In Their Own Words

What's the difference between Compliance Excellence and Contextual Excellence? Is one better than the other? Which one does a Deming organization pursue? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about the variety of types of excellence, and why they matter.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is episode 11: In Search of Excellence. Bill, go ahead, take it away.

0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: All right. So, as I've been doing for the last few episodes, I like to go back to the prior episode. Because I listen to these again and again and again. Oh, there's other things I wanna say. [laughter] Remember the title of the last session, Andrew?

0:00:46.1 AS: Well, that depends. [laughter] The title was, It Depends.

0:00:50.7 BB: Alright. Alright. So you know I'm fond of that phrase. So I wanna... I thought of after, you know, in the last couple weeks is, I took a class in program management at a big university in Greater Los Angeles. I mean, it could have been anywhere, but it was in Los Angeles, and there were 25, 30 people in the room, maybe more, from around the world coming into this university. It was a three day program, you know, like, $1,800. $1800. I had just joined a department called The Program Management Office, and I thought, I should go find out what program management is it all about? I had some ideas, but I thought, "I want to go take a real class on this." The class was presented by an aerospace veteran in project management. He had been involved in major programs with Hughes, installing, you know, working on airports around the world and other DOD stuff.

0:01:48.6 BB: And I mean, he was, he was a very interesting guy. I got there early every day looking, I was hoping there'd be an opportunity I could start a conversation with him, have lunch with him, that never happened. But three days long. And so, on the second day, he threw out a question to the audience, and people are sitting in a... It's kind of an amphitheater, with the rows were kind of curved. So he throws out a question to the audience and the guy in the front row answers, "it depends." [laughter] And the instructor very deliberately walked from the front of the room, a good 15 feet without saying anything, just walked right at that person in the front row, you know, all at the same level, gets right in his face and says the following, Andrew, are you ready?

0:02:47.6 AS: I'm ready.

0:02:48.6 BB: He says, "Are you an attorney?" [laughter] And I thought to myself, "All of that for the answer, "it depends," really?" And so, [laughter] later that afternoon, somebody asked the instructor a question, "Hey, what if you're in a situation where you gotta deal with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this, this, this, this, this, how would you handle that?"

0:03:17.3 AS: And for the listeners out there, you know the punchline here, come on, give it to me. What did he say?

0:03:23.5 BB: No, here's what he said. He said, "Well, if it involves this, I would do this. If it involves that, I would do that." And so, what did I say, Andrew?

0:03:42.6 AS: What did you say? What do you mean?

0:03:44.7 BB: I bit my tongue.

0:03:45.9 AS: Oh, you didn't say anything when he said that?

0:03:48.6 BB: Because what he just said was, "it depends."

0:03:50.4 AS: "It depends" in another way.

0:03:52.8 BB: Yeah. He found another way to say "it depends." So it was also...

0:03:56.0 AS: He sounded kind of smart, you know, well, let's just narrow it down to two potential options.

0:04:00.8 BB: "Are you an attorney?" Yeah. But he still... What he was still saying was, it depends on the situation.

0:04:09.3 AS: Yep.

0:04:09.8 BB: And I just thought... I mean... And not that I didn't mind that answer, but I was just dumbstruck as to why he was so emphatic in challenging this answer, "it depends"? And I just thought, again, I never went up and asked, but I just thought, I wasn't sure it was gonna go anywhere. So anyway, so I wanted to throw that out. Going back a couple episodes, I wanna talk about metrics and KPIs and point out that there's nothing wrong, I mean, we're not saying KPIs are bad. What we're talking about is, when KPIs are used as goals and in a way that unnecessarily drives the organization in different directions, but if a KPI is just a metric of how we're doing in sales, that's one thing.

0:05:03.7 BB: But if the metric is, I want sales to be this number, and I go to people in procurement and say, "I want you to cut back on procurement," you know, we can end up with a conflict. You know, I had a woman in class once who worked for a gym, health club. And her job was to sell memberships and get on the phone every day, sell memberships, sell memberships, sell memberships. And she told her boss, she says, "Now, if I do a really good job, lines will form if we don't get more equipment. So, while I'm doing this, shouldn't we be working on that?" And her boss' attitude was, "You keep working on that and don't worry about that." So what she realized, it was just a revolving door of replacing old people with new people. They were just managing the parts in isolation. But another thing I think we had agreement on, you know, also had agreement on KPIs is it's... We're not saying there's anything wrong with metrics, but in organizations where we've worked, we've seen people drive change with, "give everybody a KPI."

0:06:17.5 BB: We could have great ignorance of variation. We have... Leading to dissolution of, just increased separation of organization. What I'm also reminded of is a quote that Dr. Deming used to use of his statistician colleague, Lloyd Nelson, who said, "the most important numbers used to manage an organization are unknown and unknowable." And one example from when I worked for Boeing is a good friend of mine was at the Boeing Leadership Center and there was a big emphasis at that time on what's called the Economic Profit Calculator. Making sure that business decisions close. They were not gonna build the next generation airplane unless they've got all the sales lined up and you have to have closure and closure within some timeframe, and that person came out.

0:07:12.4 BB: That was the big driving change in that era. Well, right after that presentation by somebody senior, the Chief Operating Officer, Harry Stonecipher presented. And what was near and dear to Harry at that point was something he started when McDonald Douglas was separate from Boeing, then Boeing bought McDonald Douglas, and he was really big on an education program that allowed anyone to pursue any degree, all reimbursed. So if he wanted an AS degree, a Master's degree, a law degree, not only were they paying for the degrees, but there were people getting a Bachelor's and then getting a Master's in Science and a MBA, so he just go at it, go at it. And he's very proud of that.

0:08:00.5 BB: So, my friend Tim is listening to all this and he says, "This afternoon, we heard from so and so in finance about Boeing business decisions needing to fit into this Economic Profit Calculator, how does your education reimbursement program fit into that model?" And his answer was, I thought really profound, he said, "there are some things you just do." And to me that fits in with Deming saying, you can't measure the price of education. We brought an instructor in, we had you away for so many hours...

0:08:34.6 AS: You can measure the cost.

0:08:36.1 BB: And so, we can put some numbers on it. But what are the benefits? The benefits show up in the future. So I really admire that Stonecipher's answer was, I think very much in keeping with Deming is, we're gonna spend money on education. So, I just wanna throw that out for in terms of metrics and what not.

0:08:52.9 AS: And I would just throw in my thoughts on KPIs, which has gotten stronger and stronger over the years, and that is that, I really think people should stop KPIs. And the reason why is, because I think they've gotten to the point where it's just so misused and so, people are so reliant on it. Now, I know that that's an extreme view and so... But I say it to also challenge people to think about it, but if you can't stop the KPIs, then I would say the most important thing from my perspective, is make sure that compensation is not linked to the KPIs. Which of course, people will come back and say, that's the whole point of KPIs.

[laughter]

0:09:44.4 BB: Exactly.

0:09:44.5 AS: And if you remove compensation connection to KPI, and instead of that, you use coaching and working with your team, and you have metrics of what you want to achieve as a company, as an organization, as a department, and you look at those metrics... Nothing wrong with that, but it's when you bring in the personal, particularly the personal incentive or the division incentive that can then sub-optimize... Can optimize a part of the organization, either an individual or a department, and therefore, sub-optimize the total.

0:10:22.0 BB: Oh, yeah. If you tie those metrics... Yeah and that becomes the... What makes them sinister, when you provide that incentive that... And I'm sure we've both seen people given incentives and they're not gonna leave, what I tell people is, they're not gonna leave a penny on the table, whether it's get rid of that division, lay off so many people, they are going to achieve that metric, because there's money on the table and in the way of that problem.

0:10:55.2 AS: And for those people who are listening or viewing, who feel like, "My God, what would I do if I don't have KPIs, because that's kind of the way we've been managing?" The first thing is, I would say is that, if you know that... So first, talk to your staff, because once you go out and talk to the people in the company, you realize that almost nobody is in favor of KPIs, because they're being manipulated in many ways and they all see it. But if you know in your heart that it's not the right thing to do, my argument is, don't wait to stop doing the wrong thing until you know what the right thing is. You know? Stop... "I don't wanna stop beating my child, because I don't know the other way to do it." [laughter] No. Stop beating your child today, that would be a first step. Don't worry about what it is you're gonna do next. Anyways, that's enough on KPIs.

0:12:00.4 BB: You've reminded me of a story that's coming to me, but it's not coming in loud and clear, so I made a note, I'll share it next time 'cause you're gonna love it. I wanna give an example of what, of what, of what a narrow focus on KPIs can do. Just a couple of little ones, that are, you just can't make these up. In 1999, while at Rocketdyne, there was a focus on reducing costs. And this is, all organizations have these stories. And this is one I use to talk about in class all the time. So I don't think anyone's gonna be offended. Hopefully they'll laugh more than be offended by it.

0:12:37.9 BB: So there's a big focus across the company of reducing cost. Reducing cost. What do people do in a non-Deming organization? They look at cost in isolation. Where I wanna reduce the cost of this, not look at how it affects the others. And so, at that point of time, again, we're talking over 20 years ago, all the documentation to make every space shuttle main engine was on, was on paper. Every page used to fabricate the engines on paper. And there were page by page instructions of manufacturing to do this, do this, line by line by line, and on every line it might say, torque this bolt to 55 inch pounds, and it was stamped by me, the mechanic, and by you the inspector. Boom, boom, boom.

0:13:28.2 BB: So if NASA ever wants to know, was that bolt torqued on that engine on... And we have all the documentation. Guess how many pages of documentation there are? Nowadays it's likely all electronic, but in that day it was all paper. Guess how many pages of documentation for every single space shuttle main engine of which they're on the order of 18 made? Take a wild guess.

0:13:55.9 AS: Gosh. I'm just thinking thousands.

0:14:00.5 BB: 18,000 pages of documentation. So Andrew, that's like, 60 3-Ring Binders and I mean, 300 pages in a 3-Ring Binder, right? So imagine every engine's got 60 3-Ring Binders. So in 1999, all the pages in those books are on card stock heavy... Card stock paper, heavyweight paper, right? And why is that, Andrew? Because these are a storage document, right? So, I kid you not, one week I'm doing a class, you know talking about paradigms of variation and all the things we've been talking about. And somewhere in the conversation, somebody mentions that the card stock paper was replaced by lighter weight photocopy paper. And then, the person mentioned that, shared that, as a result of that, in the use of these 3-Ring Binders, the pages were falling out.

[laughter]

0:15:05.4 BB: And when I... And then the person went on to say...

0:15:07.1 AS: Oh, that's okay.

0:15:09.3 BB: Oh, no. Hold on, Andrew. So, as a focus on reducing costs, the heavy card stock paper is replaced by a lighter weight paper. The pages are falling out. So when I asked the guy, what are we doing with it? And the answer was, we're putting hole reinforcement circles on the pages to put them back in the binder.

0:15:34.2 AS: Absolutely.

0:15:35.1 BB: Right? And so, for those who don't know, hole reinforcement circles are little circles about the size of a, of a cheerio that get put on either side of the sheet of paper...

0:15:46.9 AS: With adhesive on the back of it.

0:15:48.1 BB: And it's a heavy cloth to keep it from pulling up. So, I mentioned that a couple of days later to some colleagues and they looked at me like I was from Mars. They're like, no, I mean, you've got some great stories, Bill, but they weren't buying the story. So the following week in class, [chuckle] I said, Hey, last week somebody mentioned, anybody know anything about that? And the guy in the front row, not only does he nod and say, yeah, he pulls out of his box a roll... Pulls out of his pocket a roll of like, 300 of these. And I said, so, this is really going on. He says, Bill, I go through a box of these a day.

0:16:29.9 AS: Oh, my God.

0:16:34.5 BB: So when you focus on the cost of the paper and forget that the paper is actually a storage document, not just a sheet of paper, you end up with hole reinforcement circles as a solution. Now...

0:16:46.1 AS: And the cost of the circle, the reinforcement, hole reinforcement adhesives that you put on and the cost of the labor that's spending time doing that by these high value added people.

0:17:04.6 BB: Well, and I also realized, if the space shuttle is on the pad and ready to go, fueled, if you're in that window and something comes up and somebody in NASA calls up Rocketdyne and says, we need to know for the second engine in that vehicle, if this work was done? If this work is done? If you delay the launch, if you're in the window, the vehicle was fueled, it's like a million dollars a day. So imagine going to the binder and the phone call back is, we can't find that sheet of paper. So this is...

0:17:46.8 AS: That was on page 47. I've got 46.

0:17:52.7 BB: We've got 40...

0:17:53.3 AS: And I got 48.

0:17:55.5 BB: So, but I use that. Okay, well, pre-pandemic, I was doing some training in New Zealand at a university. I needed to staple... I needed... [chuckle] I needed to staple these documents together. And so, the instructor who was hosting us, said, "What do you need?" I said, I need staples. So he goes to his office, comes back five minutes later, gives me a couple reams of staples and I go to put them in the stapler. And he says, "You're using these?" I said, "yeah, I'm using them." He said, "wait." He says, "Let me go get the good staples." I said, [chuckle] "what do you mean?" He says, "The university buys us really cheap staples. So all of us in the faculty keep a private stash of good staples. Let me go get the good staples." Right?

0:18:48.8 BB: You can't make up... Right? This is little stuff. All right. So now I wanna get to what Dr. Deming said last time I used a quote from Dr. Deming about it would be important for people to work together. And what I share in some of my seminars is an Aesop fable, from Aesop the Greek fablist. So we're talking like, 500, 600 BC and the particular fable I referenced is the four oxen and the lion. Are you familiar with that one?

0:19:23.7 AS: No.

0:19:25.1 BB: Okay. Well, I came across this, because I was doing some research on the expression "United we stand divided we fall." And I'm thinking united, divided, I'm thinking Abraham Lincoln, Civil War and to come up with, no, that's the punchline for Aesop's Fable about the four oxen and the lion. And the storyline goes that these four oxen would stand looking outward with their tails connected. That's the united we stand, they looked outward and the lion would circle them, but the lion couldn't do very much, because we're protecting one another. And then when the oxen broke rank, the lion jumped in and ate them. So the united we stand divided we fall. So the reason I use that is, I'm not proclaiming that Dr. Deming is the one who figured out the importance of teamwork. [laughter] I think that was figured out a long time ago. I look at what Dr. Deming's work is about - is helping us understand what are the obstacles to what I think we all really want. But I don't think he... So when he references teamwork, that's an old concept. That's why I like to use the Aesop fable, as it goes back a long way.

0:20:41.3 AS: Yeah.

0:20:42.2 BB: All right. But in terms of division, I'm gonna share from Russ Ackoff one of the many things I learned from him and that is that the adjective in front of the word "problem" is divisive. And so, when I worked in Connecticut for the jet engine company, we're making 120 tank engines a month, 1500 horsepower $300,000 each. And at least once a year there'd be an issue. We gotta stop production. Which would lead to the conclusion that it's a design problem in which case manufacturing did what, Andrew?

0:21:24.5 AS: Not sure.

0:21:25.1 BB: Breathed a huge sigh of relief.

0:21:26.7 AS: Not our problem.

0:21:28.4 BB: Or if it's not a design problem, it could be a manufacturing problem, in which case engineering said... And the engineering people felt slighted, because the president of the company was a manufacturing person. And so, what I saw was, yeah, as soon as you define the problem from that vantage point, then it's stuck on someone. And everybody else just says, whew! Thankful it wasn't us this time. So, I wanna share from Russ, what if we aren't so divisive?

0:22:02.4 BB: So Russ has a really neat story going back to, could be the '60s and you'll know by the punchline the timeframe. So at that point in time he was invited to GE's Appliance Center in Kentucky and he brought a graduate student with him. And he said, in the room, in the center of the room of this conference table, they're discussing this issue they're having. And around the perimeter of the room are all the major appliances that GE is selling at the time from refrigerators, freezers, stoves, washing machines, dryers, they're around the perimeter. And the issue they're facing is, what is labeled a "forecasting problem." And store owners are complaining that when the people are coming in to buy the appliances for the kitchen, they need to remodel the kitchen, they need a new refrigerator, they need a new washing machine, I mean a dishwasher and a stove.

0:22:54.2 BB: They need those three. And the forecasting issue is they come in and we only have two of the three, or we don't have the right... We don't have the matching colors, the matching styles. And so, that's why we're losing sales to the others. And we needed a better forecast. And in addition to having the right colors and the right model, another feature in that timeframe was the refrigerator door had to either open from the left or open from the right to match the configuration of the kitchen. So you may have the right... All three are right, but now you've got a left-handed door and the refrigerator needs a right-handed door. Oh. All right. So the graduate student upon hearing this uses a Swiss Army knife, Russ said, to take a door off of the refrigerator and said, have you ever thought about a reversible door design?

0:23:49.1 BB: And so, the reason I share that story for our audience is, that's what happens when you involve design in a solution to a forecasting problem. You get their inputs. And so, anything short of that, when we, when we focus on a manufacturing problem, only invite manufacturing, not invite others and as is prone in a non-Deming organization you end up with solutions that don't involve the others. And so, I just wanna throw that out that these are... The everyday things we do in organizations to divide. Alright. So now let's talk about the featured movie tonight.

0:24:27.3 AS: Yes.

0:24:27.8 BB: In Search of Excellence inspired by the book by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. Correct?

0:24:35.3 AS: Yes.

0:24:35.9 BB: Roughly '82, '83 timeframe. And so, Dr. Deming's work has been known for a couple years and Tom Peters and Waterman wrote a book talking about... There's US companies doing excellent work, so let's go look at them. So at Dr. Deming's last seminar there were three assistants helping him. He was very frail, he was in a wheelchair, ended up dying 10 days after the seminar ended. And I think I mentioned sitting next to me for all four days was a rabbi praying for him. So, Dr. Deming is very frail in the wheelchair the entire time, when he would get fatigued, he'd be wheeled off the stage. One of these three assistants would come up and pick up the pace. Couple hours later Dr. Deming comes up. And so, during one of the breaks I went up and introduced myself and, to them. And one of them told me that...

0:25:30.0 BB: You know, he traveled with Dr. Deming. He was one of what's called a Deming Scholar. So at that point of time, there was a cadre of people that would travel with Dr. Deming if he was doing a seminar or he's at GE headquarters, wherever he was that week, this cadre came with him. So he said, somebody once in one of these sessions, said to Dr. Deming, "what's the difference between Jerry Falwell and Tom Peters?" And he says, Dr. Deming says, "who's... Well, who's Jerry Falwell?" And he says, "oh, he's a Baptist minister." He says, oh, he says, so.

0:26:02.8 AS: A very famous one at the time.

0:26:05.0 BB: Very famous Baptist minister. And he says, "so what's the difference?" Dr. Deming says, so what's the difference? He says, "Jerry Falwell has a message." And so in that timeframe, I remember... I used to remember... And you likely watched these as well. So Tom Peters would be working on his next book and whatever the theme of the book was, he's doing research. And I give him credit. I mean, he's a Stanford Business School graduate. He's doing all the research, incredible at marketing. So he picks a topic, does his research, writes the book, goes on PBS to do this presentation with a thousand people in the room. And he's using real life people and companies to tell this story one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. So I thought, well, what if Tom Peters was to write a book about how to live to be a 100? Well, what do you do, Andrew? You've got to go find people who are a 100, right?

0:27:05.3 AS: Yeah.

0:27:06.2 BB: You can go find them, right?

0:27:07.1 AS: Yep.

0:27:07.8 BB: And so, I used to imagine that if Tom Peters is, you know, writing a book about how to live to be a 100, he's gonna go... The recipe is find the people, find the successful companies, go research them, a chapter on each one of them. Each of them comes up and presents. And so, there we are on PBS and the first guests that come out are a 101-year-old gentleman. And he comes out and he's chain smoking and he explains that, how does he live to be a 100? He says, well, "you...smoking is good, cigars sometimes, shots of Old Granddad and that's how you live to be a 100." And then next we have the sisters, live together, twin sisters, never married, lived together their entire lives, don't drink a thing, teetotalers, and that, you know, vegetarians. And so, you say, oh, so that's how you live to be a 100, Andrew, you drink, you drink tea, no, you stay away from alcohol, stay away from red meat.

0:28:14.6 BB: Next one comes out, right? And the point is that all these companies are different and you're left to figure out which one to think. And whereas what Dr. Deming's talking about is a theory by which to understand organizations that you could take to your organization and figure out how to live to be a hundred, not just what we see otherwise. So anyway, I was aware of all that, studied all that. I wasn't aware at the time that's what was going on, but as I started to research this Peter's and... Why Dr. Deming thought of him that way. And so, Rocketdyne was sold by Pratt and Whitney, sold to United Technologies after Boeing, and they had a big Lean Six Sigma program, but they didn't call it Lean Six Sigma.

0:29:02.7 BB: And the Rocketdyne people are asking, why did you call it Lean Six Sigma? He says, well, it is Lean Six Sigma, but GE calls their program Lean Six Sigma, and we're not gonna use the same name as those guys. Those are the light bulb people. So we've got our own name. Well, what's your name? Well, we call it ACE. What is ACE? Achieving Competitive Excellence. But it's really Lean Six Sigma. So I spent a few years trying to wonder, what does it really mean? And I'm and I'm embarrassed that it took me as long as it did, but it dawned on me what it really means is achieving Compliance Excellence.

0:29:42.9 BB: And it was all about, does this meet requirements? And so that's what I referred to early on as question number one. Does this characteristic, have you passed... You know, have you met all of the requirements? And that's all it was, it was meeting requirements, meeting requirements, meeting requirements. And then, and what it reminds me of is, I was doing a seminar in England once for a one-on-one, went over for three days through a translator, and the audience was a physician from Kazakhstan who was anxious to learn as much as he could about Dr. Deming's work and that led him to England. And through some fortunate situation, I had a chance to meet with him one-on-one and went through and explained to him, Me and We organizations, Red Pen and Blue Pen companies, all that, all through a translator. So I had asked a question in English, the translator would translate, boom.

0:30:36.5 BB: So the question I asked him was, that I wanted to share is, I said to Ivan, I said, "what's the fastest way for a Red Pen company to become a Blue Pen company? What's the fastest way?" So that gets translated into Russian. Then it comes back to me and he says, "what?" I said, "spray paint." [laughter] And to me, that's the epitome of Compliance Excellence where we're... You get a really light surface texture, where it's looking good, but it misses the deep sense of the theory of Dr. Deming's work. But I'm not saying Compliance Excellence is bad. And so, when I wrote an article about this, and if any of the listeners want to contact me on LinkedIn, I can send them an article I wrote about it. And so, 'cause when you go to write about something, now you start to think deeply about this, does this make sense as opposed to just having a conversation? And it dawned on me that Compliance Excellence is not a bad thing.

0:31:39.3 BB: And the example I want to use here is, I was listening to two friends, husband and wife who spent a whole year serving society. They were compelled, had incredible military careers, and they decided we wanna pay back society. So the plan was that the husband, Doug would ride his bicycle every day through every state in the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii over the course of one year. So they started upstate New York, crisscrossing around the country. So he was on his bike every day riding, raising awareness for veterans' issues. 'Cause for those who don't know, there's... The the suicide rate of veterans is enormous. And so, they're looking... They're out there trying to help veterans. They were compelled to do that. And Doug's wife Deb, rode the motorhome, either ahead or behind, hooking up with local radio stations, trying to get PR.

0:32:38.8 BB: Then Doug would show up and he says one day they're riding through the Rockies, having dinner... And they're having dinner that night. But all day long, Doug is going up these hills, down these hills, up these hills. And so at dinner, Doug says to Deb, he says, I mean, "how'd you like that hill?" [laughter] Deb says, "what hill?" [laughter] So to Doug, every mile is not the same. [laughter] Right? So it's 18,066 miles. Doug felt the difference in every one of those miles, more so than Deb did. So if somebody says, how far was that route, Doug? For Doug to say 18,066 miles, 67, that's ups and downs, he felt every one of them. For Deb, it was a little bit... They were more of the same. So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with answering the question 18,067, but to me that's a compliant... That's looking at every second being the same, every hour being the same, every widget being the same, not understanding the differences or how they're being used.

0:33:49.1 BB: So now I wanna talk about, instead of Compliance Excellence, again, I'm not saying Compliance Excellence is bad. What I would say is that non-Deming organizations thrive on Compliance Excellence in this sense of interchangeability. Everything is the same, looking at things in isolation. So then I started thinking, well, if that's what they do, what is it that that Deming organizations do? And that's what I would call Contextual Excellence. There's an understanding of context, understanding of the context of the system. Tom Johnson, who has written about, Management by Means, which I wanna look at in a later episode, when Tom was doing research, this is around the time I met him, 1997, '98 timeframe. He was, he was visiting Toyota Plants, definitely in the United States. I'm not sure how many overseas, but he is taking copious notes, going behind the scenes. So this was before the world was all over Toyota.

0:34:47.3 BB: So Tom had free access. He said eventually they start charging for all this stuff. But Tom was there way ahead of the crowd. And he said one day he is with his notebook and he is walking around, he is looking at the stamping presses. But they're notorious for stamping out one part at a time. One single minute exchange of dyes. So they don't make a thousand parts and then figure out how to use them. They figured out how to change the dyes quickly. So Tom said, he asked the guy, "how long does it take to change this dye?" And the guy says something like, 28 minutes. And so Tom writes down 28 minutes and later the guy came back to Tom. He says, "just so you understand" he says "28 minutes is not world class, but this does not require world class."

0:35:32.3 BB: And so this is when I was explaining Contextual Excellence to Tom. And he says, is that what you're talking about? I said, that's exactly what I would expect to see within Toyota, that things are... They fit the situation. So it's not speed for the sake of speed, it's speed that fits the context of the situation, which is also like saying, have card stock paper where it makes sense. Have the appropriate staples where it makes sense. And so, when I talk about "in search of excellence," with my classes or in presentations, what I'm trying to get across is, there's a place for Contextual Excellence and there's a place for Compliance Excellence. But I think that difference is far better understood in a Deming organization that has a great understanding of systems and connectedness and synchronicity and teamwork, and lacking that non-Deming organizations, I think unknowingly default to Compliance Excellence, driving things to zero, thinking you could have zero waste in these things.

0:36:39.9 BB: And then you end up with cheap staples, lightweight paper, and you end up paying for it somewhere else in the system. So I just wanted to point out that there's... I'm not saying one is better than the other. What I'm saying is, I believe a Deming organization would have a profound appreciation of when to use each. And as simple as, if you were to say to me, Bill, how far is it to the nearest airport? I could say, it depends Andrew, what are you... How are you getting to the airport? You say, I'm riding my bike. I said, "okay." Right? And again, not that we're always gonna say it depends, but that's what I think that appreciation has. Let me just stop there and...

0:37:19.6 AS: Yeah.

0:37:20.2 BB: See where you are.

0:37:21.6 AS: So, I have two little stories that I wanna share in relation to this. One of them is about my uncle Ham. Hamilton.

0:37:28.4 BB: Yes.

[laughter]

0:37:29.8 AS: And then the other one is about my own business, Coffee Works. And when we set up our factory 28 years ago, my business partner Dale, was absolutely passionate about coffee. He roasted every bean for our first 10 years. And he sold and he did the accounting and he did everything basically, until eventually he trained staff. And some of those staff still, they've been with us for years, for decades, and they take care of the roasting now. But what Dale really understood was what he called, "in the cup quality." The idea that when... When it's in the cup, that's about to touch the customer's lips, that's the quality that matters. Nothing else matters.

0:38:15.1 AS: If you don't get that right then, you know, it doesn't matter how much you've documented or did whatever you've done in the past, in the temperature of the water, in the grind, you know, in all of these different things. So he was really all about excellence, and we didn't get... We never got complaints. Maybe we got an occasional one, but it wasn't very common. Anyways, we got a big, big multinational company came to us and said, we want you to bid along with some other coffee companies for our business, and we bid for the business. And they said, "We're picking you. And now we're gonna go out to your factory and we're gonna inspect your factory. And if you get a score in our quality audit below 70, you're basically in trouble, [laughter] already, and you're gonna have six weeks to fix it or else you're fired."

0:39:05.9 AS: And this was a huge amount of volume and a prestigious company for us. So we pulled everything together to get ready for their audit. And they came and they gave us their score and we felt like we were pretty damn good. And they said, 65. [laughter] And you know, what we realized to them, quality was about paperwork and quality was about, you know, compliance to that paperwork. And so, we had to do that, because that's what quality was to them. We'd never done anything like that. You know, now, 15, 20 years later, we still supply that same customer and they still do their annual audits and our scores are much... They're in the 90s, which puts us in like, world class. But the point is, we learned a lesson, you know, the difference between contextual quality or let's say, intrinsic quality that Dale was working on versus this kind of, what did you call it? Compliance Quality.

0:40:08.5 BB: Yes.

0:40:09.9 AS: So that's my first story. The second one is about my uncle in Germany where he was in charge of the, of the logistics of a base of a US military base. And the commanding general came to see, and they had cleaned up everything. And they got to the end of the whole thing, and they kind of dumped out to the parking lot where there's, you know, 700 or 500 vehicles lined up in different ways and whatever, all kinds of different sizes of vehicles. And Uncle Ham said, "Sir, so how did you like the tour of the facility and all that?" And he says, "of the base?" And he said, "Ham, everything was great except one thing."

0:40:48.4 AS: And my uncle's like, "Okay, what is that, sir?" And he said... And he looked at the vehicles, a long line of vehicles parked side by side. And he asked him, he said, "Next time I come here... " Now remember, these vehicles are all different lengths. "Next time I come here, I want these vehicles all lined up. It's a mess the way you've got it done." Yeah. And so, my uncle said, "Yes, sir!" And he said, "Before you leave, sir, could you walk to the back of the vehicles for a moment with me?" "Yes, yes, I will." And he said, "Sir, would you like them lined up in the back or in the front?" And they had lined them up in the back, which meant their noses were in different lengths. And the point is, is that you can't have it all, right? Everything's a tradeoff. You want it this way. There's a compromise here, there's a challenge there and all that. And that's a lesson I learned from Uncle Ham.

0:41:46.1 BB: Well, and then he, I'm sure he learned it from that point on is, you know, when, when he is asked to line them up and make them more uniform, the question is, help me understand what that means.

[laughter]

0:42:00.3 AS: And the answer's gonna be, it depends. 'Cause this general likes them lined up in the back and this general likes them lined up in the front. We're gonna need to wrap up. So how would you close out this episode?

0:42:17.0 BB: The main thing I want to get across saying is that, first of all, Contextual Excellence is the bedrock of investment thinking. To look, when you begin to look at things as a system and to understand that every mile is not the same or do I need to... Does that matter to me? But to me, instead of everything could be improved, you know, we focus on where are the most red beads, get all the red beads to zero and then go across the organization. And what is that? That's managing actions. We talked about that months ago. And to me that's Compliance Excellence. It's looking at the parts in isolation. But to me, what Contextual Excellence is about is the better we understand, the greater how things fit together.

0:43:10.5 BB: And there, the challenge is that everything we work on is part of a bigger system, which is part of a, then again, bigger system, which is part of, then again, bigger system. So we're not proposing that you're going to infinity, you know, that there's this big picture of you, whatever that means. It's, it's, and I like it... You know, people talk about, well, you know, Andrew's a systems... You and I, Andrew are systems thinkers, as if the others aren't. What does that mean? That means that we think of the big picture. There's no such thing as a big picture. So there, what we're talking about is Contextual Excellence, is trying to gather as much context for the system as it makes sense with appreciation that you might still be missing something.

0:44:00.3 BB: And that's where learning comes in. But that understanding is part of, is fundamental to investment thinking. You know, is the education system paying off? How would you know? Where are we gonna see that benefit? What is your theory for that? So I just wanna point out is, I'm not trying to condemn Compliance Excellence. I think Deming organizations are gonna have a place for that. Just like there's a place for, you know, does it meet requirements? Yes or no? It's just becoming more mindful of these choices is, is what I'm suggesting or proposing.

0:44:31.1 AS: Yes. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. There's so much there for further learning. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. He's right there. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm gonna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

What causes fear in an organization? How is fear hurting employee morale, productivity, and overall performance? What great things can happen when you remove fear? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about fear, and how managers can get rid of it.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is Episode 14, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away.

0:00:32.9 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, we've been talking about these principles. We've sort of shifted from the myths to the principles that, you know, especially education systems leaders can use to guide their transformation work. I think we're up to Principle 8 today, and most recently I think last time we did, "institute training on the job" and "adopt and institute leadership." So we'll move on to Principle 8, which is "Drive Out Fear." So I'll start with just reading the principle verbatim from the book. So Principle 8: "Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the school system. No one can perform their best unless they feel secure to express ideas, ask questions, and make mistakes." So I think maybe for me, when you look at the 14 principles, I haven't done this analysis, but I would venture a wager that Dr. Deming spent more time on this particular principle and related topics than any of the other ones.

0:01:44.6 JD: He discussed it numerous times in Out of the Crisis, numerous times in The New Economics. And one of the quotes that really stands out for me on this topic was in Out of the Crisis where Deming said, "Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures." And I don't think that... I don't think people sort of fully appreciate just how much sort of... "Writing fiction" is sort of how I've framed this in the past in one of our earlier episodes, but just sort of how much made-up data there is in every organization. And that can be wrong figures in the form of qualitative descriptions of important work, it can be quantitative data. But in either case, it makes it nearly impossible to improve our organizations. Because how would you even know where to start improvement if the figures and the descriptions of the work are inaccurate? So that'd be a good topic for today.

0:02:53.3 AS: Sometimes this one about fear is, sometimes it's easy for people to understand and sometimes it's hard. You know, like, when you think about fear, you can think about physical fear like, "Well, okay, am I in physical danger here?" Like, what are we talking about? Or, "Am I in fear that I'm gonna lose my job?" And some people may think that that's a good thing. And one of the first things I want to just think about is, what are the specific things in a school or in a school environment that causes people to be fearful? Maybe we could identify what you see, because you've talked about the outcome of fear is made-up data, wrong figures. It's all kinds of outcomes from fear, but what are the sources of fear?

0:03:47.2 JD: Yeah. Well, one thing I think of is you certainly can have sort of a tyrannical boss or manager. That certainly exists where there's actual fear, they yell, they threaten, passive-aggressive, those types of things. So that certainly can exist.

0:04:05.4 AS: Yep.

0:04:05.9 JD: I've definitely witnessed that in my almost 25 years in terms of career, you're gonna witness things like that. But I think more often what I'm talking about is sort of more subtle versions of fear that permeate throughout organizations. So sources, there can be different sources. I think they can come internally from some of the systems and processes you've set up in your own school or school system. Some of them are external, so, I mean, a go-to source of fear for a lot of people is, "How do my kids that I'm teaching perform on the state test?" That can be a source of fear, for sure. There is sort of internal to your system. I think the fear... I think a lot of people have sort of apprehension when the principal comes to your classroom to observe your class, and then there's sort of the ratings and rankings that go with a typical performance evaluation. So I think that can be another source of fear in a school system. And there's probably many other sort of versions of that. But I was thinking of...

0:05:25.4 JD: A lot of times when you hear people talk about driving out fear, you sort of get the negative stories. I think, not related to schools, but I think of a classic example of fear in the form of an unwillingness to speak up and say something is the Challenger space shuttle explosion. I think that's a classic sort of example of where people did see issues along the way and really nobody spoke up. So I think that's a sort of a classic example. But I was thinking of... And I was thinking about driving out fear in my own organization. At United Schools Network, one of the anecdotes in the book that I tell is actually a sort of a more positive example. So I was gonna maybe share that and talk about some of the details there. And it's sort of a combination of Appreciation for a System and Driving Out Fear, sort of working together.

0:06:32.0 JD: But I'm going back to the summer of 2013. So I was a school director or principal at that time of a middle school. And to put that in context, we were grades six through eight. I was entering my sort of fifth year leading Columbus Collegiate Academy. It's a fully built out middle school, six, seven, eight, serving the East Side of Columbus. And I was sitting in my office with my colleague, her name's Kathryn Anstaett. She was the principal on the other side of town. Kathryn and I had a working relationship because she previously had served on my team as a teacher and then as sort of an assistant principal for curriculum and instruction. So we knew each other well. And then she had been tapped to lead our new middle school on the West Side. And she had just wrapped up that first year. It was growing from just serving sixth grade, and now they gonna serve sixth and seventh grade for the 2013-14 school year.

0:07:37.1 JD: And just like today, 10 years ago, sort of similar, limited pool of prospective teaching candidates. And sometimes Kathryn and I, we would interview a person and we'd both want to hire that same teacher. And we had come to the sort of agreement where across the hiring season, for us, the fairest approach was just to alternate turns. So Kathryn would get first choice on a particular set of interviews, and then I would get first choice on the next set. But on this particular day, we both wanted to hire this same reading teacher, and it was my turn in that rotation. Kathryn and I were sitting and looking at both school's staff rosters, and we literally said, "In order to sort of make a decision that's best for the system, this hire should really go to Kathryn." I wanted the person, I needed the person, but I also had this capable group of reading and writing teachers, despite the one teacher opening, but she was just building this new team. So she really needed a really outstanding reading teacher.

0:08:53.4 JD: And I think thinking through this sort of whole system's lens gave my turn to Kathryn. And I think it's important to say here, I actually hadn't heard of the Deming philosophy at this point. I hadn't been exposed to this idea for appreciation for a system, but really the decision making was pretty simple. Kathryn and I were colleagues, we were on a small team working to build this new network of schools, and one of the best ways to sort of bring that network to fruition was to, you know, allow her to hire this particular teacher for her school across town.

0:09:31.4 AS: Now where this connects with Drive Out Fear is that there were a number of things in place that sort of gave me the confidence as a school director or principal to make this decision. I was employee Number 2 in our organization, so I was sort of on that founding team. That gave me some, I guess, some standing in the organization. By this time I had been there for five years, and I was pretty well established as a leader. I had a close working relationship with our staff. I had a close working relationship with our founder and superintendent. But even in that context, if I was being honest, this sort of whole system thinking was not easy because we're still a relatively young organization. We're just five years old. Really the question for a startup in its fifth year is still survival. Are we gonna survive as an organization? And there was a lot of pressure on me as a school leader to achieve high test scores and really establish the reputation of the school as a strong option on the East Side of the city.

0:10:44.9 JD: And thankfully, I had the backing of my superintendent, I had the backing of our board to make this decision, but I was fearful. I was fearful because it is very possible that even with that support, what would happen if I had been held accountable for our reading results, let's say, after this decision had been made? Unless I reminded people a year from now when kids take the state test and they get their scores back, they might not even remember that, "Hey, remember when we had sort of collaborated and made this decision?" They're likely, and some organizations are gonna come to me and say, "Hey, John, what's up with the reading scores?" That's not actually what happened, but that certainly was a plausible possibility.

0:11:40.7 JD: But my point is, and I think most organizations, it is really hard to make decisions like that. Was I fearful of my boss? No, of course not, not in this situation. Was I fearful of my colleague across town? No. Of the board? No. But in the back of my mind, I'm sitting there thinking, "I'm gonna make this decision. I really wanted this teacher. It was actually my turn. But I think it's the best thing for the whole system if this particular teacher goes across town and helps this new school."

0:12:18.0 JD: I think I feel better today making that decision 'cause we've more explicitly made the Deming philosophy and these 14 principles a part of our system. However, I can imagine, for many people sitting there thinking if they're a school leader, could you make this same decision in the absence of having these principles in place beforehand? So I thought that was a good example of Drive Out Fear. Again, with all these things in place, even with all those things in place, a startup early employee close relationship with the superintendent, board, I was still sort of wondering if I should make that decision as a young leader.

0:13:04.8 AS: So it's interesting because I was thinking about, what is the source of fear? The source of fear is that we are personally going to be injured. If we think about the source of physical fear of an animal or of a human when we're in a dangerous situation, it's that we're gonna personally be injured. Now you could also extend that to the family. If you are a pride of lions or you're a group of animals and the mother or father instinctively knows to try to protect itself but also its family. But it's this, it's the ultimate selfishness for survival. And that's where... One of the things I was thinking about when you were talking is like, why does Deming use this word "fear?" I mean, it's a pretty intense word. It is something that's visceral.

0:14:00.2 JD: Yeah.

0:14:00.3 AS: You know, to be fearful is a scary thing. And...But what you're describing is the idea that if we don't think about the business or the school or the education as a system, then what we're gonna be doing is everybody for themselves.

0:14:24.0 JD: Yeah.

0:14:24.6 AS: Protecting themselves and rewarding the protection of themselves and their areas. And when you view things as a system, then you have to give space for people to do the not necessarily natural thing. I mean, it's strange to say "not natural" 'cause I also think that people want to work together. People do not wanna be pitted against other people. Nobody wants that. Nobody has that as a natural instinct. If that instinct to be pitted against other people is in someone, it's quite possible it's in them because of something that maybe happened in their past where they realized, "To survive in this situation, I've gotta be pitted against other people and gotta overcome that." But I would say that people naturally wanna work together, and it's like we come in and we put in structures that we think are good management, but actually cause people to be pitted against each other.

0:15:28.9 JD: Yeah. I think you have to draw this out a lot of times in terms of... Because I think a natural reaction for someone listening to this, for some people, some leaders may say, "There's no fear in my organization. I'm a good guy," or, "I'm nice," those types of things. But as soon as I would hear a leader say that, that would be a dark pink flag, if not a red flag for me. Because there is, without a doubt, there is fear in every single organization. Now, the level of that fear is gonna vary based on the culture at that particular organization. But there is some form of fear in every organization. If you've ever sat in a meeting and you have withheld a thought that you think that was important to share because you are afraid of what the response is gonna be from the people in that room or a person in that room, then there is fear in that particular organization.

0:16:30.8 JD: And I think a lot of it has to do with people are making judgements all the time based on the system that they are living in. They observe what happens to other people that make similar decisions or behave in a similar way. So that's why something like Appreciation for a System and Driving Out Fear, these things have to work in concert with each other, right? Because if I was gonna be held accountable at all costs, if the board and the superintendent that I were reporting to in that situation, that hiring situation, were solely focused on management-by-results or management-by-objective, and I had this let's say a performance evaluation tied to that, I'm not sure even in retrospect if I would've made the same decision. 'Cause all those things have to work together to facilitate the individual's being willing to collaborate like this. The system has to facilitate it. I think that's sort of the point that all these principles have to work together hand in hand in order to bring something like Drive Out Fear to fruition.

0:17:45.9 AS: And I think one of the hardest things for people that are new to this thinking is that almost everything that we do drives in fear.

0:17:55.4 JD: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:17:57.2 JD: It's "I want results. We're about accountability around here." And there's plenty of schools I'm sure that put up a sign like "Personal Accountability," and, "We want measurable results and I don't want to hear excuses and you're not responsible for another department. You're responsible for your department." And it's just everything that we are given, and everything... We are rugged individualists, particularly in the American sense. That's kind of the foundation. So to come and say, "I'm not so concerned about your individual, I'm concerned about your contribution to the whole team," it just doesn't happen that much.

0:18:41.0 JD: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing you have to do as leaders is recognize that fear is present in your organization, and then the next step is sort of figuring out the pervasiveness or severity of that fear. And a lot of that's, again, determined by the culture of your organization. But I think it is a natural byproduct. If you're doing anything that's the management-by-objective, management-by-results, performance appraisal, rating and ranking; if you are doing any form of those things, then there's no doubt that fear is pervasive in your organization. Because you're incentivizing people to optimize their individual classroom or their corner of the organization, whether that's classroom, grade level, an individual school building within a system, a department within the system, whatever it is; you are optimizing that behavior versus optimizing the aim of the the total organization.

0:19:39.0 AS: And the last part of this that I just wanted to think about was, when someone first hears this and then they start seeing the connection between personally incentivizing people through performance appraisals and merit pay and these types of things related to individual performance, the first question is, what do I do instead? I got performance appraisals and I've got pay for performance and I got beliefs about accountability and all that. And maybe a good way to wrap up this Drive Out Fear is kind of, what are some steps that you can do instead of or in replacement of or maybe you don't even necessarily have to replace something? What are your thoughts about how you can help somebody who's just coming aware of all this stuff but is a little bit overwhelmed because they're used to the traditional structures?

0:20:39.0 JD: Yeah. That's a good question. I think one thing is this idea of you have to... If you are a management or a leader or set of leaders, you have to stop blaming employees and looking at problems as systems problems instead of problems of individuals sort of serving in the system. So that may be one of the hardest things is that, then if that's true, which I think it is, then faults of the system are the responsibility then of management 'cause they're the ones that have the authority to design the system, redesign the system, change the system. I think that there has to be some type of concrete mechanism by which, in a school system whether it's teachers or students, that they can ask questions and offer suggestions for improvement. There has to be that mechanism in place.

0:21:31.7 JD: It doesn't mean that every suggestion necessarily leads to a change in the system, but there has to be a system in place that elicits those suggestions, and then some type of follow up. "I heard this. I studied it with you. We're not gonna make this change but here's the reason why." Or, "We looked into this. We studied it together over time. We gathered some data and this is actually a really good idea and we're gonna change that." So one very concrete, small thing that I do for every improvement team and every committee I lead in an organization, there's always sort of a meeting tracker document. And one of the tabs within that is just a Google Sheet. Each meeting is on a tab. One of the tabs is always a parking lot, where that every member of that committee or every member of that improvement team can drop in suggestions for improvement all along so we could make improvements in real time if we need to. So that's one very simple thing that I do. And then I also have a written record and for committees that I lead year in and year out, I just constantly, continually improve them over time based on those suggestions. So that's one concrete thing.

0:22:44.7 JD: A bigger thing for management, I think, is because things get hard when you get into a time crunch or a high stress situation, it is easy to sort of make decisions based on, "It is just easier short term to do this." So ahead of that, what I would strongly suggest is have a written set of guiding principles. That's why I like the 14 principles so much because they are a concrete written set of principles you can fall back on and you can then... You can test any idea or any direction that you're moving against those sort of foundational principles. And if the principles are violated, then you know you're moving in the wrong direction. But it's much harder to sort of do that in the high stress situation where you're reacting to something. In the absence of those foundational principles, you're more likely to sort of take the easy way out. So that's a little bit of longer process to put those principles in place. And I think that's probably a concrete thing that a leadership team or a superintendent and the board can do, so that you can facilitate having the Deming philosophy take root in your organization.

0:24:03.0 AS: So let me summarize what we've talked about in this Principle 8 about Drive Out Fear. The idea of course is to drive out fear for the effectiveness of the system, the school system, the business, whatever that is. And you talked about having the ability for people to... People to have the ability to express ideas and ask questions and make mistakes. And you mentioned that Dr. Deming said, where there is fear, there will be wrong figures. And you said, a lot of made-up data.

0:24:35.2 JD: Yep.

0:24:36.1 AS: That you see a lot of made-up data or that's what we end up. And we talked about sources of fear and we talked about tyrannical boss and possibly yelling and threatening. Those are like overt types of fears. But you also talked about subtle versions like internally driven, maybe ratings and rankings. People are fearful of speaking up. Or maybe they're externally driven by the test scores that your students get in maybe state tests as an example. And then we wrapped up by trying to think about, what are some ways to improve the situation, particularly for someone relatively new to this. And one of the things you mentioned is allowing employees or teachers to make suggestions on how to improve. And you also talked about having the written set of guiding principles which is what you've created through your book.

0:25:29.2 AS: And I like that one because that also is a longer term way of building some constancy in the business. But I just really want to end my summary by saying, for those people who are listening that think, "I haven't heard of this Deming stuff and I'm dealing with all these different problems but it's a bit overwhelming," so I think the best way to end my summary of this is - if that's the case, if you're in that situation where you're just starting to adopt this type of stuff, just start with stop blaming employees.

0:26:01.8 JD: Yeah.

0:26:03.5 AS: Anything you would add to that?

0:26:05.0 JD: Yeah, just taking that mindset of, most of the things that you're seeing are not a result of individual employees but rather they're created by the system itself. So three words. When you run into a problem, what's the system? What's the system? In the vast majority of cases, 95% plus, it's the system that is producing those results, not the individuals working in the system.

0:26:32.5 AS: Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for our 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 one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Perfection may be your goal, but unless you create an artificial environment, you're not going to get it. David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss how good managers/teachers let go of perfection and, instead, understand variation, then work on the system to produce better and better outcomes for everyone.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic for today is a discussion and a continuation of our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. Today we're talking about point number 11. And that is, "he does not expect perfection." So we titled this one, "Are You Expecting Perfection?" David, take it Away.

0:00:51.8 David Langford: Great. Good to be back again, Andrew. Thank you.

0:00:53.7 AS: Indeed.

0:00:54.9 DL: So, yeah. Five simple words for a whole podcast. So what, what is Deming talking about here? Well, I think underneath these five simple words about expecting perfection is the whole concept of understanding variation and understanding systems, and understanding psychology and understanding how do you implement new theories and come up with new ideas and innovation. And that's Deming's concept of Profound Knowledge. And if you don't have some Profound Knowledge and understand basic statistical variation, then you do go about thinking, "Well, I can just, I can just expect perfection." I remember Deming talking about this point and saying, "I don't... " And I don't know if I have this exactly right. But he said, "I don't demand perfection, but I'm happy when I get it" or something to that effect.

0:02:04.0 DL: Meaning that when something just turns out perfect, you know, that's fantastic, but that doesn't take into account the variation in people and systems and process and everything that goes into a system. So basically in a school, in a classroom, I mean, one of the ways you can, you can get perfection, have everybody score 100% on a test or something like that, is to have students cheat. [chuckle] Because then everybody can get the same answers and do the exact same thing and there's no variation and there's no reason to have any discussion or anything like that. And actually, that actually happens in classrooms.

0:02:55.4 DL: If you make the expectation so high and then you create an artificial scarcity of top marks by grading on a curve or, or there's only one, one winner of a system, then the only way some people can get there is to cheat, is to do something. I remember a friend of mine got his MBA, Master's in Business Administration, and the environment was so competitive that when the teacher would give an assignment, the students would immediately run over to the library and check out all the books that had to do with that assignment, so other people wouldn't be able to learn. [chuckle] And because you know they're expecting perfection, expecting you to master this to get this. And it's really interesting because when people do things like that in systems, we often wanna blame the people without first blaming the system and basically, you as the manager of that system. So a teacher in a classroom, if you're not getting the perfection that you wanna have, you want to think about you know, "What am I doing? What can I be doing differently that might get us closer and closer to more and more people getting those top marks?"

0:04:31.5 DL: So when I first started learning about this, and this point actually really goes to Deming's work in education about grading, grading systems, and him talking about eliminating grades and so on and so forth. I went through the same process, because I couldn't stop giving grades, or I wouldn't have a job any longer. So I had to think about, "Well, I could stop...I could create processes whereby more and more people could get that A or could get that perfection or could get that top mark." So I actually went to my principal and asked him, I said, "Is there any state law or school rule or anything else that prevents all students from getting an A in my class?" And he laughed at me [laughter] and said, "Oh, no, it's not possible, but we'd love to have all the kids getting A's." Well, at the end of that year, I think out of the 134 students, I saw that I had I think about 132 A's. And as soon as I pushed that button and turned in my grades, the principal was in my room in about 10 minutes.

0:05:41.7 AS: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

0:05:42.8 DL: "What are you doing?" [chuckle] "What are you doing?" And the academic counselor was right with him, and he said, "You're destroying the whole grading system." I said, "Well, thank you very much. That was my aim." But yet you'd have to think about if you want more and more students to get top marks, or whether you call it an A or whatever you wanna call it. By the way, sometimes I work with districts, they say, "Oh, we don't have grades anymore, so we just rank kids, four, three, two, one." [laughter] So it doesn't...

0:06:18.0 AS: That's smart.

0:06:19.6 DL: It doesn't matter. Yeah. It doesn't matter what you call it, yeah, you're still doing the very same thing. But you have to think about, "What would I have to do if I was to get every year more and more and more students to get those top marks?" Well, I would have to manage differently. I would have to let people... If they got something wrong, I would have to let them learn about it, right? And go back and fix it, and make it right. I remember talking with Dr. Deming about his own classes at New York University, and I said, "Well, what do you do?" And he said, "Well, you know, you're supposed to write a paper on something. And I read that and sometimes I'm a little concerned about what people have written or what they've done, and I'll say, 'We need to have a chat about this and talk about it.'" He said it's also a very good chance that they've come up with a different way of looking at things and a new idea that you didn't even think about, right? So it's not a matter of just doing it exactly the way, you know, the teacher wants it done. So anyway, that's my take on this.

0:07:40.2 AS: While you were speaking, I went on the Google, which is now our new brain. And I'm afraid that I feel like the definition of perfection or perfect has been changed. I haven't looked at it for a while, but it says, "Make something completely free from faults or defects." Okay? That kinda makes sense. That's what I always thought was perfection, but it has a further part. It says, "Or as close to such condition as possible."

0:08:12.2 DL: Ah, yeah. That's very Deming-esque, free of fault or defect. And Deming used to lamb-blast programs that were trying to teach people to be defect-free. And and I think that goes a lot to this very same point of thinking that you're gonna get perfection on things, not understanding that the normal variation that's in every system.

0:08:38.5 AS: So I think I've got my interpretation is for this one, "he does not expect perfection, he expects a distribution of outcomes."

0:08:52.1 DL: Yes.

0:08:54.6 AS: That's the way I would see it. That we understand that it has nothing to do with perfection, it has to do with understanding the outcomes of a system and the distribution or the variation of those outcomes. And when you truly understand that, it's much more valuable and important than understanding or sitting there and going, "I want perfection." So that, that... You talked about variation and stuff, to me, that's really a key thing that I interpret from this.

0:09:28.3 DL: Well, if you take any process, whether that's in a school or company or military or anything, and you implement this process and you have some kind of data on how did it go? What was that distribution of who did it really well, and the people in the middle, and some people at the end. Basically you look at the average performance and say, "Am I happy with the average," right? And I always tell teachers, "If you're happy with your average and you know it, clap your hands," which is [laughter] basically what you have to do. It's just to take a look at and using some Profound Knowledge. You look at the situation and you realize, "Yeah, I am happy with that average." Let's take for example, maybe you gave a test or you did something and everybody scored between 85 and 95, and the average was 90, right?

0:10:22.6 DL: But you know that you're probably going to revisit the same material two or three times coming up. Well, it, it doesn't make sense for you to spend a whole bunch of time trying to get everybody to get a higher score right now, because you know that your Profound Knowledge tells you that you're gonna be revisiting this later on. And that's what Deming's talking about here. And basically if you're not happy with your average and you know it, okay, then don't blame the students, because 98% of the reason you're getting the results you're getting is coming from the system itself.

0:11:06.6 AS: I was just thinking about a rocket that I believe Russia recently sent a rocket to the moon, and it ended up crashing, from what I remember reading. And it made me think about aiming for perfection and aiming for that one absolute outcome, when in fact there's a range of outcomes. And particularly when you're shooting something to the moon [chuckle], you know, like, and it may just be that there's a little mountain...

0:11:34.7 DL: Complexity of that, yeah.

0:11:36.2 AS: Yeah. There's a little mountain right there that you hadn't planned for, and how are you adjusting for various potential outcomes and understanding that rather than just pinpointing and saying, that's where we're gonna be 'cause chances are you're not gonna be there, so.

0:11:53.5 DL: Yeah, it's probably a good analogy. I imagine if you ask people that had been around NASA for what, 40, 50 years, et cetera, and ask them, how many perfect flights did you ever have? I would bet a large amount of money that they would say zero, [chuckle] because there was variation and complications of every single flight.

0:12:19.8 AS: Yep. Yep. So, I'll wrap this up by challenging the listeners and the viewers out there to focus on that distribution of outcomes. Someday one of those outcomes may be perfect but most days or almost every day, it's not gonna be, it's gonna be a distribution. And so if you do not expect perfection, rather focus on the distribution of outcome, I think you're gonna be in great position. David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. As always, it's fun. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to join, continue your journey and list...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."

When we answer a question with "it depends" we are asking for more information about the possible variables that will inform the answer. In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss how, in the Deming world, "it depends" can trigger improvements in processes or products and services.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, in this episode 10, It Depends, Rethinking Improvements. Bill, take it away.

0:00:34.6 Bill Bellows: Rethinking improvement, yes.

0:00:38.3 AS: You're always teasing us with your titles, Bill.

0:00:43.2 BB: I hate when that happens, I hate when that happens. No, I uh, what I would tell managers when I was doing these one-day seminars all over Boeing for year after year after year after year, and the managers would wanna know, so what should I expect from the people afterwards? And I said, or I would warn them, I said, here's what's gonna happen, just so you're ready. I'd say, you're gonna hear a lot more of people saying, "It depends." 'Cause to me, Andrew, "it depends" is the beginning of an appreciation of a system. So Andrew, you and I are going out to dinner and then you say, would you like to have some wine? And I say, sure. Then you say, red or white? And I say well, it depends Andrew, what are you having? Right, I mean, so to me, it depends is an understanding of what Ackoff would call interactions, that I cannot order the wine without knowing the meal. Planning a wedding, we can't order the food without knowing the guest list, can't order the music without going to the guest list. The colors of the flowers depend upon, the color of the tuxes depend upon it. And what is that? It is looking at things, not in isolation, but as a system. So when I tell my students, graduate and undergraduate is, you already manage systems, you already manage interactions.

0:02:09.0 BB: You don't use that word, but you couldn't plan a vacation without looking at things in context. You couldn't run errands on Saturday morning without knowing what time the store is open, what time... So, so I think we have a natural proclivity of looking at things as a system, quite often, quite often. It could be better. But I... So I just throw out, I just, I mean, if somebody asked me a question on a topic I've never heard about before, what I find is, one is I think, well, how would a red pen company, a me organization, a last straw organization look at that? And they'd look at things in isolation. Which reminds me of an Ackoff quote. He says, "getting less of what you don't want doesn't get you what you want." So we're gonna drive variation to zero, and when I was listening to the last podcast, it was talking about this driving variation to zero. You can't go to zero, 'cause Andrew, cloning does not produce identical, twins are not identical. So for those who think you could drive variation to zero, you can't. Get under a microscope and you're gonna see differences in snowflakes. The question behind reducing variation is, is it a worthwhile investment, which gets us into this continual improvement thing.

0:03:32.6 BB: But, so whether we're reducing variation to zero, reduce... Eliminating waste, eliminating non value-added efforts, what Ackoff asking is, he is challenging us saying, getting rid of what you don't want, what is it that we want? And here I had a great quote from a good friend, Dr. Deming, he says, "it would be better if everyone worked together as a system with the aim for everybody to win."

0:04:00.2 AS: He was saying, win-win before everybody was saying it.

0:04:06.3 BB: Well, what I like about that quote is, did the word quality appear in that quote? Did you hear the word quality anywhere in there, Andrew?

0:04:14.8 AS: No, I didn't hear it.

0:04:17.1 BB: Huh. And Dr. Deming was that quality guy, right?

0:04:20.9 AS: Mm.

0:04:22.4 BB: So he's got quotes that don't have to do with quality? [laughter]

0:04:25.0 AS: Yeah, and so that's one of the things that I think people come, when they first come to Deming, they're looking at, they're thinking of quality in terms of tools, you know...

0:04:35.6 BB: Tools, techniques, yeah...

0:04:36.8 AS: And then they find...

0:04:37.1 BB: And so part of the reason that I wanted to throw that quote out is, to reinforce my point, that I look at what Dr. Deming is doing, is providing guidance for how to manage resources, time, energy, money, space, equipment, tools and techniques, ideas, as a system. And the ideas as a system, is the idea that things are interdependent; I depend on you, you depend on me. And I think the better we understand that, you realize is that improved quality, what he would call quality, would come from that, improved safety would come from that, improved profit would come from that. Again, Ackoff would say, you know, profit is the result of how well we work together, which is how well we manage resources and the idea of being deliberately proactive, deliberately reactive, we talked about last time. And I also made reference last time through the term purposeful resource management, purposeful... And then also reflexive resource management, which is the "me organization," the non-Deming organization being reactive, why?

0:05:58.3 BB: I'm not thinking about it. [laughter] I just, why would I be proactive? I'm gonna be reactive. I'm not gonna work on things that are good. I'm gonna focus on the problems. I'm gonna focus on the defects. Whereas in a Deming organization, a "we organization,: I think there'd be, we're gonna be reactive, where it makes sense, it depends. When does it make sense? We're gonna be proactive when it makes sense, it depends. And another term I'm gonna throw out to build upon this purposeful resource management, which I would... I look at management as an activity, we're managing resources, we're thinking locally...

0:06:33.3 BB: Thinking globally, acting locally. And I think everyone in a Deming organization has that responsibility. You don't ask for twice as much resources as you need. So you don't, so you make sure you get things done as you would at a non-Deming company where you ask for way more than you need on everything, because you don't wanna be the bad guy, so you protect yourself. I would believe in a Deming organization, you would ask for what you need. But again, when I'm working on a project in the backyard, it involves going to the hardware store, you know, I'm gonna go there a few times that day. And, but I anticipate that. And in fact, now I get smart and instead of on one visit, and then going back, I'll say, I'll buy, if it's three different things I might need, I'll buy all three.

0:07:19.8 BB: I say it to myself, what am I doing? Managing resources. But a new term, to build upon purposeful resource management, so purposeful resource management is, "I know when I go to the hardware store, I buy more than I need. I can always return it next week and when the project is done." And that's how I manage projects. But I didn't always do it that way. So what I wanted to say is that purposeful resource management is how I currently manage resources. And then when you and I come up with a whole 'nother way of managing resources, I refer to that as purposeful resource leadership. And leadership is about creating a path for others to follow. And you say, holy cow, I should do the same thing, you know, in my part of the organization, again, where it makes sense.

0:08:05.2 BB: So whether that's focusing on an ideal value when it comes to improving integration or managing and improving how we manage interactions, purposeful resource leadership to me is everyone...I mean, someone coming up with a, then again, better way of doing it, and then we spread it around the organization, then somebody else takes the lead on their thing. The other thing I wanted to share with you is, is a quote from, quotes from two friends who spent a good deal of time with Dr. Deming, conversations. I met him twice, never asked him a question. The first time I didn't have a question to ask. And the second time he was health-wise, not in good shape. I just wanted his autograph. And I just wanted to just be thankful for being in the room. But Gipsie Ranney, who was the first president of the Deming Institute, and before that she was a professor at the University of Tennessee and a senior consultant at GM, she told me, she was a mentor for many years, she said she asked Dr. Deming once, she said, "so, um what are people getting outta your seminars?" And he said, he says, "I know what I told them. I don't know what they heard."

0:09:21.1 BB: And I think... And the more I thought about it, it's just I think that's part of the problem. So a big part, of what I was trying to do at Rocketdyne was to make it easy to read The New Economics. 'Cause I think there's, I think yeah, you can read it on your own, but I think the meaning you'll get being guided by others first, and that could be listening to the pod... You know, listening to these podcasts, watching videos on DemingNEXT. I think It's important to realize that there's words he's using that have perhaps a different meaning than you're using where you are at work. I just throw that out. And the other quote I wanted to share was from Bill Cooper. And Bill Cooper is approaching 90, he lives in San Diego, and he's a great guy.

0:10:07.7 BB: And I, I met him 20 some years ago and remained in touch. And he was a senior civilian officer, senior civilian at the US Navy's Overhaul facility in San Diego at a place called North Island, in the early '80s he came across Deming's work and became riveted, along with Phil Monroe, who was a senior military officer. And they went off to do Deming Consulting around the world. And, and Bill said he asked Deming once, Dr. Deming once, he said, "so what percent of people who attend your four-day seminars really walk out understanding what you said?" And his explanation, his answer to Bill was, "very few." And I think that's consistent with Gipsie, because I think you have to step back and realize that there's, there might be something more going on than what you're thinking. And I'm hoping these conversations help to spur that. Now, relative to teamwork, I had a colleague within Boeing, he was at Boeing Corporate, and somebody went by his office one day knowing that he was very fond of Deming's work and Taguchi's work. And the guy sticks his head out and he says to him, "you know the reason I don't like Deming, there's no equations, you know there's no equations.

0:11:30.0 BB: If you had equations, it means something." And so I told my friend, I said, next time the guy comes by and says that, say to him, "do you believe in teamwork? Is teamwork important?" 'cause at that time, within Boeing, Boeing's corporate slogan was "people working together as, as a one global aerospace companies"... But people working together. And I said, ask him, does he believe in working together? And he'll say yes. And then say, "so what's the equation? What's the equation?" And so I wanna share in advance of a, of another session where we get more into this, an example of teamwork. And I think, I think... I think if executives had an understanding of what teamwork is, that it improves profitability, no one would be against it. Now again, I've also come across people who think teamwork means everyone's involved in every decision, and they get turned off by that.

0:12:30.2 BB: And I'm not saying I agree with: everyone's involved in every decision. But what if, Andrew, in terms of a task, let's say you and I have to dig a trench that's 50 yards long. And I give you a shovel. That's a tool. I take a shovel. That's another tool. We start at opposite ends. And let's say we can each dig the trench at one foot an hour. So that means in one hour we're digging two feet, in two hours we're digging four feet. And so what is that? That's one plus one... One hour plus one hour equals two feet. That's addition, right, Andrew, addition. But if you're at one end of the trench and I'm on the other end of the trench, where's the teamwork? [laughter] There's no teamwork in that model. But Andrew, what if I came along with another tool called a pickaxe, and what if I get in there and start softening up the dirt? And then as it's softer, you can shovel faster. That's teamwork, Andrew. Teamwork is that you and I, again I'm changing tools, but what I'm showing is that you and I working together, my work depends upon yours, yours depends upon me. Two of us can be digging three feet an hour. So what's that Andrew? One plus one is three. My wife and I, a number of years ago, were scraping the spray off the ceiling in our hallway, and the work split was, I climbed the ladder and scraped off the acoustic spray. Right?

0:14:07.2 BB: And her job was to be ahead of me spraying it with water to soften it. And I use that example at class because we were doing far more together than the example I gave you. But if her ambition was to get to the end of the hallway before me, then the acoustic spray would be dry long before I got to it. That ain't helping. And so this is an example of would you like to be in an organization where two people are doing the work of two, or two people are doing the work of three, or two people doing the work of four or five or six. Or, or worse than that Andrew, would you like to have two people doing the work, falling behind [laughter] and get into the... 'Cause I also think people think, well, what's the worst case scenario? Two people equals zero? No, falling behind each day.

0:15:00.9 AS: Two people equal negative one.

0:15:02.7 BB: 'Cause they think well, how bad can it be? It can get better and better or worse and worse. And the other thing I'll add relative to the, "it depends" and the answer to every question. I think if you think of in a Deming organization, you're thinking about, "it depends." And so Andrew, if we're in a red... If we're in a non-Deming organization and I say to you, "Andrew, will that report be done by tomorrow?" How would you answer it in a non Deming organization, Andrew?

0:15:34.7 AS: In a non... Yes, sir.

0:15:36.1 BB: You're gonna salute and you're gonna say, "yes sir." All right. And I do this with my students and they'll be quick enough to figure out the answer is yes. Then I'll say, I'll call on a different person and I'll say, "Okay, let's say we're in a Deming organization, a 'we organization' will the report be done by tomorrow?"

0:15:55.5 AS: It depends.

0:15:57.6 BB: And they're like, it depends. It depends on what Andrew? It depends on what time tomorrow. It depends on those other five things you've asked me to do. And you might say, is this a five minute task or a 20 minute task or a two hour task? And so if you're unwilling to answer "it depends," then what's the chance the effort you're gonna apply? And so that's what I find is, I think the beauty of it is not, "it depends" is a smart-alecky response, it's trying to get a better sense of the system. And they, but I also say that I confess of thinking about "it depends" all the time. If my wife, of 40 years, was to ask me, do I have plans for Saturday morning? You know what my answer is, Andrew?

0:16:50.5 AS: For whatever you want, dear, I am free.

0:16:54.2 BB: I do not say, "it depends." [laughter] So it depends is the answer other than when your significant other says, do you have plans for...? And you say, no, I don't.

0:17:07.5 AS: Yes.

0:17:07.8 BB: All right.

0:17:08.3 AS: All right. So I got so many different things that you triggered.

0:17:12.2 BB: Good.

0:17:13.4 AS: The first one I wanted to mention was I have a friend of mine, Bevin in Bangkok, and he helped me edit my book, Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. And he didn't know anything about Deming, so it's kind of fun to write it and have him going through it. And he actually worked with me side by side in my office and he was reading it and going through and editing and going back and forth chapter by chapter. And then after he was pretty deep into it, he looked at me and he says, I think I just figured it out. Dr. Deming is like is a humanist that cares about people.

0:17:49.8 BB: Yeah.

0:17:51.2 AS: And that was such a... And I think for the listeners and the viewers out there, you're gonna get to a moment where you move beyond tools and techniques into the way you think about getting the most out of a system, getting the most out of people. And that's really where you really get into the meaning to me, the most powerful part of the meaning of Dr. Deming.

0:18:14.5 BB: Well, when you start to think about the potential for one plus one, and then you realize that in a non-Deming organization, you deliver the report by, you know, without understanding the context, you deliver the part without understanding the context. You have the ability to, as we've talked, spoken before, meet requirements minimally, leave the bowling ball in a doorway and... 'Cause I say, Andrew was the task completed? And you're like, yes sir, it was completed. But to do so with the absolute minimal effort and then to realize that that then is creating a ripple effect for the next person. And what we end up doing is a one plus one is a big negative number, or you go off and get the cleaning solution, which is really, really cheap, but it doesn't cut whatever the grease is on the table. And we're saving a lot of money, but we're putting all this manpower. When you start to realize how easy it is to end up in a situation where one plus one is a big negative number, why would you treat people other than with the greatest of respect? And I've had people say, "Well, oh, so it's a feel good thing." I said, are we... Is the result at the end of the day to make... I'm not saying we're in business to make a profit, but I said if we wanna be sustainable, then the better we work together, the more sustainable we are. So, do we wanna be sustainable? And you get what you get.

0:20:00.0 AS: I had some other things that came up. First one is, for the audience out there, you may not know what Bill's talking about when he kept saying Ackoff, Ackoff. But what he's talking about is Russell Ackoff.

0:20:12.5 BB: Russell Ackoff. Yes.

0:20:15.7 AS: And I just wanna go back to an article that he wrote in 1994, and it's titled Systems Thinking and Thinking Systems. But what's critical for our discussion is his description of a system, which is very brief. So let me go through it.

0:20:32.4 BB: Yeah, please do.

0:20:33.5 AS: "A system is a whole consisting of two or more parts, one, each of which can affect the performance or properties of the whole, none of which can have an independent effect on the whole, and no subgroup of which can have an independent effect on the whole. In brief then, a system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts or subgroups of parts." Now, I just wanna talk briefly about my... One of my areas of expertise is in the financial markets. And I say something a lot like what you say, when I go into my class and I said it last night in my valuation masterclass boot camp, when you finish my class, you'll be less confident than when you started. If you are less confident when you finish this class, I have succeeded. Well, this is very painful and difficult for people to think about because we're going to school to become more confident. But the stock market is not like physics where we have immutable laws that we can...

0:21:52.2 BB: That's right.

0:21:52.7 AS: Grasp and understand and then watch the interplay of those laws. The world of finance is a messy ball of activity. And the fact is, is that the minute you touch that ball, you have now affected that ball. If you place a buy order, you have just affected that ball. If you maybe place a very big buy order, you've really affected it. Some people could even say that just by looking at that ball of activity, you could influence it. When you face a complex, constantly changing system, then you start to realize that we have so little...to expect definitiveness, I'm just gonna do this.

0:22:49.0 AS: I'm just gonna take care of my department, if... And you're talking about a company, you are ignoring that the system, in this case I'm talking about the stock market, but now let's take it into a factory or into a business or into an office environment. All of these component parts. And if you write an email, a scathing email and you send it into that group of people that is working in a system, congratulations, you have made an effect or an impact on that system. For better or for worse, that system must react to every interaction. It cannot be divided into independent parts or subgroups. And therefore, the typical manager nowadays, that's all they wanna do. "I got my KPIs, that's my subgroup."

0:23:39.2 BB: Yes.

0:23:39.5 AS: We'll take care of that. And they're missing the word that I love in... When I work with management teams, the word I love is "coordination."

0:23:49.9 BB: Yeah. Synchronicity.

0:23:52.2 AS: Yep. So there's a lot there. But I just wanna highlight one other thing. You made me think of a book and earlier I was looking around for that book. So I'm gonna get out that book 'cause my books are right here and for everybody that's in business that's looking at competitive strategy of your business, Michael Porter is the guy...

0:24:14.3 BB: Yes.

0:24:14.8 AS: That's the best of all. But what I can say is that Michael Porter can be a bit dry. And the lady who worked with Michael Porter is a lady named Joan Magretta and she wrote a book called Understanding Michael Porter, a simple, small book to teach all the main things that Porter teaches. But what he teaches, the most important thing is that to develop a competitive advantage in a company, you wanna build that competitive advantage in the supply chain of that business, the flow of that business. And then he talks about the importance of fit, of how different components of that supply chain fit together.

0:24:57.3 AS: That that's the right person running the right part and that they're coordinating their efforts. And when you build that competitive advantage in your supply chain through the coordination of efforts, it's almost impossible for the competitor to copy. A great example is if General Motors, if the CEO of General Motors came in and he says, what I wanna do is start building cars like Toyota. Good luck. It's never going to happen because they've built their whole competitive advantage in their supply chain and it's not something that you can just go out and replicate.

0:25:36.0 BB: Well, to add to that, and I have a...students in one of my classes watch a one hour lecture by Porter. And then I explained to them Porter's five... I think it's a five forces model.

0:25:49.9 AS: Five forces. Yep.

0:25:52.1 BB: And all of that, I think it's absolutely important to know about. What I learned from Tom Johnson, is a retired professor from Portland State University and we'll talk more about Tom in a later session. What Tom pointed out to me that I would have paid no attention to in Porter's model is, in Porter's model it's about "power over." Power over your customers. Where else are you gonna go, Andrew, for Internet? Right? Power over your suppliers, power over your employees. I think and when we get into this "power over" model, so we're gonna go to our customers, start demanding things, put a gun to their head, drive change and they're gonna respond by leaving bowling balls in the doorway when it... So what's missing in that model is... I mean, if the model's based on all white beads are the same, everything which is good, everything is, there is no variation, then it might work. But if you now go back to the humanist, if you've got people in the loop who have vested interest in their survival as an employee, their survival as a supplier, and you go to them and start wrenching them and squeezing them and driving them to...

0:27:18.4 BB: And they respond with things that are thinner and break more often or still meet requirements, it doesn't work out as well. To your point on Toyota, my sense is Toyota has a sense of relationships with suppliers, which is not mutually self destructive. I think there's a better understanding, I think, again, not that I've spoken and gone to visit Toyota's suppliers. But I'm thinking, in order to deliver what they deliver, there's got to be some sense of, shall I say win-win, because if it's win-lose... Boeing, when Rocketdyne was owned by Boeing, you know, severe downturn in the market, there was a lot of pressure within Boeing to improve things and it was a pretty stressful situation. And Boeing was going to suppliers, not only asking them to take back inventory, all those parts you bought from the last six months and we're having trouble selling airplanes. But the reason we want you to take them back, Andrew, is it's not so much that we need the space. We want you to buy them back from us. [laughter] Yeah. Are you okay with that, Andrew?

0:28:44.9 AS: Absolutely not.

0:28:45.6 BB: And I'm thinking, what's gonna happen when you go to that supply chain and say, we're ramping up, we've got customers, and we... Andrew, we need your help, we need your help. Are you there for us? And you're like, remember five years ago? Remember? You get into this rainy day friends kind of thing. It's one thing if we're mutually suffering or mutually benefiting, but anything short of that is not win... I wouldn't define it as win-win. I also want to point out the production viewed as a system, the loop, the loop model that Deming showed the Japanese in 1950. And what I've done in the past is, is I've taken a class and I said, okay, you over there, you are the beginning, the raw material comes to you and then you do your thing, hand off to the next person, off to the next person, off to the next person. Then you over there, I go around the room, and I just show the flow of work from the first person to the last person, last person is a customer. And I say, so, where's the best place to be in this situation? And everybody wants to be way upstream. And you say, why? I say, well, when people start leaving the bowling balls in doorway...

0:30:07.2 AS: What does that mean, leaving bowling balls in doorways?

0:30:10.7 BB: If they start delivering minimally, minimally meeting requirements as they hand off as they hand off as they hand off as they hand off, and that system, the last... The worst place to be is at the end. And I say, but what if what comes around goes around? What if it's actually a loop? [laughter] Now, where would you rather be? Then you begin to realize that whatever goes into the air, I have to breathe, whatever goes into the water, I have to drink. So I think what, going back to the humanist side, I think the better you understand others, and they understand you, this is not done invisibly. So when I'm in a Deming environment, leaving the bowling ball in the doorway, meeting requirements minimally without asking for your permission, you know that, others know that, and then you might call me on it.

0:31:10.3 AS: Yeah.

0:31:11.9 BB: Because instead of black and white thinking - it met requirements, we've got shades of gray thinking - you call me over and you say, "I don't know, you're kinda new here, right Bill?" And I said, "yeah." And he says, let me take you aside. You might be able to tap into the humanist in me. So one is I'd say, I think the better our understanding of what comes around goes around, the better the understanding of what a good friend, Grace used to call boomerang karma. [laughter] But let me also say that Dr. Deming came up with that model...

0:31:49.2 AS: There's a bit of redundancy in that.

0:31:49.3 BB: Say again.

0:31:49.3 AS: There's a bit of redundancy in that. Those words kind of mean the same thing. But yes.

0:31:54.5 BB: Yes. [laughter] That's right. It's like connected as a system. That's what system means. But when Dr. Deming showed the Japanese in 1950 production to view it as a system, and there's an idea of what comes around goes around. And it took me a while to figure this out. If everyone's meeting requirements minimally in that system and you end up with something where there are problems, then if your model is meeting requirements is okay, then it wouldn't dawn on you that some of the problems could be coming from how we meet requirements. And there's a story we'll look at in a future session of a transmission designed by Ford, built by Ford, also built by Mazda in the early '80s. And Ford somehow found out that the Mazda transmission had an order of magnitude fewer complaints, with the shifting of the transmission than the Ford transmission. It was the same design, but one was built with an understanding of managing the variation between the parts and how they work together.

0:33:09.8 BB: Very much as you would do if you're working in the garage, you're gonna get the pieces to come together, not just meet requirements any way. But I thought if Ford operated with a Deming model in everything, and they end up finding out that these transmissions are performing differently, well, if you go back in and check with quality and all the parts meet requirements, you couldn't explain what's going on. And you're left thinking, well, our transmission must have some bad parts. So part of the reason I throw that out is, in the world of improvement, when you shift from this black and white parts are good, what Ackoff would call managing actions, looking things in isolation, you might find that the requirements are met to one extreme or the other. And maybe if we started to mix and match how they come together, there's an opportunity for incredible improvement when you shift your thinking from the black and white...

0:34:10.1 BB: My parts are good, to how they work together. And also, how can you have continual improvement if your mental model, your mindset is things are good and bad, but if we look at things in a relative sense, then we could say our... If we look at understanding as relative, improvement as relative, then there's room for improvement. But if quality is defined as good and bad, there's no room for improvement. And relative to the title, what I want to bring out is, there's a sense among people in the Deming community, people like a few years into Deming, we can go off and improve everything.

0:34:51.4 BB: Now, what we have to be careful about is what does improvement mean? Does improvement mean having less variation? Does improvement mean having lower cost? The important thing is to look at things, right, Andrew, as a system, and then start to ask where can we spend some, where can... I look at it as a resource management model. Where might we spend an hour to save five hours, spend a dollar to save five? And that's what I refer to not as continual improvement, but rather continual investment. And so I look at in terms of managing resources is within an organization, we've got red beads, we've got things that are defective, things that are behind that are not quite good, and we can use a control chart or run chart to manage those, see those ahead of time. And so we have a fire, Dr. Deming, he said, of course we're gonna have fires.

0:35:41.9 BB: Let's put the fire out. We end up back to where we were before, which means the process is...we wanna get it from out of control to in control. But I think the better we are in responding to that, we don't end up shut down for long periods of time. That then gives us the opportunity as you would be as a homeowner... Again, as a homeowner it's the same thing. You end up with a leak, you gotta go fix it, whether it's the faucet, the toilet, but then every now and then you're thinking about, maybe I can improve how the watering system is done. Maybe I can improve how the air conditioner works. Maybe by cleaning the filter more often. And what is that to me, Andrew, paying more attention to the filter, because if I wait six months to change the filter in the air conditioner, now all of that dust is way up inside the coils and I'm gonna spend forever.

0:36:32.0 BB: But if I'm changing that filter on a more regular basis, what am I doing? I am overall reducing the amount of effort spent on this maintenance. And I just wanted to say, I don't look at that as improvement thinking. I look at that as investment thinking, and I just wanna go from, okay yes, we can go past "all the beads are white" and we know that we don't stop at a hundred percent white beads. So that means improvement is possible, it doesn't mean, I'm not suggesting let's go improve everything. What I'm next looking at in terms of, you know, how I interpret Dr. Deming's The New Economics is asking where's the stitch in time saving nine, where's an ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure? And that I refer to as not improvement thinking, but investment thinking.

0:37:22.3 AS: Yep.

0:37:23.4 BB: And that's what I was trying to say last time. I think reading to your kids is investment thinking, listening to these podcasts is investment thinking, going to a concert, I think everything we do is based somehow on, "I think that's a worthwhile use of my time."

0:37:39.0 AS: Yep. Okay. Let's wrap up. I just want to go back to the title, which was, It Depends, Rethinking Improvements, and what you said is that, if you're working in a Deming organization, it's not gonna be as definitive. When we ask questions, we're gonna get answers like, well, it depends. Everything's a trade off. We need to know...

0:38:03.7 BB: That's right.

0:38:03.8 AS: How many things... We need to know many things, as you said, before deciding what to do because we want to think about the impact of the system... On the system. And also I would argue, and I think you make this point, that this is hard and I think there's a rush to simplification in KPIs and things like that to try to corner people into little areas and little boxes. And that's destroying the system and... Or the potential of the system.

0:38:37.5 AS: And then I mentioned the word coordination, the idea. We talked about Porter and his idea of building competitive advantage happens through the supply chain. His example, one of them that he uses is IKEA that makes flat, it ships everything in flat boxes.

0:38:52.5 BB: Yes.

0:38:53.2 AS: And that has built something in the supply chain that's not easy to replicate. And so, but that also requires fits that you're designing your supply chain around a new way of thinking. And then you've talked about Russell Ackoff and also I discussed his definition of a system that's saying that nothing can be independently... Can act independently. Everything has an impact. I talked about the stock market and how that is an interacting system. And then I just wanna finish up my kind of review of what we've talked about by a discussion, Bill, that I had with my father before he passed away.

0:39:35.4 AS: And my father had a PhD in organic chemistry and he created a career all of his life at DuPont in selling, he was a salesman and a technical salesman. And he raised three kids; my mom was a housewife. And I asked my dad, what was your proudest accomplishment? And he said, I built a trusting family.

0:40:01.4 BB: Cool.

0:40:03.1 AS: And I didn't really... It hit me then, but it just hits me more and more whenever I think about that. My mom and dad never betrayed my trust. I never was in a situation where I could see that they were acting for their benefit and...

0:40:14.3 BB: Yeah.

0:40:16.8 AS: Not considering mine. So now I wanna go back to Toyota. One of the things that makes Toyota successful is that it's the quintessential family business. It is a family business that built certain values in the family business that are ongoing. Because what we're trying to do, and when we talked about Dr. Deming being a humanist, we're trying to build trust.

0:40:42.5 AS: He's telling us to build trust in the system. In other words, don't beat up your suppliers, work with them. Don't beat up your employees and make them fearful. Don't rank and rate your employees. Build a system of trust. And what I realized, I want to just go back to the story of my father, if my father had done something that was selfish only for him and neglected the impact on me and my mom or the family, he would have broken our trust. And it just takes one time to cause a system, like a family system, to be permanently broken, unless there's effort made to try to resolve that. And it's no different in a business. What would you like to add to end up this episode?

0:41:33.3 BB: No. I think that's a good point. A number of things is, and I really like the way you described that, because I thought about that recently as well as, it's one thing to have trust in others, but I think what you're saying is that a Deming organization we have trust in the system. And when you, when you lack that trust, what do you do, Andrew? You look out for yourself.

0:41:57.7 AS: Yep.

0:42:00.4 BB: Because you've learned. You've learned the hard way. You fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. But I think if you have trust in the system, then there may be a new direction. But you say, "I don't know where we're going, I just got the announcement, but I have trust in the system. I'm not gonna get tossed overboard." And I think you're right. When you have trust in the system of the company or of the family, then you know that you're being looked out for. And lacking that, when people say something to you, you're like, "what's their ulterior motive?" And when you start thinking about ulterior motives behind coworkers or friends, then they're really not friends for long when you start wondering about ulterior motives.

0:42:51.6 AS: And that stifles innovation.

0:42:53.3 BB: Oh, yeah. You say to me, Andrew, or you say to me, Bill, hey, what do you say we go do this? The first thing comes to mind is, what's Andrew up to now? But that's the humanist.

0:43:04.4 AS: Yeah.

0:43:04.8 BB: And what I love about what Deming is saying, and when you put psychology in the System of Profound Knowledge, is that it's an understanding that that psychology gets me to think about me and not the system. That psychology, then we're looking at also an understanding that each of us is different, that's the variation piece. Right, the theory of knowledge piece or am I willing to share my theories or hide my theories? But if you're not tapping into the... That people... I mean, the most flexible part of the system, once you pour the concrete, so yeah, the chairs are on rollers and you put casters on some machines.

0:43:40.6 BB: But at the end of the day, the potential most flexible part of the system is the people. And when you turn people into concrete, now you've got trouble. So I just wanna... And I know you've got a favorite Deming quote, so let me share with you my favorite Russell Ackoff quote, and then you could sign us off. And so to borrow from Russell Ackoff, "a system is never the sum of its parts. It's the product of the interactions of its parts. The art of managing interactions is very different indeed than the management of actions. And history requires this transition for effective management, not efficient management, effective management." And that's my closing quote, Andrew.

0:44:25.2 AS: Bill, once again, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for our discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you want to keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. Oh, wow, we have a lot of good discussions there and all of this stuff is posted there. Share your ideas and opinions. 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."

"Trust me!' We've all heard it, and probably said it. But how do you build a culture of trust at work, or in a classroom? David Langford and host Andrew Stotz talk about how inclusive decision-making inspires trust, and leads to better outcomes.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's, 14 items that he discusses in New Economics about the role of a manager of people after that manager has been through the transformation. This is on the third edition of The New Economics on page 86, and in the second edition on page 125. Now, today we're talking about point 10, which is a simple and short point, and it reads as follows, "He creates trust, he creates an environment that encourages freedom and innovation." So we decided to title, this one, "Trust Me." David, take it away.

[laughter]

0:01:02.3 David Langford: Thanks, Andrew. Good to be back again. So, yeah, this point it seems simple when you just read through it, and it seems logical like all managers of people would want to create trust with their people, but it's not like it happens automatically, [chuckle], and I think a lot of managers of people do things inadvertently, hopefully they're inadvertently, where they create distrust and stress, etcetera. One of those most obvious things is performance evaluations, "Trust me, and then I'm going to rank you amongst people in the department, and then we're going to have a prize for the top person and/or a bonus or something else within that."

0:02:03.6 DL: And people learn that you're not really interested in improving the product, the service, the classroom, the function of what's going on, you're really interested in who's pleasing you. [chuckle] And that's how you get a promotion, and that's how you move up is like, they'll... The old saying, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." And, I think that's really the heart of what Deming's getting at here, that you're supposed to create an environment of trust. And it doesn't just... It's not a pill you take and where you just all of a sudden you can say to people all you want to "trust me," [laughter] but it's over time, when you find out, "Are you trustworthy?" And if you prove not to be trustworthy, either you can't keep things confidential or you talk behind people's backs, or you, you know, any of those kinds of things, over time people start to realize you're not somebody to be trusted.

0:03:16.3 DL: I often heard Deming say things like, "If you create an environment where people can't trust you, pretty soon you're only left with the people who can't get another job." [laughter] "Can't go someplace else, because you're just not trustworthy." Well, the same thing happens in a classroom, a classroom teacher that is not trustworthy and can't build trust among a classroom of students, won't get the very best from those students. Pretty soon they'll only do what the teacher wants to be done, and then that's it. They won't think on their own. They won't... Deming is talking about they won't become innovative in what they're doing, because you're not a trustworthy person managing the class. And so how do you do that? How do you build trust over time? Well, a big part of that to me is involving people in the decision-making process. On the previous points, in this section that we're working through, Deming talked about, the role of a good manager and a leader and etcetera, and those kinds of things. Ultimately, you still have the formal position, right?

0:04:43.2 DL: And it's your job or in some cases, you're next on the line, if you don't make a good decision. But the more you can involve people in that process of making decisions, number one, you're going to come out with a better decision, because you just get more brains looking at a situation in ways that you just never thought about before. And number two, it's sort of a double-edged sword, not only did you get a better decision but whatever decision you do come up with gets implemented to a higher degree. So when I'm teaching teachers to do this with classrooms with students, I always tell them, you know, if you involve students in a decision-making process, and let's say that it doesn't turn out well, it wasn't a good decision.

0:05:42.8 DL: You win both ways, right? Because it wasn't just your decision. And it's the same way with a manager in a company. If it's just your decision and something doesn't work, people will just let it fail, they'll just let it not work because they had no part in it. They don't really care if it works or not. And they'll just let you, gladly let you fail in some cases and not bail you out. But if it's our decision and we all use some tools and processes and took the time to actually work through and figure out the best solution to something, then if things start to go wrong, people, because they have such strong trust in you and the organization, they're going to pick up the pieces. They're going to do stuff to make even a bad decision work, because they have ownership in it, and they're a part of that process.

0:06:45.3 AS: I wanted to briefly talk about trust because, it's such a interesting word and concept that I think we may just brush over. I remember reading a book by Dr. William Glasser called "Reality Therapy", and he worked with prisoners and others through his psychiatry. And one of the things he always talked about is that a key sign of mental illness, which he didn't... He actually said there was no such thing as mental illness. He said basically the issue was that that person did not have a trusting relationship with anybody, and therefore it was so hard... So then all the mental problems and emotional problems they went through were coping mechanisms.

0:07:29.8 AS: And that really rang true. And I think about my friendships with my best friend, Dale, who we run - he runs the coffee business. And I think about the relationships with my mom and dad and my sisters, and I can say none of them ever betrayed my trust. And I think I thought that was normal. But when I talked to my father just before he died, I asked him, "What is the accomplishment" of many accomplishments, including getting his PhD and being successful and all that? And he said to me... I said, "What is your number one? What are you most proud of?" And he said, "I built a trusting family." And now as I've grown, you know, and I've looked at that more, I really realized that is rare. And I want to just highlight that trust is rare.

0:08:19.2 AS: And the second way I want to highlight that is that, I teach in my ethics course, which I just teach ethics and finance all the time at university and for CFA, what I say... I ask people to raise their hand. I ask them, think about how many people you truly trust. If you had a really... And I want everybody who's listening and viewing, let me ask this question. How many people do you truly trust? If you had a secret, something that you did not want to get out to the world, but you felt like you needed to tell somebody, how many people would you trust? And the answer to that after asking thousands of people that question is about one or two. And my point, and I say academic research can oftentimes be interpreting surveys. That's a survey. That's some research. And what does it tell us? It tells us that trust is rare. And so when I hear the word trust, and I think about what he's saying, "He creates trust, he creates an environment that encourages freedom and innovation." I think that's extremely hard thing to do, and it's not happening much in this world.

0:09:38.5 DL: Well, you want that freedom and innovation because in a company that's creating new products or new ideas or things like that, and people are freely distributing or giving you those ideas. And so unless you have that sort of fertile ground for creating new ideas and innovation, you're just not going to get there. It pretty much means that everything has to be a top-down decision-made process of doing something. And you want tremendous growth. It's the same way in a classroom. It's interesting that we think that, "Oh, we have to do great trustworthy kinds of things." But it happens in such simple ways. Like a teacher might say, "Oh, well just take 10 minutes to finish this." And, uh, then a half an hour later they return back to what they were working on and stuff. Students quickly learn, you're not trustworthy, [chuckle] 10 minutes means 10 minutes. And I often tell teachers, just have a little stop watch or a little timer or something, and when you do something like that and you say, "Okay, we're going to take 20 minutes to work on this," then just set a timer. It'll keep you on, trustworthy, and it'll keep them on track as well and people will know, okay, we're there.

0:11:15.5 AS: Yeah. And I think the other thing I would say is when you're standing in front of a group of students teaching you have to really understand that they trust almost no one. And so...

0:11:26.1 DL: Yeah, that's true.

0:11:26.3 AS: They're observing your every action. And I say that they trust almost no one from my survey of people that I've been surveying asking this question. And maybe even ask your students, ask them a question such as, "How many people do you trust?"

0:11:44.2 DL: Yeah. Well, I've been involved as a student myself, and an assignment was given or a timeline, "Have this by Friday or be ready to discuss this by Friday." And then you get to Friday and the teacher doesn't follow through. And you've put in all this work and effort to be ready for Friday. And it's, "Oh, well, we'll just put that off until Monday." Well, you're not building trust, you're actually taking trust away. Stephen Covey says, "You're not adding to the bank of trust." [chuckle]

0:12:17.5 AS: And it is a bank and it is cumulative. One last thing about trust that I was thinking about is, you know, for managers right now in businesses, and I'm sure it's the same in education, it's all about KPIs and measurements. And one of the real destructive things of these measurements is they destroy trust, because the manager of people is sitting behind a desk looking at a chart and graph and not understanding a person's situation and basically blasting them. I think that it's possible if we could get to where some managers want to be, that you could implant some sort of electrical stimulus, so that if somebody doesn't hit their KPI, you just give them a volt, you give them a shot of electricity and say, "That's a reminder that you haven't, didn't hit your KPI." And I think about the relationships that I have of trust, and none of them were built through KPI. So I like the...

0:13:23.8 DL: No point, they already you have it.

0:13:26.1 AS: Yep. Maybe a good ending point. Anything you would add?

0:13:30.5 DL: Yeah. No, it's just on the surface this seems so simple. But what Deming often talked about Profound Knowledge, and the word profound means deep knowledge and understanding. So it's taking these points that he accumulated basically over a hundred years. And he makes it so simple, "Hey, just think about this, just do this and things will get better." So, trust me.

0:14:00.8 AS: Trust me. So I'm going to wrap this up by first asking the listeners and the viewers, how many people do you trust? And I want you to think about the people around you. Are they any different than you? They probably trust one or two people. And some people will say, "I trust no one." And an important part of this point, number 10, is to recognize that trust is rare and rare is valuable. David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com, and this is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. I just never get tired of this quote. "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss what Dr. Deming meant by "institute training on the job" and "adopt and institute leadership" (principles 6 and 7). How do you follow those principles in the context of education?

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 13, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of schools systems. John, take it away.

0:00:30.0 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah. We've turned to this set of principles that can be used by systems leaders to guide their transformation work. In the last few episodes, we've discussed the first five principles, the five of the 14. Just to recap real quick, we did constancy of purpose was number one. Principle two is adopt the new philosophy. Then we did principle three, cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Four was maximize high quality learning, and the last time we talked about working continually on the system. And then the plan today is to talk about the sixth principle, which is institute training, and then the seventh principle, which is adopt and institute leadership. So, I figure we just dive in with principle six. So sort of the short version is "institute training on the job." And this really is training for everybody in the system. So in our system that would be students, teachers, staff, management, basically so that everyone can make better contributions to the school system.

0:01:42.7 JD: And just to clarify, when I'm talking about training, I think what it's important to know is that I'm talking about learning how to do a particular job within the system using a particular set of methods and tools. And basically the purpose of training in a system is to allow a worker or a student to know exactly what their job is. Now, we're constantly updating that training because in our world for teachers and principals, you have to constantly develop new skills to keep up with changes in whatever it may be, cognitive science, new curriculum, lesson design, new technology, better teaching techniques. Any number of things that we're training on and improving our training on on an ongoing basis. But a major aim of the training in our system is to reduce variation in methods, basically. I think no matter what type of training you get as a teacher, I think you've experienced variation in methods.

0:02:51.3 JD: And if you go to pretty much any school building in the United States, I think most educators would very quickly tell you, and I think even parents and students, you could sort of go room to room and say, yep, that's the strict teacher. That's the teacher that lets you get away with anything. So this is sort of commonly known when it comes to how teachers run their classrooms, especially on the classroom management level. Everybody knows who has the highly structured classrooms or the disciplined classrooms, but this really does cause problems when you think about it, 'cause there's this mixed message about what a classroom is supposed to look like. And I think on the flip side of classroom management is instruction. And I think there's a lot of variation there. And that's more hidden, I think, but probably possibly more important to sort of consider. And so when you have a typical, let's say an elementary school, an elementary school has three third grade classrooms, and each of those three teachers in most schools in the US, they operate pretty independently of each other.

0:04:05.6 JD: And a lot of schools, each of those teachers would have their own sort of preferred methods. And even sequencing for how that, let's say, a math class is taught. But then the problem is that some combination of students from each one of those classes in third grade that following year are gonna end up in a fourth grade classroom. And now this fourth grade teacher has to deal with this. And really the fourth grade teacher is this customer of the third grade teachers. But if each of the third grade teachers are sort of doing their own thing, then they've sort of optimized each of their own classrooms at the expense of the system. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about sort of reducing variation in methods through training.

0:04:58.9 AS: So there's a few things to discuss in this that I think are interesting. The first thing is, let me just repeat what you said. The aim is to reduce variation in methods. I think most people, if they expected you to say something, they would've expected you to say, "The goal is to reduce variation in outcomes." So tell us why... Now, it may be that methods get to reduce variation in outcomes, but you're focusing on methods. So just tell us a little bit more, because also as we know, there's teachers want some independence and there's some academic independence, at least at let's say university level. They try to have more of that. But maybe you could talk a little bit more about the methods and why you focus on methods instead of just saying you do it the best you can. And one other thing I would say about that is that you could say that if you had three different teachers, different styles, some students would perform better in one style versus another. But a counter argument is, well, we're not sorting them by that to put them into those classrooms. So it's only by luck if that happens. So tell us more about that.

0:06:05.5 JD: Yeah, I think when I'm talking about methods, maybe I should maybe use a little bit different language, but I think probably the most important thing here is that the same sort of high quality curriculum is in front of students. And let's take a math curriculum, for example. Many schools, even at the school building level, there could very well be variation in what the teachers are putting in front of the students, and even in the same school, in the same grade level, let's take those three third grade math classrooms. Now, it's certainly possible that those teachers have taken upon themselves to have a highly sort of coherent system, it's also possible that their school or their district has a highly coherent system, but a lot of times what I found is that, each teacher is sort of making their own decisions, and they sort of say, I'm following the state standards, but those state standards are often general statements, and there's a lot of wiggle room [chuckle] into what you could sort of fit into that.

0:07:11.6 JD: And so what ends up happening is people go to the internet and go to various websites and they print off their preferred worksheets a lot of times. And so when I'm talking about variation in methods, what I'm mostly talking about is a high quality curriculum that's coherent and it's used in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade and fifth grade. Now, within that, teachers have... Still have many, many, many, many decisions to make in terms of how that curriculum gets used, how they sort of adapt it to their students, how they design individual lessons, there's all kinds of room for sort of creativity, individual decision-making, responding to how your students are doing when you actually put it in front of them, but that's mainly what I'm talking about when I'm talking about variation in methods.

0:08:04.8 AS: Okay, got it.

0:08:07.5 JD: Yeah. So, I mean, I think we sort of recognized this as a school network here in Columbus, we have the two elementary schools, the two middle schools. We're a fairly young organization and our oldest building is 15 years old, our newest building is only five years old, and so because we're a relatively young organization, many of our teachers are very early in their careers. So this sort of training, having a set of methods, a set of curricula that we're training on was really important, and so we thought it was so important in fact that we actually have a three-week... It's three and a half weeks that we call a summer institute for teachers prior to the start of the school year. It's a little bit shorter for veteran teachers, but for new teachers, it's three and a half weeks and they actually just finished it 'cause this is our first day of school actually today, so we have the summer institute, and so that was important to us, we're gonna have this training program for our early career teachers, but then the question quickly becomes, what is it that we're doing during that summer institute time period?

0:09:22.4 JD: And so that's where I think this sort of deliberate thought about training comes in, so one of the things that we did is design a capacity matrix for teachers, and so we've talked about this, but just basically outlining what are the capacities that we want teachers to learn and develop during their time with us, not only as new teachers, but it's a sort of an ongoing development road map really, and we have this capacity matrix that outlines the skills, the mindsets, the knowledge that we want teachers to sort of gain over time, some of it through this summer institute, and it sort of defines, "Here's the capacities." It breaks those capacities down into things that we're then linking to specific training sessions throughout that summer institute. And it's not really an evaluation tool, it's more like a road map for, "Here are the things I wanna be working on, here's how I'm doing, here's some areas where I can go learn this even, outside the training because the capacity matrix also has readings linked, it also has podcasts or videos or books that are linked, that if there's an area that a teacher is particularly interested in, they can do a deeper dive in it, and then there's also a way to sort of track their learning over time. So that's a way to sort of add some structure to this idea of instituting training on the job.

0:10:55.6 AS: It sounds like I would be excited to sit into that 3.5 week... Three and a half week summer institute. Like just the excitement of new teachers and of prior teachers sharing their experience. I imagine that they don't get that much time to do that during the school year.

0:11:15.7 JD: Yeah, it gets tough, I mean, unless you're really deliberate about building that into your schedule because most teachers are with students obviously the majority of the day, so we have this three and a half week summer institute for new teachers, and then we also built in at least an hour a week of PD on an ongoing basis, and then we also have eight days that are so...

0:11:35.1 AS: To the listeners out there, PD means Professional Development.

0:11:38.9 JD: Oh, right. Professional Development. Yep, Professional Development.

0:11:41.4 AS: Okay. Got it.

0:11:41.9 JD: Cheers. But you mentioned teachers are excited to share what they learn, and so this summer institute has a deliberate design on that front as well. So all teachers that are in their first and second year with United Schools Network go to this three and a half week training, and then it's about half that for more experienced teachers. But the reason we do that is because early on we got this feedback that for new teachers and the amount of stuff they're trying to download on the curriculum front, on the classroom management front and other areas is basically a blur. And then they come back after living it for a year now, they're going through that full summer institute as a second year teacher, they say, "Oh, I actually can sit at a table with the new teachers and they're actually a second teacher within the training." And that's a part of the deliberate design is you've kind of lived it, you've learned it, you've applied what you learned, and now I can come back, I'm still learning as a second year teacher, obviously, early in my career, but now I have a lot to sort of pass on during each of those trainings in addition to what they're getting from who the actual trainer is up in front of the room.

0:13:03.1 AS: Well, it's interesting because I was also thinking about a production line, like a worker on a production line doesn't say, "Okay, on my shift, we're gonna do this differently." A worker on a production line learns how that process works, how it's measured, why it's important to do it this way, so that it... How it impacts the next part of the process. So whether we talk about a worker on a production line, whether we talk about a worker in an office doing software development, the fact is is that ultimately what we really want is to standardize what we're doing and then innovate over time. It's not that we don't want an employee or a teacher to stand up and say, "Okay, I think we can improve this now. Yeah, we've been doing this for a year this way, but I see more improvements that could be done." And that's where you get into this process of PDSA and thinking about how do we improve this in a methodical way.

0:14:06.7 JD: Yeah. Well, and there's two things that come to mind. So I used to be the point person on curriculum development training. I led that training in our network for I think a dozen years. And so what I would tell the first year teachers... So I had first and second year teachers in my training every year. I would tell the first year teachers, you're gonna get a curriculum that's been built and tested over a number of years. Do not touch it across the school year. And here's the reason why. One, you're learning all these new procedures and processes, you're learning this new curriculum, and you're sort of learning it just in time to teach it to students in terms of the curriculum that you're gonna put in front of students. And all of these different stages are linked.

0:14:50.1 JD: And if you start making changes in an early stage, there's sort of this waterfall that happens throughout the entire process that you're not gonna be aware of initially. And so I tell them, wait till your second year that you have the full sort of system picture in your head of your curriculum before you start making changes. And that works pretty well, and and then you'd have the second year teachers there saying, "Yes, yes, do that, do that." [chuckle] 'Cause what he is saying is, "Basically, I learned this the hard way, or you know, I thought I could do this and what happens is, I had to... I thought I was changing a lesson and that ended up meaning I had to change a unit and then I had to change an assessment that's tied to this unit and so I didn't have that full picture." So that was one thing I'm thinking of. And another thing is, you know, we want feedback on this summer institute delivery. So many of the people that are delivering this training are senior leaders.

0:15:46.3 JD: Many have been with us for more than a decade. But even just this week we got this long feedback from a first year staff member on summer institute. And an organization can respond to that in different ways. It could be, well, "Who do you think you are sending me this feedback? You just got here." But the response to that staff member was, "This is great. School starts soon, let's... We'll wait a few weeks, schedule a time so this is still fresh in our heads, and we're gonna sort of take notes on this and think about how we could incorporate this feedback into the design of summer institute next summer." And so that's sort of the continual improvement mindset, be it... Could be at the individual teacher level, or in this case it's the whole network's summer institute that we're taking a look at, but everything is on the table for continual improvement, yeah.

0:16:35.9 AS: Well, and it raises another point, which Dr. Deming talks about. I know Toyota talks about too, in the stuff that they talk about, about being a learning organization. And what does it mean to be a learning organization? The most important thing about being a learning organization, to me, is the cumulative learning. It's not the training and we do this and we have this training and we support learning and all that, it's the cumulative learning. Like you said, we've been improving this, this process, this curriculum, this teaching process over many iterations and we've gotten it to here.

0:17:14.3 JD: Yep.

0:17:15.1 AS: The objective is to bring it to the next level.

0:17:17.3 JD: Yeah.

0:17:17.7 AS: Now, you can imagine, a way to think about that is, imagine you're a new CEO, you go in and you say, "We're throwing all that out and we're going with this." And it's like all that cumulative learning is gone.

0:17:30.5 JD: Yep. Yep.

0:17:31.3 AS: Now, it's not to say that that cumulative learning ended up in the right place. That's a whole another discussion about being in touch with the customer.

0:17:40.3 JD: Yep.

0:17:41.2 AS: And making sure that you're delivering with your cumulative learning.

0:17:44.5 JD: Yep.

0:17:44.8 AS: But if you are delivering what you're supposed to be delivering to your, you know, what your customer wants, then, then it really is a matter of how do you keep that learning in your organization? And I think that's... So your three and a half week summer institute is a great example of a training method and the response about, "Hey, that's a... We are going to get all this feedback of lots of improvements, but we're not gonna do it right now, we're gonna put that together, think about it, observe, and then try to figure out, okay, one of these is particularly good." For instance, in my case with my valuation masterclass bootcamp, I'm just about to launch my 11th bootcamp.

0:18:23.9 AS: So, and I can do my iterations in about eight weeks. Bootcamp lasts six weeks, I take two weeks off, then we do it again. And I'm trying to do as many iterations as I can. And the newest iteration, after many great iterations is we are gonna test a buddy system. And we've been designing it, discussing it, looking at how do we build this into the program with the objective that the buddy system basically helps our pass rate. In other words, the people that feel like dropping out don't drop out because they've made a connection with one individual, they're already on a team, so they got a team feedback. So that is a new, just one new learning piece that we're gonna test and then see where it ends up at the end of the, you know, of the, of the six weeks. So that's an example.

0:19:11.0 JD: Yeah, that's a really good example. And I know we talked about the, that class prior, that eight-week class and... Sorry, the six week class and how it's sort of a natural sort of PDSA cycle that you're running through each of those. So you have a lot of those cycles. You just kind of keep making it better and better, you know?

0:19:28.7 AS: Well, that's what... When I heard you talk about, we'll look at that at the next three and a half week summer institute I thought, "Gosh, does it, is that," I mean, I guess that you've got improvements that you're doing throughout the school year, that you're already determined this is the things we're gonna work on, but also you have to accept the fact that everybody's probably overloaded. And so it isn't that easy to say we're gonna improve a zillion things. And that's for the listeners out there, you know, it's an important thing to understand your own capacities in your organization and to understand the cycles that you're doing through your process. If you can speed up the cycles, then you can speed up your testing and your learning. And that's something that most of the time we'll just say, well, my cycle is my cycle, but maybe not. Maybe there's some way to speed it up, 'cause I know we used to teach the valuation masterclass bootcamp every six months, and I'm like, no, it's not enough cycles.

0:20:25.0 JD: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, I mean, being able to do those sprints like that on a repeated basis is definitely an advantage, you know. I think when I was leading that curriculum development training, so there was, it was usually a two day training, the one I was doing. And, you know, I would get some on the spot feedback. I'd say if there's something that's, I can improve to make this a better experience tell me, just write, you know, if it's something I can fix quick. That's how I handled that in the moment. And then I would have some more formal surveys and, you know, some of that feedback I could take and apply to other things that were similar workshops I was doing, you know, throughout the professional development I was leading throughout the year. And then the first thing that I did as I started making that two day session better for the next summer institute was go back through that more formal feedback that folks had left. Then I have, I have those boxes of trainings going back that dozen years, including all the feedback that I got over the dozen years. So, yeah.

0:21:25.5 AS: So let's, I think that wraps up a great discussion on principle six. And I'll just summarize a couple things from it before we move on to principle seven, which is, principle six is institute training on the job. The point is, you want to get everybody to make better contributions to the system. And training is for skills as you've talked to us about. Whereas education is maybe for the acquisition of knowledge. And training is about learning how to do a job with a particular set of tools. And the aim is to reduce variation in methods. And you talked about classroom management, you talked about instruction and you talked about the same high quality curriculum in front of the students. We also talked about your three and a half week summer institute, which is happening before the school term starts. And the value of that. And you talked about the capacity matrix where you're looking at, you know, a roadmap and trying to link specific training sessions to activities and stuff. Is there anything you would add to wrap up principle six?

0:22:26.3 JD: Yeah, it's just in that capacity matrix is, sort of begin with the end. It's, that's where we started with the roadmap and sort of then worked our way backwards to the training from that, what was the end goal, these things in the capacity matrix. And then we sort of plan backwards from there, map that back to the summer institute.

0:22:44.6 AS: Got it. And now, principle seven, leadership.

0:22:48.6 JD: Yeah, principle seven is adopt and institute leadership. And basically the aim of the leadership is to help people that are working in a system do a better job. And that's management's responsibility. And Deming here is specifically talking about shifting from that focus on outcomes or solely focusing on outcomes to focusing on the quality of learning experiences or other types of services that are being produced by the education system. I think in Deming's language, he was talking about the transformation and he was talking about this, including in the transition of managers and supervisors to become leaders. And so he was I think looking at abolishing this focus on outcome, the management by numbers, the numerical goals, performance appraisal, merit pay, and installing what he called leadership. And then, you know, he sort of operationally defined what he meant by that.

0:23:52.8 JD: But basically, you know, leadership following Deming philosophy, I think the most important thing is that leaders are responsible for creating this environment, in our case, where educators and students can have sort of genuine interest in their work and that, you know, they're supported to do it well. And I think, you know, this becomes like a mutually reinforcing activity. Meaning that if people are interested in their work and learning, then they'll wanna do it well, they're gonna accept help to do that. You know, and if we set up the conditions to help them do that well, then their interest will increase and this sort of virtuous cycle is created. But then I think in many cases we have the opposite that occurs, sort of, when we don't have this type of leadership, get this vicious cycle where people just aren't, they don't feel like they're doing a good job, their interest in work or learning plummets, and then this causes them to in turn do a poorer job, which in turn lessens interest further.

0:24:58.6 JD: And I think one of the things I think of is education sort of broadly in the United States is sort of in one of these vicious cycles. We talked about the number of new teachers that are coming into the system and then being spat out of the system each year. There's this constant churn, we're sort of in this vicious cycle where we get all these new teachers across the United States, and many of those new teachers are leaving because of dissatisfaction, not feeling like they're doing a good job, not feeling like they have been set up for success. Those types of things. And I'm convinced and that's why I wrote the book and talk about these things. I'm convinced that the virtuous cycle is more likely to occur when we transform following the System of Profound Knowledge. I think when you truly appreciate your organization as a system, you have sort of logical theories of variation and knowledge and at least a basic understanding of psychological concepts like intrinsic motivation. I think that's when you truly have a chance to transform your organization.

0:26:11.2 JD: And I talked about Dr. Deming operationally defining leadership. What was he talking, cause there's many different sort of, probably we'd have many different definitions if we surveyed a hundred people about what it means to be a leader. And there's this great resource that Dr. Deming distributed at many of his four day seminars, especially the ones closer to the end of his life called Some Attributes of a Leader. And there's sort of nine points to that really, when I go through those, they really paint a clear picture, okay, this is really what leadership means when you're following the Deming philosophy. So I think it's worth unpacking those a little bit.

0:26:56.7 AS: And do you think... I mean, where do people fall down? Where they're supposed to be bringing leadership to an organization and instead they're bringing, I don't know, something else.

0:27:11.7 JD: Yeah, something else. And maybe even people that would um, maybe sometimes display some of these attributes, I think where we often fall down as leaders is when things get tough. And that's when we actually need to double down on these attributes, these leadership attributes. And when oftentimes we sort of revert back to the prevailing system of management, 'cause it's easier, maybe maybe even get some short-term impact, but it's always worse in the long-term, and that's the problem. And these things are hard. Some people probably could pinpoint some on this list of nine that they do well and others that maybe where they struggle. And I think that's fine, but I think having this list that explicitly defines leadership within the Deming philosophy is important. So I just go through these?

0:28:11.4 AS: Yeah. Go ahead.

0:28:11.9 JD: And we can talk about... I think the first one, and we've talked about elements of all of these things, but the first one is just really whatever I'm a leader of, whether it's a department or a school or whatever, whatever business unit that I'm a leader of, I think understanding how that fits into the overall aim of the system is really, really important. How does my grade level, or how does my classroom, or how is my school, how is my school system, how does it fit into the larger system? And I think you have to know that. That's key. A second attribute would be in that recognition of where you fit in the system is that you have a responsibility to work with preceding and following stages.

0:29:02.0 JD: This is pretty easy to sort of identify in a school system. If I'm a third grade teacher, I need to work with second grade teachers. I need to work with the fourth grade teachers. And that doesn't... That type of vertical sort of work doesn't often happen in a school system. But, you know, that focus has to be on our customer, both internal and external. And if I'm a third grade teacher, one of my customers is the second grade teacher, and one of my customers is also the fourth grade teacher. I think many managers, I think sort of see as one of their primary responsibilities to motivate the people that work on their team. And I think a sort of a better frame, and this is attribute three, is that leaders should work to remove barriers to joy in work and learning.

0:29:58.4 JD: And that's a slightly different conception. Maybe it's a very different conception than, you're not trying to motivate folks. You're trying to remove things that would lead to joy in work and learning, removing those barriers, that's what your job is as a leader. I think attribute four is, you are really there when you're a leader to act as a coach and counsel, not a judge. So I think that's an easy one to default to acting like a judge when things aren't going well. And one of the things about being a leader is knowing when someone is truly outside of the system and in need of special help. And that could be an employee, a teacher, a principal, or it could be a student.

0:30:53.2 JD: It's not, when we understand variation using the sort of Deming philosophy, we're not asking are our students or our employees different, but rather are they significantly different? And that's where some of these statistical methods come in. And when you have this in your leadership toolkit, then you know what questions to ask and you also know what action to take. Sure, some students might be performing lower than others, but are they statistically significant differences? And if they are, I'm gonna react to that. I think of, there is this really great figure that demonstrate this, where you have like a bell curve and you're trying to shrink the variation of that bell curve.

0:31:44.8 JD: You're trying to move it to the right, assuming right is better performance. And then you're sort of looking, is there anybody that requires special help 'cause they're outside of that system. And then if they are, then you have to provide that. That's a responsibility of leadership. But something like a process behavior chart or a control chart can help point you toward those data points that you should be paying attention to. I think another sort of key attribute of a leader is you're obviously always working to improve teaching and learning processes. Everybody's gonna say that. But what you're doing is trying to improve those processes instead of doing the sorting, the tracking, the ranking, the grading, those types of things. So that's what I was talking about when things get hard, yout know that's what people default to because it's sort of known.

0:32:46.4 JD: Attribute seven is creating trust, which, I think that, it goes without saying, whether people do that I think is another thing. I think there's lots of different ways to do that. But a key thing when you're a manager I think is follow through. I think you don't follow through on plans, if you don't follow through on commitments, I think that's where I see a lot of leaders sort of drop the ball and people stop trusting.

0:33:17.5 AS: Let me ask you about, number four I believe was act as a coach, not a judge. What was number five?

0:33:23.7 JD: Number five was, was, I don't think I stated it really explicitly, but basically, basically using data to help them understand people and themselves. So basically using knowledge about variation to understand who, if anybody, is in need of special help.

0:33:43.0 AS: Yeah. And six?

0:33:44.4 JD: Six was, working to improve the teaching and learning processes versus relying on the sorting, the tracking, the grading, the ranking. And that could be students or rating and ranking employees too. Seven was create trust.

0:34:00.2 AS: And then seven is creating trust.

0:34:03.5 JD: Yep. I think eight is, don't expect perfection. Forgive a mistake. People are gonna make mistakes. And in fact, you wanna, part of our capacity matrix for new teachers is how do you create a culture of error with students in your classroom? And that means instead of hiding mistakes, students are comfortable, when they make a mistake, highlighting that so that we can give feedback and fix it basically. Yeah.

0:34:34.2 AS: Yep.

0:34:34.2 JD: That's learning is, you get it wrong, then you get it right. Right? But you can't do that if people are always trying to sort of protect their mistakes, that type of thing. And then nine I think is, you know, listening and learning without passing judgment on the folks that they're listening to. I think that's... Again, a lot of these things are, you know, people have heard them before. I think many people would say they do them. I think, again, in reality, [chuckle] if you got that feedback from the folks that are in your department or in your school or in your school system, you might not be doing as well on those things as you may have thought.

0:35:16.7 AS: Let me summarize this a little bit for all of us. So we're talking about principle seven, adopt and institute leadership. The idea is help people in the system to do a better job and shifting from focusing on outcomes to quality of services. And I remember when I was in university, MBO was the big thing. Now it's KPI, but MBO was management by objective. And a lot of what he, Dr. Deming was talking about is by what method? It's not just, hey, let's just agree on, what, you get the result. I don't care how you get it.

0:35:50.2 JD: Right.

0:35:50.3 AS: And then you also talked about how leaders are responsible for creating the environment. You also talked about without leadership, there's like a downward spiral. And that maybe the US is in that downward spiral. And you see that when leaders really fail is when times get tough and they gotta make tough decisions. And then finally on that, you talked about how the System of Profound Knowledge could possibly be a way out of this downward spiral and into a cycle of learning. You talked about the nine principles, number one, understand how my area fits into the larger system. Two, you need to work with the preceding and following stages. You need to understand that. Number three, work to remove barriers to joy in work. I love that. Number four, act as a coach, not a judge. Number five, use data and knowledge of variation to help people better understand. Number six, work to improve the process rather than spending your time on rating and ranking. Number seven is create trust. Number eight is don't expect perfection. And number nine is listen and learn without passing judgment. Is there anything you would add to wrap up this awesome discussion?

0:37:02.0 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think just being really deliberate with the language instead of principles so we don't confuse people. I would call those, those are attributes of a leader.

0:37:11.5 AS: Okay.

0:37:11.8 JD: Just to kind of keep that clear, and, you know, a common question for Dr. Deming, I think at his seminars, because since he railed against performance appraisal, you know, a typical audience sort of follow up question then is: "Well, how do you choose candidates for promotion?" And his typical answer was, "What better than the ability to be a leader?" And then, so what he was talking about were those nine attributes. You identify those nine attributes, those are the people that you wanna be promoting in your organization. Folks that possess those.

0:37:44.7 AS: Yes. And I would just add to that in wrapping up that, part of what you realize as you get more mature, and I think most people understand it even at a low level or starting out in a business or their career, is that no measure captures what you need. You need to make a judgment about a person as a potential leader. There's no measure that could have determined Steve Jobs' ability to create Apple. In fact, if you had measured it, you probably would've kicked him out, which they did. And then eventually he came back.

[laughter]

0:38:21.6 AS: And so...

0:38:22.2 JD: Yeah.

0:38:22.6 AS: Go ahead.

0:38:23.3 JD: It'd be a hard thing. Well, I was just gonna say, as a principal, one of the types of leaders I was choosing, it was who was gonna be the grade level chair. So that was like a teacher leader position in our building. And I knew when I worked through that process, people applied for it. And I would sort of name the grade level chair. When I didn't hear a single piece of feedback, I knew I picked the right person, because people were like, yeah, that's the person. Right? And when you get a lot of pushback, [chuckle] that's when you just sort of need to go reevaluate, does this person actually have these nine attributes?

0:38:57.3 AS: Beautiful. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for another awesome discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, and of course, you can find John's book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work and learning," I'm gonna add in.

Most of the time, variation between students or workers is the result of common cause situations, but sometimes you find folks who consistently aren't performing at the same level. Does more punishment work? What should you do instead? In the episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss how managers (or teachers) should approach these "special cause" situations.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in his New Economics book about the role of a manager of people after the transformation. This is on page 86 of the third edition, or page 125 of the second edition. And this is point number nine. Let me read it to you before we get started. So again, for a, the role of a manager of people, this is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. Point number nine, he will try to discover who, if anyone, is outside the system in need of special help. This can be accomplished with simple calculations. If there be individual figures on production or on failures. Special help may be only simple rearrangement of work. It might be more complicated. He in need of special help is not in the bottom 5% of the distribution of others. He is clean outside that distribution. And Dr. Deming presents a normal distribution and some other things, in this chart that he presents in this one. And we're gonna call this episode: Who Needs Special Help? David, take it away.

0:01:40.5 David Langford: Okay. Yeah, this is always a topic of discussion because, there's all kinds of management theories out there, right? About, how we manage, I can't remember who, was a proponent of just getting rid of the bottom 10% of your...

0:01:57.9 AS: Jack Welch.

0:01:58.0 DL: Organization every year. Jack Welch, yeah. Notoriously wrong, with that. And, or well, "if you can't cut it, out you go." And that all sounds good until it becomes so expensive to constantly be hiring new people and replacing people. And the fear level goes up so high that you can't get anything done because nobody wants to take any risks because you really can't take a risk because you might be gone. So Deming is saying a lot really in this point, he talks about the distribution of people. Well, so first thing is you have to figure out what is that distribution, right? So how are you calculating that? Or how are you figuring out what that performance level is? Well, as a teacher in a classroom, obviously, you have tests that you're giving, you have projects that are happening, etcetera. It is actually pretty easy to see that distribution of performance in a classroom. You give a simple test on something and then you look at the test results and you start to see, okay, everybody scored on this test from 70%-100% on this test, right? So you can say, okay, that's an average of about 85 or so for the whole class.

0:03:31.5 DL: When you look at it on a histogram scale like that, what Deming is really talking about, he's not talking about just the people that were scoring at the lower end of that distribution. People that were getting 70, 75, 80, etcetera. They were all at the lower end of the distribution of that system. But what it's showing is that's the capability of the system. You did something, you did a process with people, you tested the process, the process produced that curve, and on average, it gives you an average of 85. Now deciding whether or not that's good, is good, is good good enough, that's a whole different really discussion than what really Deming is talking about here. So he's not talking about people just on the lower end of a distribution of performance. He's really talking about somebody that's completely outside of that distribution. So in a classroom, if I did something like that and we did a project or a test or whatever, and everybody is scoring from 70%-100% except for maybe two people that got 10 or 5, right?

0:04:46.6 DL: Obviously these are two people completely outside of the system. And what he is really talking about is probably no amount of adjusting the system is going to help those two people. They are so far outside of the distribution that they really do need special help. So in a classroom that can mean, this could be children with special needs, they could be hearing defects, they could be the eyesight that, I don't know how many times I thought somebody was an understanding problem. And then we find out, oh, they couldn't see, either they couldn't see to read or they couldn't see the...

0:05:31.8 AS: Something very simple.

0:05:32.3 DL: The whiteboard in front of them. Yeah. And they got tested and got glasses and everything and wow, it just made a huge difference. But obviously when you have people in a special category, it's gonna take much more time and effort individually to deal with them. Right? And that's why it's called special, special needs, right? Because you are gonna take the time and effort individually to deal with those individuals. If you don't have anybody completely outside of the distribution of performance, then you're gonna go back and look at the system itself. So in my example, everybody is scoring from 70%-100% on some test that you give them. And the average is 85. Then you have to decide is good good enough, is that a good enough distribution on this? And as a teacher a lot of that has to do with understanding where does this fit in the entire curriculum.

0:06:40.2 DL: So is this a critical skill, that if these students don't have this skill and they don't have it just down pat, and are acing it, it's gonna cause huge problems later on. So it might be worth the time to go back and sort of rework that for the entire class and see if we can get a higher average. On other things, you might look at that and say, "Oh, okay. Only I know really the whole curriculum for the year, and I know that we're gonna be revisiting the same concept probably four more times throughout the year. So this average at this time of the year is probably good enough." I often joke with teachers and say, "If you're happy with your average, and you know it, clap your hands," so.

[laughter]

0:07:31.0 DL: But if you're not happy with your average and you know it, then you have to think about, okay, well what am I gonna do about it? Do I have the time to go back and rework this? And Deming in his example in figure 12, that he's showing there, is actually talking about moving in the entire system forward. So shrinking the variation so that it's not nearly as wide as it used to be, and more people are getting a higher average within that. So how do you get that higher average? Well, prevention is the key to quality. So every time you're doing a lesson that you've done before and you're taking that feedback that you've gotten before, folding that in. And this time when I did it, ah wow, we got an average of 89, or we got an average of 93, or...Excuse me. It's really difficult when you're improving a system and you're moving that average up, each time you go through something, when you start to get up and really high levels performance, going from 93 to 94 is a really big effort.

0:08:57.4 DL: There's gotta be something really happening there to get that next level result. And do you really have the time right now to get that? Or is it a problem of tomorrow that we have to figure out, okay, what are we gonna do in this system, in the future, to get a higher average? But I didn't believe, really, this when I started working with Deming, but then I went back and looked at all the grades and scores that I had given people, and I was so predictable. Every year I had the exact number, the same number of people getting A's or doing top-level work. I had the same level of percentage of kids that were failing I had... But of course it was always their fault, not my fault, so. And so that was really eyeopening to me that all I had been doing is just basically, for five or six years I had been doing the same thing over and over, and over, and expecting a different result. And it just doesn't work like that.

0:10:05.2 AS: Yeah, this one is interesting because first of all, he's presenting us with a distribution. We can see a normal distribution, and he's presenting also a more narrow distribution, saying that the goal is to try to, maybe in this particular case that he's showing to, he says, "You wanna work to improve the system by narrowing that distribution so that..." And shifting it, as we can see, as we've talked about. But I think also in this one, if you don't understand the system, you can get caught up in chasing performance in individuals that actually are just a normal outcome. And you miss the time that you need to spend to fix that special cause that needs to be fixed. So that was one of the things I took away from it. What do you think about that?

0:11:02.6 DL: Yeah, that's why he hated practices like grading on a curve. Which is notorious, it is still is notorious in many universities, grading on a curve. And... Because that shows no understanding of performance and distribution and average performance and it takes no accountability. And for you as the teacher, it just all blame on the student. "Well, if you tried hard, you could do that." Well, no, that's not true. There's only gonna be so many A's, so many B's, etcetera. So you're not gonna ever get there, so. But really this is about... Go ahead.

0:11:43.8 AS: To understand that a little bit more, so is the problem about grading on a curve that you're constantly... You're not necessarily improving? You're just like, "Well, this group had a curve that was here on the continuum and this group had a little bit better, they were better." And what is it? 'Cause I'd say grading on a curve is something that people on initial blush would think, "Isn't that what Deming is talking about?" I mean, we see normal distributions, we see curves. Explain that in more detail.

0:12:15.1 DL: You're creating an artificial scarcity of top marks. So only... No matter how well we do as a class, there's only gonna be so many top marks or people that are gonna get the top grade, right? And so you're gonna create all kinds of competition and you're gonna create all kinds of weird behaviors that go on. You're actually encouraging people to cheat. And I can't remember if I told you this story or not, but one of my children, she was in a advanced chemistry class or something, I think it was. And she comes home the first day of school and she said, "Dad, I think this teacher would be really interested in talking with you about what you do and improvement, and everything else." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "'Cause he said, well, everybody in here can achieve, everybody in here can get an A, can do well."

0:13:14.1 DL: She comes home the second day of school and she said, "I think I'm gonna drop this chemistry class." And I said, "What happened in two days?" She said, "He came back today and he spent the whole hour of the class explaining how he grades on a curve. So there's no way in the world that everybody in here is gonna get an A," right? You're creating an artificial scarcity of top marks and it's just not gonna happen. And I said, "Okay, well, just let me know what you decide to do with that." Well, she comes home the next day and she said, "I think I'm gonna stay in the class. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be one of the people on top of the curve." And this was an honors chemistry class and in that class, half of the kids in that class had had straight A, 4.0 averages to that point. So, there was a bunch of kids that quit, 'cause they could not risk getting even a B in a class like that.

0:14:18.0 DL: But my daughter stayed in the class, at the end of the first semester, she comes home laughing one day and she said, "Dad, you'll never guess what happened." I said, what? And she said, well, this is a very, very smart group of kids. And not only did kids keep track of their own scores, they actually kept track of other kids' scores in the class as well. And I think there were one or two kids that found out that there were a bunch of kids that were just right on the line between a B and a C or something. But if those kids failed, it wouldn't make any difference to them. They're still gonna get the same grade at the end of the semester. Even if they didn't even take the final, it's not gonna affect them one way or the other, they're still gonna get that B or a C grade that was in that. But if they did fail it would mean it would change the curve and these other top kids could move up into the top echelon.

0:15:13.3 DL: And so they paid these kids $20 to fail the final. Well, somehow the teacher found out about it and then the principal found out about it. And there was a Spanish inquisition that was taking place and then they were talking about expelling kids and all kinds of stuff, I couldn't stand it, I had to go and talk to the principal and I said, how do you like it? He said, what do you mean? I said, "They're better at managing your system than you. They figured out how to play your game better than you. And you gotta be rewarding these kids not... And recognizing amazing statistical analysis and capability, not punishing them through that process, so." I think it was the same principal that said, "I know I'm having a bad day when your car is in the parking lot," so.

[laughter]

0:16:06.6 AS: Exactly. You should have said, you should have been... You didn't even realize you were teaching 'em a double major AP chemistry and AP statistics.

0:16:17.6 DL: Yeah, absolutely. So.

0:16:19.3 AS: Well, let's wrap this up by... I think the key thing of what Dr. Deming is telling us in this is about understanding your system and then identifying if someone is outside of the system, and that person or result outside of the system is... You know, warrants some special attention or special help and that that, you can't really know that without understanding the system and also not being too distracted by the variation that's natural from that system. And therefore, ultimately, once you understand that, then you really can clearly identify that some outcome or some individual is a special cause and then you can focus in on that and fix it. And so that's how I would summarize it. Is there anything else you'd add to that?

0:17:12.9 DL: Yeah. I was just was recalling that you are... Deming explaining several times that if somebody is outside of the systems that, far outside of the system, further rating and ranking are not gonna help them at all. Giving them more failures, more Fs, docking their pay. Whatever you're thinking of doing to somebody that's completely outside the system it's really not gonna help them at all in that process. And that... That's not help. Rating and ranking and bribing people to do better is not actually helping them. You actually have to study cause or the reason why that person is special cause and then do something about it. And in a classroom, and it could very well be that this person really doesn't belong in this class. They don't have the prerequisite skills that the other 98% of the class has. And so therefore they really don't even belong in this class. So that just means you have to get them in a different class or help them in some way to get caught up or, and it's gonna take more time and effort. Special causes take more time and effort. That's why they're special. So.

0:18:31.3 AS: Well, David, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey and you can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about resource management in a non-traditional sense. Bill explains how managing the variation and integration in your product or service is just as important as increasing consistency and removing waste.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is episode nine, Resource Management. Bill, take it away.

0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And thanks for our audience and thanks for joining in again. So we're picking up following episode nine, which was, I called it the Paradigms of Variation. It was, I think the title on the podcast may be a little bit different, but what we've been building up to from the beginning is, parallel tracks. But one aspect that I've been trying to bring forward is this idea of variation in the white beads. We talked about the white bead experiment and the idea that the red beads are not caused by the workers, they're caused by the system.

0:01:13.5 BB: And then what if we got to the point that there were no more red beads? Yes, we can make the red beads faster, we can make the red beads cheaper, but could we make, I'm sorry, we can make the white beads faster. We can make the white beads cheaper with the elimination of the red beads, but if we're dealing with nothing but white beads that are cheaper and made faster, can we improve the quality of the beads? And what I found is, when I press on people, they'll say, "Yes, everything can be improved. Everything can be improved. When I press, press, press, they'll say faster. They'll say cheaper. I said, "Yeah, we said that." I said, "But can they be better?"

0:01:53.4 BB: Is that what Dr. Deming's trying to say with continuous improvement that we stop it a 100% white beads? Or can we go further? And I find people get stuck. And I think it's very easy to get stuck, because that's the world we live in of good parts and bad parts. We focus on the bad to make them good. And what do they do when they're good? Well, they met requirements. But what's missing is this key word called variation. And yes, there's variation in the red beads and Dr. Deming would plot that on a control chart. But Dr. Deming also discovered in, definitely in 1960, from Dr. Taguchi who he met a few years earlier, this notion of variation in the white beads and that the, so I talked earlier also about question number one and quality management.

0:02:44.0 BB: Does this quality characteristic meet requirements? There's only two answers, remember Andrew, yes or no. But then question number two is how many ways are there to meet requirements? And I'd say there's an infinite number if you take into account, how many decimal places you can go. And that, the idea that you can have anywhere from the absolute minimum to the absolute maximum of the requirements is there's all those places be in between. That's called variation. And does it matter where you are within spec? Within spec? And again, by spec I mean specification. You've met the requirements for the activity. And so what we did in episode nine, I'm sorry, episode eight is look at what I call the Two Distribution exercise. And you may have caught me saying there are four suppliers.

0:03:41.7 BB: And at the end I said, forget about the four. There's actually two. I've done it with four, I've done it with two but the important thing is when I show people a number of distributions within requirements, and one of them will be, we'll go from the minimum to the maximum with near zero and frequency at either end to then high in the middle. And I'll say, "The middle is the ideal value." And then I'll say, let's say you also have a really narrow distribution consuming, and I said, last time, 10% of the variation, what I meant to say, and I said at least once, is 10% of the tolerance that, so you're using a very small portion of the tolerance, but you're far away from the ideal value.

0:04:27.0 BB: You're shifted to the right. And so when I give people the choice of buying from one of those two suppliers under the idealized situation, you may recall, Andrew, of same price, same schedule, everything's guaranteed to meet requirements. We've got histograms, we've got control charts. The processes are in control with all those, what Ackoff would call idealized situations. Make it really, really simple. Do I go with the wide one centered on the ideal value or the narrow one over to the right? And time again, people take the really narrow one, which we said was about, why do you like the really narrow one? Because they're more consistent. Then I explained that that's precision. And that's the most popular answer. And I'm reminded of that every time I use the exercise. Within the last few days, I've used it again.

0:05:19.6 BB: And that narrow one gets people's attention. What I find really fascinating is if the goal is to meet requirements, then why is the answer not, I'll take either one of them, which was one of the choices. You could take the wide one in the middle that covers the entire, or the narrow one. Why does it matter? Why not say in the world of meeting requirements, what's the driver behind the narrow one? Why don't people say it doesn't matter anymore? And I think because there's something about variation and consistency. I was talking with somebody the other day and they said, "Being consistent is, that's everything in terms of quality." And I said, "Not quite. Not quite." What... And this will become the focus of a later episode, that you could, ideally you could put the variation where you want it to be along the ideal and end up with improved what?

0:06:18.4 BB: The answer is improved integration. Because the very simple model we use in organizations is that if the parts are good, whether it's two parts, three parts, four parts, number of parts going together, you have to have at least two. And I say if the parts are good, then they fit. That's the model. If the parts are good, then they fit, then is there anything wrong with that model? And people are like, "No, that's the model we use." If the parts are good, then they fit. Now, if you're developing an airplane or a rocket engine, you've got a wing and a fuselage, then you've got all the parts to make the wing, all the parts to make the fuselage, all the parts that do these separate components, you could say the same thing for a play. You have all the elements of the first act, all the elements of the second act, and then you put them together for the entire play. So the point is that what I'm talking about is that integration is not black and white.

[overlapping conversation]

0:07:23.2 AS: What... Just... Can you define integration just so we can make sure we understand it?

0:07:27.5 BB: Yeah. Integration is when I'm going to put the cap onto the bottle of water. That's integration. The cap is good, the bottle is good. Now I'm trying to put the cap, which is good, and the bottle, which is good, and I'm trying to put the cap onto the bottle.

0:07:46.0 AS: Okay.

0:07:46.5 BB: Yeah. That's integration. Or I'm trying to put the, I'm trying to put two parts of something together. I'm trying to put the cap on top of the pen. What I love about water bottles as a prop is wherever I'm presenting, someone in your room will have a water bottle. And I'll say, can I use this as a prop? Sure. And I say, if all the requirements for the cap are met, what do we say about the cap? It's good. And if all the requirements for the bottle are met, what do we say about the bottle? It's good. Then I'll say, see what we're doing? We're managing parts in isolation. We're saying the cap is good, the body is good. Then I say, why don't we focus on how well the cap mates with the bottle? And I had a co-worker once said, well, if the cap is good and the bottle is good, then won't it fit. Fit as in absolute fit, right?

0:08:39.7 BB: Not relative fit 'cause remember in early episodes we talked about black and white thinking versus shades of gray thinking. Good versus bad is black and white. Fit is black and white. It fits or it doesn't. What I'm talking about Andrew, is the idea that there's variation in good and the variation in good cap, and the variation in the good bottle show up when I go to put the cap onto the bottle. Because if the, if the outer diameter of the bottle is on the high side and the cap, inner diameter is on the low side, then I'm gonna have trouble putting the cap onto the bottle, 'cause one's too small, one's too large. Boom. And, so what I'm trying to imply, [chuckle] not what I'm trying to imply. What I'm stating is fit is not absolute. It's relative. Integration, which is about fit, is relative. And I don't, did we talk Andrew about a hundred percent…?

0:09:41.1 AS: Wait a minute. You gotta say that again. I didn't catch that. I know many of our listeners are a little faster than me. But say that again about relative versus...

0:09:56.6 BB: Okay, so what I'm saying is the fundamental model we're using is if the cap is good of the water bottle and the bottle is good, then the cap will fit onto the bottle. It'll fit when you go to...

0:10:05.7 AS: Yep.

0:10:07.8 BB: Put the, put it on it fits just like that. What I'm talking about…

0:10:12.1 AS: And when you say fit, are you using that as a general term in a system or are you just talking specifically about the cap?

0:10:17.8 BB: No, no, I'm really, I'm glad you brought this up. What the suggestion is that fit, there's only one degree of fit. It goes together you know with a, technically what we're talking about is how much torque is required to screw it on, how much force is required. And so fit is about how much force is required to screw it on. And the implication behind them being good and fit is that they always fit the same. So the model is that parts that are good fit together the same way each time. And that's not the case. So there's a... And I, one of my first exposures to this was reading a book by David Kearns and I mentioned this, I don't know which episode. And I said that Frank Pipp, an assembly plant manager at this Ford factory had his assembly team routinely buy competitor's cars and put them together.

0:11:19.4 BB: Because at the Ford plant, most of the time when they're putting parts together, they needed rubber mallets to bang them together because they didn't quite fit. And, so they needed help. And the help was the hammers to bang them together and out. Every now and then two parts went together without a hammer. That means fit is easy as opposed to hammers, which means fit is difficult. So imagine you've got everything between I can put them together, with little effort at all to I need a hammer to bang them together. That's degrees of fit, which I'm saying Andrew is degrees of integration.

0:12:00.4 AS: Okay.

0:12:01.2 BB: And, so the point I was trying to, what got me excited about Taguchi's work and then really excited when I saw Dr. Deming realizing it, is that when I came across this a hundred percent snap fit Toyota pickup truck story account, I thought, well, holy cow. And I found in listening to these podcasts that I use a expression quite a bit.

0:12:24.1 AS: Holy cow cow, holy spicoli.

0:12:26.3 BB: Holy... Holy cow, Andrew [laughter] But what was cool is this Ford plant has discovered that Toyota, where I know Dr. Deming had some influence, but some influence, okay, what influence? that's a whole 'nother topic, but I know Taguchi had an influence there. So I'm looking at that with my understanding of variation and thinking, that's incredible. And brought that awareness to my coworkers at Rocketdyne. And we developed, with, I provided the education, they provided the hands-on go make it work. They developed hardware that went together beautifully. And why is this important, Andrew? And this is one of the things we got to in the end of the last podcast is if you would like your customers to have products that go together easily if they're assembling it or going together means that it, this product fits well with how they use it.

0:13:22.7 BB: That the car starts each time or the stopwatch, whatever they're using, works really well, which means there's degrees of performance. That's what excites me about the idea that if we can pay attention to the variation, we can either have designs that require hammers to assemble or we can design them to go together well. And, and all of this is to say that's what prompted me to get people excited by the paradigms of variation to get them to better understand that a mindset of meeting requirements is different from a mindset of precision, which is different from a mindset of accuracy. And what I've just repeated is Paradigm A is meet requirements. Get the darts somewhere on the dartboard. Meet requirements be anywhere within the requirements. Paradigm B is this idea that we're striving for consistency, incredible uniformity, otherwise known as, as precision.

0:14:30.7 BB: And, and there may be a place for that. But what Dr. Taguchi's talking about is different than that, that's precision is Paradigm B. Paradigm C is trying to be close to target. So that's taken the distribution, which is precise, and then finding a way to adjust it to be on the bullseye. And what does that gain us, Andrew? That, well, first of all, I would say when we're working at home looking for, working on the recipe, trying to get exactly one cup of flour, exactly 350 degrees, exactly one hour in the oven. As we pay attention to how close we are to those values, chances are we're gonna end up with an incredible product. And that's, we're trusting that the person who developed the recipe has done that.

0:15:23.2 BB: But so whether it is woodworking or working on any project, it could be making things out of cloth where you're, you're putting together some outfit out of cloth that my father used to do for my sister when he was in the textile business. That is about the idea that things come together well is about accuracy in improving integration. And that's what I find the Deming philosophy offers an understanding of what does it take to inspire an organization where, where it takes the people working on their different elements, not to meet the requirements any way they choose, but to meet requirements in a - ready Andrew - synchronous way. So you and I are on the soccer pitch, and it's not about your position, it's about my position and your position on defense that we're trying to win the World Cup.

0:16:25.2 AS: Yeah.

0:16:26.4 BB: And so all of that is about the Paradigms of Variation. Go ahead, Andrew. You were gonna say.

0:16:29.0 AS: You referenced sports and I was just thinking about how easily we work together in team activities, team sports that are just, clearly great teams are the ones that integrate each individual's doing their own personal work and they're doing training and they're improving themselves, and then they're practicing together. How do we bring this together into an integrated system that then wins?

0:16:54.9 BB: That's right. And so when you say bring together, that's what integration is. It's bring together, right? And we're looking, we we're screened a bunch of candidates on the phone, now we bring them in for face-to-face interviews. What are we looking for? Why isn't it enough that they meet the requirements that are on the website? We wanna know which of these potential employees is the best fit with our team, whether it's to play first base, or play senior researcher. Are they a fit? They may be very consistent in what they do, but is that consistency...I mean, they have to be, their consistency has to mesh what we want. So they may be consistently tardy, they may be consistently dominating the meeting, but what we want them to do is fit into the meeting.

0:17:50.0 AS: And the other thing that I always think about when I hear you talking about this stuff is, I think about when I was younger, when Lexus came out, if you remember Lexus, when they first...

0:18:01.8 BB: Absolutely.

0:18:02.5 AS: Launched...

0:18:02.5 BB: Oh yeah.

0:18:03.7 AS: Their great video or the great advertising was stacked up champagne glasses...

0:18:09.5 BB: Yes, yes.

0:18:11.6 AS: Onto the hood of this car. And then they lifted the wheels off the ground and then, or not off the ground, but like they had a roller that they were rolling it on, and then they revved that car up to as fast as it could possibly go, and those glasses did not fall. And you know the only way you can get that is by improving not only each individual part, but how those parts work together with the end result being less vibration, less friction.

0:18:39.9 BB: Yes.

0:18:41.1 AS: All of those things.

0:18:42.0 BB: Yes. Exactly.

0:18:42.5 AS: And you couldn't do it by just improving one part.

0:18:45.6 BB: That's right. And that's a great example because together you've got minimum vibration. That's not an accident. That's they have figured out how those things come together to have an incredible product, which is consistently, it works consistently. But the consistency, there's nothing wrong with consistency. Consistency is not the issue. But it, the issue is is the consistency we're talking about striving for precision or accuracy. So a car that consistently doesn't start is consistent, but that's not helpful. I want a car that consistently starts, right? I wanna be consistent around... I want you to bring your consistency in concert with others' consistency where those consistencies matter, you know? And if we don't need you to be consistent, then that's okay. Then we save money by having lack of consistency because why have consistency if you don't need it? But all of that's about...

0:19:50.6 AS: It's hard. It's hard. Consistency is hard and fit is hard.

0:19:55.4 BB: Yes. And, and, and, to build upon what you just said, consistency is about managing variation as a system. And so, another thing I wanna point out, and I got some comments from some friends about, you know, the last podcast. The Paradigms of Variation are about the paradigms of white bead variation. So, so, Paradigm A is we've got variation within the requirements and, and is that okay? Is it enough to have variation in requirement? It doesn't matter where we are? That's Paradigm A. Paradigm B is precision. We're consistent, but we're not around the ideal. That's accuracy. And then paradigm D is....and I was searching for the word, the expression Dr. Taguchi used. He calls that Technology Development, that we're developing an advanced technology for use in... And I, the example I used last time is, let's say we're fac…we're developing a new way of making tubes for plumbers to use.

0:21:07.6 BB: And I said in the beginning let's say we just have one inch outer diameter tubes, and that's Paradigm C because everything we make is one inch outer diameter tubes. And then somebody comes along in our research labs and comes up with a novel way to make tubes of different sizes. That's variety. So they can make them down to quarter of an inch, half an inch outer diameter. And then what we're doing with what Paradigm D is about is developing the technology that allows us to be really accurate around all these different values. That's what Dr. Taguchi calls Technology Development. I called it Paradigm D, he called it Technology Development. And in the world of sports, we talk about sports. That's the ability of the soccer player to kick the ball, or I should say a football player. [laughter] To put the ball anywhere in the net during at any time. Whether it's...

0:22:03.6 AS: That's within spec.

0:22:05.4 BB: Yeah, it's so the goalkeeper goes one way and they can hit any point in there. Because if you come up and the goalkeeper knows, oh, here comes Andrew, Andrew's gonna go to the lower left 'cause that's all he knows how to do. But you don't think I know that as your opposing goalkeeper. I know Andrew, Andrew's gonna fake, but I know what Andrew's gonna do. So the Paradigm D is in sports is the ability to move the ball around. If you're the pitcher, if you're the tennis player, and that's how you become a professional athlete, is that ability to move it around. That's Paradigm D. So, years ago, and this, I was developing this and sharing this, refining it with co-workers.

0:22:44.4 BB: And I was at a Deming Institute conference. True story, in Washington DC with Tim Higgins, a co-worker, and got a call from a really good friend, Jim. So Jim calls up and Jim was in this professional development program within Boeing doing a lot of travel. Every time he called, he was somewhere different in the country doing some really cool stuff in this incredible program to develop next generation leaders. And he definitely fit the mold. So he calls me up and he says, so he says, Dr. Bellows, have you discovered Paradigm E yet?

[laughter]

0:23:17.9 BB: I said, Jim, there is no E. He said, yeah, there's letter A, there's letter B, there's letter C, there's letter D. Oh, so there's also E. I said, Jim, A meets requirements, B is consistency anywhere, C is being on target, D is being on any target. I said, there's nowhere else to go. I said that we've run out. He said, we haven't run out of letters. [laughter] So I said, so he pushed on me and I pushed back. He pushed on me. We literally pushed on each other because I kept saying, Jim, you're you... Let's find another topic. No, no, no, no. I wanna hear about Paradigm E. And then it dawned on me, and I can remember it like it happened yesterday.

0:23:58.8 BB: And every time I have lunch with him, I say, Jim, I give him a big hug because I could not explain with the Paradigms of Variation, why would I pick up a nail in the parking lot, right? Why would I pick up a piece of glass in a parking lot? ''Cause I viewed that as minimizing loss to society, that if I pick up the nail, prevent the flat tire, pick up the piece of glass, prevent the flat tire. I am, to quote Dr. Taguchi, "minimizing loss to society." But I don't know how to put that into his loss function, which is a subject of an of a future episode. And the idea of the loss function is there's an ideal value somewhere within the requirements. And the closer we are to the ideal value, the better the integration, and therefore the easier the effort.

0:24:55.2 BB: And, so now I'm stuck trying to say, so Jim's poking me, and I'm thinking, I'm stuck trying to explain everything through Dr. Taguchi's loss function, which is looking at the impact of variation relative to meeting requirements. And it dawns on me, and what Jim is saying is, I'm stuck in the world of variation. And, so when he mentioned...as, as he pushed and pushed and pushed, and it dawned on me that there's another whole world called managing, not... There's managing resources. I'm sorry, managing variation is Paradigms A, B, C, and D. What Jim got me to do that he called Paradigm E, and later we called it Resource Management, he realizes variation is a resource. Variation is a result of how we define our processes. There's managing cost.

0:25:52.3 BB: What is the cost of what we're doing? How much time is required? So, I look at resources as all the things we have in our organization from people to equipment to software to hardware and tools and techniques. Those are all resources. And picking up a piece of glass in the parking lot is a way of managing resources to improve the system, just as being on target is a way to improve how resources are managed. I started, I just jumped back and thought, holy cow, it's bigger than variation. And I think Dr. Deming really had this in mind. It's not just about variation, it's about the system includes variation, but it also has resources. Again, people, time, ideas, money. How do we use our money? That's a resource.

0:26:39.4 BB: Are we using, 'cause the other thing that was bugging me was are we using our money to improve things that are good? No, we're using our money and our time and our resources to focus on what is bad to make it good. And so that's what started off as Paradigm E then became Resource Management. So that's the genesis for Paradigm E. Managing resources is, should I get a college education, right? Should I exercise? How often should I go to the doctor, right? How often should I go shopping for groceries? Should I go shopping every day on my way home or should I go once a week? Those are resource management questions. Should I have a garden in my backyard? Should I buy the groceries? What's a better use of my time when I'm running errands?

0:27:33.2 BB: So on Saturday morning, I'm gonna run out and I'm gonna pick up the dry cleaning, go to the drug store, go to the veterinarian, pick up something for the cats. Do I do each of those randomly, come home and I say, what do I do next? Or Andrew, do I line up the errands and figure out what time the store opens? When do the lines occur? What time does traffic start to pick up? Am I making right-hand turns or left-hand turns? And I find what I do is I'm trying to figure out how do I get all these things done as fast as possible? And that directs my route. What I'm I doing, Andrew? I'm managing resources.

0:28:11.7 AS: And you remind me of the book I'm reading right now, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

0:28:16.8 BB: Yes, I listened to it, it's fantastic.

0:28:18.9 AS: Yeah, and there's just these times that Steve Jobs would just go into an absolute focus into some minute detail that all the people around were thinking that, and rightly so in some cases, that he was wasting resources, the resource of time. But there was another component that I think they couldn't see maybe was the passion that he was conveying to people around them that this matters.

0:28:48.0 BB: Yes, well, I don't know if this story shows up on that book, but that book was a fantastic read, oh I just loved it. Do you know the subject of Walter Isaacson's next biography? I don't know when it's due, but the very next auto, biography that Walter Isaacson is doing, take a guess who it is?

0:29:07.7 AS: No idea.

0:29:08.4 BB: Elon Musk.

0:29:10.9 AS: Oh, great.

0:29:12.7 BB: Yeah, yeah. So I think Fortune Magazine had an article that Jobs, well, first of all, let's go back, let's say 15, 20 years when I would go into work with others and we'd turn on our computers and then go get a cup of coffee. You know what I'm talking about, Andrew? You know where I'm coming from?

0:29:35.4 AS: I remember that very well.

0:29:37.8 BB: And why are we going to get our coffee, Andrew?

0:29:41.1 AS: Man, it takes minutes to boot up.

0:29:43.1 BB: Yes, so because we're going to go, we gotta turn on the computer and it's going to take minutes, five, 10 minutes. And for those of you that are, I mean, really, now we're so used to turning on the iPhone and it comes right up. Yeah if you shut off the iPhone, it may take 30 seconds to turn on, but you start your computer and it, from scratch and it's within 30 seconds, your computer's up and running. No, what we're talking about, Andrew, is you go into the office, turn on the computer, go get a cup of coffee, talk with some friends, you come back in 10 minutes, your computer's up.

0:30:18.9 BB: So Jobs supposedly went to people that were working on that boot-up system and told them that if we could shave a few seconds off of the boot-up time, multiplied by the million or so users around the world, we can save society big numbers. And the person that went off and did this, or the team that went off and did it, went way beyond what he was talking about, but he's the one, he Andrew, saw that as a loss. All right, so when you're banging things together at the Ford plant and I come in on day one and, Andrew, what are you doing? You're like, and you're banging things together. I said, "Andrew, why are you doing that?" And you say, "Bill, this is how we assemble cars here." I said, "Andrew, look at those calluses on your hand." You're thinking, "Bill, you'll get used to it, but this is how we put things together." In the world of automobiles, this is how you do it, Bill." And I think, "Geez, I don't think it needs to be done that way." And what's fundamental here is, and again, the whole idea of the loss function, the integration loss function, we'll look at in a future episode, but what I want to point out here, Andrew, is if I believe you that banging it together with hammers is as good as it gets, then there is no loss.

0:31:51.6 BB: Meaning that as soon as I say that's as good as it gets and I stop, then I'm saying that this is how we do things here. But if I come in and look at that with an understanding of Taguchi's work and how to manage variation as a system or manage resources as a system, I have the capacity to look at that and say, as Jobs did, and say, "I think it can be better." And the difference between what it is and what it could be is loss. But as long as I look at what we do and say, "That's it, let's stop right here." Then what I'm saying is... What I'm acknowledging is that, that's okay. And so what I was looking for within Rocketdyne and got the president of the company to agree to this is finding some people that I was mentoring for several years and their role was to go around the organization and look for loss.

0:32:54.8 BB: And, loss is the ability…Ready Andrew, to look at what is in terms of integration and wonder what could be. And then look at the components and then ask, "Can we change the variation of the components to improve integration?" And of course, the big question is, is it worth the effort? But it's having the vision that the integration and I think that's a great example. The integration is all that time we're spending waiting is not only is it lost, but that's integration time. [laughter] Bingo. So, the next thing I wanna point out before we close is... So this conversation with my friend Jim got me out of being stuck on the loss function and then stepping back and saying that's... There's... It's a global thing. It's all about managing resources, which also means it's more than quality. It's not managing quality, it's managing resources.

0:33:51.8 BB: And if we improve how we manage resources, quality goes up, integration improves, all these things improve. Well, the next thing I wanna point out is, I started thinking in terms of a model that says, how do we allocate our resources? Again, resources are time, energy, equipment, software, ideas. How are we using them? And the first model I had in mind was, are we applying... Are we allocating the resources proactively or reactively? Are we applying the resources to go to the doctor for annual checkups just to see how we're doing. We're going to the dentist for an annual checkup. Are we having somebody come by and look at our plumbing system and getting a feeling for how is it running? Are we taking the car in for routine things. Or are we reactive? We call the plumber when it breaks, we go to the doctor when we're sick. We bring the car in when it's broken. And, so what I started focusing on is what is our preference? How are the resources being allocated?

0:34:55.6 BB: And, without a doubt, what I found is the majority of the resources, time, energy, equipment are being used reactively. Focusing on things that are broken, not good. And, and I would go into big production meetings and say, "How much time are we... How much time do you ladies and gentlemen spend every day discussing parts which are good that arrive on time?" And, no matter where I went, the answer was "little to none." And, so what I found is the resources were being used reactively, reactively. Now, let me also throw in that if the company's doing research and developing, developing next generation products, that is proactive use of resources. But what I also found is for the products that are in production, rarely did anybody ever come to me for something in production and say, "This could be better."

0:35:52.0 AS: Mm-hmm.

0:35:53.1 BB: That's rare. So the other dimension of this model. So the first dimension... I was just... In fact... It wasn't till I discovered Taguchi, Deming's work that got me to realize this is focusing on things that are broken is the norm. It wasn't just where I work. I started to see that pattern play out elsewhere. Well, the other axis of this resource management model, so the vertical axis is... Are the resources being applied proactively or reactively? So that's let's say the vertical axis going up. Top versus bottom. The horizontal axis are, is are the resources mine or are they ours? Is it my equipment, my people, my department? Or is it ours, Andrew? And so on the horizontal axis, the left hand side is the resources are mine, my department, my, my, my... And the other side of the horizontal axis is ours.

0:36:53.1 BB: And so in this two dimensional model, the vertical axis is, are the resources applied proactively, that's the top. Reactively, that's the bottom. If you think of a two by two matrix, the top row is proactive, the bottom row is reactive. And then when it comes to columns, so the left hand column is the resources are mine. The right hand column is the resources are ours. So we've got a two by two matrix. And I say to people, so given your understanding of Red Pen and Blue Pen companies, me and we organizations, last straw, all straw. I say, according to that matrix, how do you see resources managed in a Red Pen Company, a non-Deming company? And people will say the lower left quadrant, which is what, which is my resources applied reactively. Right?

0:37:43.4 AS: Yep.

0:37:44.9 BB: And then I'll say, "Okay." [laughter] And the name for that is... And it took a while to come up with a name and you're gonna love this. We started calling that at Rocketdyne, Reflexive Resource Management. Reflexive Resource Management. Because a wise man, born in Iowa in 1900, Andrew [laughter], by the name of W. Edwards Deming, once said, pulling your hand off of a hot stove requires no thought. It's all reflex action. When I saw him and that, I don't know where it was, I said, but I know he said that. And I thought, that's it. It's all reflexes. There's no thought involved. Why are we reactive? Because! I mean, why would I be proactive? I mean, why would I work? So when I started realizing is there's no thought involved in being reactive in a Red Pen Company. It's just that's what we do. So then the question is, well, how are resources managed in a Blue Pen Company? A We Organization, a Deming organization. And, what people will say is the upper right quadrant, which is proactive ours, the resources are ours.

0:38:56.1 BB: We're gonna be proactive. And wherever I go, that's people's answers. And I say, you, are you ready? And okay, what? I say, the entire right hand side is a Deming organization. What does that mean? It means I'm smart enough to know when to be proactive, and I'm smart enough to know when to be reactive. I choose, I choose to replace the light bulb when it goes out, it's a choice. Or I choose to replace the battery in the smoke alarm when it goes out. I, being reactive in a Deming organization is a choice. Being proactive is a choice. And so the right hand side, it's about choice. And it took some time to figure this out. What do we call that? What do we call this? So we call it the left hand side, the left lower left quadrant, Reflexive Resource Management. So it took a while to find out what's the adjective for the right hand side.

0:39:55.6 BB: And I come up with an adjective, find out that it's an acronym used by somebody for something else. No, can't use that. Try it again. Try it again. Try it again. Try it again. Try it again. It took about an hour to, at least an hour and finally came up with a term used by the Bureau of Land Management in the late 1800s. And it, and it's, it was known as Purposeful Resource Management. And I thought, bingo! One is nobody's got a trademark on it, [laughter] And so we started calling the deliberate use of resources to be deliberately proactive, or we choose to be proactive, or we choose to be reactive. We started calling that purposeful, thoughtful resource management.

0:40:45.5 AS: Yeah, that choice. It made me think about there's a lot of things in business that you just, your choice is to be reactive. When that breaks, we're gonna fix that because it's not so critical, whereas we cannot have a situation where we're reacting to this particular process. Like, think about my coffee business as an example. We cannot be reactive to downtime on the roasting machines. Well, we're not just waiting for that. We're doing preventive maintenance. We've got stocks.

0:41:17.7 BB: That's right.

0:41:18.5 AS: Stock of parts. We've got, so we make a deliberate effort and resource allocation to make sure we never in that situation, but there's other parts. Let's say we have a few grinders and something like that, we'll fix those when they break. [laughter]

0:41:35.0 BB: Yeah. Well, I've shared this with a woman who, the hairstylist I go to. My kids used to go there and I've been going there ever since. And she is awesome. Just awesome. So I, these are the things I discussed with her, all kinds of things. And so I have a photograph of her, Andrew, holding a hairdryer in her hair salon. And the hair salon is called Kids Cuts because a good part of her business is kids. And then people like me bring the kids in there and next thing you know, I'm a customer, too. Well, so I'm explaining this to me and she says, "Bill, every 6 months I get rid of all the hair dryers". I said, why? She says, "I cannot afford to burn somebody's hair". And so, so I've got a photo of her holding it, so she doesn't monitor how it's performing.

0:42:24.1 BB: She just knows 6 months, get rid of it now. You know, does she donate it? I don't know where it goes. And I don't wanna get into recycling, but she deliberately, she's not gonna burn somebody's hair.

0:42:35.0 AS: Right.

0:42:38.1 BB: Alright. And, what else? Oh, but you and I talked earlier in one of the episodes, this idea of choice, that instead of following the domain that says you can't have inventory, we gotta have blah, blah, blah, you realize this? No, we can choose to have inventory, or we can choose not to have inventory. And so what we're talking about in resource management is, which gets into all those things we talked about earlier, is it's about choices. And so I would say to people, I've got a slide, then I say, it's like you get to the end of the road and you turn right and turning right is being reactive.

0:43:21.3 BB: And I say, Andrew, I've been patterning you, and you get to the end of the road and you turn right, you're always reactive. Why do you turn right? And you say, "Bill, there's only a right-hand turn". And I said, "No, Andrew, there's a left-hand turn, but you can't see it. It's in your blind spot". So the right hand turn is to focus on what's bad, to make it good, what Ackoff would also call managing actions. And that's the road that's well traveled, [laughter], the road less traveled is the left-hand turn, which is to be proactive, again, when it makes sense. I'm not saying being proactive all the time, I'm saying there's a place for it. Consider being proactive, consider being reactive.

0:44:04.0 AS: So, on that note, I think we ought to leave. Why don't you leave the listeners and the viewers with a concise statement of what you want them to take away from this discussion. We went through a lot of different things, but if you wanna bring it down to something clear and concise, how would you describe that?

0:44:24.5 BB: I'd say the, um…I'd like, I'd encourage our listeners, viewers, students of the Deming philosophy, those new to it, to expand their appreciation of quality management and realize that to managing resources period. And the better we manage our resources in our organization, knowing when to collect data, when not to collect data, when to meet requirements, when to be on target with minimum variation, when having lots of variation. Should we be proactive or re…. These are all choices. And they're, and I think the better we understand those choices about how we manage variation as a system in concert, I think the better the performance of the organization and improving productivity, improving quality, improving profit. So I think all those things we're striving for come from a better understanding of how to manage resources. And so instead of just being narrowly focused on the quality dimension, I think if we step back and realize that that's one aspect of how an organization operates.

0:45:42.4 AS: Bill, 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. If you want to keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'm gonna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to Joy in work."

In this series, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss principles that educational systems leaders can use to guide their transformation work. This episode covers principles 4 and 5: maximize high-quality learning and work continually on the system.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Today is episode 12, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of schools' systems. John, take it away.

0:00:34.4 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, like you said, we've sort of turned to this set of principles that can be used by educational systems leaders to guide their transformation work. Two episodes ago, we sort of kicked off the principles, gave a little bit of an introduction. We talked about principle one, which is create constancy of purpose. And then the last time we talked, we kind of broke down two principles. Principle two was adopt the new philosophy, and principle three was, cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. So in this episode, I was gonna sort of take on the next two, the fourth and fifth principles. So the fourth principle is, maximize high quality learning. And the fifth principle is, work continually on the system.

0:01:28.6 JD: So I thought we'd sort of kick things off with principle four, that idea around maximize high quality learning. And I think sort of... If I was gonna capture that principle in just a couple sentences, I would say, you wanna maximize high quality learning and minimize total cost of education by improving the relationship with educational institutions from which students come and to which they matriculate. So, we're thinking about a single source of students coming into a system, such as an elementary school student moving into a middle school, and seeing that as an opportunity to build a long term relationship of loyalty and trust. So that's sort of the overarching idea. And I think if you sort of look at this principle through the lens of United Schools Network, where I work in Columbus, Ohio, I think that's sort of a helpful lens. And when you think about our origin story, we started as a single middle school serving a few east side neighborhoods, near downtown Columbus. And I was the founding principal, school director of that particular campus.

0:02:55.3 JD: And at the time, we decided we were gonna open a middle school, 'cause this is the point often in a student's educational career where they fall so far behind, they often then drop out of school altogether just a few years later. So we wanted to get them in middle school. So, before we were this sort of network of schools in the school system, we were this one school that grew from serving just sixth grade over the first few years to sixth through eighth grade, right. And when you looked at these east side neighborhoods where we were located, there were 15 or so elementary schools from the city school system that formed this sort of de facto feeder pattern into our middle school. Most of those schools were performing in the bottom 5% of schools in the state. Which means when those students then matriculated to our middle school, they typically did so in... The typical kid was at least two, but more often three and even four grade levels below where they should be when they enrolled with us in 6th grade.

0:04:18.1 JD: And, while I didn't have this Deming lens at the time, I did sort of approach things from a process standpoint, from a system standpoint. But, as the middle school principal, I'm thinking about sort of all that entails to run a school and a new school at that, so we're doing all the things that come with a startup. There was no way for me to run around and form relationships with the 15 principals leading those elementary schools from which our students were primarily coming from.

0:04:54.0 JD: And so when we had this opportunity to grow from one school into a network that's now four schools, we elected to grow down into elementary schools. The point in doing so was to move towards this sort of single supplier relationship, that Dr. Deming outlined in his point four. And so now, we have two middle school principals, two elementary schools in our network, and they can work together on a whole host of sort of quality characteristics, like vertically planning curriculum across that K to eight pipeline. And, we were middle schools first and then elementary schools, so while we're getting some of our students from our own elementary schools we're also still getting students from other non-USN schools, non-USN elementary schools, but we're sort of increasingly moving toward that single supplier model. And I think that coordination is one of the ways that we can then maximize high quality learning, and the great thing about this is that we then minimize the total cost of education.

0:06:14.6 JD: And I think this is one of the important paradoxes of Dr. Deming's work, in that, as quality goes up, price goes down. Which that's sort of the opposite of what a lot of people think. In the case of schools, what we're talking about in terms of minimizing cost, a lot of that has to do with less remediation of students as they sort of increasingly come from those USN elementary schools and they're not as typically far behind when they arrive to our middle schools as they were previously.

0:06:54.1 AS: And for our international listeners, and also just for a refresher for myself. Is middle school what we... I used to call it junior high, I think I called it. But what is middle school and elementary as far as your grades and ages?

0:07:09.7 JD: Yeah, that's a good question. Middle school is six through eight for us. So sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And then our elementary schools are kindergarten through fifth grade.

0:07:19.4 AS: Got it.

0:07:23.1 JD: There's also this sort of... I think when Deming wrote his point four, his version said, "End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost, move toward a single supplier for any one item on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust." So I sort of translated Deming's framing to one that applies directly to students as they move through that K-12 pipeline. However, there's also this second component to this principle that's more sort of directly analogous to Deming's point, and it's definitely applicable to the business side of running schools. And this is the idea of ceasing dependence on price tag alone when we're selecting curriculum or technology or supplies or any number of goods and services that school systems regularly buy. I think the main ideas here, is to understand that difference between the lowest bidder and the lowest qualified bidder. And I think one of the things that Deming pointed out on this side of things was that basically price has no meaning without a measure of quality being purchased, including that after sale service. So I think that's a key point as well.

0:08:44.7 AS: When did you guys open the elementary schools?

0:08:48.6 JD: Yeah, so it sort of unfolded over time. So the first middle school opened in 2008.

0:08:55.2 AS: Right.

0:08:55.3 JD: Second middle school 2012. And then we moved toward elementaries in 2014 and 2017. But a key thing here is, when we open new schools, we sort of have a slow growth model where we typically open with just a single grade level. So they can sort of put systems and processes in place, hire staff, recruit students, that type of thing. And so it took about five years before those elementary schools were mature enough that they were actually feeding to the middle schools.

0:09:32.1 AS: So let's say 2020, 2019-'20 and then onwards, you're starting to get the students from the elementary schools, was there a significant difference? How would you describe the difference in what you received, from your elementary school versus... In other words, did it deliver on what you had hoped?

0:09:56.8 JD: Yeah, I think we have work to do there. But for the typical student that's coming from our elementary schools, one, they're very familiar with our routines, our procedures, our sort of school culture, the way that the school's run. A lot of those students often have older siblings that are either in our middle school or had been in our middle school and are now alumni. And then academically we see a difference as well, especially for those students that started early in elementary, like in K-1, 'cause we take kids at all grade levels. But for those kids that started K-1 and went all the way through our system and are enrolling now six years later or seven years later in sixth grade with us, the difference is stark. Both from a sort of student traits and responsibilities and sort of student academic side of things.

0:10:52.0 AS: And how does that changing... Ultimately what I think about... Toyota is a good example. And in Thailand here, Toyota has a huge manufacturing base. And part of what's so critical to that manufacturing base is all the supplier relationships that come with that. So they're surrounded by their suppliers and they've built great relationships with those suppliers. In a sense, you just happen to own that supplier in this case, but whether you're owning the supplier or whether a listener or a viewer is saying, "Okay, I need to build a better relationship with the suppliers that I have." The question I have in your case is, how did that change the final result at the end of middle school? 'Cause ultimately what you're trying to do is get your final output of your system to be better over time. I'm just curious, how has that reflected in what comes out?

0:11:48.8 JD: Yeah, I think it has a dramatic impact because so much of education and what a student is ultimately gonna do, is sort of... I don't wanna say determined, maybe a little bit too strong of a word, but maybe not too far off, by that sort of early education foundation. Specifically, did you learn to read proficiently. And when students were coming to us in middle school without that foundation in reading, it makes it really, really hard now that when you get to a point in your schooling career where things have shifted from being sort of learning how to read to, you are reading as a part of the learning process. And we did some intensive interventions before we had elementary schools to try to catch kids up, especially on that reading front. And those are really hard sort of interventions to sort of put in place when a kid is 12 or 13-years-old when they're getting those interventions. Not to say that they can't help, but the older the student is, the farther they've gone in their educational career, the harder that is.

0:13:02.5 AS: And I guess the majority of public educators are dealing with that all the time. People popping into their district and all of a sudden... Coming from many different sources and all of that.

0:13:16.1 JD: Yeah. Yep. And in some places that's more than others. That sort of coming and going tends to be associated with certain conditions in which the school sits and the community in which the school sits, where there's higher poverty rates, there's more movement. So one stat that jumps to mind on this front, in Columbus City schools, which is where our kids would have gone had they not come to us, were geographically within that district's boundaries. In any given year, 30%, nearly one out of three kids changes school buildings during the year, which is just an overwhelming number, an overwhelming amount of transition. That's just within a year, that's not even across multiple years. And so that's why this sort of single supplier [laughter] relationship is so important, because we're trying to push back in an opposite direction.

0:14:23.1 AS: And is there ever a chance that you could have all of your students come from your elementary program? Or is that unrealistic or is that happening or can happen?

0:14:35.5 JD: Well, right now it really can't happen, and that's mostly due to the size of our building. So in our elementary schools, there is basically two homerooms per grade level. So there is two fifth grade classrooms, let's say. But in our middle schools, there is at least typically three homerooms in 6th grade. So no matter what, right now, about a third of the kids would be new in a typical school year.

0:15:07.2 AS: So capacity matching?

0:15:09.2 JD: Yep, capacity matching. Yep.

0:15:11.6 AS: Okay.

0:15:12.1 JD: That's right. That's right.

0:15:13.2 AS: That's a great explanation of the methodology you're using. There's people who are public school teachers that may be listening to this and going, "Oh come on, I can't do that." Well, yeah, you're gonna have different challenges and limits, but you can start to build those relationships with the schools that are bringing students to you and trying to do the best that you can with that. Because we know that... What Dr. Deming taught was that fixing things at the beginning of the process is the way to do it. Because if you're trying to solve the problem at the middle or the end of the process, it just grows exponentially more complex, difficult, more costly. And that's the reason why a high quality means low cost. Wait, what? Yep.

0:16:01.0 JD: Yeah. And some public schools do this really well, and they, for all intents and purposes, already have this set up. But sometimes I've seen even in places like a smaller school district that maybe just has one elementary and one middle - high school building. I've been to a place where I have heard people say, "I never even thought about leaving our building and going to see what they're doing in the high school." And part of it I get, you're a teacher, you're kind of stuck in your classroom, it has to be facilitated for you to have a sub or whatever, but it's not an overwhelming barrier. And I think it's a very valuable exercise to have some of that cross movement between buildings. And I don't think it's actually that hard to do. And the good thing is, in most school districts there's geographic proximity, so that's not a barrier. But someone has to say, "This is important and we are gonna do this."

0:16:58.1 AS: I think it reminds me of my discussions with Bill Bellows, where we were talking about... Also on the podcast, and trying to talk about the idea of thinking beyond specification and thinking beyond... And asking the question, "How is this product or service being used by the next part of the process?"

0:17:18.4 JD: Yeah. Right.

0:17:19.0 AS: And looking forward, you find that even if you think that you're doing really well, you all of a sudden find that there is a huge amount of opportunity to improve in just that one step forward in the process. All right. Well, does that bring us to work continuously on the system?

0:17:39.0 JD: Yeah, I would just say, the takeaway here for me is developing those partnerships with suppliers. Whether it's on that sort of K-12 pipeline side, or if it's more like Deming's version of point four, where you're actually making purchases for the school system. And I think... A change in thinking for me was that the suppliers are a part of your system. Whether they're internal or external to the governance structure of your school system or your business, the suppliers are actually a part of the system. And thinking about them that way is really important. And I think both those approaches are keys to helping maximize high quality learning and then minimizing that total cost. And when I actually started to think about that, even though we didn't, again, think about it through this Deming lens early on, we have a number of vendors that sort of operate like that. Our IT vendor, our food services vendor, have been with us since day one in 2008 when we started.

0:18:42.0 JD: And you'll see their employees doing things here almost like they work here. They almost feel like an employee. So at least in certain cases, we've been able to develop those types of relationships on sort of more on the Deming business side of things as well, and I think that's just as important.

0:19:00.8 AS: There is an interesting business in the US that is a model for that. And that is... So, to talk about business aspect, a company called Fastenal, that makes fasteners and many different things that companies need. But they changed their business model many years ago to basically, rather than having a warehouse and distribution, and you order from the warehouse and all that, they actually set... They go into your factory, and they take over your whole inventory, and they run your whole inventory department.

0:19:30.6 JD: Interesting.

0:19:30.7 AS: And the benefit for you is that you don't own the inventory anymore. So you could have a million dollars in inventory in your factory, and all of a sudden that all goes onto their books.

0:19:39.4 JD: Wow.

0:19:40.2 AS: And the second benefit is that, you only have the cost of that inventory at the moment that you take it out of their system, and then put it into the operation that you're doing.

0:19:50.8 JD: Interesting.

0:19:51.2 AS: And that is this relationship, this super close relationship of that supplier actually working at your facility. And it's amazing.

0:20:05.0 JD: Yeah. This shift a little bit from antagonistic. "I'm trying to get the lowest price out of my suppliers" to, "Wait a second, I need to get the highest quality at a fair price, and I'm gonna work with you on an ongoing basis to make sure whatever I'm buying from you on an ongoing basis is high quality as it comes into my system." That's a much better way to operate than the sort of the antagonistic feel.

0:20:31.3 JD: Yeah, so I think that's a good transition point from principle four to five. So principle five is, work continually on the system. So as I was gonna sort of sum up this principle in just a couple of sentences, I'd say this one is improve constantly and forever the system of planning, teaching, learning and service to improve every process and activity in the organization, and to improve quality and productivity. It is management's obligation to work continually on the system, whether that's school design, curriculum, incoming supplies and materials, technology, supervision, training, retraining, whatever that thing is.

0:21:13.0 JD: And if you think back to when we talked about principle one, principle one and principle five are very similar, and that they both talk about improvement of the system and processes over the long-term. The distinction would be that, principle one is talking about constancy of purpose, the aim of the organization, and this in turn facilitates this principle, principle five, continual improvement of systems and processes. Sort of a key idea that you mentioned I think even in this talk is that, we have to keep in front of mind that quality must be built in at that planning and design stage of work. And I think that a lot of times in the education sector, we see teachers blamed for a lot of things that they have very little control over often.

0:22:10.1 JD: And I think one example as I was thinking of examples was when a school system selects a curriculum, they often select a curriculum for the entire system, but we don't often consider the downstream effects on teacher lessons and in turn student learning. How many teachers have had the opportunity to select their district's curriculum? That's a number probably close to zero. But there are sort of many I think components of the education system that are analogous. And I think the same is true in other sectors as well, and I think that's why Deming really harped on this idea that it's management's obligation to continually improve the system, because they're making many of these decisions that then have these downstream effects on the frontline workers, be it teachers in a school or nurses in a hospital or line workers in a production facility. And this... Oh, sorry, go ahead.

0:23:27.7 AS: I was just gonna say that I was recently teaching an ethics class at a university in Cambodia called CamED, run by a guy named Casey Barnett. And he is an American guy who started it on his own, funded it on his own, and for decades now has built this university, and he's built it around his principles and he sources his students his way. He has great relationships with... He's teaching accounting, finance, business, which is the practical things needed in a developing economy or economy that's really growing like Cambodia. But it's just that what I saw was the constancy of purpose when I went through the whole university, and then I got to know more of the students and they've attended some of my valuation masterclass course and stuff online. And then I'm just like, "Ah, that constancy of purpose, and the constancy of management gives the ability to continually improve." And that without that, with constant turnover in leadership, it's so hard.

0:24:40.3 JD: Yeah, and management is hard, leadership is hard. I think schools are facing some challenging times right now, because... And this is true in any sector, but if you're a leader or you're in management, you have to deal with these day-to-day issues of the organization, then also sort of keep your organization moving towards continual improvement. You have to put out these fires, like Dr. Deming would often say, putting out fires does nothing to actually improve your system. I think sort of the way he would frame it is that, you know detection and removal of a special cause does not improve a process at best. Fighting fires, i.e., detecting special causes, just... It's important, 'cause it does return that process back to its previous state, but that state is not where you want it to be necessarily.

0:25:48.8 AS: Smoldering.

0:25:49.9 JD: Smoldering, yeah. And where I heard this, it was sort of stated in a great book on Deming's work called The Deming Dimension by Henry Neve, who I'm sure a lot of listeners know. He said, "This means that systems leaders must strive to make unstable processes stable, and to make stable but incapable processes capable, and to make capable processes ever more capable." So you sort of start to break that down, you can start to see why being in management, why being a leader is not an easy task.

0:26:27.4 AS: One of the questions I...

0:26:30.2 JD: Oh yeah, sorry, go ahead.

0:26:31.4 AS: Go ahead. Go ahead.

0:26:32.0 JD: No, I was just gonna say this idea of never ending improvement, depending on what your mindset is around that type of thing is, it can be daunting, even for the most stalwart of sort of continual improvers.

0:26:46.0 AS: Yeah. And that may determine where you position yourself within an organization, because if you're at the top, it's your responsibility to be focused on that and building the system, which can be a bit overwhelming for some people, and they say, "Look, I'm okay being in this spot, and I'll try to improve what I'm doing in the classroom, but I may not be able to be involved in how we're improving all the systems." I wanted to end this discussion on principle five with a little bit of hope and vision of what is potential. I think about my little case. I have my valuation masterclass bootcamp online. And I'm going into the eleventh one. Right now, we're in the 10th one. And I'm just doing it every 8 to 10 weeks and it's a six week program.

0:27:34.2 AS: I want repetition, I want to practice, I want to see how I can improve. And I've seen enormous improvements by just looking at the problems, solving them, going to the next level. And in bootcamp number 10, basically, the students are valuing the same companies over the last couple of bootcamps. A company called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and then in Toyota. And so they're in groups, and they're valuing those two companies. And I was really hesitant to show them the progress of the prior students, 'cause I didn't want them to copy from there. But I've now incorporated that in the bootcamp, halfway through to say, "Alright, here's the bar. This is the minimum. This is what the last group did using all the tools that we gave them. Now, your job is to take this to the next level." And yesterday, a student posted something on LinkedIn, and that was an absolutely comprehensive takeaways of the stuff that he's been learning and applying. And it's like, it worked. It inspired them to say, we gotta go to the next level. And I just want to hear from you about when you work continually on the system, what are some of the transformations and other things that you've seen, and what's some hope for the people who are struggling in a system that needs help?

0:28:57.5 JD: Yeah, that's a really good frame. I don't know if it'll get to that level, but I think, you know, as I've sort of built my sort of Deming knowledge base and spread that here internally where I work, I think I would go back to those two tools that I talked about repeatedly. The run chart or process behavior chart, and the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. And why I'm saying that is because right now, internally, we are running one, two, three, four, at least four PDSAs concurrently right now with different teams. And people are starting to see the power of this, especially in areas where performance was struggling a bit. We put PDSAs in action just to take small steps to try to improve our system. And what's happening, whether we're running that PDSA, some of these are running for a week at a time. Some of them are running for up to three weeks at a time, depending on which area you're talking about.

0:30:02.0 JD: But what's happening is we get to that Act to decide what we're gonna do next. For example, we had to make a purchasing decision where we have, talent is a struggle right now in education. We had a platform that we were trialing for 10 days, the free version. And then we have to decide, are we gonna pay for this? And with the PDSA, you get to that Act, you looked at what happened over the weeks, you did the measures of the things that you thought were important, and that decision just jumps off the page. And so these things that people used to go back and forth about, do we do this, do we not? How do we know if this is effective?

0:30:44.4 JD: Now we have this structure that makes this decision, just like I said, leap off the page in terms of its obviousness, and the direction that we're gonna go. What are we gonna do? Are we gonna buy this thing? Are we gonna spend the money? Are we gonna put resources towards this? Both in terms of the money it costs to purchase in this case, plus the human resources that it's gonna take to manage this platform? And in this case, the answer was yes. And that's all because of the power of this way of thinking. It wasn't about holding people accountable, it was about designing a good PDSA, running it, gathering the data that was important to us, and then evaluating that together and then making the decision. And so I think once people try that a few times, they'll both sort of see how clear the decision making process can come.

0:31:36.2 JD: It doesn't mean all the decisions are gonna be easy, but it clarifies decisions. It gets you working together, and planning something that's important to you as an organization and as a team, you get to see how people think things are gonna end up 'cause they predict as a part of that Plan section. And then once people get comfortable with that tool, they start owning it, they start running their own PDSAs, and they come to you and they say, "Oh my gosh, look at this, look what happened, look what I discovered. I didn't know this was gonna happen. I'm gonna keep doing this. Can I go do this over here?" "Yeah, let's set up a plan for that." And so people start to get excited, because they build this momentum with this tool. And then you pair that with a way of thinking that Deming's philosophy gives you, and your organization just starts to operate in a completely new way. And it's this sort of combination of the tools which are important, but most importantly, this way of thinking that goes with the tools.

0:32:39.2 AS: Well, let me wrap up our discussion. We're talking about principles for transformation of school systems. And today, we talked about principle four and principle five, and that is principle four, maximize high quality learning, minimize total costs. And we spent a lot of time talking about the importance of working with your suppliers, the inputs into your system. And the deeper you can build those relationships and connections with them, the better opportunities you have to improve the quality of what you're doing, and to reduce the cost of what you're doing. And principle number five, the second thing we talked about was the idea of work continually on the system. You are operating within a system, we can see there's suppliers, there's also customers that you're supplying. Ultimately, what we're talking about is planning, teaching, learning, service, those types of things are all defined as the system of what you're doing.

0:33:43.3 AS: And I think that you made the point that ultimately, that's management's job, and it has to be done by management because it has a lot of downstream effects, as Deming has taught us that ultimately the output, the majority of the output of any system is really based on what the system's capabilities are. And so your job in management is to try to improve those system capability. And maybe a teacher may find that a bit overwhelming, but that's okay, that can be brought down to a small scale maybe in a classroom. Is there anything else you'd add to that?

0:34:16.4 JD: Yeah, I think just overarching is that we're replacing those management myths with these sound guiding principles. And that, we're kind of going through 'em, either one or two at a time, these episodes, but they are sort of a mutually supporting network of principles. And so, while we may learn these piecemeal, we wanna put 'em all together, 'cause it's really that's where the power comes from is when all of these principles are working together rather than in isolation.

0:34:45.5 AS: Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book Win-Win, Dr. W Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

When things go wrong, who gets blamed? When things go right, who gets the credit? Dr. Deming wrote that good managers don't play the blame/credit game. Instead, they "study results [of feedback] with the aim to improve performance." In this episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz discuss getting honest feedback, how to react, and why it's important.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic for today is improving performance. Who's at fault? David, take it away.

0:00:28.8 David P. Langford: Hello again. So we are at point number eight on Deming's role of a manager of people. And it says he will study results with the aim to improve his performance as a manager of people. So once again, Deming wasn't into all the pronouns that we use now and everything. So when he says he, he means he, she, anybody that's a manager of people. So, our aim is to improve performance and everything that we do. Right. So I think what's going on with this simple point that he's making is to get people to think about when things go right, or things go wrong, who's at fault, or who gets the reward or who gets the blame for that process.

0:01:29.1 DL: And as a manager, if things are going well, of course, everybody wants to take credit for that, whether you're a teacher or superintendent, business owner, or whatever, then it was, the same way in politics, right? Everything's going well. Oh, I did it all. And if things are not going well, then obviously it was somebody else's fault. Right. Or if you're a manager of people, like what Deming is talking about here, we have a tendency to blame the individual without first thinking about ourselves as the manager of that situation. So I was just coaching a group of teachers and talking to them about how difficult it is to really think like that as a teacher. Because you think, "Okay, I worked really hard on this lesson, I got everything prepared, I came in and I did it."

0:02:23.8 DL: And I don't know how many times I've heard teachers say something like, "Well, I taught them, but they didn't get it." [laughter] Well, that's probably the problem, you taught them, but they didn't learn it. [laughter] Well, that's probably the problem, right? You taught them, but they didn't they didn't learn it, which is two different things. It's possible to teach and get learning, but it's better to create actual learning experiences through that process. So you have to think about if I'm not getting good results I don't care what your position is as a manager of people I have to turn the finger of blame back towards me and start to say, "Okay, what am I doing differently?" And that's a hard pill to swallow when you start to think like that and because usually most people are trying to put in their best efforts. And Deming said many times we're being killed by best efforts, [chuckle] which is like a crazy thought to think about, wow, I shouldn't be trying hard. Well, you should be working in the right way. So if you're not getting the results that you want probably the very first thing is to go back to the people that you manage and ask them what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong or what could be improved. And I have seen this with just very little kids, like three, four, five-year-olds, when the teacher says, "We just went through that lesson and it seemed like some of you weren't interested, you know, what was the problem?"

0:04:05.4 DL: And they'll tell you, [laughter], "Oh, you went too fast, or we didn't have time to think about it, or we needed more time." Or they'll tell you exactly what the problem is. And it's usually a better way to go than having your supervisor come in and do an observation, because your supervisor probably isn't there every day watching how you're managing people, how you're communicating, how you're having conversations, et cetera. But the people are there every day. And if we're talking about education and kids in classrooms, they're the ones that are experiencing your management style. [laughter] And I've found out that the more you ask, the better they get at giving you advice, telling you what to do. And when you do it, then you get even better advice. So I remember I think I may have told this story before, but I remember I had a new student that came to class and I was in a project like that and I asked the students, I said just take out some sticky notes or whatever you want to, and write down a few thoughts about how you think this last project went. What could be improved, how we could have changed it what, I might do differently next year, et cetera.

0:05:27.7 DL: Just things like that. Well, this new student, he was just like blowing this off and he was not paying attention. He's screwing around everything else. And I'll never forget one of the students that had been there all year, she turned to him and she said, You better take this seriously 'cause he's gonna do whatever we tell him.

0:05:44.7 AS: [laughter], wait, what?

0:05:49.3 DL: Yeah, I'll never forget the look on that kid's face. It was just like, Oh. And then he did... He started to sit up and take it seriously. So.

0:06:00.0 AS: Yeah. Well that's, it's... One of the interesting points about that is, when you ask for feedback, how do you receive it? I asked... I have a bunch of interns working for me right now. And I asked them to go through one of my online courses, and write down feedback in a document, a shared document that they're all writing into. It's brutal, David. It's brutal! And then when I see some stuff, my first reaction, "Oh, I can't do that because, yeah, I can't fix that because of, yeah." And it's just so hard to, you know, it's hard enough to ask, but it's even harder to receive in a way that you're able to really use that to improve yourself.

0:06:42.7 DL: One time I kept getting feedback from the students saying, you're going too fast, or you're talking too fast or can't understand it, or we need more time to process what you're saying or... I said, well, okay, I've been doing this a long time, so I've got habits and so I don't always know [chuckle] that I'm doing that. So let's work out a signal or something that if that's happening you can just suddenly kind of signal me that, okay, we need some reflection time here, or something to happen. [chuckle] And so they came up with this idea that they would pull on their ear lobe if I was going too fast or working through stuff. It's very disconcerting to... I'm into something. I'm really explaining a concept and I think I'm really doing a good job. And you look out and you see about six people going like this, and you're like, oh, oh, okay, I'm doing it again. [chuckle] But...

0:07:46.1 AS: That's one of the things that was lost in the Zoom era. It's harder to read the audience too, just to even figure out if people are understanding.

0:07:52.8 DL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But Deming often said, help comes from the outside and by invitation. So when you're inviting those students or workers or whoever you might be managing to give you that feedback, it's just really amazing what can be accomplished like that. There's almost no problem that can't be solved, [chuckle] by using the people actually doing the work to give you the feedback.

0:08:27.1 AS: You know, when we started this episode, the one thing I started thinking about was that great saying that we all probably heard when we were growing up is "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." And my mom said that to me, and my dad or anybody, I'd heard it a lot, but I guess what I thought when I heard you kick off this episode, I thought to myself, yeah, but what if you led them to the wrong pool of water? [chuckle] or the wrong place? And that there's a responsibility on the side of the teacher or the administrator to make sure that it's not enough to absolve yourself, "Hey, I did it and they didn't drink it," that's not acceptable or that's not enough.

0:09:13.4 DL: Yeah, over the last 40 years, I've heard some awful things from teachers saying things about students about...you know... Privately or not, this kid just doesn't wanna try or doesn't care, or this kid isn't one of 'em that came to mind was "this student isn't even worth my effort." So how do you know that? [chuckle] And, Deming said, "Why would I give somebody a grade when I don't know who among them is gonna turn out to be great someday?" And I might be limiting them with a grade at that point in time, but a feedback information on feedback about how to improve what, wow. People really received that really well. I think that's really what he is talking about here in point eight and I think it's pretty simple, but it's tough to do.

0:10:16.4 AS: So let's wrap this up by... First I'm gonna just read point eight again, and this remember that for everybody, I forgot to say it at the beginning, but this is from the Role of a Manager of People section of The New Economics. And point number eight, "he will study results with the aim to improve his performance as a manager of people." And, I think one of the things that stands out is study results also. What is the result that we're getting? And some of the things that we talked about is like asking the question, what can I improve as a manager of people? How do I seek out information to do that? And you said, the more you ask, the more and the better advice that you get. And you also mentioned his quote that help comes from the outside and by invitation. And so I think the main thing is being on a path and a desire to improve yourself as a manager of people. Anything that you would add to that?

0:11:19.4 DL: Well, what he is after is how do we go about improving? The classic way we do stuff is we send somebody to a conference or where, go give them some training or now put 'em on an online thing that they go through, all those kinds of things. And what Deming is really saying is, look, study the results. You need to know how you are doing. [chuckle] And once you start to figure that out, then they are going to do a whole lot better.

0:11:50.0 AS: Fantastic. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."