Interviews with members of The Deming Institute community, including industry leaders, practitioners, educators, Deming family members and others who share their stories of transformation and success through the innovative management and quality theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming.
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Travis Timmons shares with host Andrew Stotz how a decade of frustration running his physical therapy practice turned into joy once he discovered Deming's philosophy and embraced systems thinking. Through PDSA cycles, clearer processes, and genuine team involvement, he transformed Fitness Matters from chaotic growth to a scalable organization getting stellar outcomes. His story shows how small businesses can create stability, joy in work, and remarkable results by improving the system rather than pushing harder. TRANSCRIPT
0:00:02.1Andrew 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?
0:00:19.7Travis 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...
0:00:39.9Andrew 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.
0:01:22.6Travis 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.
0:02:10.1Andrew 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?
0:02:21.0Travis 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.
0:03:43.5Travis 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.
0:04:44.0Andrew 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?
0:05:09.8Travis 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.
0:05:35.7Andrew Stotz: Yeah.
0:05:36.3Travis 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.
0:06:46.2Travis 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.
0:07:42.3Andrew 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.
0:08:46.5Travis 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.
0:09:58.5Travis 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.
0:11:13.8Travis 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.
0:12:29.2Travis 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.
0:12:42.3Andrew 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.
0:13:10.1Travis 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.
0:14:25.9Travis 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.
0:15:29.1Travis 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.
0:15:41.4Andrew 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?
0:16:02.9Travis Timmons: Oh, that's 13 years ago. You're testing my...
0:16:06.5Andrew Stotz: Oh, well, you can think about a current one, too.
0:16:09.6Travis 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.
0:17:35.5Andrew 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.
0:18:08.5Travis 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.
0:19:51.5Andrew 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.
0:20:48.3Travis 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.
0:22:02.5Travis 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.
0:22:16.9Andrew 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?
0:22:36.9Travis 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.
0:24:00.4Travis 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?
0:25:26.3Travis 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.
0:26:41.4Andrew 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.
0:27:03.3Travis 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.
0:29:00.0Travis 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.
0:30:11.5Andrew 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.
0:31:18.9Travis 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?
0:32:40.0Travis 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.
0:33:01.3Andrew 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.
0:34:37.7Andrew 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?
0:35:24.4Travis 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.
0:36:49.0Travis 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.
0:37:56.9Andrew Stotz: And they weren't saying that in the beginning, but over the time they got that...
0:38:01.4Travis 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.
0:38:37.7Andrew Stotz: Seems paradoxical.
0:38:40.4Travis 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.
0:39:24.6Andrew 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?
0:41:03.2Travis 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.
0:42:15.4Travis 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?
0:43:34.3Travis 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.
0:44:06.7Andrew Stotz: Yeah, yeah.
0:44:07.9Travis 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.
0:44:23.2Andrew 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.
0:45:44.5Andrew Stotz: And I said, yes, it's a little bit of a circular references cannot be resolved.
0:45:49.7Travis 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.
0:46:58.3Travis 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.
0:47:21.2Andrew 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.
0:48:37.8Travis 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.
0:50:06.0Andrew 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.
0:50:19.4Travis 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.
0:51:23.2Andrew Stotz: Faster growth, the ability to negotiate better terms because you're delivering better product and service generally means higher profit margins.
0:51:34.2Travis Timmons: Yes.
0:51:34.6Andrew 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.
0:51:50.9Travis Timmons: Right.
0:51:51.4Andrew Stotz: Is that...
0:51:51.9Travis 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.
0:52:57.9Travis 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.
0:53:18.5Andrew 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.
0:53:56.0Travis Timmons: Love it. Love it. Thank you, Andrew.
0:53:58.0Andrew Stotz: Yep.
When is Change an Improvement?
Monday, December 29, 2025 • Duration 27:53
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
0:00:02.4Andrew 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.
0:00:23.3John 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.
0:01:21.9Andrew Stotz: Exciting.
0:01:23.2John 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?
From Student to Colleague: An Insider's View of Deming's World (Part 1)
Monday, July 21, 2025 • Duration 01:23:23
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
0:00:02.3Andrew 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?
0:00:39.5William 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 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. .
Fostering Cooperation: The Role of a Manager in Education (Part 2)
Tuesday, March 28, 2023 • Duration 29:09
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?
Growing Businesses in Kenya: Interview with Justin Macharia
Tuesday, March 21, 2023 • Duration 26:30
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.
Applying SoPK: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 2)
Tuesday, March 14, 2023 • Duration 22:01
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...
From Taguchi to Deming: Awaken Your Inner Deming (Part 1)
Monday, March 6, 2023 • Duration 50:27
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.
Define the System and the Aim: Role of a Manager in Education (Part 1)
Tuesday, February 21, 2023 • Duration 36:45
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?
Confusion vs Clarity: Deming in Schools Case Study (Part 1)
Friday, February 10, 2023 • Duration 48:55
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.
What is the Difference Between Testing and Ranking Students? Deming in Education with David P. Langford (Part 16)
Tuesday, January 31, 2023 • Duration 27:33
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...
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0:02:46.7John 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?
0:04:06.9Andrew Stotz: Yep.
0:04:08.1John 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.
0:05:15.0Andrew 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.
0:05:33.3John 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.
0:06:20.9Andrew Stotz: Improvement in their improvement.
0:06:24.4John 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.
0:07:54.2John 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.
0:08:27.9Andrew Stotz: Which is the hardest part, by the way.
0:08:30.1John 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.
0:08:43.1Andrew 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.
0:08:55.9John Dues: Yeah.
0:08:56.3Andrew Stotz: And you could also argue, if something's not easily sustained, was it really an improvement?
0:09:02.8John 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.
0:10:25.8John 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?
0:11:35.9Andrew Stotz: Yep.
0:11:36.9John 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.
0:12:55.3Andrew Stotz: In research, sometimes we'll call that time zero.
0:13:00.6John 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?
0:14:36.9Andrew 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?
0:15:24.4John 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.
0:16:42.0John 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.
0:17:36.8Andrew 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.
0:18:19.8John Dues: People don't like to change.
0:18:21.1Andrew Stotz: They don't like to change. And I would argue that they rarely change.
0:18:25.9John Dues: Yeah, yeah, no, I would agree with that.
0:18:28.5Andrew 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.
0:18:42.6John Dues: Yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.
0:18:45.6Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And then you die.
0:18:50.1John Dues: Yeah.
0:18:51.3Andrew 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.
0:20:00.5John 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?
0:20:09.1Andrew Stotz: Well, I think the first thing that this raises is, are we clearly measuring, first, whether the improvement happened?
0:20:19.3John Dues: Yeah.
0:20:19.7Andrew Stotz: And second, whether it was sustained?
0:20:22.8John 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.
0:20:39.8Andrew 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.
0:21:01.6John 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.
0:21:39.9Andrew 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.
0:21:50.5John 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.
0:22:51.4Andrew 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.
0:24:01.0Andrew 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.
0:24:24.0John 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.
0:25:27.7Andrew 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.
0:25:42.6John Dues: Yeah.
0:25:43.6Andrew 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.
0:26:13.2John 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.
0:27:14.8Andrew 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.
William Scherkenbach:
0:04:12.2Andrew 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.
0:04:43.7William 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.
0:07:33.9William 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.
0:08:43.1Andrew 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...
0:09:19.0William 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.
0:10:23.2Andrew 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?
0:10:59.6William 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.
0:11:48.3Andrew Stotz: There's a famous quote, I believe, by Deming about CI Lewis and his book Mind and the World Order.
0:11:56.0William Scherkenbach: Mind and the World Order, yeah.
0:11:59.9Andrew 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?
0:13:01.5William 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.
0:14:27.5Andrew 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?
0:14:51.0William 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...
0:16:41.6William 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.
0:17:07.7Andrew Stotz: So he recommended you don't join and you didn't follow his recommendation.
0:17:12.1William 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.
0:19:29.0William 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.
0:20:04.8Andrew Stotz: And you're mentioning about Butterworth, which is in DC.
0:20:14.7Andrew Stotz: And Butterworth Place where he had his consulting business, which he ran, I believe, out of his basement.
0:20:18.3William Scherkenbach: Out of the basement, yep, yep, yep.
0:20:21.2Andrew 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?
0:20:38.5William 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.
0:21:25.2Andrew Stotz: So when you mentioned Cecelia Kilian, is that her name, who was his assistant at the time?
0:21:36.3William Scherkenbach: Yes, yes.
0:21:38.0Andrew Stotz: Okay, so you...
0:21:38.8William 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.
0:22:01.1Andrew 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...
0:22:14.2William Scherkenbach: Yeah. A lot of, yeah, it contained a lot of...
0:22:16.6Andrew Stotz: The World of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, I think was the name of it, yeah.
0:22:20.6William Scherkenbach: Okay. It contained a lot of his diaries on a number of his visits to Japan and elsewhere.
0:22:32.1Andrew 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?
0:22:55.7William 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.
0:23:35.8Andrew 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.
0:23:59.0William 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.
0:24:37.6Andrew 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?
0:25:09.0William 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.
0:27:33.8Andrew 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.
0:28:13.4William 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.
0:30:42.8Andrew 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?
0:30:51.7William 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.
0:33:07.6Andrew Stotz: It's interesting because I believe that, I think it was Kenichi Koyanagi.
0:33:15.8William Scherkenbach: Koyanagi, yes, it was.
0:33:17.8Andrew 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.
0:33:44.4William 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.
0:35:25.9Andrew 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.
0:36:22.0William 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.
0:38:08.0Andrew 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?"
0:38:23.1Andrew Stotz: And so did you, did you move to Michigan or what did you do?
0:38:27.7Andrew Stotz: I'm sorry?
0:38:29.4Andrew Stotz: Did you move or what happened next as you took that job?
0:38:32.0William 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.
0:38:49.9Andrew Stotz: And how long were you at Ford?
0:38:53.8William 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.
0:40:25.0Andrew 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.
0:43:09.5Andrew 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?
0:43:35.9William 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?
0:45:46.8William 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.
0:46:23.5Andrew 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?
0:46:38.5William Scherkenbach: '88.
0:46:39.6Andrew Stotz: Okay, so you continued at Ford.
0:46:42.1William 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.
0:47:07.8Andrew 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...
0:47:21.4William 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.
0:47:41.9Andrew 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?
0:47:55.4William Scherkenbach: No, Deming died in '93, so he didn't see any of that.
0:47:58.9Andrew Stotz: No, no, what I mean is when Peterson stepped down, it was about '85. And then you remain at Ford until '88.
0:48:08.0William Scherkenbach: No, Peterson didn't step down in '85. I mean, he was still there when I left.
0:48:14.0Andrew Stotz: So he was still chairman at the time.
0:48:17.3William Scherkenbach: Yeah.
0:48:17.6Andrew Stotz: Maybe I'm meaning he stepped down from president. So my mistake on that.
0:48:20.3William Scherkenbach: Oh, but he was there.
0:48:24.3Andrew Stotz: So when did it start...
0:48:25.9William Scherkenbach: True. I mean, true, he was still there when Deming had died.
0:48:31.3Andrew Stotz: Yeah, okay. So did the whole team leave Ford and go to GM or was it just you that went?
0:48:39.1William Scherkenbach: Oh, just me. Just me.
0:48:42.8Andrew Stotz: Okay. And then.
0:48:44.0William 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.
0:48:59.5Andrew 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?
0:49:16.5William 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.
0:51:18.6Andrew 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.
0:51:32.8William 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.
0:53:59.2William 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.
0:54:40.6Andrew 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.
0:55:09.5William 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.
0:56:30.6Andrew Stotz: What was it that kept him going? Why was he doing this?
0:56:39.5William 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.
0:57:21.1Andrew 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?
0:57:56.6William 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.
0:59:01.1Andrew 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.
0:59:57.8William Scherkenbach: Yeah, and it, it really did. But for me personally, it was just not pleasant to see him suffering.
1:00:09.6Andrew 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?
1:00:18.7William Scherkenbach: Yeah, yeah.
1:00:20.8Andrew Stotz: And would he take naps or?
1:00:23.2William 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.
1:01:28.7Andrew 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.
1:01:51.4William 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.
1:04:36.3William Scherkenbach: So I'm in my 80th year. So, and I'm feeling good, and I also would like to help people.
1:04:46.6Andrew 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?
1:05:02.3William 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.
1:07:00.6William 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.
1:07:26.4Andrew 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?
1:07:58.8William 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.
1:08:40.7Andrew Stotz: And there's my original version of it. I'm holding up my...
1:08:47.0William Scherkenbach: Yeah, that's a later version.
1:08:49.7Andrew 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?
1:09:42.8William 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.
1:10:55.4Andrew 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.
1:11:32.1William 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.
1:12:40.3Andrew 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.
1:12:57.0William Scherkenbach: You can't do that.
[laughter]
1:12:58.8Andrew 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?
1:13:29.7William 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.
1:14:25.4Andrew 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?
1:15:08.1William 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.
1:16:34.1Andrew 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?
1:16:56.3William Scherkenbach: Do your best.
1:16:59.0Andrew Stotz: Yeah, wonderful.
1:17:01.4William 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.
1:17:56.4Andrew 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?
1:19:08.9William 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.
1:19:26.1Andrew 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.
1:19:36.7William Scherkenbach: Thank you, Andrew.
1:19:37.7Andrew 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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
