don't work together, well, you don't have to go get permission from anybody to talk to preceding stages. You just go into that person's room at the end of the day and say, hey, you got a few minutes I wanted to chat with you about something, you know.

0:24:44.0 AS: Make a new friend.

0:24:46.3 DL: Or yeah. And or following stages, you go to them, I guarantee you, you go to them and you say, what could I be doing that would significantly help you next year?

0:24:54.7 AS: Well, sit down, let's talk.

0:24:57.7 DL: Oh my gosh. Yeah. They would love you to death, right? And so it's a great way that you actually start to gain power of changing things in the system because all of a sudden then your department actually seems to get along and function well together and students are doing well. And then I guarantee you somebody from another department is gonna say, what are you guys doing over there? What's happening? Well, why do you ask? Because students in my class are saying, why can't we do what's happening over there? See? And so that's how you actually start to expand influence. And pretty soon you're operating on a bigger and bigger system, even if that wasn't your original role, but Deming said the source of power is knowledge. So you become very powerful because you know how to improve processes and systems.

0:25:51.5 AS: It reminds me of a... When I was writing Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 points. I had a friend of mine help me with the editing, and he would come over sometimes and he was... He never heard anything about Deming and he didn't know much about even business that much. He just seen all kinds of negative things happen [laughter] in the business world. But what he said is, he said, you know, I've been reading what you're writing and understanding this, and I think Dr. Deming is a humanist. He really cares about the human potential. And I was just like, that's it, it's not about this, charts and the graphs, and it's not, it's about how do we tap into the human potential.

0:26:34.0 DL: Yeah. Well, the average workers in corporations loved Deming mostly because he just berated management, totally, that you were the problem. You know, let these people do their job and get out of their way and you'll be fine. Instead of you trying to manipulate and incentivize and manage and punish and all the things that you think your job is.

0:27:00.2 AS: Let your people free. So let's wrap up. We've been talking about the list that Dr. Deming gave us in the third edition on page 86, the second edition on page 125, and it's called Role of a Manager of People. And Dr. Deming said, this is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. The first part we talked about, he talked about understanding a system and making sure that people understand the aim, but now this discussion has been about number two, he helps his people to see themselves as components in the system to work in cooperation with proceeding stages and with following stages towards optimization of the efforts of all stages toward achievement of the aim. And what we talked about is that the product of education is the process of learning and the idea of working with teachers in maybe prior grades, prior processes. And maybe a lot of what we've really talked about is communication and alignment. Is there anything else you'd add to that?

0:28:07.9 DL: No, that pretty much sums it up. I would, I will say that if you're listening to these podcasts and you're in education and you're trying to figure out where to start or what to do, we're explaining to you what to do. And so each one of these podcasts, if you just went back and did one thing we're talking about, and by the time we finish going through all these, you'll have a massive transformation of your classroom, your system, whatever it might be going on within that. But here's a great place to start right here.

0:28:36.5 AS: Wonderful. David, on behalf of everybody at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work.

Andrew talks to Justin Marcharia, Round Table Training Africa's Managing Director, about his collaboration with The Deming Institute. His goal is to help new and small businesses in East Africa use the Deming philosophy to grow in sustainable ways.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: Hello. My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Justin Macharia. Justin, are you ready to share your Deming journey?

0:00:17.2 Justin Macharia: Oh, yeah, I'm ready.

0:00:19.5 AS: I'm excited to learn... I mean there are so many things that I would like to ask you about your Deming journey and where your Deming journey is and all of that. But let me introduce you to the audience. Justin Macharia is the managing director of Round Table Training Africa Limited. Justin has been working with the Deming Institute over the past couple of years to enable DemingNEXT access into a number of East African countries through his organization. It's gonna be beneficial I think for all of our listeners to learn about this partnership and the impact that we think the Deming Institute can have in East Africa. And also, it's a great opportunity for you, Justin, to share why you think that Deming is important part of development in your part of the world and why you see the opportunity as kind of first time opportunity to enable businesses to learn and apply the Deming method. So maybe you can just talk a little bit about what you're doing first, and then we'll get into your Deming journey.

0:01:29.9 JM: Thank you Andrew. Yeah, so Deming Institute in Africa, basically East Africa, that's Nairobi, Kenya started off in the year 2020. And we've walked the journey with Kevin and Tim. And basically what we've... We've found that there was an opportunity to instill best practices in manufacturing, hospitality, and any other organizations that are moving from either raw production or the value chain addition. So what inspired us into getting into and partnering with Deming was basically the... We have a lots of trainings, consultants in our area, but however we found that they were lacking in terms of the depth and the philosophy and the models and tools. So what happens is, basically is we reached out to the Deming Institute and we did a presentation and asked if we could partner with them. And of course we had to give a little bit of background about ourselves.

0:02:34.9 JM: And what is basically happening in East Africa right now is... 'cause East Africa is be in in agribusiness, but agribusiness is on only probably small scale to large scale and mostly of the cash crops for export. But more and more now people are getting into value addition and processing. And that comes with a lot of systems, processes and management skills that are required for that. Apart from that, there's a lot of manufacturing going on and it's probably sometimes ad hoc and learning on the job which can... It can be very expensive and a little mistakes and system and processes or a lack of there of. So that has actually created the need and the appreciation and like probably Andrew had mentioned that, just a little bit earlier, is that everybody knows Deming, anybody who is in a management course, 'cause they always talk about Deming at some point during the introduction as the gurus of quality management. So the take up has been gradual and slow, but we're getting somewhere with it right now.

0:03:42.3 AS: And maybe for the listeners out there I'll explain about, what the Deming Institute is doing with DemingNEXT and trying to get, obviously all the video material that's available about Dr. Deming's teaching, but also providing all the resources necessary for training. So for those that are listening that think, God, I really wanna get more training into my company related to Deming. Well, the Deming Institute has made so much of that available through DemingNEXT. So I think that's an important message to everybody out there, is that it is a resource not only for your own personal development, but how you can bring some of that training into your company or any company that you're interacting with. Maybe you just tell us briefly about what your expectation is or what you expect to be doing with that material and with your own material and how are you doing that training. And maybe just tell us a little bit about that.

0:04:39.9 JM: Well, thanks Andrew. So what the DemingNEXT actually offers a lot of resources like you mentioned. There are PDFs, there are case studies. Because as much as we train a local organization, it's always good to give them a case study of basically where it has worked before, the successes because the industry and the verticals, probably is it the service industry, is it the telecommunication, we find 'cause somebody believes in the credibility of a process by basically seeing it has worked before with somebody else. And this what... The challenges they went through. So it shortens the learning curve because you don't have to go through the mistakes they did. They share with their case studies. And this improves like what Deming talks a lot about is the continuous improvement.

0:05:30.0 JM: Continuous improvement. So you progressively improve as you go on, get the feedback from the customers, feedback from the system itself. And this has really helped in terms of... The resources that are online on DemingNEXT has really helped in fortifying what the facilitators are actually telling and teaching the participants.

0:05:52.7 AS: Fantastic. So for all the listeners and viewers out there, make sure that you go to DemingNEXT to understand what resources are available and if you are in East Africa what's the website, your website that they could go to to learn more about what you guys are doing?

0:06:09.8 JM: Well, yeah, thanks. Our website is www.roundtabletraining.co.ke. There you'll find a wide array of programs and also the links to the Deming resources as well.

0:06:24.5 AS: Fantastic. So tell us about... You know, now it is time for some of the fun stuff where we talk about your Deming journey. And as you and I talked about before we turned on the mic, the recorder, you're early in your Deming journey. You've started recently and you're learning. And I know there's plenty of listeners that are early in their Deming journey. And I know there's some old timers also that are listening that are like, okay, so what's it like? So maybe you can tell us about the story about how you first came to understand and learn about Dr. Deming's teachings. And what was it that hooked you that made you think, I want to bring this training to other people?

0:07:02.6 JM: Thank you. Yeah, so my journey basically, my career has been spanning over 20 years, actually about 23 years. But actually within my career I have interacted with so many training institutions from ICT to management and leadership. However, there's always something lacking in them. There's always something I was feeling we're not giving them the depth and the case studies and proven models, things that have worked. So that's basically around 2020. Basically around the COVID time.

0:08:25.7 JM: I went actually searching and interacted with... I saw Deming. I saw... There is a Deming Institute in the US and we decided, okay, let's approach them because we know about Deming and Dr. Deming's philosophies. It's been trained and taught. But what really caught me and I remember and many people remember is the PDSA cycle, the PDSA that one... Everybody knows about that cycle. So when we reached out and they actually said, all right, we can give it a try. And hence we started off the journey in East Africa like that. So the PDSA and appreciation of systems and all that, those are the ones that basically caught us on teaching.

0:08:27.9 AS: And maybe we can talk a little bit about what's happening in Africa for I know a lot of listeners they may not really know all the stuff that's going on in your part of the world in East Africa. And I know Kenya is going through a lot of growth these days. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about what's going on there in particular in relation to business and development. You mentioned the idea of being a resources exporter and trying to add more value to that. Yeah, maybe walk us through a little bit about what's happening in the economy of Kenya.

0:09:01.1 JM: So Kenya is very strategically positioned in Africa. It's basically the gateway of the East and Central Africa region which covers the DRC, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan. So the economy is basically very robust especially in the... Recently the financial market, the mobile banking. Maybe some of you have heard of the mobile banking actually was actually birthed in Kenya with something called M-Pesa. So the service industry apart from the Agro and the traditional products that have been traditionally produced.

0:09:44.7 JM: There is hospitality, tourism. I know you've heard of the big five safaris. So tourism is really huge in East Africa. Not only Kenya, but Uganda, Tanzania as well. So with that is the traditional ways of commerce and the GDP relies heavily on that. However, the service and the technology has been growing recently. And thanks to the internet there is are a lot of resources as well. People are either going to school or they are self-teaching themselves. So a lot to offer from this point of view in terms of tourism, Agro-business, service, telecommunication and all that. So it's a great place to be.

0:10:32.8 AS: I'm curious, I've lived in Asia almost the majority of my life, let's say the last 30 years. And as I look back at America, I see a reason, one of the reasons why Deming has a hard time is that people are so individually focused. Like individual, they want individual compensation. They want individual rewards. They do not wanna be part of a system so much and all of that. And you can see that compares to let's say Japan where they really value being part of that system and society. They do not want the individual rewards the way that it's done. And you see every country is different. And I'm just curious, what are the motivations that drive, what are the things that drive people there that the way people think about business and doing business so that we can then understand what part of Deming is most appealing?

0:11:28.0 JM: Oh yeah, so yeah, actually it's a... I can say probably East Africa and Kenya has a lot to borrow from Japan 'cause people do get a lot of value by coming together and they value that. So there are these things we call Chamas, is like coming together maybe 10 people pulling resources and getting to a certain business investment. So it's really big all the way from the ground up we call it table banking. It could be from, let's say ladies coming together. So it's a big thing. So but what normally lacks in moving it... The transition to growth is what is normally the difficult part. They could get to point... From point A to point B but managing the growth, the change by instilling processes, systems that will enable them to grow and scale up now becomes a challenge.

0:12:28.0 JM: Hence that's why DemingNEXT and also the membership. The membership which we are also... Introduced to the market which we have individual membership for DemingNEXT and the corporate membership is what we actually been proposing to even these what I call the Chamas basically pull in and learn from the rest of the world how processes and they're very simple processes actually, DemingNEXT, actually has very simple way of breaking things up to people. So that kind of people come together in terms of business and investment but the growth trajectory is what that lacks and that's why DemingNEXT has come with this philosophies to push guys and help people move to the next level.

0:13:11.3 AS: Yeah moving to the next level is interesting 'cause I know when I moved to Thailand Justin I went out I taught a Just-In-Time inventory management class in 1992 and at that time the Japanese had really come to Thailand and producing cars. So I took my students out to a Toyota factory and I remember that the guy, the Japanese guy said I have to apologize that most of our managers are Japanese. In the beginning we just have a lot of training that we've been doing and over years you know it will grow where we'll have more of the Thai people in management. And then what you see now is when you visit Toyota and you realize wow that they've really done a huge amount of training. And many of the Thai staff that started at a low level have moved up into management and you know carrying on.

0:14:02.8 AS: So I can imagine that part of what you're talking about is that transition to just developing the core skills and then slowly developing into management and how to manage that business or your own businesses better and better. I guess that's kind of the transition that you're talking about. Would that be right?

0:14:21.2 JM: Oh yes yes. Because what is normally said managers normally they're not appointed. They grow into the position. So as they grow into the position there are some skills that we may lack in terms of managing the teams. And I like what Dr. Deming's philosophy of the psychology the soft skills part of it and relying on the process and not the big stick approach. So yeah it really helps especially new managers to fit into the role and get the rest to follow and emulate the good practices.

0:14:56.6 AS: Tell us something about let's say the characteristics of people there. And I'll give you an example. In Thailand, obviously in America if you raise your voice and you shout and you yell and say I want this and that, it... People, nobody likes that but they don't mind that, it's not a big deal. But in Thailand you never raise your voice and you just would never do that. Or else it would be people just wouldn't buy into that. And maybe tell us one characteristic that you see in Kenya that is part of the characteristic of the workforce or the way people feel socially like something that maybe an American as an example may come and think that they're bringing their culture but in fact they're not very sensitive to let's say some feeling or way that people do their... They live their lives and they think about things. Maybe you can give us some example.

0:15:51.8 JM: Alright yeah. So basically like sometimes it is very common with Kenya and of course it's spread a little bit across the region as well is appreciation the soft skills. It's continuous, celebrating small successes as well. So the populace, the employees would like to feel appreciated in the workplace. Otherwise if it's like over reliant on the processing and the system like okay it was part of your job you don't need a pat on your back. That kind a thing sometimes like oh a little pat would've helped. So it gives a smile to people. So it is the same with thank you did a good job. Even though it was part of the job. It's something that the populace really appreciate. So sometimes when you get maybe some probably managers from a different place and it is none of that it creates the silos and people pull out a little bit and it becomes an eight to five job. They're not enjoying it. It's like okay I'm just doing my job. But that's what I can actually think about right now.

0:17:00.5 AS: Yeah it's a great point and it obviously people around the world want intrinsic, they wanna feel that they're contributing to the value. And I think different societies have different need for that. I would say for Thais, they don't have as strong of a need for that but everybody likes to know when I'm contributing to the success of the organization and the role that I'm playing. So that's definitely and I'm guessing that people you know a lot of times when you look at Thailand's got an agricultural history, America has an agricultural history but it didn't last for very long because it turned into kind of in commercial and industrial agriculture. But when you look at countries that just have such a foundation in agriculture you have to work together or else in harvesting in planting villages work together in Thailand. Is that part of the history and part of the culture there? Or what's it like as far as teamwork versus individual work?

0:18:00.8 AS: Teamwork has actually been part of the culture. Because let's talk about the "Good old days" is when you're going to the farm you would go as a team. If you are ploughing, you'll plough as a team, harvesting you'll harvest as a team. So that's the same thing that has come down the generations. And even at work even though you are in the service sector you'll decide okay let's get together and let's do this. Let's get together and do this investment or let's do this team building. So it has carried on the generations and the only time maybe individualism comes and it's silos and like corporate politics, some groupings form within the organization. But that is... A good manager will know how to break the silos and to get people communicating again. So when Deming as well it gives... Has multiple courses that you can basically custom-make to break the silos which is a very popular one especially engagement, emotional intelligence and all that.

0:19:05.1 AS: Yeah. And in fact, what you learn is that the natural state of things is people don't want silos, they don't wanna be put up against each other like that.

0:19:14.8 JM: True, True.

0:19:16.5 AS: And so by breaking that... I'll tell you a funny story, when I was first working in an investment bank in Thailand, it was 1994 maybe at that time, and the Human Resource sent around a memo or a survey and they asked us to just tick what we thought and... The question was, "Would you like to have a company uniform that you would wear to work?"

0:19:41.8 AS: Now, as an American, I was like, "What? Why would I want that?" I'm an individual, I got my clothes, I don't need that. And so I just thought, nobody would answer yes to that, and then the next day then Human Resources said, "Well, it was unanimous, everybody wants a uniform, and we're gonna be working on getting those uniforms for everyone." And I was like, "Okay." I really didn't understand that about Thai people versus American people, and it just is a funny story about the idea that people wanna belong, and it's interesting that it's... In America, it really is like that individual and independent, which has it's value for sure. But that feeling of belonging, I think, is what I really like about the Deming content and what... The message of Dr. Deming. And it makes me think about... One of the questions that I like to ask is why Deming? Why now? And I'm curious, what would you answer to that, 'cause some people would say, "Oh, it's the old stuff and it's been around for a while, and there's new philosophies and new books and all that." but why would you say Justin, Why Deming? Why now?

0:20:56.1 JM: Yeah, Why Deming? Why now? Is really simple because we are in a transformational transitionary period for East Africans, and a lot of things have probably been done a little bit ad hoc, you're learning on the job, which is, we all know is costly, it's costly to learn on the job. So Deming philosophy brings forth a lot of tools and methodologies that you can basically move to the next level using international best practices. So basically what we know is a lot of tools of Deming also have been adopted in different ways, there are probably some software, have actually been designed and the background is basically the Deming philosophy, you know the PBC cycle, is it variations, understanding variations, all those things that help you to move to the next level. The PDA cycle again that again is known with the Toyota, everybody knows about Toyota and Japan after the World War II and how Deming, Dr. Deming really contributed to that. So it is done, proved, luckily also Deming Institute has also modernized the PDA cycle, there is the modern one now that it is now... It is in cognizant to the current challenges that we have today. So Deming... Right now it's in the right place, everybody should go back to the roots, those who deviated from the roots are finding themselves in unknown territory, they need to come back to the roots and we move forward.

0:22:31.3 AS: Fantastic, and I know for the listeners out there, whether you're in East Africa or wherever you are in the world, one of the things that I always see nowadays, it's like everybody thinks that KPIs and particular individual key performance indicators are the way to manage people, and I think one of the things that I really enjoy about the Deming material and the Deming method is that it's miles beyond just tracking someone's behavior, it goes much deeper than that, and it's about the psychology and bringing out the intrinsic motivation of people and getting them involved and when you do that, ultimately you unleash a power of the people that's fantastic. Maybe as we wrap up, one of the things I'd love for you to do is just share maybe one of your experiences in your training over the years that you... A story or something that you have felt like is a proud moment for you.

0:23:31.2 JM: Alright. There could be a couple I'm trying to see which one could it be but I can... Let's see. There's a time we actually had some group in-house trainings 'cause we offer open trainings, so that we get people from different organizations, but this particular one where we got into an in-house training, and so the facilitator basically got... Was sent to the organization and it was basically, the soft skills, so it was a three-day program, and what came out of it was not... Basically was not even the training, that was... Had been positioned to be trained the moment, the psychology of pains, and the breaking of the silos that came up, it became like a team building and that team building now changed the whole perspective of the training and in fact we had to change the course trajectory mid-way so that now, people can now... Because what we realized was that there were just silos, all over the place, and the training itself would not have earned any... Gotten any dividends, if it went on like that. So it was changed and they actually called us some time later to come and give them their training that had been planned, so that is why I remember that we had to change the course in between because the silos were just crazy inside there, so that one was memorable.

0:25:00.5 AS: It's interesting that you referred to silos many times in this discussion, it's clearly an issue that Deming can help solve, which is...

0:25:08.1 JM: Yes.

0:25:09.8 AS: It's happening all around the world, but it's great to think that you've got a solution, and for the listeners out there, again, if you're in East Africa, reach out and figure out how you can get some of this great stuff and this great training to your business. Well, Justin, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show. And let me ask you, do you have any parting words for the audience?

0:25:36.9 JM: Alright. I'd like to... If you're in East Africa, you can go to our website at roundtabletraining.co.ke enroll into any program or contact the number that you'll find there, and we can come and have a visit and talk to you more about what and how Deming can transform your organization.

0:26:00.1 AS:  Fantastic, and that concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community and how... We learn how Deming is making a footprint in East Africa. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming: People are entitled to joy in work.

Most people come into education familiar with classroom management and curriculum, but the concept of Profound Knowledge changes the way you view the entire field and your part in it. In the second episode of the Deming in Schools Case Study, Andrew and John talk about applying the System of Profound Knowledge to education. 

0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is applying Deming's system of profound knowledge in education. John, take it away.

0:00:26.8 John Dues: Andrew, it's great to be back. And excited to talk about this. One of the things I was talking about after... Thinking about after our last conversation was a moment I had where I realized as I worked with some senior leaders here is we have these two buckets of knowledge, one bucket I would call subject matter knowledge, and we talked about this a little bit last time, by subject matter, I don't mean knowing, reading or social studies or writing, but I mean the things that you need to know in your field, so for us it's classroom management, how to deliver a lesson, how to design a curriculum, those types of things, and that's always sort of been a part of my work and gained proficiency in that bucket over time, but what I realized in studying Deming is there's this whole other bucket or type of knowledge, what Deming called Profound Knowledge and that was missing across most of my career, and it was a revelation to understand that, "Hey, we need both of these things together to have any chance at improving our schools."

0:01:35.4 AS: It's interesting because the whole focus in most of education is to become a subject matter expert, and that's what's rewarded, that's what we're doing. And this whole way of, how do we see the world? Is such a unique thing. Maybe you can just go through a little bit on the system of profound knowledge as when you first came to it, and what does it mean to you?

0:02:04.4 JD: Yeah, I've been studying it for a handful of years now. Increasingly, it became this sort of foundational philosophy, and it really changed how I view the world, honestly, it wasn't only sort of in my work, although that's sort of where I started thinking most about Deming's ideas. It changed also sort of how I thought about my personal life, family, my own kids in school and their experience in school, so I had a profound impact on just about everything I was doing in my life, that's pretty foundational to discover a philosophy like this...

0:02:51.3 AS: Yeah, that's... I remember when I first understand... For me, it was variation and randomness that really kind of hit me because I was also working in the stock market, and I could see that there was a lot of randomness in the movement of stock prices, and then it was like all of a sudden, what I learned from the randomness aspect and the variation aspect was just like, it's like there's carpeting that we're walking on that nobody even realizes it's underlying everything, and it is this randomness, and we are trained to reject randomness because we're rugged individualists who are setting our own path and it's up to us to make a difference. And that type of thinking basically has to reject the role of randomness, so I know what you're saying about... That started to change the way I viewed the world. Continue on.

0:03:54.2 JD: I think building off what you're saying, there's a variation component to that, and that was sort of an entry point for me too as I read Donald Wheeler's Understanding Variation, which is sort of completely changed how I looked at numbers and data in our work here in schools, but I also think of what I'm hearing in what you're saying is complex systems, and so I think there was sort of an appreciation for systems thinking prior to Deming, but not in the same way, but I think for a lot of folks it's if we do A to B then C is gonna happen. And that's just not how things sort of unfolded in a complex system, be it schools or a company or a society or whatever you may be looking at, if you do A, then that may impact B, C, D, E, F, G in a certain way, and the outcome is gonna be impacted by all of those things, all of those changes, and I think that's sort of... You can start to see that when you start to understand variation, and then that other component, or first component of Deming's Profound Knowledge is Appreciation for a System.

0:05:07.4 JD: And I think that's sort of what he's getting at, that it's really hard to find causal links between things and if we're gonna search for those, then we need to appreciate our organizations as a system, how all of the departments or all of the grade levels in the case of a school are working together or not, and how something you do in one part of that system can impact positively or negatively, other parts of the system, even if what you did in the part of the system was a positive for that part of the system, they can actually destroy the system, and so all of these things were revelations or at least confirmations of things that maybe were in the back of my mind, before I had this understanding in writing from studying Deming's philosophy.

0:06:00.7 AS: And for the listeners or the viewers who aren't familiar with the System of Profound Knowledge, maybe you can just review the four points of it or the four parts, a little bit more.

0:06:12.2 JD: Yeah, System of Profound Knowledge. So four components, Appreciation for a System, Knowledge about Variation, Theory of knowledge and Psychology, and he called them a System of Profound Knowledge because the four components work together, that's the system part. And Profound Knowledge, what I learned over time, is that, what he meant by that is just sort of the deep understanding that comes through viewing your organization through the lens of Profound Knowledge, so when you bring those four things together, you get a different view of your organization, than without Profound Knowledge. And without Profound Knowledge, you are often misled, you often don't know when to react or not to react to something that's going on in your organization or system, with Profound Knowledge you now have a management philosophy by which to interpret that data that comes streaming at you, no matter what industry you're in, and gives you a way to map out how to react or again, not to react to that data.

0:07:18.8 AS: It makes me think there's a saying in Thai language about a frog under a coconut, and when you lift up the coconut, the frog kind of wants the coconut back on because that's their world. And I think about when you really come across the System of Profound Knowledge and you understand it, it's like that coconut comes off and you realize, Oh my God, I am part of a much bigger system, and all of a sudden things just open up and what was your experience when you first kind of started really realizing how this all works together.

0:08:00.3 JD: Well, maybe unlike the frog, I didn't wanna unsee it or I didn't want to be recovered, however, there certainly was... Well one, it took time for me to sort of understand what exactly Dr. Deming was saying, and I'm still trying to understand that fully, but the hardest thing was probably talking to people, really smart people, about Profound Knowledge and maybe them not sort of seeing the importance of it or the same level of importance that I thought that they should see or where we'll talk about it, it would be well-received, but then people would turn around and sort of revert back to the old way of thinking. And for me, it was just realizing that this just takes repeated practice, because it is really a completely new way of thinking.

0:09:00.9 JD: It's a completely new way to look at data or your systems, it's a completely new way to think about how do you bring new ideas to your organization, how do you test those ideas, it's really getting away from simple things like setting a goal without a method, it's appreciating the psychology of introducing changes to your organization. I found people are generally very open to new things, what they're not open to is being sort of yanked about constantly when we try this thing and that thing, and education has the same sort of problem in this area that other sectors like healthcare do, where the frontline people, teachers in our case, nurses in the case of healthcare where they're often being pulled this way and that with new initiatives to the point they get this initiative fatigue will wear people out and burn people out and then they leave because each leader comes in with their own pet idea and it's not grounded in this sort of solid philosophical foundation.

0:10:13.3 AS: One of the things that's interesting about the system of profound knowledge is that it can be a bit overwhelming for someone who's first coming upon it because it's like, Oh my God, there's a much bigger aim, and one of the reasons why we don't think in a systems way and why we do think silos is because it's easier, and so for some people it can feel like, Oh God, this is just overwhelming, and I'm just curious what your perspectives are on that, either for yourself or the people that you're working with there, and how do we make sure that you don't get overwhelmed by it?

0:10:57.6 JD: Yeah, it's a challenge because I originally came to the Deming Institute website and the profound knowledge page and went away because it didn't make sense to me initially, and it was two years later when I came back, and not that it was sort of some divine revelation, but I slowly, over time, it started to sink in, something caught my attention that this was worthy of study. So one thing I read, Dr. Deming said, you don't need to be eminent in all four areas or even any one of the four areas, but it does require serious study, so you're not gonna understand it in a day or a week or a month. I would also say anybody that gets serious about studying this philosophy, I would highly recommend reaching out to somebody that is further along in their understanding, and that's sort of a turning point, I think I mentioned in the last episode. Reaching out to Kelly Allen, who turned me on to David Langford that accelerated my learning, 'cause I could ask specific questions, and David could give me specific applications of Deming's ideas in schools, and that certainly helped to clarify a lot of things for me.

0:12:08.3 JD: So that's something I would highly recommend, but I would read widely, watch the videos, you can go to a four-day or sorry, two and half day seminar that the Institute does, and then reaching out to someone that is further along is something I'd highly recommend.

0:12:27.1 AS: Yeah, great advice. And just this podcast already is a starting point for the listeners out there.

0:12:33.2 JD: Yep, absolutely.

0:12:34.8 AS: One of the things that I say to my students in my valuation master class, they come to my class because it's like, Andrew, you got 30 years of experience as a financial analyst, and you were voted number one and you... This and that, and I really wanna learn from you. And when I come into class, I announce a couple of the things... And one of the things is I say, You Are Always Wrong. And I call it YAAW. And I try to help the students understand it, in the world of finance, there is no precision, like in the world of physics or the law of gravity or something like that, that you're always going to be wrong and therefore don't freak out over that. Understand that it's a system. The second thing that I tell the students, and this one I think really gets them, they don't really figure it out until the end, and that is in my class and in the world of finance, what I teach is, if I'm successful as a teacher in this specific area that I'm teaching, if you feel less confident when you finish my course, I've succeeded.

0:13:48.7 AS: And I think that students freak out because of I'm here to be more confident Andrew, and what I'm exposing them to is that it's a constant... We're walking on quick sand. We're operating in a world where even in the world of finance, just observing the world of finance, observing market prices and stuff can influence actions that we're taking in the market... Can influence market prices. So the complexity level is so high.

0:14:27.1 JD: Yeah, yeah, one of the things that makes me think of is sort of a... I don't know if I'd call it paradox, but one of the early places that I went even prior to sort of coming across, Deming's work is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and they have it as their mission to bring the science of improvement to the education sector. And they have an annual Improvement Summit. The first time I went, I realized that they had this footer on all of their materials and it said, "Probably wrong, definitely incomplete." And that was a really great entry way into the science of improvement because that's the mentality you need when you start any type of improvement work, improvement project in your organization, and I sort of stole that idea and stuck it on all our materials.

0:15:27.8 JD: And I think the reaction from a lot of people first is similar to how you're describing the reaction of your students is that, wait a second, aren't you supposed to be an expert, don't you know what you're talking about? And I said, "No, that's not what this is about." This is about humbling yourself, realizing the complexity of the organizations that we're working in, and that at the outset of any improvement project, that there are gonna be things that you discover along the way that were completely unknown at the start, and so if you don't take that mindset and you rush in and you're sure of yourself, then you are set up for failure from the beginning, in my opinion.

0:16:09.7 AS: So if we go back to the title of this episode, Applying Deming's System of Profound Knowledge in Education, part of it is it starts to open you up beyond subject matter, and also it starts to help you understand that there's just a much more, a bigger world out there of influences that are driving us, and I think one of the things that's interesting about that is it... Young managers in the world of business are seeming to latch on to KPIs and feeling like it is a simple solution, we just define everybody's KPI, we nail them with it, we repeat it to them, we have them write it out in their goals and we measure it, and if they don't achieve it. Boom. And what Deming is teaching is just the opposite, that when you understand the system of profound knowledge, you understand that optimizing the output of any organization is a much more complex reality than just putting a KPI and a number on it.

0:17:18.8 JD: Yeah, I think of a colleague of a contemporary of Dr. Deming, who is still doing great work, Dr. Donald Wheeler said something to the effect of goal setting, KPI setting, goal setting is often an act of desperation, meaning like you don't know what else to do, so you set a goal, you don't have a method, you don't have a theory for how to improve, so you set this goal and then say something to the effect of, "I don't care how you get it done. Just get it done." Right, and then all hell breaks loose. And what do you think he's talking about is, if you don't understand the capability of your system, if you don't understand whatever area you're talking about, whatever area that KPI is in, if you don't understand how that data is varying over time, if you don't understand if there are just common causes, there are special causes in that data, you have no idea how to react nor do you know what your system was capable of the first place.

0:18:26.1 JD: That's sort of one of the sessions I led with leadership team here, and everybody kind of looks and says, Well, aren't we supposed to set goals? and there's really nothing wrong with setting goals in and of themselves, but we often set them in ways that are completely detached from reality, both in the magnitude of improvement that we're expecting and is a lack of understanding of how that same data has performed over time.

0:18:52.5 AS: Yeah, and it reminds me of Dr. Deming's statement of 'by what method?'

0:18:56.2 JD: By what method, yeah.

0:18:58.9 AS: So for, in wrapping up our discussion, I wanna go back and review some of what we've just talked about, so we're talking about applying the system of profound knowledge in education, and what you've talked about is the idea of coming into education, most people are very familiar with subject matter knowledge about classroom management and curriculum management and all that, but what was missing when you started your journey was this concept of Profound Knowledge, and once you started to understand it, it changed the way that you viewed the world, and then we just briefly talked about the idea, I wrote down something which was "probably wrong, definitely incomplete", and I would say that there are plenty of places where they think "definitely right. Probably complete."

[laughter]

0:19:47.3 AS: And then you just mentioned the idea of setting goals, and I think Deming is not against goals, it's that goal is just one measure, I would say, if you set goals for individuals that incentivize them individually, you've created a big problem of competition, but most importantly, I think what you're saying is the idea of just setting a goal like, We wanna increase test scores by X or in my business, I want revenue growth to be up by 20% next year, the question really becomes by what method is there anything else that you would add to wrap up our discussion?

0:20:28.2 JD: Yeah, I think goals or quotas, especially if you're optimizing one part of the system, very likely to destroy the system as a whole, or at least sub-optimize it make it worse. I think Deming said something to the fact of quotas can be a fortress against improvement. Right. I think he was exactly right, because people start to do all kinds of weird things when you start to set quotas or goals, especially again, if they're incentivized as an individual, whether that's an individual worker or an individual department, things start to sort of happen in the opposite of what you wanted to happen when you do things like set goals, without that appreciation for the capability of the system in the first place, or an understanding of the data or an idea for how to improve, because it's like, well, if our goal... If we're gonna set a goal to increase test scores, let's say by 10% next year, why don't we do it this year? If we knew how to do that, what were we waiting on, why do we think we can do it next year, if we couldn't do it this year...

0:21:33.8 AS: Great points. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming; people are entitled to joy in work.

In this, the first in a series of episodes on Awakening Your Inner Deming, Andrew talks with Dr. Bill Bellows about his journey. He started with Taguchi, read his way through other quality "gurus", and finally found Deming in unexpected places - solving big problems in space shuttles along the way!

0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm here with featured guest Bill Bellows. Bill, are you ready to share your Deming journey?

0:00:15.7 Bill Bellows: I am ready. I've got my seatbelt on, crash protection devices. I'm ready to go, Andrew. [chuckle]

0:00:23.3 AS: And I am ready indeed. So let me introduce you to the audience. Bill's a 35+ year specialist in the field of quality and engineering management. In addition to adjunct professor roles, he is president of InThinking Services, partnering with clients to facilitate the understanding and application of the Deming philosophy. So, Bill, can you tell us a bit about how you first came to even learn about the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and what hooked you?

0:00:57.8 BB: Well, I was minding my own business. No. Actually, I finished my graduate studies in 1983 and went to work in the aerospace industry with a sense that I wasn't gonna... [chuckle] I wasn't quite sure I was gonna like it. I greatly enjoyed what I was doing in the field in graduate school, and the work I was to be doing in industry was very similar. So I felt okay, but it didn't take long before I just didn't like it. And I found myself teaching some college classes and then wondering what I wanted to do. And it took about... Two years after I was working at this company, I took a class in problem solving and decision making. A one-week class. And I loved it. I started looking at everything through this lens of a model for decision making, a model for problem solving.

0:02:13.4 BB: And shortly thereafter, I was approached by the training director of the company. We were growing leaps and bounds in terms of business and employment. And this guy came in and was really cool in terms of bringing us what he thought was some really professional development training. And he knew I was excited by this one-week course. And he said, "Bill, how'd you like to be the person in engineering trained in that and to teach this course?" And I was like, "Yeah. Yeah. Sign me up." So I went away for a two-week train the trainer, very intensive training. And what was interesting is I was the only one in the room, two dozen people that wasn't an HR and wasn't a trainer. I didn't know how to train... I was gung ho on the material, but I did not know what it was like to get in front of an audience. And in fact, the instructors used to kid me that I was almost afraid to move beyond the podium. I just wanted to hide behind it.

0:03:17.0 BB: And so I came out of that having been... I have to we prepare for the next day, five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Next thing you know, we're preparing these one hour long teachers. And I love... I liked it. And then back at work, the plan was that, given this role as the auxiliary instructor for this material, when people in engineering, my organization, have a need for this training to be used, I'd be called upon. And that was really cool. It got me associated with people I wasn't working with, and it was a much more exciting than what I was doing. And Lo and behold, the guy in training, the director says, "Hey, you know this... " He mentioned Deming's name, and I was a sponge. And I really respected what he was doing. And he gave me... He introduced me to Deming's work. And I remember, I think it was Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position. And I looked at that and I thought, "Okay."

0:04:30.4 BB: But then going back to the problem, we'll come back to that. That was my exposure to Dr. Deming's name. But in parallel, I was working on a very big problem on the... On our number one product, which were gas turbine engines, you could think of as jet engines, for applications in the US Army's battle tank. And we were making 120 of these a month. And I mean, it was a big, big... It was the biggest business of the company. And once or so a year, there'd be a major crisis. We can't ship hardware and the Army would come in and say, "Stop production until you solve this." And I had been dragged into some of those before. And that kind of got me in the realm of, "Hey, why don't you go off and take this training?" So now I'm not sitting in the back of the room. Now I'm in the front of the room but leading the facilitation of these techniques for problem... Mostly problem solving. What is a problem? The car won't start. It used to work.

0:05:38.5 BB: And so we're working on one big problem. And it was... It had incredible relevance relative... This is the height of the Cold War, Andrew. This is '87, '88 timeframe. And there was reason to believe by the Army that the majority of the battle tanks had a problem. And those tanks were the front line of defense of the allied forces in Europe. And so, we were running tests 24/7 trying to solve this, solve this, solve this, solve this, solve this, and we weren't going anywhere. And at one of the meetings, once a month, somebody had to go explain to the army, essentially our lack of progress. At one of those meetings, somebody said General Motors makes the transmissions for the tanks, and whenever they have an issue like this, they use this thing called Taguchi methods. So we're gonna contact General Motors and ask for their help and you're gonna send somebody then in Indianapolis to find out what it is and is it relevant.

0:06:49.8 BB: And so I go to this meeting and I learn about these goings-on, and I turn to the manager of the tank engine program. And I said, "So who's gonna go to Indianapolis?" And he said, "You are." And I looked at him dumbfounded and I said, "Why me?" He says, "You're the problem-solving guy." He says, "I want you to go." And Andrew, I had no interest in going. I was looking for reasons why it made no sense. And in the back of my mind anytime I get into a situation where I'm not happy with whatever it is, I look for something positive to make it appeasing. And believe it or not, I didn't wanna go to Indianapolis, but I thought, but I can go to the Indy 500 Museum, which a neighbor did years ago, and if nothing else, I can go to the Indy museum. And that's really what I was looking forward to, is going to the Indy museum 'cause I thought this meeting was just gonna be a waste of time.

0:07:49.7 BB: And I go into the meeting and I'm... And this is what hooked me on Taguchi then we'll come back to Deming. I go into the meeting and there were these transmission division's top people in Taguchi methods. Well, their senior people, their top most person had recently left the transmission division to go work for a new part of GM called the Saturn Corporation. And I'm thinking, holy cow, your top Taguchi guy is at Saturn, which I knew about. So now I'm thinking, 'cause prior to going out, I did a literature search. We didn't have the internet and I pulled up a bunch of stuff and it was just a mishmash. But when he said, "Our top guy who wrote this book... " and he showed me the book, "went to the Saturn Corporation," I'm thinking, now my ears are perking up.

0:08:56.4 BB: And then he says the other thing that's funny here. They brought in their chief transmission designer and he looked at the drawings of the parts that were failing in the engine. And he says, "This looks like a German design." I don't know anything about design, but he looks at the drawings and he says, "This looks like a German design." And I said, "It is a German design." In fact, I said, "The people who designed this engine designed the very first German jet engine in the late '30s for Hitler." I said, "It's the same team of people." And so anyway, he looked at it and he had some ideas, but that wasn't why I was there. But then the other two guys were there, and the first question they asked me is, "How do you come up with ideas for what's wrong with this tank engine?" I said, "Everyone's got an idea." And I said, "And what if that doesn't work?" He says, "Here's what we do. Somebody comes up with an idea and every idea we come up with, we write it down and we go run a 10-hour test at a thousand bucks an hour, which I thought was expensive.

0:10:01.5 BB: And then at the end of the test, we decide to go forward or not. Are we onto something or not? And he said, "What if it's not?" And I said, "Well, then somebody's always got an idea, somebody's always got an idea. We're running test, we're running test. Well, why are we here?" Because we're running through ideas, running through ideas, and we ain't finding anything. So then he says, "What do you measure?" And it's so funny. I don't know anything about gears other than the gears have teeth. I'm a heat transfer guy. [chuckle] So I said, "After each test, somebody goes to the manager in the gear group and shows them the gears that contact each other," and he holds 'em up and he says, they look good or they look bad. He says, "How does he do that?' I says, "He just looks at 'em." He says, "He doesn't measure anything?" I said, "No, he just holds them up to the light and he says, that looks worn, or that doesn't look worn."

0:11:01.3 BB: And I said, "Based on that decision, we run the next test." Well, he says, "Here's our first piece of advice." He said, "Stop thinking of it as being it's worn or it's not." He said, "It's really shades of grey." And he says, "What I want you to do is measure each tooth on each gear before and after." He said, "You're throwing away a lot of information based on this measurement." And I thought, okay, okay. And I said, how do you do it? Blah, blah, blah. And I went back about a week later based on what he shared with me and we put together a test plan that solved that problem in about two weeks later. And so now I'm all over Taguchi's work, I am all over Taguchi's work, all over Taguchi's work, and it became my next look.

0:11:49.0 AS: What does Taguchi have to do with just measuring versus eyeballing something?

0:11:54.9 BB: Well, that's a good question. I'd say Taguchi's work in that situation was the use of fractional factorial testing, but the issue was that we were treating the data as black and white, which is, in terms of statistics, it is a poor way of doing things, but that's... It wasn't...

0:12:19.0 AS: So either you accept or reject as opposed to measuring?

0:12:22.1 BB: Yeah. And I was... I took an undergraduate class in statistics and I just... It wasn't a field I didn't know that much about. So I just bought into it and he just brought it to my attention, and I said, okay, and it kind of makes sense where he's coming from, but the... So really, the biggest thing that came out of the meeting was not so much... It was driven by you gotta look at this Taguchi guy and it was a combination of running tests using Taguchi's ideas, which would've included using variable data and not... What was it called? Category data. And so that, it was just incredible. This was a problem that was going on with incredible high visibility at the Pentagon, and it got us out of a big jam. And we just couldn't, the answer was right in front of us, but we couldn't see it based on not so much the testing method, the evaluation method. So then that got me in love with Dr. Taguchi's work, so...

0:13:40.4 AS: Let's stop there for a second and think about the listeners for a second, and the viewers. How would you describe the lesson that you learned from that experience?

0:13:56.2 BB: I say a really big lesson is that a simple shift in our thinking, kind of like putting on glasses allowed us to see what we couldn't see that was right in front of us.

0:14:11.7 AS: And it happened by you going outside of the organization also, it sounds like.

0:14:15.7 BB: Oh inside... Oh, the organization. See, I had no reason to challenge the organization. These were the gear people. I'm a heat transfer person, so I don't challenge the gear people. What is that all about? That's why I'm just going along with the guy says, "What do you measure?" I said, again, I was out of my element relative to how organizations operate, out of my element relative to... Now I just looked at that and say, they're the experts. Why would I... I mean, [chuckle] I was just gullible. And I don't think that's uncommon. Where I worked, I found that there were fields in which everyone was an expert. And then there were fields in which... Meaning that if you... Where I worked in Connecticut, if you had some skill with statistics, people would get outta your way and they would just treat you like you walked on water, even though you were full of it. They just bowed to Andrew because you...

0:15:33.2 BB: And so I think it was something like that. I just didn't... And again, I don't think that's uncommon in organizations. But to your point, in fact, back to your point, when I walked away from that very first meeting, and here's what was cool is, it was the two of them, the designer left the room and were in a small conference room. And here I am with two instructors and me, two instructors and one student. I had a ball. And I'm taking notes and I'm writing everything down. And I'm asking this one, asking this one, asking this one, asking this one. And the plan was I would come back in a week, take the ideas, go back, talk to the experts. Well, one of the things we did when we went back is we threw out everything we thought we knew about those experiments because every decision we had made was based on this premise of look and hold a part up to the light.

0:16:27.6 BB: So I said, all this testing is meaningless. So now we've gotta go back to the original list and go forward 'cause typically you'd think, like with Edison, you try this, try this, try this. You don't go backwards. We went backwards based on what you're talking about is that I lost trust in everything we thought we knew. So we went back to the original list, which was... And the original list was what a bunch of recent design changes. So we went back to that list that had been tested, and using a shifting from black and white data to continuum data, we discovered what no one else could see. And it just jumped right out. It was just so damn obvious what was going on, but we couldn't see it. And so that got me intrigued in Taguchi's work. I was then on a mission to learn everything I could. And I then began to see my role in the organization as the facilitator of training that I was doing, and then training in this and helping the organization on applications.

0:17:41.9 BB: And it didn't take long. We were solving some pretty big problems after that. And the VP of engineering liked what was going on. And I went to one day and I said, "I'd like a job," I said, "There's incredible opportunities for us to use this, and I'd like to be the person leading that effort." And he smiled, and... "Andrew, this is the height of TQM, this is 1988. TQM is huge." And he's kinda nodding to me. And sometime thereafter I told him, I said, well what is I brought the Taguchi people in from Detroit to do a big seminar, $30,000. And I'm in charge of bringing them in. I'm in charge of who's coming to this. I remember I went to the HR training guy and I said, "Who do I invite to this training? This is out of my league." And he gave me incredible advice, and I'm sure you've heard before, he said, "It's easier to ask... " He said, "It's easier to apologize than ask permission."

0:18:48.5 BB: He said, "You are in charge of the whole damn thing." He said, "You invite who you think needs to be there." And I was like, whoa, [laughter] And I said, when did he had to tell me that. And I had so many from engineering, so many from operations, so many from procurement, invited the people in, took the course, we were able to as part of the course show what we had done and we were on a roll. And eventually I went to the VP of engineering and I said, "This is what I wanna do." And I even... In a nice way, he and I got along really well and I said, "The job I want, I've shared with you," and I said, "And I really hope it comes to be." I said, "But if it doesn't come to be, it will be because I found that job elsewhere."

[laughter]

0:19:44.0 BB: "So if I come to you and say I'm leaving, this is why."

0:19:50.0 AS: It's for that job.

0:19:50.6 BB: This is why. And then in the very same time frame that I'm out looking, looking, looking, looking, looking 'cause it would... Did not appear to be coming. And then I heard about Deming again and I heard that he was speaking about an hour away from where I worked. And at that point, I had taken an introduction to Taguchi's course, an advanced course where I drove to Detroit and self-funded a week's vacation. I was intense. And I hear about Deming speaking in the area and I thought, "Being a student of quality, I need to go find out what this is all about." So I...

0:20:28.0 AS: And what year is that and what city was it that that was happening in?

0:20:34.8 BB: Dr. Deming was speaking in February of 1990 in Danbury, Connecticut at Western Connecticut State University, and he spoke three times that day. I was there for all three and I have videotapes from the inviter, the professor. He shared with me two of the three videotapes, and one of them, the evening lecture about an hour and a half long I believe is on YouTube. I can get you that information to the link and... But Dr. Deming spoke for about an hour to the faculty, an hour to the students, and what was so cool is I attended with two colleagues from a graduate school who were in transition and I said, "Hey, there's this Deming guy appearing." He was about... He was appearing about midway between where these classmates were. So they drove and got there and I got there and we're driving around campus trying to find where this is. And what's so cool was we found the building, and found this auditorium which was empty, and as soon as we find the room, we turn, and there's Dr. Deming getting out of a limo. [chuckle]

0:21:49.9 BB: And it's about noon time, and he's with his host and all in there, and I guess they went off for lunch. So we're in the room before any... So when we found the room, we see this guy that looks like Dr. Deming. So, okay, this is the right place. So we just kind of made ourselves at home there, kind of sat. Found the place where we wouldn't be sitting kind of in the back, and he came in and started speaking, and he was entertaining. But so much of what he was saying, he was using a language that was nowhere near anything I had learned from Dr. Taguchi, who in my opinion, I was just in love with Taguchi's work. So I'm looking at Deming by comparison, I'm thinking that doesn't fit what I know from Taguchi. That doesn't fit, that doesn't fit, that doesn't fit. [laughter] So he gave pretty much the same presentation to the students and the faculty and then a little bit longer in the evening. And so much of what he said was interesting.

0:23:02.6 BB: And some of it is entertaining, I mean, entertaining in the sense that I could tell it was a joke. I mean, some of his jokes are in the context of his work and I wouldn't laugh at that 'cause I don't understand the context, but others were, so it was interesting. And then a few days later, the two guys who went with me, who lived in my hometown, I went to see them and a third classmate who got his MBA when we were getting Masters in Engineering, he showed up and he knew of Deming and he said, "So what'd you learn?" And the thing that stood out more than anything else, I said, "I don't quite... " [chuckle] I said, "I don't understand the majority of what he said." I said, "But what did stand out... " I told this classmate, I said, "I've never heard anyone speak ill of competition," 'cause Dr. Deming referenced Alfie Kohn's book, the case against competition. I can't remember the... "No Contest", right?

0:24:12.8 BB: And the guy says, "Well, what's wrong with competition?" And I said, "I don't know." I said, "All I know is he distinctly did not like it." And I'd never heard anyone... When I say people, until Deming, I've never heard anyone speak ill of competition. People always say, it brings out the best in people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but here's Deming railing against it, and that was what stuck in my mind from Tuesday through Saturday was, he doesn't like competition.

0:24:45.1 AS: And when he was talking about competition, was he talking about competition, setting up competition within your company? Or he doesn't like companies competing with each other?

0:24:54.0 BB: No, and that's a very good point. And he's... And I believe that in Deming community there's some confusion. It was hard for me to distinguish competition within the company from competition between Ford and GM. All I knew is he didn't like it.

0:25:14.4 AS: Yep.

0:25:15.0 BB: And yeah. I mean, fast-forward he's very...

0:25:17.6 AS: In America, that's just a bizarre concept.

0:25:19.9 BB: He's talking about competition... Well, he's talking about competition within the team and he would say, "Naturally, Ford and GM are gonna compete in the marketplace, so they may find opportunities to collaborate." But at that point, what just blew me away was this guy doesn't like competition. That's the only... I mean, he'd mentioned special causes and common causes. That didn't mean anything to me. I never heard those words before. So, I mean, nowadays when I go back and watch it, I can see how... What an incredible set of material he was presenting, but I didn't have anything to hold onto to be able to... I'm looking at what he's doing through a Taguchi lens, looking for the black and white and the shades of gray and some other things. But there's so much of what he was saying didn't come close.

0:26:11.9 BB: But going back to the comment of the colleague... The classmate, he said, what's wrong with the competition? I distinctly remember saying to him, I said, "I don't know." I said, "But maybe because we did okay. And graduating getting master's degree," I said, "Maybe we like competition because we won - that we did okay." And what I was also thinking about when I said that was I had a summer job in college and a factory in my hometown, and in the factory people I went to grade school with, and I was thinking of them. And so when he said,"What's wrong?" I'm thinking, I've got a PhD in mechanical engineering. I didn't drop outta high school and go work on a factory. And that's what I was doing. I'm self-reflecting on, maybe it worked for me, but maybe it didn't work for the others. And that's pretty much... And I believe in that timeframe. I mean, Dr. Deming hands out an article at that time on Profound Knowledge, two or three pages and yeah, okay. There's four elements, but I pretty much put it in the back burner.

0:27:24.0 AS: So what happened next and how did you move on in your Deming journey?

0:27:29.6 BB: Well, that was February of 1989. Later that summer, I took an advanced class in Taguchi methods, and I'm interviewing with Dr. Taguchi's company. I didn't have gray hair. I didn't have any training experience. I didn't quite fit the mold they were looking for. And so I'm trying this, and I'm just trying every opportunity, I want a job in Taguchi methods. And towards the end of the year, I met some people and they gave my resume to RocketDyne where I eventually was hired and now I'm working full-time as a Taguchi expert. You know who is an expert. If I know more than you, that makes me an expert Andrew.

[laughter]

0:28:18.5 AS: One step ahead.

0:28:20.6 BB: But where Deming came back to me was 1993, The New Economics comes out, and occasionally, I go to the bookstore, that's just before Amazon. So I go to the bookstore and I was subscribing to the American Society for Quality. So I was in that community of quality practitioners learning about it. And I literally went to the bookstore... A brick and mortar bookstore, got a copy of The New Economics, and what do I do when I look at it? First thing I do, I go to the index and say, what does this guy think of Dr. Taguchi? [chuckle] And I go to the end and it's Genichi Taguchi. So I go to the page's reference, and what floored me was chapter 10, the very last chapter, the last six pages is all about Dr. Taguchi's work. And I'm thinking, I like this guy, I like this guy.

0:29:27.5 BB: So the vote of confidence in what he is talking, I'm thinking. So I think Taguchi stuff is everything and Deming's liking it too. And when I read The New Economics... So meanwhile, in Connecticut, when I was brought in to solve, help, support issues, once or twice a year, I pretty much stopped my day job, went full-time into this problem solving practitioner facilitator mode, which could take a month or two months. And then I go back to my job. Now in Connecticut, I'm the full-time problem solving guy. This is not a part-time thing. It's a full-time thing. And the exciting thing is I'm working on some very big issues, some of which were a couple months old. One in the spatial domain engine was a year and a half old. And this is exciting, but then I'm starting to realize that there's something wrong with the business model at the organization.

0:30:28.7 BB: And when I looked at Dr. Demings, when The New Economics came out, again, I had spent three years working on major problems in the special domain engine, major problems on space station hardware that RocketDyne was developing, the electric power for. I'm briefing very senior NASA people on problem solved, problem solved, problem solved. But I'm starting to hyperventilate thinking we are kept in business by being able to solve problems. The problems we don't solve, what NASA does is they call you up and they say, "Andrew, we've given you the contract to develop the engine." You're like, "Yep, yep, yep." "And we've given you the contract to produce the engine." "Yep, yep, yep, yep." "But we understand you've got a problem on this component. We're looking to have somebody else make that."

0:31:19.7 BB: And what I saw in front of me was I'm working on a problem that's a year and a half old. There's other problems on the engine. NASA's getting frustrated saying, we're gonna outsource this work to a competitor. And I'm thinking we're gonna lose the engine one component at a time. So I'm working on a big component. And before that problem was solved, a bigger dollar value component was given to a competitor. And I'm thinking one after another. So when I read The New Economics, the first thing that jumped out is, what I'm experiencing is not unique to where I work. What I read into Dr. Deming's work, my interpretation of Deming's work was kind of reinforcing that problem solving is the result of how we see the world, that we're stuck in a rut, because I'm looking and thinking...

0:32:16.7 BB: Again, the good news is I'm kept in. I'm being kept incredibly busy working on some very high visibility problems, going to very senior people at NASA headquarters to present solutions with the president of the company. I'm feeling really good. I mean, relative to having fun, but I'm thinking, but fundamentally how the company is running is not sustainable. And so, I'm looking and thinking, "I'm enjoying this. I'm keeping busy." But we shouldn't have these problems. If we understood what Deming's talking about, my interpretation was we could be preventing these problems, not solving these problems. And I'm not saying all problems, but I'm just thinking that we're behind the eight ball, and I looked at Deming's work as how to get out in front of it, not behind it. And the big part of it was we didn't understand variation.

0:33:15.9 BB: And so what I looked at it was, if you're ignoring variation, then you're... And we'll get into more detail in another session, but what I found was we didn't see the warning signs, the way it was... This goes back to the black and white, and I liken it to things are going well, which is like, your car has gas. Okay, the car has gas. Should I go get gas? No. How do I know we shouldn't get gas, Andrew? Because the car is running.

0:33:48.2 AS: The car has gas. Yeah.

0:33:50.0 BB: And so I'm thinking, "So why are people coming to me with a problem?" Because when the car is running, they don't think they need gas. [chuckle] And now I'm thinking, "If we just had gas gauges, simple devices to monitor and get away from the car has gas or it doesn't, which is the black and white thinking that I grew to, not despise, but just become aware of its limits. And now I'm realizing it, if we looked at things along a continuum, we could be preventing these problems in the first place. And then I'm thinking, "I mean, we've got an incredibly sophisticated engineers and hardware, but we're falling victim to a mindset that says the car has gas, but nobody's asking how much." But so I, from that moment on, reading Deming's book one, it was holy cow, because the riddle I was trying to solve was, why do you come to me when the car runs outta gas?

0:34:54.2 BB: And what it didn't dawn to me was why should they come see me when the car has gas? [laughter] And Deming was... Again, and I'm not saying everybody looks at Deming's ideas the same way. And we both know that's not the case, but what excited me about him at that point was that what I was dealing with was not... The solution wasn't technical. The solution was a shift in mindset. And I then very distinctly began moving from all about Taguchi to all about Deming. And what was interesting is when I started to share that influence with people, really good friends in the Taguchi community, they looked at me, some of them down their nose. Then I've...

0:35:53.3 AS: A traitor to the cause.

0:35:56.5 BB: I'm just like I had discovered a new religion, but they looked at me like, "Deming? Deming?" And I'm thinking to myself, "Well, first of all, I was, I had great... " These were really sharp people in the Taguchi community that I had greatest respect for. And I thought they'd be excited by that. And what I was sensing was kind of a weakness. And I then, from that point on, I went from the solution was Taguchi training and advanced training and blah, blah blah. And then began to think that the reason I can't get in to do these things that I wanted to do with Dr. Taguchi's work, which is focusing on things that are good and making them better. Why am I focus... I'm applying Taguchi's ideas to go from bad to good. And all the training I had is that his ideas go the other way from good to better and better and better. And I'm thinking, "I'm stuck in this rut. And Dr. Deming's giving me great insights as to how to get out of the rut." And you can tell from my excitement it was a game changer for me and a game changer for how what we did in terms of how we were deploying Taguchi's ideas and Deming's ideas where I worked.

0:37:25.0 AS: So if we go back, I mean, let's... Now that's a good breakdown of kind of your history with it. And I'm just curious, if we think about a young person right now who doesn't know much about Deming, how would you describe what they can gain from starting their Deming journey? What would you describe now? I mean, in the beginning you've described kind of simple solutions to simple problems, but there's so much more that you started discovering.

AS: Let's just talk about when I think about young people these days and I look at the management that they're learning in universities, their MBAs and all the things, and I'm looking at the KPIs and things like that, that are going on in this world, I see some strong reasons why people should pay attention to the teachings of Dr. Deming. And I'm just curious, the question I like to ask is, why Deming? Why now?

BB: Yeah. I'd say my approach is to use examples with people of all ages that are new to Deming, right? So you don't have to be right out of college. But I like to look at it as how can I help you understand through questions and examples the degree to which you have the ability to see with new eyes right now, meaning that when I talked earlier about the limits of black and white thinking, versus shades of gray thinking. Shades of gray thinking is looking at a gas gauge and see the gas gauge is going from full to less to less to less. It's time to get gas while I still have gas. Black and white thinking just says I have gas. What about now? I have gas.

AS: Accept, reject.

[chuckle]

BB: And it's not to say that black and white thinking is bad, but it's simple versus shades of gray thinking. So what I point out to people is in our personal lives, we use both modes. Throughout the day we're in one cat... We're in one mode or the other not paying attention. And it may well be that the mode we're using is the proper mode to use in that situation. But if we became more aware of those modes, if we had the ability to flip the switch deliberately, 'cause right now what I found is I can ask you a question and get you to go into the black and white mode. You don't know that, and I'll give you another question. And to me, you're jumping between modes, you don't know it. So my strategy, is how people become aware. Why? Because what Dr. Deming's... I'll give you an incredible, a great quote that Russ Ackoff shared in a conversation with Dr. Deming, and Russ says, the...

BB: And for those who don't know, Russ was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and he passed away about 10 years ago, or so. And he and Dr. Deming were colleagues, very deeply, deep admirers of one another, but 19 years different. Dr. Deming was 19 years older than Russ. And Russ says, "The characteristic way of management we have taught in the western world is to take a complex system, break it in the parts, and manage each part as well as possible." And then he goes on to say, "And if that's done, the system performs well." And I ask people to complete the sentence and they'll say... And actually the sentence I pose it as, "And if that's done," so the character's way of management is to take a complex and then breaking into parts manage the parts as well as possible. And if that's done, okay, how would you answer it? And they'll say, "things go well, things go well." 

BB: Well, what Russ says is, "And the system will behave badly and perform well." And then that's absolutely false. And so what I then try to show to people is that what Russ is describing is what we do at work. And then, I gradually point out to them that what he is describing we should be doing is what we do at home. [chuckle] And I try to get 'em to realize that at work they're responsible for machining a whole... Delivering, converting some data from one form to another and passing it on to the next person. But they don't know what the next person does, and I point out at home, whether they're planning a vacation, planning a wedding, buying a home, they're handing off to the next person. And they are the next person, and then they are the next person. And so I try to point out to them the differences between how you would behave if you were the next person. And by comparison, what do we do at work.

BB: And I try to use examples that show the incredible shortcoming of how we treat the next person at work versus how we treat the next person at home, who is me. And so I just give them the same scenario and just say, "So why at home, do we do this and at work we do this?" And then they'll wrap their heads around it. "Because at home I'm dealing with wood and at work, I use metal." And I've had that happen, people will say, "In the garage, I have... I'm working, making a project at wood, and that's why I do that at home. And at work, it's all metal." And I try to point out, "Who designs it at home?" "I do." "Who buys the materials at home?" "I do." Or the elements of whatever it is I'm making and I try to point out, "At home, you are the ones who conceive it, bring together the elements, buying them and putting 'em all together. Then you are the user, but that's not the case at work."

BB: And so what I try to do back to your point is show them how much more advanced our thinking at home is in terms of how we treat the next person, me, versus what we're allowed to do, the next person. Try to point out to them is that, "At home, you, the receiver and you are receiving from you the provider, and at home, the person upstream may not be as generous. Nor will you at work be as generous for the next person downstream. So I try to use examples like that of how... And get into the realm of what does it mean to look at things as a system versus looking at things in isolation. And I find examples like that can grab their attention. But it's not uncommon with these people. I'd be learning about what they do and try to use examples from what they do and point out.

BB: And again, like we were talking earlier, the difference between a shades of gray approach and a black and white approach versus, am I looking at the thing in isolation? So I try to point out those types of things. Now, I mean depending on who it is, I may look at other aspects of Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge, if I think that will get me a toe into the door.

AS: Yep. So let me ask you, in wrapping up, what would you say is the most influential part of Dr. Deming's teaching for your life?

BB: The concept of the System of Profound Knowledge is... That has been a... That has changed my life. That there isn't a day that goes by that I don't look at things through the lens he's describing. The other thing I'll say for people that are new, to the Deming philosophy, and you come across this thing called the System of Profound Knowledge. And Dr. Deming would say, "If you have a better name, please help me." You have to call it something. And then you go to a Deming seminar and you learn there's four elements, and then you learn the psychology piece and this piece. And it's not uncommon, we go to school and we learn things a chunk at a time, a chunk at a time, a chunk at a time. And the challenge is that for people that are new to this, study the pieces in terms of Ackoff, in terms of the system of profound knowledge, if you're looking at variation. Dr. Deming's vast experience in education is all about variation and Shewhart's work.

BB: But if you wanna study psychology, you have to do what Dr. Deming did, was read books on psychology that are not written by Dr. Deming. Read books on systems such as from Russ Ackoff. And so what I find is my strategy was, I mean, the simplicity of the Deming philosophy relative to the System of Profound Knowledge, no one else put together those elements like that. But what I also point out to people is you're gonna have to go beyond Deming's writings to study systems and bring it back to that focus, study psychology and bring it back to there. Now again, depending on who you're reading in, may not fit the psychology Deming's talking about. But I think a big thing is you gotta be able to go beyond The New Economics to go into depth in those areas. And what you'll find is in the beginning, we think of psychology as separate than variation.

BB: And what you'll find is over time, you can't separate, and so that's what I would say is that, I know as you're coming across it and you see it for the first time and you think, "Okay, that's over there, that's over there." But don't be surprised as you continue on your Deming journey that these things come together, and then you realize that that separation is just a teaching device. And that teaching device is in every course we take, we break it in to parts and then at the end of the semester it's a whole. And that's what I would say is, what I find just breathtakingly remarkable is how that system has enabled me to think about things in a way that I would never be able to think about before. And I'm not saying I see everything, but it has enabled me to be in situations where I can turn to colleagues and say, so where do you think we're gonna go based on this decision?

BB: And we can use Dr. Deming's work to get a sense of how that might go off the rails or whatnot. And so if you think of... Dr. Deming would describe his work as a theory of management. And what is a theory? It's a prediction, so I find it's a fascinating crystal ball to look at a situation or a decision being made and start to anticipate what could happen. And I'm thinking, how can that not be invaluable to people?

Yep. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show. And I ask, do you have any parting words for the audience?

BB: I'd say, if you're new to the Deming community, welcome. [laughter] It's never too late to join. And if you're part of the community, I would say don't stop learning.

AS: Fantastic. That concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is, "People are entitled to joy in work."

With this episode, Andrew and David P. Langford start a new series on the Role of the Manager in Education. Inspired by chapter 6 in The New Economics, Andrew and David apply Dr. Deming's 14 points for "the role of a manager of people after transformation" to the world of education. (Note: this is not about Deming's 14 Points for Management.)

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 David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is the beginning of a series, The role of a manager in education. David, take it away.

0:00:29.9 David Langford: Hello, Andrew. So I always wanna say good morning or good evening, but you're in Thailand, and I'm in Montana, so there's a problem there.

0:00:39.8 AS: [laughter] They both work.

0:00:41.8 DL: So yeah. [chuckle] So glad to be back again.

0:00:43.4 AS: Great to be with you.

0:00:44.8 DL: So yes, I wanted to dive into this, because I actually had a number of comments that people have sent me, both email and Twitter and all those kinds of things, yeah, asking questions about it, et cetera. And even at seminars, I get questions about it. So we're working from Dr. Deming's book, The New Economics, in chapter six, and I have the third edition, so in my case, we're on page 86. And Deming... And the whole chapter is about the management of people. So Deming laid out about 14 different points about what managers should do, how should you operate, and what should you do, and et cetera. So I thought it'd be really good for us to kinda work our way through those and discuss what does that mean in education. Because, do we even have managers in education? So probably the first thing I wanna point out is he has a whole chapter on leadership, which is different, I think, than management. And so, I think this is getting more to on the day-to-day operations, what are we supposed to be doing or how do we operate?

0:02:03.5 DL: And he even makes the distinction, the role of the manager of people after the transformation. So that basically means, okay, you've read about Deming, you've... Or you read The New Economics, or you've watched videos, or you learned about it. And you kinda made that transformation that, "Hey, this is where I wanna go, and this is what I wanna do." Well, then comes, "Okay, well, what do I do Monday morning?" is the big... Always the big question I get. And if somebody can't help you figure out what to do Monday morning, then they really... I don't think they really understand themselves about what to do, and you should probably find another coach or another leader to [chuckle] help you sort of figure that out. So let's take the first point, and maybe you wanna read it off for our audience and...

0:03:00.2 AS: Yeah. So the first of these points is, "A manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. He explains the aim of the system. He teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims." Simple stuff.

0:03:26.6 DL: Well, it... On the surface, it does sound simple, but doing it is another matter. So I wanna take this right down to the classroom level and say that as a classroom teacher, you are a manager of people. And it doesn't really matter what age they are, if it's talking pre-school all the way to graduate school, you're a manager of people. So the first thing he says, "The manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system." So people always wanna know, "Where do I start? What do I do?" Well, there's a pretty good place to start right there. What is a system? So a system has inputs coming into it, and then it has the system itself, which is made up of processes within that system, and the system then has outputs, right. So in education, I remember back when Deming first started to get well-known, and people from business especially would come into education circles and try to tell educators what to do or how they should be managing to achieve quality, et cetera. And one of the first things they would do is they would talk about students as products, like you would think about in a company.

0:05:00.5 DL: And I kinda went for a couple of years thinking through that, and then all of a sudden it dawned on me, and a lot of it had to do with reading this section here. Students are not products, right? And if you think of them like that, then you're gonna think of them like inanimate objects that you do things to basically. And if I just adjust the process here, then suddenly all the kids will just be better, they'll learn better, et cetera, et cetera. Or I just throw in a new curriculum, and everything is gonna be fine, or you're not actually involving them in the process at all. So when I started giving seminars and working with people, I started to explain that the product of an education system is the learning itself. So what are they learning and to what degree do they... Are they learning, and how are you managing the people in that system to optimize the learning? And if you think of it like that, then you start to think of students as basically workers like in a company, in an organization. They're there to actually help you produce a product and tell you when things are going well and when things are not going well and how to make adjustments and everything to get a different result, right. And I find that when people sort of make that understanding in a system, especially as a teacher, you start to think of kids totally different.

0:06:46.6 DL: I remember when I first started and encountered Deming, teachers used to talk about students in a very derogatory way, and, "Oh, that kid isn't even worth this," and, "That kid's not worth that and can't... " That they didn't actually think of them as part of the... Of a system. And so when I started... Part of the problem is the nomenclature that we use, we have system, we have teachers, we have students, and along with that comes certain definitions that have evolved over the last couple hundred years. So when I started actually teaching teachers to stop using the term students and start calling them colleagues. Well, at first there was sort of an uproar [chuckle] about that. I remember one teacher telling me, "I mean, that snotty-nosed kid that says duh all the time, I'm supposed to think of him as my colleague?" and "Well, yes, you are, [chuckle] because that's your job," right, is to sort of... And Deming's talking about it here, is to optimize the system. Alright, so your job is to get those students to work with you as colleagues to study the system of learning, understand is it working or not, right? So how would we know it's working?

0:08:20.7 DL: Well, if you understand a system, you understand that there are outputs. So when students go on to the next level, is it working? It's pretty... It's actually pretty easy to measure that, right? So if I'm a third grade teacher teaching third grade math, am I sending students onto fourth grade math, continually getting better and better every year, and more and more of them are achieving to higher and higher levels every single year? Well, I can measure that pretty easily. I can just get the fourth grade math scores, or I could go to fourth grade teachers and find out, how are these kids doing?

0:09:01.2 AS: It's such an interesting... You're making me think about it, because really what education is, is it seems to me like it's a service, and it's a process, and if... And it's something that's repeated over and over again just like on a... In a business, we have many processes that are repeated over again. And when you improve that... Imagine that one school went on a mission to continually improve. And they're constantly looking at how to improve, and they have iterations every term as they go through these lessons. Imagine if they were focused on that, students would flock to them from around the world to come to get that transformation of learning and that experience and of learning the output and say, "I wanna come out of this process where those other people are, where I've really gained that knowledge." So am I right about that? Is there anything that you would add to that?

0:10:06.2 DL: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I think that's what Deming is giving here. I mean, it sounds simple, that as a leader or a manager, you're supposed to explain what a system is and how it works, but there's a lot of depth there about... And you mentioned continual improvement. Well, is your system continually getting better year after year, or are you just doing the same thing, you're no worse this year than you were last year kinda thing? I used to... I had an uncle, he's in his 90s now. But he taught eighth grade social studies, I think for something like almost forty years. And every year or two, family reunions or something, I'd get together. I'd talk to him about what I was doing and things [chuckle] like that. And we were talking about the system in the classroom and getting better every year, and he just looked at me blankly like I was a complete idiot. And I said, "Don't you do that?" and he said, "No." He said, "Give me a date." I said, "What do you mean give you a date?" And he said "Just give me a date." And I said, "Okay, March 15th," or something. "We'll be on page 286 in the textbook, we'll be studying this, 77% of the kids will be failing the test." I just...

0:11:31.1 DL: My mouth just dropped open, because it was a system totally set up for poor performance, and he didn't see it's his job at all to help kids understand the system they were in or try to optimize it or try to make it better, or... That wasn't his job, right? And I remember at Deming conferences, Deming would often say, "A lot of people don't know what their job is."

0:12:00.2 AS: Yeah.

0:12:00.8 DL: I remember, oftentimes people would get up and ask questions, and he would [chuckle] say, "Sounds like you don't know what your job is." [laughter]

0:12:07.3 AS: I remember being a 24 year old...

0:12:07.9 DL: And that's sad confronting it. [chuckle] Yeah.

0:12:12.1 AS: Twenty four year old kid listening to that when I was in my Deming seminars, and I was just like, "Whoa," listening to the way he responded to these older men and women that were in the audience was kinda shocking for me as a young guy.

0:12:23.3 DL: Yeah, a lot of times he's talking to CEOs, he's talking to major [chuckle] people in the military or politics or whatever kinda thinking. But to me, that's how deep this point is. So are you explaining the aims of the system? Well, that first implies that you do have an aim of the system. So, go back...

0:12:45.5 AS: Yeah, and so just to highlight for the listeners. So this very short point, number one that he makes starts with this discussion that we've just had about the meaning of a system. And now David is going on to talk about, "Okay, not just the meaning. Okay, now you got that. The question is, What is the aim of this system?"

0:13:07.0 DL: Right. So again, if we go back to our example of it was a third grade math teacher. Well, what is the aim of the system? [chuckle] Right? What are you... And are you working with students to actually produce the aim of the system, aim of this classroom, right? And it's not just a matter of just coming up with a phrase that you're gonna put on the wall or something, it's the idea that you're gonna keep communicating that constantly to people, what's the aim of this system. So if you think about if you're supposed to optimize a classroom, well, optimization, we're gonna get the highest number of students to the highest possible level we can get them to in the time that we have to do that, right? And so, if you start thinking like that, this changes your job, because you start to realize, "Wow, I'm supposed to optimize this group of students to the highest level I can get them in the nine months or however... 10 months or however long you have to work with these people. And that is confronting. And if you start to understand that, you start to realize why Deming was so adamant against grading systems, how grading systems just defeat kids.

0:14:36.4 DL: So instead of thinking that we're supposed to be spending all of your time figuring out a grading system... Oh, my gosh, over the years, I have heard so many grading systems. And teachers talk about five points for this and 10 points for that, and then I deduct 10 points if they don't do this and if it's not on time and... Wow. Well, pretty soon you start to think that's your job. That my job is to create this grading system, and then you forget all about, "No, my job is to optimize the system." So if I go through a chapter in math, and I'm teaching a particular concept, and then maybe I give students a test on that. And Deming's not saying he's against testing, he says he's against grading and ranking people. That's totally different. And if I give this class a test, and they all do really poorly on [chuckle] this section of math, I just don't say, "Oh well," and go on, because I haven't done my job, I haven't really optimized that. So one of the first things in the system you'd wanna do is to go back and figure out, "Hey guys, what happened?"

0:15:50.0 DL: We only got an average of 66% for the whole class on this concept, or... Did I not teach it well enough? Did I... And when I started asking students like colleagues and saying, "Hey, what happened?" they told me things that I didn't wanna hear, like, "You talk too fast," or, "I couldn't understand your accent," or, "We didn't have enough time to work," or just a whole host of real issues from their perspective about what was going on, how you could optimize the system. So then I've got two problems. I got the problems of today, that we gotta re-work this chapter, right? We gotta go back and do it again and optimize that so people do understand this concept. And then the problem of tomorrow was how do I make sure this never happens again, that I never find myself in this same place? But I don't just accept poor performance and just go on, because when you're doing that in a system, especially a system in education where learning is the product, right? Well, what I learn in... What I don't learn in September is going to be magnified by March, April, et cetera, 'cause I didn't learn those concepts back there that I need for subsequent concepts, and therefore, I'm gonna get further and further behind. So as teacher, you're actually just...

0:17:18.6 AS: That's so much damage.

0:17:19.7 DL: Yeah, you're just shooting yourself in the foot when you just go on and just accept poor performance. And so...

0:17:27.8 AS: Well, that... The corollary is of course in manufacturing, in any process, if you're not focusing on the beginning of that process and the design aspect, you build in all kinds of problems that multiply. And that's so critical. I'm just curious, so we've got the meaning of a system, and we've got the aim in the system, and you've talked about highest number of students to the highest level in the time that we have. Also, I'm thinking about my own... In my valuation masterclass boot camp, I always say, and I repeat it, and you said something about repeating, and it made me think, I always say... I mean, every single time I speak to my students, "The valuation master class is about transformation not information." And I set in their minds, the point is I want them to make a true transformation in their thinking. And just by identifying this aim, they become... They think, "What am I talk... What is Andrew talking about? I don't see a transformation, where would that come from? What would that be?" But I'm telling you at the last time that we meet on the final of the six weeks, each person explains the transformation that they went through.

0:18:45.2 AS: And it wasn't due... It wasn't mainly due to the content, it was due to the process and all the experience as a whole. I'm just curious.

0:18:58.2 DL: So you're making it clear...

0:19:00.9 AS: How does that clear?

0:19:00.9 DL: Yeah, you're making it clear the aim of that system. I'll ask, sometimes I'll ask teachers, I say, "What's the aim of your system?" And they'll look at me blankly. Sometimes I get answers like, "To get through it." Well, if that's your aim, that's exactly what you're gonna do, right? "I'm just gonna get through it. I don't care if people learn it or not. I don't care about the product of learning, I'm just gonna get through it. That's my job." And if upper level management is pushing that, and, "You must be here on January 12th, and you must be here on February 2nd. And if you're not, then you're gonna get in trouble, right?" Well, you're not really caring about the product of learning at all, right? Your job is just to get through it.

0:19:49.0 AS: And how does this differ from, let's say another... I don't know if you would call it an aim or not, but there's a final assignment in my valuation masterclass boot camp, which is that you've gotta do a complete valuation of a company, submit it and then present it. And that's the final... If they can't do that, they don't graduate. What's the difference between that final assignment versus me talking about transformation, not information?

0:20:18.0 DL: Well, I think what you're saying is really good, but I'd wanna look at my statistical data, the variation of that class, and if 40% of the students can't do that, there's something wrong with my process, right? So I've gotta spend extra time with these students and get them caught up and get... Because they weren't able to do that. And then I wanna take the feedback that I get now, apply it in the systems thinking can to my next master class and say, "Okay, how do I prevent the very problems that I had before?" And it's actually pretty easy to track until you get down to maybe only one student is not able to do that at the end of the master class. And then you lower the variation even more, so only one student every three years doesn't make it, right? Because I'm so good at dealing with special causes, issues, setting this up in the beginning, and talking about the aim, et cetera, that I've lowered the variation until it's just very, very rare. And that's really a special cause.

0:21:38.4 AS: Yeah. Well, we have cases...

0:21:38.4 DL: You have to visit a specialist.

0:21:40.2 AS: Where someone's gotten sick, or something in there.

0:21:42.4 DL: Of course.

0:21:42.6 AS: But I just to follow up on that, what I was noticing in my first couple of the... We're now on the seventh iteration, and in my first couple ones, I realized these final reports are not that great, because what's happening is, I'm overloading them with information for the first four weeks. And then in the last two weeks, I'm saying, "Now, finish this report." So I work with the team, and I said, "Why don't we assign them the company they're gonna value six weeks from now, on day one, number one. Number two is, the students were complaining there wasn't enough feedback, so why don't we break the assignments down week by week, and we're gonna tell 'em what they gotta get done by Friday, and then we have feedback Friday, where one member of their team presents that. And then, we give them feedback on it, and all of a sudden we're starting to build towards this final report week by week, and I just realized I should have been doing this all along as we go through this iteration, so it's a good reminder.

0:22:43.7 DL: Yeah. But you learned, and you listened to the students and they said, "Oh, we gotta have this kind of feedback all the way through." Okay, well, that means you as the manager, you have to make an adjustment in the system and the process of what you're doing, and then it's a PDSA cycle, right? You try one class and you say, "Okay, I'm gonna make this adjustment, and I'm gonna look at the data now and compare it to the data before and see, did it work? If it did, I'm gonna do this with all my classes, because I found out something that's making a huge difference for people through that process, so...

0:23:17.1 AS: Yeah. And the feedback was hard to get, David, when I could see the problem, the students talked about the problem that they were overwhelmed, and but what the answer to that was, was that, "Oh, man, they are asking for one-on-one feedback, and how can I do that with 100 students, with 500 students?" And then, the point is, is that once you raise the problem, then it opens your mind to think, "How could we solve it?" And my solution was, "Well, wait a minute. That they're making the same mistakes a lot of cases, so if we just create feedback Friday, we tell them, "You are getting feedback," and then we focus in on a small number of them, but let them all observe and then we accomplish the same thing that they wanted, but they wanted it in one-on-one, which wasn't scalable for us, which would have been difficult. So getting the information back, that's a bit painful, and I'm like, "I can't do that," but being aware of it then allowed us to come up with some alternative. So yeah.

0:24:19.1 DL: Because I don't know how many times I heard Dr. Deming say at seminars, "It's not the answer that's important, it's the question. And do you have that right?" So when you start asking the question, "Well, how do I do this with 100 students?" Okay. Well, now you're asking the right question. Right? And there's always a way. There's always a method. But instead of saying, "Oh, I can't do that, it's not possible. I don't have time for that." Well, okay, then it's never gonna happen then, is it?

0:24:49.3 AS: David, is that what my mom meant...

0:24:49.7 DL: But as soon as ypu start asking the right...

0:24:51.3 AS: When she said, "You're jumping to conclusions?"

0:24:53.1 DL: Yeah. As soon as you start asking the right question, then you'll start to solve the real problem. So I wanted to get to the third sentence here before we run out of time. There's a lot in just this one...

0:25:06.2 AS: It's amazing.

0:25:06.5 DL: Point he makes. But he says, Dr. Deming wasn't into all the pronouns and everything that we use today. We always just used he, so, but he says, "He teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims." Ah. So I've got this group of students, right, and so I've explained to them what a system is, and that we are a system, and we work to develop an aim for that system. Okay, now I have to optimize these people working together to achieve that aim, right? I remember when I first started, I couldn't get rid of just grading kids, and keep my job, I still had to... So I had to figure out, "Well, how do I do that within a grading system, even though Deming says we should get rid of the grading system. And so, when I started talking to students, I said, "What would be the aim here?" And somebody said, "Well, our aim should be that everybody in the whole class would get an A." And I was just shocked, because at that point, that never happened in my history.

0:26:23.0 DL: Well, and partly the reasons that it was never gonna happen, was a huge part me purposely was doing things to make sure that everybody wasn't achieving at a high level, and then that sounds just like heresy, but most of education is built on that. I can guarantee you, especially like a high school teacher, if suddenly all of your kids are getting As and you're turning in your grades and everybody's got an A...

0:26:49.5 AS: You're in trouble.

0:26:50.2 DL: Yeah, you're not gonna get an award. [laughter] You're gonna get visited, alright.

0:26:56.8 AS: The statistics guy will come down and say, "No, this is impossible."

0:27:00.1 DL: Yeah, the principal, or the superintendent, or, "You're destroying the whole grading system," all those kinds of things will come into play, but in reality, you should be having that person teach all the other teachers, what are they doing? What are you doing? And we're not talking about just giving them As just for the sake of giving them As. But they've established a system that almost everyone always get... Does A level work. Well, you're gonna have to do what Deming talks in this third sentence about how the work of the group supports these aims, so how do we work together as a class to support each other, so everybody can get there? That's totally different than the stereotypical classroom where I say, "Sit down, don't talk, don't talk to your neighbor. If you talk out loud, you're gonna get points taken off your grade," and those kinds of things. That's much different when I say, "Hey, we need to all work together." And so what happens if somebody struggles, or takes a little longer? Or what could we do to support them? That's a whole different kind of a way to think.

0:28:20.2 AS: Ah. There's so much to that, and the idea too, that sometimes teachers, and maybe managers in companies are really busy, and so they feel like, "I just don't have time to explain all of this." And so they end up leaving either employees, or students in the dark knowing that it is a little bit like driving in the foggy conditions. All the students see is ruts right in front of them, they're not seeing the aim. And as a result, they really... It's just a routine. "Just go in and do whatever they say, because we don't really know where we're going."

0:29:02.1 DL: Right. So we use the example of a classroom as a system here today, but whatever level of a system you are, if you're a principal, oh, well, your system is the whole school, right? If you're superintendent, your systems the whole district, or whoever you are he's talking about, your job is to do the same thing. Are you explaining to everybody in the entire organization what the system is, number one, and does it have an aim, and how can we work together to optimize this aim for the whole system? And I remember talking to a major CEO of a huge multi-international corporation, and that she was... Had worked with Deming also, and I said, "Well, how do you go about that?" She said, "Every single year, at the beginning of the year, I do 10 days of training with all managers worldwide." I thought, "Holy cow." [chuckle] That's huge, right? And who's doing the training? She is, the CEO, because she wants it coming directly from her, "This is our job, this is our aim, and our job is to optimize the system."

0:30:20.7 DL: And she didn't just do it once and then go back to her office. She said, "No, every year I've got new managers, and I've got new people come on board and we have new levels of discussion and new depth to take it to." Well, it's the same thing in a classroom, right? I'm better and better, I get faster and faster at setting the aim with this group of students. I get better and better coming up with metaphors of how to explain a system, even to preschool kids, or... And I get better and better at coaching people to support each other and help each other to achieve the overall aim. And then I use my statistics to see "Is it working? Am I actually getting better at that?"

0:31:08.2 AS: I was just thinking kind of a little bit of an inspirational thing, is to tell students that, "The aim here is to figure out the best way to get to where we're going for the benefit of the next class, the next group of students. And how could we take the way I'm explaining this particular subject and improve upon it so that the next group gets it even better? What an inspirational thing. So...

0:31:41.8 DL: Yeah, I remember a teacher that really took this to heart, and so what she would do is, she would take next year's students that she was going to have, and she'd have them come to a sort of a field trip to her class this year, and have her current students explain how we do things here, and what we do and everything. Now she's going upstream in the process in the system, and so kids were actually anticipating, "Hey, when we get to her class, oh, we have to do this, and we have to think like this." And then she had... She went to students that had left her class and asked them, "How did I do? Did you have the kind of learning that you needed for the next stage in that class," and then she used that feedback to change the system that she's in now, so...

0:32:31.9 AS: And that also makes you think about the wider system of a school, where there's a connection between the curriculum so that people see like, "Okay, there's a reason why our teacher, Mr. Tyler, that taught me pre-algebra, made me underline and write out each step in the solving of that algebra equation, because he knew I was gonna need it in the next level."

0:33:00.6 DL: Yeah, very good.

0:33:03.5 AS: So shall we wrap up?

0:33:05.5 DL: Yes.

0:33:07.3 AS: Okay. So just to wrap up for the listeners and the viewers out there, we're talking about... We're just kicking off a series on the role of a manager in education, and it's based upon Dr. Deming's writing in "The New Economics," in the Third Edition, it starts on page 86. And in the Second Edition, it starts on page 125. And the title of his list of 14 things is, "Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation." And just to review some of the things that we went through with that just first point, the first thing that we had talked about, is that classroom teacher is a manager of people ultimately, and we talked about three things that come out of that. The first thing that comes out of this first point is, you wanna teach what is the meaning of a system? The inputs, the process, the output, you've gotta start with that. If people don't understand that they're operating within a system, then they can't make the progress. Remember that students, as you've said, David, are not products, they're not inanimate objects, the product is actually the learning itself, and so the objective is to manage to optimize that learning process.

0:34:23.8 AS: The second thing that we talked about was that people need to understand what is the aim of the system? Okay, fine, it's good enough that we need to understand that things work as a system, but what are we aiming for? And you propose, "Well, maybe highest number of students to the highest level in the time that we have." So once people understand the aim, they understand where we're going, and then it brings the third part of this one, which is, so how does the work of the group support the aim? And I would say that this is part of the concept that Dr. Deming talked about, about bringing meaning to work, bringing the value to work that you have a role in this, and that is to get to that aim, so we have a common mission, a common goal, and we're working towards that, and that's an environment that I think everybody wants to either work in, in a school environment, or in a work environment. Is there anything you would add to that wrap up?

0:35:20.1 DL: Well, there's these phrases like joy in work that Deming talked about and joy in learning. How do you get there? Well, here you go, here's the first step. [chuckle] Because when I understand my job in that system, and my job is to help other people also achieve, I have joy in what I do. My relationships can flourish, right? I can share information, I could support other people, and that's really part of the human condition, and it makes it actually fun to go to school.

0:35:55.9 AS: Well, what a great way to end that discussion, fun to go to school. 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, and we are talking about "The New Economics," so you can get that on Amazon, just go to amazon.com and download it, or buy the hard cover. And 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 and this discussion today kind of explains where it comes from, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this new series on applying Deming to education, Andrew talks with John Dues, Chief Learning Officer at United Schools Network and long-time Deming practitioner. This is the first in a series of 12 episodes using John's school system as a case study for applying Deming in education. 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 here with featured guest, John Dues. John, are you ready to share your Deming journey? 0:00:17.7 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew I'm really glad to be here and looking forward to speaking with you today. 0:00:22.6 AS: Yeah, we've been talking about this for a while, and so it's exciting to kick it off. So let me introduce you to the audience. Ladies and gentlemen, John A. Dues is an accomplished education systems leader and Improvement Science scholar practitioner with more than two decades of experience. He is the Chief Learning Officer of the United Schools Network, where he directs the network's continual improvement fellowship and serves as an Improvement Advisor. He draws heavily on the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and his System of Profound Knowledge. He's currently continuing his education through the Improvement Advisor program at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, Massachusetts. John, can you take a little bit and tell us about the story about how you first learned about the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and what hooked you? 0:01:21.8 JD: Yeah, happy to do that. I sort of, I'm about 20 years into my career as an educator, and I sort of think about my career across four stages or so. Stage zero, I was a teacher, I didn't really know anything about classroom management or how to lead a class, it was a lot of trial and error type learning, and then I start to figure stuff out over time and stage one, I transitioned into now working at a series of Public Charter Schools is on the founding team of seven schools or non-profits sort of than this next stage. And I think a lot of my learning was sort of what I would call subject matter learning, so cognitive science, curriculum and lesson planning, how to use data to drive instruction, those types of things, and then about 2016 or so, I started learning about improvement science. I got an e-mail, it mentioned a book called Learning to Improve, and that got me sort of started on this path to learning the tools of improvement science, and I did that for four or five years, and then in about a couple of years ago, I stumbled across the W. Edwards Deming Institute website. 0:02:53.0 JD: And I had previously come to the website a couple of years earlier, and truth be told, I went to the System of Profound Knowledge page, it didn't make a lot of sense to me, and so I sort of let it lay for a year or two, and I came back to it in 2020, and not that all of a sudden it made sense. But there was something there that sparked this interest that's been going on for three years now, where I've devoured books, listened to interviews, and really gone on this journey to learn exactly what Dr. Deming was talking about with the System of Profound Knowledge. 0:03:36.5 AS: And when you think about the improvements that you're trying to do, or the problems that you were trying to solve, and then you started to see, let's say the System of Profound Knowledge, what was it that stood out as, Oh, that explains why this is happening, that explains why... What were some of those revelations and things that you could then bring back to your work... I'm just curious. How did that unfold? 0:04:06.2 JD: Yeah, it took some time. I mentioned sort of discovering the Institute website in about 2018 or so, and it not initially making a lot of sense, there's probably two things. One, candidly, I saw a System of Profound Knowledge, and I was like, Well, who talks like that? What is that... Like who calls their stuff profound knowledge? And then the second thing was when I looked over the four components, systems theory and the theory of variation and the theory of knowledge and psychology, frankly, most of it was incomprehensive to me, and a couple of years later, I come back, I'm a little further in this learning journey, and I go back to it, not that I had any type of instant revelation or anything like that, it has taken a lot of deep study, it did start to slowly make sense and what I realized... In one of the books I was reading is sort of this idea that there's these two complementary types of knowledge, one is subject matter knowledge, so in my case, it's those things I mentioned, knowing how to plan lessons, knowing how to do classroom management, the things that an educator that needs to know how to do. 0:05:28.3 JD: And then there was this whole other bucket of knowledge, which I realized when Deming said System of Profound Knowledge he meant the components interact, that's the system part. And then the profound part is just that you have a deep knowledge about your organization across those four components, and I realize there's this whole other sort of bucket of knowledge that we're not attending to, that tells us some of the most important information we need to know about our organizations, and it's only when you bring those two things together, the subject matter knowledge with the profound knowledge that you actually then can transform your organizations. And so that realization along the way was a big part of me sort of latching on to Dr. Deming's philosophy. And I'd say the second thing that I did very early on, besides reading the books and listening to a lot of the Deming Institute's podcast interviews was I started talking to people that appeared on those interviews, and so I reached out to Kelly Allan and then he turned me on to David Langford, who's probably the guy doing Deming in Education and started relationships with both of them, and they were very, very generous with their time and expertise, and that really allowed me to clarify my thinking now because I have this expert in Deming philosophy helping to guide me answer questions, and sort of that rounded out some of the knowledge I was doing in my self-study. 0:07:02.4 AS: Which I guess accelerates things. In my age when I was young, I sat into two seminars with Dr. Deming teaching and yeah. Okay, that answers a lot of questions, but we don't have that luxury anymore, so it's gotta be number one, reading the materials, watching the videos and all that, but also checking our understanding. And I know both Kelly and David are great resources. Kelly helped me when I was writing my book, Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points to help me think about things, and I know there's even more, so much more to learn, and I think that's where... What I think about the profound knowledge aspect, and I think what you said was, there's kind of... You have to have these two components. And its subject matter aspect, that's just a given when you're teaching and understanding how to teach, but then this whole other thing about the system aspect of it, the psychology aspect of that. 0:08:09.0 AS: And I have a question for you about education, let's say I graduated from high school, from a pretty good public high school in Ohio, and I'm just curious, if we went back to that school today, and I spent... I don't know what it was, seven hours a day at school, arrive at 8:00 and leave at 3:00 or whatever that was. I spent X amount of time at school and I accumulated X amount of knowledge during that time, and my question to you is, if we go now from 1983 when I graduated to here we are 50 years later, or so or 40... 50 years later, so now we're... Here we are in the future with so much knowledge, so much experience, our students are attending high school for either the same time and accumulating much more knowledge, or are they attending school for a much shorter time and accumulating the same amount of knowledge, or are we doing the same thing? 0:09:28.3 JD: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's sort of a relevant Deming quote that's something to the effect of "experience teaches nothing" and it's, basically it was saying, you have to have an underlying theory and then you build the knowledge and testing that theory and see how it works in the real world. So in a lot of respects, I think in the 40 years or so since you were in high school, probably a lot of schools haven't changed much, they do the same thing year in and year out, they're not really learning, they're... Like I said, across that 40-year time period, it's just sort of a repetition. Now, of course, if you went into that high school, there would be differences like the type of technology you'd see in classrooms. I think by and large, when you're talking about school, effectiveness people will argue about this, I think depending on how you're measuring that outcome, I think that schools are, generally speaking, better maybe than they were 40 years ago. Now, the problem is that better typically means that test scores are better, and of course, there's variation in this in both time and place and the variation, I don't think it's linear. 0:10:58.1 JD: I think there are ups and downs in different places based on a whole host of factors like the pandemic or even... There's less spending in schools out of the 2008 hiring crisis... Oh sorry, housing crisis, and those had an impact on things like test scores, but I think with Deming, and he was very interested obviously in education, he was a professor for 50 years, as you know at New York University. The subtitle of his last book had education in the subtitle. What he was really talking about when he was thinking about talking about education was transformation, and that was a complete change in state. And so when I hear your question, that's what I think of... I think of have schools, if they know the Deming philosophy, have they undergone a transformation following Deming's teachings, and I would say by and large, the answer to that question, not withstanding the sort of test score question, the answer to the transformation question is no. I think by and large, that's not what I've seen across my career. 0:12:11.6 AS: And if we think about a person listening into this conversation who's an educator and they're looking for new answers to maybe old problems. [chuckle] And they come across this podcast, they come across the material like you did, what's the hope that you can provide to them about how they could benefit either individually by thinking about and learning about Dr. Deming's teachings for their performance as a... Maybe as a teacher or as an administrator, and what hope or excitement can you provide them if they're an administrator of a school thinking, "Hmm, this is interesting, maybe this could provide me some things that I need to start to think differently about it." Tell me a little bit about the journey of you then learning about Deming and then start to... Bringing it into your institution. 0:13:11.2 JD: Yeah, there's a few things that I think of. So one thing is, if I've discovered the Deming philosophy and I'm an educator, how do I bring that to my school, or how do I bring that to my classroom or if I"m a systems leader, how do I bring that to my school district? And I think one of the things that I learned from David is you preach to the masses and work with the willing, and so thinking about intrinsic motivation, which I know David has talked about on your podcast, is you want people to opt in to going on this sort of learning journey with you, so that's one thing I think of. 0:13:50.8 JD: The second thing I think of is, and this was from David as well, when he started doing the Deming philosophy in his classroom and using the System of Profound Knowledge, he was a classroom teacher. And so everybody has this circle of influence, this circle that they have control over, and in his case, he didn't have control over the school building, the high school where he was... He didn't have control over the school district at the time, but he did have control over his classroom, and it was basically through applying the Deming ideas in his classroom that people started coming and saying, "Hey, what are you doing in here? There's something very different that's going on here," and then the principal got so interested in it, he said, "I'd like you to sort of teach people how to do this building-wide," and he became the director of continuous improvement there at his high school in Alaska. 0:14:42.6 JD: And then ultimately, he was encouraged by Deming to go off and consult across the world to bring these ideas to schools all over the world. So I think that's another thing that I think of. I also think that in some sort of ways, you can learn aspects of the Deming philosophy and start to apply them tomorrow. So when I think about something like knowledge about variation, I may know nothing about the technical aspects of a control chart, for example, but what I can do is I can take any data that I have that occurs across time and just plot those dots on a simple line chart and start to understand what that data looks like versus having those numbers in a spreadsheet, and then there's other aspects that do take time. 0:15:34.1 JD: I think one thing that Deming said in one of his books was, there's no instant pudding, and basically he meant that when it comes to organizational transformation, you're talking about a four or five or even 10-year journey and beyond to get this to take root in an organization. At the same time, it doesn't take 1000 people. And I heard David talk about this, and I heard Deming talk about this idea of you need to capture and educate and bring along about the square root of the number of people in your organization that really have a strong grasp of the System of Profound Knowledge and so if you're in a roughly 100-person organization, like mine I need 10 people that have learned these ideas and are interested in spreading them to their classroom or to their school, or in our case, into the network as a whole. 0:16:32.2 AS: And how did it go finding those people, and as you say, it's voluntary, you want those people to come, you wanna attract them, attraction rather than promotion. How did that journey go for you internally? 0:16:43.9 JD: Well, it's definitely ongoing. It's definitely ongoing, and I think it's going really well, it's a process, we're probably about two years into that process, and so in some ways it's now a core part of who we are. So a good example of that is going back to this idea of knowledge about variation two years ago, none of us had any knowledge of what a control chart or a process behavior chart was, and now we have dashboards that are shared system-wide on all kinds of measures that are important to us, where we're now looking at data over time and realizing that until we sort of understand the patterns that we see in that data, we don't really know anything about whatever that area is. So that's something that's taken hold and we've spread it pretty quickly across the network. Before we would say we overreact to maybe like a single test score or attendance is down this month. Now we step back and say, "Okay, what does that look like over 12 months, for 15 or 20 months? What are the patterns? Is it sort of a common cause, is it just a part of our system, or is there a signal here that we need to pay attention to." 0:18:01.4 JD: So in many aspects like that it's taken hold and in other aspects, it does take longer to implement and that... A good example there is, Deming said abolish grades, and he was pretty unequivocal about that he didn't good grades in his graduate statistical courses at NYU. That's a much harder thing to change, it's a much harder thing to get people to understand why he said that, even for myself to learn sort of... Why did he say that? Is it feasible? What's the replacement? Those all have... There's practical considerations when you're in a school system, you have to give grades, you have to have report cards, or you think you do anyway, and so things like that take time, and we're not there yet on some of Deming's ideas, like abolishing grades or changing our grading practices. 0:19:01.4 AS: It's interesting, one of the beautiful things about having a private company is that you can implement these things without kind of... I don't know, kind of regulatory oversight or that type of stuff. You just can implement it, and so there's an enormous constraint in that field. Now, let me ask you about the charts that you talk about. I wanna ask two questions. First question is, from your experience of having, looking at different charts related to education, if someone's listening to this, that it is working in a school or a classroom or whatever, they're looking at it, what would be one chart that you think that they could start on today and implement? And that's the first question I have, and the second one is about how do you prevent people from obsessing about the data in a chart and help them understand that this is about understanding a system, it's not obsessing about some KPI type of thing. So, curious what you would say to that. What would be a chart that someone could start with? 0:20:13.8 JD: That's a really good question. I have a lot of different ideas. One thing because it's so prevalent in our education system it's pretty much across the United States, is state test scores. Now in some of the aspects or... Yeah, I mean in some aspects, it's not the best thing to put in a chart because they typically only happen one time a year towards the end of the year. So it's hard to gather enough data to sort of use in practice on a day-to-day basis. On the flip side, I do think it's helpful to put something like state test scores, even though they only happen on an annual basis in a control chart or a process behavior chart, because I think people forget, frankly, they forget what happened just a couple of years ago in their system when it comes to state test scores. And so you see all these documents created all the way from State Departments of Education to individual schools that are marketing to parents in their area that basically are writing fiction about their test scores. "We improved from last year." Well, yeah, technically, maybe it went up 2%, but then it's down 5% from two years ago. And so I think plotting the dots to your test score data over 12 or 15 years gives a sense of how the data is bouncing around in average probably. 0:21:41.8 AS: Okay. 0:21:43.0 JD: And not in a meaningful way. I think in most circumstances. And I think allowing them to see those patterns is really important. And I think another sort of helpful layer to that is annotate that chart with things that have happened in either your school, your district, or even at a state policy level. Label when the test format changed. Label when the state standards change. Label the year that what kids needed to do to be you considered proficient, the cut score for the proficiency, label when that changed, 'cause these are all things that have happened in the last five or six years in most states, including Ohio where I am. And when you start to label those things and then you see the ups and downs that are associated with those labels, you start to say, "Oh, this picture of what's been happening in my system makes a lot more sense." And most of that is completely sort of out of the picture for most people. We don't really remember what happened three or four years ago, even if we have a general idea, we don't have it pinpointed to a specific year. When do we start testing on computers instead of paper and pencil? That's another example. Those all have impacts on tests scores. 0:23:01.2 AS: Okay. That's a great one for the administrators, but if you were in a classroom and you say, "I don't really have control over what goes on in my school so much, but I do enjoy this Deming journey, and I want to start to bring some of that into my classroom," what would be one chart that you would make? 0:23:23.1 JD: A couple of ideas that come to mind, maybe two, I'd share with you. One would be something like homework completion. What percent of the kids are doing either in class or it doesn't have to be homework, it would be in-class assignments? And I think the key here is, one, you have to operationally define what completion means. And that can vary by a classroom as long as everybody's on the same page. And then with that, put it up on the wall, on a piece of chart paper, because so often the things that we want kids to improve are hidden from them. They don't... Oh, I didn't know that 35% of the kids in this class didn't do the assignment from the day before right, but if they start to see that, and then we start to talk about it, and then we start to say, "Well, what are the barriers or obstacles to completion?" 0:24:13.9 JD: And then kids start to say, "Well, how can I help you?" You start to create this completely different mentality in your classroom. One classroom also that we had in our network of schools, it was a fourth grade Science teacher, she started tracking how much joy did you find in today's lesson? And so she would actually... The kids would do a short little survey and assign a number out of 100%. And then they would also have us. There was a spot in the survey to say, "What did you like about it, what didn't go so well? Or whatever, what could I improve?" This is the teacher saying that to fourth graders and they're charting that on a piece of paper. And then she's starting to learn, "Okay. These types of lessons are engaging, these types of lessons are not so engaging. The kids want more of this, enjoyment goes up when we do this as a class." And then they did that over the course of three or four months, and slowly over time, you see the engagement levels, the joy raising, kids are happier. They're more engaged in class. The teacher is having more fun. And so those are just sort of two things that I've seen done in our network of schools that I think had a really positive impact. 0:25:33.9 AS: That's exciting. And I think it goes back to the intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And ultimately kids wanna be engaged, everybody wants to be engaged in what they're going through. And the reason why they disengage oftentimes, is because we don't involve them. 0:25:55.9 JD: Right. Yeah, I agree, 100%. I think kids are really... Students and schools are the improvement secret weapon. I think a mindset shift for me was when you think about in your system, who is the worker? And a lot of educators think when you ask them that question, they'll say, "Well, teachers." And not that there's a right or wrong answer to this, but I think it's actually the students, because the thing that has to be created, high quality learning has to happen in their minds. So if they're the ones where the work has to happen, they have to be the workers. So I think of students as the workers and I think more of the teachers as the supervisors of that work. 0:26:43.6 AS: That's a great way to think about it, because it also kind of pushes it down for the teachers to think that their objective is really creating that environment for learning. I wonder when you started bringing the Deming philosophy into schools and your operations there, was there one point that was like there was resistance to or what do you think is the hardest to digest for teachers or a school system when they're looking at this? 0:27:21.6 JD: That's a really good question. I think in my own sort of personal opinion, I think that a lot of the Deming philosophy is paradoxical to typical management practices. And I think there's a lot of counterintuitive ideas in the philosophy. So I think you have to sort of be open to that from the start. And so when I first started talking with people about these ideas, I did it, both internally and with some people externally, and I just put together a presentation, I said, "I'm gonna show you this thing and I wanna collect your thoughts." And one of the first things I said is, "Before I say anything, I want you to have in your mind preemptively that you're gonna experience some serious cognitive dissonance with these ideas because they're so different than what you've heard before." So I did that as a primer, so people sort of had that expectation. I think, generally, what I find from folks is openness to the ideas. I think there's a challenge in unpacking, going back to something like I was talking about abolish grades. Unpacking why exactly did he say what he said? Whether it's abolish grades or any number of other points that he made. 0:28:52.4 JD: I think there's this sort of realization for a lot of people that when you say, "Well, what's your philosophy, or what's your educational philosophy, what's your management philosophy?" They don't really have an answer. I didn't have an answer, frankly, before I started studying this stuff. And that's a little bit convicting. And then once you decide to go on the journey, you realize, "Why do we do the things that we do?" You could ask that about a thousand things a day, whether it's a policy, a practice, just something we do, 'cause that's the way we've always done it here. And again, it's a little daunting when you start to think about, "Well, what is the underlying reason that we do this?" And so... 0:29:40.3 AS: It kind of shakes the foundation of your thinking. 0:29:43.1 JD: Yeah. It shakes the foundation, so you have to be open to that. And I think that's where the, "No instant pudding," quote from Deming comes in, is that you really have to be committed to this. And I think about a story I read in a book, Henry Neave's book, The Deming Dimension, where he basically says, "A Board engineer, a quality control guy comes to a Deming seminar one week, a four-day seminar, goes back the following week and he read the 14 Points. And one of them's about inspection and not relying or overlying on inspection. And he went the next week and fired all the inspectors in his plant." I think it was a Ford Plant. 0:30:32.7 JD: And basically, Henry Neave says, "That's not the right approach. You have to understand why you're doing what you're doing first before you do it." And you have to remember that that thing, in this case, it's inspection is a part of your system, so you can't remove it before you understand why you're doing that and what you're gonna replace it with. And that should probably happen deliberately and probably over time and not the next Monday after you've heard this idea. So it's a little of both. It's how do you start moving the needle and then how do you do it thoughtfully with an underlying understanding of the theory under all of these ideas? 0:31:13.7 AS: Another question is, if we think about the... Really, you have to, if you're bringing the Deming philosophy into a school as an example, you have to kind of convince administrators and you have to kind of... Let's say educate administrators, you gotta educate the teachers, and also there's the kids. And I'm curious, what are the things that teachers really get from the Deming like, "Okay, that makes sense." And let's strip away some of the complexity sometimes in the way that it's presented, but let's just take some of the basic principles, what are some of the things that the kids would naturally get like that makes sense to them? I'm just curious what your observations have been there. 0:32:01.8 JD: That's a really good question. How would I answer that? I think I'd start with myself first. I think because Deming talked about an individual transformation has to happen as a precursor to a larger organizational transformation. And so for me, it was starting to take many of the ideas I was reading and then think about the application in my own life, maybe as a student myself. And as I did that and I thought through those things, I never came up against something that didn't make sense to me. I think the trick is, especially for adults, is that I think in a lot of ways, a lot of people would latch on to the ideas for themselves, but this won't work for... Other people need something different. [laughter] 0:33:06.1 JD: I think that's... A good example of it is like performance appraisals. They've never been effective for me. I never have gotten great feedback from them, or I've felt they're unfair, or I got rated on my use of technology in my classroom early in my career, but there were no working computers, but everybody else needs a performance appraisal. So you come across a lot of stuff like that I think what you have to say, "Yep, that works for me in my life." And we have to take that same lesson and apply it to others, that's one thing I think about. It wasn't the exact question you asked, but that's one thing I think about. I actually find... There's things to learn in terms of teachers, but I actually think a lot of teachers sort of have a natural inclination for the general Deming perspective, Deming philosophy. I think things like grading, I think teachers would latch on to Deming's idea of abolishing grading, I think actually much faster than maybe the administrators would in a lot of ways. 0:34:13.3 AS: I think that would be a hard one for them. I remember when I went to my first Deming seminar and I was a young supervisor at a Pepsi factory in the US. And I appreciate that Pepsi put me into those seminars 'cause it really helped me, and I think I brought back stuff to the Pepsi factory in Torrance, California. But the one thing that really struck a cord with me is I didn't realize I was operating within a system. I saw individual efforts of myself and others and everybody running around trying to get things done, but I didn't see that the limitation on the output of our activity was, to a large extent, determined by the system within which we were operating. If we didn't have the resources, if we had an accounting department that was just trying to cut cost, and so we couldn't get the replacement parts for the machinery. I totally understood that once I studied Deming and learned about that. And so that's why I'm kind of thinking about what makes sense to teachers. 0:35:27.8 AS: So let's talk about kids for a moment. I think about joy in work, as Deming says, and just the intrinsic motivation. And I think about kids, they're just full of positive energy and rolling around, and there's just so much positive energy and it's like the world just starts beating them down over time. It's hard enough to overcome some of the challenges you're facing with your family at home, and then you come into a school and you've gotta operate within this framework. And it's like, I suspect that kids would appreciate the idea of bringing joy to the classroom, but what have you seen from kids? 0:36:11.5 JD: Well, I think you're onto something when you say, as kids sort of go on in their educational career, a lot of times are sort of beat down by certain aspects of the educational system. So I think one thing is there's a process to undo some of that. And that's probably what I see most with my own kids or students that I'm working with in our network. So if you ask a student or if you ask your own kids something like, "How was school today? Or how are you doing in science?" What they'll often tell you is a grade. "I got... I got... " "Okay, you had a test today. How was it?" "Well, I got a B." "Well, what did you learn?" And often times it's really hard to pull that out because they've been so trained to think about school as a series of grades or a series of silence, a series of percentages versus what did you learn? What are you taking from that? What does that mean? So I see a lot of that. I also see a lot of... There's a lot of reward and punishment that is a part of a lot of school systems, whether it's treasure boxes or reward systems in the classroom. And I was just as guilty as a teacher and frankly as a principal in that other school of having those systems. 0:37:49.0 JD: But when you say at the end of the day, "How was your day?" And they sort of tell you back what they were doing in the behavior point system versus what did they learn, and who did they talk to that day, and what did they take from the day. I think you quickly realize that even if the behavior system or the grading system had good intentions behind it, that kids are often experiencing those systems in a very different way. And so I think kids are very open to it, just like adults when you explain it, I think what's... The tough part is that they've been in the system that has all of these different sort of things that are wearing them down. And I think you have to unpack that and untie that and sort of re-educate I guess this, re-train them to think about school and academics and how they're interacting in school in a different way. 0:38:46.0 AS: And it makes you think that students are the secret weapon of the implementation of some of this, because I think there's a lot of... At first, when you come across the Deming material, it doesn't feel intuitive. It feels hard sometimes to understand, it can be confusing, but once you start to realize and understand it, you start to realize that there's a lot of intuitive nature of things. And a kid can observe random outcomes, and then they see adults rewarding random and then they're like, "Well, Johnny just got lucky in that particular thing or whatever." And so they can understand a lot of things, so maybe we can say that there is a little bit of a secret weapon there. 0:39:33.0 JD: Yeah, and kids are very intuitive, and so I think in going back to some of those rewards systems, I think one of the things that happens and we maybe don't pay enough attention to it, is as soon as there is a reward system, there's a game that starts. And so a good example of this is there's a number of reading, online reading programs where kids read a book and then they take a quiz that sort of assesses comprehension. And on the face it seems like a positive thing, oh, kids have read X number of words, I'll hear there's a lot, or X number of books, and they weren't reading before and this program gets him to read. But when you start to unpack that, you go ask a kid, "Well, what do you think of this program?" "Ah it's pretty boring, but I do get prizes." Or something like, "Well, I'm impressed, you've read 10 books this in the past couple of months, and that seems to be because you're doing this program." And he's like, "No, I just pick short books because I know I can read them faster." 0:40:41.9 JD: And so as soon as you start to put those you take sort of intrinsic nature of enjoying a book for the book's sake, for the story, and you instead tie it to some type of point system. There's all types of things, many of which are hidden that are the motivations just under the surface for why kids are doing what they're doing that you're missing because you're not talking to them, and not really listening to how they're responding to that reward system. So like even a positive thing like a reading program, that seems good on the face can often have an underlying darker nature that's going on. 0:41:17.9 AS: Yeah, and I think... I wanna wrap up this section of the discussion, and I think what I would like to wrap that up with is taking on what you were just saying is that when you are measuring anything and you find yourself wanting to add on additional measures, because they're getting... Things are getting disincentivized. So okay, now you say, "Okay, well, we've gotta track it by the length of books or we gotta track their eyeballs, or we gotta... " Every time that you find yourself having to add on some different type of measurement, I think it's a good time to step back and say, "What are we really doing here, and do we really understand the incentives that we're... The activities that we're really incentivizing by this, and are we really getting to our goal of that." And that's a painful discussion because as you say, you're still sometimes, you're gonna have to search for what's the replacement, what's the solution. But when you find yourself trying to add on more things to try to box the kids in, you're probably now caught up in this system of testing and scoring and measuring that is going out of control. 0:42:41.2 JD: Yeah, I think that's right. And the thing that I think of, and I can't remember where I saw it, if it was a Deming thing, or maybe I heard it from David Langford, it was a shift in perspective. In terms of your role as a teacher, or if you're the CEO of a company or the principal school, whatever it is, many of those folks myself included at one point, when you ask them what their job is, many people will tell you it's to motivate my students or motivate the people that work in my company. But probably a better frame is not to motivate them, but rather to remove the obstacles to them finding joy in learning or joy in work, and that's a different mindset, right? And so instead of incentivizing or coming up with different metrics in the case of that reading program, what I would be thinking about is, have I created a comfortable spot for kids to read in the classroom? Is there a good supply of books with lots of different interesting topics? Have I talked to kids about what they're interested in reading? Have I carved out a time in the day where everybody is reading? And so then instead of me pushing, now I'm removing obstacles that would prevent kids from reading in that example, and creating an environment that makes it much more likely that kids are gonna enjoy it and wanna keep doing it in an intrinsic fashion, rather than trying to monitor extrinsically. 0:44:11.0 AS: So let's wrap up by talking about what you've been working on, you've been working, you've been writing and maybe you can share where you're at and what you're producing. And then after that, I think we'll highlight to the audience what we're gonna do in the future episodes. So maybe tell us about what you're working on and kind of where that's at, and then why you're doing it, and what's the value that you think it can bring. 0:44:37.9 JD: Yeah, I'm actually, I'm writing a book on applying Deming's ideas to schools, it's sort of the tentative title is Win-Win, W. Edwards Deming the System of Profound Knowledge in the Science of Improving Schools. So I've actually found a publisher, I've completed a draft and submitted it to them, and so we're working right now on getting the book published. And so I'm hopping by the end of the school year that'll be out and published and available for folks, so that's the big thing I've been working on, I actually started in September of 2020. So it's been quite the project to bring it from just an idea to an almost published project, so hopefully soon that'll be ready. 0:45:25.6 AS: Exciting, and I think that leads us into we're gonna... You and I are gonna have some conversations about that book and about the things that you're learning and teaching throughout that, and we'll have a series that we'll be going through, which I'm excited to learn from you. Ultimately I have businesses, and I apply Deming's thinking in business, but also I'm a teacher so I enjoy everything that I can learn from people like yourself and David, and I know the audience will learn. So let me ask one last question, and that is, why Deming? And why now? Why is it important that it's Deming and why is it important that we are looking at this now? 0:46:14.1 JD: That's a really good question, I would say I consider myself a learner, I read a lot, I watch a lot, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and across my 20 years I've never found anything quite like the Deming philosophy. You search for these magic or silver bullets and they really don't exist, but the Deming philosophy really has been that thing for me, because I think what I didn't realize is the importance of an underlying philosophy for then everything else that you're doing. And that foundation is what the System of Profound Knowledge has really provided to me in my work. And I also mentioned as I thought through the ideas pretty deeply, and wrote about those ideas in the book, every time I had some dissonance initially with the Deming idea and then I put it in my own life, I worked it out and said, "Yep no, that... He was exactly right. Have we thought about how we interact in our organizations, how we interact with each other." And so not that the dissonance has gone away, not that I understand all of the ideas perfectly, but every time I've tested it and tried to falsify the philosophy or the theory I haven't been able to do it. And there's nothing else that I can say that I've worked with that has held up to that scrutiny like this philosophy. 0:47:49.7 AS: Fantastic. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show, and I wonder, do you have any parting words for our audience? 0:48:00.1 JD: Yeah, I think one of my favorite Deming quotes is really short and to the point, he said, "I make no apologies for learning." And I think that's a really good way to end the conversation, and what he meant by that was, you might have not have been doing it right before, but there's this opportunity to learn this new way. And that's sort of the opportunity that I've taken as I've discovered Deming's work.\ 0:48:28.4 AS: And that concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with my favorite quote from Dr. Deming, and that is people are entitled to joy in work.

Are tests like the SAT - and a potential National Merit Scholarship that goes with a good score - the same as grading or ranking students? David and Andrew discuss the differences.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today, his topic is, The Difference Between Testing and Ranking Students. David, take it away.

0:00:29.4 David Langford: Okay, well, if you're an educator, that should be a trigger enough for you to pay attention and listen to this. [chuckle] So I wanna tie this in with Deming thinking and the difference and what people are trying to do with equity and all kinds of things that are going on today. And it's pretty relevant too, because I just watched a newscast that a school district was delaying or even not announcing their National Merit Scholars because of the fear that it would make other children feel bad because they weren't recognized like that. So it's kind of like what Dagwood set in the comics one time sounds like a good idea till you think about it. I wanted to discuss that today because over the last 40 years, I've run seminars and talked about Dr. Deming's focus of rating and ranking and grading, and he's just really against grading, and I pulled up a quote from The New Economics, he says, our educational system would be improved immeasurably by abolishment of grading. Okay. So there's a difference between grading and actually just testing. So let's just talk for a minute about the National Merit Scholarship Program. So I just read some stats on that, about one... Over one million students actually apply for a National Merit Scholarship each year, and only about 50,000 are selected, and how are those kids selected?

0:02:09.4 DL: Well, when you're a junior in high school, you take the SAT test, and if you have one of the 50,000 scores of the highest in the nation, then you could be named as a national merit scholar, and that could mean a lot of things. I mean, it could help you get scholarships to universities, it could really look good on your resume for the rest of your life, it could mean a lot of things. So is that the same thing that Deming talks about by grading and ranking people, and I would say no, because what really should be happening instead of thinking that by honoring or naming people that, or recognizing people that took this test and got one of the top 50,000 scores that that's gonna make other people feel bad, therefore we're not gonna announce that or we're not going to recognize that is not the same thing. When you're grading and ranking people, you actually have to grade them, grade their performance in order to rank them, and talking about Deming's concept of profound knowledge, the variation in that is huge, and the psychology in that is huge. I'm sure that almost every single person can relate to a classroom where they probably told somebody, I just, I don't think this teacher likes me. I don't know why but I just don't think they like me for some reason, and no matter how hard...

0:03:42.4 AS: And it's confirmed at the end of the semester when I get my grade.

0:03:46.9 DL: Yeah, no matter how hard I try or whatever, I just don't think they like me, and I know it's happened to me at times, and I just... Well, I just, I got choices that I could drop the class or I could just put up with it and go through with that. So psychological things like that could enter in and then all the social-economic stuff that we've got going on now could enter in and ethics could enter in, and all kinds of things could enter into someone giving someone a grade, like in a classroom and then ranking them against other students, right? That's a totally different thing. If I could give this, the school district and I'm not gonna name them 'cause I don't wanna get in trouble or anything. But if I could give this school district advice, what you should be trying to do is get as many students as possible into that level of National Merit ranking, because it's not limited, as far as I know, it's not limited that you can only have one per school or something. You could have as many as qualify, and that would show what an elite school you are actually, that you have more people qualifying for a national merit scholarships than any place else. And drive other people to think, Okay, if they can do that, I can do that, right.

0:05:11.1 AS: And can we... Can we go into that more detailed, just so we really break it down. To understand when someone, I guess, voluntarily as a student does with this National Merit Scholarship, goes into some sort of competition or measurement or something like that, that that's different from a school teacher and a school administrator observing the behaviors and actions of the students and then coming up with a ranking of that environment that they're living in every day. Explain how that's different.

0:05:43.4 DL: Yeah, just a test that they take and they all go in to the room, 300 kids go in a room and they take this test and whoever gets the best score qualifies. That's all there is to it. So you have no idea if they're a male, female, tall, short, skinny or not. None of that enters in, so there's no real psychology to it, you just go in and take the test and if you gotta... You get the score, you get that, you get to ranking or it's not really... It's not a ranking it's, you just achieve that level of being able to pass that test.

0:06:17.6 AS: And as a... Okay, so from a school perspective, I can see that, then the next question is, from a bigger picture society perspective, is that person now ranking themselves or is there some problem with that from a country perspective that people are entering a competition like that?

0:06:37.4 DL: Well, would I want to put in the hard work it takes? Because when I look at kids that achieve that level of performance, I see years and years, 10, 12 years, some cases of hard work of always working hard to be a top student, and they may or may not be ranked as the 4.0 students in their schools. That has nothing to do with that, but they may be really good at taking tests or they'd be really good at studying for this, or they may have family members that are super supportive, maybe you have two parents that are both college professors, right. Well, I would think that they would have more emphasis on a National Merit Scholarship and the importance of that and be communicating that throughout this child's entire life than a sharecroppers child in Georgia, that has nothing to do with the school system, except taking his kid to school every day, right? Those are totally different situations.

0:07:46.3 AS: And in that case, if that person, let's say that person's... Let's say a family has... This is the first kid to have a chance to go to university as an example, and if that family found out about this National Merit Scholarship and they told their son or daughter, Hey, why don't you set that as a goal to try to take that exam when you are 14, or 16, or 18? Is there a problem with that?

0:08:14.8 DL: No, I don't see any problem with that at all. You have a bar that you're setting, and if you get over this bar, then basically you win, but it has nothing to do with rating and ranking the individuals.

0:08:28.4 AS: And it's part of it that it's like a third party, a separate entity that you're going to. It's kind of a voluntary thing as opposed to a system that's imposed on the teachers and the students, and everybody in the school.

0:08:40.8 DL: Has nothing to do with your school, basically, you could be the best or worst schools in the world and either pass this test or not pass. And it's not about passing his test, it's who actually gets the best scores. One of the top 50,000 scores for you to be named this.

0:09:02.3 AS: And if we look at these teachers in that school that have decided and the administrators who have decided to do this action, let's just say that their intentions are good, in the one sense that, like we've talked about here, when a student does really well in assignment, the idea that you've talked about is, Hey, how did you do that? Why don't you explain that to the other students and share what you're doing and stuff. I suspect what they're afraid of is that it's glorifying these really elite students within the school, and that the other students don't, either don't get the opportunity or they feel less of themselves. The teachers are trying... Let's just assume that the teachers are trying to do something good, but they're maybe misdirected. What would be a better idea within the school?

0:09:56.6 DL: Well, I wouldn't refrain at all from recognizing those students and saying, Hey, these are the ones that took the test and are now National Merit Scholars and, I suppose there could be an over-glorification of that, that you could go overboard with that, but to those students that are actually taking that test, they obviously know what it means, right. And the recognition that could come with it, and that could be at their college scholarships that you're a National Merit Scholar and that, I could look really good going to a major university or something, and it could actually end up in dollar values. And I think that's what are the things that the parents were complaining about is by not naming these kids in a timely fashion, apparently they withheld the names of these kids, because they withheld the names of these kids, some of them would miss out on being able to put that on their scholarship applications to universities, or even if you're just going to go get a job, that would look good on a resume and things like that, but the difference to me is that's not a rating and ranking, it's simply a count data, right.

0:11:15.7 DL: Everybody takes the test and whoever got the top scores, then they get the recognition. So, I think is all there is to it.

0:11:23.8 AS: If we were to look at another parallel and just trying to understand how Deming thinks and this concept, let's take a wrestling team as an example, where there is a team score kind of thing and an individual performance as opposed to, let's say a football team where really it's a team performance. And let's say that the wrestling coach has worked hard with their team and they're doing really well, and they've got a couple of really strong wrestlers and they compete and they win the state championship, and two of their wrestlers win the best in their weight class or whatever that is. Should that be celebrated by the school as an accomplishment, or is that rating and ranking, how do we view something like that?

0:12:15.2 DL: No, of course, it should be celebrated and kids recognized, etcetera, because those things take a tremendous amount of hard work, I don't know if you've ever were a wrestler, but I did that once upon a time.

0:12:28.4 AS: I looked at it once and I thought, Yeah, I can't work. I'm not gonna work that hard on that 'cause that looks brutal.

0:12:35.1 DL: Yeah. So not only do you get your own personal score, but those scores are all added up as a team, and that team score is what determines if your team beat somebody else's team, or you become the state championship team, etcetera. But the schools that are really good at developing wrestlers, right, they don't think about just having one person who's state championship level, right. They're developing a whole deep program that year after year after year, they have a plethora of top wrestlers that are moving into that upper echelon and can work that through. And there's also a good example, when I was the first year band teacher, the school I was at the high school was really into wrestling, and so I asked the wresting teacher, I said, Would you like to have a pep band at the wrestling meet and first he thought it was kind of nuts and he says, why, you know, I don't know, he said, Let's try that. Let's see what that was like. So I got a bunch of volunteer kids and we get a whole drum core and everything, we choreographed this whole thing. So there was still like music going, announcing the wrestlers, there was music in between and then there were drum beats going on, everything.

0:13:55.6 DL: Well, we ended up wrestling against this school that they had hardly ever beat and we just clobbered them, because the psychology of what we created was this momentum of...

0:14:07.9 AS: Energy.

0:14:09.5 DL: Wow, we're invincible, and we're one of the top programs in the state, and so on, amd so forth. So I thought the wrestling coach was gonna kiss me afterwards, and so he really liked that, but I mean, that's really kind of a good example I think that you can manipulate these things to a large degree, psychologically, if you think about profound knowledge and the psychology behind things, you can manipulate things to get the data to show different things. Were these kids all the best wrestlers? Now, I'd say probably we intimidated the other wrestlers and in an equal environment, some place, our kids may have not been able to beat these other kids because of what went on.

0:14:57.2 DL: But the point is that you're trying to develop the depth of a system in a program, so that you continually have great wrestlers, not relying on the fact that once every 12 years, we just have some naturally gifted kid that comes in. I saw this when I was a teacher in Alaska, and we had this student as a junior in high school, and he could pick up a 50-gallon barrel of oil and pick it up and put it in the back of a pick-up, and that was his job, and he came to the school and the wrestling coach said, Well, how would you like to come out for the wrestling team? And he said, Well, I've never done that before Junior in high school. Well, he ended up being state champion two years in a row, and basically he didn't have near as much training or talent as anybody else, but if he ever got a hold of somebody, they were done because he would just like...

0:16:00.2 AS: He'd put 'em in the truck.

0:16:00.3 DL: And just force them to the ground. So to me that's... And that had nothing to do with our wrestling program or the development, or anything. It's just a kid that had grown up super talented, or super strong. To me, it's also sort of the basic same kind of thing we're talking about with this PSAT test and the National Merit Scholarship, etcetera, etcetera. Are you really recognizing who's the most brilliant or who's just really worked the hardest. There's probably an element of both from the neuro-science standpoint, there's development of all of those neural structures and everything else that enabled these kids, but I would also submit that probably some of those kids were just much better at photographic memories of remembering stuff and excelling. They're just born with that, and it just was much easier for her, them to get there, but that doesn't preclude other kids that really wanna work really hard at preparing for that test and really working for them, and that's a goal or an aim that they might have that they really wanna try to do that.

0:17:09.1 AS: I would love to wrap this up by just kind of circling back to what's the objective of school, what's the objective of a business, what is the function of an individual within that system, what is the function or the objective of the management of that system and of the individual? What are we trying to do so that we just go back to first principles to make sure that the listeners, the viewers are going back to those first principles to say, Let's make sure we're doing the right thing. So can you describe for, as simply as possible what you think.

0:17:45.7 DL: To wrap this up, I will give you two words that I learned from Deming that just became imprinted on me over the years, and that's artificial scarcity. So when you're creating an artificial scarcity of top marks or top performance or anything like that, then that's bad, that's gonna have a detrimental effect on people. And we've talked about valedictorians and all those kinds of things, those are... That's really an artificial scarcity, you're actually... That's why some of the school districts are grading kids to 1/1000 of a point, et cetera, because they got too many valedictorians. Well, that's just the opposite of what you should be thinking about. You should be thinking about, can we get more and more and more people to this level, the same thing that we're talking about with the wrestling program, can we have a program that's producing more and more and more better athletes and that's a true system and a program. And that's the same thing. So you always wanna watch out, it might create an artificial scarcity. I have five children, and the example is, would I ever rank my five children, and say, Who's the best or who's not?

0:19:06.4 DL: Well, anybody who knows anything about parenting would say, No, that'd be a very stupid thing to do. Right. It'd be very foolish to do that, and they all have different gifts, they all have different skills and gifts and the backgrounds, et cetera.

0:19:21.8 AS: I'm thinking about also natural scarcity, where let's say a family does not have the means to put all five of their kids through school, and they have to choose one and say, Look, we're gonna put everything behind, and everybody knows that Bobby is the one that we think can be successful with the money that we have for University as an example, which I would say it's more natural scarcity than artificial scarcity.

0:19:47.0 DL: Yeah, even that, to me, that's a concept that may have been true 60 years ago, it's not true today, every single kid that wants to go to, even if you don't have the scores to get into a certain school you wanted to get into, okay, go to a community college for two years. And in many States, the State pay for it and it's for free, so that's a level of trying to level the playing field that... So it's not just reliant on the rich that can get to that level.

0:20:18.9 AS: So let's go back and try to... I just wanna try to wrap up what you're saying about the goal is to try to... How do we get more people to this level? And what I'm thinking about is PDSA, what I'm thinking about is training, figuring out what's working, and then bringing that...

0:20:36.7 DL: Systems thinking, Psychology, understanding variation, it's Deming System of Profound knowledge is what you need to be applying, that your system gets better and better and better and better, so that virtually anybody that comes to your school, maybe they won't rise to that level of one of the top 50,000 in the country, but everybody is getting better and better and better, and what are we doing in the system that's preventing more and more kids to get to that level of performance, just's the way you wanna think about it. So you're not creating an artificial scarcity of people.

0:21:13.8 AS: I remember Elon Musk being quoted as saying something like, We need to launch more Rockets, when he was talking about how to get better at what they were doing with landing and reusing the rockets and all that, and I just think about in my case with my valuation masterclass Boot Camp, which is a purely online system focused on a very specific thing, it's voluntary where people are signing up, and so it's very different than, let's say a public school. But the point is, is that every time we launch, we have new things that we apply from what we learn in the prior one, and as I tell my students in the current valuation masterclass boot camp, number seven. If they'd studied at number five, it's a completely different course, and I'm just thinking about all the different iterations and we stick with the things that work, and then we build and add on the next thing, and that's ultimately, I guess the job of us inside of business, inside of school, inside any process is, how do we find what works.

0:22:14.2 DL: What you're trying to do is to create a system where people are gaining knowledge that's useful and applicable in the future. One of the quotes that Deming had was, Why would I rate and rank my students, how can I determine who amongst them is gonna be great in the future, so why would I wanna limit them now with a grade. It took me years to understand what that meant, but until you've actually seen hundreds of students move through and students in high school and stuff where you think, Oh, that kid's not gonna, they're never gonna amount to anything, and all of a sudden they're state senator or they're doing something 20 years from now that you have no idea. But maybe they had to overcome your rating and ranking in order to think that that was possible, or that they were capable of doing that kind of thing.

0:23:11.1 AS: Yeah. And I went back to my high school records and I found that my GPA in high school was 2.6, I was firmly in the middle of my ranking in my high school. I was getting high basically most of the time and doing other stuff, and I wasn't really paying attention, my parents weren't pushing me that hard, they were just like, Try your best and whatever, and they didn't wanna see me drop out, but I was definitely on that path, and I think most people thought I wouldn't succeed. But then my last semester of university, I had seven classes and six of them I got As, and the seventh one I took at another university and I got a B. And something switched in me and I overcame that rating and ranking, and the fire of learning was lit under me, and I think maybe we'll wrap it up by saying that part... The whole objective of what we're trying to do is develop systems and processes that really work to set children on fire with the excitement of learning and figuring things out and finding things out with the objective that they're gonna live a better life, they're gonna have more joy and more, they're gonna understand things around them, they're gonna be able to make an impact around them, and if we can do that, I would say we're doing a pretty darn good thing. Anything you would add to that?

0:24:32.9 DL: Yeah, well, it leads into... And maybe we can discuss this in a later podcast too about, I've worked with a lot of universities and stuff, and I'll meet with them and I'll hear phrases like, Oh, we're one of the most selective universities in the state or the nation, or whatever, and we turn out the best graduates. Well, just go to our random selection of students, have a bar that you want everybody to get to a certain level, and when they do, everybody's name goes into the hat, and you draw out however many slots you have open. Now, everybody would know how they're chosen and if you can take those randomly selected students and turn out the best graduates in the country, I would acknowledge that, yeah, you've got a tremendous school, but if all you're doing is selecting, going through a rigorous process to select the people that are gonna fit your program, you're probably not doing much of anything, and you're not really developing a system of greatness where virtually anybody that comes here is gonna become great. And I want to submit kind of to wrap this up that every teacher is going through that very same thing, because students are thrown into their classrooms, usually and just randomly...

0:25:55.9 DL: Random selection, right? So if you can develop a system by which, no matter who is thrown into my class, even kids with special needs, I'm able to move them to a level of performance that nobody else is able to get these kids to, the very same kids. And next year they go into another class and they're not able to achieve that. Right. I would say you probably have created a fantastic teaching system, that no matter who I get, I'm over time, I'm able to get them to a very high level of performance. And I think that's the same thing that this whole podcast is about, you should be thinking about getting everybody to that level, and what are we doing as a system that's standing in the way that's preventing people from getting to that level of performance. So you mentioned a company, right, you don't just want one great worker, right. You want everybody to be great, otherwise you don't have a system that's continually producing great products.

0:26:58.3 AS: Yeah. Well, 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 and 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, and it just never gets old. People are entitled to joy in work.

How many people need to be "on board" in order to start implementing Deming ideas in an organization? Andrew and David P. Langford discuss Dr. Deming's answer and what that means for folks trying to make changes.

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 David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, What is the Critical Mass for Transformation? David, take it away.

0:00:27.6 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back. So this idea about transformation, what is the transformation? What are we talking about? We hear a lot about the political transformations and things like that. And I stopped shaving, so now I have a beard, and is that a transformation? And what do we do with that? I also get the questions a lot over the last 40 years about, well, how do we get everybody on board? In fact, almost anytime I do a seminar, I almost always get a question from a principal, superintendent, or somebody in education, how do we get everybody on board? Well, and Deming talked a lot about that transformation starts with the individual. So you've got to get yourself on board to begin with. And I remember when I started learning about Deming and started reading the books and kind of going through things, it was a mental transformation for me individually. So that's probably the first step if you're thinking about transforming an organization, whether that be a classroom, a school, a company, a family, whatever you might want to think about, is, getting yourself on board.

0:01:46.8 DL: And then the second thing is, okay, well, now we're going to transform a larger part of the organization. What do we do then? So I actually put that question to Dr. Deming one time, and he said, well, "I like to think about having the square root of the organization to cause a transformation of the organization. And this just blew me away because, let's say you have 100 employees or 100 staff members on a school or whatever it might be. And if you have the thought that you're going to get everybody on board before you do anything, well, if you understand Dr. Deming's concept of Profound Knowledge, you're never going to get there. You're never going to have 100 people on board before you start anything. You're going to have variability. You're going to have variation in people. And even if you had 100 people say, "Oh yeah, we're not bored, let's do this," well, what's the degree of their commitment to doing that? That's a huge amount of variation in the organization. So when I asked Dr. Deming, I said, "Well, how do I begin transforming a whole organization like that?" And he said, "Well, I like to think of the square root of the organization," that you need the square root on board to cause a transformation.

0:03:15.3 AS: So I was thinking about the square root and I was calculating it. So if we have 100 employees in an organization, that's 10 people. If we have 1000, that is 32 people. If we have 100,000, that's 300 people. It's a relatively small number.

0:03:34.2 DL: Yeah, think about that. And that as a leader, sort of liberates you from thinking that, "Okay, I've got to get everybody on board before we can start doing stuff." And that's just really not true at all. Or in a classroom, you've got 25 kids in a classroom. I really only need about five kids in that classroom that are kind of on board with me and the thought processes, and we can begin a transformation in that classroom. I've told that to so many teachers and it's like this huge revelation in their mind is like, "Oh wow, I just never had thought about that." And it enables you to sort of get to work. Almost anybody can like pick off the names of five students that would be supportive of working with you or 10 employees out of 100 that would be really supportive to working with you or 100,000, what'd you say? 320 or?

0:04:32.2 AS: 100,000 would be 316, just 300 people.

0:04:32.7 DL: Yeah. And it actually makes it doable. And so I used that for years...

0:04:39.8 AS: I'd literally go out and ask people to volunteer, to say who would be interested in being involved in a transformation and that type of thing. You're going to get more than 300 people out of 100,000 that are going to volunteer.

0:04:54.2 DL: Yeah. Dr. Myron Tribus was another one of my mentors and he was a colleague of Dr. Deming. And he used to go with me to universities because he'd been the Dean at Dartmouth. He'd been the Dean at MIT and he just had a tremendous university background and stuff. And so we would go together and give presentations and we were at a major university. I won't name it. But the Dean of Education was being pressured by the President to have us talk to faculty members. And so we, first we talked to the Dean of Education and Dr. Myron Tribus was sort of a genius at working people in higher ed. And the Dean says, well, "I'm very interested in Dr. Deming's thought processes and I would be willing to do this, but we just won't have... We just don't have that many staff that would be willing to start learning about this and applying it in classrooms," et cetera, et cetera. And Dr. Tribus said to him, he said, "Well, if you did have people that were interested and willing to start learning and get on board, would they have your full support?"

0:06:05.1 DL: And he was like, oh yeah, they definitely have their full support. So we go do a presentation in front of a hundred and some faculty members at this university and Myron Tribus at the end of the presentation, he says, "The Dean has said that he'll give his full support for anybody that wants to start learning about applying Deming in their classrooms and moving forward. So raise your hand if you'd be interested in getting on board." Now, if that 100 faculty members, there must have been 60 or 70 hands that went up. The Dean disappeared and we never saw him again. And we never got a chance to actually go further than that. But it's kind of a good example about this, that, wow, that's way more than the square root that wanted to get on board and wanted to start learning. But the problem is so many...

0:06:57.2 AS: And that goes back to the intrinsic stuff that we've talked about that people are there. They want intrinsic.

0:07:04.3 DL: Oh, yeah. They want it.

0:07:05.8 AS: They want to see change. They want to see improvement. They don't want to see nonsense going on.

0:07:08.9 DL: Well, the problem with most leaders that I've encountered and etcetera, is they spend a huge amount of their time sort of trying to placate the naysayers. So anything you want to do, whether that's bringing in Deming principles or not, but any kind of a change or any kind of a movement or whatever you want to do, you're going to have resistors and people that resist and don't want to get on board. And leaders spend so much time trying to massage their egos and help people get on board thinking, "Oh, I've got to get everybody on board," where actually you just need to leave them alone. The people that actually need your support is that square root. They're the ones that need your support and actually protection from the mob basically, because they're going to come under attack as well, within that. But one of the things that lessens the attack is when you can just say to people, "Look, you don't have to, you don't have to do this. This is a choice." And we learned about that in intrinsic motivation study that we did, right?

0:08:20.9 AS: Yeah.

0:08:21.0 DL: This is a choice. You don't have to do this, but you also don't have the right to take other people down. That, to me, that's a real strong role of leadership is that you have to be the one that's going to protect other people that are trying to get on board and create their own square root for that transformation. So it's no doubt it's challenging. If you don't and... If you don't have that individual transformation and you don't have that depth of knowledge of what it is you're trying to do, I'd say, take more time to just work on that first before you think "I have to get other people on board."

0:09:06.3 AS: Just to put it to work.

0:09:06.4 DL: But that's about every organization where I've said, how many people would be interested in learning more about this and studying it. I get way more than the square root of the organization and then that.

0:09:16.9 AS: I was just, while you were talking some, you may hear me tapping away as I was kind of looking for what's the definition of transformation. I thought, hmm, okay. And Oxford languages dictionary, as well as Google, the ultimate, maybe, says, "Transformation is a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance." And what it makes me think about when you said about focus on yourself first, is that you've really got to make a thorough or dramatic change before you can lead a thorough and dramatic change.

0:09:56.7 DL: Yeah. Or larger and larger organizations. So the other... So Deming called that the critical mass. You have to have critical mass. He talked a lot about critical mass. And I didn't think too much about that for years. And then I realized that Deming was also a physicist. And I looked up critical mass... And you're tapping away trying to look up critical mass.

0:10:23.0 AS: Yeah. Exactly.

0:10:25.4 DL: But it's the... From what I understand, it's the tiny amount of material that it would take to create a nuclear reaction.

0:10:33.8 AS: Exactly.

0:10:34.5 DL: And you're talking about almost infinitesimal amount to create this nuclear reaction, whatever that might be, powering a ship or a bomb or whatever you want to use it for. That's more of a study of values than anything.

0:10:52.6 AS: Yeah. "The minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction or also the minimum size or amount of something required to start or maintain a venture." But what's interesting, when I think of critical mass, I think of big. But what I get from what you've just said, and this is, actually, critical mass is small.

0:11:08.6 DL: Yes. Very small.

0:11:10.7 AS: It's the minimum.

0:11:12.7 DL: And if you think of it, I want to cause basically a nuclear reaction in my organization, right? I want to get us from point A to point Z or wherever we're going to go. Well, what's the fastest way to do that? That small critical mass of people that are committed to moving forward. And it's amazing how fast an organization can change when you're thinking like that. Not thinking, "Well, I've got to get everybody on board."

0:11:42.2 AS: I don't know about you, but I know for the listeners out there and the viewers that it's exciting and it's inspiring. I feel excited by this when I think about... Because sometimes when you think about transformation, you do think about "How am I going to deal with the naysayers or the people who aren't going to go along? Or, "Oh, I need everybody on board." But what you're explaining that Dr. Deming said to you was that it's actually not as daunting. And maybe I can tell a kind of a funny story about critical mass. And I was in... I was asked to give a speech in the Philippines and I went to the Philippines and my speech was in the afternoon. And I was talking about my worst investment ever podcast and the lessons I learned. My audience was 900 people who are young students.

0:12:27.3 AS: And so I was pretty excited. I went to the venue early in the morning and they were just starting. My speech wasn't until 3:00, but it was like 9:00 AM. And the organizers had said to me... I said, "How are you doing?" And I know them pretty well. And they said, "We're doing terrible." I said, "Why?" They said, "Because our keynote speaker that's going to speak at 10:30 just told us that he can't make it because he's got to take his mother to the hospital." And I said, "Well, can I help?" And he said, "Well, can you give a speech on ethics?" And I said, "Oh, yeah, I can." And so I said, "If you give me an hour and a laptop computer and one of your staff, I can pull together something and get up on that stage." Well, at the end of that, in an hour or so later, I was ready. I got up on stage and I gave a knockout presentation of something I had given before, but I packaged it for that audience. And the crowd went wild and it was 2000 people for the keynote session. But what they didn't know was that once I finished my preparation, I went to the back of the audience and I knew that they were university students in groups. So I went to the back left-hand corner of the audience and I said, I'm going to be speaking next and I'm going to ask the audience to shout out, when I get up there, like, "Who over there is ready to," and I said, "When I do that, will you guys like stand up and shout out?"

0:13:42.2 AS: And they're like, "Yeah." And "What university are you from?" And then I did the same at the right hand side. So when I got up on stage and I started to get the crowd going, I said, everybody over on the right hand side of this, on the left hand side, I called out and basically the crowd went wild. And what they didn't realize was it was just a small number of people that I had, basically so, started in this process so that they were prepared to be a player in this process when it started to happen. And then that tiny critical mass led to the explosion of the audience. So that's a little, a fun example of my own case.

0:14:19.3 DL: Yeah, that's perfect. And what happens in, whether it's a classroom, a school, university, whatever, as you start with that critical mass and as you bring more people on board and that expands, there becomes less and less room for things that are the antithesis, what it is you want to have happen. And then my experience is that people will either eventually start to get on board and start to learn about what you're teaching and what you want to have happen and etcetera, or a lot of times they'll just find another place to work, which is fine too. And then you get to, move it forward with somebody new coming in, etcetera. But either way, you're not spending all your time trying to placate people and bring them on board and soothe their egos and etcetera, etcetera. And you just keep moving on. And pretty soon there's just less and less and less space for those negative comments and people that aren't doing anything.

0:15:26.9 AS: So let's take it another step further. Let's say you get that critical mass. Let's say you've got 100 people in an organization, in a school, in a company, and you've got that 10 and you're starting to work with them and maybe you're doing some study groups and you're starting to really open up and they're starting to see. How should someone proceed from that position? Should you proceed by bringing out things and starting to test them or should you wait until you really have a deeper knowledge? I'm sure there's a tension between those two, but I'm curious what you think about that and what you think Dr. Deming said about them.

0:16:01.5 DL: Well, there's another reason that this is a almost magical way to approach a transformation, is that you yourself are probably... Let's go back to the 100 people that you have in the organization. If you had 100 people all of a sudden get on board and asking you questions all the time and "What do we do and how do we do this," and all of that, you couldn't handle that, right? You couldn't handle that much change, but you could probably handle 10 people that really want to know and really are trying to understand and work through stuff and thereby get them to think about the small ways in which they can begin their own transformations, whether that's a department or a classroom or whatever it might be through that process. But it's liberating in that way too, because it's giving you a time as a leader to learn as well, what does this mean and how would this apply and what would we do in this circumstance?

0:17:06.5 AS: And I guess in that...

0:17:07.5 DL: It's a powerful concept, and I've used it so many times and it's just, it's really caused a transformation in many organizations, no matter the size.

0:17:15.4 AS: One of the things I was thinking about is that the transformation that those 10 people are going through in that organization is probably going to mirror what their next group of people go through as the organization starts to understand. So maybe keeping notes, identifying what are the questions and maybe having like a Frequently Asked Questions document where, okay, what are the questions we have and how do we come up with some ideas of how do we answer these questions based upon what we want to do with this transformation? And then that way we're prepared when we go out and say, we're going to get the same questions from the people as they start first being exposed to the transformation.

0:17:58.5 DL: I use the example a lot about, Jesus only had 12 and he changed the world. And he changed the world. Or Confucius or any movement like that always started with just a small, minute number of committed people willing to move forward.

0:18:20.7 AS: Well, I think that's interesting and I want to wrap it up just by summarizing a couple of points. And the first one is that, the first thing that you talked about is that people often say, "How do I get everybody on board?" And your point that you've made is, you're not going to get everybody on board and that shouldn't be your aim. And what you said, is Dr. Deming said, when you asked him how many people does it take to start that, to make that transformation? And he said he likes to think of the square root of the organization. So 100 people, maybe 10 people out of that. A 100-person organization, maybe 10 people. A 100,000-person organization, maybe 300 people. And I think that you've also talked about how people are hungry for that because we've already talked about intrinsic motivation. So if you go out and say, "Hey, who would like to be involved in making this a better place and making a transformation?" then that's cool. And I think the other thing that, talking about the critical mass, which I had kind of a misunderstanding of that, but the critical mass is the minimum amount to cause a massive change.

0:19:33.0 AS: And so also you mentioned about, that we're not forcing this on people. You've got a choice, but the one choice that may be a hard choice is just staying in place and not changing and improving. And therefore there are times that you have to say, this may not be the culture for you and there's other places that have them. Anything you would add to that summary?

0:20:00.0 DL: No, it was very good. But I mentioned Dr. Myron Tribus, but he used to constantly tell me, "You preach to the masses, then work with the volunteers."

0:20:10.4 AS: That's beautiful.

0:20:11.9 DL: Yeah. You have that 100-person organization. You're going to preach to the masses and you're going to explain what this is all about, etcetera, etcetera. And then you're going to work with the volunteers and let other people just go back to doing what it is they were doing, because they're probably not going to do any worse or better. And it's going to give you time to work with the people that are volunteering to actually transform the organization.

0:20:36.4 AS: Preach to the masses, work with the volunteers

0:20:38.5 DL: And work with the volunteers.

0:20:42.7 AS: Love it. What I wanted to do before I end this episode is, I want to speak directly to the listeners and the viewers. This, what we're doing with this material is to try to help all of us think about a transformation. And I don't know about you, but from what I just heard from David and what Dr. Deming said about the square root of the organization, it really fired me up to think about how can I bring that transformation to my own organizations. And it inspired me, but it also helped me to understand that it's not as difficult as it is sometimes in our minds. So let's lay down the challenge. Time to start the transformation in your organization and in yourself. And David, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. 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, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work.

Your "meaning network" of neurons includes the subjects (like math wizzes) and relationships (like friendships) that are important to you. In this episode, Andrew and David talk about helping folks find the "why?" that intrinsically motivates them to do something.

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 am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is tapping into meaning to release intrinsic motivation. David, take it away.

0:00:28.7 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew, and good to be back.

0:00:32.3 AS: Good to see you.

0:00:34.1 DL: So we have been on this journey of five elements of intrinsic motivation and these are the ones that, through my research at least, are the most important elements if you want to see intrinsic motivation emerge. Why are we doing that? Because Dr. Deming was the one that really made it clear that you have to have intrinsic motivation and stop extrinsically motivating people. So that's why we're concentrating on, what are these elements? So the first element was the element of control or autonomy in a situation. The second element was cooperation and we talked about the support network that's necessary and the previous podcast was all about the challenge and today we're talking about the meaning. How did... That meaning is the fifth element to tap into. So in every human brain there is a preponderance of cells in your meaning network. Some of it is... Some of it you're born with, some of it you acquire through life, but it's what... It's the cells that are activated when you get a sense of meaning about, why are we doing something or why are we here, what's happening?

0:02:04.0 DL: And the more we can tap into that network with people and tap into their meaning network, we start to see more intrinsic motivation emerge and therefore more joy in learning and work emerge and therefore a higher level of workmanship that often comes out of that same thing.

0:02:23.3 AS: And when you say meaning network, sometimes when I think of network, I think of a network of people, but you're talking about a neurological network.

0:02:30.5 DL: Yeah, we're talking about the actual neurons in your brain that form the network of meaning behind your life. It's... Sometimes we're just born with a preponderance of cells in certain areas, like I have five children and one of them was just born with the gift of mathematics and that's just the way it was. And another one was just born with his gift of music and another one... On and on. And those are just there at birth. And I don't think we had anything to do with it until we started to uncover that, oh, wow, this meaning... This has a lot of meaning for this individual. In other ways, you can also acquire a meaning network over time. That's for myself and probably for you too, Andrew, that the meaning in network now includes Deming, and the work of Deming, but that had to become an acquired kind of thing. So when people go through that process of learning about it, sometimes they say, my brain hurts because you are readjusting the actual neurons and the network of neurons in your brain that taught you to think about something.

0:03:50.9 DL: So if you had a network of neurons for management and maybe even went to college like I did or university, got a master's degree in management, et cetera, it taught you to think in a certain way. And Deming's work actually, sometimes trashes all of that or sometimes just causes you to have to think in a whole different way. And so then you have to start to readjust your meaning network. So it's been a lifelong interest for me to figure out, well, how do we get more of that to happen? So probably the very first element I want to talk about is relevance. So when you're trying to get somebody to do something, whether it's just work or we're talking about learning in schools, et cetera, is there a relevance? Why are we doing this? Kids don't ask, why is the sky blue or things like that just to make you mad and make your life miserable. They're actually trying to seek meaning in their life and try to understand what's going on. So the tool we often use is five whys. When you're starting to work through something, "Why do we have to do this?"

0:05:13.0 DL: And you have to answer that question and then, "Okay, then why is that so?" And then so on and so forth. And each time you ask, "Why did I say what I did in the previous why and think through stuff?" But that actually gets people to tap into the level of meaning. I never forget I saw five whys one time on, I think it was a group of first graders or something and they'd done this five whys and on why do we have to learn to read? And they'd gone through all these kinds of things, but I'll never forget that the fifth why was we have to learn to read because if we don't, we'll be homeless and die. [laughter] So there's...

0:05:57.9 AS: Right to the point.

0:05:58.5 DL: As a group of kids. Yeah, that's pretty important, right? And so tapping into that is really important. And so when you get that kind of relevance, you also get a joy that happens in learning because you're happy about it because it's relevant to you and it's meaningful. They have the age old question, why do we why do have to learn math and people often talk about that, that, I'll probably never use this again in my whole life.

0:06:28.6 DL: And well, if you are not helping students understand the meaning behind that or tap into their own meaning network about why math is important, it's going to constantly be a struggle or other areas that sometimes we think of as boring like accounting or things like that. Certain people just look at those numbers and love working with numbers and they get a joy in that and they have relevance within that. So relevance is really important and that gets you a level of joy of learning.

0:07:03.6 AS: Right. Can we just go back one step and just describe what you mean by meaning?

0:07:11.9 DL: Well, there's a group of cells in everybody's brains, neurons called the meaning network. And these are the connections that you've made over time. And just like what is describing before that either you were born with or you've acquired over time, but it's a meaning network. And so two people can sit and listen to the same podcast or broadcast, et cetera. And one of them just thinks it's totally boring, boring and worthless. And the other one is just totally engrossed in it. And it all has to do with your meaning network and your brain and whether or not that podcast is tapping into your meaning network or challenging your meaning network.

0:07:54.2 AS: And in a classroom, what would be the opposite of tapping into the meaning network?

0:08:01.9 DL: Somebody says, "Well, why do we have to learn this?" And the teacher says, "Because I said so."

0:08:07.1 AS: Okay. It's clear.

0:08:09.7 DL: Yeah. That's not good learning. It's not gonna motivate somebody to want to learn something. It's just gonna motivate them just to avoid punishment or seek some cheap reward. And that's often why we resort to those extrinsic kinds of motivations because we don't wanna tap into the meaning network. It takes a lot more time to go in depth and to get people to really... To get a deep understanding of it. I think about my journey, understanding Deming and maybe yours is the same way. It didn't happen overnight. It took actually several years and I'm still on that journey after 40 years of really trying to understand what he was talking about and why it was important and how it applies in my life, et cetera. So that's tapping into that meaning network.

0:09:01.6 AS: And you said something that sometimes people don't want to tap into their meaning network. Maybe that's an interesting thing to understand. Why is it at times, maybe each of us don't want to tap into it? Or there's some people that may say, I never want to tap into that.

0:09:16.2 DL: Well, we get caught up into just running things, and making stuff happen without wanting to think about, why are we doing this? And when you do that, then you end up just resorting to getting people to do stuff. And if you don't do this, I'm just going to make your life so difficult you wish you would have, which is not good management.

0:09:41.2 AS: So for the listeners and the viewers out there if you find yourself just running in circles, doing a bunch of stuff and realizing that there's no meaning to it, maybe that's the time to stop and listen and let's continue on about bringing this... You talked about relevance, continue on...

0:09:58.0 DL: Yeah. So another way you could tap into the meaning network is just to concentrate on the quality of the work. And that leads us to a pride of workmanship. And when you're concentrating on the quality of it, instead of just production or just getting through it, you get a whole different level of thinking about something and you tap into a level of relevance that is not normally there.

0:10:32.1 DL: So like in school, if I give them this... If I gave an assignment and we were just talking about math and they say, "Well, you have to do these 30 problems." Well, if we talk about how to do that in a quality way, we start to tap into a pride of workmanship with that. So what would that mean to do this in a quality way? Well, the numbers have to be lined up and sometimes kids will say things, well, it should be neat. Well, we might have to define, what does neat mean? What would it look like if it was neat? But you're tapping into a level of relevance and understanding that's deeper than just do this to get through it. So we can go on to the next chapter which really means there's not much meaning to that, right? It's more of a survival, just get through it and get onto the next thing.

0:11:19.4 AS: And I'm thinking about in the corporate sphere, Deming talked about quality in the eyes of the customer and develop... The process, improving the quality of work and then seeing the customer being satisfied or achieving their goals through it just like with a student to see them achieve their goals... There is true joy in and meaning to what you're doing.

0:11:46.3 DL: Yeah. Well, just before we came on, you were showing me some feedback that you had from your students, which are ultimately your customer in your college class, et cetera. And you were really excited about the feedback. Well, it had a lot of meaning to you about the quality of what they were trying... That they got out of that experience, et cetera, and how they were relating it back to you. And it made you feel very proud of the work that you'd done with them.

0:12:12.1 AS: Well, it's raised the question, why the hell would we not be having meaning in everything that we're doing?

0:12:22.6 DL: Yeah, that's a good question. Why do people do that? Well, a lot of times they just do it just to get through it. Like I said, not enough time and I don't have time to concentrate on meaning. And well, if you don't concentrate on that, then you're going to get whatever it is you get, right? You're going to just get poor quality work and they're going to have to figure out how to motivate people. And these people aren't motivated. But Deming also talked a lot about constancy of purpose, right? And that's tapping into the meaning network. So when you're developing a constancy of purpose, whether that's with a corporation, a classroom, a whole school, a school district, whatever it is, why do we exist? Why are we here? And you're really making that explicit and getting people to align what they do every day to the constancy of purpose. Well, in schools you end up with getting a lifelong learning going then because you have a deeper purpose for going to school other than just to get a grade or just to get through it.

0:13:27.7 DL: I remember asking a group of fourth graders one time I said, "Why do you go to fourth grade?" And one of the kids said, "So we can go on to fifth grade." [laughter] Well, if that's the surface level that you're concentrating on, that's actually the kind of workmanship you're going to get in pride that you're gonna get in the people going through it because they know that you don't care either. Right? Just a step going to the next thing.

0:14:00.4 AS: And when Dr. Deming talked about cleaning a table and he gave the example that you really can't have someone properly clean a table unless they know what the table is going to be used for, is that part of the meaning of understanding the final...

0:14:12.1 DL: Yeah, that's tapping into the meaning network? What are you going to use this table for? Are you going to operate on it? Oh, well, it's certainly not clean enough for that right now. It's going to eat off of it. That's a whole different purpose that you're using for that. So yeah, that's a really good example about tapping into people's meaning network about things and then you get a higher level of quality and commitment out of people when you're actually just creating the environment for that. The other thing is vision. The more you concentrate on the vision of where you're going, what's happening and it ties into constancy of purpose about why do we exist and what we're doing too. But when you have vision, you're tapping into people's prefrontal lobe in their minds about looking towards the future. What are we trying to accomplish? Where are we going with this? And we may not be there today, but this is where we're headed and this is what we're tapping into. So there's a number of ways that come out of a lot of different research about what, makes a good vision. Number one, it's usually always leader initiated. So it doesn't necessarily mean that the person with the formal position is initiating it, but you can be a leader and not necessarily have a formal position. You just, you're seen as somebody who's very knowledgeable about a situation and therefore you start to become a leader within that.

0:15:49.1 AS: And that the good vision is leader initiated concept is contrary to some people that think about, "Oh, well I want empowerment. I want my employees involved and all of that." And when I heard Dr. Deming talk about that this is the responsibility of the leaders, I realized that, yeah, my leaders in my company, were just dumping it down on me. "Well, you tell us?"

0:16:14.8 DL: Yeah. And that's really an escape mechanism because then if it doesn't work, it's your fault instead of our fault. Whereas, where if it's leader initiated and we work together to constantly revise and revisit the vision and it's sort of a living document is what I call it, that it's constantly, it's not the thing where you go in a room and you come up with a vision statement and then you put it under glass on the hallway and then you don't visit it again until you get a new leader again. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about something that's lived on a daily basis about the vision of what it is we're trying to accomplish. And in that, it's also has to be shared and supported, right? And one of the ways you get it shared and supported is involving people in the making of a vision rather than having a board meeting and coming up with a vision and then trying to disseminate that to everybody.

0:17:12.4 AS: Right.

0:17:15.3 DL: It has to be comprehensive and detailed, a vision. So it has to have enough detail so that everybody in the organization or everybody in a classroom can see how their part relates to that vision of what it is we're trying to accomplish. And finally, it has to be positive and inspiring that I really want to do this. I really... 'Cause it's just... It's really inspiring. It's not simple, but when John F. Kennedy said, "We're gonna put a man on the moon by 1969, by the end of the decade," well, that was very positive, inspiring. Did anybody know how to do that? No, not really. And we were really behind in making that happen, but it was leader initiated. He initiated that and this is what we're going to have. And it became shared and supportive and it became very comprehensive and detailed about how we're going to make it happen. And sure enough, the country made it happen. So that's a good example of what vision can do for you.

0:18:20.5 AS: So there's relevance, there's vision...

0:18:22.7 DL: Yeah. Relevance and then the quality of what it is you do and then purpose and vision. And the last element that I'd like to share is a way that you can tap into the meaning network is to leave a legacy. Where the work means more than just the immediate result or you're trying to improve society or you're thinking about passing the torch to the next generation. This leaving of this legacy, I think is really important. When I started to tap into this was the high school where I first started and was working with Deming, some interesting things happened. The English teacher tapped into this and she would take kids over to the pioneer home where it had all the elderly people there that were in the state of Alaska at the time of statehood. And so every year she'd take kids over and they would meet with these elderly people and the people would tell stories about all the way back to 1900 and 1920 and what life was like in Alaska. And then it was their job to write up these stories. They put all these stories into a book and then bind the book for that year. So that's an example, leaving a legacy. That's much different than... Because those kids could look back at that legacy for the rest of their lives.

0:20:01.7 DL: That "I was a part of that." I helped document something that was going on or the science class had a project where every year they would take one square kilometer of the ocean floor and then kids would work to get scuba diving skills. And at the end of each year, then they would go down and they would clean up that one section of the ocean floor. And then other kids would be on the surface and, take the junk to the dump and everything and pass it on. But that's leaving a legacy that "we did this and cleaned this up" and that's passing it on to the next generation. So if you think about... It can be so simple as a fourth grade class passing on a legacy to a third grade class that's coming up and meeting with them and talking about what you do in fourth grade and being excited about that and having a vision about how great it's gonna be to be in fourth grade and what you're going to do. So I'll never forget my oldest son when he was going into first grade and we were talking all summer long about, I may have shared this story, I don't know, but we were talking all summer long that, oh, first grade is going to be so great, you're going to learn to read and you're going to be so excited, et cetera.

0:21:24.4 DL: And so we picked him up after the first day of school thinking he's gonna be all excited about stuff. He said, "How was first grade?" And he burst into tears. And we said, "What's going on is... Did you get in trouble or something or something happened at school or whatever?" And he just shook his head and he said, "I didn't learn to read." But the vision and the meaning network was incredibly strong with him going into first grade. It's just that we had neglected to explain it's going to take more than one day to reach that vision of that. But obviously in our family, reading was very important and it was very stressed. And he could see his siblings reading and all those things are part of tapping into that meaning network.

0:22:19.6 AS: The legacy is a fascinating one. And I think it's a challenge for anybody listening or viewing, what legacy are you leaving? A lot of times we just get so busy in what we're doing and we forget about that. I'll tell the quick story of when I had to go through a few different rehabs when I was a young guy because of addiction to drugs and alcohol. And the third rehab that I went into was a long-term treatment center. They only had 12 beds there and one bed opened up. It was in Northeastern Ohio. And so I went into that treatment center and when I arrived, I arrived for the graduation ceremony of the outgoing student and they had a toolbox which was an open box with a handle on it. And he stood up in front of everybody and, said he was graduating and all the things that he gained from this. And then he emptied out his toolbox and he handed it to me and he said, here's your empty toolbox. Good luck at filling it with the symbols of the intangible tools and physical tools that you develop over the next seven months. And then when I graduated, I took my tools out of the box and I gave that empty box to the next person. And yeah, it's just like...

0:23:33.8 DL: Great example.

0:23:35.1 AS: It's connection with the future.

0:23:39.4 DL: And obviously that tapped into your meaning network because you remembered it.

0:23:45.6 AS: Here we are 40 years later.

0:23:46.0 DL: They want to know what kind of experiences tap into the meaning network? Well, it's usually the ones that you remember, right? Because the other experiences, your brain just quickly gets rid of the connections because it has no meaning.

0:24:01.7 AS: So I want to wrap up and also review the five points or the five elements that you've brought up. Maybe you can just run through them briefly if we're at the end of talking about meaning.

0:24:16.6 DL: Yeah. So these aren't the only factors for intrinsic motivation, but the ones that have never failed me over the last 40 years, whether I'm working with US military or colleges and universities or a kindergarten class or a corporation, I always go back to these five and usually you'll find some fault there that people don't feel like they're supported or there isn't a high level of cooperation or they don't feel like they have the autonomy to be able to make decisions in an organization or there's a lack of challenge, that work is not challenging, or there's a lack of meaning that the organization or whether that's a classroom, a school, a company or whatever is not really tapping into that meaning network and really emphasizing purpose and vision and what it is we're trying to accomplish here and how are we leaving a legacy and passing that on. So it's the interaction of those five factors. That's the key.

0:25:27.1 AS: Right. So maybe I'll summarize... I'm gonna attempt to summarize what I think was a pretty substantial discussion today. The first thing that I got from it was why are we even talking about intrinsic motivation? As you said, Dr. Deming said, stop doing all this extrinsic motivation and start focusing on intrinsic motivation. And basically, we talked about this final point meaning, which triggers the meaning network, which is the thing that we tap into. You talked about relevance and if something is relevant to a person, then it brings more meaning. And that means, think about asking, we talked about the five whys and understanding that and just running things and running activities and doing lots of stuff without meaning becomes, well, meaningless. We also...

0:26:29.2 DL: Right. [chuckle].

0:26:30.3 AS: Yeah. We talked about quality and the focus on quality and seeing the outcome too of that great focus on quality and the joy in work that that brings. We talked about purpose and vision about constancy of purpose and that brings meaning as opposed to constantly shifting directions. And you said that vision basically about where we're going taps into people's minds about looking forward and starting to think about that.

0:26:57.4 AS: And you mentioned a few things that I thought were really good about what makes good vision and good vision is leader initiated, it's shared and supported, it's comprehensive and detailed and it's positive and inspiring. And I think that last part really is a part that gets me excited when I look at the things that I'm involved with. And then finally, you talked about leaving a legacy and I think that just speaks for itself. Anything you would add to that summary?

0:27:24.4 DL: No, that's a really good summary. So I will pretty much guarantee people that if you're struggling with the level of quality you're trying to achieve or your people don't seem like they're motivated, you might want to take a look at these five areas of intrinsic motivation and see what you need to change in the organization to see intrinsic motivation emerge because it's always there. It's built innately within us. And if we're not intrinsically motivated, you don't learn to eat, you don't learn to talk, you don't learn to survive in the world before you ever get to work or school. So it's there in individuals, you just have to find ways of managing to uncover it.

0:28:11.1 AS: I don't know about you and I don't know about the listeners and the viewers out there, but I can tell you just this discussion was inspiring in itself. So David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for our discussion. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming and it really applies in what we're talking about today. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Cooperation is built into the human condition - we don't survive without it. In this episode, Andrew and David talk about the connection in our brains between intrinsic motivation and cooperation - and how you can use that to help cultivate intrinsic motivation in an extrinsic world (and even make your organization more competitive!)

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 am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, how to apply the neuroscience of cooperation. David, take it away.

0:00:31.3 David Langford: That sounds ominous to me. So...

0:00:35.1 AS: Impressive.

0:00:35.9 DL: Yeah, we're not gonna do brain surgery, but we'll get pretty close to that today, so...

[laughter]

0:00:40.4 AS: This is brain science.

0:00:42.5 DL: Yes. So we're continuing this five-part series on intrinsic motivation. So Dr. Deming was adamant that intrinsic motivation was key, and that we're all just born with intrinsic motivation, and it's our systems and the people that we encounter over time that sort of drum it out of us. So how do you get it back, especially from people that have been beaten down from both the school systems and the businesses that they've been, et cetera? And Dr. Deming said, we have a right to joy in work and learning. And if that's true, we have to try to create these environments to make great joy in the work environment. And why do you do that? Well, when you do that, you're gonna get better productivity. You're gonna get more output.

0:01:38.5 DL: People are gonna be happy, or they're gonna stay longer. They're not gonna be looking for other jobs, et cetera, et cetera. So it all makes perfect sense to me that you wanna concentrate on creating intrinsically motivating systems even though you might be in an extrinsic world all the way around you. So in the first session, we talked about control or autonomy or ownership as being key for intrinsic motivation. And there's five key factors that we're going through. And what I wanna impress upon people is that this is a system of intrinsic motivation. So it's all of these factors together. Yes, you can just do one factor and get a result. For instance, you can just apply more cooperation and you'll see a higher level of intrinsic motivation. But if you really wanna see people rise to the true heights of what they're capable of or what their potential is, you have to think about all five of these factors.

0:02:40.5 DL: So that's why we're taking time to go through all these. Today we're talking about cooperation. And that's much different than setting up a competitive environment where people are competing for isolated resources or they're competing for a medal, a gold star, et cetera, et cetera. But cooperation is built into the human condition, thousands of years ago when we first started creating villages and people working together, and people had to cooperate to make armies, people had to cooperate to build houses. There's a myth about how the west was won in the United States, that it was the rugged individual, but yeah, there was some of that. But largely it was wagon trains of cooperative people coming west. And if they didn't cooperate and worked together, they didn't survive, the people that were the rugged individuals often perished either from native American attacks or just the environment itself. So cooperation, to me, is built into the human condition.

0:03:53.0 AS: And before you continue that, let me just ask you about competition versus cooperation. Is competition also built-in, or is cooperation more built in? I mean, that point you just made about how for survival, humans need to depend on each other to some extent as a society, but do humans need to compete with each other?

0:04:20.1 DL: Well, the great irony is, the better you cooperate, the better you compete.

[laughter]

0:04:27.7 DL: So if you're at a corporation, for instance, or even a school, and the higher the level of cooperation that you foster and create, you actually do become competitive because you actually become better than other people in your field, et cetera.

0:04:43.2 AS: And how... I love that statement, the better you cooperate, the better you compete. How is that rooted in facts? Is that rooted in... It intuitively makes sense to me that a team or a group that really cooperates well together can achieve amazing things, but is it scientifically correct to say that?

0:05:13.6 DL: Well, can we point to... We could point to obviously numbers of examples of either schools or businesses, et cetera, that have high degrees of cooperation involved. You can get... You can seize part of the market in a competitive thinking or a competitive environment or pitting people against each other to achieve inside of an organization, but to me every example I ever looked at, it doesn't last. Pretty soon, what Deming said is, the only people you're left with are the people who can't get a job someplace else.

[laughter]

0:06:01.2 DL: Because they're not happy. It's not fun. You don't feel supported, so...

0:06:06.7 AS: And that brings us back to intrinsic in the idea that it's inherent in us to want to be in a cooperative environment. Like we want to stay in a cooperative environment.

0:06:19.2 DL: Well, it's more than that. When you think about the neuroscience involved, that when you're in a cooperative environment, whether that's a small team or a company or whatever it might be, there's an endorphin released in your brain that actually makes you feel good. It's a really good feeling. The opposite happens. There's two different types of stress levels, and that's a positive sort of stress level. It can still be very stressful work, hard work, et cetera, but when you're working together to make that happen there's a positive stress hormone that's released in your brain. The opposite is true in competitive environments. So the only person that really actually gets that same kind of endorphin is the winner in a competitive environment. Everybody else becomes a demotivator.

0:07:14.9 AS: So it's kind of the endorphin distribution is what it is about. David, I have a situation at my home where I have caregivers helping me take care of my mom. And one of the caregivers left almost eight years as a nurse at a hospital, because she said, "You really couldn't give good care because of all the... Not only the competition amongst people, but also all the things that just took all of the joy out of it." But also the point where you need to push the patient to do what they need to do is the point that everybody would give up. And now when she's working here with my mom and she's made tremendous progress with my mom, it's like we're high fiving and talking about how we're cooperating. I'm looking at kind of bigger picture stuff she's implementing, and mom is getting the benefit. And when you talked about endorphin and the neuroscience of it, I really kind of just felt that, and for the listeners and for the viewers, think about that time that you've cooperated and been successful and it's worked, or even when you failed, but you are in it together. Like that is the endorphin released.

0:08:18.2 DL: Well actually, I think you should have her compete against other caregivers.

[laughter]

0:08:24.1 DL: And then to find out who is the best caregiver in... We laugh about that.

0:08:30.4 AS: Now for our trusted listeners out there, they know that you're kidding, right?

0:08:33.3 DL: Yeah. So yeah, we laugh about that here, but people are actually caught in those environments, and those things are being pushed on them and pressured and et cetera. And just like what you just described, your mom's caregiver finally just said, "Look, I'm outta here. I do not want this stressful environment. It's not fun anymore, actually." But I was also thinking about a presentation of a group of second graders, and they were talking about Deming principles that were in their classroom and all the kinds of things that they were doing. And somebody in the audience asked them a question and they said, "Well, how does it make you feel to work like this cooperatively and in a classroom like this, et cetera?" And this little boy without even hesitating said, "I really like the dolphins." He meant endorphins.

[laughter]

0:09:36.7 AS: Fire up those dolphins.

0:09:38.8 DL: Yeah. But it was very clear that the teacher had been having discussions with them about that, about how do we feel about this when we cooperate and we sort of work together? So there's... I kind of break it down and there's two different kinds of cooperation we often see, we see natural and we see forced cooperation. So forced cooperation is like, "You, you, and you, get over there and start cooperating, and then we're gonna see who's the top cooperating group in the room," and things like that. That's sort of like competitive cooperation. Whereas natural cooperation is when you basically just set up the environment and encourage people to support and help each other, they will naturally seek out other people to work together.

0:10:33.5 DL: Now, you may... In education, you may have an objective that you want people to learn to work together with people that they wouldn't normally work together. Okay, well, that's a different aim that you're trying to accomplish. And to do that, I would probably do something like just total random selection, just throw everybody's name in a hat and draw out four names and this is your team. Because then everybody knows how team members were chosen to be in that. But where we get into trouble is when teachers think, "I have all the control and I have all the autonomy, and I'm... This is my role, and so I'm gonna pick people. I'm gonna pick this person to work with that person and this person." And students of all ages, even all the way down to kindergarten, preschool, know they're being manipulated [chuckle] when they do that because they can tell that I've obviously been put with this person because I'm supposed to be helping them or something.

0:11:38.7 DL: And so that's not a good way to operate. Pretty soon you'll just have people who hate being in teams, hate working with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Also, you won't see a level of cooperation emerge if you've got a heavy duty grading system going on, ranking system in a corporation, et cetera. Because the bottom line is we're all trying to survive in this world, and if the only way I can survive is to not work well with others, [chuckle] I will do that. So, a friend of mine was getting his MBA in Australia, and he was telling me that they would automatically get together and sort of form study teams with people that they already knew or they knew well, et cetera. But then they'd be in classes and the professor would assign certain books to read or something.

0:12:40.1 DL: And so some of the teams would send out part of their team over to the library to check out all the books so that none of the other team members in the class could have access to the books, or they would have to drive great distances to go to a different library to get the book. And we tend to point at individuals and wanna blame the individual, like, "Oh, well, look what defective people they are." No, they're in a defective system that's forcing them to sacrifice their integrity to get an artificial scarcity of top marks in that class. And so when you see that kind of stuff going on, we always wanna blame the individual because that takes the pressure off of the system or the managers managing a system, whether that's a classroom, a school, a company, or whatever it might be. You can just say, "Oh, well, just look at these defective people and the behavior that they're having." Well, 98% of the behavior is coming from the system itself. Don't like the behavior, then change the system and you'll see a different behavior emerge, or like what we've been taught to do in schools. We leave the system alone and then come up with all kinds of management systems to manage the behavior it's producing, so isolation and putting kids outside in the classroom and depriving of recess and...

0:14:11.0 AS: It's a good point because I think that there's a lot of people in education and also in management that feel like, "Oh, it's an endless cycle of trying to close loopholes that people are breaking through, they're breaking our system, and it's just endless." And you see very intricate systems, well, we've got a way to deal with that. We've got a way to deal with that. They're gonna be punished on this, they're gonna be rewarded on that. And you realize that actually they're causing all of this, and then they're trying to fix it by tampering with all of these things out there. So when you set up a cooperative environment, it's like you start to... You go back to the source and stop the cause of a lot of the issues that you're dealing with.

0:15:01.5 DL: Yeah. I'll never forget, one of my children was going to high school and she was in an honors chemistry class. Okay? So this is supposed to be the best of the best kids in the school. It was a very big school. They're all in this chemistry class. Well, almost all these kids had a perfect 4.0 grade average at that time in that class. And they all knew that something's gotta give because we're not all gonna be valedictorians even though we would all be qualified for it. So my daughter came home the first day of the class and she said, "Dad, I think I'm really gonna like this chemistry class and the chemistry teacher and everything." And he said, "We're all top students. We all work together, we all wanna have great results in chemistry, everything." And she said, "I think he might be really interested in some of your methods and concepts and et cetera." So great. Second day of school, she came home, she said, "Dad, I think I'm gonna drop chemistry."

[laughter]

0:16:08.1 DL: I said, "What happened in two days?" And she said, "Well, he spent the entire class explaining how he grades on a curve." And I'll never forget her face. She looked at me and she said, "Do they just think we're complete idiots?" She said, "We've all had advanced math courses. We can't all get A's if you're grading on a curve." The process. So anyway, third day she comes back, she says, "Well, I think I'm gonna be one of the top people and I'll probably get an A anyway because... So I'm gonna stay in the class." So I didn't hear much about the class until the end of the first semester. And she comes home the last week of the first semester, and she said, "Dad, you'll never guess what happened." And I said, "What?" And she said, "Well, a lot of the kids in the class that were on the borderline between grade levels, like from a C to a B or from a B to a... " Especially a B to an A, well, not only had they kept track of their own performance, but they'd kept track of other kids' performance also in the classroom.

0:17:24.0 DL: Were able to single out several individuals in the classroom that no matter what they got on the final, they were still gonna get a B or a C or a D. They could not even take the final and it wasn't gonna change their status or their grade or whatever. But if they could get enough of these kids to do poorly on the final, it would bump some of these other kids up into the top grade level to get an A. And they actually paid kids in the class, [laughter] I can't remember, it was like $20 or something to do poorly on the final.

0:18:03.8 AS: Oh my gosh.

0:18:05.2 DL: So anyway, the principal finds out, the teacher finds out and there's this whole Spanish inquisition, and they're bringing kids in and interrogating them and everything. I couldn't resist it, I had to go in and talk to the principal and I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Oh, we're gonna have to kick these kids outta class 'cause they obviously cheated." And I said, "They didn't cheat. They played your game better than you."

0:18:28.5 AS: [laughter] That really pissed him off.

0:18:30.4 DL: Yeah. These kids ought to be getting awards of student of the year. This was amazing, amazing thing that they figured out and doesn't feel good because they turned the game back on you and found a way where we could cooperate at a high degree to get greater rewards.

0:18:49.0 AS: And the man behind the curtain has been revealed.

0:18:51.4 DL: Yeah. So, he didn't like that at all. That teacher didn't like that.

0:18:56.8 AS: Sure.

0:18:57.9 DL: And... Oh yeah. So it was later on that year that I had to go in to talk to the principal about something else. And he said to me, jokingly, I think he said, "I know I'm having a bad day when your car is in the parking lot."

[laughter]

0:19:12.9 AS: Langford! Now let me ask you, in wrapping this up, I just wanna think about the educator out there who likes what they've heard, but they are operating in somewhat of a competitive environment. What would be kind of step number 1, 2, 3 that they could do to begin to bring a more cooperative environment into their classroom?

0:19:35.1 DL: Well, you have to start looking at what are the barriers to cooperation that are going on in your classroom? Are they outside barriers, outside forces? You may have awards and all kinds of things that are going on, but you don't have to emphasize those. [chuckle] You don't have to daily say, "Well, if you don't get your work done, you're not gonna win the award." And constantly go over that kind of stuff. Instead identify that learning is the aim or the goal, and we're all here to get high levels of learning. I think also there's this misnomer about teams and teamwork. And we think that just because we put people in a team that that's teamwork or cooperation. And that's not really true either. Unless you're actually teaching and training people how to work in a team cooperatively would help set people up. I know many, many students that just almost refuse to be in teams, even at the university level because they say, "I end up doing all the work and then I got these three slackers that'll just go along and we all get the same grade."

0:20:44.1 AS: Right.

0:20:44.1 DL: That's another just convoluted process. On the other hand, if you want people to work well together, then start thinking about, how do you set up an environment so people will naturally work well together? So I created a tool in my tool time book called Code of Cooperation. And it's pretty simple. You just start off asking everybody, what leads to a high degree of cooperation? What would it be like in this class? And you just list those things off but that sort of becomes the code of how you operate. And that's a different message right at the very beginning of the class that, here's our code of cooperation and we can talk about it when we sort of start to fall down and not cooperate.

0:21:40.3 AS: Okay, great. So maybe I'll summarize some of the things that we talked about. The first thing that I was thinking about when you... I love the statement, intrinsic motivation is beaten out of us, basically. It's like we set up systems that destroy that for most and that people have a right to joy in learning. And ultimately when that happens, there's better output. Now, we had talked about control, autonomy, ownership previously, and these are kind of foundational things that begin to lead into cooperation. And then you talked about the different factors and understanding that really there's a system of intrinsic motivation, and you wanna try to apply all the different parts of that system. And so the thing that I thought was interesting was the idea of cooperation is different from setting up a system of competition, like competition for resources as an example.

0:22:42.0 AS: Now you said something that I thought was interesting also, which is the better you cooperate, the better you compete. And I was thinking about in one of my courses, I don't have them do group work, I have them do group support on their individual work. And the end result of that is they really become very close to each other. And so I was thinking that cooperation leads... Competition leads to a lifetime of enemies and cooperation leads to a lifetime of friends. And that partially tells you why the endorphin release is such a major thing. And then you talked about forced versus natural and you wanna set up that natural environment and oftentimes we blame the participants in the system rather than blaming the system. And as you've described the idea of students are really good at gaming the system.

0:23:39.3 AS: And finally, I asked you for some implementation ideas, and you talked about, first for those educators out there, look for barriers that are outside the things that are putting competitive pressures on the students and deemphasize those in your classroom. Those are fine. Let them do that outside, whatever, but try to deemphasize that. The other thing is to understand that teamwork is a cop out for teachers oftentimes because it just ends up work going on to individuals. So don't necessarily think that, "Hey, we're gonna set up teams that's gonna lead to cooperation." And number three was, how do you set an environment for cooperation? Ask this question to the students, discuss it, and when you do, you're gonna come up with a more cooperative environment. Anything you would add to that?

0:24:27.5 DL: Just lastly in Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge, understanding variation is really critical. And if you are setting up a system where you have an artificial scarcity of top marks or top grades, you will not see people cooperate to a very high degree and really they can't. So you always have to be cognizant of the System of Profound Knowledge when you look at these things 'cause it's telling you what to stop doing, [chuckle] and what to start doing.

0:25:01.4 AS: And for educators and managers out there, it's hard to break free from those systems. But if you first just become aware that that bell curve is forcing the grading on that curve or we get rid of... We give bonuses to our 'A' employees and we kick out our 'C' employees, like these types of structures that are built into systems is what Dr. Deming taught about, that you don't have to become aware of these things and the influences, you may not be able to change them right away. So, great point.

0:25:34.2 DL: Well, you're always gonna have the bell curve no matter what system you set up or whatever, but the real aim is to move the whole bell curve up. So now I have only a finite number of people doing top level work or 'A' work or the best type work. I'm actually moving the whole system up so I have a greater and greater number of people all reaching that level.

0:25:58.0 AS: Yeah. So it's like the application of the bell curve, it's a tool to understand what's going on, but it's not a tool that works for rewarding and punishing, which seems like that's what we see when we see a bell curve oftentimes.

0:26:12.7 DL: That sounds like a whole 'nother podcast right there, so...

0:26:15.5 AS: Boom, we're gonna be rolling into the next one on that, I think. All right. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners out there, 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, and it's particularly pertinent to our discussion today, People are entitled to joy in work.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is mapping the process, part two. John, take it away.

0:00:23.5 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, we've now been talking about our efforts to improve chronic absenteeism for several episodes. And we've talked about two Plan-Do-Study-Act or PDSA cycles focused on where we were working with specific students and their families regarding obstacles to getting to school. And then we shifted gears, and we started running this PDSA cycle three that we talked about last time. And just as a refresher for listeners, the objective of PDSA three is to create a process map, basically. And the goal for the process map is to standardize our attendance intervention system. And I think one of the things that comes to mind when you sort of work on process maps or on important processes is this quote from Dr. Deming. He said, If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing, which is pretty convicting when you really think about it. I think a lot of people initially will say, No, no, no, I know exactly what our process is. And then you say, Well, write it down, map it. And then it becomes much more apparent that most people most of the time have a very rough version in their head that they can't translate into an actual written process.

0:01:44.8 Andrew Stotz: And I'm curious why that is, because on the one hand, when I've done mapping a process, you end up with, Okay, but then there's this exception, and then there's this. And oh, yeah, but don't forget that. So there's like all these intricacies. That's one reason. And then there's another reason is why is that someone's tunnel vision on I know the process because I know the three parts of the process that I'm working with. Why do you think it's hard for people to understand the whole process?

0:02:11.9 John Dues: Well, I think that first reason is probably the biggest reason where there's when they actually start mapping it, there's all these things that they initially left out. And I think as soon as an organization gets to a certain number of employees and has a certain amount of complexity, or you have to add a person that's now going to do part of what you previously did because your role changed or something shifted, needs change, or whatever in the environment. And you have to bring them in. You realize pretty quickly that you can't rely on that stuff that lived in your head anymore. So I think it's a combination of all those things for why this becomes so important. And the other reason I mean, the reason you want to do this is so that there's a starting place, a standard place where people are working from so that whatever it is that the focus is that it can be improved. It's hard to do that when there's no set process to start with.

0:03:08.5 John Dues: Let me. I'll share my screen and just kind of as a refresher, take a look at some of that data that we've talked about so far on this chronic absenteeism front. So, you'll remember that we have this long range goal to improve chronic absenteeism. We've kind of talked about where we are now, where we want to be. So where we are now is in that sort of 40 to 50 % range in terms of chronic absenteeism. We want to be down in under 5%. We have eight years of data going back to the 16-17 school year. And the other thing we've talked about on the data front is that really we have this pre-pandemic world and this post-pandemic world when it comes to chronic absenteeism. For anybody that's watching, you can clearly see this on the process behavior chart or control chart that's on the screen where prior to COVID, we're sort of humming along around 25% chronic absenteeism, which is still high. But now, since COVID, we've since the pandemic, we've skyrocketed. So there's this clear, sort of, new reality, new system for schools like ours that...

0:04:23.7 Andrew Stotz: And can you, just for someone that may be just popping in and hearing this, can you just describe what is chronic absenteeism rate?

0:04:31.9 John Dues: Yes, chronic absenteeism is a standard federally defined level of absenteeism where kids are called chronically absent once they've missed 10% or more of the school year. So the percent of kids that are chronically absent is what's being displayed.

0:04:50.5 Andrew Stotz: So if a school has 100 kids, this chart is saying that 50% of them are chronically absent?

0:04:58.9 John Dues: Yes. Yep.

0:05:00.5 Andrew Stotz: Okay. Yep.

0:05:01.1 John Dues: And that's not since the pandemic happened. That's not atypical, especially for schools that serve a high population of students that are economically disadvantaged, basically, unfortunately. So that's the goal, sort of cut it by a significant amount, 40 to 50% down to less than 5%. So that's the goal. And we've looked at the... Last time we looked at sort of the processes that are currently in place. So just as a quick refresher, United Schools, where I work, is a small urban public charter school system. We have four campuses, and there's people from each of the campuses on this attendance improvement team. And what we've been doing lately is sort of mapping out the process that each campus is using. Each campus has their own little process for intervening with kids that are chronically absent. They have different people that are doing different parts of that process. And so we started with just saying, what is it that your process looks like?

0:06:09.3 John Dues: And we looked at a couple of those maps. So this first map is from one of the campuses. It's pretty simple. There's just one or two people involved. The way they represented it initially is just maybe 10 or 15 steps that they're going through to sort of identify who's having attendance issues, sending letters to families, contacting families, that type of thing. But you can see, initially, at least as they mapped it, it's a pretty simple process. And then when we looked at one of our other campuses and they mapped theirs out, it was a slightly more in-depth process. There's sort of more detail. There are more people involved in the process. I'd say there's probably a little more sophistication to sort of when and how they were intervening with parents. And a lot of the intervening is just sort of the compliance requirements. When a kid reaches a certain number of missed hours, we're required to send them a letter to their parents, for example. So a lot of the process currently focuses on sort of the legal requirements when it comes to absenteeism in Ohio's law. But these are two campuses that are about three miles apart, and you can see, even though they're following the same legal sort of requirements from the state, they have very different processes for how that work is being done.

0:07:38.9 Andrew Stotz: Or could you also say that this particular campus, the people involved may have a much deeper understanding of it or a desire to map it out with more detail? Or do you think it's significantly different?

0:07:52.3 John Dues: I think that this second one that looks like it has more steps, I think they have a person that's more of their sort of 1.0 FTEs, like more of their 1.0 FTE is focused on just attendance, whereas it's sort of like a divided responsibility.

0:08:09.7 Andrew Stotz: Wait, what's a 1.0 FTE?

0:08:12.1 John Dues: Like one full-time equivalent person. So a big part of the person's job is this attendance process. So they know this process pretty deeply. So they were able to map it in more detail, basically. So that was interesting. So part of this PDSA cycle three was, so the plan was really had sort of two steps. One, create a standardized process map for the system as a whole that everybody's going to work from. And then, once that's drafted, gather some feedback, both quantitative and qualitative feedback from our network leadership team. So that was the Plan. The Do was just make the map and then gather the input. So that's what's been happening of late with this team. But we can see pretty quickly what they did. And it certainly does help to have an improvement advisor, someone with a deep knowledge of the Deming philosophy and mapping processes, because he's the one at the meetings. He's the one sort of taking everything that the team is telling him, the process maps that the campus teams have done. And then he's putting it all together based at their input. And their input is certainly super important, but he's also very talented at building processes that are coherent and can be understood by many across our system.

0:09:40.3 John Dues: And so what he ended up doing using their input is he's now got a process map that includes not just the nuts and bolts like, okay, the kid has an attendance problem, and we have to send letters and do things like that. He's going back and created a process map that includes four different stages. So this first stage that if you're viewing this part of the process map is just for onboarding, which was completely missing from all of the campus maps. It wasn't on the... So the idea here is the very first thing, the beginning of this process is a new student enrolls. And as soon as they enroll, a family enrolls, there's going to be a number of things that happen, mostly on the educational side, like what is good attendance? So right from the get-go, one of the things they're going to do is they have this welcome folder that a family gets when they come for their tour or their orientation. And right in that welcome folder is going to be our attendance framework that defines what good attendance is and when, where it really starts to become an issue and impacts a kid's education. So this whole first process map, this whole first stage is about onboarding and educating the family and the student about what good attendance is, which was, again, completely missing from the process before.

0:11:10.2 John Dues: The second stage is attendance monitoring. So, the kid's been onboarded, school has started, and now there's a process to monitor every student's attendance, whether they have a problem or not. And this monitoring system is going to be standardized so that different notifications are being sent home to families, different sort of letters, letting them know when things are becoming a problem. So again, this whole process is about monitoring attendance after providing some of that education. And then, if through that monitoring, it becomes apparent that the student needs additional intervention, the next stage is sort of that attendance intervention plan. So this is where the full map before for each campus just focused on this part. And this is obviously, if you look at this compared to the campus maps, this is much more in detail about what's happening. I'd say, the other thing that's happening here is there's problem-solving with the family. So instead of just saying, warning, your kid has gotten to this number of missed hours, and you send that home in a letter, once that happens, you can see that there's actually Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles being run with the family and the student that are off track from attendance perspective and some individual problem solving is happening.

0:12:52.3 John Dues: See, we run three PDSA cycles to try to get them back on track. So that's a brand new component to this attendance system. And then from there, for some kids, if we get them back on track, then we don't have to take any further action. But for other students, there are some, again, some legal requirements. And so the last stage of that process is if we do have to file official truancy charges, sort of like what, or let the state know that the student is now truant, there's some steps that we take to make that filing. But that's far after many, many steps have been taken to educate, to run PDSA cycles with individual kids that are off track, to try to get the family and sort of the knowledge they need to understand, like how to keep their student on track when they're in school. So, there's a good chance that this will change pretty quickly, this process map, it's a good one, I think, having gone through it, it's a solid process, but it'll, as soon as it like gets battle tested, there's going to be updates. Now, that's not say you're going to change things willy nilly, but what you are going to do is you're going to learn what's working, what's not, you sort of have this hypothesis, but at least now, since everybody's working from the standard process, we can make improvements that then can go out to the entire system.

0:14:32.9 Andrew Stotz: Great. I'm curious, what is the definition of truancy these days? When I was in school, there was trouble in River City and it was trouble with a capital T and that rhyme with P and that stands for pool. So you had the trouble of all the kids hanging out at the pool place, but I'm just curious what's going on. What is the definition of truancy these days?

0:15:01.3 John Dues: Yeah, it's when they, I mean, students have to have missed a certain number of hours of instruction. And now instead of attendance being measured in days, there's basically a threshold that you hit in terms of numbers of hours missed that then you legally have to file truancy.

0:15:24.4 Andrew Stotz: But what does truancy mean?

0:15:27.3 John Dues: Truancy just means that you've missed a lot of school, basically.

0:15:31.1 Andrew Stotz: Okay.

0:15:31.4 John Dues: Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of reasons, when we did those first PDSAs, not all those kids were necessarily truant, but they all had serious absenteeism issues. I think what we talked about was that we found that there were many different issues that were sort of at the root of that, which is part of the challenge here is we have high numbers of chronic absenteeism and then lots of different reasons for that. And so how do you problem solve with all those different folks to help get them back on track? That's part of the challenge. For sure, part of the challenge. But so where the team is at now, so they've completed this third PDSA cycle. So the Do was to make the process map and then get the input from the leadership team. And now they're doing the Study and the Act. So the Study, one of the things I talked about was that the initial feedback from folks that aren't a part of the team was more education needed to happen during that onboarding process.

0:16:39.9 John Dues: So that was sort of like a blind spot before. Not that people didn't talk about it, but now it's systematized. Here's the piece of paper, the attendance framework you're going to give them. There's an orientation session on attendance. There's a session with students during their orientation about what's good attendance and how many days does that equate to in terms of missing school throughout the year, that types of things. Another big thing in the study was more personal touches throughout the process and not just sort of those notifications that I talked about, like the attendance warning letters. The group sort of talked about, while some of these letters are required, whether they're that effective or not is definitely in question.

0:17:25.1 John Dues: Another thing is we have a role at each campus that's called Dean of Family and Community Engagement. And so something like attendance is the responsibility of everybody in the school. But if there's a point person at each campus, it's that Dean of Family and Community Engagement. And so there's some worry about, like when I go back to this process, it's the Dean of Family and Community Engagement or DFCE, they're sort of the point person running these PDSAs and the PDSAs can be time intensive. So one of the concerns is, will they be able to sort of handle the workload that sort of comes with this new process? And I think that's definitely an open question, but at least it's on the radar. It's not like no one is saying, here's the process, go figure out how to make this work. That would be a bad way to do it. There's a recognition that we think we need to do some of this problem solving with individual cases, but there's also this recognition that there's going to be a time constraint for the DFCEs. And then another big X factor that was a part of this study write-up was transportation. Because we've talked about how bad transportation, yellow school buses have been in Columbus this year. We've had a lot of problems. And so what's that look like next year, and how does this factor in? When we did those interviews with students and families, it wasn't the primary reason for all families, but I think in about 50% of the families, transportation had some role in the attendance issues. So these are things that are on folks' minds as they're working through this.

0:19:06.5 Andrew Stotz: That's a lot of progress on this.

0:19:09.3 John Dues: Yeah, a lot of progress, I think. And you get questions like, is it worth all the time to do this? And it's like, is this improving anything? And if you're looking at the outcome, probably not yet. But now that there's this standardized process, I think we can actually make some inroads on this chronic absenteeism process. It would be very hard to do in the absence of this standardization that we're going through and this input from the group to put more sort of resources towards this to get some expertise in terms of putting together a process instead of leaving it up to individual people that maybe don't have this skill set.

0:19:53.9 Andrew Stotz: You also recently posted on your LinkedIn about the idea of a system and results. If you don't even understand the system, how are you going to get the results that you want from the system?

0:20:05.8 John Dues: Exactly. If you don't understand what's causing the problem, if you don't have a whole systems view, you could put a process in place that actually makes things worse, may make things better in one area, but make them worse in another area. So yeah, this is complicated stuff when you're trying to make change in a complex system like a school system.

0:20:25.7 Andrew Stotz: Interesting.

0:20:26.2 John Dues: Yeah, the last step is just the Act. So they're deciding what to do. Are they going to adopt this? Are they going to adapt it or abandon the idea? So I think we're not going to abandon it because obviously we're moving forward with this new process map. And it's, I would call this adapt though. So we're going to adapt this process map into the system, but very high likelihood that there are going to be many adjustments to it as it gets put into action. As I was just saying, it's not adopt because if it was adopt, this thing, this process map would be sort of run through a number of cycles where it had been tested, the kinks had been worked out, and it's sort of going to be, this is the way. So what we're doing now is adapt. So we're going to make some improvements based on this initial feedback we got from the leadership team. Now we'll make some additional adjustments, especially next school year because the school year is over during the initial implementation.

0:21:29.8 John Dues: And the other sort of part of the Act was if you read the steps in this process map from start to finish. There are a lot of artifacts that go along with this that don't exist. So for example, this attendance slide deck for new student orientation. That's a part of the process. We probably don't want to leave that up to each individual group to create on their own because what is the content of that? And so that has to be created. So there are a number of things like that, that the improvement advisor for the project is going to take on either creating himself or he's going to strongly support the creation. So those are also standardized across the network. So you see, it's a lot of work.

0:22:20.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

0:22:22.2 John Dues: So that would be where we pick up with, once students come back in August, and that's kind of leaving things off at the end of this school year.

0:22:31.6 Andrew Stotz: That's great. I was mentioning about this little jingle that I was talking about, and it comes from a 1957 movie called The Music Man. And he says, his line is, there's trouble in River City, and it starts with T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for pool. And it's this guy, he's a con man, a hustler, who's gone to the citizens of a town in River City, Iowa, telling them that the corrupting influence is the pool table in the town that's going to keep the kids from going to school. And he wants to start like a marching band. But for those old-timers that seen that movie, they'll love that reference. And if you haven't seen it, go see The Music Man on... I don't know. It's hard to find things on Netflix these days like that, but maybe it's on YouTube.

0:23:27.9 John Dues: Very classic, just like that.

0:23:30.2 Andrew Stotz: But I remember listening to that when I was young, because my parents always had musicals. My sisters actually played musicals on the record player. So you always was hearing the songs of musicals.

0:23:43.8 John Dues: Well, it seems like the truancy thing is, that's not a new problem necessarily.

0:23:48.1 Andrew Stotz: Oh, yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. Well, why don't we wrap it up there? And 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. And you can find John's book, "Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools" on Amazon. 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."

How do you tap into intrinsic motivation when the assignments (or jobs) are boring or feel irrelevant? Andrew and David talk about the role of challenge in intrinsic motivation, including why being challenged is key to innovation and improvement.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I will 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's topic is the role of challenge in intrinsic motivation. David, take it away.

0:00:30.6 David P. Langford: Hello, Andrew. Good to be back.

0:00:33.2 AS: Good to see you.

0:00:33.3 DL: So how challenging is challenge, that's really what we're after about here today. So this is part four in a five-part podcast series we've been doing on intrinsic motivation, and so when I first encountered the concept of intrinsic motivation and it's actually when I was getting my undergraduate degree and I was so intrigued about it, but even like today, there was no training in it, there was no real... There was just, "Here it is, and yeah, intrinsic motivation is really good, so good luck with that." And all the training was around extrinsic motivation, how to motivate people, and it's the same today. I get calls and I get emails and stuff, and people always wanna know, can't we use bonuses and can't we use this and... You can use those kinds of things. I always think of the phrases that Dr. Deming had, he said, "The destruction has to start somewhere."

[laughter]

0:01:40.2 DL: And people would ask him about those kinds of things like, yeah, you could do that, but... You're on the road to destruction. So I've been trying to explain the five researched key elements of intrinsic motivation that Deming talked about, and how do you actually change the system, whether that's a business or a school or a classroom, or whatever it might be. So you have people becoming more intrinsically motivated, so we've gone through a couple. So we talked about control or autonomy in the situation, we talked a lot about, in podcast number two, about cooperation, and then podcast number three is support, and now we're gonna talk about the role of challenge in intrinsic motivation. So, it's not so easy as just to like flip a switch and say, "Okay, now we're gonna intrinsically motivate people." It is a complex thinking that has to take place in management to create an environment where people can be intrinsically motivated, right?

0:02:51.2 AS: Yeah.

0:02:51.9 DL: And usually, if you find people looking like they're not motivated, Deming talked about probably 94% to 98% of the reason they're not motivated to come to work, is the work itself, the job. So when we start to talk about challenge, you wanna think about the job itself, is the job that say you're having a student do... If I tell people, "Memorize these 10 spelling words for Friday," well, yeah, for some students, that could be really challenging, for others, it's just sheer boredom of, "Why are we doing this? Where did this come from? There's no real challenge to it." So, you can take just about anything that you have that you want people to do...

0:03:39.6 DL: And in fact, Deming was actually a master of this, he went into some of the most mundane manufacturing places in the world where people are just sitting all day long and doing the same darn thing all over and over, thousands of times, and then leaving and then, how do you motivate those people? Well, let's just pay them more, let's do this or that or the other thing. And it didn't work. And the Hawthorne Studies showed that, oh yeah, you could turn the lights off and productivity goes up, or you could turn the lights on, productivity... Or you have music, or you can do all these kinds of things, but what they discovered was that it was the fact that management actually cared. [chuckle] That made the difference, and they were actually doing and trying to do something to improve the working environment is what was really discovered through that. But, Deming was the master of going in and teaching people to use their brains and to begin to improve their own situation. And that's a challenge. I'm sitting here doing this all day long, the same tedious task all day long, but all of a sudden somebody gives me the keys to improve this situation, make a change here, do something...

0:04:57.2 DL: And that's where PDSA came from, or originally PDCA was Dr. Shewhart. But Plan-Do-Study-Act, make a plan, do it, study it and act on it, did it work? It could be just that simple of a process. Now if we get together with a few other people and we study the process of what's happening, and we're given the authority or the control or autonomy, like we talked about earlier, to actually make a change, ah, well, that's pretty challenging. That's pretty interesting. And in my work with education, over and over and over when I go in and start working with people and teaching them this same kind of concept, I hear all the time administrators saying that, "We got dead wood on our staff," or, "We've got people that just don't care," or... Well, it's probably because you taught them to do that, or somebody previously taught them to do that because that's not normal if people are acting like that, etcetera, and yes, they have to make money, and yes, they have to live, and so they'll just learn to quit work, but keep the job. [chuckle] And I'll show up every day and do what I'm supposed to do, but it doesn't mean I'm gonna put in any extra effort in or any thinking or anything else, so...

0:06:21.0 AS: I can imagine a listener or a viewer listening to this and thinking to themselves, "Yeah, let's do a challenge. Let's do a competition."

[laughter]

0:06:29.1 AS: Not realizing that when you're talking about challenge, and when talking about intrinsic motivation, it's not about a challenge to compete for a spelling contest or something, it's a different type of challenge, so tell us more about what kind of challenges people respond to.

0:06:46.7 DL: Yeah, so some of the ways that you can get challenge into a mundane task or a situation is you wanna think about excitement, how can I bring a level of excitement into this situation? And well, how do you get excitement going? Well, you have to think about the level of difficulty. And so, in neuroscience, there's actually sort of a learning zone. So, too much challenge, I'm gonna be overwhelmed, I'll be frustrated, I'll get the deer in the headlights look, I just can't do anything. Too little challenge, I got boredom going on. So there's a learning zone where the challenge has to be just right, and the problem, especially with teachers, is teachers are always trying to assess that with the students that they're working with, right? They're trying to set the level of challenge, but what I learned over the last 40 years is, the only person that can really know what is challenging is the individual himself, even like kindergarten, first grade, second grade students know if something is challenging or not, and when you set up a situation where they can sort of choose the level of challenge involved with that, you get a level of excitement that you didn't get before because the level of difficulty is there.

0:08:20.2 DL: So, I think we talked a little bit in one of the previous podcasts about gaming and video games, and so many education institutes, institutions, they wanna ban gaming and they wanna ban all those kind of stuff, but why are those things so addicting? Why are kids spending so much time on that? Because they're setting the level of challenge. They're setting the level of excitement that they can handle, and if they go up too many levels too fast, this game becomes so overwhelming and so difficult that they just can't cope with it, and so will end up just quitting or backing down a level or two until they sort of master that and move forward. So, being cognizant of that level of difficulty and getting the individual to understand how to set that level of difficulty is where it's really at. I remember the story of, I think it's Secretary of State with, I think it was Nixon administration or something... Anyway, there were some...

0:09:26.4 AS: Kissinger.

0:09:30.0 DL: Yes, Kissinger. You got it. Yes. See, there's a level of challenge for you and you win. [laughter] But, Kissinger wanted some kind of a plan or a military plan or something from one of the generals about something that they were doing or whatever, and gave him a timeline, and so the general came back with a plan, and Kissinger listened patiently to the plan and said, "General, is that the best you can do?" General thought for a while and said, "Well, actually, no. Given the time and resources we had, etcetera, we thought, well, this is the best we can do." "Well, why don't you go back and re-look at it and do it again, and see if that's the best you can do." Well, the general came back two or three more times and each time Kissinger said, "General, is that really the best you can do?" And finally the general said, "By golly, we worked on this, and I believe this is the best we could do at this point in time." Kissinger said, "Okay, that's all I wanted."

[laughter]

0:10:29.8 AS: I'll read it.

0:10:30.0 DL: That's right. He just really wanted to know. So even in schools, kids learn to play the game of learning really quick. How do you get through school? By giving a teacher what they want. You don't get through school if you're super innovative... Well, you'll get through school, but you're not gonna probably get the As and master stuff if you're actually being innovative all the time and thinking outside of the box, and I think it was even Einstein got a D in physics or math or something because he kept challenging...

0:11:01.4 AS: Messing around.

0:11:03.0 DL: Yeah, he kept challenging the teacher's theories all the time. Well, that's not the way to get through school. You wanna give people the answers they expect, right?

0:11:15.8 AS: Yeah. I have a...

0:11:17.5 DL: That's the level of challenge that we're talking about.

0:11:20.3 AS: Right. I have an experience when I was 18, and I went to work in this factory, and it was a plastic molding factory back when plastic molding was done in America, and it was a very mundane job, and I would go crazy all day long waiting for the break and it would just drive me nuts. And I would be thinking about stuff all the time, and the way the company did it is they gave us three months, and at the end of three months, they'd tell us whether they're gonna keep us or not, and I started the job with a couple of other guys, some of them didn't survive, but this one guy did survive, and it was the night before we had the decision date, and I said... I asked him... We were talking about it and he asked me, "What do you think?" I said, "Man, I hope they don't offer me a job 'cause this is just gonna kill me, this is just... There is no challenge in this job." And I was like...

0:12:13.2 DL: I don't care how much they pay me.

0:12:14.5 AS: Yeah, exactly. Which I felt like must be the same answer that he was gonna give, but he gave a very different answer. He said, "Oh, I hope I get this job." And I was like, "Why?" And he said, "Because I just... I like it, I know exactly what to do. I don't have to bring the job home, I'm not facing all this stress and I can deal with that." And that was a wake-up call when I later became a supervisor at Pepsi, I was able to understand that different people have different objectives from work and different things they want from it, and some people want a big challenge and some people don't necessarily. So my question to you is, how do you handle different people that have different willingness or desire to take on challenge?

0:12:57.7 DL: Yeah, and Deming talked about that a lot in his seminars too, and one of the responses I often remember was, he said, "Sometimes people are just not in the right job." So, maybe there's another job within the company that would be much more challenging for them, but... 'Cause everybody has their own expertise that they bring to a situation, whether that's in a classroom or a job or management or whatever it might be, people have this level of expertise and maybe you're not just... You're just not being challenged to use your level of thinking and background and expertise in a new way.

0:13:40.2 AS: But in this case, that guy may not... I don't know if that would have changed anything 'cause what he was looking for from the job was not necessarily challenge. He wasn't a bad employee. In fact, he got the job in the next day, and...

0:13:54.3 DL: Well, there's two different kinds of stresses, right? There's eustress and there's distress, right? So eustress is when you are challenged by the job, and you're like, "Oh, yeah. This is great. This job's really challenging. I gotta figure this stuff out and I gotta work through this," or distress like, "These people are trying to kill me," or, "This is a... This is no fun for me. I don't like this at all. It's not something I wanna be doing," right? So a manager has to be acutely aware of who they're working with. And part of that happens in the hiring process, are you asking the right questions? And we have the phrase, "Do you have the right people on the bus?" Well, do you actually know what the bus is? What do you really want them to be doing?

0:14:46.3 AS: In fact, the person that was in trouble in that case was me. They probably... Yeah... If I had an education and I had more understanding of the world, I could have said, "Hey, could I try something else?" But I didn't have that understanding. One of the things I was thinking about that you said earlier that made me think about this situation was also that there's one thing that that other guy would respond to. And that is identifying errors or mistakes or problems because everybody is frustrated by that and because they gotta repeat their work and they just don't like that. So you could, I guess, argue that in fact, continuous improvement is something that people will be... Feel the excitement of that challenge about.

0:15:34.9 DL: Yeah, and I've encountered that with educators as well. I've had teachers just come up and tell me flat out, "I don't wanna have to think. Just tell me what to do, and I'll go do it." The problem with that is all of a sudden you're faced with, say 30 students, coming from random variation in the system coming in, and all of a sudden you're challenged with dealing with a level that you've never had to deal with before, right? And if you haven't learned to think and change and adapt and understand that situation, you're just gonna blame the individuals. "We just need some new kids here," right? Well, that's like you get that... You're in a band and you get feedback from the audience that, "Well, what you're doing really sucks," and you're thinking, "Whoa! I just need a different audience."

[laughter]

0:16:37.6 AS: That's why I go to talk to my mom, 'cause she always applauds.

[laughter]

0:16:41.8 DL: Yeah. There you go. So another way we can get challenged is through just novelty. So too much sameness does the opposite of challenge and it puts people into boredom and stuff. I always tell people, "If you don't believe me, just go to a local church and watch what happens after about 20 minutes of one method, one person talking, everybody just sitting there listening. And then you start to see a whole audience of people nodding their heads in agreement. But really, they're just trying to keep their heads up, their eyes open," right? And this is the same thing in a classroom. Past 10 minutes, if you're doing the same lecture format, the same thing all the time, there's no novelty there. There's nothing to look forward to. There's no challenge, or...

0:17:31.5 DL: I remember I was in a Master's Degree statistics class and it was a 3-hour class, two times a week at night, and the first class was just all lecture. This guy lectured on statistics and so everybody got it. And I remember it was not a very big class, only about 12 students, but the next class, there were only half as many there and when he got ready to start the class, these people would all get their tape recorders out and just punch all these tape recorders because students all realized that there's no point in me sitting here if that's all we're gonna do is just sit and listen for three hours, right? And the professor didn't care either. He didn't care if you're there or not. So that's kinda the opposite of challenge.

0:18:22.6 AS: When I see those heads nodding in my classroom, I always basically say, "Everybody come up to the board. I'm gonna show you something," and then I just do the next lecture with everybody standing." [chuckle]

0:18:35.1 DL: Yeah, so that's really good. So how do you get novelty? You can get novelty through music, adding color, and what you just described, adding movement. Change the situation and then watch how the behavior changes instead of leaving the situation alone and expecting a different behavior, which is, insanity kind of a thing. So you're exactly right. As soon as you see that, you should be changing the situation immediately. Do something different.

0:19:02.5 AS: I've been teaching an ethics class, and that's kind of known for being really sleepy. So what I do is I created a... This is gonna sound kind of funny, a cheat sheet for my ethics class. But basically I teach a little bit and then I tell the students, "Okay, write this down on your cheat sheet." So they have to do a physical activity and then after that we go back to a little bit of a lecture. And then I say, "Okay, now take a quiz question." Then they do that and then we look at the scores and see what they understood, and what they didn't, and basically by doing this type of thing, I'm trying to bring variety, novelty is the word you use. And yeah, and if I didn't do that in that topic, it's gonna be all sleepy, sleepyheads.

0:19:48.4 DL: Yeah, sometimes people interpret that as "Oh, alright, we're going to do an ice breaker." No, that's not novelty. Just a lot of people just look at that and just say, "Oh, just skip the icebreaker," right?

0:20:02.1 AS: Yeah.

0:20:02.2 DL: You have to bring novelty to the learning situation. So I remember when I was in college, I had a class called the Assassination of American Presidents. Fantastic class, but I remember one time we were talking about eyewitness accounts in murder cases and assassinations like that. And while the professor starts to talk about this and he's going through his points and stuff, probably he could never do it today, but these two people burst into the room with masks over their heads, demanded something from the professor, and actually got one of the students and pulled them out of the classroom with them, etcetera. And then while everybody's sitting there in panic, the professor says, "Okay, I want you to take out a piece of paper, write down everything that you saw."

0:20:53.9 DL: 80% of the students in that class swore up and down that these two masked individuals had guns and were holding people hostage. And then they had... He had the mask, people come back in. None of us got it right, because the adrenaline was there and there's novelty and all this kind of stuff, but it turns out these two guys had bananas in their hands, but we were all sure that they were guns and... But that's the problem with that, but that was so novel that every time you went to class, there was something, and then by the third class, you're kind of wary that there's some trick... Is there some trick to this or not?

0:21:39.5 DL: But still, you're paying attention, because there's something going on there. By the way, to get it challenging is to make sure it's compelling. And Deming talked a lot about the purpose of an organization and the aim, etcetera. But is the work more compelling than just the work itself? You think about... Like building the space shuttle is a good example. Well, I'm not just putting in rivets in the side of this space shuttle. I'm actually creating something that's a national heritage and we're doing something that's never been done before and... The work is compelling in that sense. Also, think about... I think Deming talked one time about most of the work in manufacturing during World War II was being done by women, as men were in the army for the most part, and they worked in teams, they communicated, they had fun in their work, but the work was also compelling. You knew you're actually building that airplane for your uncle in the South Pacific. And if you had errors in it or problems that that plane wasn't gonna fly right, you could be... Your family member could be in trouble. So, sometimes that has to be explicit that you have to understand how to make work compelling.

0:23:11.6 AS: Yeah. And I'm gonna wrap it up and then I want to also hear kind of a final word from you about a challenge to the listeners and the viewers to think about how to make things compelling. But let me go through a couple of things that we learned from this discussion. Of course, we're at part four of five part of intrinsic motivation. And right now, we're talking about the idea of challenge. And what was interesting that you said from the beginning was that, we don't get any training on intrinsic motivation, we get all this training on extrinsic motivation. Okay, here's how you do this and here's how you do the scores and here's how you do the competition. And what you also said is that it takes some complex thinking to think about creating an environment of challenge. And you also mentioned that too much challenge for some people could be overwhelming and too little would be boredom and so you've got to try to judge that for the students and people involved.

0:24:13.9 AS: And then you talked about also different types of stress and how are people responding to that stress? And I think that... When I think about that, I think about a lot of managers just wanna deliver stress. You didn't hit your numbers or whatever. And then just to wrap it up, you talked about the idea of how novelty in making things not the same all the time, whether it's music, color, emotion, whatever that is, can bring some excitement and some challenge. And then I think you wrapped it up with what really brings the most powerful challenge is to understand the aim or the purpose of what you're doing. And that purpose basically is what can raise your level of challenge. So if there's anything to add, please add it, and otherwise, let's give everybody a little challenge to bring challenge into their classroom, starting from after listening to this podcast.

0:25:14.5 DL: Yeah, I'd say just the last thing I would add to that is that, you can always get a level of challenge by having creativity involved in the process. So we're studying the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics, and so the creativity is you're to go home and apply the Pythagorean theorem in some way and come back and present it to the rest of the class. Well, that's a much different challenge than do Problems A through Z, and just come back with the answers. But thinking about introducing a level of creativity into the work is very challenging, so...

0:25:55.2 AS: So what would be a challenge for the listeners that they could bring into their own life, their own classroom, their own workplace?

0:26:05.9 DL: Yeah. It really doesn't matter what workplace we're talking about. Once you understand that these are the factors that create intrinsic motivation, you can start looking at your environment and say, "Okay, how could I make this more challenging? Could I add a level of excitement to this that was probably never even there before, a level of novelty? Or could I make this work compelling or add creativity?" I grew up on a farm in Colorado, and I used to sometimes hate that, I'd have to go out with my father to build a fence or something. And one of the first things he would say is, "Okay, so what are we trying to do here?" "Just tell me what to do." Well, what are we trying to do here, and go through this, and then why do we need to build the fence in this way?" And I'd go, "Well, 'cause its stock gets out and... " "What happens if stock gets out?" And he was doing with five whys stuff just intuitively, but after a few years, he could just say, "Hey, go out and build this fence 'cause you know how to do it," and the challenge was much greater of figuring it out on my own and having to work that through. So even something so simple as that can have a level of challenge to it. So think about how you can make just about anything you do, challenging.

0:27:28.0 AS: Great challenge for all of us. What is the purpose of what we're doing and let's bring that out. Well David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for your 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 Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Andrew and David discuss one aspect of cultivating intrinsic motivation: the role of support. Cooperation and collaboration don't just happen, and leaving a group of people - particularly kids - to just do as they please isn't cultivating motivation. So how do you support intrinsic motivation?

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 David P. Langford who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is The Role of Support in Intrinsic Motivation. David, take it away.

0:00:29.5 David Langford: Thank you. So we're working through five factors that lead to high levels of intrinsic motivation. And we started off with control, autonomy, ownership, however you want to think about that, but that's number one. And then we had a discussion around that you have to develop levels of cooperation. And today I want to talk about the idea of support. So I'll never forget a kindergarten class, so students was giving a presentation to the State Board of Education and they were telling the state board about all the ownership they had in class and how they cooperated and how they did all these things on their own and they just knew what to do and had high degrees of ownership. And one of the board members said, "Well, if you're doing all these things, what's your teacher doing?" And without hesitating, I'll never forget this little boy grabs a microphone and he says, "The teacher is not in the closet, you know."

0:01:39.7 AS: My gosh, insightful.

0:01:42.1 DL: Oh yeah, the room was, there was probably 300 people in the room, at this state board meeting, and you could, the whispers were just, "What did he say? What is he talking about?" See, he knew intuitively that he was being allowed to do these things and supported to do these things and to work together and have a real community in the classroom. And that just didn't happen by itself.

0:02:12.4 AS: That's interesting because in that case, you sometimes would think, oh, the teacher's just, you know, letting the class go free or something like that. But it takes a lot of work. I mean, just as you talked, I was thinking about how confrontational America is in the world. You know, here I am in Asia and most people outside of the world do not think that America is a cooperative partner. In fact, people around the world oftentimes say, you know, they don't know whether it's better to be an enemy or a friend of America. And there's that just competitive. There's just not that cooperative. How do we work this out? How do we work together to get a better result for all of us? So continue on. Tell us more about support.

0:02:57.6 DL: Yeah. So if you if you want to see more intrinsic motivation emerge, you need to take a look at what you are doing. And you know, when you point a finger there, what is it that saying, there's three fingers pointing back at you? So yeah, what am I doing and how am I managing in such a way to not have a high degree of cooperation or a high degree of performance in a group? And so there are some very key factors that I've learned over the last 40 years that will either hinder or help intrinsic motivation to come out. And the first one I want to talk about, how do you support people is the area of feedback. So feedback versus evaluation.

0:03:53.9 DL: So you know, we always think that our job is to evaluate people, evaluate performance, evaluate a paper that you write and then give it back to you, put a grade on it, etcetera. People don't respect evaluation very well. There are just so many opinions in it, etcetera. Performance evaluations, Deming talked vociferously about getting rid of performance evaluations, but they do respect feedback. So when I'm in a classroom and I have an assignment, let's say it's a paper to write and you hand it in, yeah, I could go through it, put red marks all over it and then hand it back to you with a B minus on it and you'll probably just throw it in the trash can on the way out the door and that's the end of it.

0:04:50.6 DL: But if we've gone over what a quality standard is for that paper and what it should look like to meet that standard and now you hand that in and I start to give you feedback on it. I sit down with you and I say, "You know, this paragraph doesn't quite make sense. I think you really should rework these sentences and go over this and your punctuation is not quite right here and if you make these changes, I think you're going to be very close to being there, to meeting that standard, right?" Well, that's much different because I have a way to get out of my hole, right? But if I just have a B minus on it or C plus or whatever, there's no way for me to get out of that hole or to fix it. So it also brings into the whole grading thing. That's partly why Deming was so adamant about getting rid of grading in both corporations and schools, etcetera. Because it just limits the masses of people trying to achieve a high level of quality in anything they do. So moving to a feedback system is extremely important to get support for intrinsic motivation.

0:06:08.4 AS: And what do you say about the teachers and administrators and people who say, "Yeah, but feedback takes a lot more time."

0:06:19.2 DL: Exactly. So we have to think about things like that. If I'm having to spend way too much time giving feedback to people, it's probably because the upstream process wasn't very good. And I needed to go back and look at that and see, wow, if I want to have fewer and fewer students needing feedback to get it to a high quality standard, I might want to look first at the process I'm using to... The explanation of the assignment or how we went over it or examples that I show people up-front or whatever it might be. But that process is producing the end result. If I don't like the result, don't blame the people. They're just part of the system.

0:07:00.4 AS: It's interesting because I have a course that I've been teaching for a long time. And I have a lot of students going through it on a regular basis. And I can see the weaknesses when the reports are submitted. And then I go back and think, Okay, how do we resolve this? For instance, I want them to write in a very clear format. I want three bullets. I want some supporting arguments. So when I started teaching that, what I did is I made an Excel file that had a limit. You could only type in a certain amount of characters. And I said, "Okay, your first assignment is to operate within this limit." And then what I did, David, was I created a macro that would take a picture of that in that student's Excel file. And I said, "Submit your picture to the group. And then let's discuss those."

0:07:52.0 AS: And once I then have them present, five or 10 of them, randomly call on students to present your ideas, very quickly, all students can start to see, "Oh, crap, I see the weakness here. I wasn't that clear on this." And they started looking not only at common principles, but they also see their weaknesses. And then that then goes back into my lecture as I revise it for the next group to say, "Okay, how do I make sure that they don't make those mistakes the next time?" And that's one of the things about the manufacturing process that made Deming such a, it's so, it's sometimes simple to apply in a consistent process that's just cranking away. How do we think about how we apply that in a classroom that we do once a year or once every semester or once every term?

0:08:37.6 DL: Well, one of the previous podcasts, we talked about the Bell curve or the histogram responses of somebody. So your job as a, especially in education, is to not flatten the curve so that you have greater distances from top performers to low performers, but to actually sort of tighten the curve up so it's very tight. So what used to be top performance is actually being achieved by some of your lowest level students, and the top students are actually doing things that are just unbelievable because the whole curve is much, much tighter between the haves and the have-nots, so to speak.

0:09:29.4 AS: And are we also trying to shift that, once we've tightened it, then we have the ability to start to shift it to say, "Okay, what next level of output could we get with students," or something like that?

0:09:40.7 DL: Yeah, my job is to see that the average performance goes up, overall. And the only way to get a higher average is for everybody to achieve, you know, moving that up. So there's some other key factors that are critical for supporting intrinsic motivation. So the next one is what I call fail forward. So you're going to have to put people in a fail forward loop. So either you just didn't do the assignment at all, in which you're going to have to fail forward a lot, right? Because you didn't, you have to produce something or you produced something, but it didn't, it doesn't yet meet the standard for high quality work. Well, I'm going to give you time to get it to that standard because that's my job. My job is to see that you learn this material. My job is not to come up with sophisticated rating and ranking methods and spend all my time tracking that and figuring it through. That's not the job of teaching and learning.

0:10:48.7 AS: Can you explain fail forward a little bit more? It's not something I've heard before.

0:10:54.2 DL: Well, I have five children and they all learned to walk, whether my wife and I helped them or not. But it was always great fun for us when they got ready to walk and we knew they were standing up. And so I'd stand them up and my wife would maybe get 10 feet away. And then she'd say, "Come on, come on, you can do it." They don't really know what they're supposed to do or what's going on. But they're glad that we're both there supporting them learning to walk. But invariably, our kids would take about three little steps and then they'd fall back on their little bums. And, you know, and so what did we do intuitively as parents?

0:11:37.7 AS: Go pick them up. What did you...

0:11:39.1 DL: That's right.

0:11:40.5 AS: Yeah.

0:11:41.1 DL: Or we would applause or say, good job or right. But this doesn't happen in schools. You know, my wife and I were both teachers, so we gave our children D's and F's on walking the first time around as motivation so that they'd learn to walk.

0:11:58.1 AS: You go in the corner.

0:12:00.3 DL: Yeah. So, yeah. So when we look at some basic things like that, we realize as part of the human condition, somebody that was actually grading the performance of a toddler walking like that, we would probably report them to social services or something that this is so dangerous. But why would we want to do that to them when they are in first grade trying to learn math or they're trying to write an English paper at the high school level. Right? You would want to have the same philosophy that, hey, you made an attempt. Your attempt wasn't quite reaching the standard yet, but you'll get there. You'll get there. And I'm here to support you. And my job is here that you, as long as you keep making these attempts, you're going to keep failing forward until you get there.

0:12:47.2 AS: Right.

0:12:49.2 DL: And then it's pretty amazing when you understand the neuroscience behind all this, right? Because we talked earlier about the control issue, about time, but everybody's going to learn at different rates of speed and different time. And the more I understand that variability built into the time factor, I can manage a system so that more and more and more people are all achieving very high levels of performance. And that's my real job.

0:13:20.8 DL: So another area that I want to talk about under the area of support, how to use support in an environment of intrinsic motivation is sharing. I just over the years just found that sharing is so intrinsic to people. So that's whether I have students just pair up, "Hey, pair up with the student next to you and share, you know, what did you do and how did you do it and what did you learn from that experience, etcetera." Or all the way to I have exemplary performance in my classroom by five students, and I'm going to give them a chance to share what it is they accomplished. Now, that's vastly different than me saying, I've got these five students and they're all going to get an award for being most improved students in the class or something like that. Everybody else in the class has no idea how those people got there. So they intuitively will make up their own stories. Oh, well, you know, the teacher just likes her or he's a brown noser or he's this or that. Right? That's where all of these terms come from.

0:14:34.1 AS: Right.

0:14:34.5 DL: Because they have no idea how they actually accomplished this great thing that they did because that wasn't shared properly.

0:14:43.3 AS: Right.

0:14:44.8 DL: And sharing is also a way that you can honor people that have made breakthroughs. It doesn't always have to be your top performers. Right. It could be somebody that really worked hard on something and had a big breakthrough. Is it as good as the top performer in the classroom? No, because I understand variation in the classroom. But...

0:15:05.5 AS: And you just said that somebody that went... What I was thinking about is they had a, somebody had a major breakthrough. But actually, if somebody follows the process of failing forward and they don't have a massive breakthrough, they're still going through the right process. And I was recently interviewing a lady named Annie Duke, who talked about, who talks all about, you know, that the process is more important than the outcome in decision making. You may have had a good outcome only because of luck but if you're improving your process of the way you're doing it, your probability of a better outcome over time is great. So even if somebody, you know, having someone share their experience of failing forward and keep falling down and, you know, how does it feel and what is it that's motivating you to keep getting up and, you know, yeah, because I want to do this or that. I want to, you know. So that's what I was thinking about when you were talking about that.

0:16:04.5 DL: Yeah, even inside of a grading system, when I started learning about Deming I couldn't just stop grading students. But I could apply these methods and this thinking to have more and more and more of the students all do A work. Right. So instead of like 5% of the students getting A's, could I get it to 20% of the students doing that level of work? And now can I get it to 50% of the students getting that work? And just like what you're talking about, it all has to do with the process of, you know, what are we doing and how do we do explanations? Or maybe I shouldn't even be doing an explanation. It's just getting in the way of people. And using that data to try to understand is my process producing the result I want. So in a classroom as a teacher, I have a process. I always taught my students you have processes, too. Right? So if your processes are not getting you to the level, you may be want to start talking to some of your colleagues and saying, hey, what are you doing or how are you going about that or how did you make that breakthrough? Because they may have insights that you've never thought about before.

0:17:16.5 AS: So if we look at these five key factors for a system of intrinsic motivation, control, cooperation, support, challenge and meaning, right now, we're talking about support. And would it be about also you're creating a supportive environment, encouraging people to support each other and giving them feedback? And that's part of being in a supportive environment.

0:17:40.6 DL: Absolutely. Yeah.

0:17:42.1 AS: So let me...

0:17:42.7 DL: That's why I keep saying it's a system of intrinsic motivation. These are interrelated factors. And the more you think about each one of them and how it relates to the others, you become sort of a guru in the classroom that no matter who comes into your classroom over time, you will start to see them more intrinsically motivated when you change that situation. And so lastly, I would want to say that this takes a role change, takes a role change, whether you're a teacher, administrator, a parent, a student. It's going to take a role change to think about working well with other people and cooperating. Right. And sharing what I have. See, I can't, what we talked about earlier is I can't really share my great process if it's going to be a detriment to me. Right. If there's going to be...

0:18:48.3 AS: My grade is going to go down on a curve, if it's graded on a curve, I have this amazing way of really thinking about this particular topic. So I think I'll just keep it to myself.

0:18:58.3 DL: Yeah. So, and we see this in really, you know, big systems. I won't mention the name of the university, but I was working at a university and they caught 200 students cheating on electrical engineering exams. Well, in the investigation, not only were they cheating, this cheating cycle had been going on for 12 years. The students were passing down the answers to this professor's tests for 12 years from generation to generation. They were actually being intrinsically motivated to share, you know, to the next generation about what was going on. But what did they want to do? Well, they wanted to expel the 200 students that were caught cheating and all this. But without understanding, you created a system forcing people to sacrifice their integrity to get an artificial result, because all the classes were being graded on curves. And so... You're not going to get the grade you want unless you cheat. And so the system is forcing people to do these defective behaviors.

0:20:12.5 AS: And, David, I have the most horrible response to that by the teachers or the administrators that you're telling. And they say, yeah, but we're preparing them for work.

0:20:23.0 DL: I don't want those people working for me.

0:20:24.2 AS: Yeah.

0:20:25.5 DL: Right?

0:20:28.2 AS: Yeah. But it's...

0:20:29.7 DL: We're preparing them to sacrifice their integrity when they come to work. Yeah, that's really what we want.

0:20:35.2 AS: Disaster. And it is. There's so much of that in the workforce. And so I think what you're talking about is so critical related to education, because if we can get these seeds planted right, I mean, we already know that people are, and you've talked about it, that people are intrinsically motivated naturally, people are naturally wanting to cooperate. And if we can continue that cooperation and intrinsic motivation, at least they know in school, like this is the best way to get the best out of people instead of whipping them like a horse, you know, as an example. So maybe I'll wrap up. Yep. Go ahead.

0:21:11.0 DL: Well, it's funny that you mentioned horses because I actually raise horses. But I, one of the things when people come to visit our horses and stuff, I have to explain to them that, you know, we don't use whips and we don't use carrots and we don't give them treats because you start to give a horse a treat for whatever. Pretty soon they're biting somebody and they're trying to dig in your pockets. And again, defective behavior that I'm encouraging or I created. And even the horses have an innate sense of wanting to work and do a good job. And when they see that you're really supporting them, that's our topic today, supporting them in doing that job, they can achieve amazing things, that even works with animals, so.

0:22:02.5 AS: Yeah, that's a great point. I know for anybody that's watched anything like The Dog Whisperer or The Horse Whisperer and all that, it's all about, you know, if you ever watch that show, The Dog Whisperer with Cesar, Cesar Millan, you know...

0:22:17.5 DL: Millan.

0:22:17.8 AS: Yeah. What you realize is it's all about untangling the mess that the adults or the people cause with these dogs. And it becomes so clear.

0:22:31.3 DL: He even says, you know, I don't have bad dogs, we have bad people, so.

0:22:35.8 AS: Yeah, yeah. And that's a lot of what we're talking about in the whole education space is how do we, you know, instead of focusing on the kids, focus on how we improve the system, because ultimately that's our responsibility. And if I just would share one last thing, it is that I remember going to my first Deming seminar, it was in 1990 and I was about, I don't know, a 24 year old guy, and I was working for Pepsi, and I saw a lot of the stuff that Deming was talking about. But, man, when he turned and went after some of the leading managers in that room and I wasn't one, I mean, I was a supervisor on the factory floor, and I heard that, I was like, whoa, that was a wake up call to me to say, take responsibility. You know, it is our responsibility to set this system so that there is an intrinsic motivation. So that just brought me back to that moment.

0:23:28.2 DL: Yeah. Any of us that ever saw Deming have great stories, but your story made me think about I was at a conference with him one time and an Admiral got up and asked a question and Deming said, "We already covered that this morning. Where were you, in the parking lot?"

[laughter]

0:23:49.2 DL: That was the Deming wit.

0:23:51.9 AS: Yes, it could be biting, biting. Well, let me summarize some of this now. Again, we've been talking about the five key factors for the system of intrinsic motivation. And today we talked about support. And one of the questions you kicked it off with is like, what am I doing to impede cooperation? You know, how do you start to ask that question? You also talked about the value of feedback instead of evaluation and the idea that people respect feedback. And also you talked a lot about how we can think about like, what's the quality standard and how do we give feedback? Is our quality standard clear and how do we give feedback, but also adjust ourselves and our system of teaching to improve that? And also, I like the discussion that we had about the Bell curve because it is something that it's abused.

0:24:43.5 AS: It's abused all the time around the world. But you talked about the job is not to flatten the curve, but to tighten it. We're not trying to get these extremely bad and extremely good outcomes. We're trying to get a more narrow and then to try to shift that curve. And that means that the average is going up. You also talked and you gave the example of a baby learning how to walk and failing forward. And part of support is creating a supportive environment where people are. Finally, the last part is we talked about was the idea of sharing, and sharing... Getting people to share their experience. Instead of awarding or rewarding them, having them share their experiences, not only of the people that have hit a particular milestone or whatever, but also the people that haven't done that. And then the last thing I think is really the big challenge for all the listeners and viewers out there, which is this - to be supportive takes a role change. It's about working well with others and helping other people to see how to share and work together. Anything you would add to that?

0:25:51.9 DL: Yeah, I'd say ultimately, we want people to take risks because if they're not taking risks, we're not going to have breakthroughs. We're not going to have new levels of learning in schools. And in order to take those risks, they have to feel like they're supported, whether it worked out well or it didn't work out well. If it didn't work out well, what did you learn from that? And it may be what you learned was, I'm never going to do that again. Okay, well, you learn something from that, right? But if they're in that highly supportive environment, you'll see their intrinsic motivation for learning and work come out at a level that you never thought possible before. I can guarantee it.

0:26:32.3 AS: Wonderful. Well, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion, David. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your Deming 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."

In this second episode of the Motivation series, Andrew and David P. Langford discuss how power dynamics impact motivation and why autonomy is a big factor in motivation. 

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 am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, Who Controls Motivation? David, take it away.

0:00:29.4 David P. Langford: Thanks, Andrew. So we're starting this five podcast series. In the last podcast, we talked a lot about the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Here in this five-podcast series, we're gonna discuss how do you actually create intrinsic motivation environments so that people want to do [chuckle] the work or the learning or whatever it is you might be getting them to do [chuckle] or task them to do. Right? So the first element, and I've been researching this for now over 40 years, and I've never found anything that contradicts what I'm gonna share with the listeners over these five podcasts. And these are five elements of intrinsic motivation that I guarantee you, if you start applying these, you will see either your students, your own children, employees, yourself, [chuckle] you will see people more motivated to do the work that they're doing, if you think about these five factors that we're gonna be going over.

0:01:48.8 DL: So the first factor that I wanna talk about today is the element of control or autonomy in situation. So when I have control over a situation, I have autonomy, I'm self-motivating. I'm doing things in that environment by myself. So we have a lot of buzzwords in management words like empowerment. And well, even a word like empowerment means I have all the power, and so I'm gonna give you some of it. [laughter] I'm gonna empower you to... But you can only do this a little bit, I don't want you to do a lot of stuff. I just want you to do... Be empowered to just do this thing, kind of a thing, and that's also an element of control, so.

0:02:38.6 DL: But control is... Our economy is built into the human condition, and when we tap into that in managing people in either in a classroom or a workforce or a whole group of teachers, whoever it might be, yes, the more I set up an environment where I'm allowing people to take control or have autonomy over what they're doing, the more I will see them be motivated. The more I take that away, and I start controlling everything and running stuff, I start to be really motivated, [chuckle] and I see this a lot with teachers. They're really motivated by controlling everything, controlling all those kids, controlling the process, controlling having... And they have total autonomy in the classroom to do whatever they wanna do basically, and so they're really motivated by that. Well, when they start giving up that control or that autonomy to children, a lot of times, they become de-motivated.

0:03:43.5 DL: [chuckle] I'll never forget this story. I was working with a university,in California, and I had one of the teachers, one of the professors, that really wanted to learn about this and how to run a classroom, so we talked a lot about... I've worked with him individually and talked about, "How do you set up your classroom so that when the students come to your classroom, basically they start to have autonomy and control over the process and what's happening?" Well, one day I get a phone call, and I answered the phone, and this guy is whispering to me. He said, "I think I need some quality therapy." And I said, [chuckle] "Why? What, what's going on?" And he said, "Well, I had a flat tire on the way to school. And so the university has a policy if the professor doesn't show up in the first 10 minutes, everybody can leave. So I was 30 minutes late, and I was just sure I was gonna walk into the room and everybody's gonna be gone." But he said, "I walked into the room and nobody even knew that I was missing.They were all working in teams and working on their projects and discussing stuff and doing what is they're doing?" He said, "I need some therapy." [chuckle] Because for him, that was de-motivating that they didn't need him. Right? So it's a very powerful, powerful concept once you start to get it, but you also have to understand that you, as the manager, of that situation are part of the equation, that as well, right? So you almost have to start the... Your motivation by seeing other people taking on the control of the situation and having autonomy to do what it is that they need to do. I was in a kindergarten classroom in North Carolina years ago, and the teacher had been through my training and stuff, and she invited me to come to her classroom.

0:05:34.6 DL: And so I went there early in the morning and just watched, and those little kids came in and they just knew what to do. And they all went to their tables and they got their stuff out. They were talking with each other and interrelating. And it was probably at least 40 minutes before the teacher intervened in some way. It's the kinda thing where I have to interrupt your learning to [chuckle] motivate you or tell you something. But those little kids had... Five and six-year-olds just had total control of that first 40 minutes. And were happy about it. And yeah, there was a child or two that weren't quite doing what it is they were supposed to do, and what'd the teacher do? She goes over and sits down beside them and starts working with them and explaining stuff and, "Oh, I see you might be having a little trouble with this and... " Right?

0:06:36.4 AS: Maybe just had a bad family day.

0:06:39.0 DL: Yeah. Now, that's totally different than, "Everybody get in here, sit down, be quiet, don't talk to each other, don't touch him. I'm gonna control this situation, and I'm gonna tell you what to do and... Okay, this is what I want you to do, and you go do it, and once you've done that, come back and sit down again." Well, that's the old teacher mentality [chuckle] that I have to control the situation, and there are times where you need to exert that kind of control. If there's a fire in the building, you might have to control the situation, but sometimes teachers will bring that up to me and I'll say, "Look, what if there's a fire in the building and you were incapacitated or taken out by the fire? Would all your students know what to do? [chuckle] Or maybe you were out of the classroom when that erupted, that... Would they all know what they're supposed to do, regardless of whether you were there or not?"

0:07:40.1 AS: Right.

0:07:41.6 DL: Or are they just gonna burn up, because they're waiting for somebody to tell them what to do? So, that's the element of control. So, how do you get that? One of the ways to get that is to give people more knowledge of the situation. Just the example that I just gave you. When those students have the knowledge of what to do if there's something that goes on or something happens, and they have the autonomy to do it, and so maybe you actually practice that. Well, I'm giving you knowledge of what to do in that kind of situation. And when people become more and more knowledgeable about what's going on, they feel like they have much more control over their situation, what's happening. That makes sense?

0:08:36.9 AS: Yeah, and I think what I'm thinking about then is talking with kids like, what's the objective? If there's a fire, get out of the building. And, we have... That's our objective. How do we do that? Well, we try to stay in line because we hold hands, and that helps us keep, but...

0:08:52.8 DL: And we don't wanna run over each other, and... Right?

0:08:55.1 AS: It reminds me of this story of when Dr. Deming talked about cleaning a table. And he was saying something like, "How could a worker really know how to clean a table if you don't tell them what the table is gonna be used for?"

0:09:13.0 DL: That's right. So that's knowledge, right? Are we gonna operate on this table? We're just gonna eat lunch on it? Oh, well, just... Those are two different types of cleaning, aren't they? [chuckle] And so, how can I do a good job if I don't know? I don't have knowledge of that situation or... And, you see this in little children. They're asking why. You're telling them to do this and they say, "Well, why?" Well, because...

0:09:43.4 AS: 'Cause I said so.

0:09:45.1 DL: 'Cause I said so, right? Well, and if you don't do it, I'm just gonna make your life so difficult that you wish you would have.

0:09:52.0 AS: Right.

0:09:52.6 DL: That's not good management, that's just manipulation of somebody. And yeah, you can get the result. But in the end, somebody's not gonna wanna... They're not gonna wanna do what you want them to do on their own. I remember a teacher came up to me one time, said that in the 1960s, he was working in an auto factory in California, and his job was to put these types of rivets in some part of the automobile. But he noticed that the machine that he was using to put the rivets in, would strip the rivets out every once in a while, and he got really tired of having to re-work this situation. Not rivets, they were screws, I think it was.

0:10:45.1 AS: Right.

0:10:45.5 DL: So he actually built his own little tool so that it would only go in at the proper depth and every screw was going in perfectly, and he was very proud of it. So proud of it that when his supervisor came by, he showed him, he said, "Look, look what I built, I built this, and you may wanna think about doing this for everybody," and well, his supervisor just lit into him and told him, "Your job is not to think. Your job is to put these screws in and you go back to doing what you were told to do in the first place." And I asked him, I said, "Well, so what did you do?" He said, "When the supervisor was around, I used the tool that did a bad job, and every time he would leave, I would get my tool out and do it properly." So he was still in that environment, intrinsically motivated to do a good job, but because the supervisor wanted that autonomy or control of that situation, and it's the "not invented here syndrome" that...

0:11:49.1 AS: Yeah.

0:11:49.3 DL: "I didn't invent it, I didn't tell you to do that, so therefore, it can't be a good idea," kind of a thing.

0:11:56.7 AS: And I'm thinking about... There's some teachers out there that are... Have a really hard time. "If I give up control, this classroom is gonna go chaos." They are making themselves really important in that, and let's say... Let's put those people aside for just a minute and let's just take the people that are kind of in the middle, they're open to that and all that. And I just wanna tell a quick story in my life. I remember, my father never... My father didn't tell me his personal problems. He talked to my mom about that, and occasionally, I knew a little bit of what was going on. But I remember, when I turned about, I don't know, 25, and I really had become a much more mature guy, and my dad started telling me some of the things he was dealing with, some of the ways he felt about things, and it's like the whole thing flipped. I just really saw a different side, a human side.

0:12:49.1 DL: They're human. [chuckle]

0:12:50.9 AS: Yeah. And I saw a different side of him, but also I've wanted to be a different participant in that. I wanted to be a participant and someone that could listen and understand where my dad was coming from. And I think about classroom, then I'm thinking about what you're talking about, a classroom. So for a teacher who's kind of open to try some new things, part of what you... Maybe what you're saying is, flip the script a little bit and talk about why are we here, what are we trying to do? What am I trying to do. What's my job? What's...

0:13:17.8 DL: Yeah. When I see intrinsic motivation emerge, it's there, right? It's there. All you have to do is manage the situation differently, and you'll start to see it emerge and come out. So you can take something so simple like the start of a classroom. Well, I could just have all the children come in and talk and goof around and everything else, until I stand up and tell them what to do. That's a way to control the situation or like I was saying, I could start to give them the knowledge of what to do. So let's talk about... Let's do a flowchart. Let's do a flowchart about what to do when you come in the door. Where do you go? What do you do? How do you get things set up? Well, I've now just transferred a level of control to them or a situation like, somebody doesn't know what to do next.

0:14:24.3 DL: So we talk as a class and maybe we come up with a flowchart that's what to do. What to do when you don't know what to do. So we're now giving them knowledge about that situation and being able to take action. So then if I have a child that says, "Well, I don't know what to do." "Oh, have you looked at the flowchart?" Let's talk about that. Remember we talked about, okay, the first thing you wanna do is do this and then do that and maybe talk to somebody else and see if they know what to do. But there's a process of what to do when you don't know what to do. Now, that's different than me saying, "Well, if you don't know what to do, come up and ask me." 'Cause it's putting me...

0:15:11.2 AS: And then I'll tell you.

0:15:12.1 DL: Yeah. It's putting me in total control of that situation and that's very motivating for me. But it's very demotivating for the individual because they can't take control because they don't know what to do next.

0:15:24.1 AS: Yeah.

0:15:25.3 DL: So change the situation, watch how behavior changes versus what we've been taught to do, especially in schools, is leave the situation alone and then manage the behavior that it's producing. See?

0:15:40.2 AS: So we're back to the system

0:15:42.2 DL: Yeah, absolutely. So, couple of other factors, before getting control of the situation. The more you have people self-evaluate their own progress, you'll start to see intrinsic motivation emerge. So as long as I'm evaluating you, write this paper, hand it in. I'll grade it. I'll go over it, I'll find the mistakes, and then I'll put a grade on it and I'll hand it back to you, well, that gives me as a teacher total control of that situation. I reverse that, and I set up processes for you to self-evaluate your own work, so when you think you're finished with this, here are the steps that you wanna go through, so check to see if it's this or nowadays, have you run it through Grammarly, online? But I'm putting you in a position where you have autonomy to self-evaluate your own work. And then if you think it's finished and you've finished your self-evaluation, you might wanna share it with somebody else. I'm gonna look at it, see if you can get some feedback from them. See feedback is very motivating, but evaluation is not.

0:17:00.7 DL: I can give you some feedback on the job that you're doing and support you and how you can do a better job. That's much different than me saying, "You're doing a lousy job, Andrew." Or, "I'm gonna put B on this paper." No matter how hard you worked, you're gonna get a B. So the example you gave in the last Podcast about only 10 students are gonna get A's. Well, that's an artificial scarcity of top performance. And so I'm pretty certain people looked around the room and they said, "I'm not one of those 10 people, I know that."

0:17:37.0 AS: I'm outta here.

0:17:38.4 DL: I'm outta here.

0:17:39.5 AS: And that's not achieving the goal...

0:17:40.9 DL: Right.

0:17:41.5 AS: Or the aim.

0:17:42.3 DL: Or we have other ways that people get control of their situation when they feel out of control. We call it cheating. So when the situation won't allow me actually to achieve what I'm supposed to achieve, maybe I'm a university class and I have to have this grade, have to have this class to get my degree, but the class is so horrible, I'm not learning anything, there's no way I'm gonna pass this test, and so I end up sacrificing my integrity and cheating 'cause it's worth the risk. Because the system is not gonna allow me to learn this material and get to the level I need to get to. So that's when we start to see the effective behavior emerge. It starts really very early in schools. Kids feel like, "I can't get this, I can't understand it, so I'm just gonna have to cheat, copy somebody else's paper, or steal it or something." And we wanna manage that behavior, wow, oh, we caught that, we're gonna... So we come up with sophisticated methods of catching the cheaters. Right?

0:19:00.0 DL: So you see it in the SAT tests and all kinds of things. What? You got to have monitors. It has to be one monitor for every 50 students or because we gotta catch those cheaters. [chuckle] But nobody's looking at the situation or the system and saying, "What's causing people to cheat?" Because they're feeling helpless and hopeless and, "I can't get this. And so, the only way I can get it is to cheat." There's some other ways that we can impart or get people to have more control in situations. So when you think about neuroscience, the human brain taps into mapping and patterns and systems actually. And again, we're back to Deming's work. And Deming tapped into that, actually. So when I put learning into maps or patterns or gestault kinds of things, the human brain actually responds to it better.

0:20:00.9 DL: So in a classroom, instead of me just verbally talking about stuff all the time, if I take that same information I want people to know and understand, and I put it into some kind of a map or a pattern or a flowchart, I'll see a new level of intrinsic motivation or ownership start to emerge, because I've just changed the situation and tapped into something. So I'm not just dealing with just the auditory learners, I'm really tapping into... I'm giving control of everybody over to learn. I created a tool to do that, actually, to take curriculum and put in into a map or a pattern and then give that to students at the beginning of a learning experience. And all of a sudden, you see ownership, this is all the stuff that you need to know and learn in this two weeks or whatever the time has to be. That's much different than me saying, "Well, read this book. Well, what do I need to know in this book? What's gonna be on the test?" "Well, read it just in case I put something on the test." That's a school game that puts the teacher or the system in control, but it makes the learner feel helpless in that environment.

0:21:21.9 AS: You used a word, ownership. How do we think of ownership versus intrinsic motivation? What does that... What does that mean?

0:21:29.0 DL: Ownership, autonomy, control of the situation, those are all of the same kinds of concepts that you're trying to get people just to have more ownership of their own learning, their own situation. And my job is to manage the whole system, right? So if I've got 30 kids in my class, I want all 30 to be well motivated [chuckle] to learn whatever it is that we're working on and going through. So another level of control is choice. The more choice I give people in a situation, I'll see their intrinsic motivation emerge. And it can be so simple that you can choose to do this, or you can choose to do that. [chuckle] That's an element of choice.

0:22:14.4 AS: Mom, mom, you can either walk after breakfast or twice in the afternoon. [chuckle]

0:22:20.7 DL: Yeah. But that's a level of intrinsic motivation, right? You're giving her the control of that situation. "Well, no, I'd rather do it in the afternoon." Okay. Right? That I'm managing differently by giving people choice, or in a classroom, you have the choice to choose what you wanna write about or how you wanna write it or... And now, for some children that can be overwhelming, right?

0:22:48.3 AS: Yeah.

0:22:48.6 DL: So I can say, "Well, you can choose whatever you wanna do, or I'll choose it for... Or you can have me choose it for you." Right?

0:23:00.5 AS: Right.

0:23:00.6 DL: If you want me just to give you a topic, I'll be glad to do that. Maybe it's you can't really think about what you wanna do, right?

0:23:05.5 AS: Right. That may take some pressure off of them.

0:23:07.7 DL: But still it's your choice, right?

0:23:10.3 AS: Yep.

0:23:10.9 DL: So you start to see rebellion go away when you incorporate levels of choice because I can't really rebel against myself. [chuckle]

0:23:21.6 AS: Right, yep.

0:23:21.9 DL: I chose to do this, but no, I really don't wanna do this. [laughter] But you chose it, right?

0:23:27.9 AS: And that circles back to the title, which was Who Controls Motivation? Maybe I'll just summarize some of the things that I took away. We're talking about five elements of intrinsic motivation and a lot of it has to do with creating the environment so that people wanna learn and they want to get the benefit of that. And the first element is control. And the point is when you give someone... You, if you're holding onto the control, you're not really empowering or you're not really giving autonomy and control. Just give that control to the other people, to the kids, to the other people at the company. They're gonna know what to do with it. And help them and guide them. How do I... What do I do? Give them autonomy. And also you talked about the idea that give people more knowledge. And I think that that's part of what I was telling my story about my father, is like the idea he was giving me more knowledge of what's going on. There's more there than I knew. And the more knowledge that someone has, the more they can really figure out what to do with that. You also said a good one, which was intrinsic motivation, it's there. Just change some things and watch it emerge.

0:24:41.1 DL: That's right.

0:24:42.2 AS: And then you went through a couple of different things that are really helpful for helping people take control, to get that intrinsic motivation. You talked about self-evaluation of your own progress and that helps people. And feedback is motivating, but evaluation is not. So think about constant feedback. "Hey, that was good. Oh, did you see why that happened? Why do you think that happened?" That, and also you said when people lose control, they often cheat to cope. And I liked... One of the things that you said was that the brain taps into maps, patterns, and systems. And I use that a lot when teaching. I need that to see how does this all connect? And then you alluded to the idea of appealing to maybe the left brain and the right brain type of people in the room that maybe some people are seeing things more logically, whereas other people will see things less linearly and that type of stuff. And then final thing that you talked about is choice gives control. Anything you would add to that?

0:25:55.0 DL: Yeah, there's a couple of other factors quickly. One is just-in-time learning, so when I'm getting the knowledge I need just in time. So I'm working on a project or something, and I need to know a level of skill to complete this project, well, when I discover that I need that knowledge, right, that's just-in-time learning. So if you need to know this, come to the back of the room and I'll explain it, but if you don't need to know this right now, then just keep on working and keep doing what you're doing 'cause I don't wanna interrupt you. Well, that's an element of choice. It's also a just-in-time learning. "So when I'm ready, I'm gonna go get that," versus, "I'm gonna teach this now whether you need it or not." Well, that's when you get kids sleeping in class, bored out of their minds, because maybe they don't need that at all. They don't need that explanation.

0:26:54.7 DL: I already know this, right? So I'm just gonna screw around and pass notes or do something else that's more fun than sitting and listening to you. And the last thing for control is time. So the more you have an understanding of how to manage time or teach people to manage their own time, the more, yeah, control that they'll feel like they have over a situation. They'll understand how to work it through. So I often use the example, when you have a two-year-old, right? And you have an appointment that you have to get to, and so you gotta get the two-year-old in the car and get him buckled in the car seat and you gotta go, right? And so you're in a hurry, and so you grab them up and they're yelling and they're fighting you to get in the car seat 'cause they don't wanna go, and... Right? And so, "Well, if you get in your car seat, I'm gonna give you a lolly or a sucker or a piece of candy, or... I'm gonna bribe you to do what it is, what I wanna do.

0:27:54.8 DL: Or I'm just bigger, so I'm just gonna force you into that seat and buckle you in, Right?" Well, that is a way to accomplish the task, or you could do something differently. At breakfast, you're saying, "In about an hour, we're gonna get ready to go, and we're gonna go to the doctor's office, and it's gonna be really interesting for you to see the doctor's office, and we're gonna talk about everything we're gonna do and everything else. So now we're gonna get our coats on and we're gonna walk out, and I'm gonna wait for you to climb up into your car seat, and what do you need to do now? We need to get buckled," right? That's all gonna take a lot more time than me grabbing you and forcefully [chuckle] putting you in that car seat and buckling you. You see, but the urgency of the situation was not that two-year-old's problem. It was yours. Your lack of planning [chuckle] caused the crisis. And if I change any element of that, I see that two-year-old be more intrinsically motivated to do what I want them to do, right?

0:29:05.6 AS: Yeah.

0:29:05.7 DL: 'Cause we're doing something together, and that's the relationship that they're craving more than anything. So I'll leave you with that.

0:29:12.4 AS: So just-in-time learning and teaching people how to manage their own time and it gives them control?

0:29:19.0 DL: That's right.

0:29:19.5 AS: Fantastic. That's a lot of stuff that we covered in that, and personally, I learned a lot. I did like the just-in-time learning 'cause I feel like that's my job. As a financial analyst in the stock market, I come across things I don't really know much about, and I was just looking at, "Well, green energy doesn't seem to work." Germany tried to do it, and they weren't able to replace what they lost in traditional energy. What about nuclear energy? Okay, where does that come from? It comes from uranium. Okay, where is uranium? The country that has 40% of uranium production is Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Republic. And now, all of a sudden, I put together that, wow, Russia and Kazakhstan together all control 50% of the uranium in the world. All of a sudden, you realize that Putin has control of the supply chain for nuclear power. So now, what is this country, Kazakhstan? I remember studying it 'cause I had to, but now I'm interested just-in-time to learn, "Okay, how does this all fit together?" And that to me, I just went through that process for a global investment strategy report, and I was able to tell my clients, "I don't know a lot about Kazakhstan, but here's what I've learned, and I have a feeling this will become a name of a country that we're all gonna know in the next 10 years."

0:30:42.5 DL: Well, you know, Kazakhstan is right next to, "Don't-Understand," so.

[laughter]

0:30:50.2 AS: Yes, right? Under... Understand. Yeah, that's right. [laughter] So 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. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I wanna remind you that listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Andrew and David introduce the broad topic of "motivation." David describes intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation and how motivation practices are usually manipulation tactics that don't work over the long term.  So what do we do instead?

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, The Best Way To Motivate. Take it away, David.

0:00:30.2 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again.

0:00:34.4 AS: Indeed.

0:00:35.6 DL: So, yeah, I wanted to start actually a whole series on motivation and in this podcast, we're gonna talk a little bit about two different types of motivation and how people go about motivating people and things like that. But then, we're gonna start a five podcast series breaking down the five key elements that I found over the last 40 years that really cause motivation to happen. So in this introduction podcast right now, I wanna talk a little bit about motivation. So the topic of that, what's the best way to motivate? You can't. So let's kind of get that out of the way.

0:01:20.7 AS: Don't bury the lead, David. [laughter]

0:01:21.9 DL: Yeah, you can't really motivate somebody. You can't even motivate your dog to do things. You can manipulate your dog to get a result but in the end, your dog or your child or students in classrooms or your employees or whatever, they all have to come to the conclusion that they're motivated to do this job for their... Whatever that might be and that it's their idea. And so it's all about creating an intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation environment. And I know this is contrary to all the literature that's out there and everything, and every motivational guru on the planet that's trying to get you to buy something that motivates us. And I was recalling that I was on an airplane one time and I was sitting next to this guy and you strike up a conversation sometimes and he said, "Ah, what do you do?"

0:02:30.4 DL: And so I told him a little bit about what I do and how I help school try to transform and get better results and what they do and everything. "Oh, that's really interesting, tell me more about that." And so we did and we got onto the topic of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. And I just started talking about you can't really motivate people with trinkets and gimmicks and awards and all kinds of things like that. And we got in a big discussion about trophies and sports and all kinds of things like that. [chuckle] And just as we're starting to land the airplane, I said to him, oh, I said, "Well, you know, I never got around to you." I said, "What do you do?" He says, "Well, I have a company that makes trophies." [laughter] And then it was like dead-silence. Oh, we landed the plane and got off the plane.

0:03:26.5 AS: You went your separate ways.

0:03:28.2 DL: Yeah. He did say, oh, I think I understand, but he's gonna keep making his trophies and making money, so...

0:03:39.4 AS: Yeah.

0:03:39.9 DL: And there's a lot of money to be made in it, especially in education, there's just whole catalogs. I get catalogs in the mail even today, about all the awards and trophies and everything and how you can motivate kids to do this and that and it's... Deming was the first one that kind of took a board and slapped it up inside of my head and just said, "Stop it." In fact I remember one of his conferences, somebody asked a question, "Well, Dr. Deming, I'm in a company that's trying to motivate us with a pay and pay for performance and games and gimmicks and sell so much stuff, and you get a free trip to Aruba and what do I do?" And his response was, "Well, you can always stop doing something that's stupid." And that, it was just... He had this knack of these phrases that would just cut through to people. Yeah, you can stop it. You can say, "Okay, I'm not gonna participate in that." I'm not gonna play it. I'm not gonna play that game. And so what do we do instead?

0:05:01.4 AS: And before we even get into that, what does it mean? What does motivate mean? Because you've used the word, manipulate and you've used the word, motivate. Can you define...

0:05:13.3 DL: That's kind of emerged over the last 100 or 150 years or so, as a way to try to get people to do something that basically that you don't think they wanna do. [chuckle] So whether that's kids learning math or it's an employee not getting the productivity that you think that they should get. But basically, I'm the leader, I'm the manager, and I want you to do something that you're currently not doing. And so, I'm gonna do something to you to make you do it.

0:05:55.1 AS: Which sounds like external pressure or external...

0:05:58.7 DL: External pressure. We're gonna motivate you to do stuff. And typically that's what we call extrinsic motivation, I'm gonna do something to you or I'm gonna take something away - that's really popular in schools. "Well, you're gonna have to stay in a recess, you're not gonna have any recess if you don't get that done" or "You don't do what I tell you, you're gonna be sitting in the hall. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take away all of your relationships and isolate you." And, well, that's the same concept we use in prisons, right? We isolate people. We put them in confinement and if you're really bad, then you get into total isolation. Don't even get to talk to any of your other inmates. Well, it's the same depth of motivation that is in schools today all over the world.

0:06:51.6 DL: People are still using those techniques to try to get people to do something that they're either not doing or they want them to do. So, it's really important to figure out what do you do instead? If you're gonna stop doing something stupid, [chuckle] and what are you gonna do instead? And that's where Deming really reinforced intrinsic motivation. That your job is to create a situation where people can be intrinsically motivated, that they actually want to do the job. And that's a whole different way to look at what you do. How do I set up a classroom so that kids can be intrinsically motivated? Now, none of these things are a light switch, where you can just switch it on and switch it off, "I'm going to switch on intrinsic motivation and switch off extrinsic motivation." In fact, with children, if they've been addicted to intrinsic motivation tactics for years, everything from grades, to prizes, to awards, to just little trinkets that they can get, stickers even, all kinds of things, sometimes it takes time to wean them off of that over time, and have it have the less and less meaning.

0:08:32.1 DL: I'll give you an example, the thing about stickers... I'll often get elementary teachers say, "Well, you know what's wrong with that? Somebody does a good job, I'm gonna give them a sticker." Or, When I was a child in piano lessons, I got a gold star if I did a good job in my piano lesson and the teacher would put a star on it, by it and... The problem with those things, it's not that it's evil or anything, it's just that you're taking away the emphasis towards working towards the thing that you want 'em to do and love and understand. So, if the only reason I'm doing this is to try to get a sticker, [chuckle] you've just reduced the thing that I'm doing to the value of a sticker. So there's no real conversation or a relationship going on where you're saying, "Hey, man this... You really did a great job on that. How does that make you feel to be able to understand that or explain something to that degree?" You wanna tap into that inner person about that understanding something is probably the greatest motivation. "I just feel really good about that." That's why you get children that when they finally get it, a hard concept of something and they're like, "Oh! I got it." They're really forward in...

0:10:08.9 AS: They're really enjoying the process, too.

0:10:11.0 DL: Yeah, they're really forward in their emotions and they actually put that out. But employees in business, sometimes when there's a breakthrough like that, it's more internal for them. They're just like, "Oh yeah, okay, I got this. I really worked that through." And if you come in and just reduce it to some type of extrinsic motivator... Even if I just come in and say, "Atta boy, good job, well done, Frank." And then you leave the room, and then Frank is sitting there and thinking, "I put hours and hours into working through this and going through this, and all I got is, "Good job, Frank,' and a pat on the back."

0:10:51.3 AS: "You're gonna get Employee of the Month, Frank."

0:10:55.4 DL: Yeah, so the message is, "Next time, stupid, don't work so hard." You can always stop doing something stupid. And Frank learns just do whatever the boss wants, don't put any extra effort in or go through stuff. All right, but some people will come back and say, "Well, I like to have more money." And that's a motivation. And it's actually not. Yes, we have to have money to survive, but the examples are millions of people that are making tremendous amounts of money, but they're not motivated to do the job. We can look at pro athletes. They make millions of dollars and some of them are still not motivated. [chuckle]

0:11:54.5 AS: Right. Or when the motivation stops, money can't re-ignite it.

0:12:00.7 DL: No.

0:12:00.8 AS: Let me ask you a question about this from let's say a classroom perspective. Let's say I'm a teacher in a classroom, and I'm a piano teacher, as an example, and we've got a group of 20 kids and yeah, there's a few of them that are really into it, and then there's a lot of 'em that just don't wanna do it. David, can I just use the gold stars for those ones just to kind of like, [laughter] a doggy bone, like, "Come on, over to the piano." What do I do?

0:12:27.1 DL: Or what used to be the norm in Catholic schools, "Can't I just whack 'em on the back of their hands with a ruler and get them to shut up or do whatever it is I want them to do?" Yeah...

0:12:42.7 AS: Carrot or stick.

0:12:42.8 DL: You can do those kinds of things, but eventually, you're going to have to tap into an intrinsic motivation. And so your example in a class, if I got a few kids that are really into it, whatever it is we're doing or working on or whatever, and they're really working at it, I'd probably give those children a chance to talk about, "Why are they into that? Why do you like this so much? Or why do you like practicing so much if you're learning an instrument? And how do you go about that? What do you do? And how do you find a place in your house that's quiet and where you can concentrate if you're trying to read or" Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to use the people that are already self-motivated, and to give insights to people that are not self-motivated, to try to understand that it's not just because you're just smart, right? Probably doing a number of things that are making you be successful, and those things could be shared with other people. In the same way with employees, instead of just giving an employee of the month, I'd probably have somebody that's really doing a great job explain, how are they doing that great job? What's the process that they're using? How do they go about it? How do they set up their workspace? Whatever it might be, because I want other employees to go, "Oh, that's what they're doing. I could do that." [chuckle]

0:14:13.1 AS: And is that because you want them to try to explore where is their area that they can bring them so then... Okay, you're not gonna... I got 20 people in this room, and all 20 of them are not gonna be piano lovers and virtuosos. So it's not necessarily the process of getting everybody on that piano all the time, it's the process of who are the people really love it, let them shine, let them share, and let other people say, "Okay, I don't like piano, but I do like working on fixing my neighbor bicycles, and people bring bicycles to me every day, and I fix them, and I just love that feeling," or I don't know. I'm just trying to think about it. How would you describe it?

0:14:54.7 DL: Yeah, that's right, and that goes back to Deming's concept of understanding variation, that you're going to have variable degrees of performance or ability or whatever it might be. And Deming talked about sometimes people are just in the wrong job. [chuckle] And maybe you can move them to another job in the same company that they might like more or they might be well-suited for, or the same thing in a school, right? Like example of what you were talking about, that somebody is much more suited to and enjoy working on motorcycles versus just playing the piano or something. But it doesn't mean that they can't reach a minimum level of skill and understanding about how to play the piano, maybe to the point where they decide, "Okay, I know I don't wanna be doing this." [laughter]

0:15:57.6 AS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:16:00.7 DL: That's also motivation, right? And what is your motivation? What do you wanna do?

0:16:07.2 AS: Yeah, yeah.

0:16:07.4 DL: And I get... So in my seminars, I get teachers coming up to me all the time, and I always think, "Oh, they're gonna ask a complicated question about, "I've got this kid in my class, and how do I get him motivated and everything." I'd say probably eight or nine times out of 10, they come up and they wanna talk about their child. [laughter] "My son is having a problem in this class. How do I get... " "My daughter can't get along with her teacher. What would we do about that?" Because that's really a very personal thing that's going on within them. But then to get them to see that, "Okay, well, the kinds of things that maybe you're doing in the class is demotivating a large number of students." It's all kinds of things. There's variability in time, for instance, right? So if I give you a... If I give a group of people a complex math problem, there probably is somebody in that room that could solve it in a matter of minutes.

0:17:14.7 AS: Right.

0:17:15.5 DL: But there'd be others of us that might need a lot of help. But we could probably get to a level of... Minimum level of solving it or understanding it given enough time, but the problem is, like in schools, we wanna truncate the time always, right?

0:17:34.1 AS: Right.

0:17:34.6 DL: "Gotta get this done in the next 10 minutes," or, "You gotta get it done by Friday." We don't have this deep understanding of variability and how to manage variation in performance. And so what we do is we make time rigid, but we make learning flexible. So basically, you learn any amount you want as long as you get it done by Friday because we've made the time rigid.

0:18:00.4 AS: Right.

0:18:00.5 DL: And we talked about that earlier, about a deadline and... Right? Well, when you reverse that and you begin to understand how to manage a system and manage the variability of the people in that system. Then everybody starts to be more well-motivated by themselves internally, which means you have to do less and less external motivation. You just have people coming in and doing their job and going to work, same way in the company. Yeah.

0:18:32.0 AS: I feel like even just having a discussion with your students or employees about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is right there something interesting, just to have that discussion.

0:18:48.0 DL: Yeah, I have five children, and we started those discussions, my wife and I started those discussions with them when they're two or three years old. "You're not doing this to get a sucker... If you do this, I'll give you a sucker or a lolly." No, we want you to clean up your room because that's the right thing to do. So maybe I'll come and help you clean up your room and we'll do it together, and that might be a lot more fun then. And then we could talk about how can you keep your room clean so you don't find yourself in this mess, because how do you feel when you have a really messy room?

0:19:32.1 AS: Yep. Yeah, I'm sure that you would have some great tips of, "Okay, here's the way I would do it if I... When I've had this problem," and 'Oh, okay, I didn't even think about that, put all my whites in a pile over there and put all my dark colors... "

0:19:49.1 DL: Exactly.

0:19:50.3 AS: Over there just to have a... Make a game out of it or something like that.

0:19:50.6 DL: Yeah, and that's totally different than me isolating you as punishment and saying your room is dirty, go to your room until that room is cleaned up.

0:20:00.4 AS: Yeah.

0:20:00.6 DL: Right? It's the same thing we talked about earlier. I'm gonna extrinsically motivate you to get that done and work that through versus trying to spend time, and part of it is just kid's probably really happy that you're there.

0:20:16.6 AS: Yeah.

0:20:17.4 DL: Right? I got a relationship now with somebody and let's work on this together and over time...

0:20:23.4 AS: Yeah, I don't want to be in my room alone.

0:20:25.9 DL: Yeah, and this over time, then let's figure out how do we make sure it always stays cleaned up.

0:20:32.1 AS: Yeah.

0:20:33.8 DL: But you have to understand the difference between a clean room and a dirty room, and how that makes you feel. And you'll have kids that will say, I have kids that say, "Well, I like it messy like this." "Really? You couldn't find your book yesterday because it was under a pile of clothes. You have been wearing dirty clothes to school, because... "

0:20:57.9 AS: "Your room's stinky. People can smell... "

0:21:00.4 DL: Yeah.

0:21:00.6 AS: Yeah.

0:21:02.1 DL: Right. And it's not necessarily all just about you, it's how does it affect other people that you're dealing with, right? What do you think other family members are thinking about you when your room is a disaster and you're not taking care of yourself and you don't smell good and...

0:21:22.4 AS: Right.

0:21:23.9 DL: Right.

0:21:26.4 AS: I wanna explain an experience that I had when I was young, and maybe you can help me understand the extrinsic and the intrinsic aspect of it. I went to Kent State when I was kind of first starting out, and I didn't really know what I was gonna study. I thought I was gonna study maybe Psychology, but the first professor I had, I was really not impressed. I felt like he just read this book about Psychology, and so I was searching and I found an Economics 101, Ecom 101, and I went into this classroom and it was huge, it was 200 students in there, hustle bustle. I got in the room, I sat down, the room was divided by a walkway down the middle, so there was 100 students on one side and 100 on the other. The teacher came kinda bounding down the stairs and came in front of all of us on that first day and he said, "There is 200 people in this room, a 100 of you will be gone by the time we get to the end of this term, and there will, out of the 100 that will remain, I will give 10, A's. Let's get started."

0:22:29.6 AS: Now that guy set a fire, it's just... I don't know why, I never had somebody say something like that. And all of a sudden, what I started doing is I sat right in the front row, and I told myself, I'm gonna get an A, I'm gonna survive and I'm gonna get an A. And then I started to study differently, every day after class, I sat down at a cubicle outside the room, and I re-wrote my notes with the book open and I went through it and everything, and then I would ask the teacher questions either at his office or in the room. When I had questions as I was trying to clarify. And he sparked a whole new way of studying for me that really carried me through university, but also sparked a fire of wanting to learn and the challenge of learning. And I think I read, I don't know, 3000 to 5000 books since that day. And he lit a fire in me, and I always tell my students, "I wanna light that fire in you." Now, part of that was extrinsic and then part of it was intrinsic. But can you tell me what happened to me on that day? [laughter]

0:23:35.1 DL: Well, it sounds to me like a professor that doesn't know what his job is, right?

0:23:40.1 AS: Yeah.

0:23:41.6 DL: His job is not just to weed out the bad ones, or weed out the ones that are not motivated to learning Economics, right?

0:23:49.6 AS: Mm-hmm.

0:23:49.6 DL: He's got 200 students in that class. His job is to produce 200 people who love Economics. So Deming talked about that a lot. So you don't know what your job is. That's not motivation, just to weed out all the people that don't adapt to the style that I have in the classroom, right?

0:24:18.9 AS: Right.

0:24:18.9 DL: Yeah, what happened with you...

0:24:20.1 AS: Yeah, me too. I'm sure that didn't motivate majority of people the way it motivated me.

0:24:23.4 DL: Oh yeah.

0:24:24.2 AS: It worked for me.

0:24:25.7 DL: I probably would have gotten up and walked out of that class right there. Because I would have been in the 100 people that aren't gonna be there. Or the old thing, look to the right, look to the left, one of those people won't be here at the end. That's not motivation, that's survival, right?

0:24:43.2 AS: Right. Right.

0:24:44.4 DL: You're just trying to survive that experience. Now, you personally decided the way you're gonna survive it, is you're gonna work hard and you're gonna learn this. But there was probably also a level of intrinsic motivation for Economics that you tapped into, right?

0:25:06.2 AS: Right.

0:25:06.6 DL: You realized, "Hey, look like I like numbers."

0:25:09.1 AS: Mm-hmm, yup.

0:25:10.4 DL: "And I like working with this, and I'm getting it, and I understand it."

0:25:14.7 AS: Yeah.

0:25:15.9 DL: Yeah. And then you did a number of things, you changed where you were sitting, you changed your attitude, you went in and you started working with the professor.

0:25:28.4 AS: Yeah.

0:25:28.6 DL: So even though you're in an environment that was hugely extrinsically motivating... [chuckle]

0:25:39.4 AS: Or demotivating.

0:25:39.6 DL: Yeah, demotivating everybody.

0:25:39.9 AS: Depending on which side of the room you're on.

0:25:41.4 DL: Right, you chose to rise above the situation and do something different, and you tapped into your love of Economics, which carried on far beyond the class, what you learned in that class, right?

0:25:55.1 AS: Right.

0:25:55.4 DL: Because like you said, I read 3000 books since then, well nobody was telling you to do that, right?

0:26:02.9 AS: Yeah.

0:26:03.1 DL: You weren't getting graded for it. I'll tell you that I never read a book for pleasure until I met Deming. You think of that.

0:26:14.1 AS: Wow!

0:26:14.2 DL: My master's degree, years of experience working schools. It was always because I was being told to do it or forced to do it, or for a grade or whatever it might be, but until I tapped into Deming and intrinsic motivation, that was the first time I thought, "I'm just gonna read this book for pleasure." And it was... The same kind of thing was kind of a weird thing that I had to go through because my whole life had been spent on extrinsic motivation. And I guess... And I was one of the ones that excelled in that, right? I got the grades, I got the scholarships, I got the prizes, right?

0:26:55.9 AS: The gold star.

0:26:57.7 DL: Right. And when all that ended, then now what? Well, there was no love of learning there. I had to find a way to find that. And that's what you tapped into.

0:27:08.6 AS: Yep. I feel like, just in wrapping this up, that the story that I remember I've read it, but I also remember Dr. Deming telling it at the seminar when I was there, was the story of the little girl who wanted to make the Halloween outfit to be like an angel, and her and her mom worked together on this outfit for weeks to get ready to go to the Halloween party. And of course, it wasn't beautiful, but it was handcrafted and they had such a great experience. And then they went to this Halloween party, and she was so proud to show it off and all that. And then one of the adults came up with the idea of, "Let's have a competition. Let's give a prize to the person that... " And in the end, of course...

0:27:51.8 DL: "Has the best costume."

0:27:53.5 AS: Yeah, the best costume. And in the end, of course, she didn't win.

0:27:55.5 DL: And we as adults are gonna pick the criteria for the best costume. [chuckle]

0:28:00.9 AS: Exactly. And in the end, she didn't win. She was far down the list. And all of a sudden, she was completely demotivated and realized like they reduced this whole couple of week process down to something just awful. And I always remember that story, and part of what I've always said about Dr. Deming is he's a humanist. He cares about how people feel.

0:28:28.4 DL: Yeah, we're really good at creating situations to kill the joy of learning, [chuckle] so...

0:28:32.8 AS: I did it right there. That was a story.

0:28:35.5 DL: Yeah.

0:28:37.9 AS: Let me review some of the things that you've talked about. First thing is we're gonna be talking about five key elements that cause motivation or talking about motivation. And one of the things that you said right off the bat is you can't. You can't motivate. You can manipulate and do other things. And I think we're gonna learn more about this over time. We talked about intrinsic motivation also being a bit about setting up the right environment for that intrinsic motivation. Talked about extrinsic means - giving away something, giving some incentive, a carrot or a stick, and that you're much better off using intrinsic motivation rather than trying to reward people with a gold star, because when you do that, you just reduce it down to some... Even people who are intrinsically motivated can be suckered in to just going after the gold star and...

0:29:38.6 DL: Or money. [chuckle]

0:29:39.6 AS: Yeah, or money, right? Definitely. And they may even sabotage the business or whatever to get that gold star or that money. And then you talked about the idea of the piano thing of when you've got a few students in the room that are really doing well with them, having them talk about why they're... What happened. What they like about it, what's going on for them, because maybe it's not gonna be that everybody's gonna be a piano star, but if they could learn the process or share the process of the excitement, that may be able to be applied in other areas too, for some people. And then you talked about understanding variation, and part of it is understanding that not everybody's gonna be that star. And I think also the last thing that I think about is that... The thing you said is that people may just be in the wrong job too. Like you can't necessarily get the best out of someone sometimes because they're just in the wrong job, and I think that's kind of a critical one that we oftentimes overlook. Is there anything else that you'd add to that?

0:30:50.9 DL: Well, I was just thinking about special needs kids too. I was talking about teachers coming to me and wanting to talk about their own child.

0:31:00.2 AS: Yep.

0:31:00.3 DL: They say, "Oh my son has ADD or he can't do this, or he can't do that, or he's got this thing in classroom. How do I motivate him to do stuff?" And invariably, I'll say, "Does he ever do anything on his own over a long period of time?" And invariably, they'll say things like, "Oh yeah, he loves to make model airplanes, and he'll go to his room and he'll spend just hours making model airplanes." Well, he doesn't have an ADD problem. He's got, [chuckle] a motivation problem, right?

0:31:32.2 AS: Mm-hmm.

0:31:33.3 DL: He loves doing that, but he doesn't love what's going on at school, so...

0:31:40.2 AS: Turn that.

0:31:40.9 DL: It all depends on the kind of an environment that you're gonna make, but because we have so many kids that are, like your story, are being demotivated by school, right? Well, what do we do? Well, we're gonna classify them, we're gonna call these ADD and we're gonna call these kids this, and we're gonna call this that and then we're gonna medicate this group and not medicate that group, but nobody's ever saying, "How do we change our system so we have less and less and less of this kind of behavior?"

0:32:11.6 AS: Yeah.

0:32:13.6 DL: And that's what we're gonna get to in the next five podcasts.

0:32:17.2 AS: It reminds me of that ACDC song when I was young, "Problem Child." I'm a problem child. I've been labeled. I know exactly what I am.

0:32:25.1 DL: Yeah.

0:32:25.8 AS: Well, David, on behalf of...

0:32:27.5 DL: I'm proud of it. [laughter]

0:32:28.6 AS: Yes, exactly. I've got my spot. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In our latest Deming in Education podcast, Andrew and David talk about a controversial subject: cellphones in classrooms. Should teachers have them? Students? Should they be banned? Or is there another way?

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:03.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host, as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers offered us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, "What would Deming say about cellphones in classrooms." David, take it away.

0:00:31.9 David Langford: Thank you. I just find this topic so relevant today and just so interesting, I just wanted to have this little discussion about what's going on because I'm reading articles that some high schools in Massachusetts, I think it was, are now banning cellphones completely, and so when kids come to school they have to put their cell phone in a hermetically sealed plastic bag that can only be opened by a teacher or an administrator at the end of the day. So, sort of like what Dagwood said in the comics one time, "It sounds like a good idea till you think about it." So those schools now have become the cell phone police. Alright?

0:01:23.6 AS: Yeah.

0:01:24.0 DL: They have to have people at the door, and if you think you're gonna outsmart a high school kid and get him... "Well, I didn't bring my phone today... " What are you gonna do then? You're gonna search 'em? You're gonna have a Geiger counter kind of the thing that they go through that will go off then, "You got a cell phone and... "

0:01:44.6 AS: You have got a cell phone or a gun, I'm not sure.

0:01:48.7 DL: And then you lied. And so now we have to have punishments for that and one cell phone misdemeanor will get you half an hour after school, and then so we have to have somebody to monitor the after school program and then we go on and on and on and on. And is that really the business you're in? And on the other hand, I can understand a teacher's complaint about, we got these cell phones and they're going off and everything, but I also want to tie it back into what are we supposed to be trying to do in education, what's our purpose? And Deming talked a lot about constancy of purpose, and so when all these students that are going to schools with banned cell phones get out into society and they go to work for companies like yours or other companies, what are companies gonna expect about their cell phones are we still gonna be taking cell phones away from employees when they hit the door? I would say... [cough] Excuse me. Generally, that people just make up, not necessarily even rules or regulations but ethics around cell phones. I remember as an administrator having that problem that we'd have administrative meetings and you might have 20 or 30 people in the room and there's people answering their email and they're looking up stuff on their cell phones and this and that, checking this.

0:03:25.2 DL: And in some cases, it could be an extreme emergency and they need to be paying attention to that, so do you just wanna ban that and say, "Okay, no, no answering email or doing anything like that." Or can we put some guidelines about what we believe? So it ties into Deming thinking, because the first thing that I've encountered this over and over, schools all over the world, and the first thing I would say is, "Okay, what's the statistical variation that you have on cell phones?" And they'll look at you blankly like, "Well, you know, it's just bad." [chuckle] Well, I can understand that, but does every child have a cell phone in the entire school? Are you dealing with that, well or either that system, or is there a system of inequity where only 30% of the kids can actually afford cell phones and what are parents views on cell phones and all the it's other kinds...

0:04:26.2 AS: I was just thinking that, I'm sure whatever challenges you're facing in the classroom that parents are also facing that challenge, so you actually have somewhat of an ally. I was looking at an article by CBS News, that just came out, and a quote from a guy named Tyler Rablin, a high school teacher in Sunnyside, Washington, he said, "It's a losing battle for kids and their brains."

0:04:55.6 DL: [laughter] That sounds like somebody that doesn't really wanna join the 21st century.

0:05:01.3 AS: But also the other thing is in business now, we have apps where you're communicating and you're expected to be online and respond and all that, so it's not like we're gonna get rid of...

0:05:12.0 DL: Yeah you can take that away as well. Well, and then there are developing countries, like I'm pretty sure that it's Nigeria that is actually issuing cell phones to every student because it's a miniature computer and it's affordable, and they can use it in multiple ways, working stuff through. So the idea of just, "Well, we're just gonna ban something, we're just gonna completely take it away, and so that's gonna solve your problem is actually creating its own problems, and I'd actually wanna know the data on how many interruptions are you talking about per class period, per day, what's a Pareto chart from highest to lowest of the type of interruptions with cell phones all the way to the lowest interruptions with cell phones. Have you actually come up with a cell phone etiquette for your school about how you agree to operate and have the students been a part of that, coming up with that etiquette, and what's normal and what's not normal?

0:06:15.9 DL: I know even with, as a school administrator, administrative groups, we actually had cell phone email time built into our work sessions, 'cause people said, "Well, I do need to check in and do this and there's stuff going on at my school that I need to be aware of and... " Great, so we decided to have cell phone time, there was like a 12-minute period or an 18-minute period, and they would tell us how much time they needed to do that, and everybody would go out and talk on their cellphones and call home and to see how the kids are doing, or whatever you needed to do. But then when you come back to the meeting, we're back in session and we're concentrating and we're doing the things that we need to do over there.

0:07:00.8 AS: There's a couple of things I'm...

0:07:01.2 DL: There are ways to deal with these things.

0:07:04.2 AS: I was thinking about a couple of things. Sometimes when I see a lot of distraction in a classroom, I basically tell people to turn off their phones and you can access them at the break, so we're gonna talk for an hour and a half. If you can't get away for an hour and a half, maybe you shouldn't be in the classroom, for someone that's coming for a training or something like that, no, you can't. If you say that to a kid, they'll say, "Yeah, exactly." But the other thing...

0:07:34.3 DL: Think about how if you've got that kind of thinking in your classroom, what do you need to be doing before you get to the classroom? Well, I need to be making my phone calls, I need to be doing my texting or whatever I'm going to be doing, so when I get in the classroom, I'm not gonna be tempted to be distracted from those types of things. To me, it's going back to Deming's concept of understanding the system, what is this system that you're trying to either prevent or create or work through? And I can absolutely guarantee you those kids are gonna run circles around those administrators and those teachers in those schools, they are going to find ways to make stuff happen. I'll never forget when cellphones were actually first sort of coming out and my kids were going to university, Allison got this text from my son, who was in a business class listening to a lecture that he was bored out of his mind, and that's back when we had the cell phones with buttons on 'em. And he said, "I'm texting you from my pocket because I'll get in trouble if I take out my phone." And he was doing the whole thing by feel 'cause the class was so boring, this was a whole lot more fun to see if he could pull that off, [chuckle] so that's what you're gonna be up against is...

0:08:55.7 AS: But the other thing is, I teach here in Asia, and most of my students are not native speakers, so they use their phones to record sometimes. Or yesterday, I had a class and we were running late, I had to run, but I needed to give them some advice on the next assignment, I told 'em, "Turn on your audio, I'm gonna run through seven things." One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. "I'll see you guys later." Boom. So there's that also. But what I'm coming back to, David, is that, it is really a battle for attention on what I can see the curse course of young people right now...

0:09:30.4 DL: Attention and control... And control. Who's in control here? Right?

0:09:34.1 AS: Yep. But what I can see is that I see a lot of young people that are unable to focus because they're constantly distracted, even for me, who didn't grow up with this type of thing, it can be distracting. And so I do things like, I'd leave my phone outside my office, I start work early in the morning where I know nobody is gonna send me any messages, all kinds of little tricks and stuff. But it is a challenge, which raises another issue in education, do we have a concentration time? Maybe we need to teach children about, "Hey, what is the value of going 30 minutes on this? No distraction." And teaching something like that.

0:10:17.1 DL: Yeah, I'd much rather that you had a Deming-focus in your school and you're thinking about, "Well, how do we manage this cell phone issue?" Because when students leave the school, they're gonna have to know how to use cell phones properly in work environments or in any environment that they go into. And so if we're not teaching 'em how to do it and they're not understanding how to work that through, it's just gonna be chaos on the other side of that.

0:10:49.8 AS: What about this? I remember a fund management client that I had in the UK, and I tried to get a hold of him in the morning, and he contacted me, he says, "Sorry, I didn't talk to you in the morning because our company doesn't turn on the email delivery until noon."

[laughter]

0:11:08.0 DL: Again, you're not trusting your employees to make good decisions, and so therefore, we're just gonna take care of it for you. That's another... Another way that you could do the cell phone thing is you could have a bubble over your school that prevented any cell phone access.

0:11:30.1 AS: There you go. A shield. A dome.

0:11:32.8 DL: A dome or a shield over it. We laugh about it and stuff, but and it's a very big problem for the teachers in schools and etcetera. If I was a teacher now and in a high school, I'd actually probably be requiring all of my students to have cellphones. Because I talked with one teacher about this one time, and that's what she did and she had everybody's numbers, she had everything, she would text stuff out and she said, "Oh, the kids were just like, take her cell phone away." 'Cause she was saying, "Remember we're gonna have this test on Friday, and remember you to study this." And she's blanket that out to everybody in the class, and so they're just constantly getting these text messages from her. But it's the same thing as in business, the eight-hour work day is a myth, it doesn't happen anymore. I know I'm on a 24-hour schedule because you're in Thailand and your're 11 hours different than where I'm at and... And that's happening worldwide, and if we're not teaching students how to deal with that... That's the whole advantage of having a cell phone is that I can get messages and that I can receive them and answer them on my schedule and on my time, and when I wanna do that and work through that.

0:13:00.0 DL: From a systems perspective, it's much, much more powerful to teach students how to make responsible choices and decisions, and then you're gonna get the question about, "Well what happens when if they don't make responsible decisions?" Well, are we talking about special cause, we got a thousand kids in the school and we got one kid or 10, right?

0:13:22.8 AS: Yup.

0:13:23.8 DL: Well, they're gonna need some special help, 'cause obviously they need help learning how to control themselves. But in general, 99... 98% of the students don't have this problem.

0:13:35.4 AS: So what I'd like to do is just wrap this up by thinking about a teacher who's listening to this and thinking, "Yeah, this is a challenge I'm facing in my classroom and I'm looking for different ways to handle it, and from this conversation, next week when I go into class, I'm gonna take a different perspective on this, and that is gonna be based upon what you're saying and your interpretation of Dr. Deming's ideas about this." So what kind of specific steps would you say? Like, "Maybe try this, try that, do this, do that, re-evaluate what your goals are and what's your aim?" What would you say it is?

0:14:09.7 DL: The answer to these questions always is; it depends, right? [chuckle] So...

0:14:14.5 AS: Oh, David...

0:14:16.7 DL: The control may be totally out of that teacher's hands, where the school or the district's saying, well "This is our policy, and this is what we have to do." If that's the case, then you don't really have much. But even a single teacher within a whole district, or a school, can change the system. So if I wanted to do something differently, I might go to my principal and say, "Look, can I run a PDSA; Plan, Do, Study, Act experiment on cell phones? And my students actually wanna have cell phones in their classes, and so we'd like to take a month, and in just my classes, we're gonna have cell phones and we're gonna learn how to use them really properly, and we're gonna collect some data on improper use and proper use, and try to understand the situation." And generally, I'd say that most administrators would probably say, "Yeah, that sounds like a logical solution," right? But to actually understand it...

0:15:24.9 AS: You're getting the students involved...

0:15:26.1 DL: Getting the students involved...

0:15:26.3 AS: That's part of their key...

0:15:29.0 DL: That's the whole key, the students are always the secret weapon. If you're not getting them involved, you're just shooting yourself in the foot, so I can guarantee at these high schools that are banning cell phones, there's probably not a single student that came up with this idea that, "Oh, we need to ban cell phones."

0:15:45.5 AS: Yeah.

0:15:46.1 DL: [chuckle] It's just not what's gonna happen.

0:15:49.7 AS: I was thinking about one idea could be that students may come up with this, maybe we could use this two... We could do partners, like two people, one cell phone. And how do we explore, see what we can find on a particular topic? Or how do we... Just all kinds of ideas would come up, and plus these guys, they know how to use these, that it is a tool, and maybe through that process, you would be teaching them to see it as a tool, not as a burden or not something that you gotta restrict, but how do you get the most outta this tool?

0:16:24.1 DL: Well, that's... I'm sure that your day is much like mine. Any time, any second, that I think, "I wonder what the answer to this is?" Or "I need to do a little research on this," or etcetera, I don't run to my computer 'cause it's... I'll pull out my cell phone and within 30 seconds or less, I've got the answer to that, and...

0:16:49.6 AS: It's funny because I...

0:16:51.0 DL: I wouldn't wanna deprive students of that in a school.

0:16:54.5 AS: I was talking with my mother and she was talking about one of our houses that we lived in, in New Jersey, and I remembered a picture of that house. I asked her, "What's the address of that house?" And she could remember it, even though she's getting older. And I went on Google, and I zoomed in, and I go, "Mom, is that the front porch of the house," and she's like, "That's it." And just, like, there's so much that you can do with this tool, so...

0:17:21.6 DL: Yeah, so just think of, you're just blanketly depriving people of access to using that tool. I mean, to me, it just doesn't make any sense, and from a Deming perspective, I think it's not tenable. It's certainly not sustainable. And I absolutely could guarantee you that, in five years, those very same high schools are gonna be done with that policy and, because they don't wanna be the cell phone policemen anymore.

0:17:50.2 AS: Yup.

0:17:51.9 DL: So eventually you're gonna have to learn how to teach people to use them properly within the existing systems. It's gonna come...

0:18:03.1 AS: So, maybe I'll summarize by thinking about some of the questions about cell phones, even is, does every kid have a phone? And...

0:18:11.1 DL: That's right...

0:18:11.8 AS: What's the situation?

0:18:13.8 DL: Yeah, could be an equity issue, right? Oh, we're gonna ban cell phones because only 25% of our kids can actually afford to have a cell phone. Okay, well, that's a whole different issue than we're just gonna ban this...

0:18:29.0 AS: Well, that's why I was thinking about teams, if you had a room where a certain number of people didn't have a cell phone by setting up... If the students came out and say, "Hey, why don't we work in teams?" Boom. You also talked about, maybe we should think about cell phone etiquette, maybe get parents and, obviously, students involved. And the other thing you said, are you trusting your employees? Are you trusting your students? And you also talked about, maybe, the thing to do is, let's study it, let's do a PDSA on cell phones; how to use them properly, how to use them in the classroom and try to learn and develop something that you're developing with the students, and finally, see the phone as a tool for reaching the goal of the system. Which is, let's say, to educate young people. Anything you would add to that?

0:19:21.4 DL: Yeah, I'm sure there's people listening to this and saying, "Well, those guys don't understand our reality," well, you can create your own reality. [chuckle] I'd rather be in a school system where everybody's responsibly using cell phones, even the administrators, and teachers. Where was I? In Australia or some place, and I said something about, "Some of our schools think they have a cell phone problem," and the administrators said, "You mean with the teachers?"

[laughter]

0:19:55.3 DL: And I hadn't even thought about that. He said, "We have a really big problem with that, the teachers are just always on their cell phones and using... Texting, and doing all their stuff, and... "

0:20:03.0 AS: Yup. Well, if you're listening to this podcast, you're like, "You guys don't know, and this and that... " Well, if it's getting you a little bit frustrated, you're questioning it and stuff, that's the part of the process of learning, is getting some new information and thinking about that. David, I wanna thank you for challenging us to think about cell phones, 'cause even in my case, I kinda went into this with a little bit different view, but you've got me convinced to get the students involved, and maybe their parents, and think about what's our real aim here. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn 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."

In this episode, Andrew and David talk about chaos, authority, and when calming the chaos can feel like a loss of control. They explore the "psychology" aspect of Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge, and how that applies to classrooms and and school systems.

TRANSCRIPT 

0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host, as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is Thriving on Chaos. David, take it away.

0:00:28.4 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again.

0:00:30.9 AS: Oh, yeah.

0:00:31.0 DL: So, yes, Thriving on Chaos. So I started thinking about this because of my work with executive coaching, both with principals and superintendents and people like that. And it's sort of like a pattern or if I go and visit a campus and actually start to see what's happening at the campus, either a university or a school or whatever, and it applies to Deming's concept of Profound Knowledge and the concept of Psychology and how does psychology fit in with the variation systems thinking and so on and so forth. So this whole idea about thriving on chaos comes from... You have to start to think about the neuroscience behind it as well, about who's in charge or who's in command of something. So if you're talking about a military a military commander, well, that's all based on your rank. Or you might have a formal position in a company, right? You're a vice president or you're president, and along with that there comes a certain level of authority too.

0:01:46.3 DL: Well, in a school, it's the same kind of a thing. In a classroom, a teacher has a built-in level of authority in that classroom and especially like in younger years, elementary schools or primary schools, you're physically bigger than your students or your clients or your workers or however you wanna think about students in a school system. So sometimes people get away from... Get by with a management style that, it's just based on... That is bigger and sort of is threatening, and it's scarier. And imagine if you had a boss that was like 20 feet tall and... Compared to you and stuff. It'd be kind of a scary thing, right?

0:02:38.0 AS: Definitely.

0:02:39.8 DL: Yeah, but I think...

0:02:40.9 AS: He could just squash me by just putting his foot down.

0:02:44.8 DL: Yeah. So just because you're getting stuff done doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing things well or planning things through or something. You're just getting things done because maybe you're the loudest voice in the room or the squeakiest wheel or you're the... All these other kinds of things. But along with that, when you have that formal position, I've sort of found that people have to go through a phase where they're tired of the chaos, they're tired of the craziness, but at the same time, the craziness gives you authority. "I'm the authority figure. And so, I've gotta fix this, and I gotta always be in control." And so, Deming talked about moving from one burning fire to the next to the next to the next and managing the way of thinking like that.

0:03:44.5 DL: So if you really start applying Deming kind of philosophies to your management style, whether that's in a classroom, school, company, whatever it might be, I've always found that over time, things start to calm down. [chuckle] Attitudes calm down, students just know more about what to do, how to do things. Maybe they have flow charts or operational definitions, and so they start to actually take control of the situation, etcetera. And that actually becomes threatening to somebody who has spent a career thriving on the chaos. And you walk into a classroom and none of the kids are doing what it is they're supposed to do. And so, you get really angry, and you get upset, and yell at them and then everybody does what they're supposed to do and that puts you in a position of authority.

0:04:37.9 DL: That's much different than if I walked into a classroom and the students didn't even know I was gone. They all know what they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to do it, they're all working together, they're all communicating with each other back and forth and there is no chaos. I'll never forget the... I worked with a university in Southern California and I was coaching a number of the professors. And this one professor, I get a phone call one day and he's whispering. He said, "I had a flat on the way to school this morning, and I was 20 minutes late. And we have a philosophy at the school that if a professor is more than 10 minutes late, you don't have to stay. You can leave."

0:05:28.1 DL: So he said, "I was totally sure that I was gonna get to my class and everybody's gonna be gone. There wouldn't be anybody there." He said, "I came into my class, and they didn't even know I was gone. They were all working in teams and they were working on their projects and communicating and going through stuff." [chuckle] So he calls me whispering, and he said, "I need some quality therapy. They don't need me." Well, it's just the opposite. Those kinds of environments don't happen by accident. And he had steadily been turning the management, so to speak, of the class over to the students and... "You know what to do. You know what you do when you hit the room. Why would you even come to class? What's my role? What's your role? How do we define things?" And...

0:06:18.1 DL: So he actually had turned into much more of what we all wanna do, is become a facilitator of learning, that's a very common term in education, but people don't often realize you truly become a facilitator of learning, it's kind of threatening. Because you've been thriving on chaos for years, and running stuff and being the person in control and everybody has to come to you for an answer and for a decision, and that in itself psychologically is a pretty heady thing. And if you start to change that, it becomes threatening.

0:06:56.1 AS: From your own experience, I'm guessing that there's a small proportion of people that will never change that style, everybody line up when they in, everybody be quiet. Okay, you do this, you do that, and then you've got this group that on the other end of the spectrum, it's like, you guys do it, but then you've got a lot of people in the middle, how do you convince the people in the middle that shifting... I guess what you could say is empowering one group dis-empowers another, it must.

0:07:31.0 DL: Yeah, what Deming says, leaders have three sources of power, so yes, you have your formal position, and then you also have your knowledge about things, and then there's the psychology of how you manage and what you do and all that kind of stuff, but he often talked about formal leaders don't use formal position. But you absolutely have to because you're not gaining authority or you're not gaining power or authority to change things by going through that. So yes, yes, you have the role. Yes, you have the position. Yes, you have the responsibility. And ultimately, the buck stops with you, whether that's a teacher in a classroom or a CEO in a company, but you're only gonna use that formal position to make decisions or overstep things, basically in a time of crisis or an emergency. But even then, as soon as you finish that time of crisis or that emergency you wanna spend time trying to figure out how do we make sure this never happens again. A really great example is every school in the world practices fire drills. Oh, why did we do that? Well, a child could go through entire school systems some place and never ever have an actual fire.

0:09:00.6 DL: Right. Well, we do that because... We have to practice that because the danger is so high, and if something did happen, that special cause, that one special cause, one time in 12 years or 20 years, the cost is so great that we have to practice it, we have to be ready and everything else, 'cause we can't rely in a moment, on the leader being there to tell us what to do. Everybody has to know what to do in those kinds of situations. The same thing's true today in lockdowns, schools, things like that, the danger level is so high, we have to practice it nowadays, and we have to go through the scenario, even though it's such an extreme special cause, it may... In a whole teacher's career of 40 years, they may never, ever experience an actual threat going on, but we practice it to make sure it doesn't... This doesn't happen again. So it's the same thing, if you find yourself in chaos, again, something's going on or some project didn't go well, or whatever it is that you went through, the best thing is to just figure out how do we get through this? And then secondly, start using the people that were part of the process and part of the dysfunction to actually fix the process. What do we learn from this?

0:10:21.6 AS: And would we equate when we talk about, let's just say we create a run chart on a production in a factory, and our job is to get the system in control to reduce variability, that type of thing, I guess that's reducing chaos or chaotic outcomes. So is it a corollary here that as we start to apply the principles in education, one of our goals is to reduce that variation or that chaotic, chaotic-ness? I don't know. How does that compare to what we would think in a factory, as an example?

0:10:56.0 DL: Yeah, no, that's exactly the same kind of thing. You know, it can be so simple. I remember asking teachers all the time, How's it going today? Oh, I'm having a really bad day, or I'm having great day, or these kids are driving me crazy today, it must be... Gonna rain. Well, they're just constantly victims of their own reality, and so until you have that understanding of your variation or able to sort of step back and it very well could be that it's gonna rain and that's a sort of a special cause, except if you're in Thailand it rains all the time, so it's a common cause. But... And that could be having some kind of effect, but until you have some level of data to try to look at over time, then you're on this constant psychological roller coaster.

0:11:53.2 DL: Great day and bad day, or I hate this job, or I don't like this job or... Because you're just riding those waves of psychology of the variation that's going on, and especially in schools, there's just so much random variation, like we try to control it to some level, but for the most part, still you really have no idea the variation, and students are gonna come into your classroom every year, right? So they could be coming from different countries, they could have different languages, they could have different backgrounds, all kinds of things within that. Now, unlike in a K-12 system, like we have in the United States and other places around the world, we do control that to some degree, because a certain percentage of those students are gonna stay in that system for the entire time that they're going through that system, and then they... A high percentage sometimes are transient students that are coming in and out all the time.

0:12:54.4 DL: The real key is, are you just thriving on that chaos of that and it's just, "Oh, woe is me, and I'll look at this, we got all these transient kids and kids that speak 52 different languages and everything else," or are you starting to understand that, "Oh, no, this is probably the norm of our system, and what are we doing about it?" How are we managing differently to bring all these cultures together and to manage it on a whole different level.

0:13:21.1 AS: So maybe I will try to summarize what you've been talking about. First of all, you're saying this is part of the psychology aspect of the Theory of Profound Knowledge that Dr. Deming talks about. And when you talk about psychology in a statistician kind of background or education that Dr. Deming was in, it's always kind of interesting like, "Wow, he really, really thought a lot about the human... The person involved in whatever activity is going on." You also talked about who's in charge or in command, you talked about in military it's a rank. In a business, it may be like, "I'm a VP, I'm an executive VP." So we see that, but one of the things you mentioned, which is so interesting, I hadn't thought about it, is that the teachers are just physically bigger, and so there's a certain level of power right there. And the other thing you were talking about is how people may be tired of the craziness, but the chaos makes them feel in control, like [snaps] get everybody lined up, and tell everybody what to do, and they're perpetuating the problem that they're kind of suffering from. And then you mentioned that Deming's methods, when you start to implement them in a classroom, in a school, that things start to calm down. That...

0:14:44.6 AS: And that is a threat to the person that wants to thrive on chaos, and then finally the last part you talked about was the three types of power, formal power that's derived from knowledge and power that's derived from psychology, and you said ultimately, you only wanna use the power that comes from formal position in very rare cases, but the idea is try to get the... I guess what I would say is by empowering students, you're reducing your power and let them produce from that. Anything you would add to that?

0:15:20.8 DL: No, you got it spot on.

0:15:26.4 AS: Well, there we are.

0:15:30.3 DL: Yeah, Deming talked a lot about that. Somebody that becomes more and more knowledgeable about managing situations and helping people becomes very powerful, and you may not have the formal position, so you could be a teacher in a building that has 160 teachers, but you become actually very powerful, and in some cases, more powerful than the principal, because you're constantly applying knowledge and thinking to situations versus just reacting to the chaos.

0:16:00.9 AS: It's interesting, 'cause I think about in my young days, what I did is I learned Excel. I learned how to use Microsoft Excel intensely, and that was when it was pretty... It's still pretty basic, but still the point was, is it...

0:16:13.8 DL: And that's when you could have memorized all the formulas.

0:16:16.5 AS: Exactly, exactly. And therefore, people would always go, "Go see Andrew, he can help you solve that." And I had derived a certain amount of power through my knowledge, and I loved that, and I love people coming to me and going, "How do I do this?" "Oh, that's easy to do it like that," and my power and maybe respect for my knowledge rose over time, and so I definitely see that. In fact, I would say that that was a big part of my own education, my pursuit of education, is I saw knowledge as a source of power for me or a source of controlling the situation for good or bad.

0:16:55.3 DL: Yeah, when we talk about, Deming, talked about the three sources of power, when he... I said that psychology, I was really talking about personality. So somebody... You may have worked with people that they just have a great personality, they're just fun to work with and easy to get along with and everything. Well, they actually get a lot of stuff done, right? So the most effective managers are concentrating on knowledge and personality as a way to get the stuff done and not just issuing orders through my formal position.

0:17:27.0 AS: Well, that is a great discussion on Thriving on Chaos and the pros and cons of it. David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for the discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Also, you 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."

Now that we understand Operational Definitions (see Part 12), it's time to figure out how to use them to get the improvements and results you want. Andrew and David talk about examples of useful Operational Definitions and how they can impact all aspects of education (and beyond!)

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is how to start setting operational definitions. David, take it away.

0:00:27.1 David Langford: So in a previous podcast, we talked a lot about the need for operational definitions, and how that improved systems, and why do you wanna do that. Well, that's part of what Deming talked about with profound knowledge and systems thinking, and it's really important. But the nuts and bolts about how do you begin doing that. Well, the first thing you need to do is to figure out what system am I working on, is the number one thing. What am I trying to improve or design? Am I trying to improve the system of behavior? Am I trying to improve the system of the learning in the classroom? Or whatever it might be. Or maybe you're a principal and all of a sudden you realize, "My teachers, they don't all show up on time to the staff meetings," Right? So staff meeting's supposed to start at 3:40, and we don't ever get a staff meeting going till four o'clock, so... I know when I go places and they're not getting started promptly, etcetera, I'll say things like, "What time do you usually start your eight o'clock meetings?"

[laughter]

0:01:42.3 DL: Yeah, it usually gets people to go, Oh, yeah... Sometimes they'll say, "Well, usually about nine o'clock, so."

0:01:47.9 AS: And, David, I have a story I wanna share that I think can kind of lead into this, is that I was involved with a master's in marketing program here, about 75 students every time. And then I'm also involved with a MBA, an executive MBA program with another university. And one of the things that's interesting is the master's in marketing program, 75 students, so these classes are big, pretty big, 75 students, not one of them was late, ever. All 75 were in the classroom, door closed, when it was time to start the class and I started. And the other one I was just meeting out there, and we were at an event where I was teaching, and they said, "Look, really sorry, we try to pull everybody together but they're always late," and all that.

0:02:31.4 AS: And I was just like, this is interesting, the difference here. 'Cause it's the same cohort of people, it's the same group of executives and smart people in Thailand that are pursuing a degree. And the guy asked me, and I told him the story about the other university, and he said, "How do they do it?" And I said, "Well, they set a pretty clear standard of, look, this is important to us that you're on time, and we're gonna lock the door, and if you're not there at the time that it starts, you can't go in until the break. And we're gonna get class leaders to support this, we're gonna get alumni to support this, to say, this is part of what makes us unique."

0:03:06.9 DL: There you go.

0:03:08.1 AS: And I saw a very different outcome.

0:03:10.7 DL: So there you go. That's an operational definition. And whether or not you agree with it or not, you can see by having that operational definition at the one university, you've got a level of function that you don't have at the other university, you got a level of dysfunction, because they haven't taken the time to really do that. Really define what does that mean? And so when that happens, then you're dealing with all this variability, variation from students, variation from professors, variation from everybody in the system, and the overall system is not optimized. So it just keeps coming back to what we talked about before, but in this session we wanted to get into a little bit about, how would you begin setting an operational definition? What does it look like?

0:04:06.1 DL: When I work with, say, elementary teachers, I say, start the very first day, the very first thing, so... And start operationally defining what kinds of standards and what kinds of things you wanna have happen. Something so simple about, "Every time you hand a paper in, we want you to put your name on the paper." Okay, well, let's have a discussion about, let's operationally define, what does it mean to put your name on a paper? And sometimes people look at you and say, "Hey, what are you talking about?" Well, do you want first and last name? You just want a first name? Do you want it in the upper left-hand corner? The upper right-hand corner? Do you want it just anyplace on the paper, you don't really care? Well, if it's just random, if it's just anyplace on the paper, but my name's on it, well, that means that you as the teacher, every time you get a paper you're gonna be searching, trying to find somebody's name, right?

0:04:58.9 AS: Does it need to be clearly written?

0:05:01.3 DL: Yeah. Yeah, and what is clearly? I have no idea what that means. So we might have to have a discussion as a class and start to talk about, what does clearly written mean? There are some things to that. Well, clearly written means all the lower case letters need to be the same height. Oh, okay. So I'm thinking about that and I say, "Is my name clear, all my lower case letters the same height? Well, no, they're not." Okay, well then I can fix that, can't I? Right? So you can get clarity around these things if you really are thinking like this from the very beginning of bringing people into a system. As things get more and more complicated, and let's say that you wanna have a whole group of people come to a common definition, or a common operational definition on something. I started a process years ago of, in my classes, working with students and staff too, but anytime we needed to define something everybody would write it down, and then we'd pass it around and start to share those definitions and begin to talk about it.

0:06:20.9 DL: But then over the years, that sort of evolved into a tool that we call... Nowadays we call P³T. P to the third power T. So what it actually stands for is, the P³ is the paper passing purpose tool. And that came from one of my students one time, he said, "Oh, this is P to the third power." And so we just named it that, and it's become a popular way to define things. But what you do with that... I've done this with school boards. They wanna define certain terms with the school board and everything. So let's do a P³T. So what you do is you take... You wanna get everybody's opinion without it being tainted by other people, you just start having a big discussion about how you should define something or you can take a vague word, like we talked about last time discovery, but you could take a word like behavior or discipline or anything you want and you realize that everybody's got their own definition of what that means, but to optimize the system, we all have to have a common definition of what that means.

0:07:33.6 DL: So you take all the people in a group, usually try to... If I've got more than about five or seven people in a group, then we'll break that up into multiple groups, so it might have... So let's say I'm gonna do this in a classroom, and I wanna get everybody in the classroom help contribute to an operational definition. We might just put everybody into groups of five to say eight people, and just start the process, and so then we state, "Okay, well, we wanna have a term on a quality work." There's a vague term, we want all the work...

0:08:14.1 AS: Good quality around here.

0:08:15.7 DL: Yeah, quality work, we want everything that comes in to be quality. So well, we better define what that is. So first thing I'm gonna have everybody do is write down their own personal definition of quality work, right, and they're gonna write it on this paper, and then very simply, everybody then just passes it to the right or the left, and when you get somebody's paper, then the first thing you're gonna do is read that person's definition of that term. Whatever it is you're trying to define, and as you're reading it, you're gonna automatically come to certain phrases or words where you have an affinity for that and you're gonna go, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that." So if you agree with that, what you do is you just underline it, okay, and so when you get finished, that paper has a bunch of things underlined and some things not underlined and then when you're finished with that, you pass it to the right and everybody keeps passing your paper around until you get your paper back.

0:09:14.5 DL: And if something's already been underlined once, then when I get it, if I also agree with that then I'm gonna underline it again, or if there's not enough space for that, maybe I'll put a check mark by it or just something that identifies that, okay, I agree with that, or I think that's a good idea, right? So when I get my paper back, I actually have the feedback from five to seven other people about what they thought about my definition, which is pretty interesting, right? Did I have a lot of people agree with me on certain things or maybe things that I thought were really important, nobody agreed with me on that, or nobody underlined that. They didn't think that was important at all. So you got all these definitions and papers, but you've got a chance for people to see everybody else's definition. And now we wanna start combining that into an operational definition agreement with the group. If you try to...

0:10:16.4 AS: And before we get to that.

0:10:19.0 DL: Go ahead.

0:10:19.7 AS: Before we get to that step. Can I just highlight? You talked about this idea of each person writing down their opinion so that they're not tainted by the influence of others, and that really is such a powerful first step. Because you could imagine that somebody would write down, "We've gotta be on time. That's what makes quality work to me." And now you end up... You start to expose pet peeves, maybe you call them, and then once you start... That starts going around those pet peeves kind of all of a sudden you realize that nobody underlined that, and then you think, "Oh, okay, that's interesting, I guess that's really important to me, but maybe it isn't." So that first part of the process that you've just defined of passing that paper around, I think is really valuable. So now, let's imagine that that paper has now come back to you. You're going, "Holy crap. I see some things that people agree with, but nobody underlined some of the things that I thought was important." Now you go to that next step. Tell us about that.

0:11:21.5 DL: Yeah, well often when I start with groups, a lot of times they'll have somebody that says, "Well, can we just discuss this before we start?" No, no. Absolutely not, because I don't want to give you the chance to intimidate somebody else in the group. Well, everybody here just knows what on-time performance is, right? And everybody here knows that it's this, and everybody here agrees with me. No, so psychologically, you don't wanna give people that chance to dominate a group ahead of time, and a lot of times our meetings are like that. Just full of that stuff. And by the time you actually get around to doing something or doing some work, people are so jaded, so upset that they just don't say anything, they don't wanna participate.

0:12:14.3 AS: And that's because let's say one person is kind of... They're persuasive, they have strong opinions, they tend to dominate of what it is, and we can say... There's a common word I hear a lot in America is inclusive, and one of the objectives of those people maybe is not to be too inclusive, and what you're saying is that when you're passing around that paper, it's a raw experience, you are forced to be inclusive of all people's ideas. And then you start to...

0:12:44.6 DL: And opinions and you may even have it, this is common students, that kids blow off things right, they just... They don't do it, or they put down something frivolous or silly or whatever it might be. Well, when they get their paper back and nothing on there was underlined, they start to get the picture like, Oh, okay, well, that was kind of a waste of time, right? That was just silly. And so next time around, you're probably gonna see that person take things a little more serious, a little more focus, think about things themselves before they get started, and you haven't had to say anything. They got the picture. Alright, so you got this paper back and you got these certain things, so now how do we move from... So we started with the individual and then we went to the group, and then how can you move that to a whole, say a whole class or a whole system depending on the size of the group.

0:13:39.9 DL: So probably the simplest way I've ever done it is I'll just ask somebody to start and say, "Tell me one thing that is underlined on your paper." People say, "Underlined a lot or a little or?" It doesn't matter. You decide, what was underlined on your paper that you think is important? And they'll tell me something, so we'll write that on the flip chart or the board or whatever it might be. Then you go to the next person and you say, "Okay, what do you have that's different?" And then you go to the next person and you say, "Okay, what do you have to add that's different?" And what you're doing is you're removing redundancies, you're removing all kinds of things as you go through, and people are starting to think harder and harder and look at their own paper and start to say, "Okay, these three things have already been listed, so I guess I don't have anything else to add." So once I go all the way around a group like that and I've removed all the redundancies, now we've distilled this down into what this group thinks is really important.

0:14:50.4 AS: And when we list those down, we're now listing down everything that's different. So we could have seven different things on that list.

0:15:00.0 DL: Oh, yeah.

0:15:00.2 AS: Would that be correct?

0:15:00.3 DL: Oh yeah.

0:15:01.1 AS: Okay. So now we got a long laundry list kind of thing. What do we do next?

0:15:06.7 DL: It can be, or it actually usually comes out much more concise than you think it's gonna be.

0:15:15.6 AS: Okay, because they've already kind of brought it down by underlining...

0:15:19.0 DL: That's right.

0:15:19.6 AS: And not underlining. Okay.

0:15:21.2 DL: That's right. There's other prioritization tools you could do and all kinds of things, but it takes a lot more time and etcetera. So now I've got this list.

0:15:29.3 AS: So let's say what, three... Two to five things that people have said?

0:15:34.0 DL: Yeah, it could be more like nine, 10, 12 things on this list.

0:15:38.7 AS: So we've got a long list?

0:15:40.2 DL: Yeah. So now how to... Let's say that I've got six groups of people in one room, each group has 5-7 people, but I wanna end up with a common operational definition for the whole room, right? Then I simply go to one group and say, "Okay, what do you have on your list?" And basically, I'm doing the same process but with groups. And this group says, "Oh, well, we said this in our group." Okay, so we're gonna write that down. I go to the next group, "What do you guys have that's different?" Then I go to the next group, "What do you have that's different?" And you just keep going around until everybody's... There's nothing left. Nobody has anything left.

0:16:18.6 DL: You talked a little bit about standards-based learning, how ambiguous that is. Well, here's a great way to take a whole staff and say, "Okay, well, let's try to define what we think this is, what does standards-based learning mean?" So first, what does it mean to you as an individual? And then how does my opinion sort of... What's the juxtaposition of my opinion with a group and then the thinking overall with the bigger group? So if I do the exact same process now with a group of 30 people within 10-12, 15 minutes, we've distilled it down to all the kinds of things that we think are really super important of this concept.

0:17:04.6 AS: Can I just go back? Okay, so first thing we did, we had... We broke people into different groups. So let's say we have, I don't know, five groups of six. And each person wrote down what they said their definition of that particular thing is, quality work or whatever, and then we push it around in a circle and people underline the things that they agree with, then we have... We then go up to the board and we say, "Okay, let's just get a laundry list of the different things," and we may have five, we may have 10, we may have 12, whatever, we have our list. Now, all of a sudden, you got other groups that have their lists. Now, what I'm trying to understand is that the next step, when you bring the other groups lists of 5-10 different things, are you...

0:17:49.4 DL: So basically, I'm doing this exact same process. I'll go to one group and say, "Okay, tell me something that you have on your group list... "

0:17:56.8 AS: That's different from this.

0:17:58.0 DL: "That you thought was important." And they're gonna tell me one concept. And then I'm gonna go to the next group and I say, "Okay, what do you have that's different?" And they'll tell me something else. Then I go to the next group, "What do you have that's different?" So I'm doing the exact same process, only with groups. And so I'm limiting redundancies again.

0:18:14.6 AS: And let me ask you a question. If you ended up... When you did the first group, you ended up with let's say 10 things. Then you go out to a group of groups, then you're gonna add probably on another one or two because one group had something that was different. So now you've got a list of 12 things or what happens by the end of that process?

0:18:35.0 DL: Could be. It's gonna distill it down, and sometimes it's phrases or even sentences or things that you wanna have in this operational definition. So at the end of this, you've got this concise document. Now, it's not a flowery paragraph or a statement or anything like that yet, but it is a list of everything that everybody in this room said is very important with this operational definition. And everybody in the room should be able to see how my contribution was folded into the whole. Because I can look at that list and go, "Oh yeah, I was the one. I said that."

0:19:15.8 AS: Because we didn't eliminate... Well, we could have eliminated something. If you had an idea, for instance, about quality work, let's say that it's on time and nobody else underlined that, well, then you can say, "Well, the group really doesn't see that as valuable as I saw it. So, okay, that's off." So we've eliminated some maybe pet peeves or frivolous things, and now we've a solid list.

0:19:37.1 DL: Yeah, and that's exactly what happens.

0:19:38.2 AS: We've got a solid list.

0:19:38.5 DL: Yep, that's exactly what happens.

0:19:41.4 AS: And then once we've got that solid list is what we wanna do then is just say, this is a list of everything, or do we then prioritize it, reduce it down, tighten it? What do we do from that point?

0:19:53.2 DL: Yeah, the answer to those questions is, it depends. [chuckle] So it really depends on what it is you're trying to do at that point. I find that a lot of times we're trying to operationally define something that's been kind of vague in the past, once we get that list and get it to that point, that's about all we need to do right now. We could spend weeks or months arguing about commas and coming up with some kind of statement that brings it all together, but you don't really need to do that because we've all agreed that these are all the things that we think are really important about this concept, and so that is our operational definition. Now, when I used to do this with students in classrooms... Yeah. But I'm gonna define something like quality work or on-time performance or any of those kinds of things or tardiness or anything. I'm trying to get rid of problems, right?

0:20:52.0 AS: Right.

0:20:52.7 DL: And so I'm gonna do any of those kinds of things. At some point, I would stop and have everybody take that list and try to combine those things into a paragraph or a statement.

0:21:03.3 AS: Okay.

0:21:04.8 DL: And have great fun doing that, where everybody's creativity and taking that list of items and turning it into some kinda paragraph that incorporates it. And students are amazing at this stuff. They come up with the most interesting concepts and ways of phrasing things that you could put a group of adults in a room for a year and they'd never come up with something so interesting. So, usually, at that point, I just have people go around and read what they wrote, and maybe we'll take certain phrases, and we could. We could turn it into a paragraph or something that was... Combining all that. But we're using that as a learning experience about how to take concepts and create definitions and paragraphs out of it.

0:21:50.6 AS: So let me try to summarize what we talked about. First, you highlighted the idea of like, wait a minute, what system are we trying to improve? We need to understand that first. And then to optimize that particular system, we need some common definitions. Now, when we started the conversation, I thought we were gonna end up with some really narrow, tight definition. I kinda was interested about where you ended. But before we get to where you ended with this, you talked about doing what you call P³T, or one of your students called it. I think you said paper passing purpose tool.

0:22:24.8 DL: Yeah. P to the third power.

0:22:26.1 AS: Yes. P to the third power T. And basically what you said is, "Don't let that start off as a discussion, because maybe one person could dominate that or try to influence what other people think about it." Rather, get each person to write down their definition of, for instance, we used the idea of what is quality work. And that's a pretty vague thing, so that's a good one for people to write down what are their opinions on it. And that way, they're not tainted by the influence of others. Once they've written it down, then pass it to their right, and let the person on your right underline the items on there that they agree with, and then pass that around. And by the time it comes back to you, you'll find that some of the things that you highlighted are agreed with, and some may not be. Then you basically take that and you go up on the board and say, "Alright, let's start with you." Start with one person and say, "What's one thing on your card that you've written down," and you wrote that down, and then you go to the next person, say, "What's one new thing on there that was not... That's not that?"

0:23:26.3 DL: Something different. That's different.

0:23:28.8 AS: Something that's different. And then you come up with a little bit of a laundry list. It could be five, it could be 10, it could be 12 of different things from that particular group of people. And then you can take it out to a bigger group where you have a series of groups that are doing the same thing. You then go around, you may add some things onto it. And then where I thought it was interesting where you ended with this, David, you said... You were kinda like, "Sometimes you don't have to go further than that right now. Just that is valuable process." And I thought, yeah, that's interesting, because just doing that, you can say we never have to do... 'Cause remember, before I was talking about discovery, and you were like, "I don't know what discovery is. I don't know what you mean." Well, you just described a pretty good process of discovery of what everybody thinks. Now, we don't ever go through that again. Do we have to tightly define that beyond that right now? Maybe not. Maybe we revisit it six months from now and tighten it up.

0:24:24.1 DL: It depends. So let's put this into practice. This is gonna be our definition of quality work. And so now we're gonna put it into practice, and then maybe later on, we can come back and re-look at the list. I've found that when you just have things in a list like that, people are more apt to wanna change it later on than if you have this flowery, nice paragraph that somebody's really worked on everything, and then people are like, I don't really wanna do that. But a lot of times, later on, after it's in practice, people come back and say, "Oh, we said this, but really, that's not really even relevant anymore." We can actually cross that thing off the list. That's not the most important thing. Or you were asking about prioritization. You could do a follow-on, you could do an NGT prioritization, nominal group technique, or you could do... Use just sticky dots to prioritize. Or if you need to. If you need to. But sometimes, most of the learning is in the process. So since every single person was a part of the process, every single person at the end of the process knows the definition of something, because they were a part of it.

0:25:35.9 AS: Yeah, yeah. Well, for the listeners and the viewers out there, what a great step-by-step guide that we can all try to put into practice. But most importantly, it kinda took the intimidation of operational definitions, it took some of that away from me that we're not... It doesn't have to be some... We've worked for hours crafting this statement. No. Here's a list of what we think is important. And that's good enough for a first step. And that, ultimately, is what we're talking about in this particular...

0:26:09.1 DL: And it's fun. It's fun. [chuckle]

0:26:11.8 AS: Yeah. And it's inclusive. It's inclusive. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for the discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Operational definitions are clearly defined words, phrases, and concepts that everyone working together agrees to use in the same way. Making assumptions about words like "tardy" or "good" is a fast track to confusion and disengagement. In part 12 of our Deming in Education series, Andrew and David talk about operational definitions in education - for students, faculty, and administrators. 

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is operational definitions for life and learning. David, take it away.

0:00:30.5 David Langford: So, hello Andrew. And so today, I was thinking about the concept that Deming offered to the world could be very profound, and that's why he called it profound knowledge about looking through stuff and deep and it can see... Seem kind of overwhelming, but at the same time, some of the best concepts or ways to think about things are really pretty simple, actually, and amazing, if you adopt just a few principles consistently and really get it in your psychic about how to operate, it can make life so much easier either for your own children or if you're a teacher in school or administrator or whatever, you might be in education... So one of those concepts is the idea of operational definitions. So one of the elements of profound knowledge is systems thinking or appreciation for a system, and so you have a system whether that be a classroom or maybe you're taking your own children on a summer vacation or whatever it might be, that in itself is a system as well. And a lot of the dysfunction that we deal with, especially in schools, actually is coming from the system itself. In fact, Deming talked about that 94% to 98% of the problem can be systemic, right? And the other 1% or 2% is probably special cause variation.

0:02:21.0 DL: So how do we go about making the common cause variation the norm? [chuckle] Now, in schools, what I was taught as a teacher was how to manage dysfunction. Nobody ever taught me how to prevent dysfunction, I sort of had to figure that out over time, that's where you get experience, and... But how do you actually prevent dysfunction, behavior dysfunction, learning dysfunction... Whatever it might be that you've got going on? Well, one of the simplest ways is to take a look at what you could do with operational definitions, so what do we mean by that? Operational definitions, basically just defining, how are we going to operate? So I'll never forget when I was... I think it was about fourth grade, I'd come in early from lunch and I remember I was sitting on the heat register on the side and the bell rang, and I jumped up and ran to my seat, and just as the teacher came in, seeing me run to my seat, and she pulled me out and I got into really super big trouble over that, et cetera, that because I was running in the classroom, okay. So there is a place where you could start to think about operationally defining about where do you want people to be when the bell rings? Something so simple as that, or if you have people late to school in the morning, well, what does that mean? What do you want them to do? Where do you want to be? How can you operationally define it? In the operation of what's going on, how are we gonna define that?

0:04:17.9 DL: I remember when I first started down this pathway and started thinking about things, I asked about 20 different teachers, I said, "What does on time mean to you? Just pick a card and write that down." Well, we got 20 definitions, and some of them were really good, really excellent and well thought out, and I want people in the room, in their seat with their writing utensils and whatever it might be, but when you start thinking about it in a school with a staff of 20... And if you're a student in that school and you're encountering these 20 different individuals with 20 different operational definitions of being on time, that's likely to cause variation in the system, right? And even from, say, one classroom, and you move to the classroom across the hall, if you could eliminate some of that variation, you're gonna eliminate some of the dysfunction. You know, what do we really want? But it starts to get into... Deming talked about... One of the elements of profound knowledge was understanding psychology.

0:04:38.4 DL: Well, it's the very same thing in the school, so if I'm gonna work together with all the other teachers in the school to come up with a common definition of what is on-time performance, or what does that look like, I may have to give up on some of my pet peeves about what I want, right? So that we end up with a very common definition of what goes on, and why would I do that? Well, because if I do that, chances are I'm not gonna be spending my time dealing with a lot of dysfunction. We've got an operational definition of what this means, and it's the same thing with a paper that you might write or... I remember even in college, many different professors had different criteria for how a title page should be and how it should be spaced and what it should be like and how it should... And if they just as a university gotten together and said, "Hey, at this university, here's a very common way, it's very common in life. Everybody should have a title page which you're gonna hand in the paper and it's gonna look like this". And...

0:06:46.3 DL: You then... So as a student, you wouldn't have to go from professor to professor to professor and learn a different strategy every place you go. So it's that working together to create common definitions that creates function within a system. And why would we wanna do that? Well, as a teacher, I don't wanna deal with all the dysfunction. [chuckle] My job was, I wanted to teach business applications or computer technology, or I wanna teach music or... I don't wanna have to deal with all the stuff that happens on a daily basis. Well, one of the ways to do that is work together to create operational definitions for the good of everyone in the system.

0:07:34.3 AS: And one question I have about that is, is an... Sounds like half of the benefit of an operational definition is agreeing what are not our operational definitions for that particular thing. If you say that 20 people have their opinion, then you have a discussion about that, and everybody agrees that, Okay, we're not gonna do all of those. And, okay, our operational definition may not be the best, and we could change it later. That's actually... That's less important than the idea of constantly communicating different operational definitions, or that's a... Different definitions from people. Would you say that that's half the value of it?

0:08:18.9 DL: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But it takes this thinking, systems thinking for everybody in an organization, whether you're talking about a business or schools or whatever you might be thinking about, to have a common definition of what's happening. Even with my own children, we have five children, my wife and I thought we were so clever one year, it'd been snowing like crazy, and for months and months and months. And so we set up this whole trip to go to Disneyland. And we didn't tell anybody. We just got up one morning like, We're gonna go to school and... And we... My wife gave everybody a card and said, "We're leaving. We're getting out of here. Are you tired of the snow?" And everybody's like, Yeah, yeah, we're getting out. Well, where are we going? And it was a big surprise and... So I don't know. But, yeah, we got everybody there and we're going to all these places, Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland, and we're doing all this stuff and everything. And I noticed about the third night at dinner time, everybody's just kinda depressed. And my wife and I were really frustrated that, What are you... Why are you guys so depressed and everything else? Well, this is all great and everything, and it's fun and everything, and... But we just wanted to go to the beach. 'Cause we live in Montana and we don't have beaches, and they'd never seen the ocean, and...

0:09:45.2 DL: So if we'd just spent a little time operationally defining ahead of time, what do we wanna do in our trip and what would be the most fun thing to do, etcetera, we probably could have saved thousands of dollars of doing stuff that we thought people wanted to do, but instead...

0:10:01.6 AS: And, David, you and your wife would have been sitting in comfortable chairs in the sand...

0:10:07.0 DL: That's right.

0:10:07.1 AS: Relaxing, rather than...

0:10:09.3 DL: Chasing people around, so...

0:10:10.4 AS: Yeah. Another question I have is, say, Okay, what do you do with a situation, I'm thinking about, you're a leader of a school, and you come in, you go, We're gonna set operational definitions. And then you've got all these people like, Oh, that just sounds like engineering, it sounds like a business, and we gotta get all of this and everybody's gotta do the same thing and we gotta all... And you're definitely gonna get a lot of people that say, No, we need variety, and we need all this creativity and that type of thing. How do you draw that line between that tension there?

0:10:41.1 DL: Yeah, you're exactly right. We do wanna promote creativity and we do want to have things different. But I'd much rather have creativity in my history class and kids being very creative around history versus being creative around common practices within the school. And it's not like you can actually, like you said, you're... Let's say you're an administrator coming into a new school, that you can just sit down and just operationally define everything you wanna operationally define. Doesn't really work like that. It's more of a living document or a living way to be, right?

0:11:16.6 AS: Yup.

0:11:19.1 DL: So as you start to see, when... It's often talked about with Deming's profound knowledge, it's like putting on a different pair of tinted glasses. You start to see the world and you start to see everything differently. Well, this is one of those things. As soon as you put on these... These glasses and start to think about operational definitions, you start to see all the kinds of places, dysfunctional places where operational definitions would be great. And basically, it means, How do we agree to operate? So one of the ways that you get rid of the resistance to operational definitions is getting people to agree to operate in a certain way. And on my consulting business, I've got several different tools and practices of ways to do that, how do you quickly get people to agree on something. But the bottom line is, when you're involving them in the process of setting an operational definition, they're much, much, much less likely to not wanna do it in the end, right?

0:12:29.2 AS: Right, right.

0:12:30.4 DL: That's much different than me just coming in as the administrator or whatever authority figure it might be, boss, teacher, administrator or whatever, and I just start telling people, This is the way it's gonna be. Well, if you start doing that, you're gonna have resistance.

0:12:47.5 AS: Yeah. Yup. So then I'm...

0:12:49.2 DL: And then you go to spending all your time dealing with the resistance.

0:12:51.1 AS: And I'm... I guess what I'm taking away from what you're saying is that maybe if that administrator was coming in and he's facing all kinds of problems, whether it's tardiness or whatever, that maybe he works with his team to say, Let's identify our top five problems that are causing us the most variation in our outcome, and let's get some definitions around these things, we don't need to define everything that's happening, but these are things that if we can work on these they can improve our outcomes, and that to me sounds like he'd win a lot of or she would win a lot of support because people are struggling dealing with all these things all the time, like well, Mr. Jensen says that five minutes late is not late. You said it's late, and I don't care whatever, I don't wanna deal with that.

0:13:40.0 DL: And then you got a battle and then you're just dealing with their resistance instead of dealing with the system itself and things that are in vogue now, like standards-based learning. Well, I've talked to different schools, nobody can define it clearly. Nobody can even define it within a district, they all agree that they would like to go forward with that, but there's a good example, if you wanna introduce something or move forward with something and get people on board or committed to doing stuff, hey, let's start operationally defining what is standards-based learning or standards-based grading, and how can we get some clarity around these common terms about what we have. It's also something for the future. So you got a new employee, you've got new teachers coming in, whatever, hey, I'm gonna hand them this document that defines... Okay, we're doing standards-based grading here. Now, it may not be the same exact definition of what you thought about where you came from before, but here's how we think about it, and you could bring new knowledge and creativity to this to help us refine our definitions of what are all these things under this one concept. And so to me, that's how you get continual improvement. It's not...

0:15:08.8 AS: I guess that is a type of training to say, Okay, we've found that these... Once we understand these things, that if you can understand these things, now you're gonna be able to bring a consistency to the students that is gonna be valuable. One last question for me on this is that, let's just say that the kernel, the core of learning is that interaction between the child and the book and the teacher, and the process of going through this discovery, which I'm wondering, when we look at operational definitions, again, someone may say, you're just trying to put rules about all of this stuff, or are you saying that there's a lot of outside things that we've got to resolve so that we can have more time for this real quality learning experience, or are you saying that we even wanna have operational definitions within how we're doing all that learning?

0:16:06.6 DL: Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the term discovery, I have no idea what you're talking about. [chuckle] What are you gonna tell a third grader? Well, we want you to do discovery. What the heck is that? What is discovery and what's the process of discovery that you want them to go through? Well, when you go to the library and randomly grab three books, spend a little time thumbing through them, there's a process to discovery. You don't just leave it up to the randomness of people that already know how to do that, right? Your job is to optimize a system, so you want everybody to be able to do discovery-type kinds of things, and when somebody comes up with a new innovative way that they do discovery, say in science or something, okay, let's hear that and let's try that, let's do maybe a miniature PDSA and let's have everybody try it and see what we learn from that and see if this is a better process for the process of discovery. And there you go.

0:17:16.0 AS: So then for the listeners and viewers out there, there you go, David called me out right there. I'm coming out with vague statements without providing operational definitions, and there is the benefit of it. And I was just thinking about what does discovery mean to me? I think it means something different from what it means to others. As a financial analyst, the way I did discovery is I find the strongest opponent to this idea and the strongest supporter to this idea, and I try to get them on the phone.

0:17:45.6 DL: But there's a process right there, that's a process of discovery.

0:17:48.9 AS: Yeah.

0:17:50.4 DL: And it's not like you have to be locked into a definition, you could have five or six different processes of discovery that you want people to choose from, or if you've got your own, let's define what that is. Right?

0:18:11.4 AS: Yeah.

0:18:11.9 DL: But as soon as you start to do that, you start to get clarity and then you start to see, Well, if it doesn't work, but we defined it well, let's go back and re-look at our definition and redefine it. And you could define things just in a paragraph, in words, in sentences, but you can also define things with flow charts, process charts, ways to look at things, those are also operational definitions.

0:18:39.8 AS: So this brings me to... I think my closing thought on it is, it brings me to the idea of PDSA, it brings me to the idea of how do we gain knowledge in our company or in our school, let's say, and how do we make sure that we don't lose knowledge, like we're constantly losing... We understood that before, but nobody uses the manual anymore, and those people left, and now we're back to...

0:19:08.1 AS: Going back to the same process and what I... The breakthrough I had when I really started to understand what Deming was talking about, was that if you're constantly going back and looking, Okay, what is discovery? Okay, we've just taught it... This definition, we've just taught it for a year, what did we learn, how can we improve it? Oh, there's three different ways that we now see and then how do we learn and how do we continue to modify that definition until it's a clear definition in our organization and what that does in a business is it builds a competitive strength that your competitor doesn't have because they haven't been rethinking and improving their knowledge and sustaining that knowledge and bringing it up to another level, and that is the concept of competitive advantage in the business world that I just think is such a breakthrough, and I would say that Toyota is probably the one that really built so much into their "just in time" and their Lean and all of that type of stuff, and that they built a whole system of brilliant knowledge within it. How would you relate that back to the classroom and school and organization?

0:20:12.2 DL: Well, it's... You're basically doing the same thing in a classroom, if you're a teacher in a school, you're getting a competitive edge, just so to speak, not that you're competing against anybody else really, but you're optimizing things in a way. I just remember after a few years, I'd have teachers come in to visit my classroom to see what was going on and they couldn't understand what was happening because they'd say, Well, you're just not dealing with stuff that I deal with every day. And a lot of that came from working with the kids when they came in and we'd set operational definitions about when do you need to be in your seat? There's times that, yeah, you need to be in your seat and there's times that, no, that's really stupid, you know what, I don't want you in your seat and so let's get some clarity right at the very beginning of the school year so that we're not dealing with that all the way... All the way through the school year.

0:21:15.0 AS: Right, so let me try to wrap this up, we talked about a lot of stuff, but ultimately our topic was operational definitions for life and learning, we talked about how operational definitions can make your life easier. We also talked about the idea of understanding systems and systems thinking, and that a lot of dysfunction is coming from the system and operational definitions can help you try to actually prevent that dysfunction or eliminate it because now those things are clear. And also, what I heard from you too, is the idea that different definitions, if you allow many different definitions to go on, you are adding variation to your system, and therefore you're bringing trouble for yourself, and then also we got into this discussion about what is discovery and what is the process of discovery? And then we came up with the operational definitions that we could have two or three of them, but ultimately that we discuss it, we work on it, and then if we can build it into our organization, then it's something that we're building step-by-step, competency in what we do. Is there anything else you would add to that?

0:22:32.6 DL: Yeah, in one of the podcasts we did, we spent a lot of time on optimization, and this is around that concept, how do you optimize a class for peak performance, meaning you're getting the highest number of students to the highest level possible within the shortest amount of time, you're optimizing what's going on within that. Well, one of the ways you do that is setting operational definitions, working together with people to set those definitions. I guarantee you, you will see performance go up as a whole, which is your job.

0:23:08.2 AS: Fantastic. Well, that was a great episode with a lot of stuff. David, on behalf of everybody at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for the listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners, you can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com and this is your host Andrew Stotz and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, are you ready? "People are entitled to joy in work."

Dr. Deming listed 7 Deadly Diseases of Management in Out of the Crisis, and one of the more surprising is #3: Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review. In this episode, David and Andrew discuss the harmful practice of awarding "teacher of the year," "student of the month," or other traditional recognition practices. David also offers practical suggestions for alternatives.

TRANSCRIPT

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's topic is the deadly disease of having an employee of the month. David, take it away.

Langford: Yeah, this is actually one of my favorite topics. So I thought it'd be fun for us to talk about it today. So…

Stotz: You just may win employee of the month by, coming up with this. Huh?

Langford: There you go. So right away, if you don't understand any teachings about Dr. Deming or background or things like that, you might be saying what do you mean? And maybe, maybe you were employee of the month one month or teacher of the year or student of the month or whatever we wanna think about in terms of singling people out. So what's wrong with that? And how could that be a deadly disease? Well, in one of the previous podcasts, we were talking about special and common cause variation. And we kind of went through that and talked a little bit about what Deming called deadly diseases. And he just said that there's two deadly diseases; treating special cause variation as if it's common, and treating common cause variation as if it's special.

Langford: So why is having employee of the month a deadly disease? Because it falls into category number two, you're taking common cause variation in the system and treating it as if it's special. And it happens everywhere. It happens in the military, it happens in schools and we've been sold a bill of goods years ago in management. And it's become pervasive in the way people think about what to do. So a manager doesn't know what to, what to do to motivate their people. And they think their job is to motivate people. So they say, wow, we'll have a teacher of the year or we'll have employee of the month or employee of the week. And that ought, that ought to have fixed things, right? Stotz: Student of the week, student of the month.

Langford: Student of the week, make people happier. So I'll never forget, when my, one of my daughters was in third grade and she came home and she had a certificate as a student of the month. And, I looked at it and cuz she brought it up to me and showed it and she was somewhat proud, proud of it. And I looked at it and then I did, I was thinking, how do I handle this? Because I know the problems that psychologically these things can cause and bullying and all kinds of things that can result from it. And so I looked at the certificate and I looked at her and I said, well, honey, tell me this. So what did you do this month? That was especially great, that sort of singled you out overall the rest of the losers in the class. So and she looked at me and she looked at the certificate, she did that a couple times and then she got this big grin on her face. And then she looked up at me and she said, dad, you know it was my turn.

Stotz: We have 360 students, 365 students in the class and they give it every day. So we all get it at some point, Dad.

Langford: Yeah. So, yeah. So in third grade she saw through this, she knew it's, this is just this silly game, dreamed up by the people who are running the place. and even as a student is, is if you figure out that this is, this is nuts, can you do anything about it? Well, not without becoming insubordinate or sent to the principal's office or… right?

There's obviously something wrong with you if you've pointed out a problem with the system about, how they're managing everybody in the system. Instead, we should be saying, 'Hey, well, tell me more about that. Why, you know what, what's the problem with that?' And student a month, can you be student of the month, nine months in a row?

Stotz: Yeah, that was what I was gonna say. Cuz you could also have an abuse, one abuse of it is just to kind of randomly go through students. Another abuse is constantly giving it to one person.

Langford: Yeah. I always ask people that don't believe that they're doing anything wrong or damaging to children with these kinds of things that they'll say, oh, well, you know I can judge or I can, pick out who's who's best or whatever. Well again, can you be student of the month nine months in a row? And I've done this for 40 years now and I've never had a teacher say, 'well yes,' but statistically the answer is yes if you have a student that actually is exceptional and deserving of being pointed out to other people as, as the top student, well, they probably just don't do that one month out of nine. Right? They're probably working like that or being like that all the time. And you're not actually helping them sort of cope with the situation when you're singling them out above everybody else and then pointing to them as the model.

Stotz: So, and if we go back to the basics and we think about that goodhearted teacher or administrator who's thought, 'Hey, I wanna bring recognition. I want to, I want people to feel better about, things and so Hey, employee of a month, what a great idea.' They're coming from a good intention, but you know… Tell us more about that.

Langford: Dr. Deming said we are being killed by good intentions. And, that's exactly right. And he often talked about too, sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. If you, if you don't really understand what it is you're doing and the effects of it, and maybe you're just doing what was done to you, passed down from one generation to the next, etcetera, etcetera, and you don't really understand what it is you're doing, you'd be much better off just to do nothing. Do none of those things. It's always fascinating to me, schools that have a lot of bullying also have a lot, lot of this singling people out and pointing them out as either on the top end or the low end of the system, etcetera. And then what happens after school? Well, I'll show you student of the month. It kind of reminds me of that bumper sticker.

Langford: There's bumper stickers that say my, my student was student of the month at such and such elementary, etcetera. And then there's the bumper stickers that say my student beat up the student of the month or beat up your student. I've seen those where people are, they're proud of of that, or they think it's funny or whatever it might be. This is tampering, with society and with the systems and management and people's feelings and all kinds of things. And it has long lasting effects that we have no idea what we've done to students 60, 70 years later.

My own mother who died at 86, she often would tell a story about, that she really loved to draw and etcetera, etcetera. And then she got into an elementary classroom and they were in an art class and they were supposed to draw something.

Langford: And, teacher chose only the best drawings to put on the wall. And these, these are the best drawings. From that point on, she decided she couldn't draw. And for the next 80 years, she would not ever even attempt a stick figure or anything because of that one small instance where we, when to hold somebody up and say here, why can't you be like this person? And it's very damaging. So what, what to do instead, right? Yeah. What are we doing instead? So let's say that you're in a classroom and you do have somebody doing some something exemplary, whether that's writing a paper, making a drawing, performing on a musical instrument or whatever it might be. And, instead of pointing them out and giving them some kind of an award or student of the month award or whatever it might, one thing that you could do is honor them by allowing them to share what it is they've done.

Langford: I got this idea actually from Dr. Deming, but Hey, here's something really exemplary. And the way I would approach it is I would come back to that student and say, I really like what you've done here. This is, this is really amazing. Would you be willing to share with everybody else in the class, how you did this? How did you work this through? Now, that's much different than me coming in and saying, oh, this is the student of the week. And I'm so I'm so proud of Johnny and da, da, da, da, and all the rest of the students in the class look at that and say, well, obviously he's brown nosing the teacher and or they come up with some kind of a reason about why you're doing that.

Totally different if I say, Hey, in this last project, there were several really interesting projects and I've asked a couple people if they'd share what they did and how they did it and how they worked that through. And they've agreed to share that. And so maybe they read their short story or whatever, but then we're gonna ask them, well, how did you do that? How did you think that through and how did you create the plot and what did you do to do that? Well, when you're honoring somebody in that way, the rest of the people in the class are sitting there listening to that, and they're thinking, 'oh, oh, that's how they did that.' Right? It's not just saying, oh, you're, you're just, you're just an innate great person. Right? You actually did something that enabled you to do something great.

Langford: And so other people in the class could start to say, 'oh, I could do that.' And it's an amazing thing. Like in elementary schools, something so simple as a student says, well, the way I did this is I found a place at home that was quiet and I made sure I went there every day and worked on this paper in that quiet place.

Well, we could now take that special cause, right? And we could transfer that common cause. And we got a discussion in a class, Hey, everybody in the class, think of some quiet place that you could work, or you could do something. I remember one elementary school, there was one, one child that consistently kept doing really well. And they said, well, how do you do this? And he said, well, I got a desk at home. And it was a very, very poor school. And, kids were coming from very, very poor families, etcetera. And teacher found out that almost only one child out of 30 had actually had a desk of their own at school. So she started asking the students, what can we do about this? And students came up with, I thought was an ingenious idea. And they got old cardboard boxes and they all created their own desks.

Langford: And that became a class project. And everybody took their own desk home and was information that goes home to the parents that says, Hey, it's really great. If your child spends some time at their desk each night when they're doing their homework or getting caught up on things or what they're working through. So special causes are not always bad. Sometimes they can teach us things that can be applied to the entire system that can make a big difference.

Stotz: And, so what I wanna understand now, let's just imagine that, okay, we start to kind of celebrate something about a student. I have a student of mine in my ethics class that I teach and that guy did a picture of the whole class on one big piece of paper and he laminated and he gave it to me. And it's just amazing. Now it's not the way I think, cuz I think more linearly, but he really liked pictures. But for the people in the class and others that I've shown it to, it really helped them kind of pull it all together. So that was, sharing, trying to get him to share, what he's doing.

Langford: But it's not just what, what he did it has to be how he did it. Right? That's what you have to get them to share. Otherwise it comes off as an award. I'm awarding this person because I'm gonna, I'm gonna get, have them come up and share that they did this great thing. Well, the thing is great and I'm sure everybody in the class could see, wow, that's, that's really awesome. But if you want to transfer that to other people doing great stuff, they have to have kind of some insight about 'how did you do that?' And would you be able, willing to sort of teach side class on how to do this for other people that might wanna do this?

Langford: I think that's, that's a fantastic honor. You're still honoring that individual and rewarding them in a way. If you wanna think of it that way, because think what you've done, you've taken the class time of everybody to allow this one individual to share something. Well, that's a great honor. It's a huge honor within that. But as a teacher, you want a large number of the other students to start to be able to do these kinds of things, right? You'd like to see the same level of development, same level of capability, with a lot of other people. So you have to think about, well, how are we gonna get there? Well, one way to get there is to have these students explain it.

Stotz: And you can imagine an employee of the month. I know how it goes. in companies that people are like, 'oh my God, tomorrow's the deadline for employee of the month? Who should we do?'

Langford: 'We gotta, we gotta cram for employee the month.'

Stotz: Yeah so the point is, is that, a lot of times just like performance reviews, it's just some mad rush at the end. Is what you're saying that instead of doing an employee of the month type of reward, that what we should be doing is incorporating that in our daily life, instead of saying, incorporating, seeing things that are happening that are valuable for the whole group and bringing that to light on a regular basis, rather than setting on every month, we're gonna do this or something like that. How would you describe it from that perspective?

Langford: Yeah. I thought of another example. I remember one time my flights were all messed up and connections were bad and I was supposed to start a seminar at, for the military the next morning and I was actually staying on the base hotel and so I got in really late. It was like one o'clock in the morning or one thirty and then I had to get up and I was tired and exhausted anyway. So I go to check in and this person that's checking me in is, they're doing a really great job and, talking to me and everything else. And then I happen to look up on the wall as employee of the month. And I can't stand it, I have to say something. I said, 'wow, I didn't, I didn't realize I was talking to employee of the month.' And she got all embarrassed and everything. And I said, so what did you do this month? That was so awesome. And she said again, she said, 'it was my turn.'

Langford: So if you think about it, all the money spent making the picture, giving the honor. They probably had some kind of award ceremony where they had brought all the employees in and you, you had to be there. And then she gets announced as employee of the month, and are you happy for the employee of the month? But immediately psychologically. And that's what Deming talked about with profound knowledge is psychologically, you start to think about, well, I worked hard this month, and the person next to me, I know was working really hard this month. Why, why didn't they get employee the month? And so then your mind immediately starts to wonder, oh, well it's gotta be some kind of game or there's something going on. Or the manager just likes her that there's some kind of sexual thing happening or all kinds of crazy stuff can happen.

Langford: But if you took the exact same thing where you said we have an employee and things were crazy one night and this person handled it with grace and ease and organized things and everything. And I'd like so and so to explain to us, how did you do that? How do you cope with that? How did you sort of hamper down the angst that was coming your way and how did you deal with that? And what did you think of, and you could actually learn something from somebody who's done something really exemplary.

Stotz: You could imagine that person saying, well, what I did is I stepped from out being, I stepped from behind the counter and I went to the person that was most vocal. And I talked to them about where are you going? 'Yeah, it's a birthday I'm trying to get there. I'm so frustrated. I've been delayed' and other, okay. I tried to listen to them and try to, then, if I could convince that person to just hang on or whatever, and that type of thing is the type of thing that we could learn from it. So maybe I can summarize what, what I'm taking away from it. The first thing you talked about was the idea of treating a common cause as a special cause the employee of the month, when in fact, it's just a rotation in that case really.

Stotz: You also talked about the idea that, be careful because signaling… Singling out one person can lead to bullying. If you put someone on a pedestal, someone's gonna say 'I'm gonna knock 'em down.' So that's also kind of an unintended consequences of that. And then you also highlighted, this one I thought was interesting was the impact on non recipients, how do people feel? And that didn't get it. And, now you also talked about the idea of maybe an alternative is letting someone share, you see something impressive, interesting, different, let them share. And in particular you said, have them share how they did it, not what they did, but how they did it so that people can learn. Because yeah, if, if a guy started sharing how he did this drawing and stuff, it may not mean that much to me cuz I'm more linear.

Stotz: But if he talked about it, you know what, instead of talking about what he did, if he talked about, well, I thought, how do I make these connections between this? And I did it through this, but you could do it through that. And then you also talked about honoring and rewarding, and trying to give people a chance to share. And then the last thing I thought about what you said is of an employee saying, 'but wait a minute, I worked hard this month too.' is this just favoritism? Is this just a game? Is this just a random thing? Those are…

Langford: Maybe I should only work hard when the manager's watching.

Stotz: Exactly. exactly- how do I game this thing? All right. Well, anything you would add?

Langford: Yeah, just, you made me think of a, another quick story, but in one of my seminars with teachers, we're going over this very concept and I was trying to get them to think about ways that they could operate differently to optimize their whole class or the school, etcetera. Anyway, at the break, a teacher came up to me and he said, oh my gosh. He said, this happened to me. I said, what do you mean? He said, ah, he said, well, I got outta college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I ended up getting a job at, selling insurance at this insurance company and everything. Well, they had all these extrinsic rewards and he said at, at first it was, just really great, sell so many policies and you could win a trip to Aruba and you, you can do this. And then they're always having to dream up, dream up a new, a new cuz you have to keep upping the ante if you want to keep seeing people sort of jump through the hoops to get there. He said after about five years of that, he said I was so sick of playing that game and being manipulated. And he said, and basically I had won everything that they could come up with.

Langford: And I just got to thinking about what's the, what's the, what do I really enjoy? And what's the really purpose of being here. And he said, I quit and got my teaching degree. Now I'm a teacher and I make half as much money or less than I did before. And he said, but I'm happy. This is a rewarding profession of what I'm doing. And I don't wanna see this same kind of manipulation coming into the system. He said that I'm kingly aware of this with my own students. And 'is the administration trying to bring this kind of thinking in to manipulate me' cause he's been through it.

Stotz: Yep. So to wrap it up, I think I'm just gonna challenge the listeners, the viewers, if you've got employee of the month, if you've got student of the month, if you've got teacher of the month going on, this is permission to start questioning it, start discussing it, start thinking about alternatives because there are many, many challenges that David's raised today. So David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. I think it was very interesting for listeners.

Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, David, what's the best way that people can contact you if they wanna learn more,

Langford: Probably the best way and the quickest way is just to go to our website, which is at langfordlearning.com

Stotz: Great. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I wanna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work. 

In this episode, David and Andrew talk about Common Cause Variation vs Special Cause Variation, and the problem of confusing the two. Using the example of transgender students, David describes how a system's capability should be expanded rather than using that special cause situation as a weapon to destroy the entire system. 

TRANSCRIPT

Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is weaponizing special causes. David take it away.

Langford: It sounds very dangerous, and it is. So I wanted to get into a little bit about special and common causes about what Deming talked about. So once again, we'll go back to Deming's system of profound knowledge. And as part of that he talked a lot about understanding variation in systems and without getting too statistical about things, he basically got people to identify two different types of variation. So there's common cause variation, which typically makes up anywhere from oh 94% to 98, 99% of what goes on in any system or any process. And then there's special cause variation, which is generally less than 2% or less than 1% of what goes on. So that sounds pretty innocuous until you actually start thinking about how that works out in society and systems and classrooms, especially in education in schools and Deming said over and over and over that there are basically two problems with special and common cause. So people treat special cause as if it's common, okay. Which is, and he called these deadly diseases, or they treat common cause variation as if it's special.

Langford: So sometimes it's difficult to sort of understand what is, what does that mean? So let's take an example like in a, in a school common cause variation would be say the, the performance of a whole school or a state or a nation or whatever it might be. You can chart that out over a long period of time and start to see a certain level of predictability of performance on anything you wanna look at, whether you're talking about behavior or you're talking about test scores or grades or kids showing up for school every day. Doesn't really matter what system you wanna look at. When you start looking at it from a systems perspective, you wanna look at as much data as you can.So at least six or seven data points, but preferably 12 and some, a lot of statisticians will say up to 20 data points.

Langford: So if you're just looking at, say test scores over a long period of time, well, you'd wanna actually look at average test scores over a 20 year period. So that, that could take a really long time to see data systems like that emerge, especially in education where we have what I call slow data that emerges. You're familiar with like manufacturing environments and business, where you have a lot of fast data. So you may be making something and you're collecting a hundred thousand data points in a single day or a month or a week where in education, it, it really doesn't really work like that.

Stotz: I have an example that may be helpful for those people that aren't familiar with the topic. And that is in my coffee factory, we fill bags of coffee with, let's say a hundred grams of coffee. If we fill it with 101, well, we're giving away. If we fill it with 99, we're not delivering what we say. And what first lesson that we learned is that nobody's perfect. No, there is no way to consistently hit 100 is always gonna be some variation. Now that variation may be 100.0 1, 4 7, but ultimately variation around that is bad. And what you find is that maybe when the system is not that strong, you could be putting in 95 grams on sometimes and you could be putting in 105 on sometimes and something in between those. But those are all kind of common causes.

Stotz: There's just there's variation about that average, let's say. And then the only way to improve that would to be say, 'oh, well, we need to have a more precise piece of equipment.' It's not that the workers weren't working hard enough or something, but we just didn't have, so we replace a piece of equipment that's measuring and all of a sudden we weigh more consistently the old clunky one didn't work that well, and now we're getting more and more narrow. And then one day the electricity goes off or we have a, a problem with the electricity and all of a sudden it's throwing the whole system off. Well, that would be some special cause as opposed to this common variation around the 100 that we're aiming for, would I be describing it? Right or how would you add to that?

Langford: Yeah, that, that that's exactly right. And so if we charted out filling your coffee bean bags over a long period of time, we'd probably find out that you'r, you probably have a really good system, right? So let's put it in terms of like grams or something. So you might find out that your variation is anywhere from 98 grams to 101 or a hundred, two grams. Right. And this also ties in with the last podcast we did about loss function. Because if you say, well, we're selling hundred gram bags, well, the further we move away from optimization or the optimum of a hundred grams, like what you were saying, if we're filling it too much, we're losing money. And if you're filling it too little, well, there might be a customer out there that feels cheated and might not ever buy your coffee ever again, because they, they weighed it and said, oh, this is only 99 grams.

Langford: Right? So there, and if you, the further that you would go away from that optimum 100 grams, and let's say that all of a sudden, you sent out a coffee bag that only had 90 grams in it. Now somebody could get really upset, right? Because that's a long way from the optimum of a, of a hundred grams or the opposite, right? If, if you're all of a sudden, randomly filling bags at 111 grams, well, now you take that 11 grams times the price of coffee beans. And like you said, you're losing a lot of money a lot of time.

Stotz: So it's one, one thing I would add to it is that now imagine that we're measuring it very well, and we're getting a little variation. We're getting 101 sometimes. And 99, occasionally we get 102, occasionally we get 98, but it's in a relatively tight range. Now imagine that I start rewarding the employees when it goes, you know to a certain level and I start to identify if you hit this, that you're gonna get a bonus, I'm gonna dock your pay. Well, I would just be messing around with what are really just common causes of variation that have nothing to do with the employees. They have to do what that system can do.

Langford: That's what Deming called tampering. You're tampering with the system and you're, and you're making false assumptions, cuz you're assuming that, oh, by holding somebody up as employee of the month that'll make everybody else work harder. So your assumption is that everybody else is not working harder. And the only way to get 'em to work harder is for me to manipulate 'em in some way. And Deming said that you you're now tampering with the system. You're making things worse, not better because pretty soon you have employees that say, well I'm not gonna do a really good job this month because you're offering that bonus you know, for most improved employee. Well, I can't be most improved if I'm always great, right? So one month I'm gonna look bad so I can look really good the next month.

Langford: So I can win that trip to Aruba, right? And now your coffee, the grams per sack are going down. And so everything's going haywire and everything else. And then, then you wanna blame the people in the system and not understanding that as management, you did this. You caused this to happen. And it's exactly the same way in a school classroom for education. If you start tampering with learning systems in the classroom. So most of the variation or performance of a system is built into the system. And that's what Deming talked about. Statistically like in 98, 98% of the result is coming from the system itself.

Stotz: Right. So don't like the results? Don't blame the people, blame the system. So are, are there people problems and systems that are special causes? Absolutely. And what do you do when that happens?

Langford: So like in your example, with your coffee company once in a while, maybe you just, you hire someone that hates coffee, really shouldn't be there, they're there for the wrong reasons. They don't really love what's going on, you know? So what do you do? Well, instead of like changing the whole system based on that special cause person, right? Now, everybody has to do something different because we have this one person who's got defective behavior, so to speak, you just, you deal with the one person. Maybe they're just in the wrong job. I mean, they, they should be answering the phone in the company, not actually dealing with products or, or vice versa. Maybe they just can't deal with people. So maybe they should be in a position. So you're gonna make an adjustment. You're gonna shift that one person. And ultimately, maybe they're just in the wrong profession and maybe you need to help them find another job.

Stotz: And I just, I just wanna go back because it's such a common thing that people talk about about what Deming says about the output of the system is coming from a certain amount and the output the impact that a worker has for instance. And one of the sources of that is looking at the standard deviations. From the average, if you look at one standard deviation plus and minus you come up with 68% are within that range. If you go two standard deviations, now you're at 95%. And I believe it was that two standard deviation where he's saying, look, if something's happening within these two standard deviation, it's just common cause variation. No. He was actually talking about three standard deviations.

Stotz: Yeah. So three standard deviations would be what? 99.7%

Langford: Yeah. St yeah. Statistically it's like 99.9999998%. Right. Of something. And you know, why three standard deviations away from the, the mean, or the average? Well, because when you get to that point, if something is falling in that less than 1%, you could be pretty sure that's, that's, that's a special cause. Right? This doesn't normally happen in our, in our system. Well, the same thing in a classroom, if, if a teacher's teaching a lesson and every year when they, he or she teaches this lesson, everybody in the class scores, like, let's say 95 to a hundred. Right, right. And every year I get better and better. And my variations shrinks. And pretty soon I've got, now I'm getting an average about 98 percentile of people when they go through this lesson, right? Well, that's telling you that most of the variation is good within that system. So when people are randomly thrown into that classroom, that teacher is so good they can get that same result with almost anybody thrown it into that classroom.

Stotz: And then now.

Langford: What happens, that system is like that it becomes predictable. Now I can predict that next year. I'm probably gonna get an average somewhere between 95 and a hundred percent, if I keep doing what I've been doing.

Stotz: And what happens to that teacher when they see, oh, wait a minute, we've got this one kid who's getting a 62.

Langford: Then obviously, because you understand systems performance and you understand a little bit about special and common cause data, obviously this is a special cause there's okay. So it could be a learning difficulty. It, it could be home situation. It could be something psychological, it could be, could be a lot of things. Right. And so what do you do with a special cause? Well, typically like in the education system, we basically tried to get rid of 'em for years and we get, we would get rid of them in many different ways. Like, I'll, I'll just give them a failing grade and that that'll get rid of 'em eventually. I'll send 'em out in the hallway, isolate them. I'll, we'll send them to special education classes. We don't we don't wanna have a mainstream in the class because it's a special cause.

Langford: And it's gonna take special effort to do, to work with that special cause and work through that. So veteran teachers that are really super good at dealing with students with special causes are amazing. Just amazing how no matter what the difficulty is or what the special cause that child starts to feel like they're part of the system, part of what's going on. Now, they may never get the same data as 98% of the rest of the students that come through that system, but they can also get better and better and better with, within that same system. And you that's the exciting thing about education is to think about how special causes can be transformed.

Stotz: You remind me when I was in living in West Hartford, Connecticut, when I was just a little kid, I was all kinds of trouble in the classroom. And I was just, I just was all kinds of trouble. And they sent me to some special class to get some special help. And I ended up reentering the normal class and coming back kind of into a normal behavior, cuz they helped me kind of work on some of the things that were issues for me. And I ended up becoming a good student. But imagine...

Langford: You had, you had shock shock therapy or something.

Stotz: Yeah. They, they got me, they just a minor lobotomy this, but so now let's think about this cuz the, the title of today is weaponizing special causes. We've had a great discussion now about what are common, what are special? And I'm just imagining, like, let's just say that a teacher's doing really well, but they have this one student doing poorly and we know it's identified as a special cause. And then all of a sudden they decide, wow, I've gotta redo my whole way that I'm educating because of this particular unique situation. Would that be wise?

Langford: Well, it be insanity is what it would be. And we don't have to go very far, especially in the United States right now to see this happening. So there are transgendered children that that's, that's a fact, everybody knows this is happening, etcetera. But because I have one transgender child in my classroom or my school does not mean I changed the entire system based on a special cause. And now I'm disrupting 99.8% of all, all the students and parents and everybody else that comes through the system because I'm making this system twist to accommodate only a special cause. So and Deming said, this is one of the deadly diseases. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna change the whole bathroom structure into building. I'm gonna change the whole, how PE is run. I'm gonna, we're gonna change. We're gonna change everything because we have two children out of 1400 that may be transgender.

Langford: So I don't want to, I don't wanna offend anybody by this or anything else, but I just wanna point out that you can spend literally millions of not billions of dollars. go weaponizing special causes. And this is, this is just one example and PE uh districts are now building schools., where's, they're changing the bathrooms and getting rid of gender and all kinds of things based on only a few special causes. Whereas what should be happening is what do special causes needing these special, special help? So if they need a special bathroom, that's, that's fine. And there's a transition or gender bathroom for those two students out of 1400. Yeah. But just suddenly you start making rules, regulations policy I've seen district policy. That's just crazy based on maybe one instant instance every 10 years or so. And you're, you're changing an entire system based on that. is it that maybe gonna help that one individual? Yeah. But it's the same example as, as you gave, right? instead of changing the whole school because you were having difficulty in a classroom, what did we do? Well, we got you some help, right? Yeah. And basically you need discipline and people don't, people don't understand what discipline means. The first definition of discipline and the dictionary is training.

Langford: So you needed some training, right? This is what you do and this is what you can't do and in a classroom and everything else. And when you got that kind of training and it was better for you because you felt like you were belonging and you didn't have to be disruptive anymore. And it was better for everybody else because they could accept you. Right. They didn't, they weren't all of a sudden afraid that you were gonna fly out the handle or go crazy.

Stotz: Yeah. It's, it's interesting about the transgender stuff because in Thailand Thai people are just really accommodating to transgender. It's not a big deal. I mean, and in fact, the transgender people here are people who really speak up for kind of their rights. They're more outspoken. Whereas other people kind of go along more than let's say we're used to in the west. so they're there, it's just been fascinating to watch. And I think that the point is, and it's a little bit like handicap as an example we did decide to put in ramps to, to locations. And that was an adaptation to the system to accommodate the needs of that small group, but we didn't reshape a huge amount of things and other people in...

Langford: That. Well, what you're trying to do is well we see it now in medicating children with drugs and all kinds of stuff to help them learn better. And and in some cases, some schools and places you're, you're talking about 20, 25% of the population is now being medicated. Well, that's the, that's the opposite of what Deming talked about is treating special causes as if they're common that this is a common thing. So we're gonna do this with everybody. But these special causes are very, very rare, whether it's some kind of a mental thing or transgender thing or whatever it might be, you're talking about less than 1% of the population generally. And when you start to transfer a special cause to a whole population, that's what I'm talking about, about weapon weaponizing a special cause. And then ultimately you can do that with anything, but what you're really trying to do, and you comment about the, the handicap access, etcetera. What you're really trying to do is expand the capability of a system so that there are fewer and fewer and fewer special causes, not going the opposite direction, where the system becomes less and less and less and less capable. And so pretty soon everybody starts looking like a special cause.

Langford: And and that becomes hugely expensive and not very productive when you're treating everybody like their special cause.

Stotz: So let me try to summarize a little bit about what we've talked about. First of all, we talked about the importance of understanding variation. And we talked about the idea that 94 to 99% of variation is actually common cause, and only maybe one or 2% is special cause, and you, you mentioned about treating special causes as common was what Dr. Deming calls deadly diseases. You also talked about tampering, which is when you're chasing around common cause variation and either rewarding it or punishing it or highlighting it as success when in fact you really are having false assumptions. And the best way to think about that is that you walk into McDonald's and it's got a picture of the employee of the month and it's just a rotation. And then you talked about identifying the special cause, let's say it's a poor performing student.

Stotz: And then thinking about how do we how do we deal with this special cause? And it doesn't make sense necessarily to change the whole system because of what we're seeing with the special cause. And finally, I'm gonna add in my last little bit I wrote down when you were speaking is let variation run! Allow variation. It is the beauty of nature. It is the beauty of human. It is the beauty of system. Stop trying to attack every variation through medicine or through all these different things. Let variation free. Let variation run. Anything you'd add to that.

Langford: No, it's no, that's, that's good. It's a good summary. Yeah. It's in some ways it's very, very simple to think about. But in other ways, it's, it's very complex and in many ways, very contrary to the common society and businesses and schools and the way they're run today.

Stotz: It's simple. But not always easy.

Langford: Yeah. And I think that's why Deming calls it profound knowledge. You have to have profound knowledge and profound means deep. You have to have a deep knowledge of something if you're gonna manage properly.

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion for listeners. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. David, what's the best way that people can contact you if they wanna learn more?

Langford: You could go to our website, which is LangfordLearning.com, and there you can find out resources and support material etcetera.

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, 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.

How can we improve attendance when every school has a different process?

In this episode, John Dues continues his exploration of Deming's philosophy in action, focusing on chronic absenteeism. As part of their third PDSA cycle, John's team shifts from individual interventions to process standardization—mapping how each of their four campuses handles attendance interventions. The surprising discovery? Each school follows a different process, revealing hidden variation and inefficiencies.

By visualizing these systems, the team is not only grasping the current condition but also setting the stage for a reliable, scalable, and effective process. This methodical approach highlights how understanding systems and reducing variation are key to meaningful improvement.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Mapping the Process. John, take it away.

0:00:26.7 John Dues: Hey Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. For the folks that have been following along for the past several episodes we've been working towards defining this problem more narrowly in terms of this chronic absenteeism issue we've been talking about. And for the last few episodes we've been talking about how the team didn't have enough information to write that precise problem statement. And we took a look at gathering additional information by running a couple PDSA cycles in those first two cycles that we've discussed so far. We know we had zeroed in on a handful of students and ran PDSAs with them and their families about their obstacles getting to school. And then we left off talking about how we were going to shift gears in PDSA cycle three. And instead we were going to focus on standardizing our process. So creating a process map for how we intervene with kids with our attendance teams across the network. So that's what the team is currently working on. But just as a sort of quick reminder to folks, and especially if you're watching, we have this model that we've been working through, this four step improvement model where you set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and experiment to overcome obstacles.

0:01:48.1 John Dues: And then like we've talked about several times, we're doing this with the team and that includes people working in the system, people with the authority to change or work on the system, and then at least one person with significant knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge, like an SOPK coach. And we've been using this model that's on the screen to sort of symbolize or I guess visualize what those four steps look like. You're sort of marching up this mountain towards this challenge or direction. And we've also talked about this long range goal that we've had and we've taken a look at some data where we have our chronic absenteeism rate mapped out over the last eight years or so. We have this long range goal. So this is the direction of the challenge where we're trying to take our chronic absenteeism from above 50% down to 5%. We have the data going back to the 2016/17 school year. Then we also talked about how there's this, not surprisingly, there's this sort of pre-pandemic level of chronic absenteeism, which was again too high. It's not where we wanted it, but we have this major shift up where we've seen this significant jump in chronic absenteeism since the pandemic hit.

0:03:15.0 John Dues: So in those four years, 2020/21, 21/22, 22/23 and 23/24 we were up in the 51, 52, even up into the close to the 60% range in chronic absenteeism at the height of the pandemic. So for PDSA cycle three, really doing two things. So, and we're going to talk about this in the episode today. If you remember back way at the start of this series, we looked at something I called a system flowchart. So we'll kind of revisit that and then we're going to take a look at two process maps that were created by two of our school teams to sort of map their current process. And then we'll walk through, sort of we'll take that, we'll walk through what the plan is for this PDSA cycle three. So let's start by looking back at this system flowchart. I'll sort of reorient you to this. So we have up on the, and this is the current state. So up on the top we have the target system which is attendance. And then we have this aim that is sort of a three part aim.

0:04:42.7 John Dues: We want to define strong attendance for students and staff, make sure everybody's on the same page. We want to ensure that students, families and staff have a shared understanding of what it means to have strong attendance. And then we are working on improving and creating systems that identify and remove barriers to strong attendance for students and staff. And then over on the left hand side we have sort of inputs. So these are things that contribute or their conditions that impact our system. And then in the middle we have our core activities. So the things that are happening that impact attendance and then there's outputs, both negative and positive outputs that come out of this system. And then we get feedback from our customers, we do research on this feedback and then we make design if it's a new system or redesign if it's a current system. And some of these things, some of those contributing conditions are, Ohio has a set of transportation laws. You know, there's our school model and our the way we operate our school hours, our expectations regarding student attendance, our various intervention systems, neighborhood dynamics, how far our families live from school.

0:06:03.4 John Dues: These are all things that contribute to our sort of inputs into our system. And then we have these core activities. And remember, we could just zero in on attendance systems. But there are many other parts of our system that impact whether or not kids come to school. So for one, many of our families are always going to be new to our system. So for example, in our middle schools, where they start with sixth grade some number of those kids are going to be from our elementary schools. Some number of those kids are going to come from other neighborhood schools, but they're all going to be new to that middle school. So whether they're coming from our elementary school or not, you have to think about how is the student and family being onboarded to our system. Another thing we're looking at is school culture and trust. You know, how much trust is in there, in the school. Do they have a strong culture between teachers and families or teachers and students, or the principal and teachers? Then there's academic systems how engaging are classes, those types of things.

0:07:05.7 John Dues: Then we have the attendance intervention systems, which is obviously a core focus. We have health and wellness and changes around mindset since we went through the pandemic. And then finally the third sort of, or sorry, the third, not the third, but the sixth core activity that we talked about was transportation. So we've talked about lots of problems with our busing system this year. So that's another thing that has a big impact on attendance. And so what this group, again is working on the core activity is the attendance intervention systems. What's the process for that? But I had mentioned in an earlier episode that we have another group that's working on transportation and busing and how we can improve that. So the whole point of the system flowchart is there's many, many things that go into something like an attendance rate. And many of these things are very challenging. Some are largely out of our control, but much of it is largely in our control. And we're trying to pull the levers that we think are most important when it comes to student attendance.

0:08:09.2 Andrew Stotz: And just one thing on that, one of the things I just find so frustrating and it's part of this class I'm teaching tonight is how do we scale a business. And one of the ways that's critical to scaling is simplifying. And sometimes, like, when I look at all of this complexity, on the one hand, you're like, okay, well, that's our job, right? Our job is to manage complexity. And that's the reason why we don't have a thousand competitors coming in, because it's complex and it's difficult. And on the other hand, it's like the simplifier in me is like, how do we simplify this? You know, like, I'm just curious about how you see complexity versus simplification. And in particular, it may just be in this stage, you're just putting everything up there, and it's just overwhelming. Like, oh, my God, there's so much involved in just fixing one thing, you know? What are your thoughts on that?

0:09:11.5 John Dues: Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a really good question. It's, I mean, I think it is a complex system because there's so many moving parts. And I think part of the nature of a complex system versus something like a complicated system is that when you try to impact some part of the system that has these ripple effects into other parts of the system, many of which are unattended or unintended consequences. So, yeah, I mean, I think one thing we have working in our favor is very stable senior leadership. So we're pretty good at understanding how we all work. We have a pretty good historical knowledge of how our school system has worked over time. And we have a pretty good holistic view of all of this complexity. Not that we're all able to improve it all at once, but I think we have a pretty good grasp of what's going on. And even a team like this there we could move faster perhaps, but I think we're trying to be pretty deliberate about the changes that we're making.

0:10:24.7 John Dues: And we're also deliberate about the levers that we're trying to pull for improvement. And these things change over time. So even something like transportation, I mean, the reason that we're working on that now and that we've chosen to work on that now is because the transportation that we're getting from the district is so untenable. Whereas 15 years ago, when I was a principal in our system, while the busing wasn't perfect, it was pretty consistent. You know, most days it dropped off at about the same time. It picked the kids up at about the same time every day. And while it was nowhere near where you would want it to be overall, it wasn't my biggest pain point as a principal. Now kids are literally missing hours or buses aren't showing up at all. And so we have to figure out a way to make this work. And to your point this was a system when charter schools were set up in Ohio, is just basically like the district, the nearby district, which is usually a big urban district, is going to do the busing for charter schools.

0:11:35.5 John Dues: And there really wasn't any more thought to it than that and so from the district's perspective, they they have to manage a lot of complexity. They have their own schools, they're busing for charters, which there's about 15,000 kids in charter schools in Columbus. And then they're also busing for private schools. And the district itself still has a very large geographic footprint, even though the number of students that attend there are about half what it was 50 years ago. So they have very spread out buildings, some of which are far below capacity, but they still have students attending them. So they haven't shrunk that geographic footprint. So that's a challenge as well. And at a time when it's become very difficult to find bus drivers. So I don't take lightly, like the challenges that the district is facing in this, but we got to get kids to school as a... Just as a basic starting point to be being able to do school well.

0:12:31.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay, keep going.

0:12:33.8 John Dues: I mean, it's also a really good segue. We'll take a look at a couple of the process maps. So we have our four campuses. We have something different going on. So even though our four campuses are geographically pretty proximate to each other, they have four different processes going on with their attendance intervention system. So take a look at this first process map, which is pretty simple from start to finish. What is that? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. It's really nine steps and it really...

0:13:08.6 Andrew Stotz: And for the listeners out there that can't see it, he's got a process map, State Street. And what it shows is some circles and some squares and some tilted squares. I don't know what those are called.

0:13:23.5 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, it's just the circles are the start and end points.

0:13:26.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay.

0:13:27.8 John Dues: The squares are the steps in the process. And then the diamonds are, when there's a... Some decision has to be made in the process.

0:13:37.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay, great.

0:13:38.0 John Dues: So we're not going to go through all of these steps. But if you are watching this is a pretty simple process at one of our campuses, while there are multiple people sort of involved, it's also true that one person is driving a lot of this work. But the point is, especially for people that are watching, when you sort of walk through these 10 steps, you're going to see that this map is going to look very different and less complicated than the map at one of our other campuses. But the point is, especially if you can see things visually that you can tell just by looking at the two maps, there are two very different processes going on. And these two schools, this first one is actually an elementary school that feeds into the middle school. That is the map that we'll look at second, so this is the first process map. And then when we look at the second map, we can see very quickly, just visually speaking, there are far more steps, it's far more complicated. There's far more decision points. There's a lot more detail here, and there's a lot of interfacing between multiple people that all play a role in this particular process.

0:14:55.4 John Dues: And it's not that one is right and one is wrong. It's just that when you have these two campuses doing it differently, there very likely is inefficiencies.

0:15:06.8 Andrew Stotz: And are they mapping the same thing? And they...

0:15:10.6 John Dues: Yes, it's the same process. It's how they intervene as the state requires for kids that have some type of attendance issue. And there's different thresholds that mean different parts of the process kick in as a result. But they're operating within the same state process that you have to follow. But even so, you can see that they have a very different sort of illustration of what that process looks like. And if I had the other two campuses, we'd have four separate versions. And remember all these steps and you know, all these decision points. There's documents that exist. There's meetings that happen. There's agendas for those meetings. There's agendas for meeting with parents. There's letters that have to be mailed. And so you can imagine if everybody is creating separate forms, separate meeting agendas, keeping this information in different ways. There's probably a way to design this that's far more effective and efficient by pulling from the four different processes to create one process. And oh, by the way, if you do that, it makes training easier for anybody new that's going to take on some of the clerical roles or some of the interfacing with parents.

0:16:26.9 John Dues: And then if you have one process that you're working from, then you can also share best practices as they emerge as you're working. But if you have four variants, it's much harder to share that information.

0:16:43.4 Andrew Stotz: And you know, it's questionable whether this is a core function. It is an important process. Is it the core?

0:16:54.8 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I would say it's a, I guess depending on how you define core. I mean, it's a required process. It's a process that the state requires and a lot of the sub steps are required components. Now, interestingly, this, the setup for this attendance intervention system came out of some legislation called Health...House Bill 410. And it's been in place for maybe five years or so, four or five years. And they're changing it right now. So there's new language.

0:17:30.2 Andrew Stotz: Just when we got it set.

0:17:32.2 John Dues: Just when we got it set. But we at least know the likely changes that are coming. So Ohio operates on a two year budget cycle. So in this new budget that will likely pass on. Well, it has to pass by June 30th. Right now there's language in there that changes this process for schools and actually gives schools way more leeway. So we'll sort of be ahead of the game because we're going to have our own process mapped and you know, we can remove some of those things that are a little more cumbersome on the school teams. And to your point, those things that were compliance related but didn't have really impact on improving attendance, we could just remove those now. We'll have some more freedom there.

0:18:13.8 Andrew Stotz: I mentioned about the core thing because there's a great book I read called Clockwork by Michael Michalowicz and he talks about identifying what is the core function in your business and then really focusing in on that. And it's interesting because one of the benefits of that is that if you don't do that, you can get caught up in every process like, and then all of a sudden it's just everything is seen as equal.

0:18:43.6 John Dues: Right. Yeah.

0:18:44.6 Andrew Stotz: Anyways, keep going.

0:18:45.9 John Dues: Yeah, it's one of those weird things and I'll stop sharing. Yeah, that was the last visual. But that's one of those things where like I said for the last five years or so these things have been required. And I think you'd be hard pressed to find a school system that would say these, the way things are outlined as requirements for schools to do on this front are not effective but people do them because they're required. And you know, I think with this updated language, we'll have some more flexibility to do this how we want to do it.

0:19:20.4 Andrew Stotz: And how does this, just to clarify how it fits into that mountain diagram, this is trying to assess or deal with the obstacle or is this the current state? I noticed that it said current state for the process map. But is the purpose of what you're... The original one you show. But is the purpose of what you're doing trying to overcome the, identify and overcome the obstacle?

0:19:46.8 John Dues: Well, I would say this is a part of grasping that current condition. You know, we did that early on in terms of that system flowchart, in terms of what the whole system looks like. And now what we're doing is learning about the processes at each individual school. Well, I'd say when you map out a process like this, and I think people would probably, my guess is, is that senior leaders would often say, well, no, we have a process and you know, everybody follows the same thing. And then if you actually mapped it like that, step by step, what you would see is tons of variation, tons of variation.

0:20:23.9 Andrew Stotz: So one of the benefits of that is it's not only, it's about facing the reality or understanding the true current state. Like everybody can say, no, no, no, we all know what the current situation is. No, we don't.

0:20:41.2 John Dues: No, you don't. And every time I sit with a team and make these process maps, we'll say, okay, what's the next step? And you know, maybe a couple people will pipe up and then someone inevitably goes, well, no, wait a second, that's not what we do. What we do next is X, Y or Z. I mean, it's... And that happens over and over and over again with this with this process just seems to be a part of it. It's not a bug. It's actually a feature of this mapping exercise.

0:21:08.5 Andrew Stotz: And many people try to solve these problems by just jumping in rather than taking the time to really, truly understand the current state. You know, what's the risk of the action taker?

0:21:22.7 John Dues: Well, yeah, I mean, I think what happens a lot of times is like when people don't really understand a process like this is they start blaming people for things that aren't going right. That's what typically happens.

0:21:35.8 Andrew Stotz: I want people to take responsibility around here.

0:21:38.3 John Dues: We have to hold people accountable, but you can't hold them accountable to a process that's unknown. Right. It's not well specified, but that's what typically happens. So, so yeah, so the objective for this PDSA cycle, so we're on this third cycle. So those first two were focused on talking to individual kids, interviewing with individual kids. And we said well let's actually look at our process for how we're intervening from a school perspective as a team at each of the schools and let's standardize that process.

0:22:13.1 John Dues: So that's what we're doing. We're sort of mapping it from start to finish, gathering feedback from key stakeholders as we sort of map a standardized process that works across all four schools. And really one of the things that we're doing right now is we're saying can we develop a process? And we have these four dimensions that we're looking for to sort of meet. One is functional, one is, is it reliable? Third, to your point about the business talk you're giving tonight is is it scalable? You know, does it work across the entire school and across the entire school system? And then is it effective? And we're basically, the attendance improvement team basically is going to put together the process and then they're going to put it in front of our senior leaders and we're going to rate sort of the process across those four dimensions and they've sort of predicted what they think is going to, how it's going to hold up when it's sort of tested by those senior leaders.

0:23:12.8 John Dues: So that's kind of what we're doing right now. So step one is mapping the four campuses and then we're going to map one standardized process, at least a rough draft. And again, so once that initial network wide or system wide map is created, we're going to put it in front of that senior leadership group. We're going to give them a brief survey, sort of a Likert scale across those four dimensions and see, see what they think basically. So that's our next step right now.

0:23:40.6 Andrew Stotz: Exciting, exciting. I want to tell a little story to wrap up my contribution here and that is after many years of living in Asia, I started to realize that everything's connected in Asia, people are connected. If you want to be mean to somebody, it's going to come back around to you. And if you want to push on somebody, it's going to come back around because everybody knows everybody. And I like to picture it like a circle. Let's just say a bunch of people in a circle facing the same direction. And then let's say they all put their right arm on the right shoulder of the man or woman in front of them. So now we have a circle that's connected in such a way. And if you think you're going to get something done by squeezing on the shoulder of the person in front of you, the problem you're going to face is that that's going to transmit all the way around the circle until all of a sudden you're going to be squeezed. And that is my visualization of the way influence works in Asia. Yeah, but I feel like it's the same type of thing when you just say, I want to hold people accountable and we need responsibility around here.

0:24:57.8 Andrew Stotz: What ends up happening is that the only choice that someone has is just to squeeze on the person in front of them. And when they do that, it just transmits a squeeze all the way around. It builds fear, it builds distrust and all of that. And so that. That was a visualization I was having when you were talking.

0:25:16.4 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think... And it can be convicting a little bit there. There's a Dr. Deming quote that I'll share to sort of wrap this. Before I do that, I think again, I go back to we... There are these unknown things about how to improve attendance. And so this PDSA, this plan, do study, act cycle, we're using one, again, was intervening with kids and trying to work with a handful of kids that had attendance issues and just see what works and what doesn't. We've shifted gears in this third cycle to something very different. But this is all part of one comprehensive effort by this team to put this new system in place. And all of these pieces of information are important, but this and this mapping, the process thing I think is a great... And I think maybe a lot of people wouldn't think about that as a PDSA to plan a new process, but you can absolutely use it in that way. But the Dr. Deming quote that I think of when I do process mapping is "if you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."

0:26:21.7 John Dues: And I think that's true. Again, it's not to convict people, but I think often when we say, well, that's this thing is going wrong, we need to hold people accountable. And then you ask that person that's making that claim, well, what is the process for this thing? And they often can't tell you. Or they do, it's so vague that nobody could.

0:26:45.3 Andrew Stotz: Or they say, that's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to hold you accountable for getting the result.

0:26:51.4 John Dues: Right. Yeah. And, and, and many people, many organizations don't write these things down. You know, they don't write them down and share them with folks. So that's just some of these simple things are as part of the power making things exciting.

0:27:05.1 Andrew Stotz: Exciting. Well, yeah, how about we wrap it up there and so what are we going to get next time?

0:27:10.7 John Dues: Yeah, I think so. What we went through quickly here at the end was the plan for this PDSA cycle. So by the time we get back together, will have the process map for the system and we'll have had the feedback back and we'll be able to compare that to what the group predicted.

0:27:28.8 Andrew Stotz: So ladies and gentlemen, we're watching it in real time unfold the applications of Dr. Deming's principles. And isn't that what we want? You know, obviously we love theory and we love ideas, but we really need to be all thinking about how we apply these things. And so from my perspective, I'm really enjoying this series and I'm learning a lot. And as I mentioned before, I've been improving some of my thinking and some of my teaching in particular, based upon the discussions that we've had. So 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. And also you can find John's book, Win Win: W. Edwards Deming the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon.com This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. I know you've heard it before, but I'm going to say it again. Until we have joy. "People are entitled to joy in work."

What is the Taguchi Loss Function and how does it apply to education? In this episode, Andrew and David talk about statistician Genichi Taguchi's idea that the further you move from a measurable quality target, the more quality is lost, even if the item still "meets specifications." David shows how you can apply this to education.

(For more about the Tachugi Loss Function, visit Wikipedia or Christopher Chapman's Digestible Deming blog post.)

TRANSCRIPT

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's topic is, Taguchi loss function. David, take it away.

Langford: Thank you, Andrew. And I liked how your eyes got really big when you said Taguchi loss function. Oh my gosh, it sounds frightening, doesn't it?

Stotz: It does. It's a little bit overwhelming, it's exciting. I'm interested to learn.

Langford: And in education, it's probably less known than it is in business. Usually when I'm working with a group of business leaders and I mention that I can get pretty strong - two-thirds of the audience probably knows something about the Taguchi loss function. I was at a conference with a whole roomful of school superintendents and I asked them, Anybody know what the Taguchi loss function was? And not a single hand went up. So less well known, but just as applicable. So in one of the earlier podcasts, we were talking about the concept of optimization of the system. And I just wanna refresh our memories and the memory of our listeners that it's really based on Deming's System of Profound Knowledge as well. So the four parts that Deming had was, Appreciation for a System, Understanding Variation, and especially statistical variation, Psychology and Knowledge of Theory. And I always add neuroscience to that mix as part of profound knowledge, because it's really critical to understand, especially in education, how the brain actually processes information.

Langford: So when we're talking about the optimization of a system, we're actually talking about all of those factors being optimized, especially in a classroom or a school. So you can't just sort of optimize one thing, for instance. So over the last 30 years, I've known principals that are just really, really good managers, excellent at running the building. They never do anything out of the ordinary, everything is always perfect. The trash cans are always where they're supposed to be. They're just really good managers. They're the kind of people that if you're gonna take a school trip and they have to organize something complex, that's the kind of people you want. But if you're gonna do something really super innovative, change the system in some way, do something that's never been done before, that's not the kind of person that you want.

Stotz: Right, it's interesting that you just mentioned that optimizing so many different factors, that's part of the reason why people don't do it because it is complex. David, I just pulled up Wikipedia and I thought maybe it would be interesting if we see what Wikipedia says about what is the Taguchi loss function. Would you like me to read a little bit of that?

Langford: Yeah, so, go ahead.

Stotz: According to Wikipedia, the Taguchi loss function is graphical depiction of loss developed by the Japanese business statistician, Genuichi Taguchi to describe a phenomenon affecting the value of products produced by a company. Praised by Dr. W Edwards Deming. It made clear the concept, of the quality does not suddenly plummet when, for instance, a machinist exceeds a rigid blueprint tolerance. Instead, loss in value progressively increases as variation increases from the intended condition. This was considered a breakthrough in describing quality and help fuel the continuous improvement movement.

Langford: So now that we've lost about 80% of our audience...

Stotz: Oops, sorry about that.

Langford: No, that's... It's actually correct, and Taguchi was actually a contemporary of Deming, and Deming always referred to Taguchi as having one of the best, the greatest breakthroughs in systems. I really wanna focus on in education and applying this kind of thinking to education and what would that mean? So I think we looked at a Taguchi loss function diagram and if you could pull that up on the screen?

Stotz: Yeah, let me pull that up for the video viewers and I'll walk you through and we'll walk you through for the audio listeners.

Langford: And then we'll put a link in the show notes for that.

Stotz: Yep.

Langford: If you wanna contact it later. So basically you have to start to think about... And then, in the diagram right in the very middle of the diagram, is the target or what Deming would talk about as a system that's perfectly optimized. And in that, there's not losses on either side. And basically, without getting in into too much statistics or math or anything like that, the further you move away from that optimum state, the greater the loss. So, I wanna talk...

Stotz: And maybe for the listeners, I'll just describe it. We're looking at a parabola. So we have... On the Y axis, we have the level of loss. In other words, if it goes down on the Y axis, the loss is going down. And on the X axis we have the value of the characteristics, meaning we wanna hit some target and the parabola is going up if you go too far away. So loss is rising if you go too far to the right or loss is rising if you go too far to the left. So, in fact, that's kind of interesting. Both if you're off target either way, it's still gonna bring you loss.

Langford: So let me give you a very practical education example. My good friend, Dr. Doug Stilwell in Iowa, when he was a school superintendent, his problem was that, parents were complaining when... The time that they would get called when there was a snow day or a school cancellation during the winter. And so these complaints just had gone on year after year, after year for 20 years. And so finally, when I taught him about the Taguchi loss function, he did a little study with parents to find out the optimum time to be called. And so sent out surveys and said, "What would be the optimum time?" And if I recall, it ended up the perfect time was like 6:20 in the morning. So the further, the earlier you did it as you move towards say 6 o'clock or even earlier, if you went all the way to 5:30, then the losses became huge. There's these tons and tons of people did not like that. And on the other side, if 6:20 was the optimum, the closer and closer that you move towards 7 o'clock, there's already people going to work and making other plans and not being informed, etcetera.

Langford: And so the losses are mounting on that side as well. And so he ended up implementing a system that in explaining parents always even new parents coming into the system that, "You will receive a notification by 6:20 every morning whether or not there's gonna be a school closure." And guess what? Complaints virtually disappeared completely. So I think it's a really good example about you can optimize... Even sometimes people say, "Oh well, that's not a big deal, and I'll just put up with the complaints." But why would you wanna do that? Why would you wanna have parents calling board members and calling the school and complaining about this and that. And it goes back to really making people happy within the system, but you're not just making them happy just for happy's sake, you're making them happy because you're doing a really good job of managing with the input of the people in the system because they're the most knowledgeable about the systems.

Langford: So, so many managers will make a decision like that, it could be based on what's best for the front office. It could be that the decision is what's best for me as a manager. I don't like to get up before 6 o'clock in the morning and check the weather and have that to be the first thing I do during the day. And so I'm gonna do it at this time, but have no systems knowledge. They haven't taken the time to actually solve the problem or understand even what the problem is. And that is where I think Taguchi loss function really comes in. Same kind of an example I wanna share would be like in a classroom, if you're talking about the speed at which you're moving through material that you're teaching kids as they're learning about stuff, well, you go too fast, the losses are gonna be students who can't keep up, don't understand, get frustrated and get mad, etcetera. That's on one side.

Langford: And on the other side, you go too slow, you have all the students that really do grasp things quickly and wanna move forward. So understanding that optimum zone, and often times in neuroscience, scientists will sometimes call it the learning zone. That there's a zone or speed that you can go in, but there's another way to optimize learning within the classroom too. And that is, as a teacher to stop managing the pace yourself and let each student learn to manage their own pace. And so now each student is starting to optimize learning based on their pace. Well, the reason we don't do that is if I've got 30 kids in the class and I got 30 kids at different paces, that's a lot more work for me as the teacher, right. Rather than me setting the pace and forcing everybody to work within that. So I would have to learn to manage the system much differently if I'm gonna optimize learning for every child within a classroom or think about a whole school that's optimized like that. Lots of teachers trained and in how to manage like that.

Stotz: Yeah, I was thinking about... I love some of the quotes from Thomas Sowell in America. And he's a wise man and he says, "There's no solutions, only trade-offs." And in a way, I feel like the Taguchi loss function is really kind of the Taguchi trade-off function with loss on both sides.

Whereas a lot of times we think about, there's a specification and that's what we're aiming for. And that's what is really interesting about the Taguchi loss function is that it makes you aware that either way you go, you're gonna have a trade-off. Let's say you could speed up a production process in a factory, but it will impact other processes or that type of thing. So everything is a trade-off.

Langford: Yeah, and it's exactly the same concept, the same thing in a classroom or a learning system as well so...

Stotz: And one other question about that is, you mentioned about optimizing in this case for the parents. Now, you could see that some people... Some teachers in a school might say, "I don't really care about the parents. I wanna optimize for my convenience and I leave for school at 6:00 AM, and I wanna know at 6:00 AM if we're gonna be closed or not, so I don't have to go in." So how does that work? Like you've gotta decide. Also, you talked about optimizing, you could optimize for each individual student versus optimizing for the group of students as a whole. How does someone figure that out when they're in that system?

Langford: Yeah, so that comes back to the constancy of purpose. And that was Deming's number one point out of his 14 points is, "Do you have a constancy of purpose?" And so like for a school, if the constancy of purpose is so that you always have a place to park your car and... You always get out of the building by 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and whether that's individually or written or unwritten within the whole school, you are implementing a constancy of purpose. But if your constancy of purpose is to continually create learning experiences for youth in its day, in order to add value to society, that's a much different purpose. And that means everybody has to be focused on creating those learning experiences and looking at students as if they were in a company. You'd say they would be the customers, but they're the clients or they are the people receiving the service. And the schools that really get it, understand that that's why they exist. They exist only for student learning and no other purpose, and so everything becomes optimized around that purpose.

Stotz: Great. So, maybe I'll just summarize some of the things that I took away from that. I think the first thing is, I kind of see now Taguchi loss function as it's kind of a trade-off, and we can see that the objective is to identify what are you trying to optimize for, and then understanding that deviating away from that on either side will bring loss, and ultimately what you wanna try to do is find the optimum point where that line, that parabola is having the least loss in relation to what is your constancy of purpose. What is the purpose of what you're doing? Anything else you would add to that?

Langford: No, that's exactly right. And I'm sure that there are parents that are listening and they say, "Well, you know, my child's gifted in school and they really like to move fast, and if you sort of optimize the pace, my child is gonna start to be bored." But then there's other ways to think about that, that if you finish everything very quickly, you have a lot of options now, right? You could help somebody else and is somebody gonna bully you if you've been helping them on a daily basis, understand a concept or work through something. You could go ahead at your own speed, you could go faster if you wanna go on, or maybe you're not as good in another subject, and you need to spend that time optimizing the performance in Math or English or something else that you're not as good in. And so I used to always teach students that your job is to optimize your own system, right? And my job is to operate the system... Optimize this system and the superintendent and so on and so forth, all the way up to the whole nation optimizing performance.

Stotz: I wanna just tell a quick story before we wrap up, and that is, I was teaching a finance course and I knew that my students did not understand finance and they were kind of terrified, and so what I had was... I would teach a little bit and then I would give them a practice problem, then I would teach a little bit more and I'd give a little practice problem. And what I did... Here's what I did and tell me what you think of it. So what I did is I basically told the students, I said, "Stand up when you've calculated the answer." So what happened was, after I did the first couple of questions, but first of all, I like to keep students moving just because I feel like make it a little bit more exciting.

So, the students would stand up and you could clearly see that there was a group that would stand up first.

Stotz: So what I then did, is I said, okay, now after assessing this a couple of times, I was able to see that there was five students in the class that were just not getting up really fast. I said, "Okay, now five students come down." It was a big class, it was at a university, and I said, "Okay, you five students come down to the front of the classroom and line up." So they lined up in a line, and then I told the other students, come down and get behind one of these students until we have, let's say, six people in each line. And so the students all came down and they got in line with the one that they know or whatever. And then once they were done, I said, "That's your groups." So the next time that I got, I did the next problem, I had to move around each other, the next time I had the problem, I said, "Okay, solve this problem, whatever team, where every member of the team has finished and you gotta make sure everybody's finished, that team stands up first." And then I tried to use the power of the knowledge of the senior people, or not senior, but the ones that really got it quickly to help the others, and they were helping the others just like what you said.

Langford: Yeah, so what you did is it's the System of Profound Knowledge again, but from a neuroscience standpoint, yes, you're right. Students of any age have to be up and moving, we need that spinal fluid moving up and down their spine and moving back and forth in order to get blood flow going to the brain and everything, so that part's really good. What I probably would have adjusted would, I would have said, "Okay, as soon as you understand this, I want you to stand up and find somebody still sitting down and go explain it to that person and go over it until they understand it, and then now there's two of you that are gonna stand up and you're gonna find somebody else still sitting down. And so you sort of exponentially start everybody in the room, and then the noise level goes up, and the fun level goes up, and then everybody is actually looking for somebody still sitting. And sometimes...

Stotz: And would you do that every time, every time? Let's say you have 20 quiz... Twenty test questions that you're giving them throughout a three-hour time period, let's say. Would you do that each time where you would just say, "Go help whoever's sitting down," or would you eventually allow them to get into groups or not?

Langford: They're gonna get faster and faster and faster. Again, it comes back to your constancy of

purpose. Do you have a constancy of purpose or a meaning about why you want them to get into groups? Are they struggling with group, being able to be in a group and communicate in a group and those kinds... Okay, if that's my purpose that's much different.

Stotz: Which it's not, because one of the unique things about Thais, when I teach them in Thailand is that they're much more comfortable in groups compared to let's say Americans, so they don't need group work. But I also see that what you're telling me, that method will accelerate, the process won't take as long, I think it would accelerate pretty quickly. So alright, well, I would say I learned something from today's lesson and I'm gonna test it out because my purpose for that class, I had 50 people in the class, many of them were very scared of finance, and I said, "I'm gonna get all of you to the level of competence that I want, that's my goal." It is... That was my goal in that class, and so that's part of why I did it that way.

Langford: When you're optimizing it, what you're saying is correct, you're optimizing, 'cause you want every single person to really enjoy... And I have a joy in learning for finance, right?

Stotz: Yeah.

Langford: So how am I gonna get there? What's the quickest way I'm gonna get there? How I'm gonna optimize that?

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for our discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey.

Stotz: 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."

In this episode, David and Andrew discuss the dreaded standardized tests, including how they evolved, how they're used (and not used) now, and what Deming said about them. David also offers practical tips for educators who want to move away from standardized tests in their classrooms.

TRANSCRIPTION:

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's topic is, what would Dr. Deming say about today's standardized testing? David, take it away.

Langford: So one of the things when I started learning about the Dr. Deming's field is, there's a lot of people that know about manufacturing, a lot of people know about management, etcetera, a lot of people don't, but everybody knows about education, everybody went to school somewhere, someway, homeschooling, charter schools, whatever it might be, so everybody went to school, so everybody's sort of knowledgeable on that. And one of the things that's pretty common through that process is the emphasis over the last 30 years is of standardized test, as the way to sort of measure, not only the performance of a system, or a teacher or a student individual kind of thing, but also the success of how a nation is doing, right? Can we compare the US to Japan and Australia and Thailand? And where do we rank? And who's 14th? And all these kinds of things. So I just wanna go back a little bit about, where did this evolve? Hundreds of years ago, we didn't have standardized tests, and amazingly people survived, people got jobs, became entrepreneurs, they did all kinds of things, and they didn't have a standardized test scores to be able to rank them, to be able to do stuff.

Langford: So one of the reasons these things did evolve, was a quick and easy way that we could rank individuals or rank systems, and that was one of the things that Deming was most opposed to, ranking people, either through performance appraisals, grades, standardized tests, whatever it might be. So a lot of the purpose of why we do it, is a simple way to rank schools and try to understand, "Well, who's number one? And who's not?" And that kind of a thing. And then the second one...

Stotz: And let me add something there just 'cause I wanna make sure that this comes out clear, is that obviously Dr. Deming was against the idea of ranking, but from a sincere perspective of some leaders out there, they may say, "Well, I'm not using it to rank so much as I'm just using it to figure out where is the trouble spots that I should be focusing on."

Langford: Yeah, maybe you're not doing that, but people that are getting your scores are doing that, I can guarantee it. And then now it's gone to parents looking up scores online and comparing schools even across the street to try to see, "Oh wow, that school has higher test scores than this school, so it must be a better school." Deming had a lot of comments about standardized testing, but one of the ones I remember was, he said our education system would be significantly improved if we could get rid of standardized tests and grading as a performance measure. And it goes back to... We keep talking about the purpose of the system and the constancy of purpose of the system, and so is your constancy of purpose to get good test scores? Is that really the only thing you're trying to accomplish in a school? And if that's the case, you're gonna do all kinds of really, very dysfunctional things in that school to get test scores. Like for instance, well, one of the first things we're gonna cut out is music programs and sports programs, right? 'Cause we don't test us for those, and so we don't need those, we can cut that out, and then we spend more time on this.

Langford: And I know the schools that are now mandating 90 minutes of math a day, whether you need it or not, you're gonna get 90 minutes of math a day and just waste and all kinds of stuff, and then it causes all kinds of crazy stuff within the system. And the tests themselves have slowly started to change, and one of the things that, especially that people used to say when you'd say, "Well, we should get rid of standardized tests." People say, "Well, how do we get people into colleges then? 'Cause they won't have an SAT score and they won't be able to get into college." And I think interesting thing is that there are numbers of universities, they're now throwing those things out and just saying... I know that in California, there's universities that do not require SAT scores any longer to go to the university as a measure of how well you're gonna do.

Stotz: And would just abandoning that and say, "Well, college is open for everyone." Would that be the smart thing to do? Or is it to say, "Well, let's create a system that tries to optimize for something else."? Or does that add a huge amount of complexity for a school that doesn't have a lot of resources, let's say?

Langford: Well, you want my method or do you want... Stotz: I'm only here for you.

Langford: So I don't mind that there should be some kind of a base level, you need to have graduated from a high school, you need to have done certain things, and then all the people that meet that certain baseline that wanna go into college or wanna go on to a particular college, it just goes into a lottery. And now, let's say you have a thousand spots open, so you draw out a thousand names, all those people get to come to your university or your college for that year. Now, if you weren't chosen, you know why you weren't chosen.

Stotz: Pretty clear.

Langford: Yeah, it's pretty clear. And you could put your name in for multiple universities, and if you somehow got drawn for several universities, you could make a choice, "Which one do I really wanna go to?" And you would stop all this crazy stuff about people paying to get their kids in certain universities, and some universities are so expensive that only very rich people can get their kids in those universities and just on and on and on.

Stotz: Yeah, but it could be abused. The legislators or the people in the university would say, "Well, the good news about our student body, David, is that they're all lucky."

Langford: Yeah, that's right. But if you had randomly chosen students at your university and you were still churning out some of the top students in the world in these professions, you're really doing something. You've really optimized the system in some way. On the other hand, if all you're doing is choosing the very best people that are probably gonna be successful at any place they go, you can actually get away with a lot of dysfunctional stuff, and these students are still gonna be successful because they're just gonna overcome any barriers that are put in front of them. So there's no incentive to actually optimize a system moving forward with that.

Stotz: I guess unless you're... If your method... What you're optimizing for is "I just want the top, top, top smartest, smartest as measured by score, young people in the world or in my state, or my city, or my country that's it. That's all I'm up to, man. I'm not trying to bring education to everyone," but that's not what Cal State Long Beach was doing, when I went there, they were trying to bring education to everybody.

Langford: Yeah, so it's much different constancy of purpose of what you're trying to do. The other thing about standardized tests, and we all grew up with multiple choice tests, and I remember one time somebody asking Deming at a conference about that and he paused for a long time and he said, "What do you think about multiple choice questions?" And he said, "It's ridiculous." He said, "I would much rather you have a multiple choice questions which students have to answer: in what circumstances would A and B be correct? And in what circumstances would A and D be correct?

And what would be the system if none of these were correct?" Because that would require thinking, and responses, and deep level understanding of something. But this game is still being played, especially in K-12 to get test scores, teachers are taught to teach children to guess. If you don't know the answer, just guess, because if there's four things there, you got 25% chance that you guessed right. Well, this is ridiculous, because all trying just to get your scores up. So if you really wanna find out if somebody knows something or doesn't, you certainly don't want them just guessing, that's not gonna tell you anything. And maybe 25% of the time they guess correctly, and so you're getting scores that's not telling you anything about the system.

Stotz: I was in a senior level class in my final year in university, taught by an amazing woman who had actually lived in pre-Nazi Germany, and she had just seen communism, fascism and democracy in action, and that was the name of the course. And the final exam was a essay exam, and we went in and it was, I don't know, three hours, and when I got that exam back, it said A plus, and I just felt like I just really, really understood the material, I enjoyed writing that exam and I was proud of what I accomplished. And I can say there's no multiple choice exam that I took that I'm like, "I'm really proud of what I did there."

Langford: Yeah, the same thing. We could all look back at experiences that we had, and usually they don't involve Draconian methods of testing, and standardized tests and things like that. One of the best classes I ever took in college, and I still vividly can recall or remember the name of the class was "The Assassination of American Presidents." And we went through every attempted assassination, everything, all the way up through Kennedy, and on through and analyze Zapruder films, and I don't ever remember a test in that class. Basically he just said, "Nick, if you show up every day, you're gonna get an A. Now let's start learning about this." And he had just amazing love for that whole concept and that whole thing, and that got translated to the students, and there was a waiting list to get into that class.

Stotz: And what do you say to a listener, a teacher who's listening and says, "Yeah, that's easy to do and easy to say for a senior level class or an advanced level class where you've got 15 or 20 students. But I'm teaching a freshman class of 200 students, I don't have the time to read 200 essays," How do you respond to that where they see multiple choice and standardized as kind of a weeding out, a culling, I don't know. How do you respond to that?

Langford: Well, there's lots and lots of different methods, but I would still probably require somebody to write an essay or write an explanation and go through stuff and then bring it to class, and now pass your essay once you left, and that's the person's job is to go through it and give you feedback. And then you're gonna get it back again, and then you're gonna get a chance to correct it and take that feedback, and you can do that multiple times if you want to in the class, because now you're making everybody into a teacher as well. And we all know in a classroom, the person that learns the most is the teacher.

Stotz: I'm gonna explain in a way that I've done something and then give me some critique on it or help with that. I have the valuation master class and when my students get into the advanced levels, I say, "Look, I've taught you everything I know now," and they're valuing companies, "so how much is Apple worth?" And they've gotta go through a whole pretty structured process that I put them through, and then I tell them, "Okay, when you're done, post your results up into the group, and then I'll assign another student to review the process," review what they've done and give them feedback. And then they'll have to revise, and it could be five times before I eventually look at it and give a final review and say, "Okay, here's a one little thing that you missed." And a lot of times I'll figure out, "Oh, I didn't actually teach that part," and it's being exposed because Apple is a very complex company. But the point is that, on the one hand I've been a little bit nervous about to do it because I've also felt like in an academic environment, would they say, "Well, wait a minute, are you just pure scoring or are you as the expert and the professor giving the score," how do you respond to what I'm doing and how could I improve it also?

Langford: Yeah, you have to understand that feedback is much different than rating and ranking, right? So if I write this paper and I hand it in and you give me an A minus or, you know, I might be really happy about that, or I might be just really, totally upset about that because you're ruining my GPA at the university, and it doesn't tell me a darn thing, I have no idea. You can get an A minus in one school and it's a C minus in another school, and it's an A plus in a third school, and its exact same work in all three schools, because of what Deming talked about, the variation within a system, the variability of what goes on with that. Really what you're after is feedback though, the human brain, back to neuroscience, the human brain thrives on immediate feedback, so the faster you can get that feedback to people, the better. Now, if that's peer-reviewed feedback, and that's the fastest way you can do it with 200 students at a class, that's awesome. But I always remember my son in high school was in an advanced English class, wrote a 14-page paper, worked really hard on it in September, got it back in January, and he came home with this paper and it had a grade on it, and he said, "I don't have any idea why we even wrote this thing, I don't even remember anything about it," but I got scored and moved on.

Langford: And if that's all you're after, 14-page paper, check, been there, done that and then let's move on. But if you actually wanna give people feedback, then maybe there's the whole fallacy of a 200-person class is not workable, right?

Stotz: So, in wrapping up the discussion about standardized testing, how should somebody think about it, particularly somebody that's a victim of it or in the middle of it, or being forced to do it. What's your advice?

Langford: Well, all I know is that over the last 40 years after I left high school, basically, nobody ever asked me what my standardized test score was. [laughter] No employer ever wanted to know, nobody did, they just wanted to know, Are you capable of doing the job? Are you capable of doing something? Right? And that score wouldn't have told anybody anything, even if it was a perfect score, chances are, I wouldn't wanna hire that person 'cause all they could do is just be really good at standardized tests, I need somebody with people skills in psychology and understand statistical variation, back to Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. So I would much rather our systems were preparing people to be successful in life, rather than preparing them just to take good tests.

And it's not like you can just throw the baby out with the bath water and as a teacher just say, "Well, I'm just not gonna do that anymore. I'm just not gonna test people." But there are ways that you can continually diffuse that for students so that they see it for what it is and move forward. On the other hand, you can also use a standardized test to see as a teacher, how am I doing?

Langford: Countless times I heard Dr. Deming talk about his own classes and he said, "That's what I wanna know, is how am I doing as a teacher?" Like you said, Oh, I forgot to go over certain concepts, and so a standardized test could tell me that 80% of the class didn't get this concept, and I could look back at what I did and say, Oh, no wonder, I didn't even go over that, I didn't even discuss that. So why would I wanna penalize them because I didn't do my job?

Stotz: Right. Let me try to summarize kind of what I took away from this discussion, what you were saying was that there's an emphasis on standardized tests over the past 30 years, kind of thinking maybe how is a nation doing or that score we can use to compare how different schools are doing, how different individuals are doing, and your first thing that you mentioned was, how did we survive in the past, did people learn things in the past without standardize? Of course they did. And so it doesn't mean that this is some kind of solution, and then you said that, this is the interesting part, I felt like when you were saying that it evolved as a way to rank people in systems, but ultimately it will be misused, and that is that somebody is gonna use it for the purposes that it wasn't really meant to be used for. And so it just becomes a dangerous tool. And then we talked about is the purpose to get good test scores? Because if that's what our purposes of our education system then, Yeah, go for it. Let's get the best test score. But that's not really our purpose, we also talked about how we could get people into college, maybe you talked about the random concept that they have to meet certain minimum standards, and then a random, which I found fascinating. I think it would take a lot of guts for an institution to do that, but I do think that there's definitely some interest in that.

Stotz: And then we've kind of ended up talking about feedback and using student feedback when you have a big class or you're trying to teach something at scale and how important it is to get feedback as quickly as possible. And when you were talking, I was thinking about a young person may be more concerned about what their peer thinks about what they're writing about something than the teacher. And you actually may be able to use peer pressure in a sense that they really feel like they gotta write something good, otherwise their friend next to them is gonna go, "What's this crap?" They may get more truthful response, and then finally, you talked about ultimately, our education should be about preparing people for a successful life, is there anything else that you would add to that?

Langford: I don't, you did a really good job of summarizing that up to complex subject. And it can be really fraught with emotion and there may be people listening to us that agree that that's not how we should be judging systems, but they're caught in the system itself, so you may not be able to change the system totally but you can do something. And what is that something you can do Monday morning to sort of optimize learning for the students that you're working with?

Stotz: What a challenge and a great way to end it. You may not be able to change the situation that you're in and the system that you in but you can do something, and the beginning of that something is changing your thinking. And I think that's what we're trying to get at in our discussion. So David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. I'm learning a lot and I know the audience is too. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And also, David, what's the best way that someone listening or viewing this can get in touch with you to learn more?

Langford: You can go to my website at langfordlearning.com. And if you go to langfordlearning.com/booklet, you get and download a free booklet that tells you about the services that we provide in our company, so, all Deming based.

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, this is your host Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work," and I'm gonna add learning.

Langford: Learning.

In this episode, David and Andrew discuss going beyond solving problems in schools to preventing them from happening. David also shares a tool for finding the area where optimization of the system would have the greatest impact.

In the episode, David shares his screen with Andrew and fills in a diagram. The beginning version has post-it note images around the sides, and the final version has lines drawn between all the post-it notes. See below:

TRANSCRIPT

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's topic is: optimization of a system to prevent problems. David, take it away.

Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be here again. So yes, today I wanted to talk a little bit about just the optimization of the system and what does that mean. So to go back to Deming's System of Profound Knowledge and understanding systems is critical part of the System of Profound Knowledge. And within the System of Profound Knowledge, what is a system? And so there's all that, and we talked a little bit about that in the past, but today I just wanted to talk a little bit about the optimization of the system and what does that actually mean? So it's not a matter of just trying hard. I'm gonna optimize, so I'm just gonna work hard, I'm gonna try hard, I'm gonna get better.

Langford: In fact, Deming was famous for saying that we're being killed by people's best efforts, and in education that runs rampant. He also said that copying can lead to disaster. And just those two phrases probably discounts 80-90% of what goes on in education now, because every time I do a seminar, somebody says, where else is this happening? Or Can I have a copy of that? Or somebody will go and they'll do a presentation somewhere, and everybody will just wanna copy that. So it's a sort of like, no thinking involved, just copy steps one, two, three, and four and things will get better.

Stotz: Cookie-cutter.

Langford: And that... Sometimes that just copying to try to optimize a system is better than doing nothing at all, but it's also a trial and error process. Trial and error is very expensive and very time-consuming, and you have a great chance that you're not going to improve anything, right?

Because systems that were developed at other places, so somebody, some leader comes into a school system somewhere and they do a great job in reading or whatever it might be, because they start studying their system and figuring out a process, and then they decide they're gonna market that to other people. And so you see the results of what they did, but it doesn't take in any understanding of the variation in systems, and you could have variation in schools when they're right across the street from each other. Totally different clientele and makeup of the student body and the staff and background, and all kinds of variation, so it doesn't necessarily work just to copy and apply something that was successful someplace else. Now, it is...

Stotz: And one question about that is that, I guess part of that is because the aim may be different.

If I think about when I was writing research in investment banks, the aim was to write a big, long research report. We had a lot of resources and all that, but when I set up my own firm, my aim was, how do I make this more efficient? And so I created a whole different system with a different aim, and therefore, if somebody wanted to go from my company to work in that company or vice versa, it wasn't like you could just copy what we were doing, there's a whole operating system that we created based upon a different aim.

Langford: Yeah, I remember when I first started things in classrooms with Deming help, and then people would come to visit classrooms and I'd always have the students explain what was going on and what they were doing, and invariably, my kids got really cagey because the visitors would say, "Oh, that's really cool. Can I have a copy of that?" And the kids would say, "Yeah, you can have a copy of it, but it's not gonna do you any good." And they'd say, "What, what, wait, wait, what do you mean?" And they said, "Because you don't understand the theory." So you don't understand what's going on here, and you just think you can just copy yourself to success and it just never works.

Langford: The other problem I see in optimization of systems is that people sort of come in with preconceived ideas about what they think is the problem. In fact, I had a principal at one time in one of the seminars, and he said, "I don't need all those PDSA stuff and tools and process and... I just... What the problem is." And, well, if you have that kind of divine intervention, why would you even come to a seminar on improving schools and learning if you already know, and if you already know it, why haven't you done it? Deming often said, "Well, you've been snoop goofing around for the last 20 years."

Langford: If you're that smart, you should be able... You should have already done it. So I guess seminars I typically try to coach people, I say, "You can come with a list of possible problems and opportunities that you might wanna work on," and therefore, that's why we use the word probletunities, and my students said all of our problems are... All of our problems start looking like an opportunity, and that's a great kinda way to go through life, that, "Okay, we got a big problem and okay it's an opportunity, it's an opportunity, we can make it better. We can do something here".

Stotz: Yeah.

Langford: The problem also shows you the deficit within the system or the problem within the system, and... So I wanted to kinda get into a little bit about, well, how would you go about sort of sorting out what to work on or how to move forward when you're trying to optimize the system. So I'm gonna actually share my screen.

Stotz: Great.

Langford: And I'm gonna take a chance at trying to do a tool here, and we're gonna do... If you're

watching the video, it's pretty simple, but we'll try to explain it with the audio as well as we

go along. But what we're gonna do is what's called an interrelationship digraph, okay? And I've got five common areas here that we often find in schools. Teachers will say things like, "We have a lack of effort around here." Even say, "Students don't understand the concepts." "Oh, the teacher attitudes around here is... They're bad," and, "Oh, we gotta work on the student attitudes. We gotta do something to them until... Make them have a better attitude." And "there's no time to do all these kinds of things."

Langford: So if that sounds like your system and you're starting to think about, "Well, okay, here's all the kinds of problems that we're kinda working on," so what we do here is we pick a color and we start off, we say, "Okay, is there a relationship between lack of effort and don't understand the concept?" And understanding the concepts is really important in neuroscience, that taps into the sense of meaning with people, et cetera. And so you have to say, is there a relationship? And so, usually, we do this in a group, being able to discuss and you say, "Yes, I think there's a relationship." So if you think there's a relationship, you just draw a line between the two.

Langford: There's a second question, which affects which the most. Does our lack of effort affect not understanding concepts, or does not understanding concepts affect lack of effort? And so usually, I get the... People go into higher order thinking, it looks like this, with their mouths open and...

Langford: Because their brain is having to figure out, "Okay, how does that work?" So we have the... Let's say we have a discussion and we decide, "Well, if we understood the concepts, we're probably gonna get more effort out of people, so I'm gonna put an arrow going that way." Then we have a lack of effort and teacher attitudes. Well, is there a relationship? If there is I draw a line. There's not, then I don't draw a line. Secondly...

Stotz: For the viewing... For the listening audience, just to highlight what David's got here, he's got a blank piece of paper with a kind of a circle form. And in the upper right hand corner, it says, "Lack of effort." Just below that, it says, "Don't understand the concept." And at the bottom, it says, "Teacher attitudes," and then on the left side, it says, "Student attitudes," and then in the upper left, it says, "No time," and then you're starting to draw lines connecting these two things to show the relationships. So continue on.

Langford: Okay, so we've decided that lack of effort and teacher attitudes are connected, because if my students had a lot more... Put in a lot more more effort, that would probably affect my attitude as a teacher, I would probably like that. So we're gonna make the arrow going that way. So then we have lack of effort and student attitudes. You have to say, "Are those connected?" What do you think, Andrew?

Stotz: I would say yes, lack of effort and student attitudes? Seems like it would be.

Langford: So if they put in more effort, they probably have a better attitude?

Stotz: It seems to me that, that would be the case, but I don't know. I'm gonna follow your lead. I'm learning, man.

Langford: So we make the arrow go that way. So then we have lack of effort and no time. So I would say yes, those are connected, and so I'd say, "Wow, well, if we were using... If we had more effort going on, we'd probably be making better use of our time." That would be... Or we could say, if we had more time, we could probably have better effort. So sometimes it's a 50/50 kind of proposition. And so I often tell people, if it's 50/50, just flip a coin, because whichever way it goes, if you end up working on one, you win. You work on the other, you win too, so.

Stotz: Right.

Langford: So let's say that no time... Not enough time is affecting our lack of effort. So we've already gotten one time around the circle, and so this is gonna get a lot faster now. And so, now we're gonna go to the next concept in the circle, and then we're gonna go through that in a relationship. So we have "don't understand the concept" and "teacher attitudes." Well, if students understood the concept better, I would say that's probably gonna affect teacher attitude. And then now we have "don't understand the concept" and "student attitudes." I would venture the same thing there, that if they understood the concepts, they're gonna have a better attitude. And how about "don't understand the concept" and "not enough time"?

Stotz: Yep.

Langford: So probably, that's affecting not enough time. Okay. So now we're gonna pick a different color, and we're gonna go to teacher attitudes, and it's getting easier, we're almost there. So now we have "teacher attitudes" and "student attitudes." Here's an interesting problem. Which of that... Well, number one, is there a relationship?

Langford: What do you think, Andrew?

Stotz: It's symbiotic, it feels like to me, but I don't know.

Langford: They're related in some way, right?

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: Yup.

Stotz: I guess if you asked the students, they'll give you one answer, and if you ask a teacher, they'll give you another answer.

Langford: Yeah. So here's a chicken and egg question, which affects which the most? Do teacher attitudes affect student attitudes, or do student attitudes affect teacher attitudes?

Stotz: I would say that ultimately the teacher is the one responsible for making sure that the aim of the classroom is being achieved. So if their attitude wasn't right, it would be very hard for students to get it right. What do you think of that answer, David?

Langford: Yup, I would agree with you. So students are often victims of the system, and they're gonna respond in ways to whatever the teacher's attitude is.

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: So then we have "teacher attitude" and "not enough time" or no time. So I'd say those are definitely connected, 'cause I hear that all the time, "Oh, we don't have enough time to do these things." So I'm gonna draw a line there. Which affects which the most?

Stotz: I think that the reality is we all have not enough time, so the attitude of the teacher probably is the most important thing to resolve the issue of not enough time.

Langford: Yeah. But if you're feeling hurried all the time and rushed and can't get everything done, and that's gonna be affecting your attitude.

Stotz: That's the true.

Langford: Is that what you're saying?

Stotz: Yeah, I mean, if you're overloaded, and you can't achieve what you want to achieve, that definitely will hurt your attitude.

Langford: Okay. And then I... And we just have one last connection, we have "not enough time" and "student attitudes." So I'd say, yeah, those are definitely... I'm gonna draw a line, 'cause

those are connected. Then I have to say which affects which the most. And same thing for students, is, if I don't have enough time to get this assignment done and get it to the level of quality that is being asked for, and maybe I've got that going on multiple other classes, and I'm feeling rushed and pressured, etcetera, that's probably gonna affect my attitude to some degree.

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: You have to draw a line. Okay, so when we get all finished with this in a relationship digraph, we go around, and we simply just count the ins and outs, how many arrows coming in and how many coming out. So for lack of effort, we've got two arrows coming in, and we've got two

arrows going out.

Langford: So I'm gonna just put two-comma-two next to that. For, "Don't understand the concept," we have zero arrows coming in, and we have four arrows coming out, meaning that, that area is affecting four other areas. And then down at teacher attitudes, we've got three coming in, we've got one going out, so a lot of things affect the teacher's attitude. And student attitudes, we've got four arrows coming in, and we've got zero going out. And now, with "no time", we've got one coming in and three coming out. So when we get all finished with this, what we try to look at is, we wanna think about in optimizing a system, what are we gonna work on that's gonna give us the very biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, right? 'Cause we... All of us, no matter if you're in business or school... Education or whatever, you only have so much time and money to do things, right?

Langford: And so we look for the area that has the most arrows coming out of it. And in our simple little example here, that's, "Don't understand the concept." So if this was a school I was working with, and these are the five key areas that... Complaints or problems that they identified, I would be pushing them to say, "Look, start working on teaching concepts better, ways that kids can understand the concepts," etcetera. And if you do that, teacher's gonna have a better attitude, student's gonna have a better attitude. They're gonna make more efficient use of their time, and they're gonna put in more effort.

Stotz: Fantastic. That... And that's very clear. For the listeners out there, it's a diagram with a lot of arrows going in and out of the different topics. But ultimately, what's very clear is there's one topic, "Don't understand the concept," that is impacting a lot of other things, and therefore it appears as though that is the one that should be worked on.

Langford: Yeah. The big "aha" on this too is that, what... Traditionally, where do schools spend their time? They spend their time trying to improve student attitudes, or they're gonna spend their time trying to improve teacher attitudes. And it's especially relevant now coming out of the pandemic, because across... At least across the US, I'm sure it's probably world-wide, that teachers are feeling really overwhelmed, and now they have all this video stuff to work with, and they still don't have all their students coming back, and there's all kinds of issues and problems and stuff going on. And so we need to do things to improve teacher attitudes, right? We need to have some teacher parties and maybe have a Teacher of the Year Award and those kinds of things to try to improve people's attitudes. And it's not understanding where attitude is coming from the system itself. Deming talked about that anywhere from 94-98% of the effects of the system are coming from the system itself. And if you're not addressing that, you're not doing anything.

You're just spinning your wheels, and next year you're gonna have just as depressed of teachers as you do this year. And so, then what are you gonna do? Well, we're gonna have to have more pizza parties, and we're gonna have to have other kinds of ways to sort of bribe people into feeling better about the... Their situation, "Oh, I feel better about being in a horrible school," kind of the situation.

Stotz: Right. And it feels like the idea of changing into a very, very comfortable chair from a very uncomfortable chair on the Titanic.

Langford: Yeah, that's right.

Stotz: Fantastic. But let...

Langford: And what Deming said, I think one time at a seminar, was that, pretty soon you're only left with the people who can't get a job someplace else.

Langford: Because all the people that could go some place else and work are gonna... We're gonna get out of here, 'cause nothing ever gets better year after year after year, but we're having these wonderful parties and everything, but that only lasts a little while.

Stotz: Yeah.

Langford: So it kind of leans us back into the discussion of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivations, and so these types of tools help people spend their time wisely working on an opportunity that could actually have a significant benefit.

Stotz: Right.

Langford: But sometimes when I do this with groups in schools as special aid, we get all finished and people will say, "But we don't wanna work on that. That's hard."

Stotz: And there's the secret.

Langford: Yeah, because... And that's what happens, is that we often work on the things that are really easy, right?

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: We don't wanna work on something that's really hard and difficult, nut to crack, right? It's much easier just to do this thing over here and wave the magic wand and then wish we had better students, or better teachers, or better parents, or...

Stotz: Well, it's definitely a road to competitive advantage in the business world if you take on hard projects, because you know majority of people won't do it, and therefore you can achieve another level and basically not be attacked from your competitor. I wanna summarize what I took away and then maybe you add in a little bit and we'll wrap it up. So first of all, we're talking about optimization of a system to prevent problems. You talked at the beginning about, it's not just

about trying harder. You also talked about the idea of copying can lead to disaster as Dr. Deming had said, you know that you could... You're bringing something that works for one system into another, and no systems are identical or even close maybe in some cases. The next thing you mentioned about was best efforts, which Dr. Deming said, "We're being killed by best efforts, and it's not enough. It's the right effort put to the right problem," which then brought us to your discussion about viewing problems in a positive light and seeing them as opportunities. And finally, you went through the interrelationship diagram to help us identify what particular problem of many is having the biggest impact or the most detrimental impact on the organization, and a

tool to identify that, and then to identify that: "Okay, that's where we're gonna focus." Anything else you would add to that?

Langford: That's well done, Andrew, you were paying attention.

Stotz: Yes, I sometimes have a blank stare, ladies and gentleman, but actually I am trying my best to listen and learn, and in fact I...

Langford: No, that was an excellent wrap up.

Stotz: Yes. Fantastic. Well...

Langford: So, I would say, yeah, just to wrap it up, the optimization of a system, in Deming's Profound Knowledge he also talks about, you have to have a theory. What's your theory, theory of knowledge? Well, is your theory optimization of a system? So you kind of see how all these things start to work together to make things happen, and so if I have that constantly in the back of my head, "How am I gonna optimize the system?" So you and I have been working on trying to optimize the podcast system, and we've gotten better microphones and better cameras, and better lighting, and we just keep working because it's a continual improvement, right? As soon as we think we've got it better, then there's probably gonna be a better camera that comes out, or something better, and you have to think about...

Stotz: David, I got a little depressed when you said that trial and error can be really expensive, I think we definitely got some trial and error going on here.

Stotz: Well, let's wrap it up. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, David, I wanna thank you again for this discussion, and for listeners: remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Now, this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I wanna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

With nearly 2 million students not returning to schools and educational institutions after COVID, David and Andrew explore the question "how do we create quality education systems so students are excited to come to school - and stay there?"

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host, as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming today. I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Lanford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education. And he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, "Quality is not your problem, it is the answer to your problem." David, take it away.

0:00:30.4 David P. Lanford: [laughter] Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again.

0:00:32.6 AS: Great to be with you.

0:00:33.8 DL: So and thinking about this topic, we want to think about what is quality in education and just some of the stats that are coming out in the United States alone, something like 1.3 million students have not returned to the school systems after the pandemic. So.

0:00:56.2 AS: That's unbelievable.

0:00:58.0 DL: The public school systems.

0:01:00.4 AS: Right.

0:01:00.5 DL: And, the stat I heard in the universities is they're down 600,000 students from where they were two years ago before the pandemic. So...

0:01:09.4 AS: So we're talking about almost 2 million students not coming back?

0:01:13.9 DL: That's right. So there's the pandemic caused a lot of systemic shifts. Some of them good, some of them not so good, but it also pointed out a lot of glaring issues that were going on and... In trust in the system, so to speak. And when parents started to find out what was going on with these Zoom meetings online and what a class was like, and the quality of the education and what was going on, many of them just started to make decisions about why should I keep sending my child [laughter] to a school like that if that's what they're gonna do. I was listening to a sports channel just a couple of days ago, and there were just the two guys that were on the channel, discussing sports in the morning. Well, one father was really upset because he said it's the last week or week and a half of school, and all my child is doing is watching movies in almost every class.

0:02:20.4 DL: And granted that it's the end of the school year and they're wrapping up and they're doing things at the end of the school year. But when the kids come home and mom or dad says, "Hey, what did you do at school today?" And they say nothing, which is a very common answer. We tend to think, "Oh, it is just... Oh, they're just kids, they are just kids and just can't remember," etcetera, but that's really not the case. In a lot of cases, there is nothing going on. And so when parents figured out that, okay, I could either do homeschooling. I could send my child to private school. I could go to a charter school, there's a whole lot of the other options there that I can explore and we could actually make this happen.

0:03:15.2 DL: And is that a better experience? Is it a better quality experience? So the topic today about so many schools are not worrying about the quality of what they're doing and they want to start just trying to force parents to get kids back into schools or the same way at the universities, not making a shift in what it is they're doing and just expecting that, oh, well, these students are just gonna come back. But another shift, I think systemically since this is about Deming and education and the system, is that a lot of students during the pandemic didn't go to college and they found out there's some really high paying jobs out there now [chuckle], and you don't need a college degree. And why would I... And since college is attached to debt now, so why would I incur a huge amount of debt and end up with a job that pays less than what I could make if I don't go to college? So that...

0:04:19.5 AS: It's a world turned upside down. It seems like, and one of the questions I had too about this was that, what is the aim of the public education system? Because on the one hand the people who can abandon the public system and do homeschooling or do a charter school or a private school or whatever. Yeah. I mean, they're not gonna worry about those people that can take care of themselves, but majority of people do not have the means to do that. And so it makes me think, what is that aim and how does quality come into play here?

0:04:58.2 DL: Well, another shift that's happening, especially in the United States is that all of a sudden these parents started coming to school board meetings and showing up in droves, and starting to demanding changes. And it's really interesting that the public education system especially is not used to having customers, right. And so they... When I first started doing training in education, especially with talking about Deming principles, etcetera, etcetera, I actually got a lot of pushback, well, we don't have customers and we don't have this. And even just using that word in education kind of still drive some educators crazy. Like I even had people come up to me and say, I got into education, so I wouldn't have to have customers.

[laughter]

0:05:53.9 DL: So that whole thinking, and if you think about a systems diagram from a Deming perspective about inputs into the system, the system itself, and then what the system produces and how that affects, and then the innovation that you get on the upside and that cycle of continually going through that, so much of the education system, especially public education right now is just lagging behind and the longer they wait to get on board and really to understand Deming principles on how to actually transform a system, the longer it's gonna take them to actually sort of catch up with what's happening.

0:06:40.4 AS: And when you talk about that systems diagram, Dr. Deming outlined that in, Out of the Crisis as is one of the places, I remember that, seeing that diagram when I first started studying Deming and it was interesting, but what was very interesting about it was that there was a feedback loop through the customer and the sales and marketing that then came back into the system, and I wonder if that feedback loop has been broken in public education, and as you said, with the parents coming in to the... Give the feedback.

0:07:12.5 DL: Well, I've spent 30 years teaching school districts how to proactively go out and find out what do parents want, and especially what do students want instead of just thinking that, "Oh, I'm just gonna decide and I'm gonna tell you what you want." And you have no other options. So this is... You're just gonna have to put up with it, and that's the way it is. But when you actually go out and it's the same thing that happened with corporations when they started understanding Deming and starting out to actually ask customers what they want. "What do you want in your automobile, or what do you want in your copy machine or... " I remember an executive for Xerox Corporation said that when they met Deming, they thought they had a shelf life of about two years left, or they were gonna go out of business because the Japanese were making and selling copy machines at a profit cheaper than what Xerox could make them. So you don't have to have much math, maybe about a third grade math degree to figure out that if we keep doing what we're doing, we're not gonna be here someday, and I think that the education system is in the same place as well.

0:08:41.7 AS: And when you talk about this idea that quality is the answer, tell us more about what is that answer. How would you describe that answer?

0:08:51.7 DL: Well, we talked a lot about the other in the previous podcast about joy in learning, and when you start concentrating on the quality of what you do and how that affects people, then you get a much different feeling, or end user experience for people. You really think about what's going on with that and following that all the way through. So what are you gonna do in the school system when that child comes home at dinner and mom and dad says, "What did you do at school today?" Are they gonna have an answer for that and are they gonna be excited about it? And if they're all of a sudden really excited about it and say, "Oh, today, we got hit by lightning at science class. It was so awesome studying static electricity and this is what we did and... " Or you don't even have time to ask that question because they're just kinda bubbling over about their experiences and what they did in school that day.

0:09:56.2 AS: Right.

0:09:58.4 DL: That's a different level of quality learning experience. So you think about the purpose again. We have talked about the purpose of education is to create learning experiences for youth in its day or its future in order to add value to society. So is what's happening at school really translating into students being more productive and more capable and being able to go on and to do things at a much higher level? Well, any system that's concentrating on that level of quality, you're not... You're gonna be able to attract students because the word of mouth would just be unbelievable.

0:10:45.2 AS: Right. One of the things that I... One of the fun things about Deming is that you can read the same material and go deeper every time, and one of the things that I started to really go deeper on a while ago was just this idea that in some ways I felt... I didn't really feel or understand it completely, but it was just this obsession that if you could consistently improve quality, it's like you would solve almost every other problem. Now, he's not talking about quality by some objective standard. He's talking about quality in relation to the customer's desires and needs and demands, but if you could continue to improve quality with the customer as the focus, it would solve pretty much everything else and that, I just kind of didn't get. I got the idea when I was younger. Like, change the way you think and systems thinking is up, but this obsession we're just continually improving was something that I just didn't catch. How does that apply to education... And am I right in what I'm saying, first of all? And number two is how do you see that for education as we wrap up on this idea about talking about quality as the answer to the problem?

0:11:56.8 DL: Well, I'll never forget one of the first times I went to Argentina and I was doing a breakout session at some conference that they had there, and they had a lot of educators, both from the university level and from the public schools and staff were in the audience and everything. And so I was just talking out to them about just what you're saying, this idea about continual improvement, and I'll never forget this guy that spoke English pretty well. He said... He just stood up all of a sudden and said, "All you Americans, you're always trying to improve things. Why don't you just leave things alone?"

0:12:35.5 DL: And I was just, I just was just stunned by that. I always thought you came to a conference on improving the quality of education, but you wanna argue for doing nothing. In a system that's clearly failing your country and it, so this deep seated attitude and, and it is a hard thing, continual improvement to think about, oh, I have to continually keep thinking about this. [laughter] Kind of a weird concept when you think about it, right. That you sort of think about. So when you apply it to the education, I remember when I first became a teacher, some, one of the veteran teacher said, "Oh, you're gonna have kind of the... Pretty rough couple of years, maybe three years, the first three years till you get all your lesson plans figured out and all of your tests and everything else. And then after that, it's pretty easy."

[laughter]

0:13:34.9 AS: After that you can coast.

0:13:36.4 DL: Right. And that's a pretty common thing that went on in schools and stuff that... I remember a story, one time, of a university that the students in a sorority or a fraternity, I think it was, had been swiping all of the tests from professors at this university for a period of something like 12 to 15 years. And they finally found this one professor that after like 12 years started reusing some of the tests from 12 years ago. And they, they were so smug that they now had the answers to this guy's test. They'd never been able to... They knew he was gonna repeat at some point, but [laughter] and I think that's a really interesting example of people that are not in a continual improvement, adaptive mode.

0:14:33.0 AS: And I think that, one in, in my kind of wrap up of this to think about the answer to your problem, that quality is the answer to your problem, I think about the inspiration that continual improvement brings. To see yourself bringing more value to your customer, or to your student and developing that and improving that, and testing that, to me is joy in work. So maybe you can wrap this up by summarizing what you feel like the audience should get away from this concept of quality is not your problem, it is the answer to your problem.

0:15:12.4 DL: Well, when you concentrate on that than the quality of... If learning is the aim in a school system, and you're concentrating on how do we create the highest quality learning possible? So then you start to think about, well, how do I become a better teacher? Well, if my mode of operation is, you know, lecture kind of thing, and kids taking notes, and so what am I gonna do? Am I gonna go learn to talk faster so I can cram more stuff in quicker? And that's where neuroscience comes in and tells us no, that you're just gonna put more people to sleep. And, but you might come out of that experience feeling really good, like you actually did something, but did they actually learn something? Was there... Was the quality of their learning better just because you became more efficient at what you did? I mean, you were able to flip through your slides faster in that process... So thinking about the quality of education, you have to think about, well, what does that mean? And what am I gonna do? I wanted students to have maximum ownership in everything that they did. From the time they came in the door till the time they left, we were maximizing their ownership, because what... When you have that control, you also have that learning that goes deep within your brain. And it's not just here today and gone tomorrow.

0:16:50.0 AS: Fantastic. Well, on behalf of everybody at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion, and that concludes another great discussion. I want to remind everybody to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming."People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode of our special Deming in Education series, David and Andrew talk about the difference between "continuous" and "continual" improvement - and how that applies in classrooms.

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 am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is: Should we be continually improving or continuously improving? David, take it away.

0:00:30.6 David Langford: Thanks Andrew. So some people say it's semantics and it doesn't make that much difference to how you think about it. And I think in the last podcast, we were talking about how people have trouble with the idea about continual improvement anyway. But the first person I ever heard really talking about the difference between continual improvement and continuous was Dr. Deming. And not only did he talk about it in his Deming way, he was pretty emphatic about it. And it took me a long time, I'd say 10 years or more, to start to really get it and understand the difference and what that means. But basically the difference is if you have some function of what it is you're trying to do, some program, some process, a manufacturing thing, a classroom or whatever that might be, and you're doing that process over time, continuous improvement means that you're just continuously changing things over and over and over and adapting and moving forward and changing forward. It sounds like a really good idea until you think about it.

0:02:01.5 DL: I don't think it's actually possible to do it unless you're in some kind of a mechanical machine world or maybe artificial intelligence kind of a world where changes are just constantly being made, adaptations and changes moving through. When you're working in systems like education, which is primarily a human system field, and yes, we have computers and technology and things coming into the education system now, but it's still primarily a human system, and my experience is that humans, whether thats students, teachers, parents, whoever, cannot adapt to continuously changing everything. Such like change upon change, upon change, upon change, upon change or sometimes you hear your teachers say, "What's the flavor of the month?" They don't really understand why they're changing anything, they just know that somebody up above is just changing it, then they're just going on with it.

0:03:08.6 DL: Whereas when you have a continual improvement kind of environment, Deming taught us about, you let the system run basically, because you have to understand the data, what is the system producing, and once you understand that data, understand the variation in the system, then you can do a PDSA process and Plan-Do-Study-Act and come up with a small trial method to figure out what could I change to get a significant difference in the system, and then start applying that in a larger and larger scale level. On human systems, those things take time, because it's the psychology of the people in the system, and you have to persuade people that what to do and etcetera, sometimes it can take... And especially in education, it could take years to make a transformation system like that, so people have to learn to, okay, we've gotten to a certain point.

0:04:17.5 DL: We're getting a certain level of quality. And you can measure that, anything you wanna measure that with. You can measure that in attendance records, you could measure that in test scores, you could measure that in happiness of students, you could measure that in happiness of parents or doesn't matter whatever you want. But once you get that baseline data and you start to understand it, and then you have to say to yourself, "Well, am I happy with what's happening now?" I always joke with the teachers, if you're happy and you know it, then clap your hands. You have to get to a state of equilibrium basically. You've changed, and so now you're not happy with the level of quality and you want to see a higher level of quality.

0:05:14.1 AS: So let me try to clarify for the listeners and for myself, the first thing that you're talking about is if you use the word continuously, it implies that you're continuously or constantly changing things. And that's not the objective. The objective is actually to stabilize things to some extent.

0:05:34.4 DL: Change for the sake of change. We're just changing stuff.

0:05:38.6 AS: I wanna see a continuous... Continuously changing systems here. No, that's not what we're after. And then when you mentioned about continually, then you talked about let the system run, the objective is to understand what's the output of the system by letting it run and letting it define itself as to what it's producing and then making a decision, do we take it to the next level, do we take it to or do we leave it at this point and say, "Okay, that's good enough for what we need for the ultimate aim of the system."

0:06:14.3 DL: I find it really interesting in some cases sad and disheartening that you have state systems, especially like in education and state legislators, and they just come up with new rules and regulations, and they have no idea about what the current capacity of the current system is or what the problem is. I'll give you an example. I was working in a district one time and they had an average of 94% attendance rate, I think at the high school, and all of a sudden, the superintendent came out with an edict said that they should be no less than 96%.

0:07:00.0 DL: Well, if you understand systems from a Deming perspective, you actually do want students to stay home at certain times, right? You don't want them coming to school when they're sick, and if you make the parameters so difficult that your life is gonna be terrible if you stay home, now you're gonna have kids come and they're sick, and now you're infecting hundreds and hundreds of kids, and now you got hundreds of kids not coming to school 'cause they're sick, because you are over-emphasizing this. On the other hand, in a continual improvement kind of environment, if you decide that, okay, we can do better, we wanna improve our attendance rate, well, then you have to start studying the quality of what you do, what's causing people not to show up or not to come when they can.

0:08:00.8 DL: Or if sickness is the number one problem, what can we do about it? I once worked with a school in Brazil, and they went to work on their attendance rate, found out that a lot of it had to do a sickness and everything else, so they changed their whole system, they put in more wash stations throughout the entire school. They set up all kinds of times for kids to come in and they wash their hands, and every time they came in from recess or interacting, they had a process where they went through the wash hands, they had signs up with flow charts that said, "This is how you wash your hands." There's actually a process to that or through that. Well, their sickness rate just went down to practically nothing because they put in processes and methods and stabilize the system at a much higher level, and so then most of the kids being absent due to sickness, were the new students that were coming in, and so it would take them some time to get figured out, "Oh, this is what we do around here, and this is why we do it, and everything." Change the system, you get a different result. Instead of what we've been taught to do is leave the system alone and then manage the dysfunction that it produces.

0:09:24.2 AS: And I think that Dr. Deming realized that you have limited resources.

0:09:30.3 DL: Yes.

0:09:30.9 AS: And so you've got to prioritize, and once you've gotten something to a point... And he also realized there's no perfection and there's no reason to go towards perfection, if that's not serving the ultimate customer. I was also thinking about... I was thinking about a way for me to think about this, so I wanna propose this and see what you think, David. So if it's continuously improving, when you say continuously, it means you're kind of demanding constant change, so you could think of the person that the boss saying, "Don't just stand there, do something." And when it comes to continually improving, you're trying to let the system run, make the decision if you're gonna go to the next level of quality, and therefore the person at the top is saying, "Don't just do something stand there."

0:10:21.4 DL: Yeah.

0:10:23.5 AS: Perfect.

0:10:24.3 DL: Think, study the system, start to understand what's going on, what are you actually trying to do, and do you really understand. We're talking about attendance, but do you really understand why students don't wanna come to school, and then are you actually working on those things or you just, "We are gonna punish them if they don't come to school. That's what we'll do." And so two tardies equals an absence and four absences equals this and 12 absences, you lose credit, and so schools put in the layers upon layers upon layers of these punishments and the crazy thing is, it doesn't work, never has worked. If it worked, we wouldn't have any students missing school, because we have these wonderful systems that prevent kids from missing school at all. What do you do as different? We were talking about quality as the answer to your problem, well, when you have a much higher level of quality experience going on in the classroom, and that's happening in every single classroom with every single teacher, and the joy level is really high, you actually have the opposite problem with attendance, you're actually encouraging people to stay home when they are sick, not to come. You actually tell parents, "Look, I know they're really excited," but that's a whole different problem to have, than to think all we gotta coerce these kids into coming and punish them into compliance and reward them into things.

0:12:04.6 DL: There is a school district that set up... I think they're still doing it today. Even set up a reward, the local car dealer said that for any child that is not... Doesn't miss a day of school for 12 years they get a new car. Again, it sounds like a great idea till you think about it, and I think the first year that I saw they filmed it and it was on the local news, and everybody's all excited, and local businesses are supporting education and isn't this great? And isn't this wonderful? Only problem was there were about 10 kids that had perfect attendance for 12 years.

[laughter]

0:12:46.4 DL: And the guy at the car dealership says, "Woah, woah, wait a minute, I'm not donating 10 cars." So now they've got a whole different promise so what they do, well, they gave all 10 of these students a car key and then you went out and you got in a new car, and if yours started, then you were the one that got the car. So, the TV station films the one kid that and their parents and oh, the excitement isn't as great and that. When in the background, you see nine other students...

0:13:20.6 AS: Nine disappointed.

0:13:21.9 DL: Mad, disappointed, kicking themselves, "Stupid, stupid, stupid. I did all that effort and everything else came to school when I was sick and everything else for this vague promise." But none of that's gonna change the system because when you stop doing all that stuff, the system goes right back to what it was designed to do.

0:13:45.7 AS: Yeah.

0:13:47.0 DL: What it was created to do. And that's what Deming's talking about. Once you understand that, okay, now let's go about figuring out what are we gonna do about this, what do we wanna change? And is and what you're saying, too, is attendance your number one problem? And sometimes I'll say that it's administrators in schools and say, "Well, it's a big problem around here. We know it's a big problem." Well, okay, what are all your other big problems?

[laughter]

0:14:16.8 DL: And is this the number one thing? And is this interrelated with everything else you're doing, right?

0:14:23.7 AS: Yeah.

0:14:24.2 DL: And maybe the number one problem is the actual learning experiences in classrooms not engaging, and not fun, not interesting, not relevant, not timely, right?

0:14:37.7 AS: Yep.

0:14:38.5 DL: And sometimes I'll have administrators say, "Well, yeah, but we don't wanna work on that. That's hard."

0:14:44.9 AS: Yeah.

0:14:46.3 DL: It is a lot easier just to have a new car for showing up to school on time.

0:14:51.0 AS: Yeah, we'll figure that out when we get to the end of the year. David, you've reminded me of a story that I tell about when I was the head of research at a research operation here in Bangkok. And we got a new boss that came in and he came in from outside of Thailand, and he basically went to one of our first meetings in the morning. We met every morning at 7:00 AM to present to our sales force. And one of the analysts on my team came in a little bit late, maybe 15 minutes late, and my new boss pulled me aside and he says, "I do not accept people coming in late for meetings, and I want action." And I said to him, "That guy was up until 1:00 AM last night working on what he had to present to the clients today." And so it was my decision as a manager to not go off on the fact that he was 15 minutes late.

0:15:47.7 AS: Now, if you tell me that we have to do that, I'm just telling you, you're gonna lose all that extra joy that he had. And he was determined to work until 1:00 AM to get it done. But you'll find him saying, "Okay, I'll leave at 5:10 also." And so, I couldn't really get my boss to understand that, but I saw that part of my objective was to get the maximum out of what was potential that was there. So, you know, that was just a story that happened in my life.

0:16:19.3 DL: Yeah, you reminded me the first time I got the chance to work at a whole school level. The superintendent said, "Well, we have a tardy problem, you know kids being late to classes." And so we went to work on the tardy problem. And it's really funny because when I did some work in Australia and I mentioned to them that tardy problem, they didn't even know what a tardy was. You mean I said, "Well, it's students being late to classes. It's a big problem in the US and we work on it and we do all those kind of stuff." And I said, "Don't you have that problem here?" And they said, "You mean the teachers being late?"

[laughter]

0:16:58.8 DL: That whole different worlds and whole different systems going on. But I played all kinds of games trying to figure out this whole tardy system. And I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna go back and ask the students, what do you think is the number one... What's the number one reason that people are tardy that are late to class?"

0:17:18.0 AS: And they said it's boring as hell.

0:17:20.6 DL: Well, the number one thing came back, almost 80% of students said classes don't start on time. And I thought, "That's fascinating." Because you could put a whole group of teachers in a room for a month and just say, "What are all the reasons that students are late?" And they're not gonna come up with, "Classes don't start on time."

0:17:42.7 AS: Definitely not. Definitely not.

0:17:43.8 DL: The second highest thing was even if it does start on time, it's boring. It's not relevant, it's not boring or it's not... So if you think of it from their perspective, am I gonna put in effort, get to school on time for something that is not gonna start on time anyway? And I'll always ask teachers, I say, "What do you do in the first 10 minutes of class?" Well, I'm passing out papers and taking roll, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. That's what students are talking about. Nothing towards learning is actually taking place, right? Then that system. So if you really wanna make an impact on the tardy system, all right, teach everybody how to start classes immediately, and then make sure that it's immediately relevant, interesting...

0:18:30.8 AS: With value.

0:18:31.5 DL: And engaging. And guess what? You're not gonna have a tardy problem, and you're not gonna have to have a tardy czar in the front office counting tardies. And you're not gonna have to have penalties and rewards and all the other systems that go with that. That kind of bring us back to our topic today is about continuous improvement or continual improvement. You have to get to a point where you start to say, "Okay, our tardies system is not working. Therefore we need a continual improvement. We need a PDSA cycle, study this system to figure out what we can learn. Then we'll make a change, then we'll let it run and maybe we'll let it run forever. Maybe we'll reach a point where we say we think good is good enough." With a system like that, I can put up with somebody. I remember I told the teachers at one time that, "Okay, at this school there's no such thing as a tardy anymore."

0:19:33.7 DL: And somebody said, "Well, what do we do if somebody's late?" And another teacher said, "Maybe we should just get them caught up." Hey, oh, I see your late and oh, let's get you caught up. Instead of spending time berating them and putting tardy marks and all these kinds of stuff in books and sending it to the front office and all the data and everything else. Hey, you must have missed something really great, right? So let's spend some time get you caught up with this. And so you change this system, change your attitude, change your system, and you're gonna get a different result. Rather than what we taught to do is we try to manipulate the system.

0:20:17.3 AS: Yeah. And unlike in the world of business, you can't force compliance, you can't force people to buy your products, it's voluntary exchange. So I wanna just wrap up and review what you've talked about. So first thing is you talked about the fact that education is, it's a human system. And human systems can't adapt to continuous change. And that's where you're highlighting to us the idea of it's not about continuous change because continuously changing implies that you're changing almost for the sake of change, and that's where I said, don't just stand there, do something. Instead, what you're telling us is focus on continual improvement. And let the system run, understand that there's times that you're gonna wanna just leave it where is and focus in another area. Is there anything that you would add as we wrap up?

0:21:21.3 DL: No, it's absolutely true. You know, we talk a lot about systems and everything else, but I think one of the breakthroughs that I had was when I started this process with students is to get students to think about, you are your own system, you are the top of your system, right? And so if you wanna see a different result in what you're doing, you have to think of yourself in the very same way. I can do a PDSA cycle on why am I habitually late in morning? Okay.

0:21:50.7 AS: That would be a learning process.

0:21:51.8 DL: To use Deming to go through that process and change myself within that and get a different result. And what would that be like?

0:22:01.4 AS: Yeah. And I think for young people, as I always say, they say to me, I have a problem waking up early. I said, you probably have a problem of going to sleep early. [laughter] Alright, well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for our discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz. And I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, that is, people are entitled to joy in work.

David and Andrew's discussion of how using Deming in the classroom not only inspires achievement it also creates collaboration among excited students.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01.9 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, we continue our series of Deming in Education with David P. Langford where we explore Deming's thinking to create joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help everyone get the most out of learning. Today's topic is "By what method?" David, take it away.

0:00:28.9 David Langford: Great. So in previous broadcasts, we've talked a lot about deadlines and processes, and operational definitions and quality standards and all kinds of things like that. So today I wanted to talk about, "By what method?" Dr. Deming tattooed that on my forehead, because so many times people would propose things to him and he would say, "By what method?" in his Deming voice. It's all about the method of what it is you're going to do. So what I learned to do is, instead of trying to calculate, "Is this a 92 or an 88 or 88.1?" and then I got the student upset with me, and then because I gave them an 89, I messed up their GPA, and now, so now they're not gonna get a scholarship, and now Mom and Dad is mad at me and it just goes on and on and on. And so, instead of trying to improve that process, I started working on a method to completely get out of it, and especially today, especially in K-12, lots of schools are trying to go to what they call standards-based grading, where they want all students to achieve, but unless... If you start applying a new theory like that, but you keep it in the old system for the last several hundred years, you're gonna have problems.

0:02:08.0 DL: So I had to figure out how can I do that? What can I do? Well, over time it slowly evolved into a process where if somebody turned in an assignment and it met or exceeded the standard for the assignment, then I started to say, "Well, you got that one", to kids and students. Well, that finally, I started to realize, well, why can't that just be my grade book? Either you got a one, which signifies that on this assignment, you did it to standard and you did everything required and you got a one, or it's just blank. If it's just blank, it means you still have to keep working on it to get a one.

0:02:57.9 AS: Just to clarify that. When you say met or exceeded, that's one statement, that's not saying met is one thing and exceeded is another. Is that correct?

0:03:06.3 DL: That's right.

0:03:07.2 AS: Okay.

0:03:07.3 DL: Because yes, we have a quality standard with this assignment, but I may be really interested in this, and so I did a whole bunch more than was required. Right? And so, I still wanna recognize that with students, "Look at, look at this, look what this. You did this and you went above and beyond the standard." Right?

0:03:27.8 AS: Right.

0:03:28.3 DL: So you still get a one for doing that, and I'm not gonna take away your desire to go above the standard by giving you A+++ or all kinds of games that teachers play. You got that one, which is awesome, and the rest is just joy and learning for you. Or if you went above the standard, okay, I might give you a chance to share what you did with the rest of class.

0:03:58.6 AS: That's what I was just thinking about. Yeah.

0:04:01.8 DL: Yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna ask you, "Would you be willing to share this?" I'd say, 99% of the time, kids said, "Yeah, yeah, I'd be glad to share this." And I would say the same thing to them. "Okay, but when you share what you did and the level you took this to, I want you to describe by what method did you do that."

0:04:23.2 DL: And it was so fascinating because students would say, "You know, this is what I did, and this is my project, and this how it turned out, and I'm really proud of it and everything... " Okay, by what method did you do that? "Well, I set aside 10 minutes every day just to work on this project." And amazingly, you'd see other students in the class go, "Oh, that's how they did that. They weren't just smart." Right? Because the traditional system pegs people like that. You got smart kids and the not so smart kids, right? And kids start to learn, "Well, she's just a lot smarter. So that's why she could do that." No, she had a method. Right? She may be smart too, she may have a preponderance of neurons in that part of her brain that just helps her be really good in that area. I also bet that person had a method that got him to that level, and if I give them a chance to share that method, other people can learn from that.

0:05:29.5 AS: Can I go back? Just take a step back and talk about when Dr. Deming said, "By what method?" Let's just talk briefly about what he meant by that, because sometimes, you know, we have scrutiny, let's say in management, in companies, by saying, "I don't want you to hit your goal by doing something unethical. You've gotta live up to our values. So if that's your method, don't do it. But any other method, I don't care." Right? So we oftentimes think "by what method" only applied maybe to the ethical behavior of an employee, but why is Deming saying, "By what method?"

0:06:05.6 DL: Well, you have the same thing in education. Why do we have cheating in education? And then, teachers start spending all their time trying to catch the cheaters, right? So they come up with all tricks and even when taking SAT tests and national tests, right, "We have to space them four feet apart and we have to do this, and we have to have it timed, and you have to have to work this, because we have to catch the cheaters, and that's our job because we think are our job's inspectors", right? Well, when you start to take all of that out and saying, "Well, no, that's not my job. My job is to set up the environment and the system in such a way that you can achieve, and if you don't get it to the level I want you to get to, what's gonna happen, well you're gonna get help". Novel idea. And in some cases, you're gonna get a lot of help and it's gonna be pretty intense feedback that it turns out, in neuroscience, that in order for you to switch on basic, your learning genes, you need intense and immediate feedback on stuff. So the quicker I can get you feedback on stuff, the more likely are, you're gonna change it and you're gonna make it.

0:07:25.3 DL: I never forget, my son was in high school in an honors English class, and he worked at the beginning of the school year to write this really difficult 15, 20 page paper that they were required to do and everything else. Well, he didn't get it back 'til the following February, after he'd written it in September. And to the teacher's credit, she had 130, 15, 20 page papers to get through, but by the time he got his paper back, I remember him bringing it home and he said, "Yeah, I don't even know what we were doing or why we even wrote this thing." So the feedback really wasn't useful because it wasn't immediate and it wasn't intense, and getting into that point. So, I wanna get back to "by what method are you gonna track this performance" because as you work through, and that's where the idea about the ones emerged, and it emerged with students where they said, "Oh, that's an easy one," they had lots of good metaphors like, "Did you get that one?" And, "Oh, that's an easy one." And "What happens if you didn't get that one?" Well, you can go to somebody who did get their one. Maybe somebody turned theirs in early, and they got a one that met or exceeded the standard... This would be an awesome person for you to go to and get feedback from them.

0:08:52.0 DL: So all of a sudden I was doubling and tripling and quadrupling the number of teachers in the classrooms, because all of these students could help other students if they want to. You don't have to, but if you want to share, share your information. Now why can't can you share your information about how you mastered something or achieved at a high level? Because it's not working to your detriment. See? And the fact that I got my one, and then you work to get your one, is not hurting me at all. I am still, I still aced this, I still got it all correct, whereas...

0:09:34.2 AS: So you're taking a competition that people are, and the ranking and the striving, and the idea that there's only gonna be five As in this class type of thing, and trying to make it more cooperative. Let me ask you a question about the zeroes and one. For the typical teacher or professor out there, are they able to use zeroes and one? Or are they forced to do A, B, C, D, F?

0:10:02.7 DL: Well, some of that goes into what kind of learning management systems do they have in place and does that fit? Does a round peg fit in a square hole? And how could you do that? And lots of methods to make it happen, if you wanna do that.

0:10:21.8 AS: You get a lot of objections, I'm sure, from people saying, "No, you have to have that competition or else people are just gonna, the students are just gonna be lazy and they're not gonna be excited, and you gotta motivate them through this competition and internal competition in the classroom" and all that, whereas when you...

0:10:38.1 DL: Creating that artificial competition just causes more students to quit, give up, do poor quality work because they already know they can't compete with these top level kids that are in the class, so why would I even try?

0:10:53.2 AS: I'm just thinking, I'm just writing down the idea of we want to inspire them to learn, not pound them or rank them into learning.

0:11:05.0 DL: Or do things to try to motivate them to get it to that level. All true motivation is internal, and unless you're creating systems that enable the individuals to tap into that, you're not gonna motivate people. And students are gonna get away... You could punish them. You could do all kinds of things. I read an article just recently, teacher was pontificating, "Should I finally get rid of depriving students of recess to get them to do work?"

0:11:42.8 DL: I think Dagwood in the cartoons one time said, "That's a great idea 'til you think about it." That, here you have, especially at an elementary level, kids that desperately need to get out and run around and get the cerebral fluids going up and down their spinal column, and come back with a renewed sense of energy. Right? And to attack stuff.

0:12:10.1 AS: It's exactly what they need.

0:12:13.2 DL: Right. Exactly what we need, but no, I'm gonna deprive you of that and force you to stay in during recess and now you're gonna be tired and upset, etcetera. And now I got that to deal with on the other side. You just compound your problems over and over, and probably 94% of the reason that they didn't get the work done is the fault of the teacher and the system to begin with.

0:12:37.4 AS: And coming back to the idea of the teacher that goes, "Oh, David, so what now, I have to inspire my students?"

0:12:46.2 DL: Well, that's what... Books have been written on that, and that's been going on for years and years and years. But the thing is, students are already inspired. So, the only thing you can do by trying inspirational methods is de-motivate them to give up. Right? And even... I remember having students come into my class on the first day of school, and just three or four of them just put their heads in their desk and not even look up, and it was hard for me to start to believe, "Oh yeah, these guys are inspired." But if you go back in their history, and these were high school kids, well, for the last 10 years, what, they've been beaten down by grading systems and told they can't do stuff and punished into compliance and rewarded and punished and over and over and over... "It's just a whole lot better just to put my head down and pretend to go to sleep and endure this rather than actually try to participate." So when you get to that kind of a situation, you have to think about, "Alright, I have to change this situation," and watch how behavior changes, rather than what most educators even today are taught. They basically leave the situation alone and try to punish people into compliance with that.

0:14:10.1 AS: Yeah, so for the listeners out there, think about it. Where in your life are you trying to punish or browbeat compliance, versus inspiring excellence? And I'm thinking myself, David, about my challenge I faced with my mother and trying to figure out how to keep her healthy at 84. And, yeah, recently it's been a bit of browbeating, and you've made me think. And I think that this discussion helps all the listeners think about that. I want to just go back to the topic and I wanna try to summarize and see if you can bring what you want the takeaways to be. The topic of today's discussion is, "By What Method?" What are the key takeaways that you want the audience to get as we wrap up?

0:14:56.5 DL: Well, if I think about Deming talking about the evils of grading systems, so if I'm not gonna do that by what method am I gonna do? As a teacher I do have to track progress and I do have to know that people are achieving, etcetera. So by what method am I gonna do that? And what I'm describing is not necessarily the only method, it's the method that I came up with the help of my students over many, many years. And that enabled for almost every student to get an A. And as a high school teacher I saw about 135 kids a day in about six different class periods. And before I met Deming, when I looked back at the grades that I had, the highest number of As I ever got was about 10-15% of students in that process. And when I went to this method I was getting, out of 135 kids, one year I got 133 kids that all had As. And I didn't, it wasn't like we got smarter kids. [chuckle] I got a new method by which students could get there. And change the method, you get a different behavior, and you get a different result.

0:16:14.6 AS: Great. So David, thanks for your contributions and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.

In this episode, David and Andrew continue to talk about the thorny problem of tracking student progress - grading - and how to remove it from the classroom. 

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we continue our series of Deming in Education with David P. Langford, where we explore Deming thinking to create joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help everyone get the most out of learning. Today's topic is a continuation of the discussion on tracking progress in learning. David, take it away.

0:00:34.4 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew, it's great to be back again. In the previous podcast, we were discussing tracking learning and the typical way to track learning is grading people; A, B, C, D, and F, and Deming was very adamant that we could significantly improve the education system if we just stopped grading people. So, in my work with education over the last 30 years, a lot of educators get that, and they don't like grading and they've never liked having to do it and being the final judge. And then there's another whole group that thinks it's their right to judge people and give them a grade about what they could do. So, I mentioned in one of the earlier broadcasts that Deming said, "Why would I wanna judge somebody today when I don't know who's gonna turn out to be great in the future?" So I wouldn't wanna do anything that's gonna limit them.

0:01:33.2 DL: So as a teacher myself, having to think through that and having to actually work inside of a grading system and try to figure out what you could do, I think you first have to go through the thought process; is it possible for everyone in a class, for instance, to achieve. And if you say to yourself, "No, it's not possible." I had some students that said, "It's just not possible," they can't do it, you're probably never gonna get there. But if you start to say, "if it was possible, what would we have to change in the system in order to optimize everybody getting to that point?" Well, it always turns out that through neural science, every educator, even parents, will tell you that everybody learns at a different rate. You give somebody a complex problem or something somebody might be able to answer that in three seconds, and other people it might take them a very long time, but they could eventually get it, it just might take a lot longer for you to get there. And so, we sort of truncate that in education, and we talked about, last time, about deadlines and what deadlines mean, and those are mostly for the person managing the class to keep the class moving, right?

0:02:57.1 DL: Because if I just sort of make it open-ended and say, "Okay, well, everybody has to get to a certain level of performance, and we'll just keep it open until you get there," most teachers will tell you it would just be chaos, so the idea of changing a deadline to a target date, so... Yes, here's what you need to know and learn, or the process of what you need to go through. And our target date for you to finish this is this Friday, so then we run into the problem, well, what happens if somebody doesn't do it, or they don't do it at all, right? Well, in the current systems, if somebody doesn't do it at all, some teachers actually like that, 'cause then you don't have to grade people, you just give them a zero, right? And you go on. But if you think about, "no, my job is to optimize that child's performance." So if you didn't get it done, then we're gonna have a conversation. "How quickly can you get it done? When can I expect to see this?" That you're not getting off the hook, so to speak. I observed this with high school classes I was teaching when I first met Deming, and students would just tell me, "just give me a C," or "just give me a C or a D or something", and sometimes they would be basketball players or something like that, and they'd say, "Well, I just need a D so I can play basketball."

0:04:29.6 DL: "So that's all I really want. What do I have to do to get a D?" [chuckle] So all this thinking theory comes into play when you think about, "Okay, well, how do I have to change the system?" So if I change the system to one in which I say, "Well, there is no such thing as sub-level of poor performance." [chuckle] That make sense?

0:04:54.2 AS: [chuckle] No. What does that mean?

0:04:57.2 DL: I want everybody to do A-level type work, so if I'm gonna try to get everybody as close as I can to that, then we're gonna have to define that, and Deming would call that an operational definition. So it has to be very clear to everyone; what do you have to do to get to this level of performance? And then if people understand clearly what that operational definition is, I called it a quality standard; here's the quality standard for this, and I learned over a period of time to always ask students, "If you were to do this really well, what would it be like? Or what would it look like?" And boy, they're really strict on it, and they were often more strict than I. But first getting their input also, I got their buy-in on it, they said, "Well, it should be this and it should be... The writing should be clear." "Well, what does that mean? Writing should be clear?" So we're gonna have to operationally define that and that process could take a while. But Deming talked a lot about that prevention is the key to quality, so I'm probably gonna spend more time up front when we have an assignment, or task to be done, or a project, or whatever you wanna call it, and defining the standard for quality, because as we go through the process, I basically want people to self-evaluate themselves, right? And whenever they...

0:06:35.6 DL: Yes, we have a target date that we're gonna need to get this in by Friday to stay on our overall plan for the whole quarter semester, whatever it might be, so I'm gonna have to share that with them also. Right? 'Cause there's ramifications if we don't get this done by Friday, that's gonna cause us to fall behind as a whole class. If we keep on that track, we're gonna get further and further behind. So this thinking all comes into play because you also have to understand special and common cause variation that Deming talked about, and in other broadcasts we'll get much deeper into what that means statistically in education. But briefly, so here I have my target date on Friday, and then the projects come in, then I have to take a look as a teacher, do I have common cause variation with that, meaning that probably 90... Deming talked about 90%, 94% of the students all attempted to do something. And then I have special cause variation, so I have some kids that didn't do it at all, or they did it so poorly that they're gonna need special help.

0:07:50.2 DL: That's what Deming talked about. They don't need more rating and ranking, it's not gonna do any good. They need special help, which means I'm gonna have to spend time with them one-on-one and go through, well, What didn't you understand? And what can we do and how can I help you? And so and so forth. That's gonna take my time. Then I have the common cause variation, which is that 94% of students who didn't make an attempt. I wanna take a look at all of that work and start to say, Okay, are there common cause problems within that? So probably most of the reasons that you're getting common cause variation or problems from a whole classroom of students has to do with your process as a teacher. [chuckle]

0:08:35.7 AS: Interesting, it makes me think about delivery of products in a company.

0:08:42.8 DL: Yeah, it's the same principle. Same principle.

0:08:42.9 AS: Yeah, you've got an objective that you wanna deliver this exactly two hours after you've packaged it in the warehouse or whatever, you want it to arrive, but there's a lot of different factors. But let's say you set a target time based upon the location that you're delivering to, and in the queue of where that is, but you've set an approximate time and your objective is to try to hit as closely to that time. Now, many people may say, Oh no, actually your objective is to hit earlier. But not really, I think to make it a really robust system, you need to be really accurate. And so when I think about it with education, I would say that from a... You want everybody to submit at a certain time, but you're gonna have a small number of people that are just super stars, they're gonna submit early, and majority of people that there's gonna be this long tail of submitting late.

0:09:32.2 DL: So you can have special cause variation on the high achieving end in education, and you can have special cause variation on the lower end, not cheating. And both of those you wanna handle it as special causes. You remind me of... I had a college professor one time that very clearly told us all, "Do not hand anything in before it's due, even if you're finished." And I went up to talk to him afterwards. I said, "Why do you tell people to do that?" And he said, "Well, you just give me more time to grade your work."

0:10:08.7 AS: [laughter]

0:10:09.4 DL: "And I will find something wrong with it." So it's like inspectors in a house, if your job is to be an inspector, that's what you're gonna do. You're gonna find something wrong. Otherwise, why do we have you.

0:10:22.7 AS: Yeah. "I didn't find anything there. I didn't find anything there." What are you doing?

0:10:26.2 DL: Yeah. Why do we need you then? Right. So, I want to get back to this process of, Yes, you have a target date, etcetera. So if I have common cause variation and a large percentage of the students are not meeting the target date and hitting the target standard for that, that's probably a systems problem, a common cause problem. And when you go back and you ask students why, Why is your work not meeting the standard? It could be internal forces, outside forces, there could be all kinds of things like that, that... Maybe the common thing is, Well, I didn't have enough time. Alright, then, where's your time going? What are you doing with your time? We can track that. We can figure that out, etcetera. And you may be right, the task that I'm giving this group actually requires much more time, so in my process upfront, if I'm going to the students and saying, Okay, here's the quality standard for this assignment, how much time do you think you're gonna need to get your work to this standard and turn that in? And so I created a tool for doing that, called the Loss function to figure out, and I got that from the Taguchi loss function and Deming.

0:11:55.0 DL: And I'd just ask students, How many days is it gonna take you to get it to this level? And that was also fascinating too, because many, many times they would take a look at everything that needs to be done, look at all of the other things that they need to do, and they would set a timeline shorter than what I would have done. So I'm actually improving the quality of all the work and shortening the timeline at the same time, which is gonna enable me to move kids to a higher and higher level than ever thought possible before in the same process, simply by asking them. And some things, yes, it might be shorter and some things it might be a bit longer. But I'd rather err on the side of a bit longer and have more students get to an A-level or a quality standard for this than do the opposite process, just arbitrarily set a due date and then grade all of the people performances that comes in. So if we get to the target date, and I look at a child's work. I'm looking at it, I'm not grading it, I'm looking at it to see, does it meet or exceed the standard for this assignment? If it meets or exceeds. Great, [chuckle] right.

0:13:16.2 AS: Yep.

0:13:16.7 DL: And then we can talk about you know how do we put that in a marking book or whatever it might be. What if it doesn't meet or exceed I asked Deming this question, because he taught at New York University, I said, What do you do when you get papers in, and clearly it's not to the standard that you think it should be. He said, Well, I have a conversation with them. I teach, a very, very strange practice, right?

0:13:42.6 AS: Yeah.

0:13:43.7 DL: I'd go back to them, I start to say, Well, I need more explanation about this, or I don't think this is quite right, and I think if you corrected this, you might be right or this, and then they get time to correct that and make it right. It turns out psychologically, which is part of Deming's profound knowledge right... Psychologically, this has huge impact, the power that if I didn't quite get there in the time that I was supposed to get there, I can go back and fix it. I can do it, yeah because...

0:14:14.6 AS: Welcome to the real world.

0:14:16.6 DL: Yes, because my job is to make sure you learn this. Right. Not to play some grading game or... Time game, right? My job is, you see that you learn this material and basically remember it for the rest of your life.

0:14:30.9 AS: Yep. So in the last couple of minutes, let's try to wrap up what we've learned, what we've discussed, I just think about some of the things that I wrote down while you were talking... Right? You made me think like, Okay, the goal of the system of education is to help each kid optimize their learning rather than just a classroom or a teacher optimizing their job. The second thing is, we talked about that you can let go of deadlines, and once you do that, you need to set better maybe operating, operational definitions or what you call quality standards, to more clearly design what it is or define what it is, is a good outcome this is the book, it's called Tom Sawyer. And these are the things that I want you to get out of it, or you internally, or as you said, you can go to the students and talk about what you want out of it, and then special help. The other thing you said is there's special help or special causes where we have someone, for instance, that's struggling, needs special focus, not rating and degrading them with that. What else would you add to the summary of the learnings from that.

0:15:58.0 DL: When you hold everyone to a high standard, you're actually improving performance for the whole system and for the whole standard for everybody and then what people quickly learn is that... Well, if I turn something in on the due date, just because I wanna turn it in on that date, what's gonna happen to me? One, I'm just gonna get a whole bunch of feedback and I'm gonna have to fix it, and now I have twice as much work to do, because now we're going on to the next thing that I need to be working on, and I have to get this fixed up. So what you're teaching people is try to do it right the first time, build quality into your processes, and that was partly my job as a teacher too, is to teach them how to do that, so they get closer and closer and closer to that target date and so they always feel gratified. And in doing that, basically, you can get to a point where almost everyone in your class is getting an A or what we would call A-quality work, right? And when that happens, you have joy in learning, and you have it on a massive scale because everybody's very happy and so...

0:17:13.6 AS: That's great, I love that. And the other thing I was just thinking about is you said something really kind of mind-blowing right at the end, and that was the idea of once you start working with someone and you start... You know you forget about the deadline, like what if we let go of the deadline I can imagine parents thinking that, but what you just said is, you open up a whole new world to this kid who may have been just always struggling with this deadline, and instead you're saying, I want your contribution, no matter what the deadline says, and that... Then as you said, opens up a whole new world for that student to think, Wow, okay, this is different, now I really wanna contribute and so.

0:17:58.1 DL: Well, it's that you... Some people think that maybe this is semantics, etcetera, but by not using the word deadline and I change that to a target date... Makes much more sense. This is the target date. Did I hit the target date? Yes, great. I have nothing to worry about and my work meets or exceeds the standard. Awesome, great. You have nothing to worry about, right? I didn't meet the target date, okay, I got some worries, I gotta get this fixed up, or it didn't meet the standard, Oh, I gotta get this fixed up. So anyway, my goal is to get them to have that joy in learning, because if you think about a student that sort of slopped through it and didn't do a good job and is continually getting Cs, Ds and Fs on things, there's not much joy in that right, right?

0:18:52.7 AS: Definitely. Definitely.

0:18:52.8 DL: You want people to feel really proud of the work Deming talked about that too. Pride of workmanship.

0:18:58.1 AS: And ranking doubles down on that unhappiness feeling that they're feeling right then.

0:19:02.7 DL: Absolutely.

0:19:04.9 AS: So, David, thanks for your contribution, and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.

David and Andrew continue their discussion on how to track student progress when you don't use grades or other conventional methods.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we continue our series of Deming in Education with David P. Langford, where we explore Deming thinking to create joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help everyone get the most out of learning. Today's topic is a continuation of the discussion on tracking progress in learning. David, take it away.

0:00:34.4 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew, it's great to be back again. In the previous podcast, we were discussing tracking learning and the typical way to track learning is grading people; A, B, C, D, and F, and Deming was very adamant that we could significantly improve the education system if we just stopped grading people. So, in my work with education over the last 30 years, a lot of educators get that, and they don't like grading and they've never liked having to do it and being the final judge. And then there's another whole group that thinks it's their right to judge people and give them a grade about what they could do. So, I mentioned in one of the earlier broadcasts that Deming said, "Why would I wanna judge somebody today when I don't know who's gonna turn out to be great in the future?" So I wouldn't wanna do anything that's gonna limit them.

0:01:33.2 DL: So as a teacher myself, having to think through that and having to actually work inside of a grading system and try to figure out what you could do, I think you first have to go through the thought process; is it possible for everyone in a class, for instance, to achieve. And if you say to yourself, "No, it's not possible." I had some students that said, "It's just not possible," they can't do it, you're probably never gonna get there. But if you start to say, "if it was possible, what would we have to change in the system in order to optimize everybody getting to that point?" Well, it always turns out that through neural science, every educator, even parents, will tell you that everybody learns at a different rate. You give somebody a complex problem or something somebody might be able to answer that in three seconds, and other people it might take them a very long time, but they could eventually get it, it just might take a lot longer for you to get there. And so, we sort of truncate that in education, and we talked about, last time, about deadlines and what deadlines mean, and those are mostly for the person managing the class to keep the class moving, right?

0:02:57.1 DL: Because if I just sort of make it open-ended and say, "Okay, well, everybody has to get to a certain level of performance, and we'll just keep it open until you get there," most teachers will tell you it would just be chaos, so the idea of changing a deadline to a target date, so... Yes, here's what you need to know and learn, or the process of what you need to go through. And our target date for you to finish this is this Friday, so then we run into the problem, well, what happens if somebody doesn't do it, or they don't do it at all, right? Well, in the current systems, if somebody doesn't do it at all, some teachers actually like that, 'cause then you don't have to grade people, you just give them a zero, right? And you go on. But if you think about, "no, my job is to optimize that child's performance." So if you didn't get it done, then we're gonna have a conversation. "How quickly can you get it done? When can I expect to see this?" That you're not getting off the hook, so to speak. I observed this with high school classes I was teaching when I first met Deming, and students would just tell me, "just give me a C," or "just give me a C or a D or something", and sometimes they would be basketball players or something like that, and they'd say, "Well, I just need a D so I can play basketball."

0:04:29.6 DL: "So that's all I really want. What do I have to do to get a D?" [chuckle] So all this thinking theory comes into play when you think about, "Okay, well, how do I have to change the system?" So if I change the system to one in which I say, "Well, there is no such thing as sub-level of poor performance." [chuckle] That make sense?

0:04:54.2 AS: [chuckle] No. What does that mean?

0:04:57.2 DL: I want everybody to do A-level type work, so if I'm gonna try to get everybody as close as I can to that, then we're gonna have to define that, and Deming would call that an operational definition. So it has to be very clear to everyone; what do you have to do to get to this level of performance? And then if people understand clearly what that operational definition is, I called it a quality standard; here's the quality standard for this, and I learned over a period of time to always ask students, "If you were to do this really well, what would it be like? Or what would it look like?" And boy, they're really strict on it, and they were often more strict than I. But first getting their input also, I got their buy-in on it, they said, "Well, it should be this and it should be... The writing should be clear." "Well, what does that mean? Writing should be clear?" So we're gonna have to operationally define that and that process could take a while. But Deming talked a lot about that prevention is the key to quality, so I'm probably gonna spend more time up front when we have an assignment, or task to be done, or a project, or whatever you wanna call it, and defining the standard for quality, because as we go through the process, I basically want people to self-evaluate themselves, right? And whenever they...

0:06:35.6 DL: Yes, we have a target date that we're gonna need to get this in by Friday to stay on our overall plan for the whole quarter semester, whatever it might be, so I'm gonna have to share that with them also. Right? 'Cause there's ramifications if we don't get this done by Friday, that's gonna cause us to fall behind as a whole class. If we keep on that track, we're gonna get further and further behind. So this thinking all comes into play because you also have to understand special and common cause variation that Deming talked about, and in other broadcasts we'll get much deeper into what that means statistically in education. But briefly, so here I have my target date on Friday, and then the projects come in, then I have to take a look as a teacher, do I have common cause variation with that, meaning that probably 90... Deming talked about 90%, 94% of the students all attempted to do something. And then I have special cause variation, so I have some kids that didn't do it at all, or they did it so poorly that they're gonna need special help.

0:07:50.2 DL: That's what Deming talked about. They don't need more rating and ranking, it's not gonna do any good. They need special help, which means I'm gonna have to spend time with them one-on-one and go through, well, What didn't you understand? And what can we do and how can I help you? And so and so forth. That's gonna take my time. Then I have the common cause variation, which is that 94% of students who didn't make an attempt. I wanna take a look at all of that work and start to say, Okay, are there common cause problems within that? So probably most of the reasons that you're getting common cause variation or problems from a whole classroom of students has to do with your process as a teacher. [chuckle]

0:08:35.7 AS: Interesting, it makes me think about delivery of products in a company.

0:08:42.8 DL: Yeah, it's the same principle. Same principle.

0:08:42.9 AS: Yeah, you've got an objective that you wanna deliver this exactly two hours after you've packaged it in the warehouse or whatever, you want it to arrive, but there's a lot of different factors. But let's say you set a target time based upon the location that you're delivering to, and in the queue of where that is, but you've set an approximate time and your objective is to try to hit as closely to that time. Now, many people may say, Oh no, actually your objective is to hit earlier. But not really, I think to make it a really robust system, you need to be really accurate. And so when I think about it with education, I would say that from a... You want everybody to submit at a certain time, but you're gonna have a small number of people that are just super stars, they're gonna submit early, and majority of people that there's gonna be this long tail of submitting late.

0:09:32.2 DL: So you can have special cause variation on the high achieving end in education, and you can have special cause variation on the lower end, not cheating. And both of those you wanna handle it as special causes. You remind me of... I had a college professor one time that very clearly told us all, "Do not hand anything in before it's due, even if you're finished." And I went up to talk to him afterwards. I said, "Why do you tell people to do that?" And he said, "Well, you just give me more time to grade your work."

0:10:08.7 AS: [laughter]

0:10:09.4 DL: "And I will find something wrong with it." So it's like inspectors in a house, if your job is to be an inspector, that's what you're gonna do. You're gonna find something wrong. Otherwise, why do we have you.

0:10:22.7 AS: Yeah. "I didn't find anything there. I didn't find anything there." What are you doing?

0:10:26.2 DL: Yeah. Why do we need you then? Right. So, I want to get back to this process of, Yes, you have a target date, etcetera. So if I have common cause variation and a large percentage of the students are not meeting the target date and hitting the target standard for that, that's probably a systems problem, a common cause problem. And when you go back and you ask students why, Why is your work not meeting the standard? It could be internal forces, outside forces, there could be all kinds of things like that, that... Maybe the common thing is, Well, I didn't have enough time. Alright, then, where's your time going? What are you doing with your time? We can track that. We can figure that out, etcetera. And you may be right, the task that I'm giving this group actually requires much more time, so in my process upfront, if I'm going to the students and saying, Okay, here's the quality standard for this assignment, how much time do you think you're gonna need to get your work to this standard and turn that in? And so I created a tool for doing that, called the Loss function to figure out, and I got that from the Taguchi loss function and Deming.

0:11:55.0 DL: And I'd just ask students, How many days is it gonna take you to get it to this level? And that was also fascinating too, because many, many times they would take a look at everything that needs to be done, look at all of the other things that they need to do, and they would set a timeline shorter than what I would have done. So I'm actually improving the quality of all the work and shortening the timeline at the same time, which is gonna enable me to move kids to a higher and higher level than ever thought possible before in the same process, simply by asking them. And some things, yes, it might be shorter and some things it might be a bit longer. But I'd rather err on the side of a bit longer and have more students get to an A-level or a quality standard for this than do the opposite process, just arbitrarily set a due date and then grade all of the people performances that comes in. So if we get to the target date, and I look at a child's work. I'm looking at it, I'm not grading it, I'm looking at it to see, does it meet or exceed the standard for this assignment? If it meets or exceeds. Great, [chuckle] right.

0:13:16.2 AS: Yep.

0:13:16.7 DL: And then we can talk about you know how do we put that in a marking book or whatever it might be. What if it doesn't meet or exceed I asked Deming this question, because he taught at New York University, I said, What do you do when you get papers in, and clearly it's not to the standard that you think it should be. He said, Well, I have a conversation with them. I teach, a very, very strange practice, right?

0:13:42.6 AS: Yeah.

0:13:43.7 DL: I'd go back to them, I start to say, Well, I need more explanation about this, or I don't think this is quite right, and I think if you corrected this, you might be right or this, and then they get time to correct that and make it right. It turns out psychologically, which is part of Deming's profound knowledge right... Psychologically, this has huge impact, the power that if I didn't quite get there in the time that I was supposed to get there, I can go back and fix it. I can do it, yeah because...

0:14:14.6 AS: Welcome to the real world.

0:14:16.6 DL: Yes, because my job is to make sure you learn this. Right. Not to play some grading game or... Time game, right? My job is, you see that you learn this material and basically remember it for the rest of your life.

0:14:30.9 AS: Yep. So in the last couple of minutes, let's try to wrap up what we've learned, what we've discussed, I just think about some of the things that I wrote down while you were talking... Right? You made me think like, Okay, the goal of the system of education is to help each kid optimize their learning rather than just a classroom or a teacher optimizing their job. The second thing is, we talked about that you can let go of deadlines, and once you do that, you need to set better maybe operating, operational definitions or what you call quality standards, to more clearly design what it is or define what it is, is a good outcome this is the book, it's called Tom Sawyer. And these are the things that I want you to get out of it, or you internally, or as you said, you can go to the students and talk about what you want out of it, and then special help. The other thing you said is there's special help or special causes where we have someone, for instance, that's struggling, needs special focus, not rating and degrading them with that. What else would you add to the summary of the learnings from that.

0:15:58.0 DL: When you hold everyone to a high standard, you're actually improving performance for the whole system and for the whole standard for everybody and then what people quickly learn is that... Well, if I turn something in on the due date, just because I wanna turn it in on that date, what's gonna happen to me? One, I'm just gonna get a whole bunch of feedback and I'm gonna have to fix it, and now I have twice as much work to do, because now we're going on to the next thing that I need to be working on, and I have to get this fixed up. So what you're teaching people is try to do it right the first time, build quality into your processes, and that was partly my job as a teacher too, is to teach them how to do that, so they get closer and closer and closer to that target date and so they always feel gratified. And in doing that, basically, you can get to a point where almost everyone in your class is getting an A or what we would call A-quality work, right? And when that happens, you have joy in learning, and you have it on a massive scale because everybody's very happy and so...

0:17:13.6 AS: That's great, I love that. And the other thing I was just thinking about is you said something really kind of mind-blowing right at the end, and that was the idea of once you start working with someone and you start... You know you forget about the deadline, like what if we let go of the deadline I can imagine parents thinking that, but what you just said is, you open up a whole new world to this kid who may have been just always struggling with this deadline, and instead you're saying, I want your contribution, no matter what the deadline says, and that... Then as you said, opens up a whole new world for that student to think, Wow, okay, this is different, now I really wanna contribute and so.

0:17:58.1 DL: Well, it's that you... Some people think that maybe this is semantics, etcetera, but by not using the word deadline and I change that to a target date... Makes much more sense. This is the target date. Did I hit the target date? Yes, great. I have nothing to worry about and my work meets or exceeds the standard. Awesome, great. You have nothing to worry about, right? I didn't meet the target date, okay, I got some worries, I gotta get this fixed up, or it didn't meet the standard, Oh, I gotta get this fixed up. So anyway, my goal is to get them to have that joy in learning, because if you think about a student that sort of slopped through it and didn't do a good job and is continually getting Cs, Ds and Fs on things, there's not much joy in that right, right?

0:18:52.7 AS: Definitely. Definitely.

0:18:52.8 DL: You want people to feel really proud of the work Deming talked about that too. Pride of workmanship.

0:18:58.1 AS: And ranking doubles down on that unhappiness feeling that they're feeling right then.

0:19:02.7 DL: Absolutely.

0:19:04.9 AS: So, David, thanks for your contribution, and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.

0:18:52.8 DL: You want people to feel really proud of the work Deming talked about that too. Pride of workmanship.

0:18:58.1 AS: And ranking doubles down on that unhappiness feeling that they're feeling right then.

0:19:02.7 DL: Absolutely.

0:19:04.9 AS: So, David, thanks for your contribution, and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.

"When you do Six Sigma, you're basically outsourcing your quality to an external source, providing the training, the titles, and all of that. You can cut it off any time. But when you do the [Deming] theory of knowledge and the Plan-Do-Study-Act, you have to commit. The commitment is really the big deal here...the component that is missing [from Six Sigma] is a commitment to quality."

SHOW NOTES
4:30 Variation
12:40 The problem with Six Sigma
20:40 Statical Process Control Charts
25:44 Deming chain reaction
30:03 Suboptimizing departments
43:01 Management by visible figures
40:05 Why Deming, why now? Driving out fear
50:52 Continuous improvement and Plan-Do-Study-Act

TRANSCRIPT
Download the complete transcript here.

0:00:04.1 Andrew: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest, Mustafa Shraim. Mustafa, are you ready to share your Deming journey?

0:00:19.8 Mustafa: Absolutely, let's go for it. Thank you.

0:00:21.5 Andrew: I'm excited. Well, let me introduce you to the audience. Mustafa Shraim is an Assistant Professor at Ohio University teaching quality management and leadership. Professor Shraim has over 20 years of experience as a quality engineer, corporate quality manager, and consultant. His PhD is in Industrial Engineering. He publishes widely, and he has a passion for Dr. Deming's system of profound knowledge. Mustafa, why don't we start off by you telling us the story about how you first came to learn of the teachings of Dr. Deming and what hooked you in?

0:00:57.5 Mustafa: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for inviting me back. So...

0:01:01.9 Andrew: Yeah.

[chuckle]

0:01:06.1 Mustafa: The whole thing started when I was doing my master's and that was the late '80s, at Ohio University, and I was concentrating on the area of quality. So, I was doing research, and my research touched up on what Dr. Deming was doing. I was doing it in design of experiments and quality tools and things like that. But of course, you come across Dr. Deming's work when you talk about quality control, in general, and statistical quality. So, that was the first encounter of learning about what Dr. Deming did in Japan and how he used statistical process control and things of that nature to teach how you can improve your processes, your products, and later on, the management. But at the beginning, I did not really get into his management philosophy so I was more on the technical end of Dr. Deming's teaching which was mainly quality control and SPC, and just improving quality in general.

0:02:24.1 Mustafa: So, as I went... So I went, and I started my first job as a quality engineer, and quickly after that, maybe after one year, I moved to another company, and I became a statistical quality engineer, and I was doing... I was a part of a training program there. I was doing training on SPC as a part of a training for employees at that company. It was a union shop, it was automotive, and so we utilized statistical process control and what Dr. Deming was teaching. So, that was the beginning of it, but later on in the '90s, I started learning more about Dr. Deming after I read "Out of the Crisis" and then "The New Economics" about his management method. In fact, his management methods just captured me. I knew I got hooked on the quality part first, but the management method just brought it together for me. And since then, I've been reading and practicing, trying to at least, what Dr. Deming has taught.

0:03:41.9 Andrew: And would you say... One of the things that I started realizing was that the statistical... What I thought was the end was the statistical tools. And what I started to learn is that, actually, the statistical tools start to have limitations if you're not doing the management of the whole operation in a good way. And I think that that's something that really resonated with me when I started putting the pieces together. How do you see the role... And in a little bit I'm gonna ask you about some more specific tools, but just generally, we have statistical tools, but we also have management. Many people may think that you can just apply statistical tools and solve all the problems, but I'm curious how you see that interaction between the tools and the management style.

0:04:30.2 Mustafa: Well, as you know and many, probably, of your listeners already know that Dr. Deming had understanding variation, or some variation, as a part of his system of profound knowledge. So, understanding variation, under it, is really learning how to distinguish between the types of variation that you would have in any situation, managerial or process situation. So, that interaction there is really big. That really captured me because what Dr. Deming says is like, more than 80% of the application for statistical process control is actually, should be in management, and not necessarily just on the line, controlling quality of the product. So that was... It captured me, and because of explaining how many managers, many supervisors, don't understand the difference between common cause and special cause variations, and they start managing people with common cause variation going up and down, and they reprimand if it goes down, and they praise if it goes up, and that actually just makes things even worse in the future. As you probably know, it's tampering with the process.

0:06:08.8 Andrew: The best way that I've ever come up to try to explain this is to say to people, "Imagine there's 10,000 people in a stadium. They all flip a coin, and you say, 'Hey, if you flip heads, go to one side of the stadium. You flip tails, you go to the other. Everybody sit down. Okay, now... '" Or basically say, "Flip the coin again, and if you flip heads again, so two times, stay standing. And if you flip tails two times, then stay standing, but if you hit the heads and tails, then sit down." And now, your audience is getting smaller and smaller. If you do this 10 times, you will have 10 people, generally, you're gonna have 10 people that have flipped heads consecutively 10 times, and people that flip tails consecutively 10 times.

0:06:54.1 Andrew: And if we said, if we started off the whole game by saying, "Tails is bad." Now you've got some people that have done bad 10 times in a row, and some people that have done good 10 times in a row. But we know, because of the design of that example, that it's purely random. So, the question... So, we can understand that, but when we think about random variation, what Dr. Deming started to do is show us how that fits into management and psychology and how we're missing that. I'm just curious if you can help us to understand how that variation fits into that management 'cause you started talking about rewarding and all that. So, just curious about how those things fit together.

0:07:38.7 Mustafa: Right. For example, within the control limits, and those are the limits that are on a control chart, and they are spaced three standard deviations up and three standard deviations down. All the variation within is mostly a common cause variation, and it's due to the system. It's a system variation. It's not attributed to any special cause whether it's operator or something else that changed. So, distinguishing between the two becomes very important because if you don't look at variation from the perspective of a control chart, what happens is that you are in the weeds, and you look at every point as either really high up or high down cause you don't have any perspective as to how to evaluate or filter this type of variation. On the other side, also you don't want to not react to something that is special. For example, if you don't have the control limits, and if you don't have a proper way of looking at the variation, then you might end up also passing a special cause as a common cause, or not reacting to it enough to fix it and to make it a part of your controllable system before moving on.

0:09:16.7 Mustafa: From both perspective, I think it's very important for managers, for leadership, to understand why we do this. It's not just something that you have to do on the production line. It is something that you have to do in management based on performance. Look at your data and see if it's a stable process in control or if it's not, then you need to start eliminating those special causes. Like Dr. Deming said that, "Nothing really is born perfect as far as the processes." I'm paraphrasing here. But when you start a new manufacturing process, it doesn't mean that it's going to be in control; you have to work at it. You have to eliminate one by one all these special causes that come up before you start seeing a stability. And then after stability, then you will be able to work on the system part of the process, which is a long-term continuous improvement projects.

0:10:29.9 Andrew: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember a story. When I was working at Pepsi, we had a bottling plant in Los Angeles that I worked at. And the management were putting pressure on the people that were running the bottling machine because the variation of the level of the liquid in the bottle was getting wider and wider. And so, as a supervisor on the factory floor, my job was to go and kick ass, basically, and tell the guy, "Hey, come on, what are you doing here? You're messing around." And he just said, "Look, Andrew," and I was a young guy who listened to what these guys said, and he said, "Look, look at that machine over there. They spent the money to buy that filling machine over there, and you see there's no variation. Look at the old machine that they've got, and they haven't bought the parts to repair it. I keep telling them, if they don't buy these parts, I can't get to that point." And he was like... And I realized at that point that it was a management decision that needed to be made to reduce that variation at that point. It wasn't an operator that we should be punishing for that. And I think I wasn't that popular bringing that information back to management 'cause they wanted to say, "Well, no. It's the worker," and that's where I started to think about that common cause variation, and how do you improve and reduce variation?

0:11:48.3 Mustafa: Right, right. And if you leave it also to the worker, sometimes if they don't know what to do, they start tampering with the, actually, production process, and it makes it worse. So, a training for them on variation is also important. It's not only for management but also for workers as well.

0:12:08.2 Andrew: Yeah, good point. I know your expertise in this area is so valuable, and I think that it's great to have you maybe break down the following four terms that we hear, and maybe just generally discuss the differences, and then we'll talk about them in more detail. But the first term is Lean or continuous flow, the second is Six Sigma, the third is 14 points, and the fourth is system of profound knowledge. So, maybe just give an overview. What are these things? What do they mean?

0:12:40.0 Mustafa: Okay. Well, the Six Sigma part came about in the mid '80s and started in Motorola, and a lot of people already know that. And the reason it came out is because Dr. Deming's contribution in the '80s just brought a lot of attention to variation. In addition, you have also some big issues like the Ford transmission issue that came up. And there was a study about variation, and so there was a lot of attention being focused on variation. So Motorola... Somebody at Motorola, Bill Smith, an engineer over there, actually, came up with this idea of Six Sigma. And what that means, in general, is that if you have a spec that is a certain width, like upper and lower spec limits, then you want your process to operate in about half that space. Basically, that gives you good capability of the process, and then you don't have to worry about it. The first problem that came about from Six Sigma was the controversy about the shift. The people who invented Six Sigma, or packaged it together, said, "Okay. Well, we know you wanna operate exactly in the middle, but, normally, processes shift like one-and-a-half standard deviation here, or one-and-a-half standard deviation there so we want to allow that."

0:14:18.7 Mustafa: So, that is one of the biggest controversy because when you shift something like that, the process may be out of control without knowing. So, they did not really take that into consideration, although they are teaching control charts within the Six Sigma body of knowledge, so that was not really taken care of there. But that was one of the flaws that is out there in Six Sigma. Now, there are topics in Six Sigma that are... They're okay. We can teach certain topics on continuous improvement, root cause analysis, things of that nature. But the statistical thing here was wrong. And again, the reason Six Sigma was popular is because it is packaged the way it was packaged. You have companies buying this, and you have all the titles that came with it, and you know how companies love titles, especially here in the United States. So, you got all the belts; everybody must have a belt. You gotta go through training, you gotta... And then after you get your belt, what happens? You're gonna save us money. You're gonna have to do projects, and your job is to save me 20, 30, 40, 50,000 or 100,000 sometimes. So, that was the Six Sigma part of the whole thing.

0:15:51.6 Mustafa: And so, the Lean later became Lean Six Sigma. But Lean, by itself, came from Japan, originally. It's eliminating waste. Think about things like over-production, waiting, inventory, extra motion, all of these little things that you think they're little, but when you put them together, that's a lot of waste. So, to make the process flow better, you need to eliminate all of this waste. It's more about productivity and moving things faster within the organization. Then, when we contrast that with the 14 points, the 14 points are the system for management. It's all about... It's about management. It's also about quality, like improving forever the processes and systems for example, and have a constancy of purpose like the first point says. This was the application of what then became the system of profound knowledge as we know it. I don't know... I don't wanna go too far with definitions and things like that, but the Lean Six Sigma, they had the problem of the statistical flow from the Six Sigma part, and then you have all the management by numbers, management by objectives from both the Lean and Six Sigma.

0:17:30.3 Andrew: And I'm gonna try to summarize what you just explained by talking about the Six Sigma. Is what you're saying the flaw or the issue was is that, in order to try to get good quality, why don't we just set our expectations of what we're gonna get out of the system so tight that when we actually produce, we're in a narrow range, but we're never... Let's say we don't allow... We built the system with so much margin of error that even if we move around in our output, that that still is within a very tight range. Is that the concept?

0:18:10.5 Mustafa: Yeah. That is the concept. But the problem with that concept is, if you move around, if you let the process move around one-and-a-half standard deviation, for example, which, what it says, this indicates that you could have special causes that you don't react to. You don't know at that point because you have moved the process. You end up having special cause variation based on that shift because that shift could be real, a special cause and not just allowing natural... Naturally, the process does not move one-and-a-half standard deviation

0:18:53.0 Mustafa: all of a sudden because there are tests on control charts that if the process... For shift. So, if the process, for example, gives you nine points in a row on one side of the center line, that's a flag because that's a shift. That's a shift in the process. Now the process shifted on you, and you're not reacting. You're not doing anything about it, so you have to stop and take a look at it. So, what Six Sigma is saying is, "Yeah, the process could shift one-and-a-half standard deviation." But in statistical process control terms, it can't without reacting to it.

0:19:37.5 Andrew: And a simple control chart, or run chart, will probably reveal this better than looking at a histogram type of chart, like a Six Sigma type of chart where you're observing the output of the system moment by moment. Would that be correct to say?

0:19:56.5 Mustafa: Right, right. So, the control chart... And I did a paper... And there are people that are out there and doing the same thing. I did a paper and showed that if you move the system one-and-a-half standard deviation, you will see all these points beyond the control limits by simulation, simulation of the process. You move it, and you'll start observing so many points being out of the control. And so, if you allow it, then all of a sudden you start seeing all these points beyond the control. And what do you do? So, there is nothing to cover that within the Six Sigma body of knowledge.

0:20:40.7 Andrew: And maybe it's a good point just to talk briefly about the control charts and what Dr. Deming taught about that. I think when I started seeing the control charts as he was describing them, I started to see a real intense focus on looking at... at trying to understand what's really happening with this system and trying to observe it in real-time. And the more that you did that, the more you really start to understand what's driving the performance of that system. So, maybe could you just take a moment, think about the listener or the viewer that doesn't understand the control charts yet, maybe just give a big picture about what those are, and what's the value of them?

0:21:27.7 Mustafa: So, the control chart is basically... If you think about plotting points over time, that would be a run chart. So, just looking at your performance over time and just plotting points, that's a run chart. A control chart is basically taking the run chart and creating control limits on it. And the control limits came from Dr. Shewhart who invented the control charts. And he put those control limits to minimize a couple of mistakes: not reacting enough when you have to, and not over-reacting when you see something. They were more economics. They were not statistical in nature. They don't really depend on statistical distribution or anything like that. They are very robust. They can be used in a variety of applications without having to look at the distribution of the data. And they tell you when to react to a special cause and when to leave the process alone.

0:22:41.3 Mustafa: So, when you leave the process alone, it means that you have common cause variation, just the systemic type of variation that occurs over time. But that doesn't mean that you don't work on it as management. This is a management part of the work. So, when you have a stable process, it means that this is a time for management to initiate, maybe, continuous improvement project or initiative to reduce that variation, and not... Because you can be stable and in control, but you still have a lot of variation in the process. So, the spread is very wide in the process or, in the control chart, it will be going all over with a lot of variation, but it's still within the control limits. It could have this kind of scenario. And that's when management has to step in and say, "Okay, we need to look at this from a big picture and try to look at all the causes and do some kind of continual improvement."

0:23:53.3 Andrew: Mustafa, I would think that when you look at it, it turns out that it's like a continuous experiment. And you're looking at the outcome in a control chart, and you're trying to think, "Okay, if we... " Let's just say that we add a new piece of machinery. We upgrade a particular part. Then we look and say, "Okay, how did that impact the output of the process?" And then you start to see that what you're talking about, and I think what Dr. Deming is talking about was the idea that, start to get this intense focus on how do we improve this process? And how do we reduce that variation to a point? There's no point in reducing it beyond a certain point. But just that focus. Whereas with Six Sigma, it's kind of a theoretical thing, and there's other aspects that you've talked about. But just that, a control chart really allows you just to focus on testing and understanding that the whole... The output is a function, not only of the people on the production line. Let's say if it's in a factory, and it's the machinery, it's the way you organize, it's the shifts that you work. It's all of these things. So, I can't help but think that it's kind of like the fun of testing and seeing the result coming out of it.

0:25:09.1 Mustafa: Right. When you say a special cause, it doesn't mean always that it's bad. It could be good. But you have to study it, and you have to see what happened. So, was it intentional? Was it unintentional? But at least you would stop and look and study. And that's the idea. It's not just to let it go without studying it. On the other hand, the common cause, you're just looking at the width of the variation in general. And you try to reduce that, like you just mentioned, over the long run.

0:25:42.0 Andrew: So... Go ahead.

0:25:44.8 Mustafa: No, I was just gonna go back to Dr. Deming before I move to Dr. Deming's chain reaction model. I use that all the time. I use it when I was doing workshops in industry, and I use it now in my classes. And I put that... The chain reaction model. And what the chain reaction model for those of the listeners who are not familiar with it, Dr. Deming says that, "You have to start with improving quality, and the rest is just a chain reaction." So what happens is, when you improve quality, and that is, and what he's talking about here, is a commitment by management to quality. It's not just a one-time improvement of quality, it's a commitment on improving quality. Then you start seeing defect decreasing. You start utilizing equipment better. Errors decrease and all of this becomes much less. Your productivity, as a result, goes up because the cost is down, or your input cost is down so now your output is better, and you have a good productivity which keeps you in business, and you provide better jobs to your community. I think...

0:27:18.8 Andrew: That topic is so interesting because I think most people, at the time of Dr. Deming and even now, think quality is a department; quality is something we apply in a certain area. And when you think about setting the purpose of a company to improve quality, it's a very risky thing. Most people think, "No way. Our company is about sales. Our company is about profit. Our company is about customer satisfaction," or whatever that is. Those things all are the intuitive things that we come up with to say, "That's what drives our business." And Dr. Deming, what you're saying is that... Dr. Deming says, actually, the chain reaction that starts from quality leads to all of those things. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

0:28:07.5 Mustafa: Right. So, we know that we have to start on quality. But take, for example, companies that are engaged in Lean projects. So, what they do in Lean projects, you try to eliminate waste. And eliminating waste could also be a risky business if you just arbitrarily start cutting costs of material, of employee hours, or eliminating jobs, for example. If you take it from the productivity block of the chain reaction model, you go nowhere. You gotta go back from the quality, improving quality, and that's where the chain reaction starts. But for many Lean projects, they actually start from the productivity block. So, improve productivity from the productivity block, that doesn't really work because you are not committed to quality at that point. So, what happens is, you start maybe buying cheaper material or eliminating jobs. That might help you in the short run. The short run may be the next quarter. It's going to help you out. You're gonna improve the bottomline. Later on, all of this is going to come back as customer complaints, returns, issues with employees, lack of motivation because now they have to do more with less hours, and so on and so forth. But it creates a whole set of problems that are addressed in the system of profound knowledge from the psychology part to the learning part, and knowledge and the PDSA.

0:30:00.4 Andrew: So, let's go back to then now. I wanna talk about the system of profound knowledge so that the listeners out there, some of them understand it very well, but some of them may not understand what that means at all. So, now we've kind of been through a little bit about Lean. We've been through Six Sigma. We talked a little bit about the 14 points, and I think the point that you're just making is that when you look at Dr. Deming's 14 point, first one is create constancy of purpose. The second one is to adopt a new philosophy, and the third one is to end dependence on quality inspections. It's like those top three are telling the senior management, "Your job is to improve quality." That is what's going to lead this chain reaction. And I think you've illustrated that in your discussion really well. So, take a moment and tell us about system of profound knowledge as you see it.

0:30:49.8 Mustafa: Okay. So, the system of profound knowledge is... There are four pillars or four components to it. And the first one is appreciation for a system, meaning that you have to see systems in place. You have to do a connection of different parts together, that you cannot do things in silos. You cannot suboptimize. You have to look at the aim of the system, and you try to work for the aim of the system, not the aim of each department. But with that comes the idea of creating the variation part, and what is systemic variation and what is a special cause variation? Systemic variation is a part of management's decisions. They have to make improvement on that in the long term. And how you react to variation. So, if the system has a certain capability, and then you ask somebody, "Okay, I want you to get me that which is up here, way up. That's your objective." If the system is not capable, what is the employee going to do? They're going to try to create that number to please the boss. As Dr. Deming was referring to, they tried to please their manager or the boss. So, you might take risky steps to do that, including maybe fudging numbers or coming up with ideas to create that number.

0:32:37.1 Mustafa: And that goes to psychology, so now you are... You don't feel good about it. You have to keep your job. You have to do all kinds of stuff to make sure that you don't lose your job because you could not achieve that. Now you become less motivated. You're not really engaged. And what happens? They provide you with incentives, outside incentives. Bonus is based on work that you have to do, but the system is incapable. You cannot perform beyond what the system is capable of. So, that creates all kinds of problems. And the last part is the learning part or theory of knowledge, and that you have to have a method. You have to have clear definitions and, basically, you have to know what you need to accomplish, and by what method and how you know when you get there. That's a theory of knowledge. There is no knowledge without a theory, and it has to be... It has a temporal element in it, meaning that you revise the theory, and you create more knowledge. So, that's in a nutshell how you... How all of these components are related to each other. But to me, the systems and variation, they're just out there, and I see it everywhere as a problem.

0:34:14.3 Andrew: Yeah. So, to summarize, the system of profound knowledge, as you've explained, is appreciation for a system. Number two is knowledge of variation, number three is a theory of knowledge, and number four is psychology. And one of the things that I came to learn about Dr. Deming is, I always say he's a humanist. He's a person that really sees that people should have joy in work, and he wants to see people reach their full potential, and he understood the powers of incentives like you just explained. So, now that we understand a little bit of the theory of the system of profound knowledge, what is going wrong out there in this world? Let's talk just briefly about, why is this so significant? Come on, I just go get my black belt in Lean Six Sigma and the problems will be solved, but what is it about the theory of profound knowledge that... Or the system of profound knowledge that people should pay attention to now?

0:35:21.5 Mustafa: Well, with... For example, let me just take it from a different perspective. If you look at Lean projects, and you eliminate. for example, waste. if you don't have a system of profound knowledge to check all of the things that needs to be checked, like variation and psychology and making sure that people are not fearful to do their job, then you're creating other problems, not only just... You're not just reducing waste, you are actually, maybe having... overburdening the employees with removing waste because when you remove waste, you may be removing jobs, you may be removing hours, you may be removing employees. That would create a overburden. You could also create problems for the customers and fluctuation and defects and variation.

0:36:21.8 Mustafa: That's why the system of profound knowledge is an integrated system. It's not a just one piece. Once you start going from one door, you gotta address all the other components that are tied together to it. So to me, from whatever door you go in in the system of profound knowledge, let's say you go from the psychology which is you drive out fear. You create a good climate. You do all of these things, then you start seeing people coming up with innovations, reducing variation, and working together collaboratively which creates a good system. So, whatever door you go in, you're going to get to it because they are connected. There is no way that you're not going to address the other points if you have knowledge about the other points.

0:37:15.0 Andrew: It's an interesting thing that I would say in modern management, in modern life, people are trying to compartmentalize things and thinking that being a specialist in a particular area, whether that's medicine or whatever in business, that by compartmentalizing, it gives us comfort that we can become an expert in this area and all that. But what you can see... And I'll tell you, Mustafa, about my mother who I take care of. She's 83. And if we have a problem with her foot, the doctor may say, "Okay, don't walk for a little while." Well, that causes another problem. You start to risk bedsores. You start to have problems with GI system. And what you find nowadays in medicine is it's getting more and more narrow where doctors are not seeing the holistic pieces, and I see myself always constantly thinking about the whole picture to that. And I think what I'm hearing from you is that, that we should be looking at things more holistically, and that's what the system of profound knowledge is teaching, is that... Would you say that?

0:38:24.1 Mustafa: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, you have to... The main thing there is, companies, traditionally, they try to just suboptimize through their management by objective, "We want each department to save so much money," and then, once they start doing that, everybody affects the other negatively, but they don't know until later on that they have done that. You might gain the objectives in the short run, but in the long run, it's going to be disastrous for the aim of the organization.

0:39:03.9 Andrew: So, you just raised another point that Dr. Deming teaches about is suboptimization. And what he tried to teach was that the objective of the senior management of the company is to optimize the system, not its component parts. Have you seen...

0:39:19.9 Mustafa: Right.

0:39:20.9 Andrew: In theory, people should know that, but how is that going wrong in this world these days? And why is it important to be thinking in this holistic way that Dr. Deming was teaching?

0:39:32.5 Mustafa: Because companies, if they don't do things systematically, and they don't apply the whole system of profound knowledge, altogether, they're going to rush into money-saving exercises, and those money-saving exercises could be replacing material with lower-grade material. It could be, maybe, not hiring experts and hiring somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, and not providing training, or cutting training, or foregoing maintenance. There are so many things that you can start focusing on because you have issues. So, you have issues with a customer, and you start focusing on cutting costs, arbitrarily, not with a method, arbitrarily starting cutting costs in different departments. When you put it all together, just things don't merge well together because you're trying to suboptimize. You're trying to lower the cost in each department and not really improve the aim, or attain the aim of the organization as a whole.

0:40:48.3 Andrew: We've covered so many different topics. It's pretty exciting, like this sub-optimization. I think is a really interesting one. And I wanna raise a new topic that is the opposite of one of the topics that you raised. You talked about the chain reaction. Let's talk about the opposite chain reaction. I'll tell you a story in my own coffee business. We had put some pressure on some of the people in the procurement part of the business to reduce cost. That's reasonable. Management wants to reduce cost so there we go. We put pressure on them, and we told them... We incentivized them. And what we saw was that they ended up proposing a lower quality coffee bean, green coffee bean. The production people didn't like it because all of a sudden they had to recalibrate the machines. So, there was already a cost right there because the... It was harder to hit the client's demand of what taste that they want, consistently hit it.

0:41:47.9 Andrew: Then the people that were delivering, when we delivered the product to the customer, we had some returns where the customer is like, "No, I don't like this taste," or that we would have much more variability. And all of a sudden, we had customer complaints. And then we started to realize that, "Okay, now we gotta go and replace that with the proper stuff," and then all of a sudden there was all kinds of cost. So, the chain reaction you talked about was, start with quality and you start to reduce costs throughout the chain. And a reverse chain reaction is when you start by trying to optimize one point and not realize that it's a whole system, and therefore what you've caused is a negative chain reaction of cost just when you thought you were cutting costs, you're actually raising costs.

0:42:33.7 Mustafa: Right. That is a great example of that because what you've done is maybe just looking at the productivity part, you wanted to make sure that the costs were down so trying to turn the knobs on certain things, and then it just backfired on the quality part, increasing errors, increasing customer dissatisfaction and all of that, and that happens all the time.

0:43:01.4 Andrew: And that's what Dr. Deming says, "How can you measure the cost of a lost customer? How can you measure the dissatisfaction and the frustration?" Some things are just unmeasurable. So, I wanna...

0:43:15.2 Mustafa: Right. So, that brings about the issue of visible figures. You're managed by visible figures only, and not really the stuff that are behind the total cost, which some of it is unknowable or unknown.

0:43:34.2 Andrew: Now, Professor, this is really strange. Here we are, talking about quality. You're such an expert in all of these statistical methods, and now you're saying, "Wait a minute, you can't just measure by visible figures." So, this is again a paradox of Dr. Deming where you come into his teaching, seeing all of these numbers and all that, and now what you're telling me is it's not just visible figures. Could you just elaborate on that?

0:44:02.7 Mustafa: Yeah, absolutely. Visible figures are figures that are available right there for you, and you just react to it. If things go up, you wanna reduce costs. You just take action. But visible figures are really a limited part of the whole story because the total cost of not doing things right or not following the Deming management method. They're not going to be... You're not gonna see them until later on. You may be able save for a quarter or two but, beyond that, things are going to start accumulating in terms of defects, returns, and things of that nature. So, from the Deming point of view, the visible figures are only a smaller portion of the total figures which cannot be measured at the time you're looking at the numbers and taking action.

0:45:04.3 Andrew: It's interesting because we hear sayings like, "What gets measured gets managed," and those types of sayings. And one of the things that I... When I teach young people about this, I oftentimes say, "Well, let's just look at a simple thing. What is the value of a hug? Measure it." It's immeasurable. Particularly, in a particular situation when someone is traumatized, or in a really painful situation, and that hug made a huge difference in their life that could actually have kept them alive and led them to another so that... I think that's the visible figures that you're raising. It's such a small part of this world. The bigger part is how it all fits together. And so, I think you really inspire me to rethink about this concept; that it's way beyond just visible figures.

0:46:03.5 Mustafa: Absolutely, absolutely. This thing is just... One of the things that really captured me with the Deming philosophy is visible versus invisible figures, and the sub-optimization part versus the aim of the system. And those things are just so powerful when you think about them, when you think about why we're promoting, or why we're talking about Deming, and why now and all of that. It's these things that are very common these days. And they have... To have a good system, to have good management, you have to eliminate management by visible figures on... You still have to have visible figures, but visible figures-only is what Deming is... What it was Deming opposing. What he was against, I guess.

0:46:57.8 Andrew: Yup. And you said, "Why Deming? Why now?" And I'm thinking about it myself. And my answer to that is that we have a whole generation of young people who think that successful management is, maybe, sitting at their desk behind a computer looking at KPIs. And then, when someone is down on their KPI, send them an email, kick their butt. And when someone is up on a KPI, give them a bonus, and that's it. And then you go home at the end of the day. And they're so lacking in the psychology aspect of the system of profound knowledge, but just in what management truly is. So, from my perspective, "Why Deming? Why now?" is because we have the risk of it turning into some kind of automation system of management that will always end up underperforming. Why would you say, "Why Deming? Why now?"

0:48:00.5 Mustafa: So, as you can see that, for me, "Why Deming? Why now?" is I don't see management using variation as a way to distinguish between the common cause and special cause, and also their reaction to it, or the mistakes that they make as a part of it. So, that's a big thing. The other thing is the fear that people are experiencing at the workplace. Recently, we've heard about the great resignation. People just don't wanna go back to work anymore. And a lot of people expressed that they just don't like the environment that they work in. And we know that most people, about 70% of people who quit, they don't quit because of a pay or anything like that. It's because of relationship with their bosses and the company, and they just don't feel that. So that the environment has a fear in it. So, when you create fear, you're not going to have people that contribute and collaborate, and I think that's big. If we learn anything from this whole pandemic, it is that you have to create an environment of trust because if people are away working virtually or work in the office, you shouldn't have to worry about them if you have created that environment or the trust.

0:49:34.6 Andrew: Yup. And you mentioned about the pandemic. If there's one thing we've learned, fear is a massive motivator. The level of things that people have gone through in a state of fear, things that people would have never imagined that they would have done. And so, I think what you're talking about is just one more of the many Deming principles, which is to drive out fear. And I just wanna summarize some of what we've gone through, and then we'll wrap up. So, we've talked about the differences between Lean and Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma. We've talked about Deming's 14 points. We've talked about the system of profound knowledge. We've talked about optimizing versus sub-optimizing. We've talked about the chain reaction, and I gave the example of a reverse chain reaction. And then, we talked about visible figures and understanding that there's much more than that, which is such a paradox for me when I first started learning Deming's teaching because I thought I was gonna take comfort in those numbers and the visible figures, but he told me, "No, no, no. There's much more." And finally, we talk about fear. Is there anything else that you would add to this final wrap-up of the conversation?

0:50:52.3 Mustafa: So, we started talking about Lean and Six Sigma and... Six Sigma is a continuous improvement process, but you don't really need to use it to... You can use the Plan-Do-Study-Act to it. There is no problem if you use it, and you recognize what's wrong with it, and you try to fix it. There's no problem with that. But, I think the Plan-Do-Study-Act and the theory of knowledge is sufficient for you to start working on things. But, like I mentioned, some companies, they like the titles and the tags and the big investment because then they use that as a motivator to get people to start working on projects to bring money back, to save the company the money that was spent on them. So, that's the only thing I wanted to add is just like you can't just rely on something that is big. The Plan-Do-Study-Act was good enough, and I think it's good for any organization. The problem with applying the Plan-Do-Study Act is that you have to have management's commitment because remember, when you do Six Sigma, you're basically outsourcing your quality to an external source, providing the training, the titles and all of that. You can cut it off any time. But when you do the theory of knowledge and the Plan-Do-Study-Act, you have to commit. The commitment is really the big deal here, or the component that is missing is a commitment to quality.

0:52:44.9 Andrew: Well, in wrapping this up, I wanna come back to where we started. Where we started was you were a young master's student and coming out of studying about these tools of statistical methods and all of that stuff, and you entered into our conversation, and you entered into the introduction to Dr. Deming through these tools. But here we are at the end of this interview, and now you're talking about such much bigger issues, and I think, for me, that inspires me about what Dr. Deming has taught because it is expansive. And the more you study it, the more you see it's way beyond just tools. So, Mustafa, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your experience with Dr. Deming's teachings. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

0:53:41.5 Mustafa: All I have to say, you gotta get started somewhere, and the system of profound knowledge is it. So, I would definitely recommend... I have been through many of the seminars that the Institute offers, and I would highly recommend that and also getting Dr. Deming's book "The New Economics." That's a good start. Of course, the follow-up is also just as important and continuing with the journey.

0:54:15.7 Andrew: Well, great advice. Get "The New Economics;" read it. It really sums up a lot of Dr. Deming's teachings. He put it together right at the end of his life. And that concludes another great discussion within our worldwide Deming community. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Deming frequently discussed the right to joy in work and in learning. But what does that mean exactly? David P. Langford explains Deming's intent, particularly as it applies to education.

TRANSCRIPT

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 we're gonna be talking about the Langford application of Deming to bring joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help teachers and students get the most out of learning. David, let's get into it. I think we should start with what is joy in learning as one point.

Langford: Yeah, it sounds like sort of a mamby-pamby phrase like, "Oh, let's just all have joy in learning," or something that you might put on a poster and put on a wall, and Deming was probably the first one that got me to understand that those key phrases and stuff like that aren't gonna change the system at all, and that you actually have to change the system. So having joy in learning is different than thinking about joy in the education system as a whole, because I may really enjoy what I'm learning at the university or in an elementary classroom, but the way in which the system is run is not fun, it's not joyful. So the places that can really optimize both are the places that are gonna attract the most students, are gonna have the teachers that are happier, they're gonna have students that are happier, and when students are happier, parents are happier, and everything just starts to function better. So while it is a phrase, joy in learning, it's also a depth of knowledge about thinking about systems and what do you have to do in a system to achieve that?

Stotz: And one of the questions is like, what is the aim of the system? And I'm thinking about... There was a point in time where I didn't really like reading or doing homework or whatever, and then there was just a switch that went off where I just started reading books. And now I've read thousands of books in my life, and it's a pleasure to read books. And that switch brought joy to me as a learner. Is the... What is the objective of education in the world? Why are we doing this? Is it just babysitting kids or is it to transform or what?

Langford: Well, a lot of systems over the last 20 years or more have gotten misguided because they think the aim of the system is just to get test scores, and so when you set up a system just to get test scores, just to get those numbers, and Deming admonished us about that very thoroughly. That's what you're gonna get. But if you sort of break down learning and start to think about what were the most... Well, I do this all the time with educators and have them recall the most impactful learning experiences that they ever had in their entire education career, and they'll talk about making airplanes in sixth grade, or they'll talk about all kinds of applications and making robots, and they actually will get very excited about that. Oh, it was so exciting 'cause we got to do this. Nobody ever, ever says, "Oh, it's so exciting to get the top score on my SAT test, or... " Mostly, it was just a relief of pressure to get that or that, "Oh, every year, when we take that standardized test, that was so exciting. See what my score was and see how I advanced." Nobody's gonna remember any of those things.

Langford: So you're not gonna test in quality into a system, and if you're really optimizing joy in learning in a system, you may not have the very best test scores that you could get through drill and practice and getting people to get those scores. But a lot of systems, what they do is they drive out 1 the joy in learning, and exactly what you're describing, Andrew, is that... I don't think... I met Deming after I already had a Master's degree and I'd been teaching for a number of years, and I realized at that point, I'd never read a book, I couldn't even name a book that I had read simply for the joy of reading it. The only reason I would read a book is because it was assigned in the class, and you had to read this to get a grade or do a book report, or you had to do something, and so you had to discover that joy of reading, even though the system wasn't actually teaching you to do that. But wouldn't it be glorious worldwide if our systems were actually teaching and developing a joy of reading, wanting to read, and that takes a different, much, much different type of approach.

Langford: I have five children, and I'll never forget my oldest daughter, by second grade, she already knew she wanted to be a writer, and she was telling people... They say, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" And she said, "I wanna be a writer." And the people were kinda stunned by that, but one of the reasons she did is because she had a second grade teacher and he knew that she just loved to write, and one day in the library, she was looking for books, and he walked up next to her and he pulled a book off the shelf and he said, "You know, one day I'm gonna pull this book off and it's gonna say, 'By Kendra Langford on it.'"

Stotz: Wow.

Langford: She never, ever forgot that, and now has a Master's degree in Creative Writing. But it can be so simple, and that's what Deming was talking about with the profound knowledge psychology of what you're doing and how you're managing the system, and the impact that it could have years and years later, and people ask Deming, why should we stop grading people and doing all this testing and all this kind of stuff, and he would say something like, "Well, since I don't know who among them is going to be great 15 or 20 years from now, why would I wanna limit their performance now with a grade?" See, that's a much deeper long-term purpose of what it is you're trying to do and what it is you're trying to develop.

Langford: The great irony is, the more you work on developing a system like that, your test scores go up because there's a joy in learning, and people are making neural connections that are lasting, and recall is happier. There's a lot of research on it, when you learn something and then later you recall it, whether that's a year later or years later, the first thing you recall is the emotion attached to that. So a lot of times in my seminars, I'll just say to people, "Tell me some emotions when I say the word math," oh my gosh. People are like, "Fear, tense, hatred."

Stotz: No joy?

Langford: No joy, no. There'll be some people like that, that'll be, "I love it," and usually, most of the audience were groan, but there are people that despite whatever the system does to you, I'm still gonna have joy in math because I just have a preponderance of cells in that part of my brain I was born with and I get a lot of pleasure and a good feeling when I'm actually doing that.

Stotz: It brings up a point too, that sometimes when we look at education, we think, "Okay, we have superstars that are really good at it, maybe those are the only ones that are really gonna be able 2 to get true joy out of it," whereas it sounds like what you're saying is, it's about one of the objectives of the system of education is it should be to bring joy in learning to everybody.

Langford: Yes, and I've known hundreds of valedictorians, the people that we would point to and say, "Okay, well, these were the people that really aced the system," and wouldn't those be the people that have the most joy in the learning system and it is not that way. So I know for my own children as they were going through the system, and my two oldest daughters are valedictorians, and I tried constantly to help them see that that's great, that you wanna do that and you understand the value of that long-term, but there's also a great joy in helping others in your classroom. I've heard this a lot about MBA classes, that they're so competitive that a professor will give an assignment and then students will run over to the library and check out all the books in the library so other teams, other students can't get them. Well, that's a strategy to get the highest grade. Get the highest grade you can, and if that's your aim, you're gonna employ a lot of strategies to do that.

Stotz: Right.

Langford: So even valedictorians have to at some point find joy in learning again. And...

Stotz: So if we wrap up this topic, I wanna think about a person listening to this, who is a teacher who's challenged, they're struggling, it's not easy, and they're listening to this, they're thinking about joy in learning, how would you close out this discussion to help them think about it, to inspire them, that we can have joy in learning.

Langford: Well, you brought up the topic about what is the aim of education, so if you get nothing else, but you say, "Okay, I'm gonna start to make my aim joy in learning. Now, what would I have to do?" That's why I came up with a tool or a statistical method that I call it Consensogram, just for that purpose. And I asked students on a scale of zero to 100 in 10% increments, to what degree do you feel joy in learning in my classroom? And just take those, put them on sticky notes, and then we build a histogram out of it, and to begin with, it was not a pretty picture. And I've taught this to other teachers, and I've had teachers say, "Oh, I'd never do that." I'd say, "Well, why not?" And they'd say, "Because the highest kid in the room would put down 30%." Wouldn't you wanna know that? Wouldn't you know the depths of despair that people have in what's going on, and if you did that once a week, takes 30 seconds, you get a bit of data, you start to get a run chart, you start to understand, and by continually, is my average creating joy in learning in this classroom going up?

Langford: And if you say, "Well, no, it's not." Then the people to start asking are the students, what's preventing you from having joy in this math class, or this English class, or German, or whatever it might be, what's preventing that from happening? And then prioritize it and go to work on it, but it can happen anywhere.

Stotz: It's so many great nuggets for that person, that teacher listening in, the last thing you just said means you're not alone, you don't have to go back to your desk and figure this out, just talk to the students and say, "How do we bring more joy in learning?" And I think also, you've talked about the idea of a clear aim, and I know that's a huge part of what Dr. Deming taught about systems and the 3 system needs to have a clear aim, and boy, the world... How much damage would it do to the world if, for one year, we switched the aim of education, the aim of our education system to bring joy in learning to every student in that classroom?

Langford: Yeah. I don't know if I got this from Deming or not, but it's just the phrase I use all the time is, we don't really know what could be accomplished in our education systems and classrooms, etcetera, because we've never really tried. And some people get offended by that. But if you go back and you actually start trying, you will find ways to change the system to see a larger amount of joy happening in the classrooms. Even when I asked Dr. Deming about his classes. I said, "How did you do that?" And he began to describe teaching graduate level statistics classes, which doesn't sound like much fun to me, but virtually everybody in there got an A or accomplished everything that he wanted them to accomplish.

Stotz: Well, on behalf of everybody at The Deming Institute, I want to end this session of the Langford application of Deming to bring joy in learning, and I wanna challenge everybody out there to do your best today to bring joy in learning

Langford: Thank you, Andrew.

Stotz: Thank you.

Why would any leader choose to take on a transformation that requires rethinking how they lead, how their organization functions, and how they learn?

In this episode, we dive deeper with Cliff Norman and David Williams, co-authors of Quality as
an Organizational Strategy, exploring Chapter 11: "Getting Started." They share powerful stories, practical steps, and the deep-rooted challenges leaders face when shifting from conventional methods to building true learning organizations grounded in Dr. Deming's philosophy.

This conversation highlights why improvement cannot be delegated, why leadership
transformation is essential, and how to begin the journey—with clarity, commitment, and
courage.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today we are going to continue our conversation with Dave Williams and Cliff Norman about their book Quality as an Organizational Strategy. I found this book fascinating because I think it's addressing something where there's been a bit of a hole and that is how do we think about the strategy of our business? And so we already had our conversation in a prior episode about the overview of the book, but today we're going to be talking about specifically, now this is kind of funny because we're going to be talking about the back of the book and that is chapter 11, getting started. Dave, why don't you take it away?

0:00:53.3 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having us back on the Deming podcast. So, as you mentioned, part of the way that the book is laid out is that it describes kind of the foundations that are behind quality as an organizational strategy and begins sort of with an introduction that explains a good bit about how Dr. Deming had this provocation of a need for leaders to transform the way that they approach leading organizations. And part of that was to move not just from process based improvement projects, but to start to think about major systems in the organization and to pursue quality as the overall strategy and create a continuous improvement organization or learning organization. And so the book lays some of the foundation behind the science of improvement or behind profound knowledge that underpin the thinking, walks through quality as an organizational strategy, as a method of five interdependent activities. Then at the end it comes back full circle to say, well, this is great, now you've learned about these theories and methods. But a natural question for any leader would be, how do I get started? And one of the first things that we talk about in that section actually is about why leaders would want to do this transformation.

0:02:30.9 Dave Williams: And this actually came from a conversation that Lloyd and Cliff and I had in 2020 where we were talking about getting on this journey of building the book. And we all kind of recognized that this was really, really hard work. And we were curious or we, we didn't have a good answer of what was our theory about why somebody would deviate from the way in which they work today and embark on a transformational change of the way that they approach leadership, the way that they approach organizations. And actually I ended up going on a journey of interviewing a whole host of leaders who had been influenced by Deming, who had been involved in improvement in healthcare, folks like Dr. Berwick and Paul Batalden and Brent James. I interviewed some folks in the UK and other places, like John Seddon, and asked them, oh and I should Blaine Godfrey, who had been the lead of the Durand Institute, and I posed the question, what causes somebody to want to embark on this change? And many people actually had a hard time articulating it. But the answer that emerged, or actually Blaine Godfrey was the one that kind of framed it the best, I think, for us, was a number of things.

0:03:57.7 Dave Williams: Sometimes it's something like a book like this comes out and people read it and it's interesting and new. Sometimes it's an event happens, a patient safety event or a major accident or something of which causes people to have to change or do something different. Sometimes it's a discouragement with a desire that you know you could do better, but you don't have methods or know how to. So there were a host of things that we listed, and those are some of a sample of them that might invite somebody to say, the way that we're working today is not getting us to the level that we want to. And now we want to embark on something different. And we might look to something like quality as an organizational strategy as a method for us to transform the way that we're working and build on the shoulders of Deming's philosophy and the science of improvement and do it differently.

0:04:56.0 Andrew Stotz: And when I look at the book, you guys are bringing together a lot of different stuff. It's not just a Deming book. It's Deming is a part of this, and that's fascinating. One of the questions I have is when we look at, let's say, a business owner, a business leader is looking for answers, as you said, maybe it's an event, maybe it's a discouragement, maybe it's a feeling like we can do better. Maybe it's just being beaten by competitors. They come to a point where they start looking for answers and they find some fantastic books, authors, ideas, consultants, all this and I think about whether that's Peter Drucker or whether that's the Lean movement or whether that's, let's say Taguchi or something like that is the teachings that you guys are talking about - and I'm going to specifically ask about the teachings of Dr. Deming. Is it more or is it more difficult or less difficult to implement than other books or styles or methods that someone's going to come across?

0:06:08.7 Cliff Norman: I have to quote one of my colleagues here who probably knew about more about Deming than anybody in API or all of us combined, that's Ron Moen, who did, I think it was 88 seminars, four-day seminars with Dr. Deming. Dr. Deming once told him, he said, Ron, I believe you've been to more of these and I've been to. And it's kind of a joke. He had a great sense of humor. But you know, Ron told me the problem with Deming is he's asking us to change. And there's all sorts of things out there that require the management and the leadership, they really don't have to do anything different. And there are several things out there. In fact, Philip Crosby, one of the three gurus during when they launched, he was more the evangelical and had a way of talking to management so that they understood it, which that was his contribution to all that. But when Six Sigma came up and black belts and all that, and Crosby looked at him and says, that's not going to change the system. He said, all you're doing is killing a bear for management, killing a bear for management, and then you'll get a black belt.

0:07:19.9 Cliff Norman: You know, And I thought, wow that's pretty profound. Because the management at that point doesn't have to do anything, just have the black belt ceremony. There's absolutely no change on their part. Where Deming, as Ron says, he's kind of a pain. You've got to learn about variation, you got to learn about Shewhart charts. You've got to be able to put together a family of measures for your organization. You've got to understand your organization's system. You need to understand psychology, you need to understand theory of knowledge and how people learn how they change. And nothing else out there puts that on leaders. And so that was a question that Dave was lending back to. Why would somebody do this to themselves? You know, why would they take on this whole extra thing to learn and all the rest of it. And for the people that I know that have made that, that bridge, the pure joy that they get and the rewards they get from people who are learning and that they're leading and that they're changing and they're able to go to other organizations and repeat this and call them up and say, thank you so much for helping me learn how to be a real leader.

0:08:35.8 Cliff Norman: I mean, that's the reward in it. But it requires a real change on the part of the leader. And I don't know of anything else, Andrew, that actually requires that kind of in depth change. And there was one of our leaders, Joe Balthazar, he had Jane and I do four years in a row with his leadership team, teach them the science of improvement. The same curriculum, same leaders, four years in a row. And the second year I was doing it, I said, don't we need... No, no, Cliff, I want you to do exactly what you did last year. He said, it takes years for people to understand this. And I thought, wow, this is unbelievable. But on the fourth year, the VP of sales walked up to me and he says, I think I figured it out. And I thought, wow. And it does it literally... Because you've got to depart from where you've been and start thinking about how you're going to change and let go of what's made you successful up to this point. And that's hard, that's hard for anybody to do.

0:09:47.2 Cliff Norman: And anybody's been through that four day seminar knows when they crossed that path that all of a sudden they had to say, you know what I've been doing, I can see where I've been, the problem and not the solution. And that's tough for us. That really is tough. And Deming says you have to give up that guilt trip. And once you understand the theory of variation, once you understand systems, once you understand psychology and theory of knowledge, it's time then for you to move on and let go of the guilt. I hope that makes sense. But that's the difficulty in this.

0:10:17.6 Andrew Stotz: It reminds me of two, it made me think about two things. I mean, I was just a 24 year old guy when I attended the seminars that I did, and they weren't even four day. I think they were two-day ones at Quality Enhancement Seminars in, what was it, George Washington, I think. But the point that I remember, as just a young guy who I was, I pretty much admired all these business leaders. And then to see Dr. Deming really nail em to the wall and say it's about you changing. And whether he was saying that directly or whether that he was implying that through the Red Bead experiment or other things, it's about you shaping the system. That really blew me away because I had already read some books and I was pretty excited. And then it also made me think about, let's say there's a really good book, I would say Good to Great by Jim Collins that highlights some things that you can do to succeed and make your business better. And you can just buy that book and hand it to your management team and go, hey, implement what you learned from this book.

0:11:20.8 Andrew Stotz: Whereas with the Deming book, it's like there's just so much more to it. So I guess the answer to this is it is more takes time. There's more thinking going on. And I think that's part of the whole point of what your book does, is to help us map it out. So why don't we go through and think about this and kind of maybe step by step through what is the starting point and how do we go?

0:11:45.4 Cliff Norman: Andrew, I just got to add to what you just said there and go back to Joe Balthazar at Hallmark Building Supplies. He shared with me that, and he's the one that said I want you to do these four year seminars dedicated Deming's idea of Profound knowledge. And he said, Cliff, the day I made it, I knew I'd made it. Is my son Joey spilled his milk. He's about three years old. And he said, I started to do my normal leap across the table and he said I was about mid air. And I thought, oh my, this is what they do. This is part of their system. This is common. And I'm treating this like it's special. And that was so profound for him. And when, when you move beyond the Shewhart chart and you see events in your life around you relative to the theory of variation, common and special cause variation at a deep way like that, that's the kind of transformation you want to see in a leader. And Joe will tell you he's forever grateful for Deming and everything he's learned, and I think that's the reward. But people need to be willing to go on that journey, as Dave was saying.

0:12:53.0 Andrew Stotz: So Dave, why don't you walk us through a little bit of what you guys are teaching in that chapter.

0:13:00.3 Dave Williams: Sure. Well, one of the next steps obviously is if somebody, if a leadership team thinks that they want to go on this journey, there's some considerations they got to think about. As we've already sort of alluded to or touched on, this is a leadership responsibility and a leadership change. And so there's got to be will amongst the leadership team in order to say we want to work together and work hard to do this work. That this is not something that, similar to Cliff's example of say, having black belts, that we can just hand it off, somebody else will do it, and we can just keep going about our business and hope. It's important that leaders spend time recognizing and thinking about the fact that this is going to involve them doing work, doing effort, changing the way that they think, changing the way that they practice. And I like to say it's good hard work. I mean it's going to be something that's deeply rewarding. But it does require them to have that will. And with will then it's going to come time and energy, right? They've got to make the space, they've got to create regular routines and opportunities for them to learn just in terms of content, learn in terms of practice or application and learn in the process of doing the improvement work and doing the change to the way that they work in the organization.

0:14:38.0 Dave Williams: So there's going to be a need to build in that ability. And then a third thing is to ask whether you think this is something that you can do on your own or whether it might be useful to have help. And help may be an internal, a consultant, but likely not to promote consulting it but, but there's a good chance that you're going to need somebody that has both experience in improvement and helping people do results-driven improvement as well as somebody who has experience doing system wide change through a lens like QOS. And, and the advantage of that often is it it gives you as a leadership team to focus in on your job of thinking and looking and learning and allow somebody else to be an external intervener, somebody who comes in and creates some of the support, some of the context, some of the ways that can make it easier for you to step back and look at your organization in a different way. And so many times those are some of the things that should be considered as teams working through it. Cliff, what would you add or improve upon.

0:16:07.3 Cliff Norman: The idea of external help. Deming was pretty black and white about that. I was kind of surprised. I went back and read one of his quotes. He said, "I should mention also the costly fallacy held by many people in management that a consultant must know all about a process in order to work on it. All evidence is exactly the contrary. Competent men in every position, from top management to the humblest worker know all there is to know about their work except how to improve it. Help towards improvement can come only from outside knowledge." And I was reflecting on that today with Jane who's been involved in this for 40 plus years also. I said Jane, when he said that, I think it was accurate because at that time she and I were going to Duran seminars. There's only two books out there with methods. One was Ishikawa's book on Guide to Quality Control. And the other was Feigenbaum's book. And then of course you had Duran's book on The Quality Handbook, which was a nice doorstop. But there wasn't that much knowledge about improvement. And the worst part where Deming was really getting to was there's very few people you'd run into that actually under the Shewhart methods and charts and understand the difference between special and common cause variation.

0:17:27.0 Cliff Norman: And so you had to bring that kind of knowledge in from the outside. And frankly, we've had people go off the rails here. You know, Dr. Deming in the teaching of statistics has identified analytic studies which is focused on looking at data over time and trying to understand that and simple methods and approaches and then what he calls enumerative statistics, which is use of T tests, F tests and all the rest of it, which assumes that under the IDD principle that data is independent and identically distributed. Well, if you have any special causes in the data set, it blows up both of those assumptions and the use of those methods doesn't offer any help in prediction. And as Dr. Deming often said, prediction is the problem. And then go back to Shewhart. And Shewhart said, things in nature are inherently stable, but man-made processes are inherently unstable. So when Dave and I first do a Shewhart chart for a client, we don't expect for it to be stable. We expect for to have special causes. And as Dr. Deming said and also Dr. Juran, that when you get a stable system, that in and of itself is an achievement, that means nobody's messing around with the system anymore.

0:18:43.0 Cliff Norman: And you see this in the simplest things, like in an office, somebody will walk in and they think that their body is the standard for what the internal temperature should be for that room. So then they walk up and they start tampering with the thermostat. And by the end of the day everybody's irritated because we've had so many bodies up there with their standard. Moving the funnel on us here, and just leaving it alone would probably all be better off. But you have to learn that. And I think that's what Dr. Deming was saying, is that that kind of knowledge is going to come from the outside. Now the good news is is that since he wrote that in 1986, we've got a lot of people out there and some of them are in organizations that do understand the Shewhart methods and can understand the difference between common and special cause variation. They do understand the difference between a new and analytic studies and statistics and they can be of help. So the Deming Institute has a room full of these people show up, but they're at their gatherings annually. So we're a lot further along than we were in 1986.

0:19:45.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. So let's go through that for just a second. Some considerations you've talked about. You know that it's a leadership change. Right. And you gotta ask yourself, are we ready to work on this? And you know, this is not a hands-off thing. The second thing you talked about is time and energy. Are we ready to make the space for this? We have to have regular meetings. You know, we've gotta really... There's some work involved here. And then the third part you've talked about is outside help. And you mentioned about this story of Joe Balthazar and how he asked you to do the same topic over and over for four years. And imagine if he was telling his team, let's meet and try to implement some of this stuff on our own. Everybody dig into a book and then let's try. It would be very difficult to make that kind of progress compared to bringing an outside person. Which also brings me to the last thing that you said, Cliff, which was the idea that Dr. Deming had mentioned, that you need an outside person to truly change something. Everybody's got the expertise on the inside.

0:20:44.5 Cliff Norman: I appreciate you summarizing that because my job and working with Joe and leadership team, I was meeting with him every month. But what the four years that Jane and I spent were the next levels of his leadership. You know, it wasn't the leadership team. And I'm glad you brought that up because it was the very next level that he wanted exposed to this and the VP of sales that came in, he was new, so he had to be part of this group because he wasn't there originally. And so there was that ongoing... He wanted that next generation that was going to take over for him and the others to really understand this. So I'm glad you summarized that for me to help.

0:21:30.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think one of the starting points too, I mean, the body of work, not just this book, but the other books that you guys have been involved in and produced provide a lot of the starting points for this. So there's a lot there. Dave, where do we go after these considerations? And the people say, okay, yeah, leadership says, we want to make this change. We're ready to make some time for it. We're willing to get outside support and help. Where do we go next.

0:21:57.7 Dave Williams: Right. Well, one thing that we typically invite a leadership team to do is to take kind of a self assessment of where they sort of see their baseline in relation to the methods and activities of QOS. So in chapter one of the book, there's actually a table that is 10 different categories. And then each leader takes it independently and they rate their level of agreement with different definitions from 0 to 10. 0 being this really isn't present, and 10 is, I'm very, very far along on this journey that in the book that's out now, there's a summarized table, it's on a page. But actually in the QOS field guide that we're working on publishing this year, there's a much more detailed version that we use in practice that has deeper definitions, but basically it works its way through purpose and leadership and systems thinking and measurement and all the things that are tied into QOS and what... And as I mentioned, we have each individual member of the leadership team take it independently and then we bring those scores together to learn together.

0:23:32.5 Dave Williams: And there's different ways in which you can display it. In the book, we show an example of a leadership team's scatter plot where it shows the rating and then it also shows the standard deviation amongst that exists between the leadership team. It's very, very common for leaders to not be in agreement in terms of their score in each of the different areas. You know what I said, It's a 0 to 10 scale. Typically, in my experience using the tool, people tend to be between a 2 and a 6 and hovering around a 2 or a 4. But it sort of looks like a buckshot or shotgun blast where there's a very... If you were to put dots where everybody scores, where there's variation that exists. And that's good because it's useful for the team to pause and think about why they assess the organization the way that they did. Looking at it through this new lens, where are the places that there's agreement and also where are the places that there's variation? And that helps them to be able to think about the fact that through this process, they're likely to both improve their assessment of the organization, but also increase their agreement about where they are and what they need to do to move forward and what they need to do to improve.

0:25:05.2 Dave Williams: And so that's a useful starting point, gets everybody kind of on the same page, and it's something that we can use at intervals as one of the ways to continually come back and evaluate progress towards the destination of pursuing quality as an organizational strategy.

0:25:23.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, I imagine that self assessment, it helps you too when you work with companies to be able to really understand, okay, here are starting point with this company is really, they just really don't know much about all of this stuff, whereas you'll have some other clients that basically, wow, okay, there's a lot of knowledge here about it, but how's the implementation and all that? So are we ready to change? Are we prepared to devote the time and energy? Are we going to get outside help? And where are we now? What's our starting point that's great to help us understand exactly how you step through it. What comes next?

0:26:03.5 Cliff Norman: Well, in that very first milestone, in that table, is it table three, Dave? Anyway, the very first milestone is to establish formal improvement efforts. And the reason for that is that unless people experience what it takes to develop, test and implement changes in the organizations, they really can't appreciate the structure that comes with quality as an organizational strategy. Because it's very difficult for many organizations to launch three or four improvement efforts and then bring them to fruition. And there's all sorts of stuff that happens. And then you find out very quickly whether you have managers or leaders, and organizations they've brought me in, they say, let's do some leadership training. I said, no, let's just do some improvement and then we'll find out if we have leaders or not. And one group, I won't mention who it was, but they had five people on their leadership team and they had to replace two of them because they found out they couldn't actually manage an improvement effort. And then the CEO was wondering how they actually manage their organization, which they weren't either. And so it's a rather, it's an important test in the front.

0:27:22.2 Cliff Norman: But as Dr. Juran says, it's real important to develop the habit of improvement. And if you don't know what that is, if you've never experienced it, then it's hard to say to people, gee, I need a purpose that aligns my improvement efforts. I need to understand my system so I know where those improvements are going on. I need to build an information system, get information from customers outside, people inside. I need to put together a strategic plan that actually makes improvements on purpose. That's a lot of work. And once you understand how complicated it can get in terms of just doing three or four improvement efforts and then all of a sudden you got a portfolio of 30 to do your strategic plan. Now that needs some structure, that needs some guidance and all the rest of it. But I'll just go back one step further. My own journey. I was sent by Halliburton at Otis Engineering to go see Dr. Deming 1982 in February. And coming back, I had an audience with the president of our organization, Purvis Thrash. And I went on and on about Dr. Deming. He said, Cliff, you know what I'd like to have? I said, what's up, Mr. Thrash?

0:28:27.5 Cliff Norman: He says, if you'll take this 50 million dollar raw material problem and solve this for me, I'll be a happy man and I'll give you all the quality you want. But go take care of that problem for me first and then come back to me and talk about Deming and Juran and anything else you want to talk about. So I put together four or five people and over about three months we solved his 50 million dollar raw material problem. And then he had a meeting of all executives and I was sitting with the managers in the back row and he called me to the front and he says, Cliff, will you sign this card right here? And I says, well Mr. Thrash, what is this? He says, well, I'm giving you authority to sign $50,000 anytime you need it to get all the quality we can stand here at Otis Engineering. One of the vice presidents said, well, I don't have that authority. He said, you didn't save me $50 million. You know, but once that happens, Andrew, once you do that, then you've got people that are willing to help you. And then once that takes place, I can't tell you how important, it allowed me then to bring in Lloyd Provost to help me.

0:29:36.2 Cliff Norman: And they weren't about to pay out money. They didn't like consultants, in fact, they were anti-consultant. But you saved us $50 million. I gave you $50,000. And Lloyd doesn't make that much. So get him in here, do whatever you need to go do. And I just think it's so critical that we have that demonstration project that people understand at the leadership level what we're talking about when we talk about design and redesign of the system.

0:30:00.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I mean, I appreciate in the book you're talking about this concept. I'm not going to call it quick wins, but the idea is we need to get results. You know, this isn't just about talking about stuff so that's one thing that as you just illustrated, that's one point. The second thing you mentioned, is this person a leader or a manager? You know, and I think for the listeners or viewers out there, they're probably... When they heard you say that, they're probably thinking. Okay, wait a minute. Are my team managers or leaders? How do I know? What would you say? What differentiates the two?

0:30:37.2 Cliff Norman: I was fortunate to hang around Dr. Maccabee, as Deming did, and I asked Dr. Maccabee that question. He said, Cliff it's actually pretty easy. He said leaders have followers, and if you have followers, you can be anywhere in the organization, be a leader, but if you don't have followers, you're not a leader. You might be a manager with authority. You're not a leader.

0:31:02.7 Andrew Stotz: Can I ask a little bit more on that? So I'm thinking about my own business, which is a coffee factory, and I have people that are running the business, but I also have people that are running departments like the roasting department. And that area when they're overseeing this and they're doing a very good job and they're keeping things up and all that. How do I understand in a sense you could say, are they followers? Well, not really. They're people working for them and they have a good time and so do I view that person as not necessarily a leader, but more of a manager, or how do I look at it in my own company?

0:31:35.5 Cliff Norman: It could be a manager, which is essential to the organization. And that's another big difference. You see, the leader can't delegate their relationship with the people who are followers. You can't do that any more than a teacher can dedicate her class to a substitute teacher. Anybody that's ever watched that knows that chaos is getting ready to break out here because that teacher has a relationship with those students. She knows them all in a big way. And when the substitute comes in is game time in most classrooms and so forth, the managers have skills and things that they're applying and they can actually delegate those. Like when I was a foreman, I could have somebody come in and take over my department and I say assign all my people tomorrow. And they could do that. Now, in terms of the people that I was leading that saw me as a leader in that department, they didn't have that relationship.

0:32:30.2 Cliff Norman: But management or skills and necessary things to make the organization run like you're talking about, the coffee is not going to get out the door unless I have people with subject matter knowledge and competent managers to make sure that the T's are getting crossed, the I's dotted and the rest of it. But the leadership of the organization that has followers, that's a whole different person. And I think it's important. That could be anywhere in the organization. Like I had at Halliburton, I had a VP of engineering. Everybody went to him, everybody. He had 110 patents. You know, he built that system. He built the whole organization. So the CEO did not have the followers that the VP of engineering had. And it was well earned. It's always earned, too.

0:33:16.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Okay, that's great. Leaders have followers. Leaders cannot delegate their authority. They have a different relationship.

0:33:24.0 Cliff Norman: They can't delegate the relationship.

0:33:25.8 Andrew Stotz: The relationship. Okay.

0:33:27.4 Cliff Norman: Yeah. Very important.

0:33:34.3 Andrew Stotz: So now let's go back to what, where we were. So we were saying some of the considerations. Are we ready to change? Are we prepared to devote the time and energy? Are we ready to get outside help and where are we now? And that self assessment that you talked about helps us to understand what's our starting point. I always tell a joke with my students about this when I talk about. I'd say, imagine you go to London and you're going to go visit your friend and you call your friend up, you say, I've arrived and I'm calling from a phone booth and just tell me how to get there. And the friend says, well, where are you? And you say, I'm not really sure. Well, do you see anything around you? Yeah, well, there's lots of buildings, but I don't really, you know. Well, do you see any names of any streets? No, I don't really see anything. But just tell me how to get there. There's something missing. If we don't know where we are, it's very difficult to get to where we're going. So now we understand where we are. We got that scatter plot that you guys have that you've talked about. Dave, where do we go next?

0:34:26.6 Dave Williams: Well, so Cliff already mentioned one of the fundamentals. And sometimes I think this is something that people struggle with because they want to jump into something new. But one of the best starting points is to focus in on improvement. And there's a number of different reasons for that. So one is that I don't know about you all, but in my experience, if I ask people, like, hey, I want to create some improvement projects and get started on improvement, I always tell people, like, if you remember the old Stephen Covey exercise where he put the rocks and the stones and the sand into a jar and poured water. And like you would do it in different orders. And I'm fascinated that people will stare at the big rocks or the things that are right in front of them, or the things that are on their agenda, or the things that are part of their strategy. And then they'll look to the side and grab some rare event or some extra thing that isn't related to that, but they've always wanted to work on. And where we try to focus people's attention is one, what are you already working on? Can you look through your and ask around, what are the things that are currently in play, projects that exist? And sometimes we won't ask, what improvement projects do you have? Because if you do that, you get a short list.

0:35:51.4 Dave Williams: Those are the things that people defined as an improvement effort, or maybe use some kind of framing to decide it was an improvement project. It may be better to in the beginning of the book, in the first chapter, we talk about different ways that you improve. And there's designing and redesigning a process. There's designing and redesigning a service or a product. There's changing a whole system. And so it can be useful to say, well, what are we doing in these areas? And that may actually create a bigger list of the various things where people are working on something that's about change to the system that may lend itself to be better activated through firing it up as an improvement project. And then, of course, there's a good chance that any organization, especially if they've done some kind of strategic planning, have some strategic objectives or some strategic priorities which they've committed to or already said, these are the things we're going to work on. So kind of crowdsourcing or bringing those together helps us to potentially find the early portfolio of projects without having to look much further, without having to say, what else do you want to work on.

0:37:07.0 Dave Williams: And then if we've got that, if we've got that list, a second thing that we can do is invite people to use the three questions of the model for improvement and reflect on can you answer these three questions? Do you know what you're trying to accomplish? Do you know how a change will result in improvement? Do you know what changes you'll make? What's your theory about how you'll get to improvement? And so having a list of the things that are already present or existing may be one first step. Another second step in the firing up a portfolio of improvement projects is asking the three questions for the model for improvement. And then a third one, if it's an active project is we have a project progress scale that you might use that can help you gauge. So I've got a project where is it on its journey towards achieving its aim or getting results? Those three can help us to sort of get a sense of the work that is at hand and that has already been sort of started in some fashion that is already in progress and maybe to get a sense of the level of definition and the progress that exists.

0:38:22.3 Dave Williams: They may not be the right projects, but that's a good place to start before trying to create new ones. And I'll hand it to you, Andrew.

0:38:30.4 Andrew Stotz: I find that interesting. Both the story that you told Cliff about fix my raw material problem and then, Dave, what you're talking about is as you talk in the book, focus first on improvement. What are we already working on? What's an improvement project we've got? What's a problem we've got? Because a lot of times, let's say in the teachings of Dr. Deming, it's like, no, get your mind right, read this stuff, read this, figure this out, think about this, go to a seminar, talk to other people before you do anything. I feel like that is oftentimes where people get caught is they get caught up in, I need a year to think about this. And can you explain a little bit more about why once we've done our self assessment and we're ready to go, that you focus on improvement rather than the thinking process?

0:39:21.7 Dave Williams: Well, because we want to... Well, one, we know that in order to get results or to get a different result than what we want, we got to change the system that we got. Right. So in order to do that, we've got to do improvement. The other thing is that there's already energy that's being expended here.

0:39:41.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a good point.

0:39:42.7 Dave Williams: The risk that often I find people run into is that they then add other projects that are not strategic into that bucket and take up more energy. I'll tell you an example. I was working with the health system here in the States and we crowdsource just the things that they were calling improvement projects. The health system had 25 active teams that were just the ones that were called out as improvement projects. When we looked at those 25 teams, the vast majority of them were not actually... They had been meeting for months and doing things for quite some time, but they actually weren't doing any changes and, or they've been testing changes for quite some time. So, now just this exercise alone by only asking, what improvement projects do you have? You realize you've got 25 teams that have been resourced or are spending energy or going to meetings or focused on something. They may not be the strategic thing that matters, but that's irrelevant right now. We just know that we already have invested some interest here. The second thing is these folks have been on this journey for quite some time and are not making progress.

0:41:01.7 Dave Williams: So that tells me something about maybe the way that they framed it. Did they charter it well? Did they have the right people in the room or the right team? Did they have the right tools and methods to be able to break down the problem and then figure out what to test and learn? So there may be some difficulty...

0:41:19.4 Andrew Stotz: Or did they even just dissipate their efforts across 25 projects too? Right in their resources, yeah.

0:41:26.1 Dave Williams: Yeah. Or there are overlaps? So there's a number of different factors. There's actually a paper that was published by a health system in the United Kingdom, and it was really interesting. They spent a lot of attention on generating will through training and getting people in the classroom and teaching them about improvement methods. And they fired up all this energy. They had a massive explosion of the number of projects that were started or where somebody went into their software. They had a software platform. Anybody could go and start a project. Well, something like 50% of those projects never actually got to PDSA testing where they changed anything. And then there were a slew of them that were stuck in PDSA testing but never saw any movement in their process measures or their outcome measures. And only a small number actually progressed in achieving their aim. And I asked the Chief Quality Officer about this, and and he admittedly said that it was very exciting that we we're generating will and getting things going, but that alone was only getting them to maybe some early design and some thinking, but they weren't getting them to results.

0:42:34.8 Dave Williams: And I said, well, what about the ones that were getting results? And he said, well, those are actually ones where we've got an improvement advisor who's got some skills and ability and improvement. There are things that are resourced, there are things that were prioritized. And man, when we did all those things, they moved from planning and organizing and thinking to testing changes and moving in a direction of goodness and getting at least results in their process measures, if not their outcome measures. And so in my mind, I was like, I appreciate you're trying to build this sort of culture, but it felt like a lot of burnt energy at the front end with all these teams getting into training and firing up their software and more energy might have been strategic in copying what was getting to results. And I think that's part of what we're trying to get to, is helping people learn. You've got if you don't have a method to figure out strategic projects, let's look at the ones you got. How are they going? Where are people at? And how effective is the capability that you have within your system right now? And the leaders want to be part of that, and they can learn within that to go, oh, wow, this is our current state.

0:43:47.2 Dave Williams: And so maybe we're going to agree to continue on with these projects. Maybe we're going to sunset some of them, but we're going to learn together about how do we get better at getting better, and how do we learn how to move projects forward and not to have them take two years. Let's try to get them down to four or six months, whether that's through scope or execution. But let's get better at getting better. And then as we're building... Developing the early activities of QOS, we'll eventually get to a point where we'll also be able to identify more strategic projects that are going to move us towards our aim or towards our purpose better. And this will help us as we're trying to build the capability to get there.

0:44:32.7 Cliff Norman: You know, Andrew, early on, when Dave went down this path, he said that we got to make sure that somebody's working on improvement. They're actually making changes. And Jane and I were working with a group, and the CEO said they've been meeting a long time. Could you down there and see what they're doing? Because nothing's happening. And we started looking through their agendas and they had everything well documented, and it was all about getting ready to get ready. And then they'd assign the dessert. Who's going to bring the dessert to the next meeting. And Jane looked at him and says this reminds me of something, Cliff. I said, what's that? Can I share my screen?

0:45:10.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Yep, go ahead.

0:45:13.7 Cliff Norman: I may send this to. You may know about it, but this is Dr. Deming's Diary of a Cat. And everyday...

0:45:20.6 Andrew Stotz: It hasn't come up yet. Hold on one second. Hopefully you've got permission now.

0:45:28.6 Cliff Norman: Let me go back and check here.

0:45:33.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. It looks like it's coming up. One second.

0:45:38.4 Cliff Norman: It said every day is today. There's no theory days of the week. But today I got up some food in a bowl, it was great. Slept some too. Play with yarn, got some food in a bowl, had a good nap, slept, food, yarn, fun. Play with a shoelace. There's a big change right there. Went from yarn to a shoelace. Some people call that a job shop. And ate, slept, had a good day, slept, ate some food, yarn, so forth. So, and the team meeting looked just like that. But there's really no changes going on relative to improvement. So Dr. Deming would often share this into four days seminar to make sure that we weren't involved in the Diary of the Cat, but we were actually doing something useful in terms of making changes in the organization.

0:46:24.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a great one. And it helps us to understand that we could be busy all day long and not improve anything.

0:46:31.8 Cliff Norman: You know, or actually confuse that with improvement. In fact, we have an operational API that my team, we were embarrassed in our first, wait a second, our first improvement guide we wrote. And Dr. Adamir Pente, who's a professor at the university in Brazil, he sent us a note and he said, I know you guys and he said you're real big on operational definitions, but you've written this book on improvement and nowhere have you, you've defined what you mean by improvement. And then he put together a three part definition that there's a design and redesign system, there's system measures and the change is sustainable and lasting and so we put that definition in the second edition. But I was confronted at a university, I won't mention which one it was, but they had 30 Keystone projects for a advanced degree program for nursing and they were convinced they were doing improvement. And when I had them apply that definition, they came up out of the thirty. They only could find two projects out of the 30 where they were actually designing and redesigning the system, which, that's the first thing Dave said are we designing and redesigning and making real changes? And people think just showing up and going through motions and all the rest of it is improvement. No, it means...

0:48:07.8 Dave Williams: Looks like we've lost...

0:48:11.9 Andrew Stotz: We lost you at the last, the last statement you just made. People are going through all this stuff and thinking that they're improving, but they're...

0:48:22.8 Cliff Norman: Yeah, it's showing up and going through motions and you know, having the meetings and making sure we assign who's bringing dessert. But we're not really designing and changing the system. We're not getting measurable changes of improvement. In other words, we haven't tracked the data over time and we can't say that the changes that we've made are going to in fact be sustainable because we haven't known what we've done to the system to deserve a sustainable change.

0:48:51.4 Andrew Stotz: By the way, what a buzzword these days, sustainability, sustainable and all that. And you just think do people really think about how we're building something that's really lasting and sustainable?

0:49:04.8 Cliff Norman: Well, we have a checklist and actually Jane designed it for the first edition and it literally lays out what changes did you make, which processes did you change, what's going to change in the documentation, whose role statements have been changed in the organization because of this change. And once all that's answered on that checklist, which is in the book, then we can... But we're pretty certain that we've created the structure to make it easy for people to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. But unless that structure's changed, probably not much going to happen.

0:49:40.8 Andrew Stotz: Just for the sake of time, because I think we want to wrap up in just a bit. But there's so many stuff, so much stuff that we've been through. But I know there's even more in this chapter, but how would you start to bring this together for the person who is a leader, himself or herself, and they're listening to this and they're thinking, okay, I'm ready to make a change and I'm prepared to devote the time and energy because I see the outcome and I'm open to help, whether that's through the book and other books, whether that's through a consultant, whatever that is. And I can even do a self assessment to some extent and know where our level is, which is very low. We don't know much about this type of stuff and that type of thing. We talked about the first focus on improvement. How do they pull this all together and start moving on it?

0:50:35.0 Dave Williams: There's three things that follow the self assessment. The first one is this focus on doing improvement work and setting up a portfolio of projects. And we just kind of talked about many of the different methods that go into that. And like I said, sometimes that when you say that out loud, leaders don't initially get excited by it because they think they have it. But actually it's a powerful opportunity for you to learn about what's currently going on in the organization and about where this opportunity is to reduce a lot of the noise and a lot of the friction that's getting in the way from you getting to results. The second thing that often happens in parallel is that the leaders need to build a learning system where they're going to be able to learn together both about these projects and what these projects are telling them about their organization, about their culture, about their people, and about their capacity to get results, but also that they can start to be learning about the science of improvement and profound knowledge and the activities of QOS that are going to be part of what they're going to work on developing over the course of the first year or two.

0:51:50.6 Dave Williams: And so that typically is, that's making that space and energy. It's a blend of book learning and application and practical. Trying and looking at things within the organization. It's a very applied approach, but it's an ongoing piece of their discovery. And I often argue that this is a real opportunity for leadership because they're going to be able to see their organization in a way that they haven't seen it before. And when we talk about profound knowledge, they're going to gain this profound understanding and expertise about what they're charged with and what they own and what they want to change in a way that they haven't been able to have it before. And so it's a hard work, but rewarding work. And then third is that typically where the, where we invite people to start is to focus in on the first activity, which is to develop or establish or develop their purpose. When this work was initially framed, not everybody was as... Not everybody had a mission, vision and value statement or a purpose statement that wasn't as common, but today people do. But the difference here, and you'll see this in the chapter on purpose, is that organizations that are pursuing quality as an organizational strategy are organizations that are systems that are built to constantly be trying to match a need that exists out in the world.

0:53:34.7 Dave Williams: And so often a learning for people is to step back and have to reflect on, well, what is the need in which we are creating these products and services to match? And if we're creating these things to match the need, how do we understand what's important, what are the quality characteristics that matter? And then how do we define what our mission is in that context? And being able to say, here's why we exist and the need that we're trying to serve, and in what way? And how do we set a vision for where we want to get into the future and what are the tenants or the practical values that exist in our organization, that we want to define how we work together in terms of building in that way. And so purpose is a big focus. It's that clarity of the need, the clarity of the quality characteristics that it takes to match that need. Understanding what are the products and services that we have. I know that sounds a little trivial, but you'd be stunned how hard it is, especially in service organizations, for people to actually describe what it is that they do, what are the actual services.

0:54:54.3 Dave Williams: They might have the name of the service or the class or the whatever, but to actually say this is what we deliver, and then really think about how do I use this as our organization's sort of North Star, our aim, so that everything else that follows is going to be about building a system that produces the results that we want and produces the services that match that need. So going forward, that's going to be very, very important in instructing the direction and instructing the way in which we're going to work as a community of professional people together.

0:55:30.8 Andrew Stotz: So after self assessment, we're talking about focusing on improvement. We're talking about building a learning system, and we're talking about revisiting or establishing or developing our purpose?

0:55:43.3 Cliff Norman: Yeah, I'll just add to what you just said there, Andrew. There's three basic things that have to happen when we start working. Number one is create the habit of improvement. Start improvement right away. Second thing, Dave just went through some detail on building a system of improvement. And Dave called that a learning system, which I thought was interesting because that's what Dr. Maccabee called it when he saw the five activities. Said, these are really methods for building a learning organization. And he said, I've never really seen them before, but this is what will come out of this, which is the essence of what you want. You want people continually learning, as Dr. Deming said, so they can continually improve. But the third thing that has to happen is we have to develop internal capability for them to carry this on, because we're not going to be around with them. We've never advertised. We don't advertise for clients, and we only get word of mouth. And we're only in there to do those three things, get them started on the habit of improvement, start building the system improvement so they can take it over.

0:56:43.4 Cliff Norman: And the third thing, start developing internal capability so they can continue it on into the future. So those three things basically take off on day one. And depending on the organization, I think this is critical. Dave, you asked this question the other day, if the context is such they've got things in front of them are so bad and so challenging that they just need to work on improvement. That's where we're going to be focused. But now if they can chew gum and walk at the same time, we're going to start building the system of improvement. And the first people I want on those initial teams, I want people on there who are going to be future improvement advisors. And more importantly, they perceive them as future leaders in the organization. I don't want a cadre of a whole bunch of improvement advisors. I want leaders in the future who actually understand the science of improvement, understand these methods, so when they go to the next department, the next organization, they can carry this on. So those three things start improving, start building a system of improvement. And the third thing, start developing internal capability. Those have got to take off almost simultaneously, depending on the situation, of course.

0:57:49.8 Andrew Stotz: Well, on that note, that's quite a discussion. I'm so happy that we can have this to go in a little bit deeper into the work that you guys have done. Again, the book is Quality As an Organizational Strategy. I got mine on Amazon and it sent it to me. But I wonder if you have any last words that you'd like to share about what we've talked about today in relation to getting started.

0:58:18.3 Cliff Norman: So, Dave, why don't you talk a little bit about. Because I think this is critical. We've just finished Andrew, the book that's going to be for the people who actually have to build this system. So Dave, just say a few things about that if you would, because you.

0:58:32.0 Dave Williams: About the field guide?

0:58:33.8 Cliff Norman: Yeah.

0:58:35.5 Dave Williams: Yeah. Well, so when this body of work was first created, there was the content of which you see in this book. And then there were also a lot of exercises and methods and applications and examples that existed as well. And it was a pretty thick binder. We have created two volumes. One, the book that you have, which is the description of the theory and the method and gives you some of the tools. And we're now in the process of pulling together what we call the QOS Field Guide, which is a guide that is supporting people that are going down this journey. It follows the same structure as the book, with the exception of the, the Getting started chapter that we had at the end is now at the beginning. And it walks through in great detail various ways in which you leaders and practitioners can approach getting started and building the capacity and then working through each of the activities. And it's equal in size, I mean, it's about the same thickness. But what we tried to do is to give people really pragmatic things to do.

1:00:01.1 Dave Williams: So there are exercises where people are simulating an idea or a concept or a particular piece. There are what we call QOS applications, which are where you're actually taking the theory or the method and applying it to your own organization. There are case studies and things that have been built that might allow you to practice. There's wonderful examples of just about everything from all, from people that we have worked with over the years across multiple different fields, from my background in emergency services and healthcare to education to manufacturing to elevator companies, all kinds of great stuff. And so that will be helpful as people are trying to think about pursuing this journey and working through that first phase of developing QOS and moving into using it. And we're in the stages of having it done to be available later this year.

1:01:08.6 Andrew Stotz: Exciting.

1:01:09.2 Cliff Norman: We've tried to make it useful, Andrew, that the people have to stay overnight with the management and actually get something done and build it without being run off. That everything is there for them to make sure that they make it successfully. That's the thing we kept in mind as we kept writing this second volume.

1:01:25.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, I would say my experience with your guys's writing is that it's applicable.

1:01:34.1 Dave Williams: Well, Andrew, one thing I was going to add on you mentioned a lot of different examples. There are a lot of books in which people tell you a theory, but they don't tell you how to do it. Or they tell you about their own experience, but they don't actually convey the theory. The Quality as an Organizational Strategy book is laying out the theory and the methods of this approach built on the foundations of the science of improvement and profound knowledge and the Deming philosophy. The QOS Field Guide adds to that by giving you the methods and the tools and the things. It doesn't mean that that by itself you can't just go through like it's some kind of self guided tour and all of a sudden magic happens. There's a lot of work and learning and things that have to go into going through that process. But between these two volumes, a leadership team has the tools and methods that put them in position to be able to make this journey.

1:02:41.4 Andrew Stotz: Right. Well, let's wrap it up there. On behalf of everyone, I appreciate Dave and Cliff. All that you're doing and you're sharing with us and taking the time to do that. So from everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for joining this and bringing your discussion on these topics. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And you can find this book, Quality as an Organizational Strategy at Amazon and other booksellers. Are there even booksellers these days? I don't even know. They're mainly online these days. So this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, which is "people are entitled to joy in work."

In this wide-ranging discussion, Kelly Allan shares his experience with bringing the Deming philosophy into many companies. So much of the leadership principles Dr. Deming taught have seeped into companies in all industries - though most don't know that their methods originated with Deming. Kelly believes we're reaching a tipping point, and shares his ideas on how easily anyone can get started on a path of sustainability.

TRANSCRIPT
Download the transcript here.

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 here with featured guest, Kelly Allan, who claims we are nearing the tipping point in which Dr. Deming's management methods will more rapidly replace traditional command and control methods. And he has suggestions for organizations that wanna get ahead of competitors to reap the rewards worth millions and billions of dollars depending on company size. Welcome Kelly, and please explain that bold call.   [chuckle]   0:00:40.4 Kelly Allan: Well, it's interesting. When Deming sort of burst on the scenes in the United States in 1980 in a documentary of "Japan Can, Why Can't We?," he was describing, and in his first book, "Out Of The Crisis," he was describing an entirely new way of thinking. A new way of looking into organizations to see how they work, to help them work better, to make them more productive, and so it could be more joy in work. And there was so much, I think, it was such a fresh and new way of thinking that for most folks, it was overwhelming. So, now 40 years have passed, and little by little, so much of what he wrote about in that time and during the next 13 years of his life, have seeped into the way organizations, many organizations, are run, even though the leaders and others in the organizations may not know that those ideas came from Deming, and the combination of ideas came from Deming. And part of the reason that was in my mind is the... In the new... The third edition of... I have a copy here of "The New Economics," the new chapter, chapter 11, there's a dialogue in which Deming makes... This is interesting, kind of a, I thought about this a lot, bold prediction. It's a question to Deming. It says, "Dr. Deming, how many organizations are using your methods 100% today?" And Deming says, "None." "Wow! Dr. Deming, if no organization is using your methods 100% today, how many will be using your methods in 100 years?" And he said, "All that survive."

[laughter]

0:02:39.6 KA: Blows your mind, right? What... Is this hubris? And I thought about this for years. I've known this quote for years and years. And how is that going to happen? Is the Deming Institute, the Deming practitioners, they're suddenly going to be all over the media? And I don't know if that's what he had... I don't know what he had in mind. But, here's what we're seeing is that many of the methods that he was proposing, not just the tools, the technical tools to improve quality of the charts and the graphs and the plots and the lines, et cetera, but the strategic part, the leadership part, we're seeing those become now more and more mainstream. And we're only 30, 40 years away from what he said, and the momentum that we're seeing is getting bigger. So, in another 60, 70 years, I won't be around to see it, but I would not be surprised. And I have a lot of data, not only anecdotal but research studies from universities, et cetera that was showing what's going on with this.

0:03:49.2 AS: It's interesting, as you were talking, I was thinking about, well, what else was going on in kind of the '80s and all that? And I was thinking about one of the things that was just starting was the obesity epidemic in America. And it's like in some ways, if somebody could have seen the future, they'd say, "Hey guys, we're gonna be in trouble."

0:04:09.1 KA: Super-Size Me.

0:04:11.0 AS: If this continues on, we're gonna have 30%, 40% of our population in the obese category. But who listened to that? Nobody listened to that, right? [chuckle] And now it's like, okay, so now we're here.

0:04:24.8 KA: Yeah. Well, I think it's... I'm not sure there's a direct analogy, but there is, are some, certainly some similarities that you mentioned. So, for example, with business, if I was one of those earlier adopters of something that Deming was talking about. Just to try something, right? Just not get my arms around everything but just to try something and it worked. And then, I'd try something else and it worked. And I'd try something else and it worked. So, whether we're talking about thinking about control charts instead of spreadsheets. And thinking about having managers be mentors instead of sheriffs. To be thinking about abolishing performance appraisals and focus on processes, and holding processes and systems accountable rather than just focusing on an individual and try to improve only people instead of the system on which they work. At a certain point, those organizations leapt ahead of their competitors.

0:05:26.4 KA: So it becomes... I mean part of human nature is to just, "Hey, it's familiar, it works, let's just keep doing more of that." And many of them never went back to the Deming well to get more tools. To learn more things because what they had, the few things that they tried were so powerful. Well, fast-forward. A lot of those things that were radical, revolutionary at the time Deming was first talking about them have now become more and more common practice, and they are what you need to get a seat at the table. They don't put you ahead anymore. You have to have them because your competitors are doing them. That's more with the sort of technical quality of service, improved service quality, improved product quality. But we're also seeing the things like having managers be mentors and coaches rather than sheriffs and disciplinarians, and holding people accountable for the output of the system.

0:06:31.5 KA: Younger folks, especially, will not migrate to the organizations that are still using those old tactics. Especially, we see it in technology firms, but we're seeing it everywhere. We're seeing it everywhere. So, a number of Deming-based companies during this time when it's impossible, seemingly impossible to hire people, have people waiting in line to go to work for them. And that's part of the Deming magic is you get both. As you focus on his methods, productivity increases as costs go down. Quality increases as costs go down. Joy in work increases as costs go down. Competitiveness increases as costs go down. That is powerful. Imagine having the lowest-cost service, lowest-cost product, and the highest quality with workers who want to stay and work with you and want to continue to learn. How can you not grow your market? How can you not grow your share of the pie, or grow the pie itself?

0:07:48.2 AS: Just thinking about... You were talking about going back to the well and getting other tools to apply. 'Cause I was just thinking, what you were saying, and one of the ideas I was thinking was that, if a typical person went to a typical Deming seminar and they just walked out of it and said, "Why don't I stop being confrontational with my management team and my workers? Why don't I just stop setting them against each other? And why don't I view things as a system where we're all gonna work together?" And that's the only thing they took back. They could get a huge benefit.

0:08:24.4 KA: Absolutely.

0:08:25.4 AS: There's also a lot of other aspects that can continue and build on that. So, when you're talking about... What you're saying, is that what you mean? Like there's some core principles that you could just pick up and start applying right away without having to understand everything about the technical aspects of Deming?

0:08:43.5 KA: Oh, absolutely. And in fact, a number of firms don't do much with the technical "quality tools." So, some maybe build a control chart or two a year, at the most. Some may have fishbone charts, but not all of them. Because they have focused more on the leadership methods, which are really in "The New Economics," rather than the technical quality. So when you add Professor Shraim, you're talking also about different methodologies, different disciplines to improve quality. Deming didn't make, to my mind, in my reading, it didn't make that distinction between producing a great service experience for a customer or producing a great product, with producing a great strategy in the boardroom or the C-suite, because the thinking is the same. The tools that you would use to improve product or service quality can be applied in the financial CFO's office. Right?

0:09:53.5 KA: You start looking at the numbers differently. You start understanding what the numbers are telling you or not. 'Cause spreadsheets are not really an analytical tool. They're simply a numerical record. Deming's tools provide true analysis. So, in the early days, it was easier for most organizations to grab, not all of them, Gallery Furniture for example, down in Houston, grabbed a lot of the leadership principles. Taking sales people off from commission, sales go up, turnover of employees goes down. Right? So, they did a lot of those things. Most other organizations though grabbed on to the "quality tools," right? They're very concerned about the metrics related to processes, and that's important.

0:10:46.7 KA: The thing is, we're at a point in most organizations now that if you just rely on the "Quality department" to try to improve the service that you're delivering, whether it's a customer service experience, call center experience, or whether it's a product or installing a satellite dish or whatever it is, you're not getting the full benefit of Deming because the improvements and the changes that you want to make to increase productivity and reduce costs run up against that old commanding control, traditional way of management. You mentioned, for example, causing people to compete against one another for rewards and recognition. It's interesting. Stanford did a study several years ago in which they asked, I think 435 CEOs of companies of size, I don't know if they were all public companies, I don't recall. But what was their number one issue that they're worried about? It wasn't competitor's products. It wasn't innovation. It wasn't worldwide issues. It wasn't any of these things. The number one issue was, "My direct reports don't get along, They won't play well together."

0:12:01.7 KA: Well, let's see, you make them compete against one another for your attention, for budgets, for rewards, for recognition, for all those things. Why would they get along? They're not on the same team and it's your management approach that has caused that to happen because you believe, you've been taught to believe, that competition is how you get the most out of people. Deming, of course, saw that people are maybe 3%, 4%, 5% of the results that you get. It's the process, it's the system, it's the culture in which they work that yields those results, and it's much better to have. And it's easy to do, right? That's what's amazing. It's not hard to do to improve. To make your processes and systems, whether they're HR systems, hiring systems, production systems, delivery systems, whatever it is, to make those above average, so that you can get more people who can get above-average results. It's magical. It's so simple, but it's not familiar. It's not familiar. They're in that Deming well. They're in buckets there, but most people have not been exposed to it.

0:13:19.0 AS: So, the next question I'm gonna ask you is gonna go back to what you were talking about. How some people just take some of the starting points in Deming's teaching and apply that and get a lot of benefits. And my question to you is, and you're gonna have a chance to think about this question because I'm gonna introduce you to the audience after I ask it.

0:13:37.9 KA: Okay. [chuckle]

0:13:38.6 AS: So you got a chance to think about it. But what I wanna think about is let's take a listener out there who's just very new. They're like, "Oh Deming, interesting. I've downloaded the book, I've read some of it. Some of it's confusing. It's a bit overwhelming." I want you to think about what you can tell people as far as kind of concrete things that they could do to start to bring the Deming philosophy into their work. And while you're thinking about your answer on that, let me introduce you to the audience. Kelly Allan is Chair of the Advisory Council of the W. Edwards Deming Institute, and he wrote the new chapter for the third edition of "The New Economics," Dr. Deming's seminal book on leadership. Kelly has also published in a variety of journals including "Forbes" and "The New York Times." As you might imagine, he also gives a lot of presentations and seminars on the topic. So now, Kelly, for the beginner out there who doesn't know much about Deming, they're learning. What would be the first kind of concrete things that they could implement in their business?

0:14:37.6 KA: Well, I'll give you several, because different people have different interests and different ways they like to learn and consume. So, starting with that new chapter in the third edition of "The New Economics," that's 45 pages. It's not a huge commitment, and it gives you lots of examples of what organizations have been doing, and why the thinking makes sense. And part of the beauty of what Deming gives is it's very natural, humane, authentic, genuine, intuitive. So,1 that's one thing. There's a lot of free materials at Deming.org. Just a vast amount of things. There's a new piece that's a new offering that's coming up here. It's called DemingNEXT, which is online learning, so, the self-paced learning or facilitated learning with a facilitator. That's useful.

0:15:34.1 KA: There are also seminars. So, there are one-day seminars. There's a two-and-a-half-day seminar, if you wanna go more deeply. But in one day, it's really more like six hours with breaks and lunch, et cetera, we call it one day, but you can get exposed to some of the key thinking. And it's not really lectures. It's hands-on, fun things that get past the gatekeeper in the brain said, "Well, this will never work." And people have aha moments from that. So, there's experiential, there's reading, there's... And the other nice things about the Deming Institute is a non-profit. So, our aim is about spreading the word, right? Getting people more exposed to this, so we try to make everything as affordable as possible just to cover costs.

0:16:26.0 AS: So, great actionable things. First is download "The New Economics" and read that new chapter as well as what's in the book. I think it's...

0:16:34.1 KA: Well yeah, we say the new chapter first because it's very approachable. And then you can go back and start to read Deming's own words, and it really sort of brings things together, is the theory in any case. That's what we've heard.

0:16:50.2 AS: Well, you can also see in "New Economics," you can just see that Dr. Deming's thinking and philosophy developed over time. He was continually improving. And I think that there was sometimes in early on stages where it wasn't as clear as his writing later like in "New Economics" where it really started to come together a lot more for me. So, we've got "New Economics." The other thing is to visit DemingNEXT, and I think that that's another great opportunity to do. And as far as... I wanna just talk about the first two points of Dr. Deming's 14 points because I think... I've read these over and over again, I've thought about these over over again, and sometimes I just like, "Wait a minute. I'm not exactly sure what he means." And then sometimes I feel like, I know exactly what he means. So, let's talk about create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service. And the final part is with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and provide jobs. So, he illustrates an aim of the business, but it's this constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service. Can you talk a little bit about that 'cause that's one of the first things that people are gonna hit when they come into Deming's teaching?

0:18:07.3 KA: Yes, and I think at Deming.org, there may even be a video of him talking about that. And that's all free. So yeah, to bring into that, one of the deadly diseases is the job-hopping by managers, right? Because you don't really get to know a job. So, with constancy of purpose, it does two things I think that are key. One is it gives you a long-term view, but it also helps you make short-term... You get short-term results as well. And that's also part of the beauty of Deming is that you can start doing stuff after you learn. You can start making better decisions the very next day. It's very immediate. And you'll still have things that you can learn in 20 years. So, that constancy of purpose helps with employees for example, with associates, team members, who want to come and stay, and who are attracted to the organization because what is true and genuine today will be true and genuine six months from now. Twelve months from now. Years from now, because that purpose, that constancy of purpose is to work to optimize the organization, so everybody wins.

0:19:28.0 KA: That's pretty powerful. So, whether it's customers, suppliers, people who work in the organization, the community, the environment. Deming was really pushing for big picture view with that reliable trust that people can have in the organization. Trust is so important. There's so much garbage written about trust.

0:20:02.0 KA: If you'll pardon me saying so, and it's really quite easy. And that is to do the right things and keep doing the right things. And Deming provides a framework for that versus trying to manipulate people. Versus trying to rate and rank people, in a system that is more in control of their outcomes than any individual. And that's some of the things we do in the seminars is to show the famous Red Bead Experiment and the white bead factory, and it's in DemingNEXT as well. So, that people can actually experience for themselves what they experienced when they were willing workers and forgot about when they became managers. It takes them back, that anxiety of not being able to trust the manager. So, I'll bring up another piece here, which might be useful, and it's also on Deming.org. And you can search my name to find it, if you just go to the home page, and then the search box put in Kelly Allan. There's an article that Professor Schramm and I wrote, based on a bunch of research he'd done through the years with his students engaged in the engineering school at Ohio University. And what it's about, it's called using a Deming lens to investigate and solve managerial challenges.

0:21:35.4 KA: The top things that the managers list that are causing them incredible burnout, frustration, job hopping, are all solved by understanding the Deming leadership method. It's just that constancy of purpose of trying to ensure a win-win, not manipulating people, being authentic, working on collaboration rather than internal competition, helping people be successful rather than rating and ranking them. All of these schemes and organizations have, because they think that people have to be manipulated or they won't do their work, in case, and when it just actually just the opposite case.

0:22:22.4 AS: A great way of illustrating that is to think about children. Children, obviously. There are children that are subjected to just brute force by adults, and they don't have that much joy left in them. But the fact is, is that it's like they're born with this abundant energy, a positive and energetic spirit. And when you think about what you see, it's one of the reasons why we love going to kindergarten classes.

[chuckle]

0:22:53.4 AS: And to visit the kids, it's like, "Wow, this is amazing!," 'cause here I am in the corporate world. I gotta fit in this box. I gotta punish all these people, and I gotta reward these. I gotta make the tough decisions and all of that. And it's like the distance between what is natural of just that fun and joy that you have when you went to school when you were a kid, and what you're doing as an adult. Sometimes it just gets painful. Work is painful for many people.

0:23:20.7 KA: Well, and so I think this was Dr. Deming who said this that we were all born with the desire to learn, and then we go to school, and it's beaten out of us. [chuckle] Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting, the number one issue that these managers that were interviewed said was... And it's top three things, it's a Pareto chart distribution. Listen, number one by far, which is, I have to spend so much time trying to motivate people. Why are they so demotivated, right? Most people don't get up in the morning wanting to go to work to do a bad job. We all wanna go to work to make a difference, to improve something, to do something that's a quality. Deming said pride and joy in work. So, we get to the organization, and it's a prison. Deming used that word actually, people in jail because they cannot be all that they can be, that they want to be at work. So, Deming talks about removing the demotivators. Let's get rid of the demotivators of treating people as if they're responsible for the system in which they work. They're not. Treating people for the results they get that are results of a bad process. He said a bad process will beat a good person every time.

0:24:51.7 KA: So, senior leadership is focused, and so many organizations in the past have been focused on making people accountable. The reason I think we're getting to that tipping point is there are more organizations that are realizing it's our role as leaders to provide the system, so that more and more people can be more and more successful. Because that's win-win, optimizing the system for everybody. They treat customers better, they treat each other better. They have a framework of a process they get from analytical thinking, critical thinking skills. Man, it's just fun. It's just fun.

0:25:27.9 AS: Yeah. I wanna go back to this point number one about create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service. In some ways what Dr. Deming is saying is ... Wait a minute, as a new listener or new reader of Deming, is that it? Just all we're gonna do is improve and improve and improve? Isn't there... We've gotta focus on quarterly results or we've gotta focus on mergers and acquisitions, or we've gotta produce for the shareholders, or whatever that is. But there's kind of a leap of faith there, and I just wanna talk a little about that. And I also wanna talk about one of the tools like PDSA, and this concept of what do you get if you relentlessly pursue improvement of product and service?

0:26:18.7 KA: Well, you end up owning the market in most cases. If you're doing it in the right way. If you're doing it in a command and control away by setting quotas and targets and goals that have no foundation in reality whatsoever in terms of what is the capability of a process or a system. No, you won't ... That's improvement the old way. The improvement with Deming's approach is to a handful of thinking tools, if you will, that you can apply and start to see what's going on with why are we having so much variation?

0:27:02.8 KA: Why aren't we have really a learning organization? Why don't departments get along? Why do we have so many silos? Why isn't it working the way I thought it would work? So, that constancy of purpose provides the framework for an approach, right? And we don't want people to take more than one leap of faith, and it's not an expensive leap of faith at all. It's read a chapter, reach out to us at the Institute, and we'll start to get you connected with resources, et cetera. But you just have to try one experiment. When you referred earlier to PDSA, a Plan-Do-Study-Act. And we always help people design those so they're low cost, low risk and fast. So it's not a big commitment, some of them can be done in an afternoon, to show the power of thinking differently. So, we want people to start small and then they'll take the next step. One of the things I want to really emphasize though, because I think it's so important, is that if you have not started on Deming journey, and you're the business owner or the leader of the organization, and even if you don't own the business, if you've not started on this Deming journey, you'd better hope none of your competitors have.

0:28:35.8 KA: Because if they have, they will gain momentum. First, they'll eat their breakfast then they'll eat your lunch, and then you're done. [laughter] And my organization, the Kelly Allan Associates, has worked on a number of turnarounds through the years. Companies that were going out of business. And it would be... For me, that's the proof of the Deming approach, right? No resources, in fact, negative resources. The company is going to fail. They're not going to make payroll, right? Fairly soon. We've ever walked into organizations where the lights were out. We met in a conference room that had windows. $250 million top line organization turned the lights out because they didn't know if they're gonna make the electric bill. Money was just bleeding like crazy. That is a crucible. That is a test of the Deming method.

0:29:23.7 KA: To be able to turn that around. Right? So, that if you're not getting started on your Deming journey, you're leaving yourself really vulnerable to a competitor who discovers it. Now, you can catch up if your competitor is not really going quickly, because you can't do three years of work in three months. That's not what I'm suggesting. But you can go fast, and if your competitor's doing a nice steady pace, and that's a good pace to have. But if you need to catch up, then Deming approach allows you to ramp that up pretty quickly, because it's not hard to do. The main barrier to constancy of purpose is our belief system about how things either should be or must be. And that's why when Deming burst on the scenes in 1980 in this country, it was like, people thought he was talking a different language. He was talking a different language. He was thinking differently.

0:30:33.9 AS: Yeah.

0:30:34.3 KA: And that's the leap, and that's what we try to do in the seminars and the book, is to help people make that... See that there's a different universe there that is better, faster, cheaper, smarter and more fun.

0:30:47.0 AS: Yeah, there's two things that I was thinking about too as you were talking and that is Dr. Deming, he constantly refined his thinking in his work. And I just... I'm going back to the constancy of purpose 'cause I think that I've had my own challenges thinking about it, and I think you're clarifying a lot of it. One of the things that I wanna highlight is that he talked about create constancy of purpose for improvement of products and services.

0:31:16.9 AS: Now, it's interesting. Here is a guy that was so committed to quality and all of that, wouldn't you think that he would have said to improvement of quality of products and services? [laughter] But in fact, he was saying you've gotta improve your products and services, and then how do you know if you're improving your products and services? Well, if your customers are buying more, they're feeling satisfied. It's just interesting, as I think about what you're talking about and I'm looking at it, I'm realizing it's interesting that he said improvement of product and services, not the quality of products and services. Why do you think he didn't say the quality of products and services? Instead he said improve them.

0:31:56.6 KA: Well, of course, I don't know, and I don't want to try to channel him. But my sense from exposure to him and to his readings and seminars, et cetera, is that it's the Deming chain reaction that is what gets you to do to a better space. And if you're working on improvement in the ways he suggested, ways that make sense that are not commanding control, but collaborative and insightful, et cetera, there's a methodology there that's again, easy to learn.

0:32:36.7 KA: It doesn't matter whether you are the CFO, the COO, the chief legal officer or anyone else in the organization. Because what your focus is on is trying to figure stuff out. That's the fun of it. That's when you talk about children earlier, they're trying to figure stuff out. And when they get a methodology to figure stuff out, they grab it. And that's what happened in the '80s and '90s with Deming. I think what we were all exposed to was Deming was dubbed the quality guru because so much of the name of the NBC documentary was, "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" Because the Japanese were producing high quality products, right? From they used to produce junk. Radios, right, that didn't work very well. And then once they got into Deming, quality went way up and cost went way down. So, he was dubbed the quality guru, and that's fine. But it puts him in a box, so people miss the strategic part. The original title of his first book, "Out of the Crisis," had to do with competitive advantage. He saw that. He understood that.

0:33:57.8 KA: So, that competitive advantage comes from thinking about figuring stuff out in ways that are not command control. That are not toxic.

0:34:10.4 AS: I want to talk about what you could argue is the end of an era. And I wanna go back in time to the post-World War II period when Dr. Deming was working with the Japanese and coming back to America and trying to get people's attention. And then we had about a decade of prosperity in America. Why pay attention to quality? It's just all about quantity. Last night, I was giving a lecture in economics and finance, and I was talking about this flow after World War II, and what happened. And I'm gonna share my screen for the people that are watching; and for the people that are listening, I'll read it out as we go through. So, I'm just gonna share one slide, and then let's think about this and discuss it a bit. So, let me do that right now. And this is the slide, and basically, it's a picture of Dr. Deming and a quote with his, what he said. But at the top of it, I wrote down that America was great because every other country was destroyed. And the quote goes like this. "In the decade after the war," meaning World War I or II, sorry, "the rest of the world was devastated. North America was the only source of manufactured products that the rest of the world needed. Almost any system of management will do well in a seller's market." What does that mean to you, Kelly? At that time as he was saying it, probably at that point in the '70s or the '80s, and then where we are right now.

0:35:57.6 KA: Yeah, it is now a worldwide economy, and many different countries are able to produce in volume products that people want to buy. So, that kinda takes me back to what I mentioned earlier is that that is a baseline now, right? Deming was pointing out that there was a period of time where the quality didn't really matter as much as quantity. But, as you say it, that era I think is long gone, and we expect now quality at a lower cost. And indeed, if you start to think about it, so many things that we have are remarkably inexpensive for what they do. And not just technology, but certainly technology is an example of that. So, it ratchets up my point about that is now just a seat at the table. Not only is quality able to produce quantity just a given. You have to be able to produce quantity in a way that produces quality without raising your cost inordinately, or in fact, if you can reduce your costs. And that's probably gonna be the way it is going forward. I talk in some presentations, I talk about the arc of quality being a long one but bending towards Deming. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior talked about the arc bending towards justice. Well, in terms of production, productivity, service delivery, excellence, if you will, it bends towards Deming. And I see that arc coming much faster now, both anecdotally and in the research studies that I see.

0:38:07.3 AS: It's interesting also because what we saw was a transformation that happened in Japan. And if people my age, your age and others, we knew that when we were young, if it said Made in Japan it was low quality. It was just a low quality item, and Japan really went up this quality scale into a complete transformation. And now something made in Japan is known as a very high quality product in most cases. Now, what's also interesting is China. For many people, younger generation, Made In China may have meant low quality items and possibly low price and low quality. But the quality of the cars that they're making, the manufacturing that they're doing, that the parts and the supplies that they're doing into iPhone as an example, these are very high levels of quality. And what I can imagine is that the Deming philosophy of continually improving could really be applied well in any country, whether that's Africa, countries in Africa, or whether that's in China. To say how do we keep moving up that quality scale. And as you say, if your competitor gets a hold of this, and before you, they're gonna move much faster than you. What are your thoughts about that globalization of it all?

0:39:30.0 KA: Yes, absolutely, so it's not just a competitor in any given country. It's the international. And so as you talk about they're improving quality of the products that they're manufacturing, if they don't adopt to the next one, if they don't adopt the new philosophy of management, Deming's philosophy of management, they will hit a wall. Because the commanding control approach of management by spreadsheets, management by quotas, management by the numbers, management by objectives as it's typically practiced hits a wall in a variety of ways. People don't wanna work for you. They start to sabotage you. You start to break things in the rest of the organization because you're managing through fear, right? That's why with the system of profound knowledge that Deming outlines, and the four elements of that in "The New Economics," that is the future. That is, to my mind from what I've seen in terms of impact, leverage, power, if people think the quality tools, right? And they're important and we have to have them. The charts, the graphs, the plots, et cetera. But if people thought they were powerful... And they were because if you're not doing that in your organization of any size at all, you can't... You're done. It's just... You won't be able to continue.

0:41:16.0 KA: So, almost any organization of any size that's left is doing that and they got great results from that. The system of profound knowledge, I would say, is at least four times more powerful than just using quality tools.

0:41:30.8 AS: You've touched on two things. You've started to talk about point number two: adopting a new philosophy. But you've also talked about the system of profound knowledge. So maybe you could just expound on that for a beginner who may not know anything about that and even for experts who wanna keep thinking and refining their thinking on it. Can you explain what that means to you?

0:41:53.0 KA: Well, it's such a rich area, and I like to think of it in this way. I don't wanna have to learn 400 things. I don't wanna have to learn 40 things. As a business owner, I want to do the least that I need to do to get the best results. The greater results. The system of profound knowledge is four things. I can do four things. I can figure out four things. Deming helps me figure out four things. Now, obviously, I'm over simplifying a bit because when he talks about knowledge of variation, there are some important things in there that we have to understand. What type of variation do we have? That's easy to figure out. You don't even have to do the statistics in most cases to figure out whether you have common cause type variation or special cause type variation. Because reducing variation increases productivity, joy in work, profits, customer satisfaction, et cetera.

0:42:55.9 KA: So, reducing variation is important. I'm not talking about innovation, more innovation. Deming is all about innovation. What we're talking about, variation in terms of how we can rely on output whether it's a service output or a product output. So, understanding what type of variation we have tells us what to do if we get a bad result. It tells us how to fix that, how to investigate that, or to improve the system. So, the next one has to do with appreciation for the organization as a system. People have been taught to optimize every department, which is a natural outcome of that sub-optimizes the organization. So, let me say it this way. Every organization is perfectly designed intentionally or unintentionally to get the results that it does. To produce the results that it does.

0:43:55.4 KA: I don't care if you're a financial institution, a technology organization, or a manufacturer, or a seller, or a distributor, or service organization, or whatever it is you happen to do. Whatever symptoms you're seeing that you don't like and that frustrate you are built-in, designed into your organization, and they sub-optimize it. So, we have to purposely look at the various departments and workflows to say what needs to be optimized to optimize the overall organization? What needs to be sub-optimized? We don't want everybody... And I think Deming gave the example of the symphony orchestra. You don't want everybody coming in playing loudly all the time. That's trying to optimize every person. It sub-optimizes the orchestra, right? So, that's the... So, there are some guidelines on how you optimize and have appreciation for a system, which goes beyond just systems thinking, by the way.

0:45:00.9 AS: So, we have a system, the system of profound knowledge now as you've gone through for the listeners out there that aren't familiar with it. What you've talked about is the knowledge about variation. Now, you've talked about the appreciation for a system, and then we have two other elements.

0:45:17.1 KA: Two. We have two more. Right. One has to do with theory of knowledge, which is, how do we know what we think we know is really so? [chuckle] Right? Deming's first questions was always, how are we doing and how do we know? So, how do we know what we think we know is really so? The numbers on the spreadsheet are not a proxy for reality. We have to have numbers, but let's make sure we don't imbue them with more importance than they should have. And then, how do we take that, and what we learn from that and spread it through the organization? And that's where the Plan Do Study Act experimentation comes in. That's where things like operational definitions come in. What does good mean? What does on time mean? Right? What does clean mean?

0:46:02.1 KA: And then the fourth one, the fourth element of the system of profound knowledge, has to do with psychology. How do we react and interact with one another? What causes us to collaborate? What causes us to compete against one another in our organizations? And let's leave the competition to the sports arena or against perhaps other companies. Deming also gave a lot of examples of how competitors can cooperate and get to win-win as well. Now, I should probably point out that there's one other thing that's really important to me and that is Deming called it the system of profound knowledge not because he thought he had come up with something profound. What he said is if you'll use these four elements: Understanding variation, appreciation for a system, human psychology and how we think we know what we know is really so, use them as a lens. A diagnostic lens to see what's really going on. You will... If you do that by asking just four questions: What's going on with variation? What's going on with psychology? What's going on with the system?, et cetera. You will get profound insight. You will have profound knowledge, and that's what you need to be able to reduce costs as you increase joy in work. To reduce costs that in the causes of costs as you produce things, whether it's a service or a product or whatever. So, productivity goes up, everything good that you want goes up, but the frustrations go down and the causes of cost goes away. Start to go away, get reduced.

0:47:43.0 AS: So for those that are listening or viewing this and you wanna really capture what Kelly is saying, I would challenge you to just write down four words: system, variation, knowledge and psychology. System, variation, knowledge and psychology. And what Kelly is telling us is that if we walk into a situation, and we're able to see things as a system. It's like we can back up and look at all the inputs and outputs and everything that's happening with different departments here rather than focusing in very narrowly. Number two, if we can understand variation and not freak out because something has variation in it knowing that, hey, we have to understand a little bit more about this variation before we react. And then if you think of... If your third part is the knowledge where you think, what do we know and how do we know that, and how are we building knowledge in this? Or are we are just coming at this cold every time? And then finally, what are people's psychology? What do people want? What do people feel? And if you think about system, variation, knowledge and psychology, what Kelly is telling us is that what Dr. Deming is saying is that you will have profound knowledge. Would that summarize it?

0:48:58.4 KA: Yeah, I think that's correct. Now, I think another place where the managers in the research study that I talked about, they've been taught at some seminar or something, that they're supposed... Not in Deming one, that they're supposed to manage every person as in a very special way. How can you scale doing that? I mean there are some Deming-based organizations, and there are no perfect ones, but there are some Deming-based organizations that have hundreds of thousands of employees coming through their doors every day. It makes no sense to try to have 300,000 different approaches to leadership. But because the Deming approach is so humane, it makes so much sense and it engages people. It just is so much easier than the typical things that managers have been taught about how to motivate people and how to give people bad news. And you know with Deming it's working on the work together to figure stuff out. Wow! That's a job I'd work, right?

0:50:09.7 AS: Yeah. You know, Kelly, I had an experience where I was consulting with two different companies, and I was teaching and advising them. And what I was so fascinated about was that both of the CEOs were kind of charismatic, smart, energetic, good guys. And then they had these management teams that if you talk to each of the individual managers--impressive. Cause I was reviewing LinkedIn profiles of the different managers as I was going in to get to know them and all that. Individually they were all impressive. And so, we had a great time. We did two days together, going through a bunch of stuff. And then at the end of it, I left those two different consulting jobs that I did in one week, and at the end of the week, I thought to myself, interesting. They're almost identical in so many ways, but one of them is losing money and crashing their business. And the other one is going from win to win. What's the difference?

0:51:08.9 AS: And what I came up with my conclusion was, there's really... It's intangible, which is very different from what I learned as a financial guy is that look at the numbers and that sort of things, but I learned that numbers are just tools. But it's intangibles. So, I've come to the conclusion that first, you need a good CEO that sets the right direction, that she or he knows where they're going, and they're taking in good input, and they're setting the right direction. If they're setting the wrong direction, you're in trouble. The second thing is it's not about the quality of each individual manager on a team, it's about how the CEO helps coordination of those managers, so that you do optimize that system. And I felt like it's CEO leadership, and it's the CEO's helping the management team to coordinate their activities. How does that fit in with what you've observed as a consultant over the years?

0:52:08.0 KA: Yes. So, one of the things is the gift of a CEO, and Deming writes about this in "The New Economics," and where the power of the CEO comes from the three places... I wish I was going through it right now. But it's basically if that CEO is able to adopt the new philosophy and understand it, you build a culture from that. The way we do things around here, the way we treat one another, the way we work on problems, the way we address issues is who we are. It's a part of the design of the system, and the design of the system produces the results, right? So, it's all linked together. So, charismatic CEOs can get a lot done, but a lot of not charismatic CEOs also can get a lot done with Deming. So, whether you're charismatic or not doesn't really matter. And, the thing is you can get insight about that in a day, and I'm not talking about spend a year to really dig into Deming. No, no. Give us a day at a seminar to get your feet wet, so you can go back and do some things in your organization. As an executive, you get to make some of those choices. A day is gonna pass whether you learn about Deming or not. A week's gonna pass. A year's gonna pass whether you learn anything about Deming or not. And as we interview CEOs say, "I wish I had done this years ago. I wish I had done this years ago."

0:53:48.9 AS: There's also documentation of what you were saying, Andrew. A university study that a couple of universities collaborated on over the course of 30 years, several studies that show that the results of adopting a new philosophy, the Deming approach, has incredible results. So, these are organizations that are long-lived, first of all, makes them very special, because organizations don't last that long these days. So, this is looking at organizations over 30 years who grew prosperous. They had a whole host of criteria that were needed, that they looked at, whether it's turnover rates, and pay rates, and all kinds of things. And in business, if something... If a way of leading or managing gets a 55% correlation to good results, that's pretty darn good, right? That's really very good. That's worth spending some money on, because most don't get anywhere near that. Right? Their research, if people wanna reach out it's a work that Cassandra Elrod and some of her colleagues did at the university, shows in some cases almost a 90% correlation. Unheard of. So, if you're doing things that work about 55% of the time but you're up against the Deming company that's doing things that are getting results 90% of the time. Do the math. Do the math. It's pretty easy.

0:55:35.3 AS: Right. Interesting. Well, let's get that... We'll get that link to that and put it into the show notes. So people can go in and...

0:55:40.4 KA: Yeah, I'll give it to you.

0:55:42.4 AS: I think that's a good one. In the spirit of wrapping up now, what I wanna do is ask you this question. Why Deming? Why now?

0:55:56.5 KA: Well, I think for all the things that I said, but if it's not fun, it's not done. I want to have fun. I mean, most of us want to. Not that we aren't serious about work. That's not what I'm saying, but Deming talked about it as joy in work. It is to create meaning, right? Viktor Frankl's book, "Man's Search For Meaning." It is very meaningful. At the end of the day, you don't leave work feeling like you have to go home and take a shower to wash off the toxicity. You walk out of your job knowing that your best efforts made a difference because you were working with profound knowledge. You are working with people who want to collaborate, want to figure stuff out. So, at a more... The name of Deming's second big book on leadership is "The New Economics." So, it's also about the money and the money being used to create more jobs because... And a friend of his, Peter Drucker, also an economist, recognized as many other have, of course, recognize that democracy rests in part on good jobs. Social unrest and a lot of bad things come from not having good jobs. So, at the end of the Deming chain reaction, it's being able to grow and create job, as he said create jobs, jobs and more good jobs.

0:57:35.1 AS: Beautiful. Now...

0:57:36.4 KA: It makes a...

0:57:38.3 AS: Yeah, it's a great one. And for the listeners out there and the viewers, are you bringing joy to work? Are you helping that process? Or are you causing competition at work? Think about it honestly, and start to work on bringing more joy to work. Kelly, as we wrap up, I wanna ask you a final question about your involvement with the Deming Institute. I think it's important for people to understand what's going on at the Deming Institute? And how people can understand what's going on the Deming institute, what's the direction? And also how can they support the Deming Institute in any way possible?

0:58:21.6 KA: Well, there's a lot more going on at Deming Institute than I can certainly elaborate on because it's a very robust organization these days. And the Institute attracts people who also wanna make a difference, because of the nature of their aim and Deming's principles. So, and the fact that I think it happens to be a non-profit is also a useful thing. So, it's a goodwill, right? It's about really affecting change for the better. And that's... I volunteer as do many, many people volunteer, including the executive director volunteer, Dr. Deming's grandson, volunteer time. He volunteers full-time. I would say the way to get involved is to start on a Deming journey. Deming talked about the transformation in two ways. One was it starts with the individual. Know thyself. Read Deming and think about yourself. Feel about yourself, and what is authentic about you, and how that matches Deming. But he also says that the change of recognizing improvement in quality starts in the boardroom. So, it's a combination, but you don't have to be the leader to affect change, right? And certainly for yourself as well. It applies to families, certainly also. And then once you start on that Deming journey, reach out because we'd love to hear from you and try to engage. We try to engage people, and the Institute offers some scholarships to some of the seminars for folks. It's pretty cool.

1:00:20.7 AS: Yeah, so just go to the... Just type in Deming Institute right now on your browser and you'll go straight there.

1:00:28.5 KA: Or even deming.org. It's easy for me to read. D-E-M-I... Yeah.

1:00:35.0 AS: Thinking about reaching out, I originally met you in 2014 when I saw that Deming Institute was offering a seminar in Hong Kong. And not only did I reach out and go to the event, but I also kept in touch. And you're a testament to the willingness of people within the community to help each other. And so, I really encourage everybody to reach out to Deming Institute and also Kelly and others there. So, Kelly, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute and in the Deming community, I want to thank you again for coming on this show. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

1:01:15.5 KA: My pleasure. Start now. Start now. It's so much fun. It's so interesting.

1:01:23.5 AS: It's an endless journey. And that concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite Dr. Deming quotes. "Innovation comes from people who take joy in their work."

Kevin Cahill, President and Executive Director of the Deming Institute, reflects on growing up with Dr. Deming, learning about his grandfather's impact on the world, and his own Deming journey.

Kevin also describes The Deming Institute's origins, the DemingNEXT initiative, and using Deming in the real world.

SHOW NOTES

Books mentioned
The New Economics and Out of the Crisis, both by Dr. Deming (available via www.deming.org)
Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming's 14 Points, by Andrew Stotz

0:00:36 Growing up in the Deming family

0:04:29 Watching If Japan Can, Why Can't We? with my grandfather

09:07 Kevin's own Deming journey

14:21 The origins of The Deming Institute

21:35 Why Deming, why now  

39:14 Introducing DemingNEXT

46:06 Andrew's Deming journey

53:34 Deming in the real world

TRANSCRIPT
Download: Transcript of Kevin Cahill's Podcast 4-22-22

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 here with featured guest, Kevin Cahill. Kevin, are you ready to share your Deming journey?

Kevin Cahill: Absolutely, Andrew. Excited to be here, looking forward to it.

AS: Yeah. Well, I think we gotta kick this off by introducing you. Tell us what is your connection to Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

KC: Well, I'm very fortunate to be his grandson, and also very fortunate that as I grew up in the Washington DC area, I got to spend a tremendous amount of time with my grandparents, my grandfather, Dr. Deming, and his wife, Lola Deming, who also assisted him in his work for many, many years, and got to know them growing up. And so, it was absolutely fascinating to see this man that I knew as a kindly, gentle, soft-spoken man who worked out of the small basement of his house in Washington DC, not in a big office, this little, tiny basement that used to flood in the rainy season and was just very, very small. And I always wondered what he did because everything that I saw was just figures and numbers and all this stuff, and he never talked about work. When we were together with him on Thanksgivings and Christmases, he was always talking about family and what it was like with my mother and her sisters growing up. So, a very different perspective of who this man was. That all changed at one point in my life but growing up, it was a very different kind of relationship.

AS: You know, my first connection with your grandfather was when I was like 24, and I was just in awe, but I was also in terror because I watched him pretty strict, pretty tough when he was dealing with people that just had nonsense questions in some cases, or had the wrong idea, and he really needed to straighten them out in one way or another. And it's kind of surprising, but now that I think about it, in our families, we don't bring that toughness necessarily into the family. Is that the case?

KC: That was the case. We never noticed that. He would sit at the dining room table, and he would just be quiet at the head of the table, and occasionally he'd pull this little notebook out and make some notes. I always wonder what he was writing. I found out later. Something came to mind, and then, occasionally, in the middle of the dinner, he would say... He would have this great story about my mother or something that he had. He would tell us growing up, and he just burst into this fantastic laughter of his, and it was so much fun. And we really didn't know what he did. We knew he traveled, and we knew that... Like I said, growing up, we would get scrap paper from his office, and it always just had sheets of numbers on the one side, and my brother and I would always joke that, man, "I'll tell you the one thing we don't wanna do in life is grow up and do what he's doing." [chuckle]

AS: That's tough stuff, whatever it is he's thinking about. And I'm just curious. What was his relationship with his wife, Lola?

KC: Oh, she was just this terrific lady. They met, and they actually worked together. I believe was at the Fixed Nitrogen Lab in Washington DC, and they co-wrote some papers together. She had a master's degree in mathematics at a time, early in the last century, when women just didn't have advanced degrees, and she helped him for decades with his work. And I remember seeing a lot of photos of her traveling with him to Japan and around the world. That was absolutely fascinating. She was just a brilliant woman in her own time, and with what she was able to do in terms of helping him. And she doesn't get enough credit for what she did to assist him.

AS: And before we get into the Institute, I just wanna understand your own personal journey in life. You developed... You saw that stuff, and you thought, "I'm not gonna study that." But tell us just a little bit about your own personal journey in your education and in your work life.

KC: Sure. So like I said, I didn't really know much about what he did. But when I was a freshman in college, my family had moved away from the DC area to Los Angeles, and I came back for the summer for a job that I had. I called my grandfather, grandmother, and said, "Hey, you have an extra little, tiny room in your house. Is there any chance I could stay there for the summer?" And they, of course, said, "Yes." So, I stayed there for the summer. And in June of 1980, my mother called me and said, "Your grandfather travels around and has been to Japan. They're doing a show on NBC on June 24th, 1980 called, 'If Japan Can, Why Can't We?' And your grandfather is gonna be mentioned in that show for some of the work he's done in Japan." You can imagine how excited. This was at a time when there were three networks, ABC, NBC, CBS. There was no cable. There was nothing.

KC: And this was gonna be on prime time. And so she said, "Just make sure your grandfather watches it." And so, that night of 1980, I had to go downstairs and get him in the office and say, "We've gotta go upstairs and watch this show." And so, we all traipsed up to the third floor and sat down on his couch, and my grandfather, my grandmother, and then my grandmother's sister, who was also living at the house, we all sat down to watch the show. And a few minutes into it, you saw my grandfather who was, at the time, almost 80 years old, and he had about a 15-second part in the show, and I just remember being so excited, "Oh my god. That's you. It's so cool."

KC: And then there was nothing. That was it. And for the longest time... And you could tell my grandfather was getting very fidgety. He was ready... He mentioned something... He was unhappy with a few things they were saying in the show that he thought were off-base, and he was kind of mumbling a little bit about that. And he was getting ready to leave and go back down and do some work. And then they started talking about a man who was considered the... Helped transform Japan and was considered the key person in that Japanese transformation. And at that point, I looked over to my grandfather, 'cause I hadn't said anything in about 20 minutes, and I said, "Do you know who that is?"

KC: And the announcer, he said, "It's Dr. W. Edwards Deming." And it was just this disconnect. This is the man I know, who I grew up with, and the Emperor of Japan has given you credit for the Japanese economic miracle. I still get goosebumps when I think about that moment. I just could not believe it. And then we watched the rest of the show in just stunned silence. And of course, he had some comments, and at the end, they talked about the National Paper Corporation and how he had helped them, and I just remember thinking, "This is gonna change everything."

KC: And you know what, Andrew? I was actually a little bit sad because I thought, "He's 80 years old, almost 80. He's probably..." People are gonna call him, but he may not work for more than another year or two. And then I can tell you, it was astounding because, like I said, his office was in the basement, and my grandmother and my great-aunt and I would stand at the top of the stairs, 'cause my grandfather used a speaker phone, and his assistant would say, "Dr. Deming, you've got Don Peterson, the chairman of Ford Motor Company, on the phone. You've got the head of Xerox on the phone." You've got the head of all these different companies, and we're hearing him talk on the speaker phone, and it was just astounding. It was an amazing, amazing period.

KC: So at that point, I knew things were gonna change in my life. I just didn't know what or how or anything like that. And as I moved through college and then graduated, I was just amazed that my grandfather was continuing to work and just being quoted on news articles and everything like that, and on TV shows, just continuously. And as I got into the business world in a media business, I knew a little bit about my grandfather's philosophy, some things like how important systems are and understanding that and operational definitions.

KC: And there were some of the elements of the 14 points that I understood, breaking down barriers within the organization. And so even as an assistant, what it did, my grandfather's philosophy, even though I couldn't impact anything at the top, what I was able to do within my own sphere of influence was extraordinary in terms of how it helped me move up through the organization at a much, much, much more rapid rate than I would ever have been able to do. And so...

AS: And what would you say were the core... What was the core things if you say, you didn't know all of the different things that he said, but there was those core things that really stuck with you. What would you say was the one or two core things, particularly thinking about the listener or the viewer out there who's thinking, "Wow, I would like to be able to make that impact, and I'm not sure how quickly or how much time I have to learn everything."

KC: That's a really interesting question. I would say one of the key things that I did was making the system visible that we were actually working in. So, we were a media company that was selling advertising time on TV stations around the country. And we had all this workflow that we had to do, and nobody was making it visible what that flow was. And I remember when I was trained, and I was started off as an assistant to an assistant, and they were training me, all the training was done by memory that somebody else did it. So, a lot of times they were teaching me things that were erroneous that I was trying to do and so, as I got into that position, I made sure that I put that process down so that when I moved up, and I could hand it off to somebody else, they could see what that process was. And some of it was visual, and some of it was work instructions. Other things were like operational definitions of... Somebody was saying, "Hey, can you get this done for me?" "Well, by when?" "By the end of the day?" "By the end of the week?" "By the end of the month?

KC: So, there were a lot of little things like that that made a difference in terms of the way, I thought, that helped the other people within the organization, that really made a difference, and helped me move up very quickly within that organization.

AS: And then, how did you go from your career to now, The Deming Institute? Maybe you can talk to us about that and tell us about The Deming Institute and the aims of The Deming Institute.

KC: As I continued to move up and took on greater roles and responsibilities within this media organization, again, my grandfather and... I would call him and ask him questions about things that I needed help on. I remember one time, in particular, I had an assistant who could not get a particular job done, and we worked on it and worked on it, and I tried to make it visible. I tried to do different things, and I called my grandfather one day. I asked him a question, and I said... And he gave me some page numbers in one of his books to read. He didn't give me the answer; he gave me some page numbers. And it was fantastic because the way I was explaining it to her what needed to be done was the way I understood how it needed to be done and the way I learned. It was not the way she learned. And so, once we had her learn and express this in a different manner, we never had another issue with the job going forward. All this gave me the understanding after I went to one of my grandfather's seminars and continued to read the books. It gave me a sense that I could go out and start my own business.

KC: And so, I did with a colleague of mine, and he and I co-founded a software company that provided the sales systems to these companies like I worked for. And without having my grandfather's knowledge, I would never even begun to start a company like that. So, a startup is at such an incredible advantage if you understand the Deming philosophy. Because at the time we started it up, there were two companies that had about 90 share of the market on two different ends of the market. But when we were doing this in 1999, the internet was just starting to hit. And there were, I remember, about 15, 20 different companies that all were trying to get into the same space. Within two years, they were all gone except for two of us. They didn't have the value of understanding what my grandfather had taught, that I had learned from him. And then my partner had in the terms of the way we ran and operated the organization. So, to fast forward, we kept the company for a while, merged it with another company, and then ended up selling it to a big publicly traded company. And in retrospect, I almost wish we hadn't.

KC: But by doing that, I ended up at The Deming Institute. And then what was fascinating was I spent two years of what I call penance, staying at that company because of the contract. And Andrew, that was when I saw in just... What I experienced and what we had to put people through, because of the way they looked at things and the way they operated, was just extraordinary in terms of how much it hurt me, how much I knew it was hurting the people that worked for me in the business units that I was running. And I couldn't wait to get out of there. And when I did, I spoke to my mother, Dr. Deming's daughter, Diana Deming Cahill, who founded the Institute with her father and her sister. And I said, "This is an opportunity for me to give back what I have learned from my grandfather," to take an organization that's an all-volunteer organization, that was really focused on maintaining and gaining as many of my grandfather's assets as possible without really saying, "Well, what are we gonna do with all these things now that we have all the videos?" And they did a phenomenal job of getting the videos and articles, and all these different things in getting the organization started. And so, that was kind of the continuation of my journey, was to move into this role and to be one of the leaders in the organization in terms of helping move it forward.

AS: So, let's talk about... What you've described in some ways is something that I think anybody that gets deeper into Deming realizes, is that it's really a management philosophy rather than... Like a lot of times for people that don't know much about Deming, but they've heard his name, they go, "Oh yeah, quality, statistical quality control" or something like that. And they miss the whole aspect that it is a way of thinking, it's a way of managing, it's a way of interacting with other people. Like you said, the idea of trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes to make sure... The job of the senior management is to make sure people are trained to the level that they need to be. Maybe you can just talk about the Institute, generally, and that concept of what it is. What is Dr. Deming's teachings? And what is the Institute about?

KC: So the Institute, the aim of the Institute, excellent question, is "Enriching society through the understanding of the Deming philosophy." And that can take all sorts of different directions that you might be able to go in. And so what we try to do is, we look at, "Okay. Here's what the aim is; by what method can we achieve that aim? which is what my grandfather always talked about. And we also understand that people out there, like I just mentioned earlier, learn differently. Some people are auditory learners, some people are visual learners, and there's different ways of creating learning environments for people. That's one of the things that I think is great about this podcast, and I'm so thrilled that we're getting back into it and doing that 'cause many people learn by listening to podcasts like this and gain something out of it. Other people need to be in an environment where they're physically there to actually gain something. Others can do it online. Others can do it through webinars, so there's so many different things. So, I believe our responsibility is to utilize what he has given us in a manner that can reach the broadest number of people and have the greatest impact so that they have that yearning for new knowledge. And then when they have that yearning, we have a means by which that they can continue to learn, understand, and apply it.

AS: Maybe you can just talk about what's going on with the Institute, but also before you do that, I think for... Not everybody can understand. What is an institute? Is it for-profit? Is it not-for-profit? Are there 100 employees? Is it a few people? Is there a board? Are they volunteers? What is the Institute?

KC: Well, I can tell you. I'll talk a little bit about it, but one of the best things I would say, Andrew, is go to www.deming.org, and they can learn a little bit more. But when my grandfather and my mother formed the Institute, they decided to have it be a nonprofit. And I know there was a lot of questions about that because a for-profit organization, there's a lot of things a for-profit organization can do, but there's a lot a nonprofit can do, and I think it was important for my grandfather and my mother that this be something that is a nonprofit, a 501 [c], not-for-profit organization because it also opens a lot of doors.

KC: When my colleagues and I and other board members call people, and we're calling from The Deming Institute, a lot of times they'll take that call 'cause they know we're not calling to sell them something and try to sell them a whole bunch of expensive services and things like that. We're calling to help and make a difference. And so, while sometimes there are constraints with the nonprofit that we can and can't do, as you start to look at them, you realize it also opens up a tremendous number of opportunities that we might not also have as a nonprofit.

KC: So, we're a nonprofit organization. We have a board that has a number of family members on it besides my mother. My brother is on it. He's vice chairman, my mother is the chairman, and then I'm on it. And then we have several other board members who have been terrific in terms of supporting us. Paula Marshall is on there, Steven Haedrich is on there, Keith Sparkjoy is on there, Kelly Allan. So, we have this fantastic group that provides guidance for us and support for the organization and helps me... I'm also on the board and serve as the president of the board. And we just have this fantastic group. We also have just a outstanding staff right now that has helped propel this forward, whether it's the online learning that we're launching, whether it's our communication, whether it's our administration or fund development, all these different things that we have responsibilities for as a nonprofit. We've just got an unbelievable team, and they all operate virtually. We don't have a single office. We also have this advisory council. We have a Deming fellow and Dr. Ravi Roy who's out there. We have an emeritus trustee board. So, we have a lot of people that worked with my grandfather, and then a lot of others who have this just belief in this philosophy, in these principles, and they know they need to get out there, and they're helping us get it out there.

AS: So, before we go on, I think it's kind of important to talk about, "Why Deming? Why Now?" And I'm curious to hear your idea about that. There's all kinds of new books out there. There's all kinds of gurus. There's all kinds of people talking about all kinds of things, "Come on, Kevin, this is old stuff. The world has moved on." Tell us, "Why Deming. Why now?"

KC: Andrew, I get that all the time that... Hey, I remember hearing about this guy that helped Japan after World War II, "We're closing on past 75 years on that. Why do we need this guy now? Why do we need this philosophy now?" And what I can tell you is it has worked. Every time it is used in an organization, as they begin that journey and continue down, I never hear that it doesn't work. Now, there are some companies who've tried it, and they're already too far gone to be able to even come back from the abyss that they've already gotten in. As my grandfather put it, "the pit they've already dug themself in," and sometimes you just can't do that.

KC: But when these organizations do use this, and we have so many of them that do, it is astounding how it works. And so, the books that you're talking about and all these, what we call, oftentimes, "flavors of the month" that you hear about, just wait five years and see, does anybody really using them anymore, or have they moved on to the next flavor of the month and the next flavor of the month? You go back 20 years and look, a lot of those things are gone, or they've morphed into something completely different where they may have kept the name, and now they've kind of combined a few things to try to keep it going. But the one constant is Deming works and works, and the research shows that it makes a difference. And to me, in this world right now, where we are seeing all these issues with supply, with polarization, with the need to break down barriers, whether it's between countries or within different organizations, there is an answer. Deming, my grandfather, provided that answer, and he showed that pathway. How do you do it, and then how do you get to that next step that, all of a sudden, leads to resolution of these issues that we're facing right now?

AS: Yeah, it's a great point, and there's so much there...

KC: What do you think?

AS: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I was thinking... The question that we often get, I often get too, I'm sure you get it, it's like, "Well, why isn't this everywhere? Why isn't his teachings everywhere?" And I was thinking about it, and my answer to that is, one of the most powerful things in this world is probably meditation. If you could meditate properly for 30 minutes a day, it would probably calm your mind, and it would make the world a better place and all that. But how many people actually do it? Very few. And I would say that my answer to that is that what Dr. Deming talked about was a transformation. And how many people are ready to make a transformation in their life? It's easier to pick up the flavor of the month and say, "Oh, let's do that, and let's do that," But what he's talking about is moving to a whole other level of starting to think of things as a system. And you and I have talked about caring for the elderly folks in our lives. And nowadays, doctors get more and more specialized, and they can't see the bigger picture. And everything operates in a system, and it's difficult to think in that way.

AS: And so, part of what I feel like is that what he's challenging, the challenge that he has put before us, is to start to transform our thinking, to understand statistics, to understand systems, to understand how to acquire knowledge, and to bring this together into something that can really make a difference. And that's not easy. That's a journey.

KC: No, it's not easy, and I think you hit it right on the head, Andrew. And I think part of the challenge is, if you're leading an organization, and you came out of, whether it's business school or you moved up through a certain way, well you are leading that organization because you learned how to do it a certain way. Well now, all of a sudden, your organization is having trouble. Because I can tell you right now, and I think it was a Rob Rodin, who worked with my grandfather, said this, "Somebody right now around the corner, around the world, believes they can do what you're doing better, cheaper, and faster than you."

KC: And they're just looking at you as an opportunity because you can't innovate as fast anymore. You can't do this as much. I can build a better this, better mouse trap, and all that type of stuff. But the challenge is, is that you've now... If you're leading that organization, you've gotten there. You have gotten to this point by doing it a certain way. Well now, all of a sudden, you're being asked to learn to do something differently, and I think that was... One of the big challenges my grandfather had was that in... When that program aired on June 24th, 1980, there were companies who were in crisis. Don Peterson, who was the Chairman and CEO of Ford when I met with him, when he spoke at one of our conferences at University of Michigan, and he said...

KC: One of the things he said to me was, he said, "We were two billion dollars in debt, and we were close to going under, and two years before," I believe it was two years before, "I was named 'CEO of the Year' in the U.S." And he said, "But even for me," he said, "It was so hard for us to change because we'd always done it this way. We always had these already systems in place, and now you're asking us to do these different things." And so, I think sometimes it gets rejected. The other thing that I would say, Andrew, is in 1980, while these companies did Deming at that point, they were in a crisis. And oftentimes, it's not until you're in the crisis that you end up saying, "Hey, I need to do something." And you can listen to podcasts by Paula Marshall and Steven Haedrich, who are on our board, where they were in deep crisis when they came to Deming and now, all of a sudden, they're huge advocates 'cause it not only pulled them out, but it made their organization successful. So oftentimes, it takes a crisis to have people say, "Hey, it's worth looking at something else."

AS: It reminds me of one of his quotes, "Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival." And I was thinking, when you were talking about, "Hey, your competitors are learning this," think about the transformation. When we were young, if you saw "Made in Japan" on a product, it meant low quality. And there was a transformation that happened and, all of a sudden, Japan became high quality. Now, think about China. Everything that most people have seen in the, let's say, past 20, 30 years, China, "made in China," was low quality. But they are moving up the quality ladder so fast. And I would argue that, in fact, they haven't really even gotten to some of the Deming teachings of taking that to a real transformation where you start to really bring the quality into the brands and all of that. And there is a possibility that China could go through that transformation, or at least some Chinese companies, just like the Japanese companies did. And then, "ho-hum," I'm sitting in middle America, and I'm realizing, "Whoa, wait a minute. They're transforming. What about me?" And I think that that's a lesson that you're talking about, too, is this idea that, "If you don't wanna learn, other people are learning around you, and by implementing this, you can protect yourself."

KC: You make a really good point. That's a very salient point. That's really key that if things are going well for you... And a lot of companies we're looking at before, for example, COVID hit, everything was going well. They weren't planning on a COVID hitting. They weren't... Supply chain was not an issue, and now, all of a sudden, people are having to rethink how they run and operate their business. And I'll tell you, it's fascinating, my colleague, Kelly Allan, and I have... A matter of fact, you went through one of the seminars that he put on, I believe, in Hong Kong if I remember correctly. And when he and I were traveling through the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore area, and we were going to a lot of different companies, one of the questions we would ask... And it happened to me when I started my business, my start-up, and we were struggling for a while, and we sat down at the table one day, there were only about 12 employees in the company, and we were really having a hard time. And we sat down and we talked about, "Does everybody understand what the aim of the business is?" And of course, they knew that... We had put some Deming ideas, and we were using Deming in there, they were like, "Oh yeah, yeah, we know that, Kevin. That's really important that we all know the aim of the business."

KC: So, we all wrote down the aim of the business. Well, guess what? All 12 people, including myself, wrote down different aims. So, we were working hard and giving our best efforts towards different aims. Can you imagine how much money, time, energy, and effort were being wasted because, Andrew, you were working for... You thought the aim was this, Kevin thought it was this, somebody else thought it was this. We saw the same thing in these companies as we traveled all around the country and around the world, and we would ask them, "What is the aim?" And these people, it wasn't from lack of... They were all working hard and giving their best efforts, but they all had a different understanding of the aim. Can you imagine how much more efficient and effective you'd be if everybody understood what the aim was? Just that alone... We have never once... Kelly and I together, going into different organizations and talking, never once have we seen one, unless they were a Deming organization, where everybody in that room understood what the aim was, had the same understanding of what the aim was, put it that way.

AS: They all had an aim.

KC: They all had an aim. Somebody thought it was making money, somebody thought it was selling more products, somebody thought it was... So...

AS: It reminds me of this... After many years of myself in the financial world, and I'm advising companies, and I'm... And I had these two clients and... Individually, the CEOs were fascinating and smart and all that. And individually, each member of the team, from both of these companies of the management team, were highly qualified, very experienced in their areas. And one of those companies was doing really well, and the other was doing really poorly. And I just remember thinking about that, and I thought to myself, "Number one, success is, you gotta have the right CEO." And the right CEO or the right leader, let's say, has gotta set the right direction. But more importantly, that's not enough. You can have a great guy, a man or a woman that's great, and they've set the direction. But if you let people fight against each other, you're never gonna get there, so it's that coordination amongst the management teams that's like, that's the magic. And you can't get coordination if everybody doesn't know what's the aim that we're working towards, so that coordination is kind of the systems-thinking aspect of Dr. Deming that I learned. Let's talk about the aim of the podcast. Here we are, and I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on where this podcast goes and what's the purpose?

KC: So what I see, the aim of the podcast is also tied into what listeners can expect, and that aim... What I see as the aim of the podcast is raising awareness and understanding of the Deming philosophies and teachings by presenting stories, sharing knowledge of the Deming philosophy, in a variety of different voices and from a variety of different types of organizations. And I think we look to do this by providing real-world examples of what makes Deming such a ground-breaking, unique, and unrivaled successful approach, which we just talked about a little while ago. I think we... We're also going to... And you and I've talked about this, is explore why is Deming different and so much more valuable than the wide variety of improvements and improvement programs and flavor-of-the-months out there? And I think with this podcast, it's really valuable for us to explore the Deming advantage in all of those type of organizations, how it's been implemented in different types of industries and businesses. Because one of the things, Andrew, and you and I have spoken about this before, is a lot of people think, "Well, I'm not gonna do Deming. That's manufacturing. When your grandfather was alive, he focused on manufacturing. It was Ford, it was General Motors, it was Xerox, it was... And all manufacturing companies, and if he wanted it for more than manufacturing, why didn't he spend time?"

KC: Well, the thing I would say on that is, that's where the greatest need was at that time, was in the manufacturing. But he spent time; he knew it was important to have this in education, in nonprofit, in government. He started to work, towards the latter part of his life, with Congress several times, trying to get them, as you can imagine how polarized they are, they all wanna help the country, but they all see, "We gotta do it this way or this way. And it's my way or the highway." How do you get to work together, think together, learn together, act together? And so, for us, if we wanna explore that, how it's been implemented in different types of organizations and businesses and industries, and what that transformation is like for these individuals, what challenge... Because it's not all a piece of cake, as you know. What "aha moments" did they have? What challenges were along the ways? Impacts and benefits? And then, talk to people at different stages of their Deming journey.

KC: We've got a couple of people that you and I've talked about that are on... That have been doing this... Like Paula Marshall who is the CEO of Bama Companies. She worked with my grandfather. I think she is the only one who not only worked with my grandfather, but has been the CEO all the way through to this day and is still implementing it within her organization. And so, I think the last thing I'd say is we believe that by providing people information and inspiration, they're gonna yearn to learn more, and they're gonna wanna delve deeper into Deming and hopefully apply it in their lives and organizations. And what could be better?

AS: Yeah, yeah. And I just wanna highlight that one word. One of the first words that you said is "stories," and this is a great podcast or a great platform for telling stories. We're not gonna go into super technical details about things. We've got great resources, we've got great books, we've got all that stuff. But the stories, and importantly, as you just said, to chronicle the stories of the people who knew Dr. Deming at the time while we have that opportunity, but also all the other people that are going through... And I think the other word that I like is the "journey" and the "transformation," and highlighting that journey and transformation. That's very exciting. So, how do people get the podcast?

KC: So, there's a couple of different ways that you can get the podcast going forward. For those of you.. There's many of you that have listened to the podcast in the past. We've had almost 1.6 million podcast... What would you call it downloads or listens?

AS: Yeah, downloads.

KC: And so, what we're gonna do is we're still gonna make that available just like we always have. But in one of our newer programs, which is called DemingNEXT that we're just launching right now, that program is a subscription program, DemingNEXT. We're gonna put the podcast in there with the video that you and I are talking right now, through Zoom that we're using, so that it will be in there with the video, audio, and then the transcript. And then our producer on the programs, in DemingNEXT, is also putting it in a different format so that you're not just watching a video with the words right next to it, it's in a very, very nice format. I think you saw a sample of that that I sent you the other day, and it's gonna be really cool how it's gonna be accessible through that mechanism so that within that subscription service, you'll be able to see it. But for those who aren't in the subscription, they'll still be able to hear it, just like they always have.

AS: So, if somebody is listening to it, let's say they've never really heard that much about Dr. Deming, they're listening and thinking, "This is good stuff. I like what I'm hearing on the podcast." Where do you want them to go so that they get that? Is it... Tell us the website and tell us where they should start.

KC: So, what I would suggest is you go to www.deming.org. And then from there, depending upon what you're looking to do, as an individual or with your organization, you're going to see that we have this online program, DemingNEXT, that we're just launching. We have workshops, in-person that we're gonna hopefully going back to soon, seminars in-person. We also have virtual workshops, webinars, some conferences coming up. So, there's a whole different, wide variety of ways that you can learn. But I think one of... The big thing that I would say is the launch of our DemingNEXT program which is an online learning program. It's a blended learning program where we're building in all sorts of webinars into it as a part of it. So, it's not just online.

KC: That opens us up to a whole different world that, as you know. You attended a seminar in person in Hong Kong, and I wanted to talk about that in a few minutes, but I don't know how many people were there, maybe 40, 50, 60, whatever that is. It's not 400, 800, 600, that we need to get that pivotal number of people that are learning this stuff, understanding, and applying it. So, the DemingNEXT online is a mechanism for us to be able to do that around the clock, around the world, at any time, with organizations of different sizes where they can use these in their own learning management systems. They can use it in our learning management system. They can use it in working with their consultants who they're... Who are advising. There's all sorts of different ways to do that.

AS: So, if someone is listening and think, "My goodness, I need my management team to get, to understand, some of these things," they can use the resources that DemingNEXT, just directly and say, "Hey, you guys, I want you to... Everybody to listen to this particular module," or that type of thing. Or if there's a consultant out there that's helping people implement, they could say, "Wow, why don't I use that as a tool within my toolbox?" So, it sounds like... It's really gonna be something that can be implemented across a company without having to go to a seminar if they can't or whatever.

KC: You hit it right on the head because what we have is that... We'll oftentimes have CEOs and executives come with their management teams to a workshop or seminar like the one you went to. Well, then they come to us afterwards and say, "This is fantastic. We're gonna start to implement it, but I've got another 200 people in my company. I don't have the ability to send them to the seminar, or have you bring the seminar to us." Some companies are doing that, but others are saying, "We don't have the ability to do that, yet I want everybody within the organization to have an understanding of the common language, what we're talking about when we talk about a special cause, a common cause, an operational definition, system, system of profound knowledge, understanding variation theory of... Just a basic understanding."

KC: And so, that was one of the things that pushed us to develop this DemingNEXT is, to not only have it available for leadership and management, but for all levels of the organization to be able to understand, learn, and apply it, and not to push back. Because that was one of the things, again, going back to Don Peterson and Ford was, even though they sent hundreds of people every month, sometimes thousands, he had 150,000 people around the world, they couldn't send everybody through. And the people that didn't go through were the ones that were a challenge. Not because they wanted to be a problem, but because they didn't understand what was being talked about when management was saying, "Hey, we need to look at our suppliers differently."

KC: Well, no, that's not how we do it. And so, it's hard. You know what it's like. When you push against somebody, they push back. They always do. So, what you need to do is provide them a level of understanding, and then it's accepted, and then they're not pushing back and fighting you. They're actually embracing it. And so, that's one of the advantages of using this approach, is that it can be blended learning. It can be done at your own and, like you said, with consultants. We already have a number of consultants that have their own specific external portal tied into our DemingNEXT where they're working with clients in a completely different environment to help support what they're already teaching them.

AS: It's exciting. That's a whole other level. When you think about my own Deming journey, I think about, there was limited resources. There are some books, and I found what I could find and that type of thing, but you kinda had to piece it together. And so, I think I'm really excited, and I feel like the journey going forward, it's so important to get this message out. But the ability to get it out now is really there, and so I would say that's really accomplishing the main aim of the Institute.

KC: You're right, and for those who are listening who know about it, a lot of my grandfather's videos, writings, case studies, articles, things like that that he did, they're also in there. But we've spent a lot of time using subject matter experts, some of whom worked directly with my grandfather, to help us develop specific courses that are tied into the way adults learn. Adults, a lot of times, don't wanna sit and watch my grandfather go through the red bead experiment for an hour and the lessons of the red beads on a video recording that is 40 years old. The audio is not that great, the video is not that great, but you know what's interesting, Andrew, what we have found is once they go through some of the developed courses that we've worked on, then all of a sudden they wanna learn more. They then go and watch it. They'll spend the hour watching my grandfather do the red beads and lessons of the red beads or talk about the 14 points in these long-form video formats that were acceptable back in the '80s and early '90s. But we need to get them there to be able to say, "I wanna learn and go ahead and do this."

AS: Yeah, it's... The method of learning has changed so much. But it's so fun to watch those old videos 'cause you see his reactions, and you see the way he's berating people and making... He was also a very funny guy at times. He would really have some great cracks. [chuckle]

KC: Yeah. He really did. Let me ask you a question if you don't mind. How did you come to know about my grandfather, and what was kind of your Deming journey? You and I came across each other years and years ago, but I'd love for the audience to also hear that.

AS: So, I was a young guy, studying finance at Cal State Long Beach in Los Angeles, and I got a job at Pepsi in operations in Los Angeles. And Pepsi was also kind enough to pay for my MBA if I got good grades, and I did. And basically, I worked in operations, and I just saw all of these troubles. Now, I happened to be... It was 1989 when I went to work for Pepsi. And I had learned how to use a computer so I could make charts and graphs, and I started charting stuff and putting stuff up on the walls. And I had this habit I've had all my life, is I just chart performance of different people and put it up there, and then I don't say anything about it. And then, I just let people go and look at it, and then they start asking questions. And then you start getting information from that, and so that was kind of where I... And then there was a manager at Pepsi, he's like, "Oh, you're really into statistics." I wasn't necessarily into statistics, but he thought I was, and he said, "You ought to go to listen to this guy."

AS: And so, Pepsi flew me in 1990, in October of 1990, to George Washington University and to take the instituting Dr. Deming's methods for management of productivity and quality. And I got 1.44 continuing education credits for it. But I remember...

KC: Wow, you got some CEUs.

AS: Yeah, I remember going to this event. It was a huge room. I was 23, maybe 24. I was a young guy, all the older people in there. And I just thought, the only thing I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna go to the front row. And I just sat in the front row listening, and it just... Everything was blowing my mind. I had been working for a year or so in Pepsi, and I'd seen all of the problems we had in the factory, and then here was the solution. And so, I really caught on to that, and I went back and I started to try to implement that. And then, I started to realize what he was talking about. Change has to happen from the top because a young guy trying to make an impact, you can do something, but you can't make a huge impact. And that was kind of my first beginning. And then I got Dr. Deming's book, "Out of the Crisis." I still have the one he signed at that time, and I got a great picture of me with him at that time.

AS: And then I went back, and my roommate, Dale, and I used to read chapters and discuss them in my apartment, in our apartment where we lived in L.A. And then another time in 1992, he had a seminar done by quality... What was it called? A quality enhancement seminar. Yes, that was 1992. And so, I got a double dose, and I listened to him and was blown away. I just kept learning. And then I eventually moved to Thailand, and I was a young guy teaching finance, and I went to work in finance. But the point was, my best friend, that he and I were reading those chapters of Dr. Deming's teaching. Dale came, and we set up a company called CoffeeWORKS here in Thailand, and we just really wanted to implement Dr. Deming's teaching. We weren't fanatical about control charts or anything like that. We were operating in pretty much chaos here on the outskirts of Bangkok, but we definitely tried to implement ideas like systems thinking and treating people with respect and dignity and trying to get out fear in the workforce. That's a little bit of my journey.

KC: So, how is the company doing?

AS: Well, we've survived, and we've survived COVID, that's for sure. And basically, we've been in operation about 28 years. And so, we have about roughly 100 employees, and we're growing, and we're profitable, and we've learned a lot. I would say that also operating in a foreign country has always been a challenge. But I would say we're doing okay, and our objective is to try to make sure that we are making an environment where employees really enjoy their work and feel trust and feel cooperation in particular.

KC: And with you saying that, we're hearing in the States, and you're experiencing it, how many... So many companies seem to take it for granted that, hey, the employees are gonna stay because this is really their only job opportunity here, and that has been just spun completely out of control with the advent of COVID. And now, all of a sudden, people are saying, "Wait a second. I wanna be at a company where I feel I can make a difference, and I enjoy being there because I've now realized that life can be pretty darn short, and I need to have, as my grandfather always talked about, joy in work." And we would talk to executives in organizations in years past, a lot of times, we would never bring up joy in work because they didn't see it that way. It was just "grind it out," have these people just work. And now, all of a sudden, there's this realization how important that is, and I think that's another... Once you implement that Deming philosophy, it has an enormous impact on employee retention, on joy in work which is keeping people there, that they wanna stay. They wanna be a part of something where they enjoy being there, and I think that's just one more reason why the Deming philosophy, we talked about it earlier, is still even relevant today, and more so than ever.

AS: And that's part of driving out fear, is making a trusting place and Dale's... Now, it's interesting situation in my case. I never worked as an employee in my own company. Dale is the managing director, and we own it equally. But we decided in Thailand, it would be better if I focus my efforts on building my career in the world of finance.

AS: Now, this is where I think my experience with Dr. Deming becomes interesting. The first part is that I felt like I really wanted my employees in the coffee business to understand it, and that's the reason why I started taking notes about the 14 points and thinking about how would I explain this. The way he talked, I don't think it's gonna translate very well into Thai language and for Thai people. How do I simplify that? And that's when I started writing the book, "Transform Your Business with Doctor Deming's 14 Points," and ultimately translated it into a Thai language so that the employees would be able to get some access to this and understand it, and that was my only real goal. I did put it up on Amazon. But the main thing was how do I bring this teaching to these people who really didn't know anything about it?

KC: Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that was really the basis for the book. I know there's some companies that we've mentioned already today who actually have purchased your book and use it as kind of a book club type thing that they do with their team members as they go through the one that you wrote. So, that's pretty interesting. I didn't realize that about... With you about the 14 points.

AS: Now, the other angle that I think it's been interesting because one of the things that Dr. Deming talked about was the idea of "don't be focused on quarterly results," but isn't that the whole financial world?

KC: Well, it's funny 'cause I was just about to ask you. With all your focus on finance and understanding it, you've gotta run up that... Even if you're not a publicly traded company, we talk to organizations that are always focused on that. One of the suppliers that we work with at the Deming Institute, we literally left them about six months ago because you could always tell it was it... I'd always look, and I'd go, I'd start getting the phone call going, and if I hadn't thought about it, it's gotta be the end of the quarter 'cause, man, they're just trying to sell me something now. And they were always trying to gain their numbers, do something by the end of the quarter. And I said, "You know what, I'll let you watch it, as my guest, go through some of the DemingNEXT stuff because as long as your management will do it because you have no idea the impact you're having," and we left them because...

KC: And we ended up going with a different vendor because we could see this happening, and it was getting worse and worse. And we were told there was a new CFO that had come in. There was a real focus on, "we've got to get the numbers up." And so, what they ended up doing was cutting customer support because that was an easy one. People like us already had a contract with them for a certain amount of time, and they figured they might be able to get us to renew it. But the impact... Stop. I can keep going on and on.

AS: Well, maybe I'll just explain it. I grew up as an analyst in the stock market in Thailand, and I was eventually voted the number one analyst in Thailand. And I was the head of the CFA Society for Chartered Financial Analysts which was an honor of a lifetime. And I had seen, maybe... I've met with maybe a thousand fund managers, and I've taken them to meet with a thousand CEOs. And a CEO asked me, "What would be your advice from everything you learned?" And I just said, "Never listen to analysts. They don't know about your business. They don't know how to run your business, and you have to be very careful. All they wanna do is set a fire of quarterly earnings." Which brings me to, having taught finance all my career, when I walk into a finance class nowadays, I tell the students, the first thing I tell them is, "Finance adds no value." And that puts their head in a spin, particularly, 'cause they're studying that topic, and I said, "What adds value?"

AS: And we have a long discussion about what adds value in a business, and I say, "Ultimately it's the products and the service, and finance is a support function just as human resources. And the purpose of finance is to operate as a mirror to reflect management's decisions to help us see the consequences, short term and long-term, of management decisions. And it's when finance starts being the head of the business that you get into trouble." Never make, as I say, "Never make the right finance decision over the right business decision."

AS: Always make the right business decision over the right finance decision. So, I've come at finance from a very, very different perspective, and that's allowed me also to help my clients improve their profitability and help them really think about profit very differently than a lot. And that's where I think the combination of my experience with Dr. Deming, as well as my finances, bring me to a place that I really enjoy talking about the finances of a business.

KC: Yeah, and I think what you said is really important because if the focus of the company is on... is solely on making a profit, they may make a profit to the detriment of the organization that eventually puts it out of business. I always loved what, I think it was Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs, where he was talking to Jobs about what was really the... I don't think they use the word aim, but what was the aim of the organization? And it wasn't to make money. Apple wasn't there to make money. It was to make insanely great products that help people. And then, the money was a byproduct of it. They sure did well taking that approach. Now, you look at somebody like Enron, for those of you that remember Enron. Well, their goal was to make money. Well, that didn't work out so well. And you can see that the finance, like you said, if that's where it becomes the focus on is how do we just make money, and every decision is based on making money, eventually that is going to bite you big time. And the companies that focus on that are usually gone at some point within a certain amount of time.

AS: Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I feel like Deming is such a critical tool, or critical knowledge, that people need to have now because we're slipping into an era of data. And we are very fast, quickly slipping into this era where a young person graduating from university today may think that their job is setting key performance indicators and tracking them, and you can almost imagine the ideal job... I have a cartoonish picture in my head of a young manager these days with a bunch of screens in front of them and KPIs going. And then they've got this button that sends an electrical shock to the employee who's not hitting their KPIs, and then that's it. There's business and there's management, and I fear that a lot people are feeling like being tough on KPIs is what good management is, and they're lost on that.

KC: Well, and I can say if they come in and start to learn Deming, whether it's using DemingNEXT, whether it's using other resources or videos or books or things like that that we have, if their focus is on solely on KPIs, I encourage you. Come in and read and go through and learn some of this, whatever the best way for you to learn is, because it will open up a completely new world in terms of understanding what the impact of those on the organization.

KC: And it's usually a detrimental impact. And what the potential is by looking at things a little bit differently, or a lot differently, depending upon where you are, but you're right. There's so much stuff, and you hear about big data all the time, and we've all seen so much. So many journalists, and I always feel bad for them because they're looking at these data figures, whether it was COVID or other different things, and they make interpretations that are oftentimes erroneous. And we see it all the time. Andrew, it must drive you crazy when you see, "Well, the stock market was down yesterday, it must mean this is happening." Two days later, "Well, the stock market is up because this is happening." Talk about not understanding variation and special and common cause and reacting to a common cause as a special cause. It's unbelievable. But once you understand it, you start to see things, and it opens up a completely different world for you.

AS: And one part of my business is managing people's money. And for that part of my business and investing, it's so critical what I learned from Dr. Deming about that they're ultimately... What I say is that we can understand the variation and the randomness of a flip of a coin or at the roulette wheel. We understand these core principles of randomness and variation, but we then kind of abandon all that when we go into life, and we don't... We miss that there's this subtle thing happening below the scenes and the outcomes of things that we're seeing. There is a portion of those outcomes being driven by randomness and variation. And if we don't have awareness of that, we will get misled, and it will happen all the time to amateurs in the stock market that will assign special causes to different things. And they get all excited about things, and they miss the whole randomness and variation. And that is a carryover from the world of what Dr. Deming taught in statistics into the world of the markets and investing.

KC: Yeah, it's a big problem. I talk to people all the time. And that treating a special cause as a common, you know, common variation as special variation, and vice versa, ends up being huge. And the thing is, we already know it in our lives. We know to get to the grocery store is gonna take us between 9 1/2 minutes and 11 minutes, and the average is, whatever, 10 minutes. But we know we're never gonna arrive there exactly at 10 minutes. We know. And when you ask people, "Why is it?" Well, because there's variation in there. It's 9 1/2 to 11 minutes to get there. Yet they go in their companies and they teach. They, all of a sudden say, "Well, I got there in 9 1/2. Oh my gosh. I got there really quickly." That's great. Okay. Well then, the next time when you get there at 10 1/2, "What did I do wrong?" And they try to fix that instead of understanding that, "Well, wait a second. I know how this works when I go to the store. Why do I not apply the same concepts when I'm in the business?"

AS: And every now and then, they come home, and they say, "It took me two hours to go to the store." Oh, what happened?" "Well, I had a flat tire, or there was a fire, and there was a..." And all of a sudden, you start to understand special causes. Now, I think I would like to wrap it up at this point and ask you, do you have any parting words for the audience? What would you like the audience to understand about what's going on at the Institute? What's going on with the podcast? Let's leave them with something exciting.

KC: Well, I don't know how exciting this is, but one of the questions that I get right now, Andrew, is what would your grandfather say about DemingNEXT? Because it's completely different. It's not always using just him because there's people out there that tell me, "Unless you're using Deming's exact words, then it's wrong." And I'm like, "No, no." My grandfather, when I look through his books, quoted people all over the place, whether it was Don Wheeler, whether it was Ed Baker, Joyce Orsini, he was always learning. Bill Scherkenbach. He was learning from everybody.

KC: And I would say the one question I get a lot now is, what would your grandfather think about DemingNEXT? And I gotta tell you, I believe he would be absolutely thrilled because he would see that as another means, another way that we have done a PDSA Plan-Do-Study-Act where we have tried to improve the means for us to get his message out to a broader audience. And I think he would be absolutely thrilled with what we've done, how we're doing it, why we're doing it. And I believe he would be very excited about what that impact is to get that message out. Because I know when he departed from this earth, I think the thing that probably bothered him the most was he didn't have more time to get his message out. He knew that he was running out of time as he got older, and he formed this organization to get that message out. And I think that, to me, is an important thing, is by what method are we getting this message out that will accommodate the needs of how people learn, understand, interact within their own organizations?

AS: Well, ladies and gentlemen, you've heard it from the man who probably is the closest to understanding the ultimate aims of Dr. Deming. Kevin, I wanna thank you for this great time together and sharing your personal experiences, as well as divisions, and the opportunities that I see at the Institute and what you're doing. That concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community. Remember to go to deming.org, as Kevin has told us, to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In our 6th Interview episode, Plant Manager Dan Vermeesch and Quality Manager Brain Hoff discuss their Deming Journey. Topics include a discussion on variation and getting the Deming Philosophy into the education.

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Deming Institute Podcast Interview

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Micron Manufacturing

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History of Micron Manufacturing

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Dan Vermeesch

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Brian Hoff

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Dr. Deming at Micron

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Variation

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Eliminating Performance Reviews at Micron

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Struggles of Working with the Deming Philosophy

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Micron Gives Advice on Adopting the Deming Philosophy

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Shingo Silver Medallion

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Variation a Key to Micron Improvement

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Deming Needed in Education

Tripp: [00:00:12] In this Deming Institute interview, I speak with Dan Vermeesch and Brian Hoff of Μ Manufacturing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We discuss the history of Μicron, their improvement journey and how the Dunning philosophy is affecting this journey today.

Tripp: [00:00:35] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt, host of the Deming Institute podcast. Our guests today are a couple of gentlemen from Micron Manufacturing, Dan Veermsch and Bryan Hoff. Welcome, gentlemen.

Dan: [00:00:48] Hi, Tripp. Thanks for having us.

Tripp: [00:00:50] Very good. So first of all, micro manufacturing I'm not familiar with it. Won't want to share a little bit about what Micron Manufacturing does and a little bit about both your gentlemans role in Micron churn, Micron manufacturing as it was using machine products company in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dan: [00:01:10] It's been in business since 1952, Ed and Jackie Preston founded it back then and until just a few months ago, Jackie Preston still came in every day, five days a week. She just turned ninety one a couple of weeks ago and she hasn't been in in a few months. But she was here every day until then. And it was great because her son currently is the president at Micron. And we have a niece and nephew that work here. And the nephew has a 5 year old daughter that comes in on Saturday and plays on a computer. So one of the best parts of the story of Micron is we have four generations in this building every week.

Dan: [00:01:51] And it really is part of the story that's important because there's a lot of family focus here at Micron that that's important to us. So I am the plant manager, have been the plant managers since 97 and also the lean champion that has tried to be the architect of some of the various improvements systems that we have had since the year 2000 is when we really begin implementing our transformational change. So I'll let Brian introduce you.

Tripp: [00:02:26] Okay.

Brian: [00:02:27] I'm Brian Hoff. I'm a quality manager at Micron. This would be my twenty second year with Micron. And as Dan said, it's around 2001. We began to be to transform our journey from kind of an old school business model to trying to adapt what is the best way to make change and improvement. And it's been an amazing journey. And lately we seem to have encountered Mr. Deming once again. And I guess I'm mature enough to understand it better than I did 20 years ago. And I'm using him almost daily to try to influence the decisions I make each day.

Tripp: [00:03:13] Very good. And where are you guys located?

Dan: [00:03:17] Grand Rapids, Michigan. OK. We're on a dead end street in the northwest corner of Grand Rapids, Michigan. So that's that's always part of my favorite part of the story here is we're kind of located on the edge to nothing. And despite all that, our folks here have made so many great changes over the years that we've had thousands of people from, I think, 26 states and eight countries that have come to visit us to see the systems that have been put into place over the years. And we're only a 40 person company. Twenty eight thousand square feet. So we're just a small about on the map that that over the years have made a big ripple in the pond. The precision machining industry. And it is exciting that we've got such a great group of folks that have not only made change, but we've made a lot of improvements over the years. But part of our story that we'll get into and will allow is we're making a lot of change, but we kind of lost sight of whether or not some of that was improvement. So we could see a lot of change around here. But the dials stopped moving after awhile. And so we had to go back to the drawing board. And that drawing board was Dr. Demings work.

Dan: [00:04:35] Okay, very good. Well, let's pick it up from there. So how did you guys come across Dr. Demings work? It sounds like maybe you initially knew Dr. Deming then kind of got away from it. So once you share a little bit about your journey there.

Brian: [00:04:52] So this, Brian, and back when I was a young 20 some year old, I happened to go to a statistics course, and during that course the instructor had mentioned Juran and Deming. So I began with Juran and in Juran Zone books, he mentioned Dr. Deming, so once I completed listening to the doctor, Mr. Grant, I read out of the crisis and.

Brian: [00:05:18] I don't know that it made complete sense to me at the time, but it did. The thing that got me was the study of variation. But so I spent five or six years diving kind of deep into statistics and I made some headway that wasn't I wasn't at Micron at that time. I was I was in the plastics industry. So when I joined my Mike Brown back in ninety one and.

Brian: [00:05:46] We were able to use some of the statistical tools so that in a way I was holding on to some old blood. Dr. Deming talked about variation. But I wasn't I wasn't truly knowledgeable about profound knowledge and the way to think of all of that. And then I admit to somehow I lost track of Dr. Deming for a decade or more. And then later, when Μicron started doing its deep transformation, Dr. Deming started coming to my mind more often. So I re-read the books again. And since then, it seems as though. There was a trajectory of adopting a little more of Dr. Deming, and then recently we seem to have found a new gear in regards to appreciating what he said.

Dan: [00:06:41] So a number of years ago, maybe the early 2000s. Brian and I have had a lot of conversations over our years of transformation. We always called it our lean journey. And that's that's how we knew it. But he would bring up regularly his views on variation. And then I asked, would you come up with all this? And we mentioned Dr. Deming and I need to learn more about this.

Dan: [00:07:07] Never, never really put forth the effort to do so. Until I was at a conference in Columbus, Ohio, I think about eight or nine years ago, and the speaker talked about the 14 points. It seems like I've heard of those in the past. Any you talk further about the doing performance evaluations and the disrespect that came from it. It just so happened to be the high end and pushing performance reviews here created a very in depth system. We're doing them quarterly. We're doing all this stuff and I hated every minute of it. And I couldn't put my finger on what was it that I felt that was wrong with it until I heard the speaker say just how disrespectful Dr. Deming felt that they were and why that day.

Dan: [00:07:58] I decided before I left that meeting, we were never doing another one. And I came back and I told our management team it's called team strategy. I apologize for pushing it so hard for so many years and shoved it down everybody's throat. And today we stop. I. I wish I would have gotten a picture of the room on that day, because I think the shock phase, after pushing it so hard that doing a complete 180, but it truly was like like seeing the sun come up because it put words to the feeling that was growing in me, that this is just wrong because half the people were walking out of the room feeling they were below average. Right. Who do you want to feel that way? And that was the day that I thought, I need to learn more about this guy.

Tripp: [00:08:46] Very interesting. So. So, yeah, go ahead.

Dan: [00:08:50] Oh, I'm sorry. So I was a few years after that that I don't and I can't recall right now how I caught wind of the Deming research conference in Fordham University in New York. And we've done a lot of presentations, like I mentioned earlier, sharing our lead story. And so I thought I'll submit and see us there is interested in her interest in hearing our story at the research conference. And then I was honored to be selected to do that. And.

Dan: [00:09:23] It was then that I met Dr. Demings, daughter and grandson, great grandson, and and heard everybody else that was speaking there, it truly became inspired by what I heard. And and Brian joined me on that trip and I brought my 15 year old daughter at the time and I thought because the story was about this whole story of Μicron. And I just wanted. I thought she needs to hear what grandpa and grandma created because I didn't mention earlier, I'm the son in law of the founders, but so I brought her with me.

Dan: [00:09:58] And it turns out she was the youngest attendee at a DME conference, I think, in the history of the den. And so Kevin and his wife is her name's Judy, I think, right? Yep. Yep. So they embraced her so much. I was really touched by that. So when the conference came to Michigan State University, where my daughter attends now at the conference, we walked in and she was just going to visit and say hi and whatever. And they made her so welcome. And got her a badge and invited her to attend a conference and everything. And it was really touching that they had a remembered her and they have really embraced a young person. And she's brought it up so many times. And and it's just that to me, that whole story just adds flavor to what I believe is the Deming community that I'm beginning to learn more about. So it's not just about the things he taught, but it's I'm beginning to see that the people that truly understand them are beginning to it. It's a group that we need to hang out with more. Right.

Tripp: [00:11:06] Very good..

Tripp: [00:11:07] So so let me ask you guys, when you started in to the Deming philosophy or as you've worked with with it, what things have you either personally struggle with or maybe even the organization has struggled with?

Dan: [00:11:23] So for me, I mentioned it again today in our strategy meeting to Brian and others that my 2019 transformation that came earlier this year when Dennis Sergent was the instructor of our Deming CQ Academy is what he calls it. And there was so much reference to improve it. So I love the statement. All premier requires change. Not all change results in improvement. So that was great to hear her have heard that before. But. I am a numbers guy. True and true on the facts and figures and dates and deadlines, you gotta go. You know, maybe that's part of being a plant manager. I don't know, but I begin to understand that.

Dan: [00:12:18] And then we've done a great job recently with our team strategy meetings. We are going to take a step in the right direction every day. And we we don't hold our feet to the fire like we used to about by this date. This thing has, you know, those kinds of things that the made up numbers of.

Dan: [00:12:35] You got to hit this goal by this day. We still have some of that. But there's far less focus on that than there was coming into 2019. And I struggle with it every day, every day that I bite my tongue and say, don't kick a no, don't create a no, don't push a number. Push the improvement and true change towards what we are looking to accomplish.

Dan: [00:13:01] And it's it's liberating, to say the very least. And again, it's humbling. It's almost like that day came back and say and said, when I do another performance evaluations offered me by longshot that because it's such a one idea who I am.

Tripp: [00:13:18] Interesting. Brian. Brian, how about you?

Brian: [00:13:22] Well, first, I want to attest to watching Dan's struggle with Martin.

Tripp: [00:13:28] Okay, so you've witnessed it. Okay, I got it. I think me.

Brian: [00:13:36] Oh, recently I encountered a. A customer had a problem, and normally if if we have material here that we asked to re-inspect, we learn how to do it. And we show another person how. And we call that a training system.

Brian: [00:13:53] And for some reason, and this particular incident, I decided instead of training the way I always have, I'm going to do it different. Because Mr. Deming said you should look harder at your training systems. There are likely problems there. And so I decided what would be a better way. And when I was done, it literally opened my mind to the amount of variation in a training system.

Brian: [00:14:22] Either doesn't pay attention to or creates all by itself, and so that would be a thing that recently happened to me in regards to understanding better, something that Mr. Deming talked about.

Tripp: [00:14:39] Very good. So here's a question for both of you. And it does matter what order that you respond. But if you were if you're a manufacturer, it's, say, listening to this podcast episode and you were thinking about this. What are some of the maybe, I don't know, pointers that you might give them about going to this philosophy, Will? What are the steps that you think they might go through or what advice might you have?

Dan: [00:15:10] That's a very good question. I think that as in most things, learning has to take place. And for me and for Brian, that fact he's got out of the crisis in his hands now, I've got some sticky notes in it.

Dan: [00:15:25] I get it. I always give Ryan a little ribbing because I call his Brian Dowling Bible here because he carries with him everywhere. I don't think I'd recognize him if he came to work about the thing in his hands. I think you have to start there. And I didn't start there. I just read the New Economics. In fact, I just got done with it in recent ago. First book I ever read.

Dan: [00:15:52] And then I have a long time ago, before I went to the Research Council that I read online, I learned more. I loved the history. I loved the fact that he grew up in a farming area and studied. How should it be? Because I grew up on of farm in Michigan here. So that really all resonated with me. And as I began to learn his story and his half life begins to patch together a lot of thoughts about how this may have all developed for him. And I want the history part of it. That's great. So I would suggest people be read about him and listen to these podcasts for sure.

Dan: [00:16:33] Look online if the educational beginning. But it was instrumental earlier this year. After all this time, haven't taken the Dennis Surgeons CGI Academy that really gave us this. It's what we did, guys. And I have to believe these types of sessions are all over the United States for people to be able to learn more and participate in groups. Exactly. And implement exactly what he's what he's trying to implement. And so through that, one of the things that's occurred to me this year is I began to have a greater recognition and appreciation for. Let's go back to our founders, Ed and Jackie Preston. You know, back in 1952, they they started this business.

Dan: [00:17:18] And so when I came on board in '96. There was a a few things that stood out to me. A phone never rang more than three times because it was disrespectful to the customer to make them have to listen to the ring on the phone more than three times. It was just a thing. Everybody here still knows by the time that there is a fourth ring, everybody in the plant is running for a form because it shouldn't ring more than three times. That system still by Mr President from the beginning.

Dan: [00:17:46] The other thing is when we have meetings here and we have a lot of meals at this company, the first an Ed or Jackie Ed's passed away now. And anytime we had a meal, they always eat last. They always insisted everybody else. You go first. We go laugh. Simon Sinek wrote a book. Leaders eat last. And when I read that, I saw Jackie. But I still believe it's all part of what Deming. His respect that he had for people. And and I saw so much of that and have seen so much in adding Jackie over the years that respect for people to make sure that the people in this company are taken care of first.

Dan: [00:18:30] And how so? So I would read, learn and then recognize and appreciate what already exists around you. And then I would start, I think, trying to implement the things that you were there.

Tripp: [00:18:43] Brian -do you have something to add.

Brian: [00:18:46] Not really know that.

Tripp: [00:18:50] No, that's fine. So let me ask you. Just kind of a broader question. I guess it looked like you guys sell globally, correct?

Dan: [00:19:00] Mostly in the United States. OK. If something goes outside of the United States and through our customers, not not directly from us to a customer outside the United States.

Tripp: [00:19:12] Ok. So has the environment changed much? I mean, there's a lot going on economically for your company. Is it gotten a lot better or is it kind of been stable all along or what's it like out there as far as manufacturing goes?

Dan: [00:19:28] So this year there's been a softening in general across pretty much all of the industries that we serve.

Dan: [00:19:37] And we we serve a number of them. Most of our business is relatively local. About 70 to 73 percent is in Michigan and the rest is either in southern Indiana or Texas. Shooting down that quarter in general have softened. And I just saw the numbers today that manufacturing in the third quarter actually went up a touch, which surprised me because we haven't seen it and I haven't heard that from our suppliers, to be quite honest with you. But one of the things that we've tried to do over the years, as we called our lean journey or on our shifting gears and to we actually trademarked a year or two ago the term system, Micron, because the reason people come here, the reason three thousand people visited are to see our systems. We had fire departments, health care, the company that created the resistor. And A we've had people from all over the world come to see how we schedule production.

Dan: [00:20:39] We have no mid-level management, how we have total flex time. People can decide which days they work, what hours they work. The whole nine yards. And and so people have come from all over to see how well how can we manage a company to where there are no bosses. There's a movie that tells people what to do. Brian, are the managers of quality in manufacturing and there's there's an engineering manager. We're responsible for the systems and making sure the people, the resources are there, of course. But it's it's really there's so much autonomy that people have. And and this year, really, over the last three or four years that we've been using the Toyota car, it really began to teach us a better understanding of the kind of calls PDCA.

Dan: [00:21:31] And that PDSA. So we use that language mostly because of that. But because of that, we began to emphasize every conversation. What did we learn? What did we learn? I think if I were to look back in the three last three years, the number one question that we ask yourself is what did we learn? Fill in the blank on whatever the heck it is that we're talking about. So I would I would dare say that the Deming philosophy is all about what have you learned? And we've embraced that.

Tripp: [00:22:04] And you guys have mentioned the lean journey that you kind of started on before you kind of got into Deming. What do you see as kind of the differences between them or or how did they maybe synergistically and engage with each other as you work through this or or what's happened with this this lean journey still continuing that as the Deming philosophy, enhance it. What's your view?

Dan: [00:22:34] So. I think that. Like most things in life, it's the perspective you choose. And I think that you can and perhaps many companies have chosen the perspective of Lean as the elimination of waste. And of course, that's an element of it.

Dan: [00:23:00] But I believe and we've used that language here a lot, but I believe truly that what we've tried to do with our lean journey is to best use our resources. So Dr. Deming talks about optimization of processes, right? We haven't used that language exactly a lot, but that's what our journey has been about. How do we optimize what we do? How do we create standards, stick to improve the standard and make things the lives of our people better?

Dan: [00:23:28] And that from day one, when we are first meeting about why are we going to take this lean journey? Way back in August of 2000, our management team said it is for one reason and that it is to make the lives of our people better and.

Dan: [00:23:46] From that day on, I felt as long as we have that focus. We're on the right path. And and so as we went through our lean journey, we were. Awarded the Shingo Silver Medallion for operational excellence back in 2008 93. And it's referred to as the Nobel Prize of Business or Manufacturing by Business Week. And that was nice to get. It was kind of a confirmation that we're on a good path, but the best thing about us told us all things we could do better. And so we tried to embrace them. And so on. As we learned more about the teachings of Dr. Deming, here's a thing that we weren't using properly our entire lean during that we're only now starting to learn and use much better.

Dan: [00:24:39] And that is the understanding of variation that Brian mentioned earlier or in control charts and we hadn't used. I don't know if we used a control Chart. Fifteen years probably that are 20 0 0 0. And now we really are. We're embracing the heck out of that. And we're beginning to understand where we have to measure data and where you continue on.

Dan: [00:25:02] Probably the greatest weakness, though, for us, the difference between how we treated women and what we're learning from Dr. Deming, though, is we are making a lot of change and we're necessarily tracking whether or not that change was an improvement towards the saying we needed improvement on. Right. Yeah. In that corner of the planet might look better now, but is it truly improving anything that's going to help the customer? And we lost sight of that for a while, I believe. And I think we're getting on back, Brian, to everything else then was pretty good a.

Brian: [00:25:37] The appreciation of a system as as we did the room. I think we learned more about systems because you have to diagram them out and understand the interactions between them. And so that kind of opened our eyes and just happened to fit in with a kind of reconfirms that Dr. Deming needs says. You should understand your system as good as you can. I think it also psychology. You know, in the beginning there are resistors because change is scary. And I'm sure some people wonder if you truly mean it. Or is that just the passing thing this month? And so you understand as you push that journey through and you get the buy in from people that that were once resistors. OK, that's cool. You get to watch and growth in your own people. You learn how to achieve that growth faster. Either by learning from your mistakes or the occasional times we we somehow did it right. So I thought all of that. There is a consistency between Lean and Dr. Deming. I think I can see that.

Tripp: [00:26:50] Okay. And Brian, you have to ask, because you mentioned that you kind of got into variation, you know, years ago or maybe even a couple of decades ago. And we're using it, you know, in what's different today, what it what it sounds like. You started into it kind of got away from it and then went back to it. What would take me a little bit on that journey?

Brian: [00:27:13] Long ago when I was when I first was introduced to it, we were trying to everything classic's and we wanted to learn how to build Dai's better. So is there a way to design a dye with more success by the time you're done, by the time you're finished? And I couldn't believe how much statistics help you in design. So that was kind of low hanging fruit and. So it's fun to play with.

Brian: [00:27:43] But we didn't necessarily use it in day to day production at that facility I worked with.

Tripp: [00:27:49] OK,.

Brian: [00:27:50] So then I. I moved on to Micron and that was my first attempt. OK. We don't use it to design our process, but we do use it to monitor our process. And back then, it was sort of driven by customers. They were requiring statistical data. And that's fine. But what's more, fighing are more fun to actually learn that you can predict your process. But I find that fascinating every day.

Brian: [00:28:19] So we're into that pretty deep for about four or five years. And for some reason, the customers decided to let those requirements go. And somehow that that seemed to be it took the wind out of the sails of that process.

Brian: [00:28:37] And so for some time, we didn't use statistics for quite some time. And then I would say in the last five or six years. We are doing more and more statistical studies and realizing once again the benefits of doing so. And now we're actually applying it to management processes rather than just parts or machines. And we're finding that. That is even more fascinating than than going out new in capability studies out next to a fancy.

Dan: [00:29:10] I think though, one of the stark differences between then and now is we did it because the customer demanded it and the sooner they stop demanding it, we stop doing it tells you how mature where I am right now.

Dan: [00:29:27] Now we go this beginning. We realize, as Brian said, it's helping us understand our management systems in ways we never would have dreamt before. And we're doing it because it's the right thing to do and you're learning from it. And we're the kind of company that there's no doubt in my mind that sometime very nearly down the road, we're going to be pushing this to our customers to try to do the same thing as we did that with our lean systems. When when we first started Dileep Journey by time 2003 rolled around, we had made a lot of changes and we realized that one of our customers had any idea what lean was. And we we began to bump up into. We can only improve our systems so well if we can't tie it to where our customers are demanding or needing from us. So we went on this magical mystery tour out to our customers for three years to try to see how can we link what we're doing to what you might need. And pretty soon, all of our customers want to delinked their systems to ours. And we went from like 16 percent of what we built was on some kind of pulse system to 68 percent within those three years. And it was an amazing thing because when they began to recognize what it could do for them and it helped us help them, it was great. So we were still and we began then to take what we've learned and what we knew and share it with the customer. So here's just another thing that as we learn more, I can see that we're going to share it with the customers because it will help them help us.

Tripp: [00:31:07] Very cool. So my last question for you guys is, is my typical one, which is. Is there anything that we've talked about or that you've responded to that you'd like to make a clarification of? Or is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I would have?

Dan: [00:31:28] That's really that's a great question.

Dan: [00:31:33] I know that they're the Deming Institute is reaching out to educational organizations across the country. I'm not aware of any of that in Michigan. There are individuals, like I mentioned Dennis a few times now that is trying to help industry. But it's important that we believe that the school systems are help. Few years ago, Mike Rather, the author of The Toyota Kata, was gracious enough to stop that. Mike Brown wandered through the plant. And then I was so bold as to invite him to teach the school that my kids went to grade school or how to do the participate in the Kata, which of course, as I mentioned, includes the whole PDCA cycle of improvements. And he did so and I thought it was a fantastic session. And it began the thinking, how can we get more AUTHERS? How can we get more people helping teach the schools that teach students how to be more critical thinkers? So I think that that would be something of. All certain interests of manufacturers all over the country. Here, as we try to help, you know, he knows the skills gap all the time, right?

Dan: [00:32:53] Mostly is a critical thinking gap in our opinion. We can teach the skill. So anything like that. We would love to see and hear more about it as time goes by.

Tripp: [00:33:03] Very cool, Brian. Thoughts? Last thoughts.

Brian: [00:33:07] Yeah, I don't remember who you were talking to and one of your podcasts, but your guest. You ask the question of them and I'm going to paraphrase. Do you think the Deming Philosophy is growing or shrinking or remaining the same. And he said he did not believe it to be growing.

Brian: [00:33:29] My guess, I was disappointed. Whoever your guest was, it seemed like a person that would probably know that answer better than I did. And that made me sad to think. And so I am curious, as Dan just said, you know, not only getting to the local school systems, but also the business schools. What is what is coming out of the business schools now? The people that we're going to hire soon?

Brian: [00:33:56] And then how do we get even further ahead, as Dan said? And get this all the way down to how do you teach young people to think in a better way? And.

Dan: [00:34:08] It's important for us. So earlier this year, Ryan and I both referred to CQI Academy that we had taken to learn more about Dr. Demings work, and I had coordinated through an organization called Discover Manufacturing here in West Michigan.

Dan: [00:34:26] They coordinated and I see it an industry led collaborative where four of our companies, 19 different people or 20, went to this class and one was in carbon composites, another one furniture, and there another machining company like ours.

Dan: [00:34:45] And it didn't matter that we were basically different industries and different walks of life. It was somebody from shipping to, you know, my position, brines as managers and everything in between. And it was a fantastic way to learn these collaboratives of different companies. So we're intending to do it again this next spring. I'm signed up as the co-lead for Discovery Manufacturing and make sure you do. And that's that's our contribution to try to make sure that we're spreading the teachings of Dr. Demings in West Michigan here, because regardless, I'm not sure what else we can do other than it here. We have tours every two or three weeks and people who come see it and we're trying to help this. I'll see more companies learn about it. So I hope that your listeners and companies that are getting involved open the doors and bring people in and show what they're learning. It doesn't matter how minor it is. Teach what you're learning and then try to get other companies together to do the same.

Tripp: [00:35:53] And that's sage advice. We appreciate it. Well, Dan and Bryan, we certainly appreciate you being part of the Deming Institute podcast.

Dan: [00:36:04] Well, thank you, Tripp. Greatly appreciate it.

Tripp: [00:36:08] Thank you for listening to the Deming Institute podcast. Stay updated on the latest blogs, podcasts, programs and other activities at Deming dot org.

In our 5th interview podcast of 2019, Alan Winlow, MBE, former Managing Director of Yorkshire Brick Company, Continuous Improvement Director at Marshalls PLC, and 2019 ASQ Deming Medal Recipient, offers insights on his efforts to lead a Deming transformation.

(This is Tripp's first interview with Alan)

Highlights include:

• Opening quote from Myron Tribus, "If you continue to do what you've always done, you will continue to get what you've always got"
• In the late 1980s, while serving as Managing Director of the Yorkshire Brick Company (YBC), employment in the UK brick industry plunged from 14K to 8K employees and plants were closing
• Question at hand, "How to survive in a labor-intensive business?"
• How had the Japanese captured critical UK business segments?
• Started to read about Dr. Deming and attend British Deming Association conferences
• Discovered sources of variation and PDSA, plus the importance of data
• Found the majority of variation came from manufacturing equipment and raw materials for the bricks
• Discovered how to change the brick manufacturing process to improve brick uniformity
• Began to meet regularly with YBC's production team to continue to improve brick uniformity, savings in water use, energy use, and discarded bricks
• Discovered mental models, including the Taguchi Loss Function
• Explored how to remove barriers within workforce, everyone came on staff
• Began to understand what his job was, including reading books and seeking new learning
• Alan led consulting visits to China in 1987 to assist in developing the Land Fill Gas business.  The Chinese were extremely interested in the landfill gas abstraction at YBC and sent no less than 8 delegations to visit the Yorkshire site. Alan was invited to visit by the Mayor of the city of Anshan.
• Teaming with local schools and universities, a local jail, and a county council to share lessons learned within YBC, including environmental projects
• Yorkshire Brick was honored in 1991 for contributions to environmental causes
• In 2000, Alan was honored by Queen Elizabeth as a Member of the British Empire for his leadership within YBC
• Never met Dr. Deming at BDA events; met Myron Tribus on many occasions
• Comments on challenges in implementing the Deming Philosophy
• Continued relevance of the Deming Philosophy today  

In our 4th interview podcast of 2019, Donald Berwick, co-founder and former President and CEO of IHI, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, shares his Deming Journey.  Dr. Berwick, who presented at The Deming Institute's 2018 Conference, is one of the nation's leading authorities on healthcare quality and improvement. 

(This is Tripp's first interview with Dr. Berwick)

Highlights include:

• His training as a pediatrician
• His efforts to apply quality management, before his introduction to the Deming Philosophy
• Co-Founded IHI in 1989 as a non-profit organization
• Appointed by President Obama, in July 2010, to the position of Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which he held until December, 2011
• Ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2014
• 4 children and 7 grandchildren
• Attended a Four-day Seminar with Dr. Deming in 1986, leaving early and then returning
• Prior to meeting Dr. Deming, serving as "VP of Inspection"
• In the world of inspection, everything stayed the same
• Waiting times of 2 minutes for x-rays were reported to him (with falsification) by the radiology department 
• "Do something about it"
• Question: What is the pushback that you see today in healthcare?
• The Red Bead Experiment was "electrifying," including triggering a vicious cycle of blame by management and withdrawal by willing workers.
• The workforce (willing workers) wants to do well
• The influence of Dr. Deming, and others, on IHI
• Prescriptions for fixing healthcare - "It takes leadership"
• General tone of healthcare today; "measure enough, yell enough, things get better"
• Continued focus today (backsliding) on measurement for inspection
• Question: What are physicians learning today about management? Answer: "Heroism as the route to excellence"

In our 3rd interview podcast of 2019, Wendi Middleton, Director of Continual Quality Improvement, from the Aging Adult Services Agency within the State of Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services, and Dennis Sergent, President, Sergent Results Group, share reflections on the "Challenges and Opportunities in Applying the Deming Philosophy in Government."

(This is Tripp's first interview with Wendi and Dennis)

Highlights include:

• A 5-year history of applying the Deming Philosophy within the State of Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
• The development of Aging and Disability Resource Centers
• Learning "Who are our partners?"
• Where to start? / Who does what to whom?
• Family services and a cat
• First exposure to the Deming Red Bead Experiment
• Getting to know each other better within Michigan's HHS
• Creation of the BOLD ("Building Options for Long Term Decision-Making") Council
• Acronyms as an art-form
• Detailing the processes - Where to start and where to integrate?
• Exposure to control charts within the Bell Telephone System
• Education and steps to move forward
• Creation of the BOLD ("Be OLD") Councils
• Acronyms as an art-form
• Grant funding provided consulting help
• Process steps, including road blocks and issues
• Subject Matter Experts (SME) and Design Teams
• A focus on quality improvement, not change
• Policy changes, with improvements
• Living at home, using improvements in non-emergency transportation services
• Weekly Stand-and-Deliver meetings to review ongoing PDSA efforts
• Continual Improvement efforts are not always "linear," with forward improvement (sometimes they go backwards)
• State government is a culture all by itself
• People sometimes become their job (position)
• Getting people on board with improvement; not always happy fits, some move on to other positions
• Managing "Level-of-Care Determinations"
• When facing system obstacles, take inspiration from Eleanor Roosevelt, Don't take a "No" (answer) from someone without the authority to say "Yes"
• Setting new standards for working with state vendors
• New skills by Design Team members
• "Everything is designed around getting money from the federal government"
• Design Team roles are about improving access to state services, not finding sources of funding
• Effectiveness (doing the right thing), before efficiency (faster, better, cheaper)
• Cost savings have been measured, yet the bigger impact is serving more people for a given budget allocation
• Reducing the waiting list for services
• Instead of asking for more money, ask if the existing process can be improved to provide better service
• Discovering a mindset that if some don't have a problem with a given process, others won't as well (meaning, the process is deemed to be OK as is, while it may well need improvement) 
• Impact on Design Teams after attending The Deming Institute's "Me vs We workshop" 
• Getting over self-interest issues
• T-Shirt idea, "The Status Quo is Not an Option"
• Avoiding doing better what needs not be done
• Design Teams need ongoing support, including starting with on-boarding and ground rules
• Emergence of self-respect and respect for others

In our 2nd interview podcast of 2019, Steven Haedrich, President of New York Label & Box Works (NYLBW), shared reflections on his continued admiration and application of the Deming Philosophy.

(This is Tripp's second interview with Steven.  Link here for the first interview.)

Highlights include:

• Update on NYLBW
• Immersed in the Deming Philosophy every day
• Everything is moving much faster; quality has been a selling/differentiator
• Also, a focus on innovation
• Deming Chain Reaction, less rework/fewer mistakes/creating good paying jobs; the ONLY way to survive!
• Continual improvement on a daily basis
• Impact of a Total Cost focus?  NO!   Lowest price still gets the bid
• Interaction with your peers in sharing the Deming Philosophy; sharing it every day with both private and public companies – explaining the old ways of sale commissions, performance appraisals, etc.
• Other obstacles; clients and vendors adverse to partnering
• Steven's 2014 podcast – Deming is it!
• Wonderful opportunity to join the board of directors of The Deming Institute
• Deming Online – worldwide access to online learning with the potential to reach millions of students of the Deming Philosophy
• How to get the word out on the Deming Philosophy
• Steven's speaking engagements – Graduate School USA, Conestoga College, upcoming printing conference
• People are beginning to realize the limits of the prevailing system of management
• People are beginning to see the prospects of a changing world and the need to be more effective with management systems
• Where to start – The New Economics, 3rd edition, with Chapter 11 by Kelly Allen
• The world is finally realizing that the old ways that we have accepted as the standards of thinking are no longer going to prepare us for the complexities, for the challenges, for the true globalization of the world.  
• The Deming Philosophy captures the essence of collaboration and cooperation and teamwork and systems thinking and continual improvement; including joy in work!
• The Deming Philosophy allows for a different end of the day experience; allowing us to make the world a better place!

In our January 2019 interview podcast, his 8th session with Tripp, Superintendent David Langford reflects on the state of education, the system, and how its set up, including various ways in how schools are working to move from "theory to practice" in their understanding and application of the Deming philosophy.

Highlights include:

• The short term thinking which Dr. Deming warned us of, whether looking at profit or test scores
• Longer term strategies are sacrificed for short term results
• People get creative when driven to "show the numbers"
• Myths about charter schools being able to select their students
• Lack of a level playing field
• The strength and will power required to absorb the impact of a special cause being treated as a  common cause
• Rare to find Profound Knowledge
• Fear manifests itself in many ways
• Dr. Deming encouraged David to consult for education systems
• The right to joy in work and joy in learning
• Blaming the individuals vs. the system in which they operate
• How to change the system to all for joy in learning
• The role of rewards in narrowing one's focus
• The fears and motivations of a school board
• Possible agendas of school board members
• An onboarding process for board members
• There are pockets of excellence in education systems

For more information about David's current work with Ingenium Schools, please visit ingeniumfoundation.org

In our second interview podcast of November 2018, Doug Hall provides an overview of his latest book, "Driving Eureka!: Problem-Solving with Data-Driven Methods & the Innovation Engineering System"

(This is Tripp's third interview with Doug.  Link here for the first interview and here for the second.)

Highlights include:

• Inventing "big ideas" for clients, as they entered the "Killing Zone"
• Applied innovation, using the Deming Philosophy
• How to "Find, Filter, and Fast-Track" big ideas
• Happy clients, paying big money, but the ideas did not happen
• Half the potential value of the big ideas is lost in internal development efforts
• The independent parts of organizations work to promote their own silo
• The average new product idea has a 95% failure rate in the market place
• What's wrong with project management?
• Innovation projects have uncertainty
• Problem solving with data-driven methods
• Big ideas are easy – making them real is hard
• A major obstacle is a reliance on opinions vs data
• Shifting innovation from an art to a science
• What to take away from this book?
• All products follow a life cycle, from birth to death
• Innovation for extending product life
• How to create an innovation culture
• Innovate or die
• Obstacles to innovation – Lack of Leadership and Lack of a Process
• Brain Brew Whiskeys for mass customization
• Don't feel you need to do "all" of the Deming Philosophy
• Just get started!
• How to receive a special gift from Doug - go to gift

In our November 2018 interview podcast, his 1st session with Tripp, Mike Tveite reflects on his interactions with Dr. Deming, beginning with attending a Four-Day Seminar in 1986.  Mike went on to help Dr. Deming with 25 of his Four-Day Seminars, and to follow him around while he consulted with a division of General Motors.  

Highlights include:

• Mike's career, beginning as a Professor of Statistics
• First "World Shake" upon meeting Dr. Deming
• Dr. Deming in the MIT lecture series
• Learning statistics from Dr. Deming
• "Pond" statistics and "Stream" statistics
• Enumerative (pond) and Analytic (stream) Studies
• On what are you taking action?
• Mike's 2012 Deming Institute Conference presentation
• 14 Points for Management
• Management in a "pond" vs a "stream"
• The System of Profound Knowledge as a lens
• Production Viewed as a System
• The interdependent components of a system
• A single aim for the whole system
• Forces at work which undermine the aim of an organization
• Maximizing shareholder value
• Optimizing the system over the long term
• Data is like garbage, the need to know how to use it before collecting it

It's time for PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) Cycle 2 in John Dues' journey to reduce chronic absenteeism in his schools. His team is using PDSA to quickly test ideas and learn on a small scale. Find out what happened and how PDSA can be a powerful tool for learning.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of a new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Powerful Learning with the PDSA Cycle, Part 2. John, take it away.

0:00:26.7 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, like you said, we, I think for the past three episodes or so, we've been working towards getting a better definition of our problem specific to this chronic absenteeism issue that we're working on this year. I don't know if you remember from last episode, but we have this team working and they've basically said we don't have enough information quite yet to write this precise problem statement. So we decided to gather information running the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. And last time we focused on the first cycle. This episode, we're gonna focus on a subsequent PDSA cycle, sort of along those same lines. For folks that are watching and perhaps just joining for the first time, I'll kind of share my screen and do a little bit of a review so that everybody can see or know what we're talking about, even if they're just listening for the first time. So we've talked about this improvement model. We're working through this four step improvement model. So set the direction or challenge is the first step. Grasp the current condition is the second step. Third step is establish your next target condition and then fourth, experiment to overcome obstacles.

0:01:44.3 John Dues: And we're doing all this with a team, people working in the system. People have the authority to work on the system and someone with the System of Profound Knowledge knowledge. right. And so, you know, we've talked about setting that challenge or direction. And as we're grasping the current condition, we've actually decided to skip to step four and experiment a little bit so we can get a deeper understanding of this problem that we've been working on. And you'll remember probably as well, did the screen change for you so you can see the chart now?

0:02:21.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

0:02:22.9 John Dues: Yeah. Great. So I thought it'd be helpful to show this again too. So this is our process behavior chart of the chronic absenteeism rates dating back to the 2016/'17 school year. So we have eight years of data in regards to this problem. And you'll remember when we talked about set the direction or the challenge, we wanna basically cut this chronic absenteeism rate we're seeing coming out of the pandemic by a lot. So we're hovering around this 50% chronic absenteeism rate. We wanna cut it to 5%. So that means, you know, 50% or more of our kids, or right around 50% of our kids are missing 10% or more of the school year.

0:03:06.2 John Dues: And this is a trend that we're seeing all over the United States right now. And the other thing that we talked about is when we looked at this process behavior chart, that it's basically like there's a pre-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism, and then there's a post-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism. So, you know, before the pandemic, the rates were too high, but nowhere near to where they are now. So, you know, prior to the pandemic, we were sort of hovering around the, you know, 20 to 30% of kids chronically absent. And then, you know, coming out of the pandemic, it's been more like that, that 50% number that we've, that we've talked about.

0:03:49.4 Andrew Stotz: And so to reiterate for the listeners or the viewers, this is the chronic absentee rate at your school, as opposed to nationwide, which I remember last time you talked about, it's about 30% nationwide, and pre-pandemic, it was about 16%.

0:04:06.5 John Dues: Yeah. Right around there. So, yeah, so I'm talking about the four schools that make up our school system in Columbus, Ohio.

0:04:15.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep.

0:04:16.6 John Dues: And, you know, we have a pretty high percent of our kids are economically disadvantaged. And so the rates in schools that have that demographic tend to be more like ours, in that 40, 50% range. And then, but all schools coming out of the pandemic had much higher rates than what they had pre pandemic. No matter your affluence levels. It's just, just like a lot of things the schools with the most kids living in poverty get hit the hardest when you have these problems, basically. So, yeah, yeah. So what we were, we were studying this problem, and, you know, we have some idea of what's causing our challenges, but we've started running these PDSA cycles to dig into that a little bit more, and I'll, I'll, I'll stop sharing. So that's not distracting. And so we ran this first PDSA cycle we talked about last time, and now we're running, or we've just gotten finished running a second PDSA cycle. So for folks that are new to that, what that means is that we are basically running an experiment to test an idea, an idea about how to improve chronic absenteeism.

0:05:26.6 John Dues: And to do that we plan the intervention, then we do or run the experiment, we study it and then we act on that information. 'Cause that's where the PDSA comes from. So basically the objective specific to PDSA 2 is were or we designed a individualized intervention based on responses we get from interviews with kids using this five whys sort of empathy interview template. Right? And then after we do that, what's happening is that students are actually. So after the five whys is completed with the student, we move right into creating the plan of the PDSA still with that student. So they're part of the process. So that's also sort of a key, I think innovation of this particular round of PDSAs is the student is sitting there as we design the intervention. A student that has some issues with chronic absenteeism. And then basically in this particular plan, we decided we're gonna collect detailed attendance data for two weeks to evaluate the effectiveness of that.

0:06:39.7 Andrew Stotz: When you said this one, are you talking about the PDSA one or two?

0:06:43.5 John Dues: Two. The one. The one you just got done running. The one we're talking about. So the PDSA 2 ran for two weeks. So when I say experiment, I'm not talking about, you know, like a randomized controlled trial that can last a year or two years or five years before you get the results. I'm talking about something you can do in a day, a week, two weeks. My general rule is not to go over a month with these PDSA cycles. It starts to feel like it's too long. I wanna get data back quicker than that on an intervention. And so that's what we did with this PDSA cycle 2. And it was really, the plan was built around this key question. The key question was, will involving students in the design of an individualized intervention to address their chronic absenteeism lead to an increase in their average daily attendance rate during that period of intervention. So we're not taking that for granted just because we're sitting with the kids creating a plan with them. We don't know, we don't know what's gonna happen exactly. And basically step one of that plan was this five wise interviews that I talked about.

0:07:50.2 John Dues: So basically we had four staff members. So each one was assigned a student at their campus that they chose to work with on this initial intervention. And they took a piece of sticky paper and up top they basically wrote, here's our problem, the student's name. So let's say James is not coming to school consistently. And when students miss a lot of school, they're at risk of falling behind academically. And right below that problem statement, then they wrote, why are you not coming to school consistently? 'Cause that's the first why question. So that's sort of the first part of this five whys interview. So it's very simple. You need chart, paper and marker in about 20 minutes to do this. Step two is, then they used the information that they gathered from that five whys interview to design the intervention with the student. And basically what they did was they designed the intervention around the root cause that they got to at the bottom of that five whys sequence. So basically, you know, when they said that, when they asked that first question, you know, why are you not coming to school consistently? The student is then going to say something, right? I miss the bus almost every day.

0:09:10.7 John Dues: And so the next question, the next why question is built on the previous answer from the student. So why do you miss the bus every day? And you kind of keep going. And it doesn't always happen perfectly. Sometimes it takes three questions, sometimes it takes a little more than five. But generally speaking, once you drill down with those five whys, you'll get to sort of a root cause from the interviewee, right? And so then they're basically saying like, you know, based on that root cause we identified, what do you think we can do to improve your daily attendance? And then now they're sort of transitioning from the five whys into the planning of the intervention. And sort of that was step two of the plan. And step three is then actually starting to track the student's daily attendance as they do whatever that plan is across the 10 school days that are in that particular cycle. So that's the plan phase. You know, we had a key question that we designed around, and then the team also makes predictions about what they think is gonna happen during that cycle. That's the plan.

0:10:23.5 John Dues: And then, so then they move into, once the plan's in place, you run the experiment. That's the do, right? And so in this particular do, PDSA cycle two here, that team collected both the quantitative data, so that's the five whys interview, and then the quantitative data, that's the daily attendance data. And so, you know, I mentioned that they had chosen four students to do this work with. And so what you're doing in the do is saying, did you do the plan? Basically. And that shouldn't be assumed because things may happen that interrupt the plan or derail the plan or make you change the plan. The guy that's designing these PDSAs is pretty good project manager. He knows improvement science, he knows the Deming stuff pretty well. So largely this experiment ran as planned. It's also for a pretty short time frame, so there's less time for it to go sort of off the rails and go wrong. But one of the student's attendance, it was so poor during this two week period that they never actually held the empathy interview. So you're noting stuff like that. You plan to interview four kids, you actually only interviewed three kids.

0:11:34.9 John Dues: And here's the reason why, we couldn't even get to the part of interviewing the student, this particular student, because he was not there during that two week period when they were gonna do the interviews. And so then the data comes in, right? The data comes in and now we're ready to study what actually happened during that two week period. So with the first student, interestingly, during the course of the PDSA, that daily attendance rate did go up. Right? And he was actually, he did miss a couple days, so it wasn't perfect, but he brought a note and there was actually a medical diagnosis. There was like a excuse reason for those particular days. Right. The second student was that student I was just referring to. So it was, his attendance was so poor that weren't even able to do the interview. That happens that you know, in real life. Third student's, this was a real success story. She was a part of her, the plan that she designed. She was meeting with one of the staff members at the school she attends that she chose one-on-one at the start of the day and she had significantly increased attendance during this two week period.

0:13:04.0 John Dues: And then the last student had this initial bump early in the PDSA and then had four straight sort of missed days at the end of that two week period also due to an illness, due to the flu. So you know, four kids, one uh two kids, pretty good success. Two kids still had some absences throughout the period. And then one kid sort of really didn't break the cycle. Nothing changed. And in fact the interview didn't even occur. Which means there was also no intervention that occurred with that particular student. Even so, with the student where we couldn't do the interview during that period, part of the plan was to get him a more reliable bus stop and we actually were able to change his bus stop, communicate that to the family and then that still didn't lead to increased attendance. And that's, you know, when you, I think when you work like this too, when you are sort of a policymaker or politician and you make these proclamations, we're gonna decrease chronic absenteeism or to cut it in half. And then you say, okay, well here's four students. Do that in two weeks. Do that over the course, just two weeks, just 10 days. How hard could it be? Right. [laughter] You see, you see just how hard these things are in reality. Right. So can't just make these proclamations.

0:14:32.9 Andrew Stotz: And is that part of what you're trying to do also in this process is get people to, you know, I mean, obviously what you'd love is to be able to come up with solutions from these four students. But really what you also are identifying is the other side of that. Wow, this is even harder than I thought.

0:14:50.2 John Dues: Yeah. And I, you know, with the people that work in schools, like the folks that are on this improvement team, none of this is gonna be a surprise to them.

0:14:57.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, they already know that, I guess.

0:14:58.6 John Dues: They already know.

0:15:00.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

0:15:00.4 John Dues: Because they're on the front lines. I mean, they already know knew this is, you know, multi layered, challenging problem to address. But on the flip side, there were some pretty encouraging signs that getting, we call it getting proximate to students, individualizing some of those interventions and then including the student in that attendance monitoring and the intervention that it, you know, like I said, there were some success stories. So that first student I talked about, he went from 52% attendance to during the intervention period, it jumped up to 70%. So, you know, it's a short time frame, but a positive sign. That second student that I said that, you know, we never even got to do the interview with, he actually got quite a bit worse. So he had something like 37% attendance and that dropped 10% during that two week period. And then that third student that I said was a real success story, she went from 75% attendance to 96% attendance. And 96% attendance is good. And then the last student, she was the one that I said, you know, there was an initial bump and then kind of fell off, due to the flu at the end, she basically stayed the same. Like she was at right around 56% attendance and stayed right in that mid-50s range during the intervention.

0:16:19.8 Andrew Stotz: And just for, if a listener or a viewer has come in just on this episode and they're trying to understand where we're at, it's maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're doing in the sense that someone may look at it and say, wait a minute, this is just some anecdotes and how does that help you? And then on the other hand, one of the lessons in the business world that people sometimes say these days is do things that don't scale, which is counterintuitive. But what they're trying to get you to do is focus in, on getting it right with a small number of people before you then, you know, decide to go to the next level. So just maybe just give a brief of where it's at in this whole process.

0:17:04.8 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think. I mean, that's the whole point of the PDSA. The counterintuitive thing is that while you want to improve things for all students, you may start by working with a single student or a single classroom, or in our case, you know, four students. So, you know, the good thing is, is that what you could possibly do out of a cycle like this is, and this is only two weeks. But there's significant learning. And so what you would then do with cycle three, perhaps if the team decided this was what they're gonna do, is make some adaptation to this process, and if you were feeling confident that the adaptation was gonna work, then you could possibly. It's pretty early cycle two to start spreading this real wide. But I mean, you could spread this, you know, if you wanted to, to instead of four students, maybe you wanna try 10 students, something like that. Right. And in that way, and that's the basic idea, is to go from one student to one classroom of students to maybe one grade level of students to a whole school, perhaps if some type of idea is working really well. But the thing is, is that the whole mantra is, I lost my train of thought. Start small, learn fast. That's the mantra. Right.

0:18:23.7 Andrew Stotz: And then the other question I would have is, to what extent is this, you know, just subject to the Hawthorne effect in the sense that we knew in the many years ago that when they increased the intensity of the light, the workers did better, and then when they reduced the intensity of the light, the workers did better. So it was just that somebody was paying attention to the workers and the result was they appreciated that and so they did better.

0:18:53.9 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, that's possible. I mean, I would say...

0:18:57.0 Andrew Stotz: Which of course. Which of course may be the solution anyways. Right? You know, like, geez, if a teacher was... If each student was greeted by a teacher who cared about them and said, I'm so happy to see you, and it's great that you made it on time. Let's get started. I mean that could change the life of some people for sure. Including me.

0:19:13.7 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like the girl that went from 75% to 96% attendance during the intervention. I wouldn't say, oh my gosh, we're gonna do this school wide now, but what I would say is, wow, that worked for that two week period.

0:19:25.7 Andrew Stotz: We're learning.

0:19:27.5 John Dues: It was relatively easy to do on a daily basis, so let's do more of that. Right. And also another thing you can think about is when you run PDSA cycles and you, let's say you do have really great success on whatever that thing is and you've spread it throughout your system. But now the priorities have changed. There's some other thing that really needs intensive intervention. One thing you can do is sort of as the 10th step in our improvement process is hold the gains. And so you often can then check back in on that thing in a month or two months and just see what the data says. Did it deteriorate because we're not paying as much attention to it or because we put that thing in place and left it in place? Although we're not as hyper focused on it, is it still sort of continuing on in a way that's at least acceptable to us?

0:20:22.3 Andrew Stotz: I just had an idea. Why don't we put a finish line and a countdown clock and a checkered flag and cheer every student as they get over the line?

[laughter]

0:20:35.0 John Dues: Yeah, that would be great. That would be great. The problem is, is the cheering isn't the thing that's preventing them from coming to school.

0:20:45.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

0:20:46.1 John Dues: Maybe like the cherry on top, but you know.

0:20:49.4 Andrew Stotz: Exactly.

0:20:51.6 John Dues: So, so it's tough. Yeah.

0:20:52.2 Andrew Stotz: Great, great example of where superficial things that outsiders see may not really connect with the real trouble that they're struggling with. Yep.

0:21:01.5 John Dues: And remember, the student's not the only part of the process. The people, the staff that were doing these interventions, they reported that this was like a really powerful experience for them. Most of them haven't been through a PDSA cycle before.

0:21:18.6 Andrew Stotz: Right.

0:21:18.6 John Dues: So this.

0:21:20.3 Andrew Stotz: Maybe I was, slogans and exhortations is what I was just talking about.

0:21:24.8 John Dues: Right, right, right. Yeah. But they felt pretty confident that doing more of that thing was a good idea coming out of cycle one and then this second cycle. Now, with that being said, one of the things that we've also discovered is that there's some required intervening that has to happen as kids meet certain thresholds that are required by the state of Ohio. And so I think I mentioned this before, that one of the things that we're doing as a part of the project was mapping out the intervention process in place at each campus. So while the benchmarks are the same for when you need to do that, the how and the who and the when, that there's variation in that. So right now we're taking like each of the campuses mapped out their intervention process for attendance, and we're taking a look at that. And so what we're actually gonna do in the next cycle is work to put together a more standardized approach to these intervention teams. So, and that... And you get that from the team, you know, you're sort of talking about, you know, as we get to the Act.

0:22:38.4 John Dues: I think I've talked about this before. There's sort of the three A's. You can adopt this into your system, write it down in a manual or whatever, you can adapt it, change it a little bit, or if it's really not going well, then you abandon it. So in this case, there's an adaptation where we're gonna sort of shift gears and work on this process mapping and get that put in place 'cause the team feels like that's the highest lever, next thing to do, basically.

0:23:06.5 Andrew Stotz: And is that. Have you already mapped out PDSA 3 now? And you're in that process? Is that. And that's what we're gonna talk about next one, or where are you at with that?

0:23:15.5 John Dues: Yeah, so I think looking at the process maps would be interesting because you can sort of assume that things happen relatively similarly, you know, especially in a small school system like ours. But you're gonna see that there's... And it's not right or wrong necessarily, but there may be a sort of like, again, a better way to do things because there are many... There's sometimes many people involved, many processes, many forms. And so, yeah, we're gonna look and see, basically, is one more efficient than the other, is one more effective than the other, that type of thing.

0:23:51.4 Andrew Stotz: Okay.

0:23:52.3 John Dues: Yeah. So a lot of learning, you know, I mean, I think, and you know, again, this takes time. But, and we're still sort of in that "define the problem" step. But again, the fact that we're studying the problem, the fact that we're talking to kids as a part of it, we're actually learning from data coming from what's happening on the ground. The ultimate solution or set of solutions we come up with are gonna be much more robust, you know, and they're gonna be much more sort of durable into the future, anti-fragile you know, into the future because of this work versus, you know, the typical fly by night. Let's have a pizza party on Friday to encourage kids to come to school, that just... There may be an initial bump, but it's just, this has no durability into the future. Yeah.

0:24:44.8 Andrew Stotz: Great, great. Well, I like that. And I got excited 'cause I thought, oh, maybe we can come up with some incentive or something. But what I see is that the challenge is how do you make it durable? So I like that word. And this was a good discussion on that.

0:25:01.8 John Dues: Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say the other point I would make is, you know, sometimes you can plan, plan, plan, but that, you know, at any point of an improvement process, you can use a PDSA cycle, start running an experiment and start gathering information right away. Just do something, you know, thoughtful, but do something. Don't plan in a room when you can go out and get actual, run actual experiments and get back real data.

0:25:27.5 Andrew Stotz: All right, and one other question I had that just came to my mind is what is the value of doing this in such a structured way as the PDSA versus Oh, come on, John, we're testing things all the time, you know, and let's say that to some extent they are, right? We all are testing every day. Why is it important that it's done in a structured way, in a documented way?

0:25:50.8 John Dues: Well, I mean, one, you have a historical record. Two, you know, we had four. So there's one PDSA cycle, but actually there's four different mini experiments happening, one at each campus. And if you didn't write it down like the guy does that's designing these, every one of the experiments would have been different. And he really thinks through step by step. Okay, put this number here. How are we gonna define that? There's a validated list of definitions of that type of attendance issue that day. Because if you don't have all that stuff, then there's no way to analyze it after the fact, or at least it's a lot less, a lot less efficient.

0:26:28.3 Andrew Stotz: And the learning could be lost too.

0:26:30.1 John Dues: Learning could be lost. And you know, I would venture to guess that, you know, if you run a sort of an experiment haphazardly, especially if there's multiple locations, the people sort of, their definition of the thing that's being measured is gonna vary too.

0:26:45.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

0:26:45.5 John Dues: Almost every time. Almost every time, even subtly.

0:26:50.9 Andrew Stotz: All right, well, that was a great discussion. And 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. You can find John's book, Win-Win, W. Edwards Deming, The System of Profound Knowledge and The Science of Improving Schools on Amazon. 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.

In our latest podcast for October 2018, Tripp interviewed Southern Utah University Professor Ravi Roy and Department of Aviation Director, Michael ("Mike") Mower, following their presentation at The Deming Institute's 2018 Conference.

Highlights include:

• Changing aviation training through the Deming Philosophy
• Mike meets Kevin Cahill during a visit to SUU to deliver a convocation lecture
• Not always a fun message of valuing collaboration
• Shifting away from a conflicting public / private partnership in the Department of Aviation
• A management style of using carrots and sticks
• Moving away from management by fear, with zero creativity
• A feeling of being entrenched in the prevailing system of management
• Applications beyond Department of Aviation
• Reaching graduate students from the public sector with the Deming Philosophy
• The reaction of staff members to the adoption of the Deming Philosophy
• The world of aviation is dynamic, while university environments are more static
• The impact of short memories; Deming – Now More Than Ever!
• The mindset for embracing the Deming Philosophy
• Support from SUU President Scott Wyatt while facing eminent failure
• Investing in the future
• The Deming Institute's incubator at SUU
• The 3rd annual Bryce Canyon Society Forum, April 4th, 2019
• Leading by example, spreading the Deming Philosophy beyond SUU
• Seeking change with a march on Washington, DC
• Success in having the Senate and Congress pass a Maintenance Training Modernization Bill inspired by SUU, with details at this link
• With this new bill, SUU will be the first in the US to change 60-year old aircraft maintenance training and practices
• Moving from fear of the future to hope in the future

In our second interview podcast of July 2018, Doug Stilwell shares lessons learned on his transition from a public school administrator to a professor of education at Drake University, once bitten by the Deming philosophy. 

(This is Tripp's second interview with Doug.  Link here for the first interview.)

Highlights include:

• Continued impact of new education methods in the Urbandale Community School District

• How to bring more of Dr. Deming's ideas into higher education?

• How to impact the next generation of leaders in education?

• Drake's Continual Improvement Network

• What happens when students leave Doug's classes?

• Network improvement communities

• "The system always wins"

• Moving away from the A-F grading system

• Shifting from a "time rigid / learning flexible" system to a "time flexible / learning rigid" system

In our July 2018 interview podcast, his 7th session with Tripp, Superintendent David Langford reflects on the efforts of the entire staff of Ingenium Charter Schools to move from "theory to practice" in their understanding and application of the Deming philosophy.

Highlights include:

• David's (new) role as superintendent
• Ingenium operates with 6 schools across Los Angeles, CA
• Restoring joy and meaning to learning as Ingenium's constancy of purpose
• Meaningful and relevant learning
• Moving from theory into practice
• 5 areas of practice (focus): SoPK, intrinsic motivation, continual improvement, neuroscience, and (project-based) quality learning experiences
• Student involvement
• Dashboards for monitoring joy in work
• Students learning about common and special causes of variation
• Student feedback on their experiences within Ingenium schools
• Neuroscience research

For more information about David's current work with Ingenium Schools, please visit ingeniumfoundation.org