In Their Own Words

In this episode, David and Andrew ask: should we tell people when they make mistakes? How do educators manage mistakes in a classroom setting, after their organization/classroom is transformed by learning and implementing Deming?

0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic for the day is, "should we tell people when they make mistakes?" We are continuing a discussion about Dr. Deming's section of the book, The New Economics. If you have the 3rd edition, that's page 86. If you have the 2nd edition, that's page 125. And this is a list that Dr. Deming has given us of 14 points. It's not The 14 points that we normally talk about, but these are... The title of this 14 points is called Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation, and we are on point number six. And I'll just read it before we get David to start talking on it, and that is this.

0:01:02.7 AS: "The role of a manager in a new style," basically he's saying, "If he understands a stable system. He understands... " And I know we can also say she, "understands the interaction between people and the circumstances that they work in. He understands that the performance of anyone that can learn a skill will come to a stable state upon which further lessons will not bring improvement of performance. A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake." David, take it away.

0:01:41.2 David P. Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again. Yeah, I was just reflecting on this list is... It's such a great list. I'm sure that when people first read through this book they kinda just take 30 seconds to read through the list and then you go on. I've been studying Dr. Deming's work for over 40 years now and still find so much insight into all these things. So if you go through this and you start thinking about, "Well, what can I do differently and where do I begin?" I was also thinking that, when I got my Master's in Administration, I never heard of any of this. I never heard of a stable state, control charts, theory. I never got any of this or had a list on to how to manage people, which would have been very helpful, very insightful. So if you're working at a university right now and you're a teacher of classes of administration, here's some good advice, take people through this list and they'll actually come out with capability of what to do. But now back to the list. So, the first thing he says is you have to understand a stable system.

0:03:01.1 DL: So we did a couple of previous podcasts on stable and unstable systems, and on face value, a lot of people think: "Okay, well, stable system, okay, well, it's working well." But Deming's thinking around a stable system is much, much deeper than that, and it has to do with statistical stability. And so if you understand a stable system, then the first thing you're gonna have to do is you have to find out, "Do I have a stable system?" And so often when I work with people, I'll just start with sort of disarming questions and say, "Hey, how are things going?"

[chuckle]

0:03:45.4 DL: And they'll usually say, "Well, it's going pretty good." And, "Okay, well, how do you know?" "Well, 'cause people are telling me that it goes pretty good." "Well, how many people do you manage? Oh well, I have like 30 people on the staff." So you're telling me that 30 people are telling you every day that things are going really well? "Well, no, one person told me." "Well, do we know what the other 29 think?" So, right there you realize a manager does not understand a stable system. They have no idea what they're doing, and the phrase in America is "you're flying by the seat of your pants" which basically means you're just…whatever is happening from day to day, you're just going with the flow, but you're not managing a stable system nor do you really understand it.

0:04:39.7 DL: So the first thing I wanna point out is that this is telling you, before you do anything, you have to understand the system. So you have to figure out, "Okay, what am I gonna collect data on? What's really important? How do I really understand if I have a stable system?" Then you're gonna have to set up that process and you're gonna have to do that for at least 12 data points, if not 20 data points. And in education that could mean 12 days, 12 months. It could mean long periods of time. Or the other thing is you have to go back into history and get that data for previous years. That's another way you can get the data points, put them on a run chart and see, "Is this system stable?"

0:05:32.7 DL: So what does that mean? Well, once you do that, you'll find out you have average performance over a long period of time. Okay? And usually there will be variation in that. Some data points will be higher and some will be lower. There are only three possibilities for a data point, up, down or the same. And that's called variability in a process over time. And so you have to understand that, and you can't understand that just by intuitively sort of going day by day going through things, because psychologically you're constantly reacting to a situation.

0:06:17.6 DL: You go home at the end of the day and your wife or your husband says, "How was your day, dear?" And, "Oh I've had a terrible day," and duh, duh, duh. But they usually don't say, "Well, how do you know it was a terrible day? How do you know it was worse than any other day, or better than any other day, or..." Well, until you actually understand a stable system and understand what's going on, you don't know really. You're reacting psychologically to that, and that's part of human nature.

0:06:47.5 AS: I wonder, David, would it be...do you think it would be...would it be proper to say that most systems that are kind of running, and haven't been looked at as to whether they're stable or not, are probably unstable?

0:07:04.3 DL: Not... My experience, I'd say 90% of my work has been in education, not business, etcetera, but what I found out is that intuitively people will stabilize a system over time. If they don't unintentionally do that, they kinda go nuts, they go crazy. Because one day they're in euphoria and the next day they're in hell, and then they're just... The roller coaster swings are so great that they'll usually leave the profession, go find something else. I used to see that a lot with new teachers, brand new teachers. And they call it the Fall Wall. So you start school and everything seems really great, and then you start to realizing, "Wow, this is work, and this is managing people, and this is every day, this is..." You're on and you're working through that, and then there's the Fall Wall of this huge depression cycle, and...teachers that stay with it and really have a love of kids and a purpose behind why they're there, they'll start to normally just stabilize the system. They may not get great results, but on average they're no worse or not much worse today than they were yesterday, or vice versa. But they're not gonna get a breakthrough in that system.

0:08:35.4 AS: Yeah, and I'm thinking about even when I recently did like a fast and my weight went down, and I had it down for a little while, and then I went back to eating, of course, and then all of a sudden you've realized there's this rebound and now that you're back, and now I'm back up to where I was and it's stable. It's not what where I really want it to be, but it's stable. And so you realize like there's a...as you're saying, people can't deal with chaos every day, so it stabilizes at some point, but that point may be far from the optimum of what that system could produce or something like that, I guess.

0:09:13.4 DL: Well, that's a good example, 'cause the person says he understands the stable system. Well, before you started to do that fast and actually track your weight, you were probably...your weight was probably in a normal range. That's the way it is for me. If I don't track it at all, it's usually within five or six pounds, given what's going on over a long period of time. But as soon as I track it and I start to understand what's happening and I see what the average weight is, then I have to think about, okay, am I happy with the average? So, again, this is back to the stable system. I always tell teachers, if you're happy with your average and you know it, clap your hands.

[laughter]

0:10:00.8 AS: If you're happy with your average, and you know it, clap your hands. [singing]

0:10:03.4 DL: And you know it, clap your hands. Yeah.

0:10:06.7 AS: There you go.

0:10:06.8 DL: So yeah. And they all laugh and everything else, but how do you know if you're happy with your average? Well, you're gonna have to collect some data. So it really doesn't matter what system you're thinking about managing, you have to understand...do you understand a the stable system? So let's say that: "Well, these kids today, they're always late to class." Okay, well, set up a run chart, track that for 12 days or 20 days, and find out what you're talking about. Find out. Are all the kids late to class? "Well, no, they're...no, they're not all late to class." Well, okay, well how many are late to class and what's happening with the data over time?

0:10:46.7 DL: So you have to figure it out what's important to you and how you're gonna go about that. The example I often give is, I worked with a middle school principal and he said, "Oh well, the teachers are complaining that the buses are always late." And I said: "Okay, well, that's pretty easy to track, so let's set up a run chart and you track the buses for 30 days, the arrival times of buses." Well, he did that, and not only were they not late, they were consistently really good. It was a stable system.

0:11:23.6 DL: 20 buses were arriving within a five-minute span. These people knew their jobs. But then one day they had fog, and one of the buses got delayed with the fog for like two hours before they arrived, and then all...so all these kids get off the bus and they're two hours late, and everybody in the front office has to get them caught up, the teachers have to get them caught up, it's a big emotional deal. But that's what everybody is responding to. They're not thinking about the stable system. They're responding to this one special cause, and psychologically it was a big problem, therefore "these buses are always late."

0:12:05.3 AS: Recency bias.

0:12:07.0 DL: Yeah, there you go.

0:12:08.3 AS: And it's an emotional attachment. I had two quick stories I wanna tell you, David, about this, and then maybe you can help me understand them. But the first one was that I was teaching at...I teach a program called Masters in Marketing at a university here in - Thammasat University in Thailand. 75 students that are studying in the class. And then I teach at another program in another place. And one of the things you notice is that in the other program, the students are late. You just count on it. And so you kind of don't start until five minutes after, or 10 minutes after, and let them drift in. And with the Master's in Marketing students, I've never ever seen any of the 75 students late. And here we have Bangkok traffic, you got something to blame it on. And it's never late. So is it different students or is it a different system? Well, when I investigated it more, many years ago, to try to understand it, I realized that they set a rule. They said if you're not in the classroom five minutes before, we're locking the door. Come back next time.

0:13:14.1 AS: And for some people that was really harsh, but once people signed up and they knew that that's the way the system worked, the output of the individuals was very different, the activity of what they did, just because they knew what to respond.

0:13:29.4 DL: Well, you bring up... Yeah, you bring up a good point. One way that people often stabilize systems is to make more rules. Well, let's just make a rule like that, and if you show up late something bad is gonna happen to you, or you can't get into the door or something like that, and if it doesn't work then just make it harsher. And public schools...or not public schools, but all schools, K through 12 schools especially, go through that. So if somebody's late, what happens to you? Well, you know, this is gonna happen, and then if you're late three times then this happens, and if you're late six times then this, and then so many times you're gonna lose credit and.... Does it work? It will stabilize the system to a point, but every administrator knows, there's just students that are like, "I don't care. Do whatever you want. Because I don't wanna be here in the first place."

0:14:31.8 DL: "The system you're running is so terrible and I hate it so bad, that [laughter] only reason I'm here is to avoid the punishment". And if that's the system that you're running, and soon as you stop doing those things, the variation is just gonna go back to where it was before.

0:14:51.2 AS: And is there a difference when it's...in the case of the Masters in Marketing students, they're all kind of voluntarily there, they paid a lot of money to get this education. Does that make any difference? Do you have to handle it differently or would you do pretty much the same and say, well, just squeezing down on people may stabilize, but it may not actually solve the root problem?

0:15:16.3 DL: Well, the answer to it actually is in this point that we're talking about here. Because the next sentence, he [Deming] says, "The manager understands the interaction between people and the circumstances that they work in." Okay? "Understands that the performance of anyone...they can learn a skill in a stable state." And so the answer to the question is right there. I would like to think about, you're starting class, if you want everybody there immediately, you're starting class immediately. So if I'm late to class, and you better make darn sure that what you're doing immediately is really important and really fun and really interesting. So if I walk into class late, I know immediately I've missed something. But the reverse...

0:16:06.5 AS: So it makes me think of start with a hook, start with something that's a grabbing activity that they wanna be a part of.

0:16:12.7 DL: Yeah, it could be. And sometimes I've been in situations where I had to manage like that, and so I would just start the class outside. If you're late, you came to class, you'd show up and there's nobody there, and you're like, "Where is everybody, what happened?" So the next class, you're probably thinking, "Well, I better get there on time because they're gonna be doing something." Or what I used to always, or still do, is tell teachers is, "Start class before class starts." What's that? Well, that means, well, when people are on their way to class, what do you want them to be thinking about, getting ready to do? Well, that's probably gonna have to start at the end of the previous class.

0:17:02.4 AS: Hold on, David, that's so valuable. I'm just thinking about my own students tonight, that I have my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, and starting class before class with the idea, I have a communication channel and I know what I'm gonna talk about tonight, and I know what we're gonna be doing. So maybe in that channel I should be throwing out some things that get them excited about, "What are we gonna do tonight?"

0:17:31.2 DL: Yeah, or you actually go through a quick process with them to set up a little flow chart, how to start class before class starts, and get their feedback about, "Well, what should you be doing when you're stuck in traffic in Thailand and trying to get to the university on time? What should you be doing?" I should be going over about, "Hey, what are they gonna be talking about this time and what's gonna be happening?" "Well, how am I gonna know that?" Well, somehow through the syllabus or the previous class. Or that's why ending a class by going over what are we gonna start with next time, is really a good thing, because people are like, "Oh yeah, okay, and now I know what's gonna happen as soon as I hit the door."

0:18:14.1 AS: So that's another practical thing right there, and I learned this from attending an online course of a guy named Brandon Gale, and he had at the end of each of his presentations, he'd say, "Up next, I'm gonna show you da, da, da." And I was just like, "Okay, that just absolutely made me wanna go to the next one." So now in all of my presentations I always have this one slide that says, "Congratulations, you've made it to the end of this section. Up next, you're gonna learn the one thing that da, da, da." And then that really helps people. And I have another...

0:18:47.4 AS: Okay, so now here's another actionable thing that a friend of mine does. He issues podcasts out to the world, but they're directed at his students. And think about following up - a preview podcast about this material that then is published out there to the world, but his students know they need to listen to it when they're in the car on the way to the class. So, yeah. Okay, these are some great, great ideas, let's continue.

0:19:15.6 DL: Yeah, So that's a really great example that: here's the process that we're gonna go through. And so you need to have listened to this podcast because when you hit the door, you're gonna be put into random groups and you're gonna be asked to start a discussion immediately on the podcast that you were supposed to listen to. See? So now the responsibility is shifted from me as the instructor to them as the students: it's your responsibility, as soon as you hit the door, get together with three other people, you got 10 minutes to go over the podcast, and what were the significant points that you got out of that.

0:19:53.0 DL: Well, somebody that didn't listen to it, is gonna be in that group and they're gonna feel very foolish once or twice, and then they're gonna start actually paying attention and doing the podcast.

0:20:05.8 AS: So for the listeners and the viewers out there, here's a challenge, here's a challenge to you: take some of these actionable ideas and play with them, enjoy them, bring them to your students, bring that into the classroom. You highlighted something that I didn't think about either, but the idea of starting class with something like pleasurable, rewarding, something like that, and when I start...

0:20:31.3 DL: It doesn't necessarily even have to be that. It has to be something that needs to be relevant, needs to be timely and it needs to be engaging. So I have to do something as soon as I hit the door. I have a responsibility as soon as I get there or online, if it's an online class, and what do you want them to do immediately as they're sitting there waiting for the online session to start or something, right? Those are all processes that's gonna get you a different stable state than if you just wait and you're gonna tell them what to do when things start. And people learn from that too, because they'll learn that, "Oh well, don't bother to read the syllabus or understand what's going on because he's gonna tell us what to do as soon as we get there." They'll learn really quick that they don't have to think or plan, or do anything, because you're gonna tell people when they get there.

0:21:38.7 AS: Right. One of the other things that I tried something kind of bold, I know my team was a little bit worried about it when we did it with the Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, we do live sessions at 6 o'clock, two or three nights a week, and basically, what we started was a breathing exercise and I recorded it as an audio clip where I just say, breathe in for four seconds, count one, two, three, four, hold it for four seconds, one, two, three, four, let it out for four seconds, one, two, three, four, and then we go through that cycle three times and it was a risk to bring that out. I felt like some people may think, "Oh, come on."

0:22:15.2 DL: It's a yoga class or what?

0:22:18.3 AS: What's that?

0:22:19.4 DL: Is this a yoga class?

0:22:21.8 AS: Exactly, so I went... By the time we got to the end of that first class where I tested this new idea, I asked them, "What did you think about that?" And they just absolutely loved it. And I know that breathing can actually stop your intensity that you've had from your day and kind of separate that from the actual class, but I can say for myself as the teacher, I enjoy that moment that we all have together where we breathe together. And I know it puts me in a different state, and I know that the value of that is, so that is something that I think students like to be a part of, they see the value in that, they feel the value of it, and therefore they wanna be on time to be in that. So that's an idea.

0:23:03.8 DL: There you go, there you go. So I wanna get back to this. So he [Deming] says he understands that the performance of anyone that can learn a skill will come to a stable state. So that's what we've been discussing, you've taught people a skill and now you stabilized it and it's coming to a stable state, that this is what we're gonna be doing. "Further lessons will not bring improvement or performance, a manager of people that in this stable state, it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake." And so that's the topic for our session today, are way supposed to be telling people about mistakes?

0:23:40.4 DL: Well, Deming's thinking around a stable...the interaction to create a stable system goes also to why he was so adamant against grading people. That it's not just you doing your own work in a system, it's the interaction of all these people within the system that gets the result. So if you set up a system where you are doing that, you're actually forcing individual, individuals to work alone, don't share anything, don't talk to anybody, don't... Well, what's gonna happen is you'll have an isolated few people that'll really do well, right? They get the A's, they get the top marks, the top grades, whatever it might ever be, and then you'll have everybody else stratified layers, B, C, D and F or whatever you wanna say, on down within that, because what you're really doing is shutting down the interaction of people to create a different result.

0:24:51.1 DL: Well, even in that kind of a world, teachers learn to create a stable system within that. "I got rules and no, you can't do make up work and you can't do this, and you can't do that, because I've got my stable system that I must maintain the system over everything else," which flies in the face of understanding why people are there in the first place, right? They're supposed to be there to learn not to play this game or figure out what the game is for people to go through the system.

0:25:31.1 DL: So what [Deming] he's talking about is that if you're in a system and somebody's making mistake within that system, you're actually...and you're pointing it out or whatever you're doing, you're actually blaming them, the individual.... This is what I believe he's talking about. You're blaming the individual for that mistake when the mistake may have come from the system itself and they can't change the system, only the manager can change the system, whether that's the teacher or a supervisor in a company, or a vice president, a principal, whoever it might be. The individuals typically can't just change the system, right? They can't just come up to the teacher and say, "well, I'm just not gonna play your system anymore, but I'm gonna do this system 'cause it gets better results." Most teachers would kind of freak out about that and, "No, you're not. You're not doing that."

0:26:26.3 DL: If somebody did that to me though, I'd say, "Well, tell me about it, tell me about what you're talking about and why does it get better results, and maybe we should try that as a class and maybe we should learn from that and try to figure out...maybe we will all do that, if we can figure out that's gonna get a different result."

0:26:46.9 AS: And what would happen if you have a worker who just makes a mistake, they're supposed to have done a particular step and they didn't do that step or something like that, some people would feel like, "Oh, well, he should be blamed or she should be blamed for that."

0:27:03.5 DL: Deming often talked about, he went and visited a company, I think in Ireland or something like that, and a big sign in the company, that says "465 days without an accident" in the company, right? And then they go to walk up the stairs and the railing on the stairs was so loose that he almost fell off the stairs, going up the stairs. Well, that would have been an accident, and is that the individual's fault or is that the system? And when you start thinking like that, especially in a classroom, it's the same kind of thing: if somebody doesn't understand a concept, let's say you go through a process where you train people and everything else, but then you've got one or two people out of the group that didn't do it right, don't understand, etcetera.

0:28:00.9 DL: Well, whose problem is that? Well, that's a level of variability, a variation, that eventually you want to limit that variation, so instead of having one or two people every class period that don't understand, now I'm down to once a month, somebody doesn't understand. Now I'm down to once a year, somebody doesn't understand. Now I'm down to about once every five or 10 years, I'll run into somebody [chuckle] that doesn't respond to the process I've set up, and they really are a special cause and I need to treat them like a special cause. I'm not going to change the whole system for that one individual, but I am gonna help them individually because they're not part of the stable state that I've set up and that I'm working within that over time.

0:28:51.8 AS: And so would it be right to say that, okay, once we reach a stable state, really a lot of all the variability and the mistakes, people are gonna make mistakes, that's all kind of noise that's not.... That there's nothing meaningful about that, and therefore pointing out this mistake or that and why did this happen? It's just chasing around common cause variation, and truthfully, the job of a manager should be able to be to think way beyond that, and you wanna encourage everybody through education, not training, we're talking a lot about training here of getting people to a standard stable state, but then the idea is, come on, well look at the opportunities are huge ahead of us, and that is just normal variation.

0:29:37.2 DL: Yeah, I'll give you a personal example [chuckle] from me. I was in an honors English class when I was a junior in high school, and we're all supposed to be top kids in the school, and these English class and working very hard. Well, I was sick for the whole week. And we were studying Arthur Miller, the famous playwright.

0:29:58.5 AS: Death of a Salesman.

0:30:00.1 DL: Yeah, and I came back and I had missed what the assignment was and everything else, and I went up to the teacher real quickly and said, "What did I miss? And what am I supposed to do?" And she said, "Well, everybody in the class was assigned a different aspect of Arthur Miller where things through...so she said, "What I like you to do is I'd like you to make a bibliography of Arthur Miller." Well, whether it was because I was sick or whatever, I heard her say, biography. So I went home and spent a week writing a 14-page biography of Arthur Miller's life and everything, and even hand wrote it out three times to make sure it was all clean and everything else, I was so proud of it at the end of the week, brought it back in and handed it to her before her class started.

0:30:54.5 DL: And she looked at it, she says, "What's this?" And I said, "Well, it's my assignment," and she looked at it and she threw it in the trash can, and she said you were supposed to write a bibliography," and [chuckle] I was just like stunned. I'd made a mistake, but whose mistake was it? So verbally, those two things sound a lot alike and etcetera. I turned around and walked out of the class and went up to the principal's office, and I was gonna change this situation and get it changed. So I mean there's a good example that she was pointing out a mistake that was the interaction of parts to the whole within the process. Simple change would have been to have all the students listed out and all the things that they were supposed to do on a piece of paper and not just verbal announcements about what you're going to do, right? Because there's a certain amount of variability, obviously in a verbal announcement. That make sense?

0:32:04.1 AS: Yep.

0:32:05.2 DL: And so if you keep operating like that, it makes you as the manager in total control of everything, but it actually turns everybody else into victims to some degree.

0:32:17.3 AS: Well, let's wrap this up. I just wanna go back through this one and read it again, because there's just so much to it. Number six: "He understands a stable system. He understands the interaction between people in the circumstances that they work in, he understands that the performance of anyone that can learn a skill will come to a stable state upon which further lessons will not bring improvement of performance." And finally, to wrap it up in relation to what we titled this, "A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake."

0:32:51.0 AS: What a great discussion. I appreciate it. I got some actionable ideas out of it, and I think for everybody out there, put some of these ideas into place. And 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. And listeners can also learn more about David at Langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, John and Andrew discuss what "transformation" means in education. John juxtaposes two reports, conducted a decade apart, that have influenced education for the last 40 years: A Nation at Risk and the Sandia Report.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is, Do we really need to transform our education system? [chuckle] John, take it away.

0:00:26.7 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back with you. Yeah, I thought... Sort of as a jumping off point from our other conversations, I remember, I think in our first conversation, you mentioned you graduated from high school, 1983 in Cleveland area, went to a solid...

0:00:44.9 AS: Hudson High.

0:00:45.2 JD: Hudson High, good traditional public school in Northeast Ohio. And your question was, if I went back to the high school 40 years later, would it look and sound the same, would it have gotten better? Would it have gotten worse? What's going on with our schools in United States, I think was the basic question, I think... When I answered you, I said two parts, there's the question about what most people probably focus on when you think about that question about Did a school get better? Did the test scores improve or decline over time? And then there was a secondary question of, Did the school transform along the lines of the Deming philosophy? And I think that those two questions would have different answers depending on which schools you're looking at, but I thought it would be interesting to sort of think about this question, Do we really need to transform our education system through the lens of a couple reports...

0:01:48.5 JD: Education reports, one that's well known in our world, one that's lesser known, that took a look at the... At least the test results question in the education sector, and then build from there this idea of whether or not we need to transform our schools. One thing, there's no shortage of calls to transform or some people would use the word reform our schools, and those two words probably in and of themselves, probably have different applications, but we'll use them interchangeably as we go through that question and attempt to maybe answer that over this episode and maybe a couple additional episodes.

0:02:36.7 AS: I find that fascinating as I observe education around the world from my own experience outside of the US, and I look at the US, and I think about the importance of education, the role of education. There's a part of education that you could say is kind of indoctrination in the way a country educates its youth to be a certain way or to understand things a certain way, so I didn't see that part of education when I was young, but now I see every country's got their indoctrination that they do within their school system, so I see it kind of broadly, but I'm just curious, really take us through what you'd like to explain about that.

0:03:20.4 JD: Yeah, I think the sort of start... I think there's this quote in The New Economics where Dr. Deming says that people are asking for better schools with no clear idea how to improve education, nor even how to define improvement in education, and I think if that's... And he's saying this roughly the same time that these reports are coming out, and if that's true, I think what happens is when reports come out about the state of our education sector, it's pretty easy to get pulled this way and that. When you don't have a clear picture in your mind for what schools should look like or how to improve schools, these reports have large impacts. And so the first report is well known. It came out about the same time you were graduating from high school, in 1983 in the first Reagan administration, called A Nation at Risk. It's pretty well known in the education sector, and it's had a lot of far-reaching impact in both time and place, where even today, 40 years later, we still... Some of the roots of the various reforms that we've undergone in our sector, it's still playing a role.

0:04:40.6 JD: The second report is, that I'll sort of juxtapose against The Nation at Risk is a report that came out about a decade later called the Sandia Report, and I think it's really interesting just to look at those two reports and the impact or lack of impact they've had over the last 30 or 40 years in the world of education. So I think I would start with, when A Nation at Risk came out, and it was commissioned by the Reagan Administration, the National Commission on Excellence in Education is the group that released the report and one of the leading statistics that's in the report is that the SAT, the college entrance exam that high school students take demonstrates a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980, where average verbal scores fell over 50 points, and average mathematic scores dropped nearly 40 points in that roughly 20 year time period. And there's these really memorable quotes that are clearly meant to awaken the public to the state of its schools that people still remember to this day, and I'll read one. It says, "We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people."

0:06:24.0 JD: You couldn't get much more of wake up type people language, it's really, really interesting. Like I said, this report over the last four decades has been that foundation or bedrock for the various federal reforms that people are probably familiar with, starting with...

0:06:41.0 AS: And to put it into context, that's the kind of talk that was coming out of the Reagan administration, like government's not helping and government can be a problem and we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and you need to take personal responsibility, so it's very... It makes sense that that type of language was coming out of the Reagan administration.

0:07:05.4 JD: Yeah, and I think... So this report is floating around, there's a convening of all the governors in the United States in about 1989, and some pretty strong federal education legislation starts getting put together, it starts with the first Bush and then it ends up being passed during Bill Clinton's years called Goals 2000. And has various goals around increasing graduation rates and test scores and things like that, and then that transitions to No Child Left Behind with many people are familiar with that. Came out in the early Bush years and had a lot of impact on schools when my career was first getting started down in Atlanta, but it was federal legislation, so it covered the entire country, and then it even played a role even into the Obama years when he released the Race to the Top legislation, and that was more of a competitive grant program federally that was lots of strings attached a lot of focus on test scores, a lot of focus on teacher evaluations and principal evaluations and using test scores in those evaluations.

0:08:21.3 JD: And so you can see this, I think, direct linkage between A Nation at Risk, to Goals 2000, to No Child Left Behind, to Race to the Top, and even to the stuff that you see at the federal level to this day. So when a report like this comes out, it's called A Nation at Risk, the thesis of the report is right in the title. A nation is at risk because of its education sector, and so it's like... Most people say, Well, we gotta do something about this. We need to take action. There's some serious implications. And so about a decade after this report comes out, the Department of Energy sort of commissions its own report. The point of this report, as you might expect, is the department of energy, they're actually looking to do some economic forecasting, so it's not directly about our schools, but they wanna take the same data set that The Nation at Risk authors looked at and analyze it.

0:09:32.3 JD: And interestingly, they entered this analysis thinking that they are going to verify the results from a Nation at Risk, but what actually happened is that on nearly every measure of achievement, the Sandia analysts found actually steady or slightly improving trends in the test data. So they were...

0:10:02.1 AS: And in the same test data or in new test data that was coming out?

0:10:04.7 JD: Same exact data. They actually didn't look just at test data, they were actually looking at graduation rates, dropout rate, college-going rates so on just about every one of those measures, it was either steadily improving or slightly improving. And so you go back to A Nation at Risk and you have this absolute decline in SAT scores from the early '60s to the early '80s, and the Sandia authors aren't disputing that, but they're looking at their analysis and they're saying, wait a second, this decline in average scores, actually doesn't mean that the high school students of the early '80s or early '90s, weren't as capable as their 1960s peers. And so then you start to think, Well, how could this be? It's really, really interesting. And what the Sandia report authors go on to say is that when they broke out the test scores and these other measures like I said, graduation rates and other things like that, they broke them out by race and socioeconomic status, class rank, gender, they found these steady or improving rates in all of these groups, and they chalked it up to this statistical phenomenon called Simpson's Paradox, and basically what that is, is when trends that appear in this aggregated data set, which is sort of A Nation At Risk analysis, that reverses when the data is separated into sub-groups, like it was in the Sandia report.

0:11:45.6 JD: So basically what they're saying is that there are a more diverse mix of students on any number of measure, socioeconomic status, gender, race, those types of things, class rank, that there's a more diverse mix of students taking this test, and that is what causes this sort of change in average test scores and other similar measures.

0:12:10.6 AS: Which I guess A Nation at Risk should have controlled for?

0:12:17.6 JD: At least... I think breaking the scores out in the way that the desegregating the data like Sandia did would have been an important step given that the population of test takers was very different in 1963 than it was in 1983 or 1993. So the Sandia researchers basically found these improving trends on dropout statistics, standardized tests, post-secondary studies, educational funding even, international assessment comparison, so all these different measures that... This sort of earlier report is raising serious alarm bells about. This new report is saying, Well, wait a second, if we look at this data and we drill down in a little bit different way, we get the opposite results, but hardly anybody knows about the Sandia report, and just about everybody in my sector, my age and older knows about the A Nation at Risk Report, it's cited all the time. Even to this day, I just heard someone on a podcast a week or two ago talking about A Nation at Risk.

0:13:24.7 AS: So I guess one of the lessons is be careful with how you handle data.

0:13:30.6 JD: Be very careful. I think one of the principless we use here is data has no meaning apart from its context, and this is a very good example of data taken out of context. I think one of the lessons for me is that when you look at our schools, and I think this is maybe what happened with A Nation at Risk, is that for most people, what you see in educational data that comes out of our schools depends, in large part, on what you thought about our schools before we looked. I think they kind of drew a conclusion and then they sort of found evidence to support that.

0:14:14.2 AS: Supposed to be the opposite way. Good research.

0:14:16.8 JD: Yeah, I think so. I think so, should have been an open question, and the Sandia Report had... I think maybe their eyes were a little more open or their willingness to consider alternative explanations was a little bit more because they were not inside the Education Sector, they were outsiders, they were physicists and economists in the Department of Energy, and so they didn't really have a dog in the fight. I guess you'd say.

0:14:41.5 AS: Well, I guess you could probably say we actually don't really know, but the assumption is because they're outside in the department of energy, they're completely neutral, but they may have had their own biases that they brought into that too, but still...

0:14:56.3 JD: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

0:14:58.2 AS: It's a great lesson on... What was it you said, data has no meaning without...

0:15:02.3 JD: Apart from its context. Yeah. Apart from its context. Yeah, I think that's a good example. Yeah.

0:15:06.6 AS: Yeah, and what it also makes me think about. One of the things that's so interesting about the stock market is that you can take a lot of data, you can analyze it and come up with your opinion, and let's just say that you're not that good at analyzing and you've missed some very key things in that data, and then you put your money down and the market will take it away from you, boom like that. Like as an immediate punishment for poor logic and reason, and I'd say that it's kind of one of the last places where that's kind of allowed and where it's kind of supposed to happen, but I think that the immediate punishment for bad logic and reason is not that common any place anymore.

0:15:53.6 JD: Yeah, I would agree. And the troubling thing is the, like I said, the wide-ranging implications that reports like A Nation at Risk can have even 40 years later.

0:16:11.9 AS: Yeah, and I guess that's another lesson from this, so first lesson is about understanding the data and being very careful of how you're interpreting that, the second one is that I like to say first to the mind wins. It's just... I have a funny story where I moved to Thailand and I didn't have a girlfriend and I lived with my best friend, and basically there was people at that time that took that circumstantial evidence and they said, Andrew is gay. Okay, that circumstantial evidence could point to that, and I didn't make any attempt to answer that question, so 20 years, 25 years later, a friend of mine was at a bar, and he said that he overheard two people talking about me, and they were talking about how I'm gay. And my friend went up and said, Well, actually do you guys know Andrew? And they're like, No, we've never met him. And he said, Well, I'm friends with him, and I can put this to rest that Andrew is in fact not gay. They refused to accept that. And I just thought, first of all, first opinions are very difficult to reverse. It takes a lot of emotional and intellectual energy for somebody to do that, and therefore that partially explains...

0:17:46.9 AS: Now, the second part that explains it, is that when you attach emotion to something, it also emboldens it or it makes it in your mind much more so if you think... If you ask an older person, Where were you when you heard that John F. Kennedy was shot? They know exactly where they were because that scary negative painful motion was attached to that particular event. So that's another lesson. But really, John, I wanna know. So my iPhones improve. The car I drive has improved. The TV I use is improved. Everything around me, the medical advancements have improved. Has education improved?

0:18:35.0 JD: Yeah, that's a great question because, What is education? I think probably in some places, and in some times it has and in other places, in other times it hasn't. And in the same place, in different times, the answer would probably be different and depend a lot on what it means to improve, going back to that original quote from Deming, What does improvement mean?

0:19:01.0 AS: So I'm asking a very non-specific general question, it sounds like what you're saying.

0:19:07.8 JD: Yeah. Well, and...

0:19:10.2 AS: Can I ask it in a little bit different way?

0:19:12.4 JD: Sure, because I was gonna say, before we move on from your story of the bar story, I think somewhere... There's a researcher named Zeynep Tulfekci, and I was listening to her on a podcast, I think she's some type of researcher. She said, I can't remember what they were talking about, maybe it was something COVID-related or something from a few years ago, and she said, "Whatever thing is that you're researching or just hearing about, go to the primary source and read the entire thing." And I wrote that down on a post it note.

0:19:45.7 AS: Nobody does that.

0:19:46.8 JD: 'Cause nobody does it. Now, in fact, I talk about being first to mind in some training or conversation or a book, I am sure that I heard or read about A Nation at Risk, and then I just repeated a few things over and over as if it was truth in fact, for probably 15 years before I went and read the thing myself, and my first impression reading it was, Whoa, this is all that's in here. I forget if it's 30 or 40 pages. There's not a lot of data in it. There are some compelling statistics like the SAT thing and some quotes that jump off the page, but I was struck when I actually read it for myself. There wasn't a lot there, certainly not enough to base 40 years of education reform work. That's for sure.

0:20:31.2 AS: And I think that's another lesson too, related to Dr. Deming's teaching. And let's say sometimes the Japanese were kind of famous about go to the location where the problem is coming from, get out of your office and go out. I think that Dr. Deming really highlighted the importance of valuing the workers and their inputs 'cause they know what's going on, and so that's something that I think if people aren't reading some of the basic research or originations of ideas, they're also probably not going down and checking out what's actually happening and you could find a very different story.

0:21:10.0 JD: Yeah, go to the Gemba, go to the factory floor, in our case, it's go to the classroom to see what's actually happening. Yeah. And you're gonna ask that question.

0:21:17.7 AS: So I wanna break my question then... I'm gonna break it down and make it a little bit more specific in hopes that you...

0:21:26.7 JD: You pin me down.

0:21:28.3 AS: Could answer it. The first question I have is that, If we go back 40 years, and I can remember, I had to take a French class and I wasn't particularly interested in France and French language, and I had no interest in that really at the time. And now, let's say it's 40 years later and a young kid like me has to take a French class: Have we come up with a better methodology for learning a language like, Okay, we've advanced, we've been teaching French for 40 years from that time to now, and now we know that there is a better way to acquire a language that cuts the language acquisition time from 40 hours to proficiency, or let's say, I don't know, 400 hours to proficiency to 300 hours to proficiency, this has nothing to do with education or the system of education, but: Have we come upon methodologies that can allow us to acquire knowledge any better or faster than what we did 40 years ago?

0:22:36.9 JD: That's a good question. I think... how would I answer that? I would say that in many areas of education there have been significant advances in the understanding of cognitive science or the application of cognitive science to improve teaching methods. In many areas, I think over the last 40 years, there have been advances, but like in other areas, whether or not those advances make it into the hands and the practices of the front line people is a different question.

0:23:23.6 AS: Which is separate. That's a separate point.

0:23:27.5 JD: When there's two things too, and let's take medicine for example. In medicine, there are a series of landmark trials that led to standard practices in medicine, so in education, I think in most areas, there's actually fewer of the landmark trials and key areas that everybody knows about.

0:23:52.4 AS: So I guess part of what I'm thinking about is one of the arguments I read in a great book called Future Hype, where the guy talked about how everybody hypes how things are moving so fast, but in fact, most of the progress that we've made in this world was made a long time ago. And he uses one example is jet airplanes, basically, we're flying at the same speed today as we did in 1950.

0:24:15.7 JD: 1950, yeah.

0:24:17.7 AS: There's been no advancement, and I can say flying back and forth from seeing Thailand and the US, there was a slight advancement where we had a plane that could fly from New York to Bangkok, but eventually they cancelled that because it was just too expensive and stuff, so it's like there really has been no... Maybe we hit the limit. And you could argue that when it comes to education, it should be quickly adopted if there's a new technology or a new way of acquiring knowledge, repetition or whatever that is, it's pretty quickly adopted, so it could be that we're at the... There's just so much that the human mind can take in.

0:24:55.2 JD: Well, yeah, I've heard that argument, and the second part too would be, to finish off that landmark trial thing is, in medicine where there have been landmark trials that it takes on average like 16 or 17 years for that landmark trial to then be sort of standard practice in practice by doctors and actual hospitals and clinics and even in that... In those sort of... Even when it hits that tipping point, that's far from majority...

0:25:23.3 AS: So you can tell the parents just wait 17 years.

0:25:28.6 JD: [laughter] And then we'll have this best practice for...

0:25:31.3 AS: I listened to somebody say that, We want you to make an investment in our education system, and the investment is your child. We'll do the best we can, but it's an investment, we're still learning and all that. So that brings me to the second part of the question is... And let's just say that education is mainly done through government in Thailand, in Asia, in Europe, in the US, I guess it's mainly done by government, but let's just say generally: Have we improved the way that we educate? Is there... I'm trying to ask it in a way that would be maybe a better way like... Okay. I don't know how to ask it, but I'll just say, like I said, my iPhone's improved tremendously. The camera that we're using on this, the microphone, the internet service that we're using to do this, all of these things have incrementally improved and at times made a major jump in improvement. And my question is, Has our ability to educate young people improved at the pace of other things or at a certain good pace?

0:26:50.2 JD: The way I would answer that is two parts, one, Have you ever heard of the Flynn effect?

0:26:56.9 AS: The what?

0:27:00.1 JD: The Flynn effect.

0:27:00.6 AS: No.

0:27:00.9 JD: Its name for the psychologist that discovered it. Flynn, F-L-Y-N-N. The fun fact is basically, this idea that IQs rose about three points per decade over the last century or so, I think I have that roughly right, in every population. So because of the modern world over the last 100 years has gotten more complex and there's sort of more to life that's like taking a standardized test. We've gotten better at that type of thinking over the last 100 years, so IQ has risen. So in that respect, we have gotten better, I guess, at least measures that purport to approximate whatever intelligence is. However, I don't think that we've closed gaps between groups. Those gaps that exist between different groups, performance wise, I think those... And that's sort of a key area of work for education reform movement that came out of A Nation at Risk. One of the things that people are working on is closing the achievement gaps between different groups, especially kids that are living in poverty, and their more affluent peers. I think those gaps, I think over time have been stubborn, because if you consider the Flynn effect, and that's not what's being measured on state exams, but when one group is going up and the other group is going up too, right.

0:28:45.7 JD: So both are relatively higher than, let's say, IQ scores were 50 years ago, but there's still this gap between groups. So again, it depends on exactly what you're talking about and determined what happened.

0:29:02.4 AS: And when I look at Asia, knowing the education system in Asia, first of all, over the last, let's say, 20 to 30 years, you have many, many families that have finally gotten their first kids into college, and you could argue that that's real advancement for that particular family and maybe for that society. The second thing is, you can see the culture in Asia still remains that education is very important, and so there's pressure from family and all of that in society, that it still is there, so whether American education is declining or improving, also you have to think of it in context of what's happening globally. And I think there's two ways to think about it. First is the quality of a country, ultimately the education of the people should have some effect on the quality of the country and the quality of life in that country. And then the second thing is that the position of that country in a global context should have some relationship to the level of education of that country. Those are just my ideas, it's not necessary something proven, but I feel like that could be true. So I wanna wrap this up a little bit, but how would you summarize what you want people to take away from this?

0:30:37.9 JD: Well, a lot of this stuff, there's sort of two counter-intuitive ideas here. When you look at these two reports that we were talking about, so on one hand, I don't think there's clear evidence that schools have been on a steady decline for the last, let's say 50 or 60 years going back to that, the early '60s that a Nation at Risk is talking about. However, on the other hand, I think that to achieve equitable outcomes for all students, that schools must undergo this transformation on an order of magnitude that's never really been seen or seldom seen in the history of organizations. And I think both reports are mostly looking at test scores and that's a pretty narrow definition of success, or there may be some uses there because we don't know how groups are doing and maybe where to allocate resources without some of those results, but they're definitely more of an inspection and in sorting mechanism than they are an improvement tool. So I think the other problem is, is that if there's this narrative that the nation is at risk, and then... Well, then you... You're saying that things are on the decline and then, Who do you blame for that decline?

0:32:12.9 JD: And I think what happened a lot in the last 40 years of the educational reform movement, deliberately non-deliberately, what happened was a lot of a brunt of that blame was placed on teachers and principals, the people that are working in schools. By the time Race to the Top comes out, using student test results in teacher and principal evaluations is sort of like part of getting the money that was there available through Race to the Top. And so I think my whole point with these types of reports is that, something like the Sandia report can have useful insights that maybe can facilitate some sound database decision-making, but so many times these reports come with these preconceived notions, political agendas, those types of things and the only way to make...

0:33:11.8 JD: To have a sound decision-making is if our education system sits on this solid philosophical foundation, and that's where I think Deming comes in, because if you have that foundation, you're not gonna make changes simply because of changes in test scores, you're gonna make changes based on whether or not something is principled and need to change according to the philosophy, and that's where I really see Deming coming in as this solid philosophical foundation, so it doesn't allow you to get swayed by a political agenda, it's a foundation that's grounded in principles, and so that's what I was thinking, we talk about in the next episode is: When you don't have those principles, what are some of the myths that emerge? And then when you identify those myths and can set those to the side, what are the principles that come in that then drive that transformation going forward. And I think Deming's work is at the center of that.

0:34:16.3 AS: And one of the things that makes me think about is: Can the system transform itself? And one of the ways to try to answer this question, it could be right, it could be wrong is, Is there an alternative solution for educating young people? And if there is, has there been an increase or decrease in people turning to that alternative? You could imagine that if there was a competing system and there was a huge outflow of people from one to another, then parents may say, Well, yeah, you guys can't measure what it is that is great output, but I can. That my student has homework that my child is learning, that my child is... Whatever their assessment is, and so there's someone outside, you could say the customer or the outside interested party just says, I vote with my feet. And I'm just curious, as we wrap up, Is there any knowledge that you have on what... Is there an alternative for government education in America? And has that been more or less popular over the last I don't know 10, 20 years?

0:35:31.0 JD: Yeah. Well, I'm gonna say the first part of your answer, I think your hypothesis, your instinct is right, is that you focused on the system. It's that focus on the system versus the focus on the individual, solely on the individuals within the system, like what was happening with the teacher and the principal evaluations and using the test data in those evaluations. So I think Deming said something like: He estimated that 94% of the problems in organization was due to the system, 6% special, and he meant 6% was maybe attributed to issues at the individual level. So the vast majority of the potential for improvement lies with the system. So I think that's what we're talking about here, the redesign of the system.

0:36:17.5 AS: And that also goes back to constancy of purpose, it also goes back to leadership. And is it possible that the system simply can't have constancy of purpose for political reasons or other reasons, and that... It's just a question I've never even thought about, but it is a challenge to think about, Is there constancy of purpose? Is there strong leadership without leadership...

0:36:45.5 JD: Yeah. There has to be fortitude there. Intestinal fortitude for sure. A strong leadership is a prerequisite. One of the things that Deming railed against was the transition, the frequent transitions amongst management leadership in the United States, because you do need that stability of leadership to maintain that focus on the aim that's guiding the system. So I think that is... That's sort of a part of the formula for success, for sure.

0:37:13.0 AS: I kind of interrupted you and you're, I think may be attempting to answer the question, Is there an alternative and has it grown or contracted?

0:37:22.0 JD: Well, so there's government-funded schools, that's traditional public schools, certainly where I am sitting in public charters, that's a government-funded school that has a slightly different governance structure. So that sector didn't exist 35 years ago, and so that now is maybe six or seven percent of the kids in the United States, something like that, attend a public charter school, and then the other component would be kids that attend a private school or are home schooled, now both of those, as I understand it, both of those populations of students rose sort of coming out of the pandemic, for sure. Yeah.

0:38:03.3 AS: Well, an interesting topic, and the original question is, Do we really need to transform our education system and maybe before... As we wrap up here. How would you answer that?

0:38:18.7 JD: So, yes, I think yes, but it's not for the reasons outlined in A Nation at Risk.

0:38:27.7 AS: Got it. 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. 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 part 5 of this series, David and Andrew discuss the pitfalls of managers acting as judges versus the benefits of acting as a coach. They explore the history of traditional management practices, and how Dr. Deming's philosophy creates happier, healthier, and more productive workplaces.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic for today is: management through coaching and counseling. And as a reminder, we are reviewing the role of a manager of people in The New Economics that Dr. Deming wrote. And if you are in the third edition, this is on page 86, if you're in the second edition, this is on page 125. Now we've been through steps or the list, let's say, all the way up to number four was our last one, and now we're into number five. And what Dr. Deming says pretty short to the point, and that is the new manager, a transformed manager is a coach. He is coach and counsel, not a judge. David, take it away.

0:01:07.7 David Langford: Okay, thank you, Andrew. Yeah, so this seems like a pretty short point and pretty obvious on the surface, but the more you get into it, the more you start to really think about, Well, how do you do that on a daily basis? And once again, I'm applying all this to the field of education, so when we're talking about the management of people, we're talking about teachers, we're talking about principles, professors, we're talking about administrators, so we're not... It's not just corporate thinking that we're after here. So what does that mean managing through your, somebody's a coach and counselor? Well, why, I had to always think about Why did Deming say this? Why did he make that as a point? Well, through his lifetime, 80 years in applied management, he constantly saw people that were, sometimes is called Boss management. It's: either my way or the highway management. There were the years during World War II where there's military management, and if you didn't follow orders, you could be court marshaled, or shot or whatever. And so really after World War II, all those people in the military came back, and people who had been in the service went right back into management positions in corporations, and so what philosophy are they bringing back with them. Well, they're bringing back military management.

0:02:54.1 DL: It's my way or the highway kind of thinking. And all these phrases that have bounced around for the last 50, 60 years, you're not getting paid to think, you're getting paid to do. Well, Deming was just the opposite. He was always trying to get people to think. In the previous point, we spent quite a bit of time talking about creating training and learning for people, and on the job, all kinds of training and learning, not just things that are gonna help you with your job because you wanted people to think. And why. Why would he want people to think? Because that's where creativity comes from. You get everybody in an organization and you have a Thinking Organization going on, you've really got something fantastic happening.

0:03:48.8 DL: If you don't have that and you got boss management and everybody's just waiting around for the boss to tell them what to do, you're not gonna get creativity, you're not gonna get new thoughts. In fact, creativity gets shut down in a situation like that. I'll never forget, a friend of mine talked about working in an auto plant in California during the 1960s, and his job was to put in screws. And as the cars came by, he'd put in these screws and he kept noticing that the tool that he had to put the screws in was stripping the screws out every tenth screw or so. So he actually took his time to create a special little attachment and a tool to make sure that every screw that he put in would be perfect, and he wouldn't be stripping those screws out in these vehicles, and he was so excited that when his manager came around, he's shared with him this idea about...

0:04:50.2 DL: Look what I've done, I've created this tool that goes on the end of the rivet gun or whatever it is, and to make sure that the screws are always in perfectly. Well, he got in huge trouble. Manager just ate him out and one side down the other. You're not getting paid to think, you put it back on. And that was prominent thinking then and probably management thinking that Deming encountered in our auto industry and why the Japanese suddenly started beating us in the auto industry is because they had people that were thinking and not just doing. So Deming wanted... What does that mean for like a teacher? Well, you're trying to get students always to think on their own. I've helped teachers many times, especially young kids to come up with a flow chart with their students, what to do when you don't know what to do. And there's a lot of thought in that. Right. I have a whole flow chart, well, what do you do when you don't know what to do. Do you just sit around and goof around and bother other people? Do you... What happens in those kinds of situations?

0:06:11.5 DL: Or have you gone through a process to try to solve the problem yourself? I know after a couple of years of working like this with students in classrooms, I'd have students come up to me and they'd get ready to ask a question, and then they'd look at me and they'd go, never mind. I said, No, I'd say, No, wait a minute, don't leave, why don't you wanna ask your question? And... Well, I haven't really gone through the process of trying to solve it myself yet. Oh, okay, well, let me know how that goes. Because until you do that, you're not really thinking and you're not really... The neurons are not gonna connect in a pattern that next time around, you can actually think through and solve the problem yourself. And so there's steps to going through those things and getting students of all ages to be able to think and solve problems themselves, and unfortunately, we're not getting better at this in organizations, we are still reverting and going backwards in many cases, partly because once you become a manager, there's power in that and control. And if I think that people don't need me, does that make my job sort of worthless? Maybe I don't need to be there.

0:07:39.8 DL: Well, it's actually just the opposite, that if you have people taking autonomy, solving problems, figuring things out on their own, and when they come to you, you're giving them coaching and counseling. Have you thought about this, have you thought about this way? And what do you think would happen if you did this? And rather than judging them about it, you get people thinking on a higher level all the time. I'll never forget... I can't remember if I told the story or not, but the school district I was working in, in Texas, the State Board of Education asked me to come and speak to the state board and talk about what I was doing with the schools in Texas. And I said, Well, I won't come unless I can bring a hundred of my friends. And he said, What are you talking about? And I said, Well, I won't come unless I can bring some of these students that are already in classrooms functioning this way with Deming thinking. And he said, Oh yeah, that'd be great. We never get to see any students. Isn't that odd? State board of education never sees their customers. Anyway, so a school district brought a bus load students, and in that bus load of students was a teacher and her kindergarten, five and six-year-old students, and they had told me at the state board that I had 10 minutes to make a presentation.

0:09:16.3 DL: So I talked about 3 minutes, and it's about who was Deming and applied thinking, etcetera, and then I had these kids talk. Well, I'll never forget these kindergarten kids were at the microphones and they're talking about how autonomous they are in their classroom, how they solve their own problems, how they work together, how they support each other, they're just amazing. Going on and on. And one of the state board members says, "Now, I understand that you have a lot of control and responsibility in your classroom," and all these kids are shaking their heads, yes. And she said, "Well, if you have all this control and responsibility over what you do every day, what's your teacher doing?" And this little boy without hesitating grabbed a microphone and looked right at her, and he said, The teacher is not in the closet, you know. It was stun silence. There's like 300 people in the room, it's dead silence and you hear all those whispering, What did he just say? Deming said profound knowledge is not limited to age. At five and six, he knew that he'd had a coach and a counselor in the classroom, and he was able to do this and take this kind of responsibility because of the teacher, not in spite of the teacher.

0:10:44.4 DL: So if you're not allowing your students to take responsibility and own their own situation, then you can have a rebellion going on. And you might never even know it because it could be an underground rebellion going on.

0:11:00.1 AS: Yeah, by the time you know it, it's too late. I was just thinking about some of these words, just to make sure that we're super clear, like I was looking at the word coach online, and one dictionary says someone whose job is to teach people to improve at a sport or skill or a school subject. Another one was counsel, which is to give advice, especially on social or personal problems. Another one was judge: to form, give or have an opinion or decide about something or someone. And I'm also reminded of a very good book that I found helpful in the coaching space, written by Michael Bungay Stanier, and he has some questions, it's called The Coaching Habit, and he had the questions that being a coach, he said You should ask, what's on your mind? What else is on your mind? And another question is, what's the real challenge for you that you're facing? What do you want? How can I help? If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? And what was the most useful for you in that process? So those are some of the words, and I'm just curious, can you really be a coach in school? Or do you need to be kind of authoritarian to control a classroom? That's one of the questions that I'm sure some people are like, Yeah, that sounds great, David.

0:12:24.9 AS: But my classroom is out of control and I've gotta really... I've gotta squeeze down here to get things together.

0:12:32.8 DL: We need some discipline around here.

0:12:34.8 AS: Exactly.

0:12:39.2 DL: Yeah, the beatings will continue around here until morale improves.

0:12:43.4 AS: Exactly.

0:12:43.5 DL: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, every time I hear educators talking about, Oh, we got a discipline plan, or these kids need more discipline or... Every generation says, These kids today, they don't understand discipline. And I often will tell teachers, have you ever looked up discipline in a dictionary? Most dictionaries, the first definition of discipline is training.

0:13:11.0 DL: So you have a discipline problem, Oh, you got a training problem. And that totally changes things, and it actually goes to Deming's point when he says, Don't sit around and judge people. Train people in the way that you want them to go and what you want them to do and how you want them to act and let them make decisions and... Don't just judge them and heap so many demerits, this is gonna happen to you, and three tardies equal an absence, and three absences is equal this, and that's judging people and you're not actually improving the situation at all. I just read an article that Los Angeles has a chronic absentee problem. Well, partly because nobody wants to go to school there, right? You're not gonna miss something you think is fun and you're involved in, and you're actually learning. Learning is the most motivating thing that could be happening, and if students are going to school and they're not learning, then why am I even bothering?

0:14:27.8 DL: Now, you can try to discipline by heaping judgments and punishments and all kinds of things on people, but the bottom line is people are gonna vote with their feet and they're just... They just don't wanna put up with it over time or they'll show up, they won't do anything, they won't learn anything, they won't get involved. And the thing is that we always wanna blame the people and not the system, and that's what Deming is talking about, not being a judge, stop judging and blaming the people in this system and start fixing the system. And you'll get a different result.

0:15:10.4 AS: I went on the dictionary again to look at discipline, once you said that, I'm your handy-dandy fact checker here, and in fact, the first word in the description in the dictionary is training, and it says, training that makes people more willing to obey or more willing or more able to control themselves.

0:15:30.7 DL: Yes, and that's ultimately what you're after is to get people to control themselves instead of you thinking that you have to do everything.

0:15:43.9 AS: Another way of looking at this too, is to think about, How would you like to be treated? I think one of the best questions in a job interview that I've learned to ask is, What's the best way to manage you? And sometimes, I'll ask it by saying, if I was to talk to your last boss and ask them, what's the best way to manage you, to get the most out of you? And then it's amazing what that opens up. Some people say, like for me, I often explain that I'm kind of an incrementalist, so if I have a project, I want to check that it's on track, and I wanna work on a bit of it at a time, and then go from there, whereas there's some other people like, Just leave me alone and I'll produce this thing at the end of the... And when a boss or a colleague understands that that's the way my mind works, then it's easier for them to understand that doing a project with me, it's better to have daily check-ins versus someone else that may not want that, so think about how you would describe yourself to your boss, to your administrator, and describe how you would like to be treated, and surprisingly, it may be the way you should be treating other people too.

0:17:04.0 DL: Yeah. So take that same thinking and translate it to a second grade classroom. Do you really know your students and know how to coach and counsel each of those students either collectively or separately? And rather than thinking that since I'm bigger and have a stronger voice, and I'm the authoritarian person here, I can just tell you what to do and if you don't do it, I'm just gonna make your life miserable until you do do it. It's not a really good way to manage, and...

0:17:36.1 AS: Yeah. I'm imagining a little kid saying, and a teacher in that classroom saying, So how do you learn? How do you learn to memorize something? And they say, I take the first letter and then I make a rhyme. Alice likes such and such, and then I sing it in my head, and then people are like, Wow, okay, I never even thought about doing it that way. I know for me, I write out, let's say the first letter of something that I wanna memorize and think about it as a neumonic, but the idea of sharing those things in classrooms, and that's one way to coach, Counsel and discuss.

0:18:16.0 DL: Well, when you hear athletes in interviews and there's great coaches and that these athletes have worked for and they say, what about this guy? What makes him a great coach? Invariably, they'll say things like, he's a teacher, or she's a teacher. And just an incredible teacher. So when you're a manager of people like that, like whole groups of people, whether in a classroom, a team or a company or whatever it might be, and over time, you are a coach and a counselor versus being a judge with people. What does that do for you? Well, when times of crisis do come along, Covid, whatever it might be, if you've trained people up well, discipline them to think and understand and to work well with each other and support each other to a very high degree, you are now capable of taking on challenges that just across the street, the same kind of organization, they can't cope with it, they just fold because they have no internal ability to work together to a high degree to support each other to get through a crisis kind of a situation.

0:19:34.9 AS: When I think about Coach, I think about my dad and my mom to some extent, because they kicked me out when I was 18, and they said, Go make it on your own, but the deal was at that point, that was when they stopped giving any advice, it's like, You gotta do it. And we don't have any right to say, No, you've gotta make it on your own. My parents were never big on advice, but what they did is they listened to me, and then they tried to understand and all that, but I don't really remember my parents giving me advice specifically, and I can say that I remember when I had a girlfriend a long time ago in Thailand and I had some difficulty in my life that was pretty bad. It was pretty tough. And she said, You know what did you do? And I said, Well, I called my dad. And she's like, You talk to your dad about something like that!?

0:20:27.9 DL: Oh, wow.

0:20:30.5 AS: Yeah, and I learned in Asian culture, dads are not necessarily as approachable as they may be in the Western culture, which was a real surprise to me because I had seen Asian families as being very, very close, but what I just recall is just the comfort of being able to talk honestly and openly about a problem that I was facing. That was half of the solution, right there is to get rid of the anxiety and then start to think through. And so from a coaching perspective, I feel like coaching and counseling is really all about listening.

0:21:10.5 DL: Yeah, you made me think about... I grew up on a farm, and my father intuitively understood a lot of these things, even though his father was never like that with him, but my dad would take me out, we'd go to, put in a new fence or would repair something or do something, and one of the first things he'd say is, Okay, now what are we trying to do here? And the first few times, I remember thinking, Oh, don't you know? [chuckle]

0:21:42.5 AS: Fixing this fence. What are you talking about?

0:21:43.5 DL: Right, that's right. But he was trying to get me to think, and then by the time I was like 15 years old, he could just send me out to go, Hey, go down there and fix that fence or put that fence in. And he knew it was gonna be done right and done well. Because he taught me to think about situations and work through it.

0:22:04.9 AS: Well, maybe I'll wrap up this topic by... First of all, I think highlighting... We're on point number five. And that's... These points that Dr. Deming has highlighted. There's 14 of them. It's different from The 14 Points. And remember, if you're in the third edition, this is on page 86 of the new economics, if you're in the second edition, it's on page 125, and before I summarize point number five, I do wanna go back to point number four because you highlighted that, the point about being an unceasing learner, and let's just review point number four. He is... So we're talking about the transform manager, he is an unceasing learner, he encourages people to study, he provides when possible and feasible seminars and courses for advancement of learning, he encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined, and that brings us to number five, which we've just been wrapping up, and that is he is coach and counsel. Not a judge. You highlighted the idea that particularly coming out of World War II, when military management, boss management or this management style of trying to tell people what to do was brought back into American industry, and all of a sudden it didn't lead to the result that it was supposed to or maybe people didn't even think about that, but what Dr. Deming is trying to teach us is that you really wanna get people to think.

0:23:34.0 AS: Particularly I was thinking as you were talking about that, the idea of continual improvement in The 14 Points, he's talking about making a long-term commitment to continual improvement. You can't get to continual improvement if people are not thinking. And so that's where I think this coaching and counseling rather than judging, is all about getting people to think and getting people involved in it, and so you've raised some really interesting points in academic setting, such as talking with the kids and that type of thing, and getting them involved. Is there anything you'd add to this summary?

0:24:12.4 DL: No, I think that's basically it. And sometimes we think that it's so difficult to give up that power of controlling people and things and making all the decisions, but when you do give it up and you train and discipline people to know what to do, when they have that power, you see a level of performance and really a joy in learning and work at a level that you never thought was possible before. Over the years, I've seen teachers over and over and over, tell me just that, that... I'll say, How is it going this year? And then say, I'm having such a great time. This is the best year I've ever had in my whole career. And they say, Well, what's happening? He says, Well, everybody just seems happier because we all work together and support each other, and instead of the other way around that we use to work.

0:25:10.9 AS: Yeah, and that's a great way to end it by also just refocusing all of us on the point that there is always an opportunity to improve, and in order to see the next improvement down the road, we can't see it until we get through our latest work that we're doing that then opens our eyes to the next opportunity. So I really wanna challenge the listeners to be focused and remember there's always opportunity to improve. David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for our discussion. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn more about David at Langfordlearning.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work.

Is there a secret weapon for improvement? Yes! John and Andrew discuss how students fit into improvement projects - and how that translates to businesses.

TRANSCRIPT

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

0:00:28.0 John Dues: Andrew, it's great to be back with you on the podcast. Yeah, this is sort of a revelation to me when I was working with... It's actually working with David Langford, and we were talking about, "How do you bring about improvement in schools," and at one point, he said to me, to kinda give it away at the top of the program here, "Students are sitting right in front of you, and they are the secret weapon when it comes to school improvement." Engaging them in those improvement processes is really the secret to improvement, because almost everything we want to improve in schools has to do with students, but we almost never directly engage them in this improvement process. It was so obvious they're sitting right there in front of me, but it wasn't until David said it that way that I said, "Oh, my gosh, all this time." Of course, as a classroom teacher or a principal, students were sometimes tangentially involved in improvement efforts, but how many times are they central to it, how many times do we put the data that we want to improve right in front of the students and elicit ideas for improvement as we watch that data move up and down over time? So it was a real sort of eye-opener for me to start thinking in that way.

0:01:50.8 AS: It's funny 'cause when I first started teaching many years ago, teaching finance, I was always worried that I would get a question that I couldn't answer. And what I came to learn from that was that a question that I couldn't answer is a great opportunity for a discussion. And then I would basically say, "Hmm, well, what do you think is the answer?" Now, in a way, I was playing a little bit of a trick 'cause I was deflecting the fact that I didn't have an answer. But I said, "What do you think? Okay, what do you think?" And then we started to construct and answer to that as best we could. And it took a lot of pressure off me because I realized that that discussion was a fine discussion to be had in the classroom around a topic that I wasn't exactly sure how to answer.

0:02:37.9 JD: Yeah, I think all of us try to hide our weaknesses, especially early on. We gain experience, it gets more comfortable to say, "I don't know," which is a fine thing to do as a experienced classroom teacher as well. And I'm thinking about in this context involving students, probably the best ideas for improvement are living right there with them, just like even if you didn't know the answer in your early classrooms, that sort of elicited a discussion that maybe was richer than it would have been otherwise. So I think, yeah in either case, involving students is a real sort of key to this improvement process, whether it's a single teacher in front of a classroom of college students in your case, or in my case, where we're trying to improve our system of schools.

0:03:30.7 AS: In my Valuation Master Class Boot Camp, which is like an online course, I have so much more flexibility than you have in high school. But I found one of the students was just really engaging and really supportive of the other students, so I hired him. And I said, "Why don't you become student experience? That's... Your job is about bringing that great student experience." And then whenever I kick off the Valuation Master Class Bootcamp, I ask prior graduates to come and speak and tell the students, give them some advice, and tell about the transformation that they went through in that course. So on the first day of class, they're inspired and encouraged, and then throughout the class, they've got a prior student guiding them and helping them get through where he knows are the most difficult parts. But you don't have that kind of flexibility, I would guess in your setting. Tell us more about that.

0:04:30.2 JD: Yeah, I think well, one I think that example that you just told is outstanding, and I actually think... I think it's a little bit of a misnomer. There are a lot of regulations, there are a lot of handcuffs on... To certain things in terms of what we can do and what we can't do. But actually we have fairly wide latitude. We're a small public charter school network, so we maybe even have more latitude than the typical traditional public school. We have the latitude of a district, so we're making decisions for district of schools, basically. And we're small, we're pretty nimble. We think innovation is pretty important. We think continual learning is important, and we put some processes in place to elicit that. Where there can be some roadblocks here and there, I think one of my jobs is actually find a way around those roadblocks, if they're in service of our mission and in service of helping students be educated at a higher level.

0:05:29.4 AS: So what I do is I ask the students at the end of the whole course, I say, "Tell me what you learned. What is the number-one thing that you took away," that type of thing. And I'm putting them in a pretty intense situation for six intense weeks, but then they've got a record of that, they've thought through that. And then when they come back, then they can share, "Here's what I went through, and here's my advice on how to get through it." And it is an idea in a school to say, having a list of the people who made it through the class on the wall.

0:06:03.4 AS: And then another idea is to find one or two students that would say... Come back and talk to the students to say, "Okay, this class is about American history, and the one thing that just lit me on fire is the story of Philip Sheridan when he was attacking... The US cavalry, was attacking the southern cavalry, and how he knocked out Jeb Stuart, and it just got me reading all this stuff from blah, blah, blah, blah, and then... " So, of course, that's big brainstorming, but that's an idea.

0:06:33.5 JD: Yeah, I think that... You said a six-week course. What you're describing is essentially that Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, so I could see a scenario where in your six-week course where you run a PDSA on how are we gonna improve the class. And at the end, when you get to that act, you sort of decide with the class... What should I focus on for the next PDSA with the next class. And so in that way, you'd sort of be... Assuming you're re-teaching this class on an ongoing basis, you'd be sort of continually improving, and that's really the sort of... We talked about the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, the PDSA cycle, the last couple sessions, that's really what it is. It's where you leave off at the end of that cycle and you decide what you're gonna do next, feeds into that second cycle of improvement. So whether you called it that or not, it sounds like you're basically running PDSAs with the finance classes that you're teaching.

0:07:34.6 AS: Yeah. In fact, at the end of the class, I ask them another question, which is, what could we do to improve? And...

[chuckle]

0:07:43.3 JD: It's perfect.

0:07:45.5 AS: So the question... The problem that I faced was that the students said I want more one-on-one feedback, that they submit their assignment and they just get pass/fail or a grade and they don't get the feedback that they wanted. And really, I have to say, I was kind of upset about this reply because I felt like, "I can't do it, it's too many students," and my goal is to grow it so that I've got 100 or 500 students. How am I gonna scale it if it's about personal feedback? So we talked about it a lot for the next Boot Camp that came up, because we had seen this complaint coming up, and we came up with this idea. And I said, "Maybe... " And this... Part of this is talking to people like you and David Langford and others, maybe we need to do more work on clarifying the assignment. And so we went back and I said, "Look, every week we need to make it super clear on Monday what's the assignment for the week."

0:08:48.3 AS: And we even provided them kind of a score card of the way we're gonna look at it. "Did you do this? If you did that, you get a point. Did you do that? Did you check your grammar," whatever. And so we got much more clear, and then what we decided to do was to say, "Look, the teams will meet in the week, they always meet once a week, and they need to pick one or two people to present that on Friday." And then what we had is, we had the students present their work, just the best of the best, and I would say not the best of the best, but the ones that shows... Said, "I'm ready and I can do that," and then myself and my team gave them feedback after they presented, and said, "Okay, see that? Try to fix that. Make sure that you don't... " And then once we did that, what I then did is I took notes throughout those and recorded those, and then I improved again the description of the assignments and the common mistakes that people made. And so the next time that we did it, the next launch of the Valuation Master Class Bootcamp, we now had an even more clear focus on what you've got to do by the end of this week.

0:10:00.1 AS: And then finally, what I did is I called it Feedback Friday. And I said, "A whole week, we're working on a bunch of stuff but the end result is on Feedback Friday. One person, two people from your team is gonna present and you're gonna get critiqued and see how you do, and everybody's gonna watch that, it's gonna be recorded. Anybody can go through that." So we've been doing Feedback Friday now for three bootcamps and I would say all of the complaints related to feedback and not enough personal feedback are gone. And it wasn't through personal feedback that we resolved the issue of not getting enough personal feedback.

0:10:35.0 JD: Yeah. Well, that's a PDSA cycle for sure. Another thing I think of is what you... Sounds like you did over time as you iterated this class, and how you gave feedback, you actually found the actual root cause that was causing the problem. And the third thing I was thinking of, 'cause you talked about complaints, one thing we can do is overreact to complaints. So that's another thing that you could do is put the complaints on a process behavior chart, and if you get to a certain number, that might sort of signal that you have an issue. Otherwise, there may be an acceptable level... Number of complaints and... Or a third level analysis is, it's a stable number of complaints but the number is not acceptable to you as the instructor and so you wanna go about improving the whole system. It sounds like that's exactly what you did, sort of what we've talked about the last couple sessions, is you chart something, whether it's quantitative or qualitative data, you're keeping track of that, and then you're tagging it to this structured improvement process. And, yeah, it sounds like you're running the PDSA cycles for the class. It's pretty cool.

0:11:57.1 AS: That's a comforting message for the listeners and the viewers because what it tells you is that you don't have to be super official and have all of the tools that we learn from Dr. Deming's teachings that... First, is to start with the thought process. And my first thought process is, "I want my Valuation Master Class Bootcamp to be the best course in the world." That's all I want, just the best in the world, so I'm constantly wanting to improve. The second thing, I do not ever focus on competitors because my course is just so different, and all I focus on is the students. The third thing is I'm getting feedback on a consistent basis from the student about what they like and what it's worth to them. Because I also ask them, "Now that you understand exactly what's in the Valuation Master Class Bootcamp, what is the price that you think I should charge for this?" And my goal is that that price continues to rise as the perception of the value of the course rises. So I'm getting feedback, and then I'm looking at that feedback and I'm trying to identify what I think is the most important feedback that we've got to somehow resolve.

0:13:13.3 AS: And then I'm coming up with a theory that how, "Okay, wait a minute, if we clarify more about what we want, maybe that's gonna help, but even if we clarified our assignment, it wouldn't have helped the feedback. They still could have had the same problem of, "We're not getting any feedback." But then it was the idea of coming up with the Feedback Friday and really naming it. And that's what I've learned from the world of marketing and all that, is that you've got to name something and repeat it. And so all of that is... And then I keep wanting to repeat that process, which is why I love doing the bootcamp 'cause it's six weeks, every 10 weeks or so I do it again, and that gives us a perfect opportunity. And that's what teachers are doing, they're doing again and again, right?

0:13:53.9 JD: Yeah, yeah, and it makes me think... I'm obviously living in a different world than you in terms of who the students are and who the customer is. But we... In our network of schools, we have two elementary schools, two middle schools, and a lot of your description makes me think of this first ever PDSA cycle we ran a few years ago when we were working on an improvement project we called Eighth Grade On Track, which is just like what it sounds. How do we make sure that our eighth graders are on track to go to high school? We don't have a high school in our network, but we have a high school placement process. One of the things that parents expect of us is that their child is well-prepared to go to a good academically-oriented high school once they leave us, and, of course, high schools are also expecting that from us. So the parents are the customer expecting certain things from our schools. The high schools that we feed into are expecting certain things from our schools. So of course we can't fulfill our mission, we can't be an important part of that sort of education system, if we're not preparing our students to leave us as eighth graders and matriculate into a solid high school.

0:15:09.4 JD: And I remember working through, what does it mean to be on track in eighth grade to predict that you're gonna go on and be on track and do well in high school? One of the interesting things that, as I was reading some research out of the University of Chicago on this, was that when you look at students in middle school, you see grades start to drop that's actually a leading indicator of things to come in high school, which makes a lot of sense, 'cause if you start to experience academic issues in middle school, high school is a little harder, academically, plus some of the supports that are in place in elementary and middle school start to drop away so that makes perfect sense. Bs drop to Ds in middle school, and Ds drop to Fs in high school. And, man, if you're off track, even in your ninth grade year, students have a lot of trouble bouncing back from that. So I remember there was a student I was working with named James and this exact thing happened.

0:16:19.4 JD: I was looking at his grades, I was looking at his GPA, his attendance, his discipline record in sixth grade and everything was on track. In seventh grade, it was mostly on track. Things were looking pretty good. And then all of a sudden, here we are in the first trimester of eighth grade, and his reading grade dropped from a B in seventh grade all the way down to a D in that first trimester. In a lot of places, that's not gonna... Especially if the rest of his grades are pretty good, good attendance, he never was in trouble, he's not gonna get on a lot of people's radar. But we have this on-track system in place, so once we saw that data, our team, we said, "Wait a second, James was on track in sixth grade, on track in seventh grade, and now all of a sudden, he's off track in eighth grade," and we started asking why. So we're adults, we're sitting around the table in a conference room, "Why is James off track? Why is he off track in eighth grade? Well, his B in seventh grade dropped to a D."

0:17:25.8 JD: "Well, why is that? Why did that grade drop from B to D?" We're looking at his scores, and he's got pretty high reading test scores in his class. And then we look at his homework grade. His home grade's really low in his eighth grade reading class. And so then we asked this next question, "Why is James' eighth grade reading homework grade low?" And then we get stuck, and this goes back to this whole point of this episode, which is students are the improvement secret weapon. So we're sitting around this table and we say, "How do we figure this out? Why is his reading grade and homework grade, low? Let's go get it. Let's go get it." [chuckle]

0:18:10.5 AS: And for the people who are working in a manufacturing company listening to this, it's like sitting in your office above the factory...

0:18:19.1 JD: Exactly.

0:18:19.9 AS: And looking at the chart and thinking, "I wonder why this is happening."

0:18:24.0 JD: "Why this happening?" Yeah. So this is when the conversation gets really interesting. We had never done this before. We go get James on the spot from his eighth grade classroom and say, "Hey, we're doing this thing where we're just trying to figure out what's going on with your grades."

0:18:40.0 JD: We're asking some "why" questions. We're basically using the 5 why tool, we have a piece of chart paper and listing these things out, and so now we've invited him into the room, we just say, "Why is your reading homework grade low?" And he says, "Well, I really do the easier less-time-consuming homework first, math and science and history are fairly easy for me. So I do those first." A pretty typical answer from an eighth grade boy, and so what he's basically saying is he does his reading homework last, "Well, why do you do your reading homework last?"

0:19:28.9 JD: "Well, I don't like doing my reading homework, it's too much work." "Why do you dislike doing your reading homework?" "It's too much work. It takes too much time. I wait to the last possible moment." And we said, "Well, what is the last possible moment mean?" And he said, "Well, I usually not only do it last, I do it on the bus ride to school in the morning." It's dark. It's bumpy. That's the worst possible place to do the hardest homework, but that's what he's doing 'cause he does wanna get it done, he wants to turn in something, but he's not putting any type of effort, so now what we've uncovered is, why is it exactly that his homework grade is low?

0:20:02.9 JD: Now, if I was just an administrator sitting in my office, I could see that D and say, "James needs to go to after school tutoring," or "James needs to do this," or "James news to do that." But none of that, like what you were talking about with the student complaints in your class, none of that would have been the actual root cause of James' reading homework problem. So then we said, "Okay, now we know what the problem is, what are we gonna do about it?"

0:20:35.6 JD: And I had just learned about this Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle thing, and I said, "Well, let's sit down and write... Literally write out a simple PDSA with James." And the basic question was, if we could do reading homework first, could we raise that homework grade to at least a 70%? So we kinda looked at what his homework grade had been and what he needed to do to pass, and so that's what we settled on. We said, "James, what do you think about doing your reading Homework first?" And again, typical eighth grader here's where some of the psychology comes in, he says, "I don't know...

0:21:09.6 JD: I don't know if I really wanna do this. I don't think it's gonna work. I hate reading, I hate my reading homework," I said, "James, I hate getting up in the morning and running, but when I do it... When I get myself to do it, I feel better." He said, "Oh yeah okay, I could buy that." And I said, "Could you try this for just five days," and he looked at me, he kind of nods and I said, "No," I literally got up out of my chair, he got up out of his chair to go back to class and I said, "I need you to look me in the eye and shake my hand and tell me you can do this for five days." And he said, "Sure, I think I can do this."

0:21:54.1 JD: He said, "At the end of the day, when I'm sitting in my homeroom class, when we work on homework... Do you mind if I sort of sit in the back of the room so I can concentrate better?" "No problem. Great." So we write this down for the next five days, James is gonna work on is reading homework first, we tell the teacher that's in the homeroom so she can check to make sure he's actually doing that, and then we talked to the reading teacher and said, "Hey, can you give us James' last five assignments in reading and can you put the next five in this table to see if this is working." So just over the next five days, he does this, I check in with his homeroom teacher... Yep, he's working on his homework at the kidney table back in the back of the room.

0:22:33.5 JD: And then we start seeing the data come in, so whereas... Right before this intervention, it's one out of five, that's a 20%, three out of five, that's a 60%, three out of five... Those types of grades. First homework comes in five out of five, second homework comes in a three out of five. It's gonna take some time. Then it's 6.75 out of 10, it's five out of five, four out of five. And you start seeing this sort of momentum building, and after five days, he not only has a C on those assignments, he's very nearly got a B. And so we're studying this. And we're saying, "This seems like it's working pretty well." He sort of out-did even our predictions, and so we go to him and say, "What do you think about this sort of reading homework-first intervention?" And he says, "Yeah, it's going pretty well."

0:23:27.3 JD: "You're gonna keep doing it?" "Yeah, let's keep doing it." We design a second PDSA, We're gonna check in in two weeks now, so you can kinda see how this process goes, you create this very small plan, the student was hesitant, but he gave really great answers, insights into why his grade was low, he helped develop the plan, so now he's intrinsically motivated, 'cause this wasn't something that we did to him, we did it with him, and he's starting to get some momentum, he had some immediate success.

0:24:06.7 JD: And so you can see even just the small little change had this huge impact on this kid, and then he starts to build this momentum, and this has really changed a lot about how we approach changes, whereas before we'd sit in a room and plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, and then you go implement, you're like, "Oh man, I wasn't expecting this to happen, I wasn't expecting this to happen, I wasn't expecting this... " In five days, we went and saw "What would happen if we put this plan in place," and it worked pretty well, and all of a sudden we're gonna do it for 10 days instead of instead of five days.

0:24:40.3 AS: So let's just break it down for the... For the listeners to understand, we often talk about PDSA and all that, I think the first lesson that I would take from what you've said is that, yes, it can be a formal thing where we sit down and write down Plan-Do-Study-Act, and we go through it in a formal way, but it can also be just an informal process that we go through, but let's just break it down. They'll... Explain to us, P-D-S-A, how does that break down for this specific thing?

0:25:14.1 JD: Yeah, so the P would be the plan. And so I think the important thing to keep in mind here, is one... We wrote it down. You know, that sounds simple, but that's a big first step. We wrote the plan down, we made a prediction, we said, if James does this reading homework-first intervention, we predict that he'll have a 70% or higher on each of his homework assignments over the next five days, so we've quantified what we think is gonna happen. Then it's just the who, what, where, when, and of the plan. So it was literally like on March 22nd, 23rd, 26th, 27th and 28th.

0:25:54.7 JD: So on the next five school days, James is gonna work at the back kidney table, he's gonna work on his reading homework first, his homeroom teacher, Ms. Kramer, she knows that this plan is being put in place and she's just gonna check that he is working on his reading homework and then his reading teacher who is. Dr. Brennan, she said, "I'll record his homework scores as I get them over the course of each of those five days, so we can see if this is in fact having the sort of success that we think it is." So the plan is our hunch, it's really our theory about how we're gonna improve James' reading grade, but we don't know if that's actually connected to the real world in terms of if it's gonna be successful or not, until we actually put it in place. So we made a prediction, we made a plan that plan included who's doing what, when, and then it also included a plan for collecting just a little bit of data to see if this PDSA is on track so that's the P, the plan.

0:27:03.9 JD: In terms of the Do then after those five days, we just came back together as a team and just said, "What actually happened? Did James go and sit at the back kidney table? Did he do that each of the five days? Did he work on his reading homework first?" And it actually... This is a pretty simple plan and it's only over the course of five days, so in terms of implementation, the Do, everything matched exactly with what we put in the plan, and part of that is because the plan was simple, straight forward and on a really, really, really short time frame.

0:27:43.1 AS: So that is him doing the plan executing the plan.

0:27:44.4 JD: Us running the tests. Yeah us running the tests. Now on the study, the difference between the Do and the Study is the Study has... That the plan has been run, the test has been run, and now we have the data in and so we looked at what happened for the five days before we started the study, and over the course of those five days, he had gotten a 53% average on his homework on those five days pre-intervention, after the intervention began over those next five days, he earned a 79% average on his homework, and that 79% was 9% higher than what we had predicted, so the intervention actually went better than we thought at the outset, so that gives us evidence...

0:28:36.1 JD: That one, we know what we're doing in terms of creating the plan in the first place, and two, that the implementation can actually be put into effect in a real school, in real classrooms, with all the constraints that you have with time and all that, all that stuff. And I think another big thing besides writing it down, besides having the structure of this PDSA, we had James, we had James there, so I think it was a pretty good plan because of that. And so...

0:29:01.6 AS: And then, so what happened? Okay, so we've got the Study and what about Act? What does act mean in this case?

0:29:09.3 JD: Yeah, I think I mentioned this in one of the last two podcasts that when I think of Act, I'm gonna do one of three As, I'm gonna either Abandon the idea that we put in place 'cause it didn't go so well, I'm going to Adapt the idea 'cause some of it went pretty well, but maybe there are some things that need to be tweaked or iterated on, or I'm gonna Adopt it, this intervention went so well that it's gonna become a part of my system.

0:29:41.3 JD: So in this case, because we've only done this over five days and it was successful, but that's a pretty short time period, now we're gonna adapt it, we're gonna adapt it. And in this case, we're gonna... We call this thing reading homework first, that's the name of the intervention or change idea. Now, instead of five days, we're gonna do this for 10 days, and then one other piece of the Act is going back to the appreciation for a system component, that you can improve one part of a system and destroy the rest of it, that sort of idea. We're focused on reading. And everything else was pretty good when we started this focus, but we wanna look at James' whole system. In this case, we're talking about grades, so we're not gonna do sight of writing class and math class, and science and social studies, those types of things, because we're all focused only on reading, so we added that as a sort of a second component to the second cycle so we're gonna run a little longer. We're also gonna add his other grades to the data we're collecting just to make sure that those things stay on track.

0:30:53.4 AS: And one of the lessons I've learned, John, in the stock market where I basically spent most of my life is that you have to also double-check that your process didn't go wrong in some particular area or is biased, for instance, just the fact that we're paying attention to James... And maybe the teacher is gonna grade things slightly different now because they know that we're looking and we're trying for improvement, and so you also have to ask questions and try to understand where the biases are because you may come to a conclusion, "Wow, this is great." And then you wanna think, "I'm gonna apply this more across more students or across more systems," and then you find out that it starts to fail and why does it fail because there was some kind of fatal flaw in the process. Do you have any thoughts on that?

0:31:43.1 JD: Yeah, I think that goes back that I think... Something we've talked about very early-on in this series, maybe in episode one or two. This idea is there are goals for accountability and then there's goals for improvement, and I think... Now bias can happen at any point, for sure, because we are paying attention to this more, but when you're in a system and the goals are accountability-focused, you're much more likely to get that sort of nefarious or "I'm gonna change my behavior, maybe not in the best way, because I have to meet this goal - my job's at stake, or... "

0:32:30.2 AS: In other words, when you talk about goals for accountability, let's say that you went to that teacher and said, "You're gonna get a bonus if this one particular case is able to really improve." Okay, now you've brought in a whole another element into this thing.

0:32:41.1 JD: Yeah, that would be the carrot side or the stick side, you know, "If this kid's homework doesn't improve, you're gonna get a bad rating." Something like that, and that... Like I said, I think there's still always potential for bias or doing some things subconsciously in terms of how hard your grading him or something like that, but I think it's much less likely to happen if we're sitting down and saying as a group, "Hey, what can we do to improve James' approach to reading class?" Versus those things that we just talked about, whether it's a carrot or a stick, a ranking that could be impacted, those types of things.

0:33:20.1 JD: I think in focusing on improvement-oriented goals, you're much less likely to sort of see that... See that type of behavior. I think a lot of it goes back to what's the aim, what's the aim or objective of the PDSA, what's the aim of your system in general, what's the orientation you have in terms of how you manage as a principal, the teachers or the teachers managing the students, I think that's where you have to be careful. And this sort of improvement orientation, I think helps overall rating and ranking accountability-driven system.

0:33:58.4 AS: So let me try to summarize a little bit about what we've talked about, and for the listeners, this is kind of our way of trying to make sure that we all learn from what John's sharing here. So the first thing you were telling the story about how it's important when eighth graders leave because you're preparing them for high school, and you talked about the idea of being on track and when somebody starts to fall that it's hard to bounce back, and then you identified James.

0:34:26.8 AS: And then you said, "Okay, we saw something sliding there from a B to a D, and that was his reading grade," and you thought, "What could we do about this?" And your first reaction was to sit back in your offices looking at the data and thinking about it, but instead you say, "Well, let's just bring him in here and talk to him." So this is the secret weapon you're talking about is getting the student involved, then you went through a PDSA, so let's just try to review that briefly, so the plan is, you guys came up with an idea and you wrote it down, and you had...

0:34:58.6 AS: Like who, what, where, when? So that it was clear what was gonna be done, also you made a prediction, because if you don't make a prediction, you don't have some sort of theory, it's very difficult to really understand what happened, and as Dr Deming says, "Without a theory, there is no knowledge." And you also had a plan for collecting the data too, to make sure that you had that. Then Do, meaning that you ran the tests and James did what was planned... In this case, it went well, 'cause he actually did it, and then after that, you have to Study where...

0:35:36.1 AS: After the test was run, so the test has to be run first, the Do has to happen first, then you started to compare the outcome to your prediction, and as you said, it was slightly better than the prediction that you had made, and then you came to the Act section, where you had to think, "Well, do I abandon... " "Do we abandon this? Do we adapt it? Or do we adopt it?" And part of what you said was that it's about adapting a little bit, maybe and saying, "Okay, what we've... " "We've identified this as reading homework first, maybe now we're gonna test that on a 10-day basis," but you also had to think about it.

0:36:07.9 AS: This is a critical part, you had to think holistically, you had to think systems thinking, because your objective was not to increase the performance in one area at the cost of another, so you had to look at it holistically, and finally, we talked about the risks that something like, this can go wrong. And if you're tying goals to accountability to the people involved, and all of a sudden they're being punished or rewarded based upon the outcome of that result, it's gonna be much more risk that it's not gonna go properly compared to looking at goals for improvement, anything that you would add to that?

0:36:45.2 JD: I think that was a really perfect summary. I think it was spot on. Spot on and the only thing I'd say is not every PDSA is gonna work that smoothly, I think, but it illustrates the key points of what a PDSA is, how simple it can be, how to connect ideas that are sort of in the universe to reality, what actually happens in actual classrooms and schools when you try something. I think that's the power of the PDSA. I think you nailed it in your summary.

0:37:17.2 AS: So ladies and gentlemen, now it's your turn. What's something that you can do a PDSA on, just like John has described to us? And what improvements could that bring, and most importantly for the teachers and the administrators out there, my question to you is, do you realize that engaging students is the secret weapon for improvement? John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for listeners remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is people are entitled to joy in work.

What's the difference between "perfect" and "that will work?" We use them interchangeably all the time. In this episode, Bill and Andrew discuss what "perfect" means and why it's standing in the way of innovation and improvement at work and at home.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is The End of Perfection. Bill take it away.

0:00:29.0 Bill Bellows: The finish line of perfection. [laughter] Andrew, here we are, session four. And welcome to our audience.

0:00:39.7 AS: Yeah.

0:00:43.0 BB: And the end of perfection is a topic of a number of presentations that I've done for The Deming Institute and for others. Part of the reason it's on our list is a focus, is that I come across people who are improvement specialists, continuous improvement zealots, specialists, professionals who speak in terms of striving for perfection. And I just start sort of become... Actually, for some time now I've been bothered by that concept, but so let me just say, if I walk into a hardware store where you work, Andrew, and I'm looking for a bolt or something, some tool, something for some project I'm working on, and I'm just hoping you have it. And I come up to you and you say, How can you help me? And I say, I'm looking for this, and you bring me over. And again, I'm just praying that you've got it. And you say, Is this what you're looking for? And I say, perfect. Oh man, I am so excited. I don't have to run across town. You've got what I'm looking for. Perfect.

0:01:52.8 AS: So easily pleased.

0:01:55.5 BB: Yeah, but when I say perfect, what I'm saying is that's exactly what I'm looking for. I'm not saying it's the best saw blade ever known to man, beyond which they'll never be a better one. So I look in terms of casually, I hear the reference, the context of perfection being exactly what I'm looking for versus as lean professionals will use it and other continuous improvement professionals use it, they're implying perfect means you can't go past that point. It's a... And so what it means, Andrew, is that continuous improvement stops at perfection.

0:02:46.5 AS: There's an event horizon.

0:02:49.4 BB: And that I have a problem with. And so what I like to say that people is... Again, I don't have a problem with... I walk into the hardware, I would call it lower case perfect, small p, not capital P. Capital P, I don't believe exist, or I would say to people, you can't believe in continuous improvement and capital P perfection. And people will say, "Well, Bill, but we're... When Toyota's striving in pursuit of perfection, they're implying that, we'll never get there." I say, I don't believe there exists. And I said, it's like getting in the car saying, are we there yet? Are we there yet? So I would say a mindset of capital P perfection is the antithesis of continuous improvement.

0:03:41.2 BB: And why is that important? 'Cause I think there are incredible opportunities for improvement in any organization. I'm not saying they're all worthwhile to pursue, they have to be worthwhile, meaning the benefits from it have to offset the investment of time and energy, so I'm not saying we should improve everything in the organization. And that mind set exist. That is alive and well, that we can improve everything, we can improve everything. I say, when... People don't improve every aspect of their home, they improve bathrooms and kitchens, 'cause that's the highest return. And so likewise, we have a... I think there are people out there in their personal lives of a very pragmatic sense of we don't improve everything. So I think that's understood, but I think there's some confusion. So there, I just wanna say that capital P perfection, I challenge what that means, but where I wanna go next is how that mindset comes about and how prevalent it is. And in a future session, we're gonna talk more about this, but I just wanna hit the word perfection today. I gave some examples of where that thinking comes from. So we were talking earlier of, that Dr. Deming's Red Bead Experiment, and we appreciate, Andrew and I appreciate there are people in the audience that are wondering Red Bead Experiment, what is that all about? Another is saying, I've got a red bead kit right here in my office.

0:05:11.6 AS: Exactly.

0:05:14.3 BB: In fact, I've got a red bead kit right... Two kits right behind me.

0:05:18.0 AS: So for those people that don't know, Red Bead Experiment, we have that on The Deming Institute website. You just type in Deming Red Bead Experiment, and you can get there. There's videos also on the YouTube channel and in DemingNEXT, so there's a lot of resources and of course, there's also other people that are doing it. But for those people that know it, we've decided we're not gonna go through all the details of it, but rather talk about it.

0:05:44.1 BB: Yeah, so as a refresher for those who are familiar with it, and again, if this is brand new to you, then the suggestion is you pause here, go watch the videos on Deming Institute's web page and then come back and join us. But for those who are familiar with it, Dr. Deming, came up with this. I think someone at Hewlett-Packard exposed it to them him in the early '80s, and the way Dr. Deming had run the Red Bead Experiment as it's called, is he'd have a bowl with roughly 4000 beads that are you used to make a necklace, very small beads, maybe an 8th of an inch in diameter. And then the bowl would be mostly small white beads, and then roughly 20% red. Same diameter, roughly, again, about an 8th of an inch, and he would start off by having the beads, the mixture, and one bowl poured into another to mix them up and then pour them back into the other bowl, and then he'd have willing workers from the audience one at a time come up and put a paddle in. And the paddle is maybe the size of a 3 inch by 5 inch pad. And he put a paddle in with small holes. In those holes, the beads would collect. And in a given paddle, there would be 50 divots for the beads to collect, and so the workers with Dr. Deming's instructions would put the paddle in, shake it a little bit, remove the paddle, go to inspector number one, who would count how many red beads are in the paddle, go to inspector number two, count how many red beads, and then they'd be announced, the total is 13 red beads.

0:07:37.2 BB: Andrew, dismissed. Next worker. And so he would go through and have one worker at a time, go through this four or five times, each time being, say, a day of production. So what are red beads? What's implied in... Again, there's a chapter in The New Economics on the Red Bead experiment. The implications is red bead are defects, things the customer doesn't want, the customer wants white beads. So what are the red beads? Things that don't meet requirements: scrap, rework, defects. And if we go back to last our previous sessions, the difference between white beads and red beads is, question one, white beads meet requirements, they are good. Red beads don't meet requirements, they are bad. And so in the Red Bead experiment, Dr. Deming would go through and collect data from four workers, perhaps four times each, and the data being a spreadsheet, and then he looked row by row and point out there's highs and lows in the number of red beads in he'd start...Dr. Deming as the manager of this white bead factory, would start to berate the workers who created more red beads as if they did it all by themselves. And so the punch line, the reminder punch line for those who have seen this before, what Dr. Deming, what he was doing was blaming the workers for the red beads.

0:09:04.8 BB: And the workers had no choice but to think that they were causing the white beads. And so one of the big takeaways for people in the Deming community who really love the Bed Bead experiment is that the red beads are not caused by the workers, they are caused by the system, which includes the supplier of the red beads and the white beads, the instructions, the bowl, the paddle, the worker, the instructions. And you don't blame the workers separately, and so that becomes a really big takeaway. Well, where I would like to go with this beyond that, what I like doing in an audience or a class in a university class is we'll get to the point of collecting the red bead data, the number of red beads per day per worker, and we'll move it from a control... From a run chart to a control chart. We'll will calculate control elements, we'll talk about common cause variation, and the idea that the system is most likely not gonna produce special causes because the system is semi-closed, unless there's an earthquake and the paddle is broken or something like that.

0:10:18.0 BB: Well, the question I'd like to ask people is, now we appreciate that the red beads are caused by the workers... Are caused by the system which includes workers. But what I like to ask is, is your understanding of the Deming philosophy that the objective everywhere in the organization is to strive to eliminate all the red beads everywhere in the system, which can include going to suppliers, no longer buying them, working with their suppliers? And so I just like to ask people this, and I've had a couple of hundred people in the room and I'd just say, is that what you think where Dr. Deming is talking about, that the objective, one, is to understand that red beads are caused by the system, not the worker, but then we go the next step and say, let's strive to eliminate all the white beads everywhere, and if we do achieve that, are we done?

0:11:10.8 AS: Right. Wipe out all red beads everywhere?

0:11:12.8 BB: I'm sorry. Wipe out all the red beads everywhere? Are we done? Have we achieve perfection? And people will say... Or I'd say, but simultaneously Dr. Deming told us about the value proposition of continuous improvement. So then I'll say to the audience, do we stop at a 100% white beads, or can we improve? And if we can improve, what does that mean? And then we get, we can make them faster. I say, Okay, fine. We can make them cheaper. I say fine. I said, but can we make them better? And then people will say, "Well, we can make them faster," and I I'd say fine, we can make them cheaper, and I'd I say fine. And we're going around, around, and they'll say, everything can be improved. And I say, well, but how do you improve the white beads once they're all white? And people will say, you can always have a better mouse trap. Then I'll hold up the beads, and I say, I'm not talking about a better mouse trap, I'm saying, these beads, you can't get any... So what I love about the red bead experiment is, it's not a mouse trap with springs and wires, it's a really simple... It's just a bead.

0:12:24.4 BB: We've got white ones and red ones, how can you make the white beads better once they're all white? Now they're stumped. They are stumped, and they are... And when I lead them to... And this is the part of the Red Bead experiment that I enjoy is this piece, and the punch line is, it comes from what I learned from Dr. Taguchi is that the white beads are not uniformly white, they actually have different shades of white, which is question two, they have different diameters, which is question two, different weights, and point out that you can continuously improve the white beads once you understand that there's, questions two, that there's degrees of white degrees of diameters and things like that. And the idea being that in order to understand why that variation matters, now we get to what we look at the end of module three is we have to look at how the beads are used.

0:13:33.9 AS: And just to summarize, question one is, does it meet requirements, I think is right?

0:13:38.6 BB: Yes. Question one is does it meet requirements? Is it white or is it red. Well, it's white.

0:13:45.0 AS: Yep. So that was a fine...

0:13:48.1 BB: Good question.

0:13:49.5 AS: That was a definite or yes or no answer, as you said. So...

0:13:54.7 BB: Absolutely. That is a question one, does it meet requirements. Yes or no. Black and white thinking, we also talked about it. Question two is, there's shades of grey. And in this case, there's shades of white, there's shade... They're different diameters. And now we begin to understand, again, that the impact of different diameters and different shades shows up in how they're used, in terms of how they're used to make a necklace or however they're being used by the person downstream. And so at the end of module three, we talked about what are the types of things we could do at the end of module three to help people begin to understand the implications for Dr. Deming's work. And is go downstream and see how your work is being used. So instead of striving to make sure all you send downstream is white beads, not red beads... Again, I'm not underestimating the value proposition of getting to that point. But what I'm saying is, that's not perfection. Actually, if you look at it as perfection, then we say we are done, now let's go elsewhere, get all the red beads done and get the white. So the strategy is to... I think the overall strategy is, what's the best use of our time? Is it going from some red to all white, or is it going from all white to then look at the variation in the white, which is then looking at what are the opportunities for improving the organization by looking at how the beads are used?

0:15:28.4 AS: And if we think about this, it made me think like, let's just say that somebody's implementing Deming's teachings, and they've done a lot of great work to get down to that point of, let's say eliminating red beads, we've rooted out the red beads, and there is a huge gain there for the organization, for the customer, for costs and all of that. So you could even say that in some ways, that that's what they call the low-hanging fruit, but what's fascinating that you've talked about is going through the looking glass to the other side, and now you go to the step further where you have... It seems like it's incrementally not worth it, in some cases, because it's just tinkering around with something that's pretty close enough, but yet, if you go deeper to that, it's very possible that you reach a level of precision that brings an exponential improvement, not only in the system, but also in the outcome and also in the competitive position relative to your peers.

0:16:38.4 BB: A few things on what you just said, one, is... And I really like the metaphor you're using, and I like to say that people is that you have no idea what's on the other side of the doorway. So question one is getting to the point of, we want all the beads to be white, and then we're done. That's perfection. And so what I'm saying, there's more, there's more, and the more is going through the doorway and beginning to look at how are the beads used and what opportunities are there. But right, there's this economic sense of diminishing returns and measuring returns. I'd tell you, the excitement you're hearing is that I've seen so many situations where the gains are so significant for such a small additional effort, that I no longer... This idea that we run out of opportunities for improving. Nonsense, absolutely nonsense. What I say to people is, if you don't look, you won't find. If you do look, there's no guarantee, but also, as I said, there's three things, One is get to the doorway and move through the doorway and look at the variation in the white beads, and that gets us beyond perfection into the world of continuous...

0:18:06.8 BB: For the time, we'll call it continuous improvement. In a later session, we'll switch to continuous investment. And the reason I call it that investment is that it has to be worthwhile. We don't improve to improve, we improve because the gain we get in the marketplace, economically, market share, has to be more than what we're putting into the effort. It's gotta be worthwhile. But the other thing I wanna say is, I've seen people strive to make things... Well, just, I will save this for later. There's a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to everything being good. And again, which is why we've been talking for four sessions now about question one and question two, and the idea that I've not seen anywhere in quality management, let alone management, period, an appreciation of question two, whether it's program management, have the requirements for that task been done? In program management, they'll talk about red, yellow, green, green is good. We passed the floor. What does green mean? Mean green is good. So even in the world of program management, I see the same mindset of striving for everything being good, missing opportunities to manage the variation of things that are good to improve integration. And ultimately, everything has to integrate.

0:19:46.0 AS: Yeah, it's making me think a lot about the idea of once you get through the doorway, through the looking glass to the other side, that you're now really investigating what's happening further on down, and you may even find that the requirements, that the setting actually can be improved, then maybe they didn't even come with improved requirements 'cause they thought, Well, you can't even meet the requirements I've given you, so forget it. But then you just see that opportunities start to open up. And I think the other thing that...

0:20:21.6 AS: I remember a light bulb going off in my head about the Plan-Do-Study-Act, and thinking about it a lot and thinking about if you were to do a Plan-Do-Study-Act on one particular operation in a business, and let's say that you did it properly where you did it, you learn new information and you incorporate that information into the training manual for the people that are working in that operation, then you do another Plan-Do-Study-Act, and then you again, improve and then codify that in training. Then you do it again, and then you codify that in the training, so that you're never going back, number one, so you're never making prior mistakes, and you're bringing your operation to a higher and higher and higher level. Let's say you go through 10 iterations of that. The fact is that you've got all kinds of different improvements that have happened, but the biggest improvement is you have acquired knowledge in your company that your competitor doesn't have.

0:21:26.9 BB: Well, and let me add to that. Again, in the world of: if you don't look, you won't find, and if you do look, there's no guarantee, I've seen many a PDSA effort lead us in a direction we were not expecting, which can be disheartening. And essentially what you're discovering is not what you plan to discover. [chuckle] And I've seen people kind of fall off the horse because we discover something in the experiment... We discover something in the PDSA process which we never knew about, which turns out to be vital information, but because it wasn't what we were looking for, there's a disappointment more than a chagrin, of "darn." It's like we're using this piece of equipment, and we're trying to improve the equipment and in the process, we find out there's something wrong with how it's plugged in. Well, now, we know that. And so I've seen PDSA efforts result in great improvements, I've also seen the result and great learning. What do I mean by learning? From Russ Ackoff. Russ would say, learning is what happens when things don't go as planned. And what does that mean? It means there's financial pain, 'cause we spent a whole lot of time not expecting...

0:23:01.9 BB: Yeah, It just we fall flat. I've fallen off my bike. And as a result, changed how I ride my bike, which is a learning process. Ended up in physical therapy for months. So I say to people, learning could be financially painful, emotionally painful, physically painful, but improvement requires learning. Ackoff would say, "If we're not learning," which means making mistakes, "then how can we improve without that?" So you have to have a mindset. I think where we're coming from is, we wanna go through that doorway, we wanna continuously look for opportunities to improve, but we have to also be mindful. Let me throw another Deming quote based on what you were saying earlier. Dr. Deming would say, "The bigger the system, the more complicated to manage." So we can keep it really, really small. Deming says, "The bigger the system, the more complicated to manage, but the more opportunities... " Well, the reason I wanna throw that out to our viewers is, you may have... I've seen people focus on little things, little things, little things, and unknowingly create big trouble over here that they couldn't see. But what I don't want them to do is use that to become gun-shy that we shouldn't change anything.

0:24:25.6 BB: It's just the idea that don't underestimate how connected these aspects of the system are. Now, we go back to learning. And so it takes... It's so easy, Andrew, to just stop at the doorway, to stop at all white beads, to not go downstream and see how people use our work. What differentiates the Deming philosophy from all the others is going through the doorway, realizing that the white beads... The Red beads are not caused by the workers, they are caused by the system. But also realizing there are opportunities to improve the system, and you can't talk about system without asking how are the beads used?

0:25:08.9 AS: Yup. When I think about what you've described, to get to the door, that, I guess what I'm thinking about is, what do we call that? I wrote down some notes when you were talking, I said System of Profound Knowledge, implementation, improvement.

0:25:25.7 BB: Yeah.

0:25:27.5 AS: Getting in control, fixing the system. It's just the simple awareness of System of Profound Knowledge and that systems will get you to the door.

0:25:37.7 BB: Yes.

0:25:41.3 AS: And that's step one, and you're way beyond where you were in the beginning, so congratulations. Now, I'll use a little analogy, in that I'm in a 12-step program, and in this 12-step program, they had a thing called the 12 promises, and they said, you're gonna know a new freedom and a new happiness. You won't regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. You're gonna know freedom and all these different things. And I thought, I want every single one of those. But what I found when I went to that 12-step program, which I've been in now for more than 40 years, is that there's many people that go to a meeting to stop drinking or stop using drugs or stop, let's say over-eating or whatever that thing is, and then they stop there. And they don't take it to the next level of really pushing themselves to dig deep and follow the 12 steps to get to the 12 promises. And that's kind of what I'm thinking about because there's a great word in the 12 promises called... It says, "If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we're halfway through," and I thought about that word, painstaking. And if you reverse it around, it's called taking pain.

0:26:50.3 BB: Yes.

0:26:52.8 AS: And that made the difference of whether someone went through the door. Getting to the door is good enough for most people, but getting through the door and to the other side is the real Holy Grail.

0:27:03.8 BB: Well, let me come back to that point you just made. There's a point of time, and I thought that I had co-workers, I thought, whose wish was for a job that I could take where I can kinda do the same thing every day for like a career, and then retire. That's the kind of job I'm looking for, where I don't have to learn new things. I could just come in, hang out, get into the routine and then go home. Do you have jobs like that at your company that I could apply for? And I think there are people that... I think there are people that have that attitude.

0:28:00.5 BB: Now, I would also say, given our mutual understanding of System of Profound Knowledge, I think people have developed that attitude by working in organizations where they're blamed, and that becomes, just get me out of here. I don't wanna raise my hand, I don't wanna be blamed, so I'm gonna keep my head down. So I'm not saying these people grew up that way, I think they become conditioned that way. But what I would also point out is that, [chuckle] for those people that want that job, I would say, how many of you would like a cell phone which has far more capacity in terms of storage and speed than your current one? And it's also cheaper. Andrew, can I sign you up for that? Or maybe a television system.

0:28:48.5 BB: Can I sign you up for that? Oh yeah, so you wanna be... What you're saying, Andrew, is that you wanna be the beneficiary of people out there doing things above and beyond, but you just want a job where you can just kind of do it... Is that what I'm hearing? You wanna receive blood, but you don't wanna donate? Because that, I think, becomes the societal compact, is we come into this world receiving... Well, we have an obligation to contribute. And I think... But again, I'm not saying people... I'm not trying to imply that people are bad, I think we have conditioned people to want that. But I don't think that's their real nature, I think organizations that follow the Deming philosophy, I've seen people have incredible turnarounds in attitudes and to become people that are willing to take on challenges. Of course, there's variation. I'm not saying everyone's gonna be watching how the beads are used, so maybe that's not you, maybe that's somebody else. But I'm gonna need you in the implementation, Andrew.

0:30:03.1 AS: Yeah.

0:30:04.2 BB: And that goes back to variation. It's hard to say that. I think we all want the same thing. And I think for many people, it gets beaten out of us in terms of our obligation to society.

0:30:19.9 AS: Okay, so let's try to pull this together, the end of perfection, what we've talked about is the idea of... We've used the red bead experiment to get through this, but I think that tool is now served it's purpose. What we're really talking about is that in the initial stages of maybe implementing Deming's teaching or getting a particular system into control, there's a lot of fantastic gains that happen, and they get you to a point that is very satisfactory.

0:30:54.4 BB: Yes.

0:30:54.4 AS: And some people may confuse that point to perfection. But the reality is, is stepping through that point brings us to a whole another phase where there's so much more that we can consider so that we can improve the outcome for the end result that we're trying to do. But we'll never get there if we don't go through that doorway that goes beyond perfection.

0:31:23.1 BB: Yeah, and it's... The bigger thing I'd like people to appreciate, continuous improvement is a real deal, that... I mean we are constantly surrounded by technologies that are advancing. We have opportunities to get to continuously learn, and that's "continuum thinking" as opposed to black and white thinking. And what Dr. Deming is talking about is... With an appreciation of the System of Profound Knowledge, we have organizations with people with joy in learning. Learning is about making mistakes, trying to figure it out as we're talking about. So again, so let's not underestimate that to really love learning, is to really love the pain of learning [laughter]

0:32:12.9 AS: Painstaking.

0:32:13.1 BB: And in willing to... If you're leading a team, you need to know this, maybe the others don't, and you need to help them get back on the horse, you need them to understand that what we've learned is not what we expected, but that's all part of this journey that we're on. And so I think it's important for those that wanna lead these efforts to be vigilant and not... Just realizing that learning is about... As again Ackoff would say, "Learning is when things don't go as planned." Russ would also say, "When things go as planned, we have an illusion of understanding."

[laughter]

0:32:54.1 AS: Shall we...

0:32:54.7 BB: We just don't know when that learning is gonna happen.

0:32:58.7 AS: Shall we wrap it up?

0:33:00.1 BB: And the other thing I was going to say is, relative to achieving perfection, I would say Thomas More, I think an Englishman, I don't know, in the 14th century, whatever, wrote a book about a place called Utopia.

[laughter]

0:33:19.7 BB: And so what I wonder is, Andrew, do you think people in the Utopia were having conversations about continuous improvement?

0:33:29.4 AS: Okay, so I think we'll leave it on that? What do you think, Bill?

0:33:34.1 BB: Okay. [laughter]

0:33:35.5 AS: Alright. Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. Fascinating. For listeners remember, go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Dr. Deming encouraged lifelong learning for everyone, but particularly for managers and leaders. In this episode, David and Andrew talk about Deming's fourth point in his list for The Role of the Manager of People After the Transformation: "He is an unceasing learner. He encourages his people to study. He provides when possible and feasible seminars and courses for advancement of learning. He encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined."

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. The topic for today is Learning to Learn. And just as a reminder, we're going through the section of The New Economics third edition, it starts on page 86 for those who want to follow on, and for those who have the second edition, it starts on page 125, and the title of the list that we're going through is called Role of a Manager of People. This is the new role of a manager of people after transformation. And we are now talking about the fourth point on this list, which reads as follows: He is an unceasing learner. He encourages his people to study. He provides when possible and feasible seminars and courses for advancement of learning. He encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined. David, take it away.

0:01:16.8 David Langford: Yes, good to be back, Andrew. So I always have to caution people, Dr. Deming wasn't into all the pronouns and everything that we use today, so he just means everyone. So if you're a manager... Yeah. So all of these points I, over the years, have taken to heart, and even as a classroom teacher I started figuring out, "Where do I start? What do I do?" Once I have been to a Deming seminar everybody wants to know, "What do you do Monday morning?" And these are really good places to begin, and you certainly can't do them all at once. It's sort of an inter-related system, and so when you start concentrating, you're always wondering, "Well, what do I do next as a manager?" Go back to one of these points to say, "Okay, have I done anything about that?" And so when you think about your role as a manager and if you think about yourself as a teacher, you're a manager, you're administrator, you're a manager, he's talking about... Anyway, if you're a parent, you're a manager of a family, right. And so you wanna think about it in those terms all the time.

0:02:31.2 DL: I never forgot even the very first seminar or the very first time I ever got to talk to Deming, and he was really interested in talking to me because there weren't very many educators at the time talking with him, and he was an educator. He was taught at New York University for 40 years, so I was really interested in talking to him about education and we were just chatting about the application of his thinking and theories to education. And while we're talking, he says, "Just a moment," and he pulls out this little notebook and he starts writing down what we were talking about. And I was just like, "Dr. Deming's writing down something I said, or we said, or we were talking about or whatever." And then come to find out his whole life he kept these little notebooks and sometimes if you were around them at the end of the day and people would be talking, he'd pull out his notebook and he'd say to people, "Look what I learned today." And that was just - flabbergasted about that, and not only is this guy 90, 91, 92 years old, but he was actually living this point every single day of his life. He was consulting...

0:03:48.8 AS: Yeah. And you can realize that when you read his work too, because he's always highlighting, someone said in a seminar or so and so said this, and that you now picture, he's taking a note and then later he's put in into his book.

0:04:03.2 DL: Yeah. When you're at the seminars, you hear him say, I'm eternally grateful to so and so for this point, or the Taguchi loss function, or all these amazing economical ways of thinking and management and all those kinds of things. He's really great at giving credit like that, but he was also very great at explaining that, hey, he'd learn something new. Even at his age, 90 years old, he was still learning things that were new to him.

0:04:35.3 DL: I was living in Alaska, at the time we were remodeling a house built in 1898. I happened to find a box of photographic plates in the attic, and when I was cleaning out stuff and everything, and these were late 1800s, and they were photographic plates on glass. The wedding that had taken place at the house that we then owned and we were remodeling, so that was pretty cool. As I was looking at the box, it said if you find any defect, anything... I can't remember exactly the wording on it but, "If you find anything wrong with these photographic plates, please contact us at this address, and also please add the box number of photographic plates, so we may find the person guilty of making the error and remove them."

[laughter]

0:05:41.6 AS: What?

[laughter]

0:05:41.6 AS: They're terminated.

0:05:44.4 DL: "Thereby improving the quality of our product." And this is... I'm not gonna say the name of the company, but it was a major company at the time, and I was so blown away by this so I took the box, took the plates out. I took the box to Dr. Deming at one of the seminars and brought it up to him and said, "I have a gift for you," and he said, "You do?" And I said, "Yes," and I told him where I found it, and I said, "I think you will really enjoy this label." And he read it and his mouth dropped open. He said, "Oh my god." I said, "I'm gonna give it to you as a gift." And he said, "Oh no, this is too valuable for you to give it to me." And then... So he made somebody go down and make a copy of it and turn it into an overhead thing, and he started using this at seminars because it was exactly everything that he was reversing in management thinking at the time, for the next 100 years he was reversing that thinking.

0:06:50.0 AS: It was just to put some context...

0:06:52.8 DL: And I was always so proud of that that I was one of those people that said...

0:06:57.3 AS: Look at this.

0:06:57.8 DL: Thanks to David Langford for this. That was my big contribution.

0:07:01.7 AS: There you go. And for the listeners out there who... To put this in a frame of reference, back in those days, the way that we presented, and I didn't so much 'cause I was pretty young when I went to my first Deming seminar, is that we had acetates or meaning transparent pieces of A4 or letterhead paper, letter paper, the size of that, it was just a clear plastic thing and then you would write on it, and then you would put it onto a screen which would then project up on to a wall. And so it was either that or we had rollers where you could roll the acetate across, so you'd write a little bit and then you'd roll it, and so that was the way that he did his presentations in those days.

0:07:46.5 DL: Yes. He was constantly rolling forward, rolling backwards and drawing right on the screen and working through, so... He was well-known for being very, I'm going to say, curt, but very direct, very short with people. When they asked a question, like people would line up at different points in time and get ready to ask him a question, somebody would come up and ask a question, and he'd say something like, "We already covered that this morning. Where were you, in the parking lot? Next question."

0:08:23.2 AS: Yeah, which is kinda scary for people in the audience.

0:08:25.4 DL: Yeah. Well, a lot of people viewed that as, "Oh well, he's not really interested in people learning about things." But no, it's just the opposite. If you are trying to ask a question simply to discredit him or to take him down in front of, or make yourself look better in front of other people, or things like that, he had no time for you and he would openly say, "I don't have time for this. I'm 90 years old or 92 years old. I don't... "

0:08:57.0 AS: I'm on a mission.

0:08:58.7 DL: "I don't have much time left and I don't have time to waste on you." And he wouldn't ever say that...

0:09:00.7 AS: But he would...

0:09:01.7 DL: But he would cut people off, for sure.

0:09:04.8 AS: And I remember that I felt pretty safe as a young guy with pretty innocent questions coming to him. I felt like he was very welcoming to the majority of people. But there was a certain thing that either someone that completely missed what was going on and he could get a little bit annoyed with that, or if it was someone at a senior level that should know this and they don't know it and, "I'm gonna make sure you never forget this interaction." And I remember the one that I remember from being in the seminar was when someone got up and said, "Since you're the father of TQM, I wanted to ask you a question about X, Y, Z." And Dr. Deming looked at him and he says, "What is TQM?"

0:09:48.7 DL: Yeah. He knew full well.

0:09:50.9 AS: And he goes, "Wait, wait, what? Wait, what? I don't understand 'cause I didn't know what he meant."

0:09:56.4 DL: Yeah. Well, not only was he an avid learner like that himself, he wanted everybody else to be like that too. You wanna do continually questioning, continually trying to understand, continually learning, apply, thinking on a level that most people were never taught to think on that level.

0:10:19.3 AS: I wanted to ask you a question about this from a bigger picture perspective, and that is to say that you're a learning company or you're an unceasing learner or we're into learning and all that. It's such an easy thing to say.

0:10:36.9 DL: Cliche.

0:10:39.4 AS: Yeah, it's cliche, yes. But it feels good to be able to say, we're a learning organization. We're trying to learn. But the fact is, is that he's... The reason why he's raising this is maybe most people really are learning or they're not a learning organization. Can you put it in that framework before we get into a little bit more detail on it?

0:10:58.8 DL: Yeah, absolutely. I thought the first time I went to see Deming, I was a year out from getting my Master's degree, right. And so I'm thinking, well, yeah, I'm a learner, right? I got my Master's degree and like you have a whole bookshelf behind you, yet people just listening can't see it, but you have a ton of books behind you, and I might have an entire library here myself, etcetera. And so I'm a learner, but at that time, I suddenly had this realization in probably the very first four-day seminar, I had never read anything that wasn't assigned to me. I've been going through school my whole life or being a teacher myself and teaching a curriculum or dictating what other people should read based on that curriculum, but I'd been... I don't know, probably since I was a little kid that I just went to a library and looked around and just picked out a book I wanted to read. And that started really my journey of thinking, "Okay, I have to be just learning all the time, I have to be reading all the time and thinking all the time," and have never forgotten that. And so that also causes you to have a very open mind about things.

0:12:23.7 DL: In the politically charged realm that we are now, there are so many people that you can't even talk about the opposite point of view. It's just a complete shut down of, "No, I'm not gonna talk... I'm not even gonna talk about that." I think Deming would just be shocked and dismayed about that, that if you can't argue with your boss he's not worth working for.

0:12:53.8 AS: Yeah. And also as a person that's lived outside of the US for many years and look back at the US, I realize that the collision of ideas and opinions is actually the whole process of learning.

0:13:09.0 DL: That's the whole point. Yes.

0:13:10.5 AS: That is how... That is kind of the history of how we've acquired new knowledge.

0:13:18.9 DL: Quickly and move a society for it or a business forward or whatever it might be. And so what he's talking about here in a company or a school, etcetera, if you're not constantly encouraging people to think and to learn and to understand, you're gonna become stagnant or not only stagnant, you're gonna go backwards, and I think about things.

0:13:44.1 AS: Can you explain this again? Going back to the big picture. I bet you that if you and I did a survey of top US companies that are successful, or the companies they're gonna all say... They're gonna all say, we're a learning organization.

0:13:58.5 DL: Right.

0:13:58.6 AS: And I just want to understand...

0:14:00.5 DL: When I started this journey, yeah, I studied Toyota because Deming had done a lot of work with Toyota and everything at the time. And one of the things I learned from one of the managers there, I said, "Well, how much time do you spend in training and development of employees?" And he said, "20% of the time." He said, "We're hoping to get to 40% of the time." "What? You mean 20% to 40% of the time you're actually training, developing people, giving them information, etcetera, instead of actually producing their products?" That didn't make any sense. So I went back to my school, I did an analysis, how much time did we actually spend with our staff and faculty in training, and it came up to be like 5% of the school year was actually spent in us training them in new concepts or ways to think, etcetera.

0:15:00.5 AS: And it's a great point...

0:15:03.8 DL: And I thought how much time do we spend training the students in thinking?

0:15:09.6 AS: Yeah.

0:15:10.4 DL: Well, zero.

0:15:10.6 AS: Yeah. It's a great point to stop for a moment for the listeners and the viewers to ask yourself, how many hours, what percent of the time, of the week, of the month, of the year do you spend or does your school or your firm spend in learning and training, in both training and education? I bet you it's not 20%.

0:15:39.5 DL: Well, the students that I was working with, these were just high school kids, and so we were going through these points and we're having this discussion, and I showed them the data, and they said, "Well, when do we get to learn?" And... "So what are you talking about? You're going to school." And they said, "No. You're learning all this stuff about Deming and discussing it and watching videos and everything. When do we get to do that?" And I realized I wasn't doing that with students, and so I put them to work because the teachers all said, "Oh, we don't have time for that. We're already crammed. We can't get through the curriculum. We don't have time for anything like that," and so I put the students to work to come up with a new master schedule and then come back and present it to the staff, and they came up with two... I think it was 60 or 90-minute sessions per week that they wanted to come together and just and learn, and it was just an amazing way to think about it.

0:16:42.7 DL: So one of those sessions I had each week with the entire student body, and basically I'd show them a Deming film or I'd show them something new or something that's happening in education, and I'd put them into groups and have them discuss about it, and what do you think about that and how could that be applied here, and what should we do differently? And then the other session was a session where they wanted to go anywhere that they needed to go in the building to get help and catch up on anything they needed to catch up on. And this is totally a foreign concept because we were constantly following every kid down, "Where are you going? You're going to the bathroom. Here's a bathroom pass and you're gonna go here and... " What? We're going to actually trust these kids to do stuff? So it took us probably a whole year to convince the staff, the administration and everybody that, "Okay, well, let's at least try this." Right.

0:17:41.0 DL: So the first time we ran a session like that where the students could go any... They could go to the science room, they could go to the computer lab, any place they needed to go to learn and catch up and get help or work or however they wanted to do, but they just had to be learning during that hour session. Well, the principal went around and actually counted kids in all these rooms and everything else, and lo and behold found out there were like 10 kids that took off and went to town. Right. So he calls an emergency meeting after that day and says to the whole staff, "We can't keep doing this. We got 10 kids that took off and just blew the whole thing off, and so we gotta change the whole master schedule and redo it and everything, and we gotta start over again." And I'll never forget 'cause we're just sitting there, sort of stunned. Trying to think, "Well, okay, now what are we gonna do? And then we're gonna have to redo everything."

0:18:46.0 DL: And all of a sudden, the science teacher said, "You know, in my room, I must have had 60 kids doing science, and he said, I'd say a majority of them weren't even doing stuff that was assigned to Science class. They were exploring all kinds of new concepts, asking me questions about all kinds of things in Science." And English teacher said, "We were having the greatest discussion about applied Romeo and Juliet to modern issues." She said, "I never had time for that in my classroom, but a whole bunch of us just ended up sitting around and we just started talking about the application of these things in a modern society." And almost every single teacher said the same thing. And then finally somebody said, "Well, how many students we have?" And I think at the time we had about 300 students, so 10 of them left. That means 290 students were actually engaged in learning and doing exactly what we want them to do, and we wanna throw this out because of special causes. And that's when I realized, oh, special and common cause - people are getting it. Our training is actually seeping into the terminology and the way of thinking about people. So we didn't throw it out and we kept it, and within a few weeks there wasn't anybody gone, because the kids that had took off came back.

0:20:19.3 AS: They got it out of their system.

0:20:21.5 DL: While the other kids said, we're talking about the great time they had, and not only that they were catching up on work that they didn't have time to normally, and all kinds of other things that went on. It even happenened in sports, a whole bunch of them went to the gym and just worked on basketball techniques, and even the PE teacher was amazed that I just had all these kids in their learning and wanting to know about, "How do you do a shot and how do you do this and how do you make this happen?" And teachers were just sort of dumbfounded about this, that students would actually learn on their own without being given a grade or forced to do something.

0:21:01.9 AS: And what I wanted to also think about is the idea that if we read the 14 points and trying to understand what Dr. Deming is telling us, there's this, number one, constancy of purpose, there's this real focus on improvement, there's a focus on the customer, not the competitor, to try to improve what you're delivering to the customer, and then you combine this focus on learning and training. You bring these things together and in some way, it's almost like you've created kind of a tunnel vision that's between your company and the customer and your company and the suppliers, and it's this obsession on these things. And at first, it's hard to understand, but as you start to see this obsession you realize this type of focus can... And because you're learning, everything you're gaining it's taking you to another level and another level, and then you're applying it for your customer, for your student, for your school, and next thing you know, you do that over and over again, and you will be at a very different place, and you'll also be at a place where people really feel great about it. That's not what's happening in learning organizations, companies that say we're a learning organization. Tell me more about that?

0:22:25.4 DL: Well, if you're continually learning like that as an organization and constantly expanding the ways of thinking, etcetera, when you get to major hurdles like Covid, etcetera, you have a whole staff, learned staff that's used to learning and used to figuring things out and used to thinking and coping with disasters or anything that goes on, and so the system doesn't fall apart, that's what I saw happening over and over in companies and schools and universities that I worked with for a long time, that those organizations could just overcome obstacles that would just be a huge thing to other systems, because they weren't used to learning or coping or understanding. They're usually used to just being told what to do. The same thing in education, the curriculum is coming down from the state or the national edict on X and... Oh, well, we just got... So they just learned to constantly be in a response mode, so they're not in a mode of constantly innovating, thinking, what can we do next.

0:23:41.7 DL: So I know in my school, I started... Not only did we have this one time a week where we could work with all the faculty and...or all the students, we just started having a faculty come in and learn with the students, which was a novel idea. Right? 'Cause normally we segregate them out and the faculty goes off and learns this stuff and comes back and does it to people. Right? But we just set up this learning session with students, faculty, everybody and faculty were learners and lo and behold, that's probably the best model that you could be in a school, is to show students that you're constantly learning, that you're constantly reading, you're constantly figuring something. "Hey, I read this thing last night. This book, it's really great. Da da da da da."

0:24:38.9 DL: I didn't fully realize the impact of what we had done until after the first year that we'd really tried to implement this and get stuff going. And during the summer time, teachers are usually... The school year ends and all the kids leave and you never hear from them until start the next school year up, right. So I'm out mowing the lawn in the summer time and my wife comes out with the phone and she says, "Hey, one of your students is on the phone." Well, I'm thinking that there must be some kind of accident that happened or something that goes on. And I'll never forget because when I'm talking to this student, I actually stopped. I was looking at the phone like, "Who are you?" Because he said, "Hey, I read this book and I just wanted to know if you read and there's some really interesting concepts that I picked up on it and wanna know if you'd heard about it." And I was so stunned 'cause 15 years, no student had ever done that. It never ever come up to me like that? Well, that summer, I had 12 students do that. Twelve of those kids called me over the summer, and I started to learn... When they'd call up, "Hey, what have you been learning?" And they, boom, they just tell you, because we had taught them to be learners, learning to learn.

0:26:00.9 AS: And what about people that are listening that are in, let's say, public schools or other places, and they feel constrained, they've got the mandates from on high, as you mentioned, and I think what I guess what I'm hearing is the idea that you may be less constrained than you think in that there may be more room to do and still be able to follow what you got to follow. What would you advise to them?

0:26:27.6 DL: Yeah. Well, if you have management of your organization, etcetera, that wants nothing to do with this and they're not really interested in making big changes or doing anything differently, etcetera, that doesn't preclude you from doing something as a teacher and I did the same thing. I'll give you an example, one of the classes I was... I can't remember the title of it now, but it's media management or something like that. I can't remember what we called it. But I just set up the first 10 minutes of class, I said the first 10 minutes of class we would get all the newspapers from the library that were used up the previous two or three days. And you got 10 minutes to go through the paper and pick out the most relevant things happening, and then share that with the rest of the group, and then we're gonna talk about Deming Management as applied to those issues. And it was such an amazing, amazing thing because the kids would talk about how stupid some of the things were happening politically, or this was happening, and it was totally contrary to what Deming talked about, and then they talk about what should happen, etcetera.

0:27:37.6 DL: So after about three or four years, I started taking students out on a tour, and we'd take any students who wanted to go and we'd raise money throughout the year and everything else, but we wouldn't go just on a field trip just to go to Disneyland or something. We went to universities, we went to major corporations, we went to places where we could learn stuff. And I'll never forget, the kids were at Motorola, Motorola, I think, it was in Phoenix, Arizona. And they had heard all about us and everything, and they set up all this thing, and our students would come in and give this whole presentation about Deming management applied to education. Well, when we got there, we walked into this room that they had set up for us, and there was literally a red carpet laid out, and in the back of the room was this whole banquet of seafood and just huge tables of food and everything else. Kids all walked in. And the CEO from Motorola is there and everything. And the kid says, "Who's this for?" And he says, "It's for you, we think you're the most important people in the country right now."

0:28:49.6 DL: These kids, a lot of them Native American kids, a lot of them from very rural background, you could literally see them grow 14 feet in that instance. I'll never forget because after we finished our presentation the CEO got up and he said, "I wanna know two things." He said, "Number one, how do I get my son in your school because he's not learning this in his school? And number two, I'm gonna set up a room across the hall, and I just wanna start interviewing people so you can come to work for us when you get out of high school." And some of those kids did actually get hired and go there.

0:29:32.3 DL: I'll tell you another story. The same thing, we took a group of kids to Texas and we went to one of the, I think, it was one of the oil companies, I think it was. And so the whole thing was, we said, "Hey, we'd like to come in and give you a presentation about what we're doing, how we're applying quality methods and thinking to education. We'd also like your managers to give us a presentation about what goes on here, what do you do, how do you apply these things and work things through." I'll never forget, we've finished our presentation at 45 minutes, kids were very efficient, they were all... That was part of it. Everybody was helping everybody do the presentations and work through that. And so their manager, I can't remember his title, but it had something to do with quality, the quality manager for the corporation or something, he gets up and start... He's got his presentation stuff and he starts giving a normal business presentation after these kids giving multimedia presentations for 45 minutes. And he talks for about 30 seconds about some of the things they're doing, and he said... He said, "Forget it," he said, "You guys already know more about this than we could ever hope to know about it." So he said, "What we wanna do is we've got all of our executives in the room, we just wanna pair up with these kids, high school kids, 15, 16, 17 years old, and have conversations about this and why it's applied.

0:31:00.3 DL: And I'll never forget, I walked by this girl that was talking to this high level manager at this petroleum corporation and they're arguing about intrinsic motivation and how employees have to be extrinsically motivated and everything else, and this girl, 16 years old is not backing down and she's just taking this guy to task. And finally they end their conversation and she leaves, and I walked over to him and I said, "Do you realize she's only 16 years old?" And he just looked at me, he said, "I forgot all about that."

0:31:34.1 AS: Yeah.

0:31:39.2 DL: See. And...

0:31:39.4 AS: Potential. The potential.

0:31:40.2 DL: Yeah. Deming often said that profound knowledge is not limited to age, and I didn't know what that meant for a long time until I started seeing young kids adapt these... Or absorb these concepts and take them to heart and be able to do it much better than us as adults, learned a different management thinking and we had to sort of transform ourselves. These kids they didn't know anything different. I think somebody asked one of the students one time how did you learn to do this or how did this happen or whatever? And they just looked at him and said, "Well, doesn't everybody do this?"

0:32:20.9 AS: Yeah. We stamped that out.

0:32:24.6 DL: They couldn't understand.

0:32:26.3 AS: We stamped that out at an early age.

0:32:26.3 DL: I'll give you one more quick story. We took the kids to visit a huge high school in California at the time, and that was probably about around 1991 or something like that. So computer technology was really starting to get into the schools, but our schools are already one-to-one technology and we had advanced technologies for all kinds of stuff and STEM and things like that. And so the principal is... Big high school in California, a pretty brand new high school, that's why we went there to cut and I wanted them to see what a big high school looked like, and we were going around, and he goes and he says, "We're really proud of this room," and he goes and unlocks the door. And this was in the spring probably around about March, unlocks the door and turns on the light and there's like 60 computers in there, all set up, all ready to go and everything. And one of the kids says, "Well, where is everybody? Why aren't people using them?" He said, "Oh well, you know, we haven't got the teachers trained and we're not ready to start using this, but we got it all purchased, we got it all set up and we're gonna start using it for... We're starting, using it next fall in September." And I'll never forget one of our students said, "Can we just take all those back with us and we'll ship them back to you in September."

[laughter]

0:33:48.9 AS: Yeah, exactly.

0:33:50.8 DL: Said, "We know what to do with those."

0:33:52.3 AS: And if you unleash group of kids in there, before you know that they would be training the teachers on that.

0:33:57.7 DL: Yeah, absolutely, they'd be training the staff about how to do the stuff so.

0:34:01.2 AS: Yeah. I wanted to wrap up with a little bit of kind of discussion about the idea of... I'm gonna talk briefly just about business, just 'cause that's something I understand pretty well, and that is a lot of times when managers in businesses see the same mistakes happening, they're like, "We've got to stop. Who is responsible for this?" Or as you started the whole discussion, "We got to get rid of the person who's the problem." Or, "Why is everybody making these same mistakes or whatever?" And that's really the problem actually at leadership level, really it's the idea of how can we study this situation, how can we get together, pool our resources and our knowledge and make some scientific style analysis, like a PDSA, a Plan-Do-Study-Act, and try to understand and learn here what the problem is and how can we solve this problem. And that is the process of acquiring knowledge through the scientific method, but acquiring knowledge is meaningless if it's not continually applied, so then we take that knowledge and we build it into our training of the new workers or new employees that are gonna be in that area, so we never go back and make the same mistake. We've fixed it permanently, and we've trained people to another level. But of course we're gonna come up with another common problem that's showing up all the time, and we do the same thing, and then we improve that and we gain knowledge on that, and then we train so that everybody's operating at that next level.

0:35:33.4 AS: Now, when you do this over a period of years with this constancy of purpose of continually focus on learning, what ends up happening is that you have actually acquired a large amount of knowledge in your organization that does not exist in your competitor.

0:35:52.2 DL: That's right.

0:35:52.4 AS: In addition, you've codified it, you've quantified this to be in the behavior of your employees. So let's say you do that for one, two, three years, all of a sudden you have created a deep level of knowledge on a particular topic that your competitor does not have that deep of a level of knowledge on that particular topic. Now they may be... If they're a good competitor then they may be learning in another area, but let's just say that most new companies aren't learning. And the end of, end result is that you start to build a competitive advantage and that...

0:36:26.3 DL: Even though.

0:36:27.2 AS: Competitive advantage just shows that... That competitive advantage just could last for decades.

0:36:34.7 DL: Yeah. Even though defeating your competitor was not your aim. Your aim was learning and getting better all the time, but by doing that you became a very fierce competitor, you became very good at solving problems, moving forward, understanding new concepts, applying things quickly, adapting to new technology, whatever it might be. You become a very good competitor even though you're not actively trying to compete. People sometimes blame Deming saying, "Oh, you don't want... You're against competition," 'cause he talked about cooperation a lot. And he said, "No," he said, "The best thing you could have is a good competitor. Right? Somebody else that's innovating, somebody else that's thinking something. Getting you to think differently about things." So the great irony is the greater you cooperate and learn together, the greater you compete, even though you're not necessarily trying to compete. You see the same thing in sports. We have March Madness going on now. If you listen to coaches at the end of games or coaches getting ready to play really big games coming up, they'll say things like, "Well, this will be a good learning experience for us, or this will be a really good test for us." Those are the really good coaches because they're looking at every single game about, "What can we learn, how can we apply that to the next one, and how can we move forward?"

0:38:03.0 DL: One of those trips I took with students, I took them to an electronics corporation in Phoenix, I can't remember the name of it, I don't really remember what they were making, but it was very sophisticated electronics with chips and all of that kind of stuff in a dust-free environment and it's a huge room in which these panels... I think it was very sophisticated art tablets that they were making, but they had all these lights up around the room and everything red, yellow and different things, and so most... Every one of the stations had green lights and everything, and then all of a sudden a yellow light came on at one of the stations. And I said to the guy giving me the tour, I says, "Well, what happens now?" And he says, "Well, immediately, any managers that are available, we rush to that center to find out what's going on. There's an error or a problem or somebody has observed something that is going on there, and we try to actively fix it and try to understand it and fix it for tomorrow too and make sure it's not gonna happen again.

0:39:13.3 DL: And I said, "What's the red light for?" And he says, "Well, anybody in the entire corporation has the ability to stop the entire line and turn on the red light. And when the red light comes on the whole place shuts down." And this was like 300 employees that they had. The whole place shuts down and everybody has the authority to do that. And I said, "What happens then?" He said... Then he said, "All management empties out, comes down in a learning environment and tries to study what's going on, what has happened, how do we fix this, how do we make this." Well, that's totally different than if you make an error or you screw up, you might get fired. And if that's the case, you're not gonna share an error or a problem that's happening, right? You're gonna keep that and hide that or cover it up or do something else, because you have managers that don't understand this thinking so.

0:40:08.7 AS: Yeah. I saw just the opposite of that when I was working in Pepsi, that in the production and process, basically, you constantly running around trying to patch things up and not raise them to a higher level, and so you're constantly making the same mistake. I wanna wrap up this discussion by just going back to point number four now that we've been through so much about it. So this is, again, we've been reviewing the role of a manager of people. And the fourth point that he talks about here is, he is an unceasing learner, he encourages people to study, he provides when possible and feasible seminars and courses for advancement of learning, and he encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined. David, is there anything you would add as we wrap up this discussion?

0:41:03.6 DL: Yeah. He does mention college or university classes, things like that, but he also was a very strong proponent that they just need to be learning. Learning a new language, learning new concepts, new things that are happening because you have active minds then and you have people making new connections and thinking, and it does something to your personality and the way you think about things, etcetera. And so he just said it could be anything, they can be learning basket weaving, but they just need to be learning all the time.

0:41:38.2 AS: Fantastic. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for the discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode (part 4 of the series), John and Andrew continue their discussion from part 3. They talk about how to use data charting in combination with the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle to gain the knowledge managers need to lead effectively.

0:00:00.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Prediction is a Measure of Knowledge. And John, to you and the listeners, I have to apologize. I'm a bit froggy today, but John, take it away.

0:00:30.9 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew, it's great to be back. I thought what we could do is sort of build off, what we were talking about in the last episode. We sort of left off with sort of an introduction to process behavior charts and importance of charting your data over time. And sort of the idea this time is that, like you said at the outset is prediction is a measure of knowledge and prediction is a big part of improvement. So I thought we'd get into that. What role prediction plays in improvement, how it factors in and how we can use our chart in combination with another powerful tool, the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle to bring about improvement in our organizations.

0:01:15.1 AS: And when you say that prediction is a measure of knowledge, you're saying that prediction is a measure of how much you know about a system, or how would you describe that in more simple terms that for someone who may not understand that, that they could understand?

0:01:31.4 JD: Yeah, it took me a while to understand this. I think, basically the accuracy of your prediction about any system or process is an observable measure of knowledge. So when you can make a prediction about how a system or a process, and I use those words interchangeably, is gonna perform the closer that that sort of initial theory is, that initial prediction is to what actually happens in reality, the more you know about that system or process. So when I say prediction is a measure of knowledge, that's what I'm talking about is, you make a prediction about how something's gonna perform. The closer that prediction is to how it actually performs, the more you know about that system or process.

0:02:19.1 AS: I was just thinking about a parent who understands their kid very well can oftentimes predict their response to a situation. But if you brought a new kid into that house that the parent didn't know anything about their history, their background, the way they react, that the parent doesn't really have anything to go on to predict except maybe general knowledge of kids and specific knowledge of their own kid. How could that relate to what you're saying that prediction is a measure of knowledge?

0:02:52.3 JD: Well, I think that's a great analogy. One of the things that Dr. Deming said that it took me some time to understand was that knowledge has temporal spread - just a few words, but really causes some deep thinking. And I think what he meant was, your understanding, your knowledge of some topic or system or process or your kid has temporal spread. So that understanding sort of increases as you have increased interaction with that system process or in this analogy, your own kid. So when you replace a parent who knows their kid well with some other person that doesn't know that kid as well, they haven't had that sort of, that that same, that shared time together. So there's that, they don't have that same understanding. It's gonna take time for that understanding to build. I think the same thing happens when we're trying to change a system or a process or improve it or implementing a new idea in our system or process. And so the prediction at the outset is probably gonna be off. Right, and then over time, hopefully as we learn about that system or process or kid in this instance, that that prediction is gonna get better and better, as we learn over time, basically. I think.

0:04:15.8 AS: Yeah, it's interesting because saying the words temporal spread kind of gives way to the idea that Dr. Deming was educated in 1910, 1915, in speaking, reading, writing. And then he also, he said things, that his objective wasn't to just completely simplify. And I think that the messages that he was bringing were difficult to simplify, but you could say that, "improves over time" is what temporal spread may mean. Right? Okay. Let's keep going on this. This is interesting.

0:04:55.0 JD: Yeah, I think, maybe it'd be helpful if I share my screen and we can sort of connect the dots from last time to...

0:05:00.8 AS: Yep. And for the listeners out there, we'll walk you through what John's showing on his screen in just a moment. All right. Now we can see a chart on his screen.

0:05:11.7 JD: Yeah, I think, so we see a process behavior chart sort of orient, the watchers and then even the listeners. So the chart is a process behavior chart. That terminology can be a little bit confusing. Some people would call this a control chart, some people would call it a Shewhart chart, my sort of preferred terminology is process behavior chart because it's literally charting some process over time. So the example I used last time was charting my own weight. So you can use, you can chart personal items, you can also obviously chart things that are important to you in your organization. But the main thing is pull numbers out of a spreadsheet. That's what we talked about last time. Pull numbers out of the table instead plot that same data over time. So you can see how it varies naturally, perhaps, or how it varies in, special ways over time. So the, for the watchers, the blue dots are individual data points. The dates are running along the X-axis of the chart. And so you can see those moving up and down over time as I weigh myself every morning. Then we have the green line.

0:06:30.6 AS: At the beginning of the chart, we see those individual data points hovering around maybe 179 to 80, something like that.

0:06:41.8 JD: Yeah. Bouncing around in the 180, 178, 176 range. And then...

0:06:48.8 AS: And just for the international listener, John is not 180 kilograms [laughter], he's 180 pounds. Okay. Continue.

0:06:56.8 JD: That's right, that's right. On the Y-axis, we have weight in pounds. And so in addition to the blue dots and we've added a green line that is the average over time. And then we have sort of the last component of the process behavior chart, we have the red lines, which are the upper and lower natural process limits, or some people call them control limits sort of are the bounds of this particular system at a given point in time. And so, as we watch this data unfold, we can see that it does move up and down in different ways, in different patterns, but it's far more illustrative than if I was just looking at that table of numbers. So when I do this daily, I don't wanna overreact to any single data point. Instead, what I'm trying to do is get a sense of how this data is performing over time, right? So I can see this unfold over the course of days and then weeks and then months and all along, my knowledge of my weight system is increasing.

0:08:09.7 JD: Even if you don't know anything about process behavior charts, you could do this on a simple line chart or run chart without the limits, and you'd still learn much more than what you would with that table of numbers. But with the addition of the red lines, the natural process limits, what I am doing is sort of saying based on some simple mathematical calculations, that these are the bounds of my system that I would expect because of the data empirically based on the actual dots on the chart, these are the bounds of my system. And if a point would happen to fall outside of those red lines, I know something special has happened because it's so mathematically improbable that it's not to be expected. And there's a few other patterns in the data too that you can look for besides a single point outside of one of those red lines.

0:09:08.4 JD: But I'm looking for those patterns to see if something special has happened or I'm seeing if my data is sort of generally bouncing around between those red lines. And in either case, there are different approaches to trying to improve that, improve that data over time. And one other thing that I like to do, I always make my data blue, my average line green and my process, my natural process limits red. And then whenever I do this internally with data from our own organization, whether it's attendance data or test data or financial data, whatever the data is, I always use that same pattern. So people get used to seeing these colors and they associate blue with data, green with the average and red with the limits.

0:10:00.7 AS: So tell us more about, I mean, one of the things before we even talk about PDSA, what's happening here is that the upper limit and the lower limit at two points in this chart shift down. So you're, if you didn't change the upper and lower limit and you just had your, that standard one across the whole chart, then it probably starts to lose its value because the process that you're describing is going back in time to such an extent that things were different. Tell us about why you've made this adjustment.

0:10:46.0 JD: Yeah, I'd say if the natural process limits, so the red lines sort of stay in the same spot. So if I don't see those special patterns, basically what I can assume is that that system is, despite the fact that the data is bouncing around a little bit naturally, that, there's nothing sort of significant that's happened either in terms of my weight system getting worse, or in this case I want to get better. Obviously, I wanna lose a little bit of weight. If I don't see those patterns in the data, then nothing has changed. So if I'm trying something new to bring that weight down and I don't see any of those special patterns that tell me to adjust the natural process limits, that means what I'm doing is not having an effect. Right. So there's one, you wanna know what reality is for whatever the thing is that you're talking about.

0:11:37.7 JD: So on the very first day, you can see, when I weighed myself, it was like something like 182 pounds or something like that. And I could say I weigh 182 pounds, but that's not really reality, except that I weighed 182 pounds on the morning of November 28th when I recorded that data. But the very next day it goes down a little bit and then it goes down quite a bit that third day, and then it bounces back up, and then back down, and then back up and then back down a little bit. And that's the real sort of reality. And I don't really weigh 182, I'd probably weigh somewhere closer to that average of 179 across those first two weeks or so. Right? But I don't know that until I've collected, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 data points, what my reality is.

0:12:30.0 JD: And that's why this charting is so important. It helps me understand reality in a much more accurate way. So when we're trying to improve, I think, in this case, I decided to gather data on a daily basis. And I think when that's sort of another important consideration, when you're doing improvement work and charting, you wanna gather data in a rhythm that matches whatever it is, whatever that metric is that you're concerned with, you want that, you want the data to be gathered in a way that matches that metric. But in general, more frequent is better, as long as you're not overreacting, like I said earlier, to any single data point. Instead, you wanna gather data, you wanna have those 15, 20 data points, see the patterns, and then start to look for changes in those patterns. The three that I happen to look for are, a single point outside the natural process limits, or I'll look for eight consecutive points, either above or below that average line, or I'll look for three or four points that are closer to the red line than they are to that average line.

0:13:41.4 JD: Any of those three patterns emerge. I know something has changed, and I'll go ahead and shift the limits. If I know, when I'm looking for those patterns, I wanna know why that change has happened. So sometimes when I see a pattern, and if I don't have an explanation for why that data shifted, even though it shifted in a way that was mathematically unexpected, sometimes in those instances, I won't shift my limits. So I generally will only shift when I see a pattern and I can sort of pinpoint a reason for that, for that shift.

0:14:18.4 AS: And when you say shift, you're saying shift your upper and lower process limit?

0:14:20.0 JD: Yeah. I shift the limits at the point where I saw one of those special patterns begin, basically.

0:14:29.6 AS: Okay. All right. Keep going. So you got PDSA on there now.

0:14:32.9 JD: Yeah, so I think, when I think about continual improvement, there's a lot of different tools we can use and a lot of tools that are valuable, especially when you sort of facilitate an improvement team, a group of people working together, especially because those various tools can help you visualize what people are thinking. But if I had to boil continual improvement down to two tools, it'd be the process behavior chart combined with the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So sort of the theory of variation is the process behavior chart, and then what Deming would call the theory of knowledge, the PDSA or Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle is a key component of that theory of knowledge part of the system of profound knowledge. So you can see on my chart, I have three cycles that I've gone through so far.

0:15:24.6 JD: So I've basically run three experiments to try to bring the weight down. So PDSA cycle one, then I made a slight adjustment based on what I learned adjusted after about 30 days, I ran another Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, ran that for another 30 days to see how it'll impact my weight. And then I've started a third cycle, and I've been running that now for about 45, 50 days. So the idea is, you run a, basically a structured simple, it doesn't have to be overly complex, simple experiment. And then you see if what you're doing is working, and in this case it's resulted in two, two shifts or two patterns of data that tell me that that actual improvement has happened. Not that I just decreased my weight, but it decreased to such an extent that it showed up as a mathematically unlikely pattern in my data.

0:16:33.3 AS: Well, I think all of us who wanna reduce our weight, kind of wonder, what did you do that caused your weight to fall and be consistently lower?

0:16:47.5 JD: Yeah, [laughter] that's a good question. I mean, pretty simply, mostly I focused on what I was eating. I sort of cut out the sort of typical culprits, the extra carbs, the processed food, and the sugar and focused mainly on meat and vegetables, across all three meals. And I added a little bit of exercise, there's a little more detail to it than that, but that's the basic, the gist of it. But the thing was, I wrote it down in a template, a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle template. So I had a simple plan written down. I had the dates during which I was gonna do this, and then I was gathering the data and charting it every morning to see how the experiment was working. And then after 30 days or so, I would study it a little more closely, revise the plan, and then sort of keep going with it. So it's not, certainly not rocket science, but it's a powerful method when you combine these two things. And again, you can do this for just about anything, any data that occurs over time in your organization, you can run these same experiments.

0:17:58.5 AS: So the power of the chart is that it gives you feedback to try to see if your prediction came true?

0:18:10.7 JD: Yeah. And you have the historical results. And then you can also look to see, again, if those special patterns emerge that tell you that actual improvement happened, verse, an insignificant, in this case, decline in weight.

0:18:29.0 AS: And what's interesting is after PDSA number three, you've gotten your weight down to an average of let's say 172, 173, something like that.

0:18:38.1 JD: Yep. That's right.

0:18:39.6 AS: And it's just kind of bouncing around tightly, somewhat within that level.

0:18:47.0 JD: Yeah, I mean, basically what you see is you'll see three or even sometimes four, or even close to five days in a row where it's below that average line. And so you're saying, "Oh, I'm getting close to being able to shift again." And then what actually happens is the weekend [laughter] So I'm way more disciplined during the week when I have to go to work and those types of things. And then, but you can learn from that. You can learn that that's what's showing up in the pattern. And I've also gotten to a point where it's gonna be harder. Those first five eight pounds are much easier. And then, from there, depending on what you wanna do goal-wise, it could be harder, it could require a sort of a slightly different plan because PDSA one, two, and three are all variations of each other. There wasn't a lot of change from each of the cycles, but there was some learning that happened.

0:19:35.1 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I mean, that's a good point to maybe go little deeper into the PDSA cycle. So I mean, I think, for me, it took some time to sort of understand the PDSA cycle, even though it's, again, it's a relatively simple tool, and I think it's just one of those where you just need to do it, and over time you're gonna learn. So I think the first thing, you make a plan, you do it, you carry out the plan, you study what happened, and then at the end you act and you decide what to do. And I think really, the most powerful part for me was this realization that during the plan phase of the PDSA, it is absolutely imperative that you make a prediction.

0:20:29.0 JD: And if I'm doing team-based work, I have everybody on the team make their own prediction independently. We actually record that prediction in the PDSA cycle. And then during the study phase, we compare the data that actually was produced from that system or process, and we go back and compare it to what we predicted. And the difference between those two things is the learning that drives the next cycle, basically. So it's this iterative process. So you're, you don't just run one PDSA cycle, you basically run it until you've brought about an amount of improvement on that system or process that's acceptable, not, and then you may turn your attention to some other metric in your organization that's important to you.

0:21:22.0 AS: So I think what's important about this is that what he's describing is the way to acquire knowledge within an organization. But many times we see organizations lose the knowledge that they had. And I think that brings us to the concept of training and making sure everybody understands how we're improving the system based upon the knowledge that we gain. And if you can hold that, then the next time that we wanna try to improve the system, hopefully we go to another level, and then we hold that other level through training and making sure that everybody understands the knowledge that has been acquired in the system. And once we feel comfortable with that, then we go to the next level. And let's say that we do that 10 times in a particular process. That means that we've acquired, at 10 different points in time, we've acquired additional knowledge about the system.

0:22:23.2 AS: Now since I'm a finance guy, I like to bring that into finance terms and say, and that's how you build a competitive advantage in your company. It's the acquisition of knowledge of your system and continuing to improve that. And by doing that, you start to get to a point where your competitor doesn't understand nearly as much as you do about that one area. And if you can solidify that through training, then you now are operating at a different level than your competitor. Now your competitor may be doing the same thing in another area, but you've built some competitive strength. And the end result from a business perspective is that you start to produce slightly better profitability relative to your peer until either they catch up or maybe they build some competency in another area. But I'm talking and thinking all about, business. Tell us more about how to apply this in education.

0:23:25.7 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think there are all kinds of applications, and I think you're exactly right. I think what most people have is streams of information coming to them in the form of various types of data every day. But they have very little knowledge, actual knowledge about that data, lots of information, little knowledge. What the PDSA does is allow us to gain that knowledge in combination with the with the process behavior chart. And I think having this structure is very important. I mean, I think you talked about building knowledge over time in your system. I think the fact that the PDSA, when you plan it, you write it down, just doing that is a huge advantage over how most people operate, and you write it down in this structured way.

0:24:23.0 JD: So there is this knowledge store, there's this written record that someone can go back to to see what you did on whatever area you were trying to improve at that time. You have this written record, you have this plan, you understand how that plan was put together, who was doing what, when were they doing it, where were they doing it, how were they doing it? Who was doing it? And then you can see how it actually worked in implementation. And then you can see the actual data that sort of came back when you tried something. And you can do these PDSA cycles on a very, very tight timeframe. So when I got some training on this, they suggested, some of the trainers suggested you, you do this, you can run a PDSA for one day, one hour, depending on the situation.

0:25:09.5 JD: I think in general, what I've seen is that PDSAs that I run are generally somewhere in the two to three to four week timeframe. And I try not to ever go beyond four weeks with the PDSAs. I wanna get back some learning... It may not mean that I know everything about whatever it is I'm trying to improve, but I wanna give back some data that tells me sort of what direction should I go next? What direction should I go next, and I'll keep going in that way until I learn sort of more and more over time. I do think it's helpful to have just a very simple template, which I'm happy to share with folks, in terms of the plan, I'm writing out a question or two that's most important for us to answer. And again, I'm making predictions around those questions. What do I expect to happen when we do this change, when we make this change.

0:26:07.6 AS: Like cutting carbs down to 30 grams per day from 60 grams per day, will, my prediction is that will bring my weight down over the next week or two by one or two pounds or something like that.

0:26:23.6 JD: That's right. That's right. If we have an attendance problem, we're gonna try some attendance intervention, and I predict that if I make this change, it's gonna improve X amount in the next three weeks. Right it's a concrete prediction and I, again, I mentioned that I have everybody on the team do that because then you can start to see too how people are thinking about these ideas, how much they believe, what degree of belief do they have in the change idea. You see that show up when you see their prediction and then you literally, it's the who, what, where, when of this idea. And you get, when I do this, I get very, very specific, John will do X, Y, and Z on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday for each of the four weeks of this cycle. Catherine will do this, Ben will do this, you're very specific.

0:27:11.4 JD: So everybody knows their role, what their job is in this PDSA, and then the two other things that are a part of the plan. First one is super important, it's the operational definition. So whatever the key concept or concepts are that are under study, we operationally define them. So it's very, very explicit how we're gonna measure those things when we start actually running the experiment. And then we have a plan for collecting data. And I like to put the data right into my PDSA template, so everything's in one place. Sometimes it'll be a link to a Google sheet and a series of charts, but a lot of times I'll just create a table and then link the charts. So you can see, you can see the data right there in the PDSA.

0:27:58.5 JD: I think from there we just, we run the test, we run the test on a small scale, and after the test, as the plan's been implemented, we're going to describe what happened. We're gonna talk about what data we collected and what observations we made. Now in this Do phase, you're not actually doing any analysis. All you're doing is describing how the plan was implemented in when the rubber met the road, when you actually put things into action, how did implementation go compared to how you said it was gonna go in the plan. And almost every time I do this, there is some sort of aberration, some change from the plan that needs to be noted because I didn't anticipate, or we didn't anticipate, something happening. In schools, maybe I was gonna do this for three weeks and, on the third day of the test cycle, the experiment, we had a snow day that was unanticipated, or a key person in the experiment was not there. A student that we were working with on a PDSA cycle missed three days of school because of the flu, you report those things back because they're gonna impact the data that you collected.

0:29:22.4 JD: So that's what you're doing in the Do cycle. You run the test and then you describe what happened, verse the implementation plan. I think probably the most sort of important part then is that study phase, so we're gonna analyze the results and again, compare 'em back to the prediction. So this is the absolutely critical part of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. I almost think of it like a mathematical formula. The analysis minus the prediction equals the learning. This was a sort of aha moment for me. And this is where you...

0:29:58.6 AS: Which is where Dr. Deming said, what is it? Something like, testing without prediction, doesn't acquire, you don't acquire knowledge. The only way to acquire knowledge is to make a prediction and then look at the results relative. Otherwise you're just messing around. You're not necessarily acquiring knowledge.

0:30:26.7 JD: Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. There's like, no, there's no theory without prediction. There's no knowledge without prediction. That's what we're doing in the study phase. We're, again, we're, why, why did what we see happen? Why did that happen? Why was it so different from my prediction? Or why was I able to make that prediction? What did I understand about our system or process? So again, it's not a test, one of the first PDSA cycles I ran with a teacher, the prediction, was very different than the outcome. He said, "Oh, the test failed." And I said, no, we learned something on a very small scale before we did that same thing. Instead of with one student, we could have been doing it with a whole school of students and imagined the time and the resources that it would take to do that sort of failed effort.

0:31:22.3 JD: We learned on a very small scale not to do it that way. And in PDSA cycle two, we're gonna adjust, right? And that's what we're doing. So in the study phase, we're comparing prediction and what actually happened. And then in that act phase, basically we take what we learned and make the next test, right? This on this continual basis. And I always sort of say, think about the Act as the three A's. We're either going to Abandon that change idea because it went so poorly. Now, that's not gonna happen very often in that first cycle, or two or three, but down the road, maybe it is, we need to abandon this idea and let it go. But more generally, what happens, especially early on, is that you Adapt each cycle a little bit. Like I was doing in that weight example, I was just adapting, I was sticking with the same basic diet plan and making some tweaks as I learned.

0:32:19.4 JD: So I was adapting each of those PDSA cycles. And then the third sort of option is to Adopt. And by adopt, I mean, you're gonna make this sort of a standard approach, standard work in your system. This is how we're gonna do things from now on. And generally, we're not gonna make a decision to adopt something, an intervention, until we've tested it across, four or five, six, seven test cycles. And, as we do these iterations, in a school example, maybe we're gonna try an attendance intervention with one student, and then we're gonna try it with 15 students. If the test with the one student went pretty well, and now I want those 15 students to vary a bit from that original student, I want this next group to have, some other characteristics, whatever that may be, than that, that original kid, and then maybe I'm gonna test it with a whole classroom and then maybe I'm gonna test it with a whole grade level, and then maybe I'll test it with the whole school. But that's sort of the mindset. You sort of go up this ramp of testing, and as you go up that ramp, you sort of increase the sample size of who is included in that test. So that if you're gonna adopt this into your system, you wouldn't be pretty sure it's gonna work broadly within that particular context.

0:33:51.5 JD: So that's sort of the basic idea. And then, what I stick in all of the footers, and I stole this idea from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, but in the footer of my PDSA template and in all my sort of improvement templates, I put this phrase "probably wrong, definitely incomplete." Because that's the sort of the mindset that you have to have with continual improvement in general. And definitely with the PDSA cycle, because those first cycles, you're probably gonna get a lot wrong as you're sort of turning information into knowledge early on. You're not gonna know a lot about that thing, you're gonna learn over time. And so you sort of have to adopt this as your sort of mantra for PDSA cycles.

0:34:32.1 AS: Great. I was just looking at quotes by Dr. Deming, and the quote is, without theory, there is no learning. All right. So how would we wrap this up?

0:34:45.8 JD: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great quote. And I think, so it doesn't, I mean, theory can be a little intimidating, just the word theory. I sort of originally thought of these grand academic or scientific theories, but that's not really what he was talking about. Generally, a theory can be a hunch. A theory can be an idea you have, a theory can be at one time I had a student that wasn't doing their homework, and I just, said, can you do this piece of homework first? [laughter], when you have study hall, you're never doing your reading homework when you go home. Can you just do this before you leave school? So that's a hunch, that's a theory, a theory to make things better.

0:35:28.1 JD: So I think, what I would do for folks that are listening to this, just grab a PDSA template, which you can find on a simple Google search. Just start plotting your data for something that's important to you. Get a bit of a baseline 10 or 12 or 15 points, and then try to run one of these PDSA cycles. I mean, I think it's this whole idea. I was in this IHI Improvement Advisor Program, and they would say, Okay, you got this whole hospital or this whole school, or this whole school system or hospital system, you need to improve. What are you gonna do on Tuesday? What are you gonna do on Tuesday when you go back into the office or the school or the hospital? That's sort of this idea of PDSA, do something, try something, get some change ideas going and see what that does to your data. It doesn't have to be this huge, huge scale thing. Try it on a small scale and see what happens. See what you'll learn.

0:36:31.1 AS: Well, there's a challenge. John on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember, you can go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your froggy 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 and Andrew discuss variation, the impossibility of true interchangeability and why we need to apply "shades of gray" thinking at work. Bill shares the key question that will take your organization beyond "meets specifications" and help improve your processes, so you can delight your customers.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is 20th century quality, Bill take it away.

0:00:28.2 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. So the running joke on the 20th century quality is we could have said 19th century, and sadly it's still 21st century. And what do I mean by that? In our second episode, we've talked about the two questions of quality management. Question one, does this characteristic, does this product, does this thing meet requirements? There's only two answers. That's 19th century quality, that's 20th century quality, and by and large, that's 21st century quality. And my hope is that our conversation inspires people to move into question two, which opened opportunities for as you're talking about opportunities for investment, opportunities for doing amazing things, when we get out of the black and white of question one into the shades of gray, of question two. That's, that's so...

0:01:26.5 AS: So what century are we in now?

0:01:29.1 BB: I think the 21st.

0:01:30.5 AS: 21st. My goodness. People always get, I always get confused. We're in the two thousands, but that's a 21st century. And 19th century is the 1800s.

0:01:46.7 BB: Well...

0:01:47.5 AS: 20th century would then be from 1900s until 2000 or 1999.

0:01:54.3 BB: The... And just for some more clarity, and I was doing some research earlier today, but there's a great tie between question one and 19th century 20th centuries still: question number one, does this meet requirements? A lot of that ties back to this whole concept of interchangeable parts. Which is not what we do in the garage when we're in the garage building something - that's 21st century quality, because we design it, we buy the stuff again, whether you're building something in the kitchen, in the backyard, and we put it all together with a 21st century, a Deming-Taguchi approach to quality, which means we're not looking at the parts in isolation we're looking at how they come together, the idea of interchangeable parts, and the... A name that I usually find as being the father of this concept of interchangeable parts. People talk about Eli Whitney.

0:03:02.3 BB: But Eli Whitney heard about interchangeable parts from the first American to hear about this concept, who was Thomas Jefferson. And he heard about it when he was US Ambassador to France, in 1802 timeframe, he was Jeff, he was George Washington's ambassador to France. And while there he came across a Frenchman by the name of Andre Blanc, B-L-A-N-C. And Blanc is considered the... Not the father of interchangeable parts. There's a French general in the 1770s had this idea of you're in the battlefield, you've got all these broken weapon systems and I can't cobble together this cannon with these wheels to be able to continue fighting the battle because they're all crafts built with craftsmanship, which means these things don't come together. So this general had the idea, and I like to tell people, Blanc is the one who got the marching orders to go put this concept into practice. And so he's given credit for being the one to work through the details.

0:04:17.1 BB: And what I was reading earlier tonight I've done other reading on this before, but it was, Jefferson went to a presentation by Blanc, heard about the ideas. Jefferson wrote a letter to John Jay and I don't know exactly, I, John Jay's name, I... Name I've heard before. I don't know exactly what his role was in government. But he wrote a letter back that there's this thing, this guy Blanc, this concept of interchangeable parts. And as the story goes, Jefferson offered Blanc the opportunity to come to the States 'cause Jefferson saw this, not just on the battlefield, the ability to repair weapons quickly, quickly, quickly, but what this means to a growing society. And Blanc had no interest. And so Jefferson took the idea, gave it to Whitney. Whitney gets credit for the first contract with Congress ever for a product with interchangeable parts, which turned out to be rifles. And it took on the order of 20 years for him to figure out how to do that. But in the process, he was working on the design protocol, the quality system, which is 18th century quality, which is looking at all these parts, giving them requirements. And that's what we do today.

0:05:39.8 AS: So the US Congress kind of funded that research and development basically.

0:05:44.3 BB: Well, there's a fun story and [chuckle] is it a true story? It has the making of a true story 'cause he figured Jefferson is the, you know, the godfather of this movement. And the story is in the early 1800s John Adams is president and Jefferson goes to the Oval Office with Whitney to give John Adams an update on this thing called interchangeable parts. And so he brings in Whitney, you know, this is, you know, Mr. President, okay, this is Eli Whitney. And evidently Whitney comes in with two rifles and Jefferson says, okay, make me proud. And he takes the rifles apart and he moves the parts from one to the other and shows them this is what we're working on. And evidently Adams is blown away by the whole thing. Well, the punchline is that Jefferson working with Whitney's, hoodwinked Adams because the parts were handcrafted to be identical. What took another 18 or so years was his effort to create the tooling to mass-produce these, not hand-file them. It took some time. It took some time. But Whitney gets all that credit, but it goes back to Blanc. And also, in the very same timeframe, I've read of incredible efforts by the British in using this for pulleys and warships. And so this was going on elsewhere.

0:07:24.6 BB: What I've also heard... And I'll just throw out, I don't wanna go there. But I've heard accounts that the Chinese centuries before were looking at this. If somebody's thinking, "Well, was it them or... " I don't know. And so in the Google searches I was doing about an hour ago, I didn't find anything on China. But the important thing for our conversation is the idea of taking a product, breaking it into parts, giving the parts requirements, and having this sense of, "All these springs meet requirements. They're all good," which is question one. "All the bars are good, and we can interchange them." What I also say is that the concept behind question number one, saying that all these things that make requirements are good, all the barrels are good, all the locks are good, I would define that as absolute interchangeability, meaning the sense that any one of these can be put together with anyone else, and I could take any doctor, any of this, and I can absolutely plug and play. And what that ignores is variation. From a Deming perspective, which is question two, when you realize that all these parts that meet requirements have variation, that means they're relatively interchangeable, but they're not absolutely interchangeable.

0:09:01.2 AS: Which makes me think about the before interchangeability, which we're so familiar with in this modern world. Before...

0:09:08.4 BB: Everything is.

0:09:09.3 AS: Interchangeability, there was craftsmanship, whereas the difference is in those parts of a shoe, even though they may... My uncle and myself got the same shoe, there are some unique differences to those exact same shoes that the craftsman's not trying to get rid of. They're part of what... It's not a pressure that the craftsman feels.

0:09:33.7 BB: Well, handcrafted is expensive. These are handcrafted, a handcrafted guitar, a handcrafted... There's a place down the street where they... Essentially, it's handcrafted car wash, by hand. In the early days, handcrafted was the only thing. Then we went to interchangeable. And so we could have handcrafted truck, handcrafted this. But the point I wanted to make for our audience is question one does it meet requirements. There is a sense of absolute interchangeability, that I could replace this doctor with this doctor because they're both board-certified, this engineer with this engineer. It's like in the world of computers and software, it's this idea of plug and play. "I can take this one out, plug this one and just move on." And we have that sense of everyone in the organization is relatively interchangeable. The idea of interchangeability from a Deming perspective is workers are treated as interchangeable, products are treated as interchangeable, and what's missing is a sense of differences, that the people are actually different. They're not... And that's what we... The running joke we used to have with friends is that we've got... People are making parts that are interchangeable, and we're treating the people as if they are interchangeable.

0:11:03.5 BB: And that mindset of interchangeability is alive and well. Now, another thing just throw out, just for those that might not be familiar with this conversation, is that when requirements are set and I just like to say to people is, "Can a company go to a supplier and say, 'We want this part to be exactly 1-inch thick'?" And they'll say, "Yeah, we can pull that out." And I say, "Well, technically, no." 'Cause what exactly does 1 inch mean? Does it mean 1.000 inches? Does it mean we're gonna have that thickness all the way around the table? And what that is ignoring is variation. Even if I measure it and it's exactly 1.000 all the way around, well, when I ship it to your company, Andrew, and you measure it, are you gonna get the same value? And if you get a different value, does that mean I can't sell it to you? What we do is we take the 1.00 and we say, "Plus or minus some small number." We can say, "10 plus or minus 1/16 of an inch." And then we get into the world of requirements where there's a maximum and a minimum. And now what we're saying is good, which is question number one, is everything in between. And my explanation is, if we didn't allow for that wiggle room, we couldn't have commerce because we're not acknowledging variation.

0:12:49.3 BB: And that goes back to... Again, it goes back to Whitney and Blanc is a sense of, "We're gonna put bounds on it, anywhere in between." In the world of American football, that saying... Or international soccer, "Anywhere within the net is a goal. Anywhere within." What's missing from that is if, is what happens if we're at different values within that range, what, where does that, what do the differences in meeting requirements mean? And what I point out is the differences in how we meet requirements shows up when you take the thing from me and try to do something with it.

0:13:37.9 AS: So it's related to the application that it's being used in.

0:13:43.6 BB: And I don't... A question that I like to ask that I don't, I'm not sure if we've gotten into in the first or second session is, I'll ask people, what do you call the person that graduates last in their class in medical school? Doctor. They meet the requirements. So does the first person in class. Well, they, that's from a question one perspective, those two doctors are absolutely interchangeable. I need a doctor. Well, what I ask is, is there a difference between those two doctors? And if there is a difference, when does that difference appear? And that's what you're talking about. From a question two perspective, the difference between those two doctors shows up when they walk into your room. They know when they're providing the whatever procedure you need, when they interact with you and your family, when they interact with other professionals at the hospital. The difference between any two things that meets requirements shows up when they, when all these things come together. And my excitement over Deming's work is he learned about that from Dr. Taguchi, who I learned it from.

0:14:47.1 BB: And what Dr. Deming did was integrate that sense of understanding variation and systems with the psychology of theory of knowledge of the system of profound knowledge. And that's provides an incredible theory by which to run organizations. That's the potential of 21st century quality that I hope we can inspire.

0:15:08.7 AS: And if I kind of try to piece together what you're putting out there, I think the first thing you're saying is that absolute interchangeability doesn't exist.

0:15:18.7 BB: No, no.

0:15:18.8 AS: Because nothing can be perfectly interchangeable. The other thing...

0:15:22.5 BB: If no two snowflakes are the same, if twins aren't identical, then you can't have absolute, absolute interchangeability. If you understand variation, it can't be.

0:15:32.9 AS: Okay, so then the next thing is that because we can't have absolute interchangeability, we need to understand some parameters or requirements and of what we need for this application. And then the other part of that is to understand that then there's variation even within, once you've set those parameters or requirements, there's going to be variations within that. Help me to continue to understand this.

0:16:06.4 BB: Well, first, let me give you an example outside of manufacturing just to make it easier to understand. So one is you put out a job search that you're looking to hire someone with these skills and 10 people meet the requirements. And does a given company take those 10 people and say, "Okay, put their names in a box, we're going to randomly pull them out?" I don't think so. We narrow it down. We take the ones that meet requirements. We call them up. We do an interview. What are we doing? We're sorting amongst things that meet requirements. Why? Because they aren't absolutely interchangeable.

0:16:50.3 AS: But when we're sorting amongst those, we're sorting, as you just described it, we're sorting by different characteristics like from the way they respond to something, or.

0:16:58.3 BB: Well, we're saying these... So we're saying these 10 people all meet the requirements of number of years of experience, a bachelor's degree, this and this. But now what we're doing is seeing through phone call, likely the scenario would be we're going to interview them by phone and get it down to three, bring the three in. What we're looking for is, what we're saying is those 10 are different. They all meet requirements, but they're different. And what we're looking for eventually is which one's the best fit. Why? Because fit is relative, not absolute. If fit was absolute, we would just roll the dice and say they're all the same. It doesn't matter. No, we don't do that. And like I say, I kid people, "Is that how we find a spouse? We just go to some dating app. We end up with three people. We say, this one?" No. We're looking for which is the best fit.

0:17:52.9 BB: So this idea of understanding fit as relative is an everyday thing. All the parking spots meet requirements, which is the best fit for what I'm doing that day? That's what we're talking about. And I mean, aside from manufacturing, it's the same concept. We're saying all the fruit is not the same. I want one which is about this juiciness. These applicants are not the same. What we're looking for is which is the best fit into the system of the product or the service or the company.

0:18:29.7 AS: And this discussion helps people to think about the idea that it's kind of nonsense just to think that by defining something kind of loosely, like I want this one inch long, as an example, that there's just so many flaws to that, that it's not the best way to do it. We need to understand more. What does it take away from this?

0:18:58.6 BB: Well, let me say this, because I don't want to make it complicated, but there's a time and a place for absolute interchangeability and moving on. We go to McDonald's, that's how they make their food. We're just saying, okay, I mean, I'm not saying absolute interchangeability, get rid of it. What I'm saying is use absolute interchangeability where it's not worth doing more than that. And then where it makes sense, whether it comes to staffing, a relative... And even in every feature of a product that you make, not every aspect of it has the same fit issue. So the big thing is, where fit is most difficult, or most important, that's where you apply the meaning of question two. So if it's not worth the effort, then you don't do it because the strategy is the amount of time I put into sorting the things that are good has to pay for itself.

0:20:06.9 BB: So I go through all that trouble when it comes to who I wanna date, who I wanna marry, where we're gonna have the reception, where we're gonna go on vacation, alright? But it doesn't mean we apply that same degree of effort everywhere. Again, when you're selecting a doctor, you might wanna go to that extent. When you're selecting an attorney, but the idea is that you can, as we've talked prior, is become aware that's it's a choice. Do we focus on question one, which is absolutely interchangeability. It's a very simple model. Does the application... Is it worth any more time than that? No. Then that's the way to go versus question two. Let it be a choice.

0:20:49.5 AS: So let's wrap it up by thinking about the listener here and saying, okay, they're gonna go back into their job after listening to this. And what part... What can they do with this knowledge? Let's say an exercise at work or a way of thinking about how this can help them in their everyday job.

0:21:11.2 BB: I think the big thing is, and it's very straightforward, I don't know how much work it takes, but pay attention to how people use what you give them whether it's data you're handing off in a spreadsheet. Last week I met with our CPA who does our taxes year after year. And for my business, I give him a spreadsheet with a bunch of different columns and rows, and every year I add a couple more columns and a couple more rows. And I cut and paste and put it into a PDF file and send it to him. And I was talking with him last week and I said," You know, Mike, I can put that in a spreadsheet. It's a little bit more work for me." Because I said, "How legible is that fine print?" And he said, "It would be helpful if you did that." I said, "Boom, I can do that. I'm gonna do that." But if I didn't know, I would keep sending it to him, and he's squinting, squinting, squinting.

0:22:14.1 BB: And that's exactly what I'm talking about, is pay attention to how people use your work. It's as simple as that. Going around the corner and just asking for more clarity 'cause then the question is, "Is it possible that with a little bit more effort, I could save you a lot more effort?" [laughter] And that's what we're looking for. And relative to our accountant, it's not that hard for me to cut and paste and send him a different spreadsheet. That's a few seconds, and I think I could save him a lot more than a few seconds. So that's... The big punchline is in the world of interchangeable parts, I just say, "Hey, this is good. It meets requirements." Now what I'm paying attention to is, "What if I put a little bit more effort in this, can I make your life easier?" And that's the essence of teamwork.

0:23:11.8 AS: Yep. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap it up, Bill. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. 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 third discussion in a series on the Role of a Manager, David and Andrew discuss how a manager should view, and treat, people. Deming wrote, "It's just not ranking people, it is instead recognition of differences between people and an intent to put everybody in position for development." David applies this to education: literally looking at how to support everyone with limited resources.

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation, and before we get started, David, I have to apologize my voice, I got a little bit hoarse. The topic for today is Optimizing Diversity. David, take it away.

0:00:28.7 David P. Langford: Well, you've been talking too much, Andrew. So we've been working in this section in Dr. Deming's book, The New Economics, and we've talking about the role of the manager, and the reason we're doing that is because I often get asked all the time, well where do we begin, and what do we do and how do we start stuff? And people get fired up about Deming concepts, and then they wanna know what to do next, and so that's why we've been talking about this about the role of a manager in a system and studying the aim of systems so on and so forth.

0:01:06.5 DL: So this is point number three, and I will just take a stab at just reading it. First off in Deming's words, so he says "A manager of people understands that people are different from each other. He tries to create for everyone interest and challenge and joy in work, tries to optimize the family background, education, skills, hopes and abilities of everyone. It's just not ranking people, it is instead recognition of differences between people and an intent to put everybody in position for development." So in today's lingo lingo, we would call that diversity, and there's lots of different diversity, of course, there's diversity in cultures, there's difference in languages, there's diversity of thought. There's lots of different ways to think about this.

0:02:01.9 DL: And I really like what Deming is talking about here. He said... He's talking about, what's your role as a manager? And so in this podcast, we're always talking about what are these things mean in education, obviously, Deming was talking mostly to corporate managers and people like that in business, but he was also an educator himself, so I always applied all these things to education in the same way. So as a teacher, you are a manager of people in a classroom, and when that group comes into the classroom, your job is to optimize the ability of them to work together, and that's what Deming is talking about here. And so there's lots of ways to do that. One of the ways that I picked up on a concept that was in Lean management called huddles, in which the Lean managers are taught to have a huddle with your employees first thing in the morning, well I transferred that into education and taught teachers all over the world have a huddle first thing in the morning. I just read a local research paper that came in on the web the other day, and a teacher was talking about the value of morning meetings.

0:03:28.5 DL: Well, call it whatever you want, but a huddle is just that basically, you just get everybody together. And it works fantastic, even kindergarten, whatever it might be, and get a chance to optimize their diversity. What happened over the weekend? What was memorable or not memorable. Does anybody have anything they wanna talk about? Something that happened that maybe you need support with or you don't have to say anything, but if you wanna say something, you can. And I've always found those things just to be amazingly helpful to everybody, because once somebody in the group knows that somebody else is hurting in some way throughout the day, they can do little tiny things, and kids have amazing hearts and will help people if they know that they need help. Another way that I've taught people to optimize the diversity through the classroom or problems and issues that people have is an exercise called fear and a hat, and with fear and a hat you get people to write down what are their fears, and works really great, like when you're trying to form a group, like in the beginning of the year, maybe even like day one, what are your fears about this year and what's happening or this class or just anything. You don't have to put your name on it.

0:04:58.8 DL: In fact, we don't want you to put your name on it and then just drop it in this hat, and everybody drops it in a hat and then you rummage them around and you pull one out. I've had kids put in things like, well, I don't know how to swim, and I'm afraid that other people are gonna find that out, and I'll get ridiculed for it. And these are high school kids. And so all we do is get in the huddle and just say, Okay, this... If you had a friend that had this fear or you had this fear, what advice could you give them about how to operate or what to do. And amazingly, kids come up with just fantastic ideas about how they could help somebody else, or sometimes kids will say things like, well, you could tell somebody else, you could tell somebody that you don't know how to swim, and so maybe they could help make accommodations for you or help you work through that, or you could take a swimming class and learn. It's never too late to learn how to swim.

0:06:03.8 DL: I have a good friend in Texas said she started taking a swimming class when she was, I think, 55 years old. Never learned how to swim really had convinced herself she doesn't know how to swim, and she started taking the class and lo and behold, she actually learned how to swim. You can overcome problems at any stage in your life, and when I read this point that Deming's making is that your job as the teacher/manager in that class, is to find out what is the diversity that you're dealing with in that class, and then learn how to optimize it within the group, because chances are the next group that comes in next year, you're probably gonna have somewhat the same diversity of thought and culture, you don't often get radically different groups in communities, you pretty much get the same kinds of kids coming through a system, unless they come from outside the country or outside the state, etcetera. And that diversity or those differences between people is something to be celebrated, not to be looked down on. And... Yeah, so I just found that to me, that's what Deming is talking about, is your job as the manager is to understand all these things about people, and then learn how to optimize that. And he goes further about... Go ahead what?

0:07:43.2 AS: At the end of that sentence. At the end of that whole section, he says, in an attempt and an attempt to put everybody in position for development. What... Is he talking personal development, is he talking development of the organization. What does he mean knowing that next section, he's gonna talk about learning, life-long learning and coaching and things like that, what do you think he meant by this word development?

0:08:10.1 DL: I think just that, that the development of the person. I've had students in classes that I didn't hear this one girl I had in class she didn't make a sound, didn't ever... You'd call on her she just look down at her desk. So I quickly learned, I can't really do that, I can't single her out, she was so embarrassed about that, and it was finally about January or February, one year, about six months into the school year, she was in a group, and they were going around the group and you could either participate or just say pass, and she couldn't even say pass. She would... It would just get to be her turn and all the kids just knew, Okay, well, we just waited a little bit here and then we're just gonna go on because she's not gonna say anything, and I'll never forget that it got to be her turn and all of a sudden, she looked up and she said, in the softest voice. Well, I think that... Around the kids and they were just like, everybody froze and it was like, oh my God, she speaks. And don't say anything, don't do anything, don't intimidate her in any way or she'll never speak again.

0:09:24.8 DL: But this was a girl that two weeks later, I had her giving a multimedia presentation in front of corporate heads at Motorola Corporation, and I'll never forget at the end of that that one of the managers came up to me and said, "Where do you get these kids?" Well, there's no way that he could see a nine months process in place, and this child had come in, and in many cases, sometimes people would have just written her off, but just gradually, tiny little challenges and getting the group to understand that their job was to support people that... You're always gonna have an issue or a problem going on. Well, that all came from this point, number three, of Deming's right here.

0:10:17.1 DL: And so when I would take students out to do presentations, we would talk about this very point, and everybody had a job of supporting everybody else. So when somebody got up to do a presentation, there was somebody running their video, there was somebody running this, there was somebody making sure their sound was correct, there was somebody who was doing this. And every time a student got up, there was this huge support network, and I will not forget, I went to a major state department, education state department at a capital in the US, and these kids gave a presentation, and I had just tons of people in education department, coming up to me saying the same thing, "Where do you get these people." And I thought, wow, you don't really even know the background of these students, some of them, we had to take them downtown and show them a stop light and go over the rules of the stop light, they'd never seen one before in high school, and these are the very same kids that are giving this presentation in front of all these people. So...

0:11:26.4 DL: To me, that's what he's talking about here, is getting everybody to work together, challenging them different levels, giving them experiences where they're learning new things and working together, but you're actually... You're creating a team, you're creating an interactive team, and it's a conscious effort that you're doing that, it just doesn't happen organically or by itself, it's a conscious effort that every day you're thinking about how can I optimize this team and move people forward? And if you do that and you think like that, pretty soon you have this amazing team of people.

0:12:10.2 DL: So I remember, I think in one of the videos that The Deming Library, there's a superintendent that I worked with in Texas for years, and he was talking about. People would come to his district and experience being around his staff, big staff, 3000 teachers in his district, and invariably superintendent from outside the district would say to him, "Where do you get these people?" Even in a system that big, and the first couple of times that would happen, he would just look at them kind of blankly and just say, "Well, I get them the same place you do, but I guess we just go about working together differently and thinking about supporting each other differently."

0:12:58.5 DL: The other thing I found out that through this process is that you have to be very patient because whether you're talking about students in a classroom whether you're talking about employees or entire student body or whatever it might be, you have to be patient that they're gonna come around over time, if given the right amount of support and challenge through that process. And be very cognizant of the small little ways that people are actually are moving forward and they are learning and they are feeling like they're supported, because if you don't have a very supportive classroom, you're not gonna get kids to take risks. You don't get kids to take risks, they're not gonna learn new things, they're not gonna try new things, and basically the only ones that achieve in an environment like that are the ones that really didn't need to be in the class in the first place, probably they could already aced everything that you are gonna have them do in that class, but you have to always remember that your job is to optimize the system and as... Get as many of these people to the highest level possible in the time that you have to work with them.

0:14:14.4 DL: And people that do that are very profound, and that's why Deming calls it Profound Knowledge, because when you see people like that, you are truly amazed that this can go on, so...

0:14:29.0 AS: One last thing for me is, why did he need to write this point, it seems so obvious that we should be trying to get the most out of everybody and get the uniqueness out of each person and bring that into value to our system, to our customer. I'm just curious, why isn't this being done?

0:14:56.1 DL: He's saying that, this is not about ranking people, so if you think your job is to rank people, you're not gonna be thinking like this, you're not gonna be thinking that, oh no, my job is not just to find out the weak ones and get rid of them or the people who can't do what they need to do, my job is to develop everybody as quickly as possible, giving them new opportunities and being supported within that organization. When you do that, you get amazing creativity at the same time. Because creativity gets shut down any time people feel intimidating... Intimidated, those kinds of things. This is also where bullying comes in, so if you're setting up the classroom where you're more concerned about ranking and rating people and grading people, then you are about optimizing the whole... Everybody's learning in that class. You're really opening it up for bullying and all kinds of things that go on. I've run into so many examples of parents telling me that all of a sudden their child was doing really good the year before, and all of a sudden this year, they're in a class and they just... They wanna quit, they wanna give up, they wanna get out, whatever it might be, and people wanna blame it on bullying, but you have to realize that 98-99% of the bullying is systemic.

0:16:33.8 DL: So the degree to which you have that going on in your organization, you need to be thinking about, okay, what am I doing that's actually encouraging bullying. And when you're grading people to 1/1000 of a point and ranking them and holding people up as being superior to other people, and things like that you're gonna get bullying, because the only way to exceed an organization that's like that is to put somebody else down. If I tear somebody else down, then somehow psychologically, that makes me look better, kind of thing, or even to the point of I'm gonna get rid of them 'cause they're a threat to my ranking and what I look like. And so... It's deep, it's profound. That's what the word profound means is deep. When you think about it in an organization, the last point I would wanna make about this is that because he's talking about your role as a manager, well, if you take this on as that, this is your job, I will guarantee you, you will be happier. You'll come every day, when you meet those students, you're just much happier about being with them because you're supporting them, but they're supporting too. They're supporting you as well.

0:18:01.5 DL: I used to do low ropes course training, and some of you may have heard of things like trust falls and things like that, where you fall back and somebody catches you, but we did a lot of those kinds of things with teachers and students to get teachers to learn to trust their students, and I'll never forget, I was in a middle school one time and I had taught all the teachers about how to run certain events and said, okay, well, here's how you do the first trust fall and then you can go all the way up to having somebody stand on a table and have all the students lined up behind them, and then they have to really trust and fall back and have the students catch him. Well, I was just kinda going around to all the groups, making sure everybody was safe and they were doing things correctly, etcetera, and I came by this one group in the cafeteria and this pretty veteran lady a teacher, she was really great at getting all her students that were in the group to do this trust fall and they well, clap and they were all happy about catching somebody and supporting them and stuff, and then this one little girl turns to her and she said, now is your turn.

0:19:12.0 DL: What this teacher came up with, oh, well, it's this, I'm too old to this, I can't do that, and they just let her go on with all these excuses, and finally one of the little middle school kids said, "Oh, but you have to." And you could just see the blood drain out of her face, but everything was... She had to step up on this step and then step up onto the table every time she would make an incremental leap in performance, kids would cheer like crazy. And she finally did it, it took a long time, but she finally crossed her arms and closed her eyes and fell back in those middle school kids caught her.

0:19:58.2 DL: And she burst into tears. And she told me later, she said, "You know, when I hit those kids hands my first thought was, in 20 years of experience, I had never really trusted my students with anything." And I thought, oh that was amazing. And I checked in with her a months later and a year later, and everything she said my whole life changed because of that kind of experience. So either you lead and you do these kinds of things to optimize the group and the diversity of the group that you have then and teach people to work together and support each other, or you end up leaving them up to their own devices, and then you end up managing the behavior that it produces all the time, because I can tell you that teachers that work in this kind of environment and really work diligently to optimize the diversity within their classrooms, they're not dealing with behavior problems, they're not dealing with bullying, they're not dealing with all the kinds of things that a lot of teachers think that that's their job. I'm supposed to keep track of all that and punish people that are doing it and etcetera. And Deming would say, well, you don't know what your job is.

0:21:23.2 AS: Well, let's wrap it up by thinking about optimizing diversity with the idea that the objective of a manager is really to get the most out of people and to get them to work as a team, and I think about it in the business world, it's the same thing and bullying that happens in schools, goes into the business world, and when you start ranking people, you start... And you have a scarce reward, you know, it just turns into pitting people against each other. You've talked about a couple of tools, one of them is the huddles, which is one way a morning meeting or a huddle, a very short morning meeting to check in with everybody and the value of that, and the second tool you talked about was

"fear and a hat" and anonymously putting fear into a hat and then discussing those, sharing those in a group. You talked about the importance of supporting each other and working together to overcome challenges, and ultimately the idea of getting the most out of people and out of the system is also about creativity and getting that creativity, you never know where things will go. Is there anything you would add to that, wrap up?

0:22:38.1 DL: No, I think that's done well with that, except the final thing we talk a lot about... Deming talking about people have a right to joy in their work. Well, the same thing in schools, students have a right to joy in their learning, and if it's mudville every day and I hate going to school, there's something systemic probably going on that needs to be looked at and understood. And it all depends on the largest system that you have to work with it. So you may not have a supporting school, but it doesn't mean you can't optimize your classroom and these 30 students that you see every single day.

0:23:22.4 AS: 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 froggy host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and it's very appropriate for this discussion, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Education is often touted as data- or evidence-driven. But in this discussion, John Dues contends that educational data is often fiction, given how easy it is to distort, both via the inputs and outputs and through manipulation.

0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of the educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Data is Meaningless Without Context. John, take it away.

0:00:28.3 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. I'm thinking a lot about educational data, and I think about how it's often presented, and I think so often, what we're actually doing with our educational data is what I call writing fiction, which is taking a lot of liberties with the data that comes into our system, whether it's state testing data or some other type of data that gets reported out to the public, and we often sort of manipulate that data or distort that data in a way that paints our organization or our school system or our state in a positive light, and I think we do that sometimes at the detriment of actually working to improve those organizations or those systems because we spend so much time trying to paint this positive picture instead of just putting the data out there.

0:01:26.3 AS: And it's interesting you talked... One of the interesting things about what you're saying is that it could be accurate and good data, but it's just the context or the structure of how it's presented makes it meaningless.

0:01:39.9 JD: Yeah, we try so hard to sort of paint it in this positive light to make it look like we're doing a good job. Everybody wants to do a good job, but I think we often do that at the detriment of our systems.

0:01:54.7 AS: One of the things that made me think about it, in the financial world, we have a code of ethics, and that is basically that... Particularly for CFA charter holders, financial analysts, that you have to present a complete picture of your performance. So if you have 10 customers that you're managing their money and one of them, you really bombed out and you decide you're gonna do the average of the nine that you did well on and then go out to your clients and say, "This is my performance," that's a very... You have an obligation to accurately represent your performance. And when I think about it in all the charts and graphs that people are making in education all around, I would say that most people probably are just, I would call it CYA, cover your ass type of charts [laughter] of, "How do we make this look good?"

0:02:43.9 JD: Yeah, I think... I read somewhere that there's sort of three ways you can respond to your data. You can actually work to improve the system, which would be a positive, and then the other two ways are two forms of a negative, one is you could distort the system itself, or you could actually distort the data. And a lot of times, there's not sort of a nefarious motivation underneath that distortion, but there's sort of, again, this desire to paint your organization or your system in this positive light. So sometimes they're straight up unethical behavior or cheating, but most of the time, that's not what I'm seeing and that's actually not what I'm talking about here today. It's more of this sort of taking liberties, writing fiction. "Okay, we declined from two years ago, but it's up from last year." Those types of sort of distortions of the data that I think are fairly common in education sector, probably all sectors too, so.

0:03:49.9 JD: I think... Maybe I'll share my screen for the folks that have video and I'll talk through it for the listeners that don't have video, but one of the things I often think of and focus on is state testing data, because so many people are looking at that data all the way from State Departments of Education, the school system, the individual schools, the individual teachers and classrooms with their students, and then of course, families get these state testing reports as well.

0:04:23.8 JD: And a handful of years ago, I was looking at one of these reports from the Ohio Department of Education and sort of picture this fancy, glossy, colorful PDF. It's got this big headline on it, it says, "Ohio students continue to show improved achievement in academic content areas." Then it's got a table with all the state tests, all the different grade levels, and three columns for three different years of data. And then in the last column, there's these up green arrows for where there's been improvement from year over year and then these red down arrows for where there's been a decline, and I was thinking to myself, "Well, in some of these areas, one, some of the percentage changes are so small that just on that... In that realm, they're sort of meaningless, like fifth grade science goes from 68.3% in one year and it goes up to 68.5% in another year. That's essentially a rounding error when you're talking about 100,000 or so students that are taking the test. I think calling that improvement is a stretch at best.

0:05:39.0 JD: And then I was focusing on third grade reading specifically because that's such a critical area. In Ohio, there's actually a third grade reading guarantee, so if you don't pass the test, there's the potential there that you could get held back in third grade, so there's a lot of focus on that data. So I was reading on in that state education department document. It said, "Well, third grade did see this decrease this year, but when you look back two years, it actually had... Third graders actually had an increase of proficiency." So again, you actually have a decline from this previous school year to the more recent school year in this document, and they're still making this claim because if you go back two years versus this most recent year, you do see improvement, and so you start to think to yourself, "Well, what is improvement? Do we have a definition of improvement? And if so, what has to be present?"

0:06:43.4 JD: And a few years ago, I came across this definition in sort of a seminal work in our area called The Improvement Guide, and the author sort of outlined a definition for improvement, and it sort of has these three components, and this made a lot of sense to me. If you're gonna claim improvement, you have to, one, alter how work or activity is done or the makeup of a tool. So you had to change something. Basically change something about the work you're doing. That change had to produce these visible positive differences in results relative to historical norms, and then the third thing is it had to have a lasting impact. And so when I go back and I think about that state testing data or really any type of data, you start to ask this question, Is this really improvement, or again, is this writing fiction? Is this not really improvement, but we're twisting the numbers to sort of fit our narrative?

0:07:45.0 JD: So when we think about that state testing data, do we have knowledge for how worker activity has been altered systematically. And if I can't point to that, then how am I gonna take the so-called improvement and bring it to other places in the state that may not have had those same improvements? Do I have these visible positive differences in results going back and comparing to historical norms, not just last year or even two years ago, but five or six or eight or 10 years worth of data. And then have I been able to sustain that improvement? Has there been a lasting impact? Have I been able to hold the gains? And if I haven't been able to do those three things, point to what we change compared to historical norms and then sustain that improvement, I would argue that we haven't really brought about improvement. We can't claim that we've improved our system.

0:08:46.9 AS: It's interesting. Before we go on the numbers that you were showing, roughly, the average there is something like 60%. What's the 40? That 60% is what? And that means 40% is not that.

0:09:07.7 JD: Yeah, I'll go back. So when you're thinking about state test scores, most states have some type of threshold, like we have this goal that X percent of our students are gonna be considered proficient on any given test. So in Ohio, that threshold is 80%. So the state says, in order to meet the benchmark, any given school needs to have 80% of its students, let's say, on third grade reading test have to meet this proficiency standard. And so what we saw in this particular data is that in the 2015-16 school year, 54.9% of the kids met that proficiency threshold. The following year in '16-17, 63.8% of the kids met that threshold, and then in the most recent year in this particular testing document in '17-18 61.2% of the kids were proficient. So just about 40...

0:10:04.8 AS: So even if it was a sizable increase, it wasn't just statistically insignificant, it's still roughly 40% of the students aren't proficient. No matter even what the government says about what's the minimum standard, it would be hard to really argue too much about improvement when you're so low. [chuckle]

0:10:32.8 JD: That's right, yeah. And that's what you often see in these types of these documents. So 40%, a significant minority of students are not proficient on the third grade reading test, and 60% are, and there's these incremental increases and decreases depending on the year that you're looking at.

0:10:54.6 AS: It's like the Titanic heading for an iceberg and you say, "I've turned the ship one degree, but we're still gonna hit the iceberg."

0:11:01.9 JD: But we're still gonna hit, yep, yep.

[chuckle]

0:11:04.3 AS: Alright, keep going.

0:11:06.0 JD: Yeah. So I think what's really important thinking about data in context, when you start actually stepping back and saying, "Okay, let's look at third grade reading over the course of 16 or 17 years versus three years," this very different story emerges. Part of that story is that context, so what has changed about Ohio's third grade state reading system over the course of those years? So if you go back all the way back to the 2003-2004 school year, you see Ohio is giving a particular test called the Ohio Achievement test, and you see as that's administered each year for six or seven or eight years, the results are sort of bouncing around this average, somewhere in the neighborhood of 77-78%. Then you have a change in about the 2011-12 school year. Now, we're given this test called the Ohio Achievement Assessment, but it's pretty similar, just the name has changed, the test itself is still the same, and you see basically these very similar results. And then all of a sudden, you sort of fast forward to the 14-15 school year. Anybody that's an educator from back in that time period, they'll sort of recognize that now we're getting these new common core standards, these more rigorous college and career-aligned standards, we start giving these new tests.

0:12:38.7 JD: So Ohio switches to the PARCC Test for the '14-15 school year for one year, and even then, the test itself changed pretty significantly in terms of format, but you still see pretty similar results that you've seen for the past 11, 12, 13 years. Then all of a sudden, that next school year, that 2015-16 school year, so that's the first year from that testing document, you see the results drop off a cliff and you start thinking, "Well, what happened to third graders?"

0:13:11.7 AS: Right. From, let's just say about 77 down to the next data point is 55.

0:13:18.6 JD: Yeah, just under 55% now. So you have this just about a 20, 22% drop in one school year. Now, the test did change again. Now it's called The Ohio State Test, it was called the PARCC Test, but the test itself, the format itself isn't probably what brought about that precipitous drop. Instead, what's happened is the legislature in Ohio has changed what it means to be proficient on the test. So basically, each sort of proficiency level has a cut score, and the cut score has increased for an individual child to be considered efficient. So the kids are no different in '14-15 than the new crop of third graders are in '15-16, but what has changed is what you need to do to be called proficient, and so because of that change, you see this huge drop in test scores along with this new test, and then over the course of the next three years, you sort of see an increased in test scores, and then a decrease in test scores, and then an increase in test scores, and then a decrease in test scores. And the Department of Education is claiming that there's improvement happening, but really what's happened is a whole new system has been created. You really change that third grade reading state testing system into this brand new system, whereas the average had been bouncing around 77% or so. Now you sort of have this new average bouncing around that 60% mark.

0:14:56.9 JD: And again, the kids are no different from those previous years, it's just the test and what you need to do to be considered proficient has changed. And the problem is, is that if you don't look at data like this, if you don't sort of...

0:15:11.5 AS: As a run chart or as a continuum of genuine information that's coming out of the system as measured by some measurement style.

0:15:21.0 JD: Yeah, and annotate it with point to the year that the new test goes into effect, point to the year that the definition of proficiency has changed, point to the year that schools had to switch from paper and pencil test to computer-based test because just a year or two or three after, those sort of memories become really fuzzy, that context becomes very fuzzy and you start to forget, "What year did we switch to computer test? What year did the standard switch? What year did the proficiency cut score switch?" And so if you don't have that sort of running record, that gets completely disconnected, the data gets disconnected from the context, and then you're likely not to make sound decisions because of that lack of context.

0:16:09.2 AS: And maybe I'll raise a few points here about the chart that we're looking at, and this chart is fascinating to me. The first thing that I think about, as a financial analyst in the stock market, basically, if anything is wrong in my chart and in my data and then I put my money down on that, it's gonna get taken from me in the stock market. And I have to really be very rigorous in how I'm looking at data.

0:16:39.1 AS: And when I look at this, I just think this is just so full of so many different ways that could go wrong in the way that things are measured, the way people are incentivized, those types of things. And the other thing that you realize is what you're showing here is that it's a description of the system. It's trying to describe things that are going on, and you're trying to describe certain points, which you can't do in charts that are... Bar charts and things like that. A line chart or a continuous point chart or a run chart really illustrates that. But also I think... I just realized that so much of almost every bit of charting is meaningless or just... Or is even giving you a wrong signal. There's so many things that I think about that and I'm just curious, 'cause you also said something before to me about how maybe people just don't pay much attention to it and then they just accept it for what it says and they don't go and look at the data, think about it and go into more detail. Those are some of the things that come out of my head as I'm looking at this, but what else do you want us to take away from this?

0:17:58.0 JD: Yeah, I think one thing, without the context and the annotations on a line chart or a run chart, data shown over time, you do forget. That's one thing. That's just human nature. You're gonna forget. I'm not gonna remember what happened 10 years ago in my testing system. I'm probably not gonna remember what happened five or even three years ago. The second thing I would say is that the vast majority of data that gets presented is in a table or a spreadsheet, and that data is usually what I would call limited comparison, so this year's data compared to last year's data or this month data compared to the same month last year. And so we're usually trying to draw conclusions with just two or maybe three data points, and that gets even worse when we sort of layer sort of a color-coded stoplight type system where we label certain data red and certain data yellow and certain data green and then we look for the red and the green data, even though the differences between those two, the scales that we use to to assign those colors is often arbitrary and meaningless.

0:19:11.0 AS: One last thing I would add to it, and I think you're gonna show us a good, an example of a good use of data, but also you have to ask the question, Are the people who are preparing this data incentivized to produce a particular outcome, and when you understand the incentives involved, it helps you also understand where it could go wrong.

0:19:33.2 JD: Well, I think that's exactly right. I think what happens oftentimes is the state testing data is a part of an a accountability system, and the point of an accountability system is to sort the good from the bad and to issue sanctions and rewards, and we sort of point to that data and say, Well, your scores are low, you need to improve. And so we sort of conflate this idea of accountability data or accountability goals and improvement goals, and those are really two different things, and so you brought up sort of this idea of CYA or cover your ass type stuff, and when we point towards accountability data, that's what people are gonna do because they are being held accountable for this data, they're gonna cover their ass. If we're truly using data for improvement, there's a completely different mindset. For one, the data tends to be local and well-known to the people that are using it, and if there's not sort of sanctions tied to it, then there is this ability to be more honest and candid about that data because we're using it for improvement purposes rather than using it for accountability purposes.

0:20:51.9 AS: Okay, that's great, great description. Alright, keep going. What do you wanna show us next?

0:20:56.8 JD: Yeah, I think this last chart. And so for the listeners, I've taken the five most recent years of third grade reading test data and put it in an actual process behavior chart, or some people call them control charts, and the advantage here is like the run chart, we're seeing data over time, we're seeing the variation, we're seeing the data move up and down over time, but with the process behavior chart, we're adding these upper and lower natural process limits or some people call them control limits and define, sort of, predict the future of what's gonna happen in this particular system, as long as things move along at the current steady state, and so remember, I was gonna say, just remember in that third grade reading data, and they sort of said, "Well, we improved, and then we did decline this most recent year, but if you look back two years, it's actually an improvement," but actually what you see is, if you play that out over five years, you see the data increase and then decrease, and then increase and then decrease, and that's a very sort of common occurrence with this type of data where there's this natural variation, it becomes obvious when you plot the dots over time, and you really see what is happening with this data is it's just sort of moving about an average, about a 60% proficiency rate.

0:22:35.1 JD: Some years it's a little lower than that, some years it's a little above that, but it's all within the limits of the system, so that tells us that all of that's present is common cause variation, just sort of this every day sort of expected up and down in the data, there's sort of nothing special that's happened to use Deming's terminology, there are no special causes present that would be... So there's these signals we can look for based on patterns in the data, but that's not to say that we're satisfied with this third grade Reading System. So to your point earlier, that average proficiency rate for the state, so we look at all of the third graders in the state of Ohio, and they took this test over the course of five years, about 60% of the kids were proficient in any given year. So that means 40%, two of the five kids that are taking this test are not proficient. So we have a stable but unsatisfactory system, but because there's no special causes, no special events to study or point to what we need to do is improve that third grade reading system across the state.

0:23:47.0 JD: And so that's a completely different mindset than pointing to a single data point saying, "Oh, we've gone down, what are you gonna do, or issue sanctions to this school or to this teacher", that's not the way to improve. What we need to do is improve the system of third grade reading instruction across the state, so a completely different mindset.

0:24:08.1 AS: That's a great explanation. The idea that I get from you is the idea of taking all of the emotion out of it, and let's say how do we use this to improve? And what you're describing here is, and what you've done is you've taken the most recent period of time, now, some people would say, "Oh well, you should look at it over a longer period of time", but what you've described is that the system has changed.

0:24:30.1 JD: That's right.

0:24:31.9 AS: There's been some significant change, and so it may not make sense to look at that prior period, so now you brought it down to the most recent period, what's operating under the same type of system, and what you find is that it's pretty much random variation, which I'm even surprised for 2020, 2021, given COVID and all that, I would have thought that instead of coming down to 53 or so, that that would have come down to 40 or something, just because now maybe it does in the next year, I don't know, but... Okay, that's a great illustration. Now, you had an example to try to show the good use of a chart.

0:25:11.2 JD: Yeah, I have a personal example. I can sort of talk through, this one is a little busier, but I think what I'm trying to illustrate is one, I think when I think of continual improvement, I think that is the same thing as what I would call intermediate statistical methods, that's equivalent to continual improvement. Those two things are the same thing. So what I mean is that in order to bring about improvement, it's very, very powerful to use one of these charts, whether it's a run chart or a process behavior chart, but the point is display your data over time and see how it's performing, and then what you can do then is run these systematic tests, this is sort of that theory of knowledge component of Deming System of Profound Knowledge, specifically the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So you sort of run this structured test to try something within your system, in this case, if you can see the video of this, I'm displaying my weight over the course of three or four months, and you kind of see that over time, it's slowly shifting down, but there's a lot of ups and downs in this data as I'm trying various things, so I have PDSA 1 marked with a vertical dotted line, I gave PDSA two marked with a vertical dotted line and PDSA three marked with a vertical dotted line.

0:26:46.5 AS: And for the listeners that don't know what PDSA is, it's Plan-Do-Study-Act. It's that cycle.

0:26:53.0 JD: Right, Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, these scientific tests where I'm trying something, maybe it's related to my eating habits, or maybe it's related to my workout habits, or maybe it's sort of a combination of those two, but I'm writing those things down in this Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. And then the second thing, I'll describe for those that are only listening, I'm also annotating when special events have happened that then lead to signals in my data. So for one, I have in December, towards the end of December, it's probably not hard to guess I have these holiday cheat days marked because you see this jump in weight that goes above the sort of upper limit, which says to me, "Oh, wait, something so different has happened in my system, and that I really need to attend to that", right. Now, if I had waited until February 21st, the day we're recording this, to look back and see this highest data point in my system over the last three or four months, I probably would not remember what caused that. Because I annotate it as it happened, I have this picture, I have this narrative tied to my data that allows me to think back and reflect and figure out what happened to make the weight in this case jump off the page. Over time, what I'm trying to do is both shrink the limits, so lessen the variation around the average, as well as again, in this case, it's weight, so a decrease is good, so I'm also trying to bring that average data down over time and so the idea would be the same no matter what type of data, whether it was those state test scores, whether it's attendance rates, whatever it is, homework completion, whatever it is that you're trying to improve, this sort of same combination of understanding variation, combining it with these Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles. This is the method, This is continual improvement, I think in a nutshell.

0:29:00.2 AS: Fantastic. Alright, I think that illustrates it well, and maybe if you stop sharing that screen and then I'm gonna show you something, John, and for the viewers, they'll be able to see it, but for the listeners, I'll explain it. I'm gonna walk over to my other part of my room here for a second, I'm gonna grab the chart that I fill out each day.

0:29:26.9 JD: Oh my.

0:29:27.8 AS: And this is my chart, and for the listeners out there, I'm holding up a big chart paper, and it's related to my top three goals. I ripped it by... But my goals are related to sales, to health as in yoga and doing exercise every day and my sleep patterns. And I'm tracking how many hours I work on each one, or how many hours I slept, how much time I did on yoga, and I'm not even putting in any kind of limits into it. What I like to do is to track data and just observe, don't try to think about it, don't try to work towards it, just chart it and start observing, and one of my goals is to sleep more. I wanna sleep seven hours, and on average I sleep about six, and I don't have a solution for it, but I know that charting it and observing it and starting to think about it just raises the awareness and gets me thinking, "Okay, I'm far away from my goal, what do I need to do"? So charting is just fantastic, and I think that what you've described is a great way of understanding it.

0:30:34.0 JD: Yeah, I think when you read Deming stuff or listen to him talk, there's often these sort of short phrases that he'll refer to or say, and over time you start to understand what he was saying in just a few words, these powerful statements. When I think of looking at data in a chart over time, Deming said, "Knowledge has temporal spread", four words, knowledge has temporal spread, so what does that mean? So it's not until... Sorry, it's not until you understand or look at data unfolding over time and how it's moving about, how it's varying from point to point, it's not until you see that over the course of 20 or 25 or 30 points that you really start to know how your system is performing, and I think that's really what I was trying to show with the state testing data, with this personal example in a process behavior chart. I think that's the power of the Deming methods when you put all this together.

0:31:43.7 AS: Fantastic. Well, let me try to wrap up a couple of things, we start off with the title of our discussion, which is Data is Meaningless without Context, and you were asking the question like, Are we really improving or are we just writing fiction here? And I was thinking about a lot of cases, people are of massaging the meaning of it. And then another thing that you raised was the idea of what is improvement, do we have a definition? What does it mean? And then you reference the improvement guide book, which talked about the three things that are critical for being real improvement, first that it alters something, second that it produces visible results, and third, that it has a lasting impact. I wrote after that, I was taking notes and I thought, Is it repeatable? Was kind of what they're saying, but I think from a business perspective, and maybe from an education perspective, the better word is it replicable, can it be implemented at other places and brought the same type of improvement? And then finally, I'll wrap up my summary of what you said with your discussion about accountability data versus improvement data, and how improvement data, it's important not necessarily to tie it to incentives, that data is really for how do we understand the system and how do we think about improving that system through a PDSA and other things. Is there anything else you would add to that summary?

0:33:11.5 JD: Yeah, I think that this idea of what's the purpose of the data? Is it for accountability? Or is it for improvement? I think that it sort of gets at one of Deming's 14 points, which is drive out fear, he said, "Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures", and I think that really ties to that idea of Well, what's the purpose of this data? If there's fear and people are thinking that they're gonna be sanctioned in one way or another, then you're not gonna get correct figures, that's just sort of human nature, and I think that's why all this stuff sort of fits together, and you need the sort of full picture about the four components of the system of profound knowledge, the 14 points like drive out fear. And it's bringing all those things together at the leadership level to create the conditions for improvement to actually occur in an organization.

0:34:04.7 AS: Yeah, and I'd imagine as your organization really improves, you'll kinda laugh at all the charts and graphs you used to produce or you used to talk about, and now you're really making use and making data meaningful. So John, I think that's a great discussion. And on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for it. And for listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work".