In Their Own Words

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

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, how to apply the neuroscience of cooperation. David, take it away.

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

0:00:35.1 AS: Impressive.

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

0:18:03.8 AS: Oh my gosh.

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

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

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

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

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

0:18:56.8 AS: Sure.

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

[laughter]

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

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

0:20:44.1 AS: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:26:15.5 AS: Boom, we're gonna be rolling into the next one on that, I think. All right. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners out there, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and it's particularly pertinent to our discussion today, People are entitled to joy in work.

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

0:02:51.2 AS: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

0:09:26.4 AS: Kissinger.

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

[laughter]

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

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

0:11:01.4 AS: Messing around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:20:02.1 AS: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:27:28.0 AS: Great challenge for all of us. What is the purpose of what we're doing and let's bring that out. Well David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for your discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, and listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

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

0:00:03.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is The Role of Support in Intrinsic Motivation. David, take it away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:11:40.5 AS: Yeah.

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

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

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

0:12:47.2 AS: Right.

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

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

0:14:34.1 AS: Right.

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

0:14:43.3 AS: Right.

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

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

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

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

0:17:40.6 DL: Absolutely. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:20:24.2 AS: Yeah.

0:20:25.5 DL: Right?

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

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

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

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

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

0:22:17.5 DL: Millan.

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

0:23:49.2 DL: That was the Deming wit.

0:23:51.9 AS: Yes, it could be biting, biting. Well, let me summarize some of this now. Again, we've been talking about the five key factors for the system of intrinsic motivation. And today we talked about support. And one of the questions you kicked it off with is like, what am I doing to impede cooperation? You know, how do you start to ask that question? You also talked about the value of feedback instead of evaluation and the idea that people respect feedback. And also you talked a lot about how we can think about like, what's the quality standard and how do we give feedback? Is our quality standard clear and how do we give feedback, but also adjust ourselves and our system of teaching to improve that? And also, I like the discussion that we had about the Bell curve because it is something that it's abused.

0:24:43.5 AS: It's abused all the time around the world. But you talked about the job is not to flatten the curve, but to tighten it. We're not trying to get these extremely bad and extremely good outcomes. We're trying to get a more narrow and then to try to shift that curve. And that means that the average is going up. You also talked and you gave the example of a baby learning how to walk and failing forward. And part of support is creating a supportive environment where people are. Finally, the last part is we talked about was the idea of sharing, and sharing... Getting people to share their experience. Instead of awarding or rewarding them, having them share their experiences, not only of the people that have hit a particular milestone or whatever, but also the people that haven't done that. And then the last thing I think is really the big challenge for all the listeners and viewers out there, which is this - to be supportive takes a role change. It's about working well with others and helping other people to see how to share and work together. Anything you would add to that?

0:25:51.9 DL: Yeah, I'd say ultimately, we want people to take risks because if they're not taking risks, we're not going to have breakthroughs. We're not going to have new levels of learning in schools. And in order to take those risks, they have to feel like they're supported, whether it worked out well or it didn't work out well. If it didn't work out well, what did you learn from that? And it may be what you learned was, I'm never going to do that again. Okay, well, you learn something from that, right? But if they're in that highly supportive environment, you'll see their intrinsic motivation for learning and work come out at a level that you never thought possible before. I can guarantee it.

0:26:32.3 AS: Wonderful. Well, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion, David. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your Deming journey. Listeners can learn more about David at Langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming: "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this second episode of the Motivation series, Andrew and David P. Langford discuss how power dynamics impact motivation and why autonomy is a big factor in motivation.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, Who Controls Motivation? David, take it away.

0:00:29.4 David P. Langford: Thanks, Andrew. So we're starting this five podcast series. In the last podcast, we talked a lot about the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Here in this five-podcast series, we're gonna discuss how do you actually create intrinsic motivation environments so that people want to do [chuckle] the work or the learning or whatever it is you might be getting them to do [chuckle] or task them to do. Right? So the first element, and I've been researching this for now over 40 years, and I've never found anything that contradicts what I'm gonna share with the listeners over these five podcasts. And these are five elements of intrinsic motivation that I guarantee you, if you start applying these, you will see either your students, your own children, employees, yourself, [chuckle] you will see people more motivated to do the work that they're doing, if you think about these five factors that we're gonna be going over.

0:01:48.8 DL: So the first factor that I wanna talk about today is the element of control or autonomy in situation. So when I have control over a situation, I have autonomy, I'm self-motivating. I'm doing things in that environment by myself. So we have a lot of buzzwords in management words like empowerment. And well, even a word like empowerment means I have all the power, and so I'm gonna give you some of it. [laughter] I'm gonna empower you to... But you can only do this a little bit, I don't want you to do a lot of stuff. I just want you to do... Be empowered to just do this thing, kind of a thing, and that's also an element of control, so.

0:02:38.6 DL: But control is... Our economy is built into the human condition, and when we tap into that in managing people in either in a classroom or a workforce or a whole group of teachers, whoever it might be, yes, the more I set up an environment where I'm allowing people to take control or have autonomy over what they're doing, the more I will see them be motivated. The more I take that away, and I start controlling everything and running stuff, I start to be really motivated, [chuckle] and I see this a lot with teachers. They're really motivated by controlling everything, controlling all those kids, controlling the process, controlling having... And they have total autonomy in the classroom to do whatever they wanna do basically, and so they're really motivated by that. Well, when they start giving up that control or that autonomy to children, a lot of times, they become de-motivated.

0:03:43.5 DL: [chuckle] I'll never forget this story. I was working with a university,in California, and I had one of the teachers, one of the professors, that really wanted to learn about this and how to run a classroom, so we talked a lot about... I've worked with him individually and talked about, "How do you set up your classroom so that when the students come to your classroom, basically they start to have autonomy and control over the process and what's happening?" Well, one day I get a phone call, and I answered the phone, and this guy is whispering to me. He said, "I think I need some quality therapy." And I said, [chuckle] "Why? What, what's going on?" And he said, "Well, I had a flat tire on the way to school. And so the university has a policy if the professor doesn't show up in the first 10 minutes, everybody can leave. So I was 30 minutes late, and I was just sure I was gonna walk into the room and everybody's gonna be gone." But he said, "I walked into the room and nobody even knew that I was missing.They were all working in teams and working on their projects and discussing stuff and doing what is they're doing?" He said, "I need some therapy." [chuckle] Because for him, that was de-motivating that they didn't need him. Right? So it's a very powerful, powerful concept once you start to get it, but you also have to understand that you, as the manager, of that situation are part of the equation, that as well, right? So you almost have to start the... Your motivation by seeing other people taking on the control of the situation and having autonomy to do what it is that they need to do. I was in a kindergarten classroom in North Carolina years ago, and the teacher had been through my training and stuff, and she invited me to come to her classroom.

0:05:34.6 DL: And so I went there early in the morning and just watched, and those little kids came in and they just knew what to do. And they all went to their tables and they got their stuff out. They were talking with each other and interrelating. And it was probably at least 40 minutes before the teacher intervened in some way. It's the kinda thing where I have to interrupt your learning to [chuckle] motivate you or tell you something. But those little kids had... Five and six-year-olds just had total control of that first 40 minutes. And were happy about it. And yeah, there was a child or two that weren't quite doing what it is they were supposed to do, and what'd the teacher do? She goes over and sits down beside them and starts working with them and explaining stuff and, "Oh, I see you might be having a little trouble with this and... " Right?

0:06:36.4 AS: Maybe just had a bad family day.

0:06:39.0 DL: Yeah. Now, that's totally different than, "Everybody get in here, sit down, be quiet, don't talk to each other, don't touch him. I'm gonna control this situation, and I'm gonna tell you what to do and... Okay, this is what I want you to do, and you go do it, and once you've done that, come back and sit down again." Well, that's the old teacher mentality [chuckle] that I have to control the situation, and there are times where you need to exert that kind of control. If there's a fire in the building, you might have to control the situation, but sometimes teachers will bring that up to me and I'll say, "Look, what if there's a fire in the building and you were incapacitated or taken out by the fire? Would all your students know what to do? [chuckle] Or maybe you were out of the classroom when that erupted, that... Would they all know what they're supposed to do, regardless of whether you were there or not?"

0:07:40.1 AS: Right.

0:07:41.6 DL: Or are they just gonna burn up, because they're waiting for somebody to tell them what to do? So, that's the element of control. So, how do you get that? One of the ways to get that is to give people more knowledge of the situation. Just the example that I just gave you. When those students have the knowledge of what to do if there's something that goes on or something happens, and they have the autonomy to do it, and so maybe you actually practice that. Well, I'm giving you knowledge of what to do in that kind of situation. And when people become more and more knowledgeable about what's going on, they feel like they have much more control over their situation, what's happening. That makes sense?

0:08:36.9 AS: Yeah, and I think what I'm thinking about then is talking with kids like, what's the objective? If there's a fire, get out of the building. And, we have... That's our objective. How do we do that? Well, we try to stay in line because we hold hands, and that helps us keep, but...

0:08:52.8 DL: And we don't wanna run over each other, and... Right?

0:08:55.1 AS: It reminds me of this story of when Dr. Deming talked about cleaning a table. And he was saying something like, "How could a worker really know how to clean a table if you don't tell them what the table is gonna be used for?"

0:09:13.0 DL: That's right. So that's knowledge, right? Are we gonna operate on this table? We're just gonna eat lunch on it? Oh, well, just... Those are two different types of cleaning, aren't they? [chuckle] And so, how can I do a good job if I don't know? I don't have knowledge of that situation or... And, you see this in little children. They're asking why. You're telling them to do this and they say, "Well, why?" Well, because...

0:09:43.4 AS: 'Cause I said so.

0:09:45.1 DL: 'Cause I said so, right? Well, and if you don't do it, I'm just gonna make your life so difficult that you wish you would have.

0:09:52.0 AS: Right.

0:09:52.6 DL: That's not good management, that's just manipulation of somebody. And yeah, you can get the result. But in the end, somebody's not gonna wanna... They're not gonna wanna do what you want them to do on their own. I remember a teacher came up to me one time, said that in the 1960s, he was working in an auto factory in California, and his job was to put these types of rivets in some part of the automobile. But he noticed that the machine that he was using to put the rivets in, would strip the rivets out every once in a while, and he got really tired of having to re-work this situation. Not rivets, they were screws, I think it was.

0:10:45.1 AS: Right.

0:10:45.5 DL: So he actually built his own little tool so that it would only go in at the proper depth and every screw was going in perfectly, and he was very proud of it. So proud of it that when his supervisor came by, he showed him, he said, "Look, look what I built, I built this, and you may wanna think about doing this for everybody," and well, his supervisor just lit into him and told him, "Your job is not to think. Your job is to put these screws in and you go back to doing what you were told to do in the first place." And I asked him, I said, "Well, so what did you do?" He said, "When the supervisor was around, I used the tool that did a bad job, and every time he would leave, I would get my tool out and do it properly." So he was still in that environment, intrinsically motivated to do a good job, but because the supervisor wanted that autonomy or control of that situation, and it's the "not invented here syndrome" that...

0:11:49.1 AS: Yeah.

0:11:49.3 DL: "I didn't invent it, I didn't tell you to do that, so therefore, it can't be a good idea," kind of a thing.

0:11:56.7 AS: And I'm thinking about... There's some teachers out there that are... Have a really hard time. "If I give up control, this classroom is gonna go chaos." They are making themselves really important in that, and let's say... Let's put those people aside for just a minute and let's just take the people that are kind of in the middle, they're open to that and all that. And I just wanna tell a quick story in my life. I remember, my father never... My father didn't tell me his personal problems. He talked to my mom about that, and occasionally, I knew a little bit of what was going on. But I remember, when I turned about, I don't know, 25, and I really had become a much more mature guy, and my dad started telling me some of the things he was dealing with, some of the ways he felt about things, and it's like the whole thing flipped. I just really saw a different side, a human side.

0:12:49.1 DL: They're human. [chuckle]

0:12:50.9 AS: Yeah. And I saw a different side of him, but also I've wanted to be a different participant in that. I wanted to be a participant and someone that could listen and understand where my dad was coming from. And I think about classroom, then I'm thinking about what you're talking about, a classroom. So for a teacher who's kind of open to try some new things, part of what you... Maybe what you're saying is, flip the script a little bit and talk about why are we here, what are we trying to do? What am I trying to do. What's my job? What's...

0:13:17.8 DL: Yeah. When I see intrinsic motivation emerge, it's there, right? It's there. All you have to do is manage the situation differently, and you'll start to see it emerge and come out. So you can take something so simple like the start of a classroom. Well, I could just have all the children come in and talk and goof around and everything else, until I stand up and tell them what to do. That's a way to control the situation or like I was saying, I could start to give them the knowledge of what to do. So let's talk about... Let's do a flowchart. Let's do a flowchart about what to do when you come in the door. Where do you go? What do you do? How do you get things set up? Well, I've now just transferred a level of control to them or a situation like, somebody doesn't know what to do next.

0:14:24.3 DL: So we talk as a class and maybe we come up with a flowchart that's what to do. What to do when you don't know what to do. So we're now giving them knowledge about that situation and being able to take action. So then if I have a child that says, "Well, I don't know what to do." "Oh, have you looked at the flowchart?" Let's talk about that. Remember we talked about, okay, the first thing you wanna do is do this and then do that and maybe talk to somebody else and see if they know what to do. But there's a process of what to do when you don't know what to do. Now, that's different than me saying, "Well, if you don't know what to do, come up and ask me." 'Cause it's putting me...

0:15:11.2 AS: And then I'll tell you.

0:15:12.1 DL: Yeah. It's putting me in total control of that situation and that's very motivating for me. But it's very demotivating for the individual because they can't take control because they don't know what to do next.

0:15:24.1 AS: Yeah.

0:15:25.3 DL: So change the situation, watch how behavior changes versus what we've been taught to do, especially in schools, is leave the situation alone and then manage the behavior that it's producing. See?

0:15:40.2 AS: So we're back to the system

0:15:42.2 DL: Yeah, absolutely. So, couple of other factors, before getting control of the situation. The more you have people self-evaluate their own progress, you'll start to see intrinsic motivation emerge. So as long as I'm evaluating you, write this paper, hand it in. I'll grade it. I'll go over it, I'll find the mistakes, and then I'll put a grade on it and I'll hand it back to you, well, that gives me as a teacher total control of that situation. I reverse that, and I set up processes for you to self-evaluate your own work, so when you think you're finished with this, here are the steps that you wanna go through, so check to see if it's this or nowadays, have you run it through Grammarly, online? But I'm putting you in a position where you have autonomy to self-evaluate your own work. And then if you think it's finished and you've finished your self-evaluation, you might wanna share it with somebody else. I'm gonna look at it, see if you can get some feedback from them. See feedback is very motivating, but evaluation is not.

0:17:00.7 DL: I can give you some feedback on the job that you're doing and support you and how you can do a better job. That's much different than me saying, "You're doing a lousy job, Andrew." Or, "I'm gonna put B on this paper." No matter how hard you worked, you're gonna get a B. So the example you gave in the last Podcast about only 10 students are gonna get A's. Well, that's an artificial scarcity of top performance. And so I'm pretty certain people looked around the room and they said, "I'm not one of those 10 people, I know that."

0:17:37.0 AS: I'm outta here.

0:17:38.4 DL: I'm outta here.

0:17:39.5 AS: And that's not achieving the goal...

0:17:40.9 DL: Right.

0:17:41.5 AS: Or the aim.

0:17:42.3 DL: Or we have other ways that people get control of their situation when they feel out of control. We call it cheating. So when the situation won't allow me actually to achieve what I'm supposed to achieve, maybe I'm a university class and I have to have this grade, have to have this class to get my degree, but the class is so horrible, I'm not learning anything, there's no way I'm gonna pass this test, and so I end up sacrificing my integrity and cheating 'cause it's worth the risk. Because the system is not gonna allow me to learn this material and get to the level I need to get to. So that's when we start to see the effective behavior emerge. It starts really very early in schools. Kids feel like, "I can't get this, I can't understand it, so I'm just gonna have to cheat, copy somebody else's paper, or steal it or something." And we wanna manage that behavior, wow, oh, we caught that, we're gonna... So we come up with sophisticated methods of catching the cheaters. Right?

0:19:00.0 DL: So you see it in the SAT tests and all kinds of things. What? You got to have monitors. It has to be one monitor for every 50 students or because we gotta catch those cheaters. [chuckle] But nobody's looking at the situation or the system and saying, "What's causing people to cheat?" Because they're feeling helpless and hopeless and, "I can't get this. And so, the only way I can get it is to cheat." There's some other ways that we can impart or get people to have more control in situations. So when you think about neuroscience, the human brain taps into mapping and patterns and systems actually. And again, we're back to Deming's work. And Deming tapped into that, actually. So when I put learning into maps or patterns or gestault kinds of things, the human brain actually responds to it better.

0:20:00.9 DL: So in a classroom, instead of me just verbally talking about stuff all the time, if I take that same information I want people to know and understand, and I put it into some kind of a map or a pattern or a flowchart, I'll see a new level of intrinsic motivation or ownership start to emerge, because I've just changed the situation and tapped into something. So I'm not just dealing with just the auditory learners, I'm really tapping into... I'm giving control of everybody over to learn. I created a tool to do that, actually, to take curriculum and put in into a map or a pattern and then give that to students at the beginning of a learning experience. And all of a sudden, you see ownership, this is all the stuff that you need to know and learn in this two weeks or whatever the time has to be. That's much different than me saying, "Well, read this book. Well, what do I need to know in this book? What's gonna be on the test?" "Well, read it just in case I put something on the test." That's a school game that puts the teacher or the system in control, but it makes the learner feel helpless in that environment.

0:21:21.9 AS: You used a word, ownership. How do we think of ownership versus intrinsic motivation? What does that... What does that mean?

0:21:29.0 DL: Ownership, autonomy, control of the situation, those are all of the same kinds of concepts that you're trying to get people just to have more ownership of their own learning, their own situation. And my job is to manage the whole system, right? So if I've got 30 kids in my class, I want all 30 to be well motivated [chuckle] to learn whatever it is that we're working on and going through. So another level of control is choice. The more choice I give people in a situation, I'll see their intrinsic motivation emerge. And it can be so simple that you can choose to do this, or you can choose to do that. [chuckle] That's an element of choice.

0:22:14.4 AS: Mom, mom, you can either walk after breakfast or twice in the afternoon. [chuckle]

0:22:20.7 DL: Yeah. But that's a level of intrinsic motivation, right? You're giving her the control of that situation. "Well, no, I'd rather do it in the afternoon." Okay. Right? That I'm managing differently by giving people choice, or in a classroom, you have the choice to choose what you wanna write about or how you wanna write it or... And now, for some children that can be overwhelming, right?

0:22:48.3 AS: Yeah.

0:22:48.6 DL: So I can say, "Well, you can choose whatever you wanna do, or I'll choose it for... Or you can have me choose it for you." Right?

0:23:00.5 AS: Right.

0:23:00.6 DL: If you want me just to give you a topic, I'll be glad to do that. Maybe it's you can't really think about what you wanna do, right?

0:23:05.5 AS: Right. That may take some pressure off of them.

0:23:07.7 DL: But still it's your choice, right?

0:23:10.3 AS: Yep.

0:23:10.9 DL: So you start to see rebellion go away when you incorporate levels of choice because I can't really rebel against myself. [chuckle]

0:23:21.6 AS: Right, yep.

0:23:21.9 DL: I chose to do this, but no, I really don't wanna do this. [laughter] But you chose it, right?

0:23:27.9 AS: And that circles back to the title, which was Who Controls Motivation? Maybe I'll just summarize some of the things that I took away. We're talking about five elements of intrinsic motivation and a lot of it has to do with creating the environment so that people wanna learn and they want to get the benefit of that. And the first element is control. And the point is when you give someone... You, if you're holding onto the control, you're not really empowering or you're not really giving autonomy and control. Just give that control to the other people, to the kids, to the other people at the company. They're gonna know what to do with it. And help them and guide them. How do I... What do I do? Give them autonomy. And also you talked about the idea that give people more knowledge. And I think that that's part of what I was telling my story about my father, is like the idea he was giving me more knowledge of what's going on. There's more there than I knew. And the more knowledge that someone has, the more they can really figure out what to do with that. You also said a good one, which was intrinsic motivation, it's there. Just change some things and watch it emerge.

0:24:41.1 DL: That's right.

0:24:42.2 AS: And then you went through a couple of different things that are really helpful for helping people take control, to get that intrinsic motivation. You talked about self-evaluation of your own progress and that helps people. And feedback is motivating, but evaluation is not. So think about constant feedback. "Hey, that was good. Oh, did you see why that happened? Why do you think that happened?" That, and also you said when people lose control, they often cheat to cope. And I liked... One of the things that you said was that the brain taps into maps, patterns, and systems. And I use that a lot when teaching. I need that to see how does this all connect? And then you alluded to the idea of appealing to maybe the left brain and the right brain type of people in the room that maybe some people are seeing things more logically, whereas other people will see things less linearly and that type of stuff. And then final thing that you talked about is choice gives control. Anything you would add to that?

0:25:55.0 DL: Yeah, there's a couple of other factors quickly. One is just-in-time learning, so when I'm getting the knowledge I need just in time. So I'm working on a project or something, and I need to know a level of skill to complete this project, well, when I discover that I need that knowledge, right, that's just-in-time learning. So if you need to know this, come to the back of the room and I'll explain it, but if you don't need to know this right now, then just keep on working and keep doing what you're doing 'cause I don't wanna interrupt you. Well, that's an element of choice. It's also a just-in-time learning. "So when I'm ready, I'm gonna go get that," versus, "I'm gonna teach this now whether you need it or not." Well, that's when you get kids sleeping in class, bored out of their minds, because maybe they don't need that at all. They don't need that explanation.

0:26:54.7 DL: I already know this, right? So I'm just gonna screw around and pass notes or do something else that's more fun than sitting and listening to you. And the last thing for control is time. So the more you have an understanding of how to manage time or teach people to manage their own time, the more, yeah, control that they'll feel like they have over a situation. They'll understand how to work it through. So I often use the example, when you have a two-year-old, right? And you have an appointment that you have to get to, and so you gotta get the two-year-old in the car and get him buckled in the car seat and you gotta go, right? And so you're in a hurry, and so you grab them up and they're yelling and they're fighting you to get in the car seat 'cause they don't wanna go, and... Right? And so, "Well, if you get in your car seat, I'm gonna give you a lolly or a sucker or a piece of candy, or... I'm gonna bribe you to do what it is, what I wanna do.

0:27:54.8 DL: Or I'm just bigger, so I'm just gonna force you into that seat and buckle you in, Right?" Well, that is a way to accomplish the task, or you could do something differently. At breakfast, you're saying, "In about an hour, we're gonna get ready to go, and we're gonna go to the doctor's office, and it's gonna be really interesting for you to see the doctor's office, and we're gonna talk about everything we're gonna do and everything else. So now we're gonna get our coats on and we're gonna walk out, and I'm gonna wait for you to climb up into your car seat, and what do you need to do now? We need to get buckled," right? That's all gonna take a lot more time than me grabbing you and forcefully [chuckle] putting you in that car seat and buckling you. You see, but the urgency of the situation was not that two-year-old's problem. It was yours. Your lack of planning [chuckle] caused the crisis. And if I change any element of that, I see that two-year-old be more intrinsically motivated to do what I want them to do, right?

0:29:05.6 AS: Yeah.

0:29:05.7 DL: 'Cause we're doing something together, and that's the relationship that they're craving more than anything. So I'll leave you with that.

0:29:12.4 AS: So just-in-time learning and teaching people how to manage their own time and it gives them control?

0:29:19.0 DL: That's right.

0:29:19.5 AS: Fantastic. That's a lot of stuff that we covered in that, and personally, I learned a lot. I did like the just-in-time learning 'cause I feel like that's my job. As a financial analyst in the stock market, I come across things I don't really know much about, and I was just looking at, "Well, green energy doesn't seem to work." Germany tried to do it, and they weren't able to replace what they lost in traditional energy. What about nuclear energy? Okay, where does that come from? It comes from uranium. Okay, where is uranium? The country that has 40% of uranium production is Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Republic. And now, all of a sudden, I put together that, wow, Russia and Kazakhstan together all control 50% of the uranium in the world. All of a sudden, you realize that Putin has control of the supply chain for nuclear power. So now, what is this country, Kazakhstan? I remember studying it 'cause I had to, but now I'm interested just-in-time to learn, "Okay, how does this all fit together?" And that to me, I just went through that process for a global investment strategy report, and I was able to tell my clients, "I don't know a lot about Kazakhstan, but here's what I've learned, and I have a feeling this will become a name of a country that we're all gonna know in the next 10 years."

0:30:42.5 DL: Well, you know, Kazakhstan is right next to, "Don't-Understand," so.

[laughter]

0:30:50.2 AS: Yes, right? Under... Understand. Yeah, that's right. [laughter] So David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I wanna remind you that listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Andrew and David introduce the broad topic of "motivation." David describes intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation and how motivation practices are usually manipulation tactics that don't work over the long term. So what do we do instead?

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, The Best Way To Motivate. Take it away, David.

0:00:30.2 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again.

0:00:34.4 AS: Indeed.

0:00:35.6 DL: So, yeah, I wanted to start actually a whole series on motivation and in this podcast, we're gonna talk a little bit about two different types of motivation and how people go about motivating people and things like that. But then, we're gonna start a five podcast series breaking down the five key elements that I found over the last 40 years that really cause motivation to happen. So in this introduction podcast right now, I wanna talk a little bit about motivation. So the topic of that, what's the best way to motivate? You can't. So let's kind of get that out of the way.

0:01:20.7 AS: Don't bury the lead, David. [laughter]

0:01:21.9 DL: Yeah, you can't really motivate somebody. You can't even motivate your dog to do things. You can manipulate your dog to get a result but in the end, your dog or your child or students in classrooms or your employees or whatever, they all have to come to the conclusion that they're motivated to do this job for their... Whatever that might be and that it's their idea. And so it's all about creating an intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation environment. And I know this is contrary to all the literature that's out there and everything, and every motivational guru on the planet that's trying to get you to buy something that motivates us. And I was recalling that I was on an airplane one time and I was sitting next to this guy and you strike up a conversation sometimes and he said, "Ah, what do you do?"

0:02:30.4 DL: And so I told him a little bit about what I do and how I help school try to transform and get better results and what they do and everything. "Oh, that's really interesting, tell me more about that." And so we did and we got onto the topic of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. And I just started talking about you can't really motivate people with trinkets and gimmicks and awards and all kinds of things like that. And we got in a big discussion about trophies and sports and all kinds of things like that. [chuckle] And just as we're starting to land the airplane, I said to him, oh, I said, "Well, you know, I never got around to you." I said, "What do you do?" He says, "Well, I have a company that makes trophies." [laughter] And then it was like dead-silence. Oh, we landed the plane and got off the plane.

0:03:26.5 AS: You went your separate ways.

0:03:28.2 DL: Yeah. He did say, oh, I think I understand, but he's gonna keep making his trophies and making money, so...

0:03:39.4 AS: Yeah.

0:03:39.9 DL: And there's a lot of money to be made in it, especially in education, there's just whole catalogs. I get catalogs in the mail even today, about all the awards and trophies and everything and how you can motivate kids to do this and that and it's... Deming was the first one that kind of took a board and slapped it up inside of my head and just said, "Stop it." In fact I remember one of his conferences, somebody asked a question, "Well, Dr. Deming, I'm in a company that's trying to motivate us with a pay and pay for performance and games and gimmicks and sell so much stuff, and you get a free trip to Aruba and what do I do?" And his response was, "Well, you can always stop doing something that's stupid." And that, it was just... He had this knack of these phrases that would just cut through to people. Yeah, you can stop it. You can say, "Okay, I'm not gonna participate in that." I'm not gonna play it. I'm not gonna play that game. And so what do we do instead?

0:05:01.4 AS: And before we even get into that, what does it mean? What does motivate mean? Because you've used the word, manipulate and you've used the word, motivate. Can you define...

0:05:13.3 DL: That's kind of emerged over the last 100 or 150 years or so, as a way to try to get people to do something that basically that you don't think they wanna do. [chuckle] So whether that's kids learning math or it's an employee not getting the productivity that you think that they should get. But basically, I'm the leader, I'm the manager, and I want you to do something that you're currently not doing. And so, I'm gonna do something to you to make you do it.

0:05:55.1 AS: Which sounds like external pressure or external...

0:05:58.7 DL: External pressure. We're gonna motivate you to do stuff. And typically that's what we call extrinsic motivation, I'm gonna do something to you or I'm gonna take something away - that's really popular in schools. "Well, you're gonna have to stay in a recess, you're not gonna have any recess if you don't get that done" or "You don't do what I tell you, you're gonna be sitting in the hall. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take away all of your relationships and isolate you." And, well, that's the same concept we use in prisons, right? We isolate people. We put them in confinement and if you're really bad, then you get into total isolation. Don't even get to talk to any of your other inmates. Well, it's the same depth of motivation that is in schools today all over the world.

0:06:51.6 DL: People are still using those techniques to try to get people to do something that they're either not doing or they want them to do. So, it's really important to figure out what do you do instead? If you're gonna stop doing something stupid, [chuckle] and what are you gonna do instead? And that's where Deming really reinforced intrinsic motivation. That your job is to create a situation where people can be intrinsically motivated, that they actually want to do the job. And that's a whole different way to look at what you do. How do I set up a classroom so that kids can be intrinsically motivated? Now, none of these things are a light switch, where you can just switch it on and switch it off, "I'm going to switch on intrinsic motivation and switch off extrinsic motivation." In fact, with children, if they've been addicted to intrinsic motivation tactics for years, everything from grades, to prizes, to awards, to just little trinkets that they can get, stickers even, all kinds of things, sometimes it takes time to wean them off of that over time, and have it have the less and less meaning.

0:08:32.1 DL: I'll give you an example, the thing about stickers... I'll often get elementary teachers say, "Well, you know what's wrong with that? Somebody does a good job, I'm gonna give them a sticker." Or, When I was a child in piano lessons, I got a gold star if I did a good job in my piano lesson and the teacher would put a star on it, by it and... The problem with those things, it's not that it's evil or anything, it's just that you're taking away the emphasis towards working towards the thing that you want 'em to do and love and understand. So, if the only reason I'm doing this is to try to get a sticker, [chuckle] you've just reduced the thing that I'm doing to the value of a sticker. So there's no real conversation or a relationship going on where you're saying, "Hey, man this... You really did a great job on that. How does that make you feel to be able to understand that or explain something to that degree?" You wanna tap into that inner person about that understanding something is probably the greatest motivation. "I just feel really good about that." That's why you get children that when they finally get it, a hard concept of something and they're like, "Oh! I got it." They're really forward in...

0:10:08.9 AS: They're really enjoying the process, too.

0:10:11.0 DL: Yeah, they're really forward in their emotions and they actually put that out. But employees in business, sometimes when there's a breakthrough like that, it's more internal for them. They're just like, "Oh yeah, okay, I got this. I really worked that through." And if you come in and just reduce it to some type of extrinsic motivator... Even if I just come in and say, "Atta boy, good job, well done, Frank." And then you leave the room, and then Frank is sitting there and thinking, "I put hours and hours into working through this and going through this, and all I got is, "Good job, Frank,' and a pat on the back."

0:10:51.3 AS: "You're gonna get Employee of the Month, Frank."

0:10:55.4 DL: Yeah, so the message is, "Next time, stupid, don't work so hard." You can always stop doing something stupid. And Frank learns just do whatever the boss wants, don't put any extra effort in or go through stuff. All right, but some people will come back and say, "Well, I like to have more money." And that's a motivation. And it's actually not. Yes, we have to have money to survive, but the examples are millions of people that are making tremendous amounts of money, but they're not motivated to do the job. We can look at pro athletes. They make millions of dollars and some of them are still not motivated. [chuckle]

0:11:54.5 AS: Right. Or when the motivation stops, money can't re-ignite it.

0:12:00.7 DL: No.

0:12:00.8 AS: Let me ask you a question about this from let's say a classroom perspective. Let's say I'm a teacher in a classroom, and I'm a piano teacher, as an example, and we've got a group of 20 kids and yeah, there's a few of them that are really into it, and then there's a lot of 'em that just don't wanna do it. David, can I just use the gold stars for those ones just to kind of like, [laughter] a doggy bone, like, "Come on, over to the piano." What do I do?

0:12:27.1 DL: Or what used to be the norm in Catholic schools, "Can't I just whack 'em on the back of their hands with a ruler and get them to shut up or do whatever it is I want them to do?" Yeah...

0:12:42.7 AS: Carrot or stick.

0:12:42.8 DL: You can do those kinds of things, but eventually, you're going to have to tap into an intrinsic motivation. And so your example in a class, if I got a few kids that are really into it, whatever it is we're doing or working on or whatever, and they're really working at it, I'd probably give those children a chance to talk about, "Why are they into that? Why do you like this so much? Or why do you like practicing so much if you're learning an instrument? And how do you go about that? What do you do? And how do you find a place in your house that's quiet and where you can concentrate if you're trying to read or" Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to use the people that are already self-motivated, and to give insights to people that are not self-motivated, to try to understand that it's not just because you're just smart, right? Probably doing a number of things that are making you be successful, and those things could be shared with other people. In the same way with employees, instead of just giving an employee of the month, I'd probably have somebody that's really doing a great job explain, how are they doing that great job? What's the process that they're using? How do they go about it? How do they set up their workspace? Whatever it might be, because I want other employees to go, "Oh, that's what they're doing. I could do that." [chuckle]

0:14:13.1 AS: And is that because you want them to try to explore where is their area that they can bring them so then... Okay, you're not gonna... I got 20 people in this room, and all 20 of them are not gonna be piano lovers and virtuosos. So it's not necessarily the process of getting everybody on that piano all the time, it's the process of who are the people really love it, let them shine, let them share, and let other people say, "Okay, I don't like piano, but I do like working on fixing my neighbor bicycles, and people bring bicycles to me every day, and I fix them, and I just love that feeling," or I don't know. I'm just trying to think about it. How would you describe it?

0:14:54.7 DL: Yeah, that's right, and that goes back to Deming's concept of understanding variation, that you're going to have variable degrees of performance or ability or whatever it might be. And Deming talked about sometimes people are just in the wrong job. [chuckle] And maybe you can move them to another job in the same company that they might like more or they might be well-suited for, or the same thing in a school, right? Like example of what you were talking about, that somebody is much more suited to and enjoy working on motorcycles versus just playing the piano or something. But it doesn't mean that they can't reach a minimum level of skill and understanding about how to play the piano, maybe to the point where they decide, "Okay, I know I don't wanna be doing this." [laughter]

0:15:57.6 AS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:16:00.7 DL: That's also motivation, right? And what is your motivation? What do you wanna do?

0:16:07.2 AS: Yeah, yeah.

0:16:07.4 DL: And I get... So in my seminars, I get teachers coming up to me all the time, and I always think, "Oh, they're gonna ask a complicated question about, "I've got this kid in my class, and how do I get him motivated and everything." I'd say probably eight or nine times out of 10, they come up and they wanna talk about their child. [laughter] "My son is having a problem in this class. How do I get... " "My daughter can't get along with her teacher. What would we do about that?" Because that's really a very personal thing that's going on within them. But then to get them to see that, "Okay, well, the kinds of things that maybe you're doing in the class is demotivating a large number of students." It's all kinds of things. There's variability in time, for instance, right? So if I give you a... If I give a group of people a complex math problem, there probably is somebody in that room that could solve it in a matter of minutes.

0:17:14.7 AS: Right.

0:17:15.5 DL: But there'd be others of us that might need a lot of help. But we could probably get to a level of... Minimum level of solving it or understanding it given enough time, but the problem is, like in schools, we wanna truncate the time always, right?

0:17:34.1 AS: Right.

0:17:34.6 DL: "Gotta get this done in the next 10 minutes," or, "You gotta get it done by Friday." We don't have this deep understanding of variability and how to manage variation in performance. And so what we do is we make time rigid, but we make learning flexible. So basically, you learn any amount you want as long as you get it done by Friday because we've made the time rigid.

0:18:00.4 AS: Right.

0:18:00.5 DL: And we talked about that earlier, about a deadline and... Right? Well, when you reverse that and you begin to understand how to manage a system and manage the variability of the people in that system. Then everybody starts to be more well-motivated by themselves internally, which means you have to do less and less external motivation. You just have people coming in and doing their job and going to work, same way in the company. Yeah.

0:18:32.0 AS: I feel like even just having a discussion with your students or employees about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is right there something interesting, just to have that discussion.

0:18:48.0 DL: Yeah, I have five children, and we started those discussions, my wife and I started those discussions with them when they're two or three years old. "You're not doing this to get a sucker... If you do this, I'll give you a sucker or a lolly." No, we want you to clean up your room because that's the right thing to do. So maybe I'll come and help you clean up your room and we'll do it together, and that might be a lot more fun then. And then we could talk about how can you keep your room clean so you don't find yourself in this mess, because how do you feel when you have a really messy room?

0:19:32.1 AS: Yep. Yeah, I'm sure that you would have some great tips of, "Okay, here's the way I would do it if I... When I've had this problem," and 'Oh, okay, I didn't even think about that, put all my whites in a pile over there and put all my dark colors... "

0:19:49.1 DL: Exactly.

0:19:50.3 AS: Over there just to have a... Make a game out of it or something like that.

0:19:50.6 DL: Yeah, and that's totally different than me isolating you as punishment and saying your room is dirty, go to your room until that room is cleaned up.

0:20:00.4 AS: Yeah.

0:20:00.6 DL: Right? It's the same thing we talked about earlier. I'm gonna extrinsically motivate you to get that done and work that through versus trying to spend time, and part of it is just kid's probably really happy that you're there.

0:20:16.6 AS: Yeah.

0:20:17.4 DL: Right? I got a relationship now with somebody and let's work on this together and over time...

0:20:23.4 AS: Yeah, I don't want to be in my room alone.

0:20:25.9 DL: Yeah, and this over time, then let's figure out how do we make sure it always stays cleaned up.

0:20:32.1 AS: Yeah.

0:20:33.8 DL: But you have to understand the difference between a clean room and a dirty room, and how that makes you feel. And you'll have kids that will say, I have kids that say, "Well, I like it messy like this." "Really? You couldn't find your book yesterday because it was under a pile of clothes. You have been wearing dirty clothes to school, because... "

0:20:57.9 AS: "Your room's stinky. People can smell... "

0:21:00.4 DL: Yeah.

0:21:00.6 AS: Yeah.

0:21:02.1 DL: Right. And it's not necessarily all just about you, it's how does it affect other people that you're dealing with, right? What do you think other family members are thinking about you when your room is a disaster and you're not taking care of yourself and you don't smell good and...

0:21:22.4 AS: Right.

0:21:23.9 DL: Right.

0:21:26.4 AS: I wanna explain an experience that I had when I was young, and maybe you can help me understand the extrinsic and the intrinsic aspect of it. I went to Kent State when I was kind of first starting out, and I didn't really know what I was gonna study. I thought I was gonna study maybe Psychology, but the first professor I had, I was really not impressed. I felt like he just read this book about Psychology, and so I was searching and I found an Economics 101, Ecom 101, and I went into this classroom and it was huge, it was 200 students in there, hustle bustle. I got in the room, I sat down, the room was divided by a walkway down the middle, so there was 100 students on one side and 100 on the other. The teacher came kinda bounding down the stairs and came in front of all of us on that first day and he said, "There is 200 people in this room, a 100 of you will be gone by the time we get to the end of this term, and there will, out of the 100 that will remain, I will give 10, A's. Let's get started."

0:22:29.6 AS: Now that guy set a fire, it's just... I don't know why, I never had somebody say something like that. And all of a sudden, what I started doing is I sat right in the front row, and I told myself, I'm gonna get an A, I'm gonna survive and I'm gonna get an A. And then I started to study differently, every day after class, I sat down at a cubicle outside the room, and I re-wrote my notes with the book open and I went through it and everything, and then I would ask the teacher questions either at his office or in the room. When I had questions as I was trying to clarify. And he sparked a whole new way of studying for me that really carried me through university, but also sparked a fire of wanting to learn and the challenge of learning. And I think I read, I don't know, 3000 to 5000 books since that day. And he lit a fire in me, and I always tell my students, "I wanna light that fire in you." Now, part of that was extrinsic and then part of it was intrinsic. But can you tell me what happened to me on that day? [laughter]

0:23:35.1 DL: Well, it sounds to me like a professor that doesn't know what his job is, right?

0:23:40.1 AS: Yeah.

0:23:41.6 DL: His job is not just to weed out the bad ones, or weed out the ones that are not motivated to learning Economics, right?

0:23:49.6 AS: Mm-hmm.

0:23:49.6 DL: He's got 200 students in that class. His job is to produce 200 people who love Economics. So Deming talked about that a lot. So you don't know what your job is. That's not motivation, just to weed out all the people that don't adapt to the style that I have in the classroom, right?

0:24:18.9 AS: Right.

0:24:18.9 DL: Yeah, what happened with you...

0:24:20.1 AS: Yeah, me too. I'm sure that didn't motivate majority of people the way it motivated me.

0:24:23.4 DL: Oh yeah.

0:24:24.2 AS: It worked for me.

0:24:25.7 DL: I probably would have gotten up and walked out of that class right there. Because I would have been in the 100 people that aren't gonna be there. Or the old thing, look to the right, look to the left, one of those people won't be here at the end. That's not motivation, that's survival, right?

0:24:43.2 AS: Right. Right.

0:24:44.4 DL: You're just trying to survive that experience. Now, you personally decided the way you're gonna survive it, is you're gonna work hard and you're gonna learn this. But there was probably also a level of intrinsic motivation for Economics that you tapped into, right?

0:25:06.2 AS: Right.

0:25:06.6 DL: You realized, "Hey, look like I like numbers."

0:25:09.1 AS: Mm-hmm, yup.

0:25:10.4 DL: "And I like working with this, and I'm getting it, and I understand it."

0:25:14.7 AS: Yeah.

0:25:15.9 DL: Yeah. And then you did a number of things, you changed where you were sitting, you changed your attitude, you went in and you started working with the professor.

0:25:28.4 AS: Yeah.

0:25:28.6 DL: So even though you're in an environment that was hugely extrinsically motivating... [chuckle]

0:25:39.4 AS: Or demotivating.

0:25:39.6 DL: Yeah, demotivating everybody.

0:25:39.9 AS: Depending on which side of the room you're on.

0:25:41.4 DL: Right, you chose to rise above the situation and do something different, and you tapped into your love of Economics, which carried on far beyond the class, what you learned in that class, right?

0:25:55.1 AS: Right.

0:25:55.4 DL: Because like you said, I read 3000 books since then, well nobody was telling you to do that, right?

0:26:02.9 AS: Yeah.

0:26:03.1 DL: You weren't getting graded for it. I'll tell you that I never read a book for pleasure until I met Deming. You think of that.

0:26:14.1 AS: Wow!

0:26:14.2 DL: My master's degree, years of experience working schools. It was always because I was being told to do it or forced to do it, or for a grade or whatever it might be, but until I tapped into Deming and intrinsic motivation, that was the first time I thought, "I'm just gonna read this book for pleasure." And it was... The same kind of thing was kind of a weird thing that I had to go through because my whole life had been spent on extrinsic motivation. And I guess... And I was one of the ones that excelled in that, right? I got the grades, I got the scholarships, I got the prizes, right?

0:26:55.9 AS: The gold star.

0:26:57.7 DL: Right. And when all that ended, then now what? Well, there was no love of learning there. I had to find a way to find that. And that's what you tapped into.

0:27:08.6 AS: Yep. I feel like, just in wrapping this up, that the story that I remember I've read it, but I also remember Dr. Deming telling it at the seminar when I was there, was the story of the little girl who wanted to make the Halloween outfit to be like an angel, and her and her mom worked together on this outfit for weeks to get ready to go to the Halloween party. And of course, it wasn't beautiful, but it was handcrafted and they had such a great experience. And then they went to this Halloween party, and she was so proud to show it off and all that. And then one of the adults came up with the idea of, "Let's have a competition. Let's give a prize to the person that... " And in the end, of course...

0:27:51.8 DL: "Has the best costume."

0:27:53.5 AS: Yeah, the best costume. And in the end, of course, she didn't win.

0:27:55.5 DL: And we as adults are gonna pick the criteria for the best costume. [chuckle]

0:28:00.9 AS: Exactly. And in the end, she didn't win. She was far down the list. And all of a sudden, she was completely demotivated and realized like they reduced this whole couple of week process down to something just awful. And I always remember that story, and part of what I've always said about Dr. Deming is he's a humanist. He cares about how people feel.

0:28:28.4 DL: Yeah, we're really good at creating situations to kill the joy of learning, [chuckle] so...

0:28:32.8 AS: I did it right there. That was a story.

0:28:35.5 DL: Yeah.

0:28:37.9 AS: Let me review some of the things that you've talked about. First thing is we're gonna be talking about five key elements that cause motivation or talking about motivation. And one of the things that you said right off the bat is you can't. You can't motivate. You can manipulate and do other things. And I think we're gonna learn more about this over time. We talked about intrinsic motivation also being a bit about setting up the right environment for that intrinsic motivation. Talked about extrinsic means - giving away something, giving some incentive, a carrot or a stick, and that you're much better off using intrinsic motivation rather than trying to reward people with a gold star, because when you do that, you just reduce it down to some... Even people who are intrinsically motivated can be suckered in to just going after the gold star and...

0:29:38.6 DL: Or money. [chuckle]

0:29:39.6 AS: Yeah, or money, right? Definitely. And they may even sabotage the business or whatever to get that gold star or that money. And then you talked about the idea of the piano thing of when you've got a few students in the room that are really doing well with them, having them talk about why they're... What happened. What they like about it, what's going on for them, because maybe it's not gonna be that everybody's gonna be a piano star, but if they could learn the process or share the process of the excitement, that may be able to be applied in other areas too, for some people. And then you talked about understanding variation, and part of it is understanding that not everybody's gonna be that star. And I think also the last thing that I think about is that... The thing you said is that people may just be in the wrong job too. Like you can't necessarily get the best out of someone sometimes because they're just in the wrong job, and I think that's kind of a critical one that we oftentimes overlook. Is there anything else that you'd add to that?

0:30:50.9 DL: Well, I was just thinking about special needs kids too. I was talking about teachers coming to me and wanting to talk about their own child.

0:31:00.2 AS: Yep.

0:31:00.3 DL: They say, "Oh my son has ADD or he can't do this, or he can't do that, or he's got this thing in classroom. How do I motivate him to do stuff?" And invariably, I'll say, "Does he ever do anything on his own over a long period of time?" And invariably, they'll say things like, "Oh yeah, he loves to make model airplanes, and he'll go to his room and he'll spend just hours making model airplanes." Well, he doesn't have an ADD problem. He's got, [chuckle] a motivation problem, right?

0:31:32.2 AS: Mm-hmm.

0:31:33.3 DL: He loves doing that, but he doesn't love what's going on at school, so...

0:31:40.2 AS: Turn that.

0:31:40.9 DL: It all depends on the kind of an environment that you're gonna make, but because we have so many kids that are, like your story, are being demotivated by school, right? Well, what do we do? Well, we're gonna classify them, we're gonna call these ADD and we're gonna call these kids this, and we're gonna call this that and then we're gonna medicate this group and not medicate that group, but nobody's ever saying, "How do we change our system so we have less and less and less of this kind of behavior?"

0:32:11.6 AS: Yeah.

0:32:13.6 DL: And that's what we're gonna get to in the next five podcasts.

0:32:17.2 AS: It reminds me of that ACDC song when I was young, "Problem Child." I'm a problem child. I've been labeled. I know exactly what I am.

0:32:25.1 DL: Yeah.

0:32:25.8 AS: Well, David, on behalf of...

0:32:27.5 DL: I'm proud of it. [laughter]

0:32:28.6 AS: Yes, exactly. I've got my spot. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In our latest Deming in Education podcast, Andrew and David talk about a controversial subject: cellphones in classrooms. Should teachers have them? Students? Should they be banned? Or is there another way?

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:03.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host, as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers offered us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, "What would Deming say about cellphones in classrooms." David, take it away.

0:00:31.9 David Langford: Thank you. I just find this topic so relevant today and just so interesting, I just wanted to have this little discussion about what's going on because I'm reading articles that some high schools in Massachusetts, I think it was, are now banning cellphones completely, and so when kids come to school they have to put their cell phone in a hermetically sealed plastic bag that can only be opened by a teacher or an administrator at the end of the day. So, sort of like what Dagwood said in the comics one time, "It sounds like a good idea till you think about it." So those schools now have become the cell phone police. Alright?

0:01:23.6 AS: Yeah.

0:01:24.0 DL: They have to have people at the door, and if you think you're gonna outsmart a high school kid and get him... "Well, I didn't bring my phone today... " What are you gonna do then? You're gonna search 'em? You're gonna have a Geiger counter kind of the thing that they go through that will go off then, "You got a cell phone and... "

0:01:44.6 AS: You have got a cell phone or a gun, I'm not sure.

0:01:48.7 DL: And then you lied. And so now we have to have punishments for that and one cell phone misdemeanor will get you half an hour after school, and then so we have to have somebody to monitor the after school program and then we go on and on and on and on. And is that really the business you're in? And on the other hand, I can understand a teacher's complaint about, we got these cell phones and they're going off and everything, but I also want to tie it back into what are we supposed to be trying to do in education, what's our purpose? And Deming talked a lot about constancy of purpose, and so when all these students that are going to schools with banned cell phones get out into society and they go to work for companies like yours or other companies, what are companies gonna expect about their cell phones are we still gonna be taking cell phones away from employees when they hit the door? I would say... [cough] Excuse me. Generally, that people just make up, not necessarily even rules or regulations but ethics around cell phones. I remember as an administrator having that problem that we'd have administrative meetings and you might have 20 or 30 people in the room and there's people answering their email and they're looking up stuff on their cell phones and this and that, checking this.

0:03:25.2 DL: And in some cases, it could be an extreme emergency and they need to be paying attention to that, so do you just wanna ban that and say, "Okay, no, no answering email or doing anything like that." Or can we put some guidelines about what we believe? So it ties into Deming thinking, because the first thing that I've encountered this over and over, schools all over the world, and the first thing I would say is, "Okay, what's the statistical variation that you have on cell phones?" And they'll look at you blankly like, "Well, you know, it's just bad." [chuckle] Well, I can understand that, but does every child have a cell phone in the entire school? Are you dealing with that, well or either that system, or is there a system of inequity where only 30% of the kids can actually afford cell phones and what are parents views on cell phones and all the it's other kinds...

0:04:26.2 AS: I was just thinking that, I'm sure whatever challenges you're facing in the classroom that parents are also facing that challenge, so you actually have somewhat of an ally. I was looking at an article by CBS News, that just came out, and a quote from a guy named Tyler Rablin, a high school teacher in Sunnyside, Washington, he said, "It's a losing battle for kids and their brains."

0:04:55.6 DL: [laughter] That sounds like somebody that doesn't really wanna join the 21st century.

0:05:01.3 AS: But also the other thing is in business now, we have apps where you're communicating and you're expected to be online and respond and all that, so it's not like we're gonna get rid of...

0:05:12.0 DL: Yeah you can take that away as well. Well, and then there are developing countries, like I'm pretty sure that it's Nigeria that is actually issuing cell phones to every student because it's a miniature computer and it's affordable, and they can use it in multiple ways, working stuff through. So the idea of just, "Well, we're just gonna ban something, we're just gonna completely take it away, and so that's gonna solve your problem is actually creating its own problems, and I'd actually wanna know the data on how many interruptions are you talking about per class period, per day, what's a Pareto chart from highest to lowest of the type of interruptions with cell phones all the way to the lowest interruptions with cell phones. Have you actually come up with a cell phone etiquette for your school about how you agree to operate and have the students been a part of that, coming up with that etiquette, and what's normal and what's not normal?

0:06:15.9 DL: I know even with, as a school administrator, administrative groups, we actually had cell phone email time built into our work sessions, 'cause people said, "Well, I do need to check in and do this and there's stuff going on at my school that I need to be aware of and... " Great, so we decided to have cell phone time, there was like a 12-minute period or an 18-minute period, and they would tell us how much time they needed to do that, and everybody would go out and talk on their cellphones and call home and to see how the kids are doing, or whatever you needed to do. But then when you come back to the meeting, we're back in session and we're concentrating and we're doing the things that we need to do over there.

0:07:00.8 AS: There's a couple of things I'm...

0:07:01.2 DL: There are ways to deal with these things.

0:07:04.2 AS: I was thinking about a couple of things. Sometimes when I see a lot of distraction in a classroom, I basically tell people to turn off their phones and you can access them at the break, so we're gonna talk for an hour and a half. If you can't get away for an hour and a half, maybe you shouldn't be in the classroom, for someone that's coming for a training or something like that, no, you can't. If you say that to a kid, they'll say, "Yeah, exactly." But the other thing...

0:07:34.3 DL: Think about how if you've got that kind of thinking in your classroom, what do you need to be doing before you get to the classroom? Well, I need to be making my phone calls, I need to be doing my texting or whatever I'm going to be doing, so when I get in the classroom, I'm not gonna be tempted to be distracted from those types of things. To me, it's going back to Deming's concept of understanding the system, what is this system that you're trying to either prevent or create or work through? And I can absolutely guarantee you those kids are gonna run circles around those administrators and those teachers in those schools, they are going to find ways to make stuff happen. I'll never forget when cellphones were actually first sort of coming out and my kids were going to university, Allison got this text from my son, who was in a business class listening to a lecture that he was bored out of his mind, and that's back when we had the cell phones with buttons on 'em. And he said, "I'm texting you from my pocket because I'll get in trouble if I take out my phone." And he was doing the whole thing by feel 'cause the class was so boring, this was a whole lot more fun to see if he could pull that off, [chuckle] so that's what you're gonna be up against is...

0:08:55.7 AS: But the other thing is, I teach here in Asia, and most of my students are not native speakers, so they use their phones to record sometimes. Or yesterday, I had a class and we were running late, I had to run, but I needed to give them some advice on the next assignment, I told 'em, "Turn on your audio, I'm gonna run through seven things." One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. "I'll see you guys later." Boom. So there's that also. But what I'm coming back to, David, is that, it is really a battle for attention on what I can see the curse course of young people right now...

0:09:30.4 DL: Attention and control... And control. Who's in control here? Right?

0:09:34.1 AS: Yep. But what I can see is that I see a lot of young people that are unable to focus because they're constantly distracted, even for me, who didn't grow up with this type of thing, it can be distracting. And so I do things like, I'd leave my phone outside my office, I start work early in the morning where I know nobody is gonna send me any messages, all kinds of little tricks and stuff. But it is a challenge, which raises another issue in education, do we have a concentration time? Maybe we need to teach children about, "Hey, what is the value of going 30 minutes on this? No distraction." And teaching something like that.

0:10:17.1 DL: Yeah, I'd much rather that you had a Deming-focus in your school and you're thinking about, "Well, how do we manage this cell phone issue?" Because when students leave the school, they're gonna have to know how to use cell phones properly in work environments or in any environment that they go into. And so if we're not teaching 'em how to do it and they're not understanding how to work that through, it's just gonna be chaos on the other side of that.

0:10:49.8 AS: What about this? I remember a fund management client that I had in the UK, and I tried to get a hold of him in the morning, and he contacted me, he says, "Sorry, I didn't talk to you in the morning because our company doesn't turn on the email delivery until noon."

[laughter]

0:11:08.0 DL: Again, you're not trusting your employees to make good decisions, and so therefore, we're just gonna take care of it for you. That's another... Another way that you could do the cell phone thing is you could have a bubble over your school that prevented any cell phone access.

0:11:30.1 AS: There you go. A shield. A dome.

0:11:32.8 DL: A dome or a shield over it. We laugh about it and stuff, but and it's a very big problem for the teachers in schools and etcetera. If I was a teacher now and in a high school, I'd actually probably be requiring all of my students to have cellphones. Because I talked with one teacher about this one time, and that's what she did and she had everybody's numbers, she had everything, she would text stuff out and she said, "Oh, the kids were just like, take her cell phone away." 'Cause she was saying, "Remember we're gonna have this test on Friday, and remember you to study this." And she's blanket that out to everybody in the class, and so they're just constantly getting these text messages from her. But it's the same thing as in business, the eight-hour work day is a myth, it doesn't happen anymore. I know I'm on a 24-hour schedule because you're in Thailand and your're 11 hours different than where I'm at and... And that's happening worldwide, and if we're not teaching students how to deal with that... That's the whole advantage of having a cell phone is that I can get messages and that I can receive them and answer them on my schedule and on my time, and when I wanna do that and work through that.

0:13:00.0 DL: From a systems perspective, it's much, much more powerful to teach students how to make responsible choices and decisions, and then you're gonna get the question about, "Well what happens when if they don't make responsible decisions?" Well, are we talking about special cause, we got a thousand kids in the school and we got one kid or 10, right?

0:13:22.8 AS: Yup.

0:13:23.8 DL: Well, they're gonna need some special help, 'cause obviously they need help learning how to control themselves. But in general, 99... 98% of the students don't have this problem.

0:13:35.4 AS: So what I'd like to do is just wrap this up by thinking about a teacher who's listening to this and thinking, "Yeah, this is a challenge I'm facing in my classroom and I'm looking for different ways to handle it, and from this conversation, next week when I go into class, I'm gonna take a different perspective on this, and that is gonna be based upon what you're saying and your interpretation of Dr. Deming's ideas about this." So what kind of specific steps would you say? Like, "Maybe try this, try that, do this, do that, re-evaluate what your goals are and what's your aim?" What would you say it is?

0:14:09.7 DL: The answer to these questions always is; it depends, right? [chuckle] So...

0:14:14.5 AS: Oh, David...

0:14:16.7 DL: The control may be totally out of that teacher's hands, where the school or the district's saying, well "This is our policy, and this is what we have to do." If that's the case, then you don't really have much. But even a single teacher within a whole district, or a school, can change the system. So if I wanted to do something differently, I might go to my principal and say, "Look, can I run a PDSA; Plan, Do, Study, Act experiment on cell phones? And my students actually wanna have cell phones in their classes, and so we'd like to take a month, and in just my classes, we're gonna have cell phones and we're gonna learn how to use them really properly, and we're gonna collect some data on improper use and proper use, and try to understand the situation." And generally, I'd say that most administrators would probably say, "Yeah, that sounds like a logical solution," right? But to actually understand it...

0:15:24.9 AS: You're getting the students involved...

0:15:26.1 DL: Getting the students involved...

0:15:26.3 AS: That's part of their key...

0:15:29.0 DL: That's the whole key, the students are always the secret weapon. If you're not getting them involved, you're just shooting yourself in the foot, so I can guarantee at these high schools that are banning cell phones, there's probably not a single student that came up with this idea that, "Oh, we need to ban cell phones."

0:15:45.5 AS: Yeah.

0:15:46.1 DL: [chuckle] It's just not what's gonna happen.

0:15:49.7 AS: I was thinking about one idea could be that students may come up with this, maybe we could use this two... We could do partners, like two people, one cell phone. And how do we explore, see what we can find on a particular topic? Or how do we... Just all kinds of ideas would come up, and plus these guys, they know how to use these, that it is a tool, and maybe through that process, you would be teaching them to see it as a tool, not as a burden or not something that you gotta restrict, but how do you get the most outta this tool?

0:16:24.1 DL: Well, that's... I'm sure that your day is much like mine. Any time, any second, that I think, "I wonder what the answer to this is?" Or "I need to do a little research on this," or etcetera, I don't run to my computer 'cause it's... I'll pull out my cell phone and within 30 seconds or less, I've got the answer to that, and...

0:16:49.6 AS: It's funny because I...

0:16:51.0 DL: I wouldn't wanna deprive students of that in a school.

0:16:54.5 AS: I was talking with my mother and she was talking about one of our houses that we lived in, in New Jersey, and I remembered a picture of that house. I asked her, "What's the address of that house?" And she could remember it, even though she's getting older. And I went on Google, and I zoomed in, and I go, "Mom, is that the front porch of the house," and she's like, "That's it." And just, like, there's so much that you can do with this tool, so...

0:17:21.6 DL: Yeah, so just think of, you're just blanketly depriving people of access to using that tool. I mean, to me, it just doesn't make any sense, and from a Deming perspective, I think it's not tenable. It's certainly not sustainable. And I absolutely could guarantee you that, in five years, those very same high schools are gonna be done with that policy and, because they don't wanna be the cell phone policemen anymore.

0:17:50.2 AS: Yup.

0:17:51.9 DL: So eventually you're gonna have to learn how to teach people to use them properly within the existing systems. It's gonna come...

0:18:03.1 AS: So, maybe I'll summarize by thinking about some of the questions about cell phones, even is, does every kid have a phone? And...

0:18:11.1 DL: That's right...

0:18:11.8 AS: What's the situation?

0:18:13.8 DL: Yeah, could be an equity issue, right? Oh, we're gonna ban cell phones because only 25% of our kids can actually afford to have a cell phone. Okay, well, that's a whole different issue than we're just gonna ban this...

0:18:29.0 AS: Well, that's why I was thinking about teams, if you had a room where a certain number of people didn't have a cell phone by setting up... If the students came out and say, "Hey, why don't we work in teams?" Boom. You also talked about, maybe we should think about cell phone etiquette, maybe get parents and, obviously, students involved. And the other thing you said, are you trusting your employees? Are you trusting your students? And you also talked about, maybe, the thing to do is, let's study it, let's do a PDSA on cell phones; how to use them properly, how to use them in the classroom and try to learn and develop something that you're developing with the students, and finally, see the phone as a tool for reaching the goal of the system. Which is, let's say, to educate young people. Anything you would add to that?

0:19:21.4 DL: Yeah, I'm sure there's people listening to this and saying, "Well, those guys don't understand our reality," well, you can create your own reality. [chuckle] I'd rather be in a school system where everybody's responsibly using cell phones, even the administrators, and teachers. Where was I? In Australia or some place, and I said something about, "Some of our schools think they have a cell phone problem," and the administrators said, "You mean with the teachers?"

[laughter]

0:19:55.3 DL: And I hadn't even thought about that. He said, "We have a really big problem with that, the teachers are just always on their cell phones and using... Texting, and doing all their stuff, and... "

0:20:03.0 AS: Yup. Well, if you're listening to this podcast, you're like, "You guys don't know, and this and that... " Well, if it's getting you a little bit frustrated, you're questioning it and stuff, that's the part of the process of learning, is getting some new information and thinking about that. David, I wanna thank you for challenging us to think about cell phones, 'cause even in my case, I kinda went into this with a little bit different view, but you've got me convinced to get the students involved, and maybe their parents, and think about what's our real aim here. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Andrew and David talk about chaos, authority, and when calming the chaos can feel like a loss of control. They explore the "psychology" aspect of Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge, and how that applies to classrooms and and school systems.

TRANSCRIPT

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

0:00:28.4 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again.

0:00:30.9 AS: Oh, yeah.

0:00:31.0 DL: So, yes, Thriving on Chaos. So I started thinking about this because of my work with executive coaching, both with principals and superintendents and people like that. And it's sort of like a pattern or if I go and visit a campus and actually start to see what's happening at the campus, either a university or a school or whatever, and it applies to Deming's concept of Profound Knowledge and the concept of Psychology and how does psychology fit in with the variation systems thinking and so on and so forth. So this whole idea about thriving on chaos comes from... You have to start to think about the neuroscience behind it as well, about who's in charge or who's in command of something. So if you're talking about a military a military commander, well, that's all based on your rank. Or you might have a formal position in a company, right? You're a vice president or you're president, and along with that there comes a certain level of authority too.

0:01:46.3 DL: Well, in a school, it's the same kind of a thing. In a classroom, a teacher has a built-in level of authority in that classroom and especially like in younger years, elementary schools or primary schools, you're physically bigger than your students or your clients or your workers or however you wanna think about students in a school system. So sometimes people get away from... Get by with a management style that, it's just based on... That is bigger and sort of is threatening, and it's scarier. And imagine if you had a boss that was like 20 feet tall and... Compared to you and stuff. It'd be kind of a scary thing, right?

0:02:38.0 AS: Definitely.

0:02:39.8 DL: Yeah, but I think...

0:02:40.9 AS: He could just squash me by just putting his foot down.

0:02:44.8 DL: Yeah. So just because you're getting stuff done doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing things well or planning things through or something. You're just getting things done because maybe you're the loudest voice in the room or the squeakiest wheel or you're the... All these other kinds of things. But along with that, when you have that formal position, I've sort of found that people have to go through a phase where they're tired of the chaos, they're tired of the craziness, but at the same time, the craziness gives you authority. "I'm the authority figure. And so, I've gotta fix this, and I gotta always be in control." And so, Deming talked about moving from one burning fire to the next to the next to the next and managing the way of thinking like that.

0:03:44.5 DL: So if you really start applying Deming kind of philosophies to your management style, whether that's in a classroom, school, company, whatever it might be, I've always found that over time, things start to calm down. [chuckle] Attitudes calm down, students just know more about what to do, how to do things. Maybe they have flow charts or operational definitions, and so they start to actually take control of the situation, etcetera. And that actually becomes threatening to somebody who has spent a career thriving on the chaos. And you walk into a classroom and none of the kids are doing what it is they're supposed to do. And so, you get really angry, and you get upset, and yell at them and then everybody does what they're supposed to do and that puts you in a position of authority.

0:04:37.9 DL: That's much different than if I walked into a classroom and the students didn't even know I was gone. They all know what they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to do it, they're all working together, they're all communicating with each other back and forth and there is no chaos. I'll never forget the... I worked with a university in Southern California and I was coaching a number of the professors. And this one professor, I get a phone call one day and he's whispering. He said, "I had a flat on the way to school this morning, and I was 20 minutes late. And we have a philosophy at the school that if a professor is more than 10 minutes late, you don't have to stay. You can leave."

0:05:28.1 DL: So he said, "I was totally sure that I was gonna get to my class and everybody's gonna be gone. There wouldn't be anybody there." He said, "I came into my class, and they didn't even know I was gone. They were all working in teams and they were working on their projects and communicating and going through stuff." [chuckle] So he calls me whispering, and he said, "I need some quality therapy. They don't need me." Well, it's just the opposite. Those kinds of environments don't happen by accident. And he had steadily been turning the management, so to speak, of the class over to the students and... "You know what to do. You know what you do when you hit the room. Why would you even come to class? What's my role? What's your role? How do we define things?" And...

0:06:18.1 DL: So he actually had turned into much more of what we all wanna do, is become a facilitator of learning, that's a very common term in education, but people don't often realize you truly become a facilitator of learning, it's kind of threatening. Because you've been thriving on chaos for years, and running stuff and being the person in control and everybody has to come to you for an answer and for a decision, and that in itself psychologically is a pretty heady thing. And if you start to change that, it becomes threatening.

0:06:56.1 AS: From your own experience, I'm guessing that there's a small proportion of people that will never change that style, everybody line up when they in, everybody be quiet. Okay, you do this, you do that, and then you've got this group that on the other end of the spectrum, it's like, you guys do it, but then you've got a lot of people in the middle, how do you convince the people in the middle that shifting... I guess what you could say is empowering one group dis-empowers another, it must.

0:07:31.0 DL: Yeah, what Deming says, leaders have three sources of power, so yes, you have your formal position, and then you also have your knowledge about things, and then there's the psychology of how you manage and what you do and all that kind of stuff, but he often talked about formal leaders don't use formal position. But you absolutely have to because you're not gaining authority or you're not gaining power or authority to change things by going through that. So yes, yes, you have the role. Yes, you have the position. Yes, you have the responsibility. And ultimately, the buck stops with you, whether that's a teacher in a classroom or a CEO in a company, but you're only gonna use that formal position to make decisions or overstep things, basically in a time of crisis or an emergency. But even then, as soon as you finish that time of crisis or that emergency you wanna spend time trying to figure out how do we make sure this never happens again. A really great example is every school in the world practices fire drills. Oh, why did we do that? Well, a child could go through entire school systems some place and never ever have an actual fire.

0:09:00.6 DL: Right. Well, we do that because... We have to practice that because the danger is so high, and if something did happen, that special cause, that one special cause, one time in 12 years or 20 years, the cost is so great that we have to practice it, we have to be ready and everything else, 'cause we can't rely in a moment, on the leader being there to tell us what to do. Everybody has to know what to do in those kinds of situations. The same thing's true today in lockdowns, schools, things like that, the danger level is so high, we have to practice it nowadays, and we have to go through the scenario, even though it's such an extreme special cause, it may... In a whole teacher's career of 40 years, they may never, ever experience an actual threat going on, but we practice it to make sure it doesn't... This doesn't happen again. So it's the same thing, if you find yourself in chaos, again, something's going on or some project didn't go well, or whatever it is that you went through, the best thing is to just figure out how do we get through this? And then secondly, start using the people that were part of the process and part of the dysfunction to actually fix the process. What do we learn from this?

0:10:21.6 AS: And would we equate when we talk about, let's just say we create a run chart on a production in a factory, and our job is to get the system in control to reduce variability, that type of thing, I guess that's reducing chaos or chaotic outcomes. So is it a corollary here that as we start to apply the principles in education, one of our goals is to reduce that variation or that chaotic, chaotic-ness? I don't know. How does that compare to what we would think in a factory, as an example?

0:10:56.0 DL: Yeah, no, that's exactly the same kind of thing. You know, it can be so simple. I remember asking teachers all the time, How's it going today? Oh, I'm having a really bad day, or I'm having great day, or these kids are driving me crazy today, it must be... Gonna rain. Well, they're just constantly victims of their own reality, and so until you have that understanding of your variation or able to sort of step back and it very well could be that it's gonna rain and that's a sort of a special cause, except if you're in Thailand it rains all the time, so it's a common cause. But... And that could be having some kind of effect, but until you have some level of data to try to look at over time, then you're on this constant psychological roller coaster.

0:11:53.2 DL: Great day and bad day, or I hate this job, or I don't like this job or... Because you're just riding those waves of psychology of the variation that's going on, and especially in schools, there's just so much random variation, like we try to control it to some level, but for the most part, still you really have no idea the variation, and students are gonna come into your classroom every year, right? So they could be coming from different countries, they could have different languages, they could have different backgrounds, all kinds of things within that. Now, unlike in a K-12 system, like we have in the United States and other places around the world, we do control that to some degree, because a certain percentage of those students are gonna stay in that system for the entire time that they're going through that system, and then they... A high percentage sometimes are transient students that are coming in and out all the time.

0:12:54.4 DL: The real key is, are you just thriving on that chaos of that and it's just, "Oh, woe is me, and I'll look at this, we got all these transient kids and kids that speak 52 different languages and everything else," or are you starting to understand that, "Oh, no, this is probably the norm of our system, and what are we doing about it?" How are we managing differently to bring all these cultures together and to manage it on a whole different level.

0:13:21.1 AS: So maybe I will try to summarize what you've been talking about. First of all, you're saying this is part of the psychology aspect of the Theory of Profound Knowledge that Dr. Deming talks about. And when you talk about psychology in a statistician kind of background or education that Dr. Deming was in, it's always kind of interesting like, "Wow, he really, really thought a lot about the human... The person involved in whatever activity is going on." You also talked about who's in charge or in command, you talked about in military it's a rank. In a business, it may be like, "I'm a VP, I'm an executive VP." So we see that, but one of the things you mentioned, which is so interesting, I hadn't thought about it, is that the teachers are just physically bigger, and so there's a certain level of power right there. And the other thing you were talking about is how people may be tired of the craziness, but the chaos makes them feel in control, like [snaps] get everybody lined up, and tell everybody what to do, and they're perpetuating the problem that they're kind of suffering from. And then you mentioned that Deming's methods, when you start to implement them in a classroom, in a school, that things start to calm down. That...

0:14:44.6 AS: And that is a threat to the person that wants to thrive on chaos, and then finally the last part you talked about was the three types of power, formal power that's derived from knowledge and power that's derived from psychology, and you said ultimately, you only wanna use the power that comes from formal position in very rare cases, but the idea is try to get the... I guess what I would say is by empowering students, you're reducing your power and let them produce from that. Anything you would add to that?

0:15:20.8 DL: No, you got it spot on.

0:15:26.4 AS: Well, there we are.

0:15:30.3 DL: Yeah, Deming talked a lot about that. Somebody that becomes more and more knowledgeable about managing situations and helping people becomes very powerful, and you may not have the formal position, so you could be a teacher in a building that has 160 teachers, but you become actually very powerful, and in some cases, more powerful than the principal, because you're constantly applying knowledge and thinking to situations versus just reacting to the chaos.

0:16:00.9 AS: It's interesting, 'cause I think about in my young days, what I did is I learned Excel. I learned how to use Microsoft Excel intensely, and that was when it was pretty... It's still pretty basic, but still the point was, is it...

0:16:13.8 DL: And that's when you could have memorized all the formulas.

0:16:16.5 AS: Exactly, exactly. And therefore, people would always go, "Go see Andrew, he can help you solve that." And I had derived a certain amount of power through my knowledge, and I loved that, and I love people coming to me and going, "How do I do this?" "Oh, that's easy to do it like that," and my power and maybe respect for my knowledge rose over time, and so I definitely see that. In fact, I would say that that was a big part of my own education, my pursuit of education, is I saw knowledge as a source of power for me or a source of controlling the situation for good or bad.

0:16:55.3 DL: Yeah, when we talk about, Deming, talked about the three sources of power, when he... I said that psychology, I was really talking about personality. So somebody... You may have worked with people that they just have a great personality, they're just fun to work with and easy to get along with and everything. Well, they actually get a lot of stuff done, right? So the most effective managers are concentrating on knowledge and personality as a way to get the stuff done and not just issuing orders through my formal position.

0:17:27.0 AS: Well, that is a great discussion on Thriving on Chaos and the pros and cons of it. David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for the discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Also, you can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "people are entitled to joy in work."

Now that we understand Operational Definitions (see Part 12), it's time to figure out how to use them to get the improvements and results you want. Andrew and David talk about examples of useful Operational Definitions and how they can impact all aspects of education (and beyond!)

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is how to start setting operational definitions. David, take it away.

0:00:27.1 David Langford: So in a previous podcast, we talked a lot about the need for operational definitions, and how that improved systems, and why do you wanna do that. Well, that's part of what Deming talked about with profound knowledge and systems thinking, and it's really important. But the nuts and bolts about how do you begin doing that. Well, the first thing you need to do is to figure out what system am I working on, is the number one thing. What am I trying to improve or design? Am I trying to improve the system of behavior? Am I trying to improve the system of the learning in the classroom? Or whatever it might be. Or maybe you're a principal and all of a sudden you realize, "My teachers, they don't all show up on time to the staff meetings," Right? So staff meeting's supposed to start at 3:40, and we don't ever get a staff meeting going till four o'clock, so... I know when I go places and they're not getting started promptly, etcetera, I'll say things like, "What time do you usually start your eight o'clock meetings?"

[laughter]

0:01:42.3 DL: Yeah, it usually gets people to go, Oh, yeah... Sometimes they'll say, "Well, usually about nine o'clock, so."

0:01:47.9 AS: And, David, I have a story I wanna share that I think can kind of lead into this, is that I was involved with a master's in marketing program here, about 75 students every time. And then I'm also involved with a MBA, an executive MBA program with another university. And one of the things that's interesting is the master's in marketing program, 75 students, so these classes are big, pretty big, 75 students, not one of them was late, ever. All 75 were in the classroom, door closed, when it was time to start the class and I started. And the other one I was just meeting out there, and we were at an event where I was teaching, and they said, "Look, really sorry, we try to pull everybody together but they're always late," and all that.

0:02:31.4 AS: And I was just like, this is interesting, the difference here. 'Cause it's the same cohort of people, it's the same group of executives and smart people in Thailand that are pursuing a degree. And the guy asked me, and I told him the story about the other university, and he said, "How do they do it?" And I said, "Well, they set a pretty clear standard of, look, this is important to us that you're on time, and we're gonna lock the door, and if you're not there at the time that it starts, you can't go in until the break. And we're gonna get class leaders to support this, we're gonna get alumni to support this, to say, this is part of what makes us unique."

0:03:06.9 DL: There you go.

0:03:08.1 AS: And I saw a very different outcome.

0:03:10.7 DL: So there you go. That's an operational definition. And whether or not you agree with it or not, you can see by having that operational definition at the one university, you've got a level of function that you don't have at the other university, you got a level of dysfunction, because they haven't taken the time to really do that. Really define what does that mean? And so when that happens, then you're dealing with all this variability, variation from students, variation from professors, variation from everybody in the system, and the overall system is not optimized. So it just keeps coming back to what we talked about before, but in this session we wanted to get into a little bit about, how would you begin setting an operational definition? What does it look like?

0:04:06.1 DL: When I work with, say, elementary teachers, I say, start the very first day, the very first thing, so... And start operationally defining what kinds of standards and what kinds of things you wanna have happen. Something so simple about, "Every time you hand a paper in, we want you to put your name on the paper." Okay, well, let's have a discussion about, let's operationally define, what does it mean to put your name on a paper? And sometimes people look at you and say, "Hey, what are you talking about?" Well, do you want first and last name? You just want a first name? Do you want it in the upper left-hand corner? The upper right-hand corner? Do you want it just anyplace on the paper, you don't really care? Well, if it's just random, if it's just anyplace on the paper, but my name's on it, well, that means that you as the teacher, every time you get a paper you're gonna be searching, trying to find somebody's name, right?

0:04:58.9 AS: Does it need to be clearly written?

0:05:01.3 DL: Yeah. Yeah, and what is clearly? I have no idea what that means. So we might have to have a discussion as a class and start to talk about, what does clearly written mean? There are some things to that. Well, clearly written means all the lower case letters need to be the same height. Oh, okay. So I'm thinking about that and I say, "Is my name clear, all my lower case letters the same height? Well, no, they're not." Okay, well then I can fix that, can't I? Right? So you can get clarity around these things if you really are thinking like this from the very beginning of bringing people into a system. As things get more and more complicated, and let's say that you wanna have a whole group of people come to a common definition, or a common operational definition on something. I started a process years ago of, in my classes, working with students and staff too, but anytime we needed to define something everybody would write it down, and then we'd pass it around and start to share those definitions and begin to talk about it.

0:06:20.9 DL: But then over the years, that sort of evolved into a tool that we call... Nowadays we call P³T. P to the third power T. So what it actually stands for is, the P³ is the paper passing purpose tool. And that came from one of my students one time, he said, "Oh, this is P to the third power." And so we just named it that, and it's become a popular way to define things. But what you do with that... I've done this with school boards. They wanna define certain terms with the school board and everything. So let's do a P³T. So what you do is you take... You wanna get everybody's opinion without it being tainted by other people, you just start having a big discussion about how you should define something or you can take a vague word, like we talked about last time discovery, but you could take a word like behavior or discipline or anything you want and you realize that everybody's got their own definition of what that means, but to optimize the system, we all have to have a common definition of what that means.

0:07:33.6 DL: So you take all the people in a group, usually try to... If I've got more than about five or seven people in a group, then we'll break that up into multiple groups, so it might have... So let's say I'm gonna do this in a classroom, and I wanna get everybody in the classroom help contribute to an operational definition. We might just put everybody into groups of five to say eight people, and just start the process, and so then we state, "Okay, well, we wanna have a term on a quality work." There's a vague term, we want all the work...

0:08:14.1 AS: Good quality around here.

0:08:15.7 DL: Yeah, quality work, we want everything that comes in to be quality. So well, we better define what that is. So first thing I'm gonna have everybody do is write down their own personal definition of quality work, right, and they're gonna write it on this paper, and then very simply, everybody then just passes it to the right or the left, and when you get somebody's paper, then the first thing you're gonna do is read that person's definition of that term. Whatever it is you're trying to define, and as you're reading it, you're gonna automatically come to certain phrases or words where you have an affinity for that and you're gonna go, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that." So if you agree with that, what you do is you just underline it, okay, and so when you get finished, that paper has a bunch of things underlined and some things not underlined and then when you're finished with that, you pass it to the right and everybody keeps passing your paper around until you get your paper back.

0:09:14.5 DL: And if something's already been underlined once, then when I get it, if I also agree with that then I'm gonna underline it again, or if there's not enough space for that, maybe I'll put a check mark by it or just something that identifies that, okay, I agree with that, or I think that's a good idea, right? So when I get my paper back, I actually have the feedback from five to seven other people about what they thought about my definition, which is pretty interesting, right? Did I have a lot of people agree with me on certain things or maybe things that I thought were really important, nobody agreed with me on that, or nobody underlined that. They didn't think that was important at all. So you got all these definitions and papers, but you've got a chance for people to see everybody else's definition. And now we wanna start combining that into an operational definition agreement with the group. If you try to...

0:10:16.4 AS: And before we get to that.

0:10:19.0 DL: Go ahead.

0:10:19.7 AS: Before we get to that step. Can I just highlight? You talked about this idea of each person writing down their opinion so that they're not tainted by the influence of others, and that really is such a powerful first step. Because you could imagine that somebody would write down, "We've gotta be on time. That's what makes quality work to me." And now you end up... You start to expose pet peeves, maybe you call them, and then once you start... That starts going around those pet peeves kind of all of a sudden you realize that nobody underlined that, and then you think, "Oh, okay, that's interesting, I guess that's really important to me, but maybe it isn't." So that first part of the process that you've just defined of passing that paper around, I think is really valuable. So now, let's imagine that that paper has now come back to you. You're going, "Holy crap. I see some things that people agree with, but nobody underlined some of the things that I thought was important." Now you go to that next step. Tell us about that.

0:11:21.5 DL: Yeah, well often when I start with groups, a lot of times they'll have somebody that says, "Well, can we just discuss this before we start?" No, no. Absolutely not, because I don't want to give you the chance to intimidate somebody else in the group. Well, everybody here just knows what on-time performance is, right? And everybody here knows that it's this, and everybody here agrees with me. No, so psychologically, you don't wanna give people that chance to dominate a group ahead of time, and a lot of times our meetings are like that. Just full of that stuff. And by the time you actually get around to doing something or doing some work, people are so jaded, so upset that they just don't say anything, they don't wanna participate.

0:12:14.3 AS: And that's because let's say one person is kind of... They're persuasive, they have strong opinions, they tend to dominate of what it is, and we can say... There's a common word I hear a lot in America is inclusive, and one of the objectives of those people maybe is not to be too inclusive, and what you're saying is that when you're passing around that paper, it's a raw experience, you are forced to be inclusive of all people's ideas. And then you start to...

0:12:44.6 DL: And opinions and you may even have it, this is common students, that kids blow off things right, they just... They don't do it, or they put down something frivolous or silly or whatever it might be. Well, when they get their paper back and nothing on there was underlined, they start to get the picture like, Oh, okay, well, that was kind of a waste of time, right? That was just silly. And so next time around, you're probably gonna see that person take things a little more serious, a little more focus, think about things themselves before they get started, and you haven't had to say anything. They got the picture. Alright, so you got this paper back and you got these certain things, so now how do we move from... So we started with the individual and then we went to the group, and then how can you move that to a whole, say a whole class or a whole system depending on the size of the group.

0:13:39.9 DL: So probably the simplest way I've ever done it is I'll just ask somebody to start and say, "Tell me one thing that is underlined on your paper." People say, "Underlined a lot or a little or?" It doesn't matter. You decide, what was underlined on your paper that you think is important? And they'll tell me something, so we'll write that on the flip chart or the board or whatever it might be. Then you go to the next person and you say, "Okay, what do you have that's different?" And then you go to the next person and you say, "Okay, what do you have to add that's different?" And what you're doing is you're removing redundancies, you're removing all kinds of things as you go through, and people are starting to think harder and harder and look at their own paper and start to say, "Okay, these three things have already been listed, so I guess I don't have anything else to add." So once I go all the way around a group like that and I've removed all the redundancies, now we've distilled this down into what this group thinks is really important.

0:14:50.4 AS: And when we list those down, we're now listing down everything that's different. So we could have seven different things on that list.

0:15:00.0 DL: Oh, yeah.

0:15:00.2 AS: Would that be correct?

0:15:00.3 DL: Oh yeah.

0:15:01.1 AS: Okay. So now we got a long laundry list kind of thing. What do we do next?

0:15:06.7 DL: It can be, or it actually usually comes out much more concise than you think it's gonna be.

0:15:15.6 AS: Okay, because they've already kind of brought it down by underlining...

0:15:19.0 DL: That's right.

0:15:19.6 AS: And not underlining. Okay.

0:15:21.2 DL: That's right. There's other prioritization tools you could do and all kinds of things, but it takes a lot more time and etcetera. So now I've got this list.

0:15:29.3 AS: So let's say what, three... Two to five things that people have said?

0:15:34.0 DL: Yeah, it could be more like nine, 10, 12 things on this list.

0:15:38.7 AS: So we've got a long list?

0:15:40.2 DL: Yeah. So now how to... Let's say that I've got six groups of people in one room, each group has 5-7 people, but I wanna end up with a common operational definition for the whole room, right? Then I simply go to one group and say, "Okay, what do you have on your list?" And basically, I'm doing the same process but with groups. And this group says, "Oh, well, we said this in our group." Okay, so we're gonna write that down. I go to the next group, "What do you guys have that's different?" Then I go to the next group, "What do you have that's different?" And you just keep going around until everybody's... There's nothing left. Nobody has anything left.

0:16:18.6 DL: You talked a little bit about standards-based learning, how ambiguous that is. Well, here's a great way to take a whole staff and say, "Okay, well, let's try to define what we think this is, what does standards-based learning mean?" So first, what does it mean to you as an individual? And then how does my opinion sort of... What's the juxtaposition of my opinion with a group and then the thinking overall with the bigger group? So if I do the exact same process now with a group of 30 people within 10-12, 15 minutes, we've distilled it down to all the kinds of things that we think are really super important of this concept.

0:17:04.6 AS: Can I just go back? Okay, so first thing we did, we had... We broke people into different groups. So let's say we have, I don't know, five groups of six. And each person wrote down what they said their definition of that particular thing is, quality work or whatever, and then we push it around in a circle and people underline the things that they agree with, then we have... We then go up to the board and we say, "Okay, let's just get a laundry list of the different things," and we may have five, we may have 10, we may have 12, whatever, we have our list. Now, all of a sudden, you got other groups that have their lists. Now, what I'm trying to understand is that the next step, when you bring the other groups lists of 5-10 different things, are you...

0:17:49.4 DL: So basically, I'm doing this exact same process. I'll go to one group and say, "Okay, tell me something that you have on your group list... "

0:17:56.8 AS: That's different from this.

0:17:58.0 DL: "That you thought was important." And they're gonna tell me one concept. And then I'm gonna go to the next group and I say, "Okay, what do you have that's different?" And they'll tell me something else. Then I go to the next group, "What do you have that's different?" So I'm doing the exact same process, only with groups. And so I'm limiting redundancies again.

0:18:14.6 AS: And let me ask you a question. If you ended up... When you did the first group, you ended up with let's say 10 things. Then you go out to a group of groups, then you're gonna add probably on another one or two because one group had something that was different. So now you've got a list of 12 things or what happens by the end of that process?

0:18:35.0 DL: Could be. It's gonna distill it down, and sometimes it's phrases or even sentences or things that you wanna have in this operational definition. So at the end of this, you've got this concise document. Now, it's not a flowery paragraph or a statement or anything like that yet, but it is a list of everything that everybody in this room said is very important with this operational definition. And everybody in the room should be able to see how my contribution was folded into the whole. Because I can look at that list and go, "Oh yeah, I was the one. I said that."

0:19:15.8 AS: Because we didn't eliminate... Well, we could have eliminated something. If you had an idea, for instance, about quality work, let's say that it's on time and nobody else underlined that, well, then you can say, "Well, the group really doesn't see that as valuable as I saw it. So, okay, that's off." So we've eliminated some maybe pet peeves or frivolous things, and now we've a solid list.

0:19:37.1 DL: Yeah, and that's exactly what happens.

0:19:38.2 AS: We've got a solid list.

0:19:38.5 DL: Yep, that's exactly what happens.

0:19:41.4 AS: And then once we've got that solid list is what we wanna do then is just say, this is a list of everything, or do we then prioritize it, reduce it down, tighten it? What do we do from that point?

0:19:53.2 DL: Yeah, the answer to those questions is, it depends. [chuckle] So it really depends on what it is you're trying to do at that point. I find that a lot of times we're trying to operationally define something that's been kind of vague in the past, once we get that list and get it to that point, that's about all we need to do right now. We could spend weeks or months arguing about commas and coming up with some kind of statement that brings it all together, but you don't really need to do that because we've all agreed that these are all the things that we think are really important about this concept, and so that is our operational definition. Now, when I used to do this with students in classrooms... Yeah. But I'm gonna define something like quality work or on-time performance or any of those kinds of things or tardiness or anything. I'm trying to get rid of problems, right?

0:20:52.0 AS: Right.

0:20:52.7 DL: And so I'm gonna do any of those kinds of things. At some point, I would stop and have everybody take that list and try to combine those things into a paragraph or a statement.

0:21:03.3 AS: Okay.

0:21:04.8 DL: And have great fun doing that, where everybody's creativity and taking that list of items and turning it into some kinda paragraph that incorporates it. And students are amazing at this stuff. They come up with the most interesting concepts and ways of phrasing things that you could put a group of adults in a room for a year and they'd never come up with something so interesting. So, usually, at that point, I just have people go around and read what they wrote, and maybe we'll take certain phrases, and we could. We could turn it into a paragraph or something that was... Combining all that. But we're using that as a learning experience about how to take concepts and create definitions and paragraphs out of it.

0:21:50.6 AS: So let me try to summarize what we talked about. First, you highlighted the idea of like, wait a minute, what system are we trying to improve? We need to understand that first. And then to optimize that particular system, we need some common definitions. Now, when we started the conversation, I thought we were gonna end up with some really narrow, tight definition. I kinda was interested about where you ended. But before we get to where you ended with this, you talked about doing what you call P³T, or one of your students called it. I think you said paper passing purpose tool.

0:22:24.8 DL: Yeah. P to the third power.

0:22:26.1 AS: Yes. P to the third power T. And basically what you said is, "Don't let that start off as a discussion, because maybe one person could dominate that or try to influence what other people think about it." Rather, get each person to write down their definition of, for instance, we used the idea of what is quality work. And that's a pretty vague thing, so that's a good one for people to write down what are their opinions on it. And that way, they're not tainted by the influence of others. Once they've written it down, then pass it to their right, and let the person on your right underline the items on there that they agree with, and then pass that around. And by the time it comes back to you, you'll find that some of the things that you highlighted are agreed with, and some may not be. Then you basically take that and you go up on the board and say, "Alright, let's start with you." Start with one person and say, "What's one thing on your card that you've written down," and you wrote that down, and then you go to the next person, say, "What's one new thing on there that was not... That's not that?"

0:23:26.3 DL: Something different. That's different.

0:23:28.8 AS: Something that's different. And then you come up with a little bit of a laundry list. It could be five, it could be 10, it could be 12 of different things from that particular group of people. And then you can take it out to a bigger group where you have a series of groups that are doing the same thing. You then go around, you may add some things onto it. And then where I thought it was interesting where you ended with this, David, you said... You were kinda like, "Sometimes you don't have to go further than that right now. Just that is valuable process." And I thought, yeah, that's interesting, because just doing that, you can say we never have to do... 'Cause remember, before I was talking about discovery, and you were like, "I don't know what discovery is. I don't know what you mean." Well, you just described a pretty good process of discovery of what everybody thinks. Now, we don't ever go through that again. Do we have to tightly define that beyond that right now? Maybe not. Maybe we revisit it six months from now and tighten it up.

0:24:24.1 DL: It depends. So let's put this into practice. This is gonna be our definition of quality work. And so now we're gonna put it into practice, and then maybe later on, we can come back and re-look at the list. I've found that when you just have things in a list like that, people are more apt to wanna change it later on than if you have this flowery, nice paragraph that somebody's really worked on everything, and then people are like, I don't really wanna do that. But a lot of times, later on, after it's in practice, people come back and say, "Oh, we said this, but really, that's not really even relevant anymore." We can actually cross that thing off the list. That's not the most important thing. Or you were asking about prioritization. You could do a follow-on, you could do an NGT prioritization, nominal group technique, or you could do... Use just sticky dots to prioritize. Or if you need to. If you need to. But sometimes, most of the learning is in the process. So since every single person was a part of the process, every single person at the end of the process knows the definition of something, because they were a part of it.

0:25:35.9 AS: Yeah, yeah. Well, for the listeners and the viewers out there, what a great step-by-step guide that we can all try to put into practice. But most importantly, it kinda took the intimidation of operational definitions, it took some of that away from me that we're not... It doesn't have to be some... We've worked for hours crafting this statement. No. Here's a list of what we think is important. And that's good enough for a first step. And that, ultimately, is what we're talking about in this particular...

0:26:09.1 DL: And it's fun. It's fun. [chuckle]

0:26:11.8 AS: Yeah. And it's inclusive. It's inclusive. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for the discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners can also learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Operational definitions are clearly defined words, phrases, and concepts that everyone working together agrees to use in the same way. Making assumptions about words like "tardy" or "good" is a fast track to confusion and disengagement. In part 12 of our Deming in Education series, Andrew and David talk about operational definitions in education - for students, faculty, and administrators.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is operational definitions for life and learning. David, take it away.

0:00:30.5 David Langford: So, hello Andrew. And so today, I was thinking about the concept that Deming offered to the world could be very profound, and that's why he called it profound knowledge about looking through stuff and deep and it can see... Seem kind of overwhelming, but at the same time, some of the best concepts or ways to think about things are really pretty simple, actually, and amazing, if you adopt just a few principles consistently and really get it in your psychic about how to operate, it can make life so much easier either for your own children or if you're a teacher in school or administrator or whatever, you might be in education... So one of those concepts is the idea of operational definitions. So one of the elements of profound knowledge is systems thinking or appreciation for a system, and so you have a system whether that be a classroom or maybe you're taking your own children on a summer vacation or whatever it might be, that in itself is a system as well. And a lot of the dysfunction that we deal with, especially in schools, actually is coming from the system itself. In fact, Deming talked about that 94% to 98% of the problem can be systemic, right? And the other 1% or 2% is probably special cause variation.

0:02:21.0 DL: So how do we go about making the common cause variation the norm? [chuckle] Now, in schools, what I was taught as a teacher was how to manage dysfunction. Nobody ever taught me how to prevent dysfunction, I sort of had to figure that out over time, that's where you get experience, and... But how do you actually prevent dysfunction, behavior dysfunction, learning dysfunction... Whatever it might be that you've got going on? Well, one of the simplest ways is to take a look at what you could do with operational definitions, so what do we mean by that? Operational definitions, basically just defining, how are we going to operate? So I'll never forget when I was... I think it was about fourth grade, I'd come in early from lunch and I remember I was sitting on the heat register on the side and the bell rang, and I jumped up and ran to my seat, and just as the teacher came in, seeing me run to my seat, and she pulled me out and I got into really super big trouble over that, et cetera, that because I was running in the classroom, okay. So there is a place where you could start to think about operationally defining about where do you want people to be when the bell rings? Something so simple as that, or if you have people late to school in the morning, well, what does that mean? What do you want them to do? Where do you want to be? How can you operationally define it? In the operation of what's going on, how are we gonna define that?

0:04:17.9 DL: I remember when I first started down this pathway and started thinking about things, I asked about 20 different teachers, I said, "What does on time mean to you? Just pick a card and write that down." Well, we got 20 definitions, and some of them were really good, really excellent and well thought out, and I want people in the room, in their seat with their writing utensils and whatever it might be, but when you start thinking about it in a school with a staff of 20... And if you're a student in that school and you're encountering these 20 different individuals with 20 different operational definitions of being on time, that's likely to cause variation in the system, right? And even from, say, one classroom, and you move to the classroom across the hall, if you could eliminate some of that variation, you're gonna eliminate some of the dysfunction. You know, what do we really want? But it starts to get into... Deming talked about... One of the elements of profound knowledge was understanding psychology.

0:04:38.4 DL: Well, it's the very same thing in the school, so if I'm gonna work together with all the other teachers in the school to come up with a common definition of what is on-time performance, or what does that look like, I may have to give up on some of my pet peeves about what I want, right? So that we end up with a very common definition of what goes on, and why would I do that? Well, because if I do that, chances are I'm not gonna be spending my time dealing with a lot of dysfunction. We've got an operational definition of what this means, and it's the same thing with a paper that you might write or... I remember even in college, many different professors had different criteria for how a title page should be and how it should be spaced and what it should be like and how it should... And if they just as a university gotten together and said, "Hey, at this university, here's a very common way, it's very common in life. Everybody should have a title page which you're gonna hand in the paper and it's gonna look like this". And...

0:06:46.3 DL: You then... So as a student, you wouldn't have to go from professor to professor to professor and learn a different strategy every place you go. So it's that working together to create common definitions that creates function within a system. And why would we wanna do that? Well, as a teacher, I don't wanna deal with all the dysfunction. [chuckle] My job was, I wanted to teach business applications or computer technology, or I wanna teach music or... I don't wanna have to deal with all the stuff that happens on a daily basis. Well, one of the ways to do that is work together to create operational definitions for the good of everyone in the system.

0:07:34.3 AS: And one question I have about that is, is an... Sounds like half of the benefit of an operational definition is agreeing what are not our operational definitions for that particular thing. If you say that 20 people have their opinion, then you have a discussion about that, and everybody agrees that, Okay, we're not gonna do all of those. And, okay, our operational definition may not be the best, and we could change it later. That's actually... That's less important than the idea of constantly communicating different operational definitions, or that's a... Different definitions from people. Would you say that that's half the value of it?

0:08:18.9 DL: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But it takes this thinking, systems thinking for everybody in an organization, whether you're talking about a business or schools or whatever you might be thinking about, to have a common definition of what's happening. Even with my own children, we have five children, my wife and I thought we were so clever one year, it'd been snowing like crazy, and for months and months and months. And so we set up this whole trip to go to Disneyland. And we didn't tell anybody. We just got up one morning like, We're gonna go to school and... And we... My wife gave everybody a card and said, "We're leaving. We're getting out of here. Are you tired of the snow?" And everybody's like, Yeah, yeah, we're getting out. Well, where are we going? And it was a big surprise and... So I don't know. But, yeah, we got everybody there and we're going to all these places, Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland, and we're doing all this stuff and everything. And I noticed about the third night at dinner time, everybody's just kinda depressed. And my wife and I were really frustrated that, What are you... Why are you guys so depressed and everything else? Well, this is all great and everything, and it's fun and everything, and... But we just wanted to go to the beach. 'Cause we live in Montana and we don't have beaches, and they'd never seen the ocean, and...

0:09:45.2 DL: So if we'd just spent a little time operationally defining ahead of time, what do we wanna do in our trip and what would be the most fun thing to do, etcetera, we probably could have saved thousands of dollars of doing stuff that we thought people wanted to do, but instead...

0:10:01.6 AS: And, David, you and your wife would have been sitting in comfortable chairs in the sand...

0:10:07.0 DL: That's right.

0:10:07.1 AS: Relaxing, rather than...

0:10:09.3 DL: Chasing people around, so...

0:10:10.4 AS: Yeah. Another question I have is, say, Okay, what do you do with a situation, I'm thinking about, you're a leader of a school, and you come in, you go, We're gonna set operational definitions. And then you've got all these people like, Oh, that just sounds like engineering, it sounds like a business, and we gotta get all of this and everybody's gotta do the same thing and we gotta all... And you're definitely gonna get a lot of people that say, No, we need variety, and we need all this creativity and that type of thing. How do you draw that line between that tension there?

0:10:41.1 DL: Yeah, you're exactly right. We do wanna promote creativity and we do want to have things different. But I'd much rather have creativity in my history class and kids being very creative around history versus being creative around common practices within the school. And it's not like you can actually, like you said, you're... Let's say you're an administrator coming into a new school, that you can just sit down and just operationally define everything you wanna operationally define. Doesn't really work like that. It's more of a living document or a living way to be, right?

0:11:16.6 AS: Yup.

0:11:19.1 DL: So as you start to see, when... It's often talked about with Deming's profound knowledge, it's like putting on a different pair of tinted glasses. You start to see the world and you start to see everything differently. Well, this is one of those things. As soon as you put on these... These glasses and start to think about operational definitions, you start to see all the kinds of places, dysfunctional places where operational definitions would be great. And basically, it means, How do we agree to operate? So one of the ways that you get rid of the resistance to operational definitions is getting people to agree to operate in a certain way. And on my consulting business, I've got several different tools and practices of ways to do that, how do you quickly get people to agree on something. But the bottom line is, when you're involving them in the process of setting an operational definition, they're much, much, much less likely to not wanna do it in the end, right?

0:12:29.2 AS: Right, right.

0:12:30.4 DL: That's much different than me just coming in as the administrator or whatever authority figure it might be, boss, teacher, administrator or whatever, and I just start telling people, This is the way it's gonna be. Well, if you start doing that, you're gonna have resistance.

0:12:47.5 AS: Yeah. Yup. So then I'm...

0:12:49.2 DL: And then you go to spending all your time dealing with the resistance.

0:12:51.1 AS: And I'm... I guess what I'm taking away from what you're saying is that maybe if that administrator was coming in and he's facing all kinds of problems, whether it's tardiness or whatever, that maybe he works with his team to say, Let's identify our top five problems that are causing us the most variation in our outcome, and let's get some definitions around these things, we don't need to define everything that's happening, but these are things that if we can work on these they can improve our outcomes, and that to me sounds like he'd win a lot of or she would win a lot of support because people are struggling dealing with all these things all the time, like well, Mr. Jensen says that five minutes late is not late. You said it's late, and I don't care whatever, I don't wanna deal with that.

0:13:40.0 DL: And then you got a battle and then you're just dealing with their resistance instead of dealing with the system itself and things that are in vogue now, like standards-based learning. Well, I've talked to different schools, nobody can define it clearly. Nobody can even define it within a district, they all agree that they would like to go forward with that, but there's a good example, if you wanna introduce something or move forward with something and get people on board or committed to doing stuff, hey, let's start operationally defining what is standards-based learning or standards-based grading, and how can we get some clarity around these common terms about what we have. It's also something for the future. So you got a new employee, you've got new teachers coming in, whatever, hey, I'm gonna hand them this document that defines... Okay, we're doing standards-based grading here. Now, it may not be the same exact definition of what you thought about where you came from before, but here's how we think about it, and you could bring new knowledge and creativity to this to help us refine our definitions of what are all these things under this one concept. And so to me, that's how you get continual improvement. It's not...

0:15:08.8 AS: I guess that is a type of training to say, Okay, we've found that these... Once we understand these things, that if you can understand these things, now you're gonna be able to bring a consistency to the students that is gonna be valuable. One last question for me on this is that, let's just say that the kernel, the core of learning is that interaction between the child and the book and the teacher, and the process of going through this discovery, which I'm wondering, when we look at operational definitions, again, someone may say, you're just trying to put rules about all of this stuff, or are you saying that there's a lot of outside things that we've got to resolve so that we can have more time for this real quality learning experience, or are you saying that we even wanna have operational definitions within how we're doing all that learning?

0:16:06.6 DL: Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the term discovery, I have no idea what you're talking about. [chuckle] What are you gonna tell a third grader? Well, we want you to do discovery. What the heck is that? What is discovery and what's the process of discovery that you want them to go through? Well, when you go to the library and randomly grab three books, spend a little time thumbing through them, there's a process to discovery. You don't just leave it up to the randomness of people that already know how to do that, right? Your job is to optimize a system, so you want everybody to be able to do discovery-type kinds of things, and when somebody comes up with a new innovative way that they do discovery, say in science or something, okay, let's hear that and let's try that, let's do maybe a miniature PDSA and let's have everybody try it and see what we learn from that and see if this is a better process for the process of discovery. And there you go.

0:17:16.0 AS: So then for the listeners and viewers out there, there you go, David called me out right there. I'm coming out with vague statements without providing operational definitions, and there is the benefit of it. And I was just thinking about what does discovery mean to me? I think it means something different from what it means to others. As a financial analyst, the way I did discovery is I find the strongest opponent to this idea and the strongest supporter to this idea, and I try to get them on the phone.

0:17:45.6 DL: But there's a process right there, that's a process of discovery.

0:17:48.9 AS: Yeah.

0:17:50.4 DL: And it's not like you have to be locked into a definition, you could have five or six different processes of discovery that you want people to choose from, or if you've got your own, let's define what that is. Right?

0:18:11.4 AS: Yeah.

0:18:11.9 DL: But as soon as you start to do that, you start to get clarity and then you start to see, Well, if it doesn't work, but we defined it well, let's go back and re-look at our definition and redefine it. And you could define things just in a paragraph, in words, in sentences, but you can also define things with flow charts, process charts, ways to look at things, those are also operational definitions.

0:18:39.8 AS: So this brings me to... I think my closing thought on it is, it brings me to the idea of PDSA, it brings me to the idea of how do we gain knowledge in our company or in our school, let's say, and how do we make sure that we don't lose knowledge, like we're constantly losing... We understood that before, but nobody uses the manual anymore, and those people left, and now we're back to...

0:19:08.1 AS: Going back to the same process and what I... The breakthrough I had when I really started to understand what Deming was talking about, was that if you're constantly going back and looking, Okay, what is discovery? Okay, we've just taught it... This definition, we've just taught it for a year, what did we learn, how can we improve it? Oh, there's three different ways that we now see and then how do we learn and how do we continue to modify that definition until it's a clear definition in our organization and what that does in a business is it builds a competitive strength that your competitor doesn't have because they haven't been rethinking and improving their knowledge and sustaining that knowledge and bringing it up to another level, and that is the concept of competitive advantage in the business world that I just think is such a breakthrough, and I would say that Toyota is probably the one that really built so much into their "just in time" and their Lean and all of that type of stuff, and that they built a whole system of brilliant knowledge within it. How would you relate that back to the classroom and school and organization?

0:20:12.2 DL: Well, it's... You're basically doing the same thing in a classroom, if you're a teacher in a school, you're getting a competitive edge, just so to speak, not that you're competing against anybody else really, but you're optimizing things in a way. I just remember after a few years, I'd have teachers come in to visit my classroom to see what was going on and they couldn't understand what was happening because they'd say, Well, you're just not dealing with stuff that I deal with every day. And a lot of that came from working with the kids when they came in and we'd set operational definitions about when do you need to be in your seat? There's times that, yeah, you need to be in your seat and there's times that, no, that's really stupid, you know what, I don't want you in your seat and so let's get some clarity right at the very beginning of the school year so that we're not dealing with that all the way... All the way through the school year.

0:21:15.0 AS: Right, so let me try to wrap this up, we talked about a lot of stuff, but ultimately our topic was operational definitions for life and learning, we talked about how operational definitions can make your life easier. We also talked about the idea of understanding systems and systems thinking, and that a lot of dysfunction is coming from the system and operational definitions can help you try to actually prevent that dysfunction or eliminate it because now those things are clear. And also, what I heard from you too, is the idea that different definitions, if you allow many different definitions to go on, you are adding variation to your system, and therefore you're bringing trouble for yourself, and then also we got into this discussion about what is discovery and what is the process of discovery? And then we came up with the operational definitions that we could have two or three of them, but ultimately that we discuss it, we work on it, and then if we can build it into our organization, then it's something that we're building step-by-step, competency in what we do. Is there anything else you would add to that?

0:22:32.6 DL: Yeah, in one of the podcasts we did, we spent a lot of time on optimization, and this is around that concept, how do you optimize a class for peak performance, meaning you're getting the highest number of students to the highest level possible within the shortest amount of time, you're optimizing what's going on within that. Well, one of the ways you do that is setting operational definitions, working together with people to set those definitions. I guarantee you, you will see performance go up as a whole, which is your job.

0:23:08.2 AS: Fantastic. Well, that was a great episode with a lot of stuff. David, on behalf of everybody at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for the listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Listeners, you can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com and this is your host Andrew Stotz and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, are you ready? "People are entitled to joy in work."

Dr. Deming listed 7 Deadly Diseases of Management in Out of the Crisis, and one of the more surprising is #3: Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review. In this episode, David and Andrew discuss the harmful practice of awarding "teacher of the year," "student of the month," or other traditional recognition practices. David also offers practical suggestions for alternatives.

TRANSCRIPT

Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is the deadly disease of having an employee of the month. David, take it away.

Langford: Yeah, this is actually one of my favorite topics. So I thought it'd be fun for us to talk about it today. So…

Stotz: You just may win employee of the month by, coming up with this. Huh?

Langford: There you go. So right away, if you don't understand any teachings about Dr. Deming or background or things like that, you might be saying what do you mean? And maybe, maybe you were employee of the month one month or teacher of the year or student of the month or whatever we wanna think about in terms of singling people out. So what's wrong with that? And how could that be a deadly disease? Well, in one of the previous podcasts, we were talking about special and common cause variation. And we kind of went through that and talked a little bit about what Deming called deadly diseases. And he just said that there's two deadly diseases; treating special cause variation as if it's common, and treating common cause variation as if it's special.

Langford: So why is having employee of the month a deadly disease? Because it falls into category number two, you're taking common cause variation in the system and treating it as if it's special. And it happens everywhere. It happens in the military, it happens in schools and we've been sold a bill of goods years ago in management. And it's become pervasive in the way people think about what to do. So a manager doesn't know what to, what to do to motivate their people. And they think their job is to motivate people. So they say, wow, we'll have a teacher of the year or we'll have employee of the month or employee of the week. And that ought, that ought to have fixed things, right? Stotz: Student of the week, student of the month.

Langford: Student of the week, make people happier. So I'll never forget, when my, one of my daughters was in third grade and she came home and she had a certificate as a student of the month. And, I looked at it and cuz she brought it up to me and showed it and she was somewhat proud, proud of it. And I looked at it and then I did, I was thinking, how do I handle this? Because I know the problems that psychologically these things can cause and bullying and all kinds of things that can result from it. And so I looked at the certificate and I looked at her and I said, well, honey, tell me this. So what did you do this month? That was especially great, that sort of singled you out overall the rest of the losers in the class. So and she looked at me and she looked at the certificate, she did that a couple times and then she got this big grin on her face. And then she looked up at me and she said, dad, you know it was my turn.

Stotz: We have 360 students, 365 students in the class and they give it every day. So we all get it at some point, Dad.

Langford: Yeah. So, yeah. So in third grade she saw through this, she knew it's, this is just this silly game, dreamed up by the people who are running the place. and even as a student is, is if you figure out that this is, this is nuts, can you do anything about it? Well, not without becoming insubordinate or sent to the principal's office or… right?

There's obviously something wrong with you if you've pointed out a problem with the system about, how they're managing everybody in the system. Instead, we should be saying, 'Hey, well, tell me more about that. Why, you know what, what's the problem with that?' And student a month, can you be student of the month, nine months in a row?

Stotz: Yeah, that was what I was gonna say. Cuz you could also have an abuse, one abuse of it is just to kind of randomly go through students. Another abuse is constantly giving it to one person.

Langford: Yeah. I always ask people that don't believe that they're doing anything wrong or damaging to children with these kinds of things that they'll say, oh, well, you know I can judge or I can, pick out who's who's best or whatever. Well again, can you be student of the month nine months in a row? And I've done this for 40 years now and I've never had a teacher say, 'well yes,' but statistically the answer is yes if you have a student that actually is exceptional and deserving of being pointed out to other people as, as the top student, well, they probably just don't do that one month out of nine. Right? They're probably working like that or being like that all the time. And you're not actually helping them sort of cope with the situation when you're singling them out above everybody else and then pointing to them as the model.

Stotz: So, and if we go back to the basics and we think about that goodhearted teacher or administrator who's thought, 'Hey, I wanna bring recognition. I want to, I want people to feel better about, things and so Hey, employee of a month, what a great idea.' They're coming from a good intention, but you know… Tell us more about that.

Langford: Dr. Deming said we are being killed by good intentions. And, that's exactly right. And he often talked about too, sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. If you, if you don't really understand what it is you're doing and the effects of it, and maybe you're just doing what was done to you, passed down from one generation to the next, etcetera, etcetera, and you don't really understand what it is you're doing, you'd be much better off just to do nothing. Do none of those things. It's always fascinating to me, schools that have a lot of bullying also have a lot, lot of this singling people out and pointing them out as either on the top end or the low end of the system, etcetera. And then what happens after school? Well, I'll show you student of the month. It kind of reminds me of that bumper sticker.

Langford: There's bumper stickers that say my, my student was student of the month at such and such elementary, etcetera. And then there's the bumper stickers that say my student beat up the student of the month or beat up your student. I've seen those where people are, they're proud of of that, or they think it's funny or whatever it might be. This is tampering, with society and with the systems and management and people's feelings and all kinds of things. And it has long lasting effects that we have no idea what we've done to students 60, 70 years later.

My own mother who died at 86, she often would tell a story about, that she really loved to draw and etcetera, etcetera. And then she got into an elementary classroom and they were in an art class and they were supposed to draw something.

Langford: And, teacher chose only the best drawings to put on the wall. And these, these are the best drawings. From that point on, she decided she couldn't draw. And for the next 80 years, she would not ever even attempt a stick figure or anything because of that one small instance where we, when to hold somebody up and say here, why can't you be like this person? And it's very damaging. So what, what to do instead, right? Yeah. What are we doing instead? So let's say that you're in a classroom and you do have somebody doing some something exemplary, whether that's writing a paper, making a drawing, performing on a musical instrument or whatever it might be. And, instead of pointing them out and giving them some kind of an award or student of the month award or whatever it might, one thing that you could do is honor them by allowing them to share what it is they've done.

Langford: I got this idea actually from Dr. Deming, but Hey, here's something really exemplary. And the way I would approach it is I would come back to that student and say, I really like what you've done here. This is, this is really amazing. Would you be willing to share with everybody else in the class, how you did this? How did you work this through? Now, that's much different than me coming in and saying, oh, this is the student of the week. And I'm so I'm so proud of Johnny and da, da, da, da, and all the rest of the students in the class look at that and say, well, obviously he's brown nosing the teacher and or they come up with some kind of a reason about why you're doing that.

Totally different if I say, Hey, in this last project, there were several really interesting projects and I've asked a couple people if they'd share what they did and how they did it and how they worked that through. And they've agreed to share that. And so maybe they read their short story or whatever, but then we're gonna ask them, well, how did you do that? How did you think that through and how did you create the plot and what did you do to do that? Well, when you're honoring somebody in that way, the rest of the people in the class are sitting there listening to that, and they're thinking, 'oh, oh, that's how they did that.' Right? It's not just saying, oh, you're, you're just, you're just an innate great person. Right? You actually did something that enabled you to do something great.

Langford: And so other people in the class could start to say, 'oh, I could do that.' And it's an amazing thing. Like in elementary schools, something so simple as a student says, well, the way I did this is I found a place at home that was quiet and I made sure I went there every day and worked on this paper in that quiet place.

Well, we could now take that special cause, right? And we could transfer that common cause. And we got a discussion in a class, Hey, everybody in the class, think of some quiet place that you could work, or you could do something. I remember one elementary school, there was one, one child that consistently kept doing really well. And they said, well, how do you do this? And he said, well, I got a desk at home. And it was a very, very poor school. And, kids were coming from very, very poor families, etcetera. And teacher found out that almost only one child out of 30 had actually had a desk of their own at school. So she started asking the students, what can we do about this? And students came up with, I thought was an ingenious idea. And they got old cardboard boxes and they all created their own desks.

Langford: And that became a class project. And everybody took their own desk home and was information that goes home to the parents that says, Hey, it's really great. If your child spends some time at their desk each night when they're doing their homework or getting caught up on things or what they're working through. So special causes are not always bad. Sometimes they can teach us things that can be applied to the entire system that can make a big difference.

Stotz: And, so what I wanna understand now, let's just imagine that, okay, we start to kind of celebrate something about a student. I have a student of mine in my ethics class that I teach and that guy did a picture of the whole class on one big piece of paper and he laminated and he gave it to me. And it's just amazing. Now it's not the way I think, cuz I think more linearly, but he really liked pictures. But for the people in the class and others that I've shown it to, it really helped them kind of pull it all together. So that was, sharing, trying to get him to share, what he's doing.

Langford: But it's not just what, what he did it has to be how he did it. Right? That's what you have to get them to share. Otherwise it comes off as an award. I'm awarding this person because I'm gonna, I'm gonna get, have them come up and share that they did this great thing. Well, the thing is great and I'm sure everybody in the class could see, wow, that's, that's really awesome. But if you want to transfer that to other people doing great stuff, they have to have kind of some insight about 'how did you do that?' And would you be able, willing to sort of teach side class on how to do this for other people that might wanna do this?

Langford: I think that's, that's a fantastic honor. You're still honoring that individual and rewarding them in a way. If you wanna think of it that way, because think what you've done, you've taken the class time of everybody to allow this one individual to share something. Well, that's a great honor. It's a huge honor within that. But as a teacher, you want a large number of the other students to start to be able to do these kinds of things, right? You'd like to see the same level of development, same level of capability, with a lot of other people. So you have to think about, well, how are we gonna get there? Well, one way to get there is to have these students explain it.

Stotz: And you can imagine an employee of the month. I know how it goes. in companies that people are like, 'oh my God, tomorrow's the deadline for employee of the month? Who should we do?'

Langford: 'We gotta, we gotta cram for employee the month.'

Stotz: Yeah so the point is, is that, a lot of times just like performance reviews, it's just some mad rush at the end. Is what you're saying that instead of doing an employee of the month type of reward, that what we should be doing is incorporating that in our daily life, instead of saying, incorporating, seeing things that are happening that are valuable for the whole group and bringing that to light on a regular basis, rather than setting on every month, we're gonna do this or something like that. How would you describe it from that perspective?

Langford: Yeah. I thought of another example. I remember one time my flights were all messed up and connections were bad and I was supposed to start a seminar at, for the military the next morning and I was actually staying on the base hotel and so I got in really late. It was like one o'clock in the morning or one thirty and then I had to get up and I was tired and exhausted anyway. So I go to check in and this person that's checking me in is, they're doing a really great job and, talking to me and everything else. And then I happen to look up on the wall as employee of the month. And I can't stand it, I have to say something. I said, 'wow, I didn't, I didn't realize I was talking to employee of the month.' And she got all embarrassed and everything. And I said, so what did you do this month? That was so awesome. And she said again, she said, 'it was my turn.'

Langford: So if you think about it, all the money spent making the picture, giving the honor. They probably had some kind of award ceremony where they had brought all the employees in and you, you had to be there. And then she gets announced as employee of the month, and are you happy for the employee of the month? But immediately psychologically. And that's what Deming talked about with profound knowledge is psychologically, you start to think about, well, I worked hard this month, and the person next to me, I know was working really hard this month. Why, why didn't they get employee the month? And so then your mind immediately starts to wonder, oh, well it's gotta be some kind of game or there's something going on. Or the manager just likes her that there's some kind of sexual thing happening or all kinds of crazy stuff can happen.

Langford: But if you took the exact same thing where you said we have an employee and things were crazy one night and this person handled it with grace and ease and organized things and everything. And I'd like so and so to explain to us, how did you do that? How do you cope with that? How did you sort of hamper down the angst that was coming your way and how did you deal with that? And what did you think of, and you could actually learn something from somebody who's done something really exemplary.

Stotz: You could imagine that person saying, well, what I did is I stepped from out being, I stepped from behind the counter and I went to the person that was most vocal. And I talked to them about where are you going? 'Yeah, it's a birthday I'm trying to get there. I'm so frustrated. I've been delayed' and other, okay. I tried to listen to them and try to, then, if I could convince that person to just hang on or whatever, and that type of thing is the type of thing that we could learn from it. So maybe I can summarize what, what I'm taking away from it. The first thing you talked about was the idea of treating a common cause as a special cause the employee of the month, when in fact, it's just a rotation in that case really.

Stotz: You also talked about the idea that, be careful because signaling… Singling out one person can lead to bullying. If you put someone on a pedestal, someone's gonna say 'I'm gonna knock 'em down.' So that's also kind of an unintended consequences of that. And then you also highlighted, this one I thought was interesting was the impact on non recipients, how do people feel? And that didn't get it. And, now you also talked about the idea of maybe an alternative is letting someone share, you see something impressive, interesting, different, let them share. And in particular you said, have them share how they did it, not what they did, but how they did it so that people can learn. Because yeah, if, if a guy started sharing how he did this drawing and stuff, it may not mean that much to me cuz I'm more linear.

Stotz: But if he talked about it, you know what, instead of talking about what he did, if he talked about, well, I thought, how do I make these connections between this? And I did it through this, but you could do it through that. And then you also talked about honoring and rewarding, and trying to give people a chance to share. And then the last thing I thought about what you said is of an employee saying, 'but wait a minute, I worked hard this month too.' is this just favoritism? Is this just a game? Is this just a random thing? Those are…

Langford: Maybe I should only work hard when the manager's watching.

Stotz: Exactly. exactly- how do I game this thing? All right. Well, anything you would add?

Langford: Yeah, just, you made me think of a, another quick story, but in one of my seminars with teachers, we're going over this very concept and I was trying to get them to think about ways that they could operate differently to optimize their whole class or the school, etcetera. Anyway, at the break, a teacher came up to me and he said, oh my gosh. He said, this happened to me. I said, what do you mean? He said, ah, he said, well, I got outta college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I ended up getting a job at, selling insurance at this insurance company and everything. Well, they had all these extrinsic rewards and he said at, at first it was, just really great, sell so many policies and you could win a trip to Aruba and you, you can do this. And then they're always having to dream up, dream up a new, a new cuz you have to keep upping the ante if you want to keep seeing people sort of jump through the hoops to get there. He said after about five years of that, he said I was so sick of playing that game and being manipulated. And he said, and basically I had won everything that they could come up with.

Langford: And I just got to thinking about what's the, what's the, what do I really enjoy? And what's the really purpose of being here. And he said, I quit and got my teaching degree. Now I'm a teacher and I make half as much money or less than I did before. And he said, but I'm happy. This is a rewarding profession of what I'm doing. And I don't wanna see this same kind of manipulation coming into the system. He said that I'm kingly aware of this with my own students. And 'is the administration trying to bring this kind of thinking in to manipulate me' cause he's been through it.

Stotz: Yep. So to wrap it up, I think I'm just gonna challenge the listeners, the viewers, if you've got employee of the month, if you've got student of the month, if you've got teacher of the month going on, this is permission to start questioning it, start discussing it, start thinking about alternatives because there are many, many challenges that David's raised today. So David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. I think it was very interesting for listeners.

Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, David, what's the best way that people can contact you if they wanna learn more,

Langford: Probably the best way and the quickest way is just to go to our website, which is at langfordlearning.com

Stotz: Great. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I wanna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work.