What are unhurried conversations, and why should managers prioritize them? In this episode, David Langford and host Andrew Stotz talk about the kinds of conversations managers should be having with their team members.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today, we continue our discussion of Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discusses in The New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. In the third edition, that's page 86. And in the second edition, that's page 125. So we are talking about item number 13, and in that point, I wanna read it to you. It says, "Number 13, he will hold an informal unhurried conversation with every one of his people at least once a year, not for judgment, merely to listen. The purpose would be development of understanding of his people, their aims, hopes and fears. The meeting will be spontaneous, not planned ahead." We're calling today's conversation the unhurried conversation. David, take it away.

0:01:17.5 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again. So always fun to discuss these points and talk about the depth of what it means and how to work through that. So once again, this all sounds really simple. You know, hey, just have this unhurried conversation with people at least once a year. When I talked to Dr. Deming about this years ago, he was recommending more like once a quarter, if you can do that, to work that through. But what are we really talking about? So in this world of managing with data and KPIs, key performance indicators and, you know, holding people's feet to the fire and really making them toe the line and all that kinda stuff, Deming is sort of just pretty much kind of the opposite. Those things all have their place and time, but that's not the kind of conversation that he's hinting at here or he's talking about here.

0:02:24.4 DL: I find it really interesting that he says, you know, it shouldn't be... The meeting will be spontaneous and not planned ahead. And so what he's getting at is that you're not, you're now coming in with an agenda for what you wanna hear from somebody. And on the opposite side, as an employee or somebody that you're working with, they're not prepared with some kind of an agenda where they're telling you what they think they... Where they're telling you what they think you want to hear, kind of thing. And I think that's what he is talking about why it needs to be spontaneous. He also goes deeper and he talks about, you know, find out people's aims and hopes and their fears and what's happening. And I was just thinking about that movie The Intern where the guy is hired in the company and he is 80 years old, and so they're doing the interview with him. And this young kid asked him the question, where do you see yourself in five years? I think, he looks at it and says, "You mean when I'm 85?" So, different...

0:03:47.4 AS: Dead.

0:03:48.1 DL: Yeah. Different points of life, different ways to think about it. So yeah. But he's just talking about, hey, just set up a time, be spontaneous, come in, sit down with somebody, and just not necessarily talking about business. Right? What are your hopes and fears and where do you see us going? And do you think we're on the right track? And...

0:04:13.2 AS: I'm curious, why do you think that... I mean, in some ways it seems like such an obvious thing. Why do you think he even needed to say this?

0:04:18.7 DL: Because it's not happening and it's even even worse today, I think, than in Deming's time in the 1990s when all this, all the computer technology, KPIs, all that stuff was just coming into being. Well, nowadays, it's sort of just a way of life to have all that kind of stuff. And I, I hate the phrase about being data managed or managing with data or data-driven. That's what it is. Well, we're a data-driven school district, and we make all of our decisions. Well, there's a lot of problems with that, just the word "driven" kind of drives people a little bit crazy about stuff. And really, the data is just there just to be informed. So you could still make informed good decisions, but I think Deming even talked about if you just make decisions just based on the data, you're probably gonna go out of business because you're not really paying attention to the people and what's really going on in the organization, what's happening and that type of thing.

0:05:34.4 DL: So it can also be really intimidating if you're the boss, and you're just popping in and saying, hey, you got a few minutes, you wanna sit and talk for a while? Because especially if you're in an organization where you've always... Or your predecessor, or you've always had an agenda for that meeting, it can be somewhat threatening for people. I know when I was a superintendent and I tried to do this with the principals that I was working with and stuff, and one of them, I'll never forget, she was just, she was just shaking the whole time. And I just had to say just, let's just sit here a minute and just calm down and what are you so nervous about? And just get to know her and everything else. Well, always before, the person before that had been the boss had come in and only time you had a meeting was when something was wrong.

0:06:42.7 DL: And she was gonna get ripped into. And so her fear was super great like that. Also found teachers just the same way that when as a new superintendent, I'd walk into their classroom just... I just wanted to sit and watch what's going on and maybe help out or participate or do whatever. And they'd just be almost shaking in their boots that the boss came in today. And what I found out is that it wasn't until at least six or seven months of doing that just spontaneously popping in, observing, watching what's happening, et cetera. Maybe chatting with them a little bit afterwards or doing something like that, that pretty soon that started to go away and people started to sort of function on a normal level. So one of Deming's 14 points in Out of the Crisis was pretty simple, drive out fear.

0:07:42.8 DL: And I think that's also what he's alluding to here is, here's a way that you can drive out fear, you know? And at the same time, just really get to know people. I've done a lot of study with neuroscience and the science of how do we actually think and et cetera. And there's a lot of that in neuroscience as well, that if you have a very fearful situation, you actually downshift and your brain actually shuts down. It goes into the survival mode of... And you're not gonna think creatively about a different option. You're simply trying to find out, what do I have to do to get out of this situation? And I think that's a lot of what Deming's talking about here is, hey, you gotta have these meetings and spontaneous and make it a joyful experience and just talk to people about what they wanted to have happen.

0:08:41.3 DL: Other thing I'll never forget in his seminars, he used to talk about this point or these points and stuff, and he said the purpose of the conversation is not for me to find out how you're doing. He said, I wanna know how I'm doing. And I remember the first time as a superintendent, sitting down with people and say, tell me about how I'm doing. They would look at me just kind of blankly like, what? Yeah. Well, how do you think I am doing with this job? And what do you think I need to be doing differently? And I always found those conversations really interesting, and again, it wasn't until like the second or third time having conversations with people that they actually started to tell you stuff that was useful. Because they don't wanna tell you something and then you end up firing them. So they have to have trust that you really do wanna find out how to improve, how to get better, so.

0:09:48.8 AS: Yeah, it's interesting. When I worked for Pepsi, when I first got out of university, it was three years I worked at Pepsi, and I would say we probably never had one company outing that I could remember. And in Thailand, I remember when I worked at one of my first jobs as a broker, and I was an analyst, and there was a questionnaire passed around, this was 25 years ago, that was questionnaire passed around, "Would you like to wear a company uniform to work?" And I said, well, obviously no. I was like, yeah, no.

0:10:27.9 AS: And then, I was stunned to see the results that majority of people said yes. And that's when I realized like, what Thais value in work is the comradery and the connection and the closeness. And they appreciate the relationship. And so therefore, you also have outings and things that we do and parties and go bowling or go hiking. And those things are where some of these unhurried conversations happen. Oh, well, yeah, this is what's going on at my home and with my family, and this is why I'm struggling and all that. And so what I realized in American culture, it's just not that common. You go into work, work's work.

0:11:14.4 DL: Yeah. So I'd say my last comment on this is that it's really not so much about work. I mean, it is work related, and obviously, there's an employee employer relationship going on, et cetera, but it's more about what you just talked about, really getting to know somebody, really getting to understand them. And again, back to neuroscience, I used to advise teachers all the time to try to do the same thing or at least do an exercise with kids. What's your aim? And have kids actually set aims and hopes and fears? And if you can do that very same thing. Where do you aim to be? And et cetera. Because if you have a second grader who wants to be an astronaut, and soon as you find that out, well, there's all kinds of ways you can tie everything that they're learning to eventually becoming an astronaut. And suddenly, everything that they're learning becomes relevant, and relevance is the key.

0:12:20.3 AS: Yeah. And the next year, they may say they want to become such and such, and then take that and run with it. You know? One of the last thing I would say about this that I always say when my students are giving their final presentations in my Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp, is I say, okay, now the last thing I want to tell you before you present is we're on the same team. Which I'm trying to convey to them that although I'm gonna critique you and I'm gonna challenge you and all that, we're here together for the same purpose.

0:12:54.6 DL: Yeah. I'm gonna give you feedback, but yeah, we're both here to accomplish the same aim, so.

0:13:01.4 AS: Yeah. So I love the unhurried conversation. So any last thing you wanna add to this before we wrap up?

0:13:08.9 DL: No, that's pretty much it. So I think we don't wanna make it too much out of it. I mean, it is on face value, it is pretty much what it says, have these conversations and understand who people are. And you'll find out that pays off in multiple ways down the road.

0:13:29.7 AS: So I'll wrap up by just saying to the listeners and the viewers out there, start today. Start today to have an unhurried conversation that's not connected to performance, compensation, company goals. It's an unhurried conversation to have two human beings sit down and take an interest in each other. And that's really the challenge I think that we got from this discussion. 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. 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.

Quotas, arbitrary targets, work standards with numerical goals - these don't seem to apply to schools. But, as John Dues and host Andrew Stotz discuss, quotas show up a lot in classrooms, causing harm and preventing improvement.

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 John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 17, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away.

0:00:34.3 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah we've been working our way through these 14 Principles for Systems Transformation. Last week or last episode we did eliminate slogans and exhortations. And so we're on to principle 11, which is Eliminate Arbitrary Numerical Targets. So I'll start with the overview. So principle 11, eliminate arbitrary numerical targets in the form of work standards that prescribe quotas for teachers and numerical roles for people in management, substitute leadership in order to achieve continual improvement of quality and productivity. And the first thing I wanted to start with was just this really powerful Deming quote on quotas. In Out of the Crisis, he said, "A quota is a fortress against improvement of quality and productivity totally incompatible with never-ending improvement." I just love that quote because it's just such a forceful pushback in the other direction. It's a fortress against improvement. There's really no gray area there in that quote.

0:01:43.0 AS: It's not a fort, it's not a barrier, it is a fortress.

0:01:48.2 JD: Fortress. It kind of brings together a mental image in your mind when you hear fortress, a fortress against quality, a fortress against improvement. So why did he say that? One of the things that's interesting is, especially thinking about work standards that prescribe some type of quota for teachers, it's like, well, when you think of a quota, you typically think of a worker and some type of production facility. And that, of course, is largely what Deming was talking about with his Point 11 'cause he was doing a lot of work in manufacturing and that type of setting. However it does, like all of this stuff, it translates into education. And, you know, so that's why I decided to keep Principle 11 'cause it does show up in different ways in the classroom setting. And I think examples are really good because when I initially read this quote and I was thinking, well, how do quotas show up in a classroom setting?

0:02:40.5 JD: And I thought of one that really stood out from when I was a principal here at one of our middle schools here in Columbus, at United Schools Network. We, we had this quota of sorts for homework. So in the middle school where I was, teachers had to assign homework nightly in their classes to students. And they had to grade two to three of those assignments a week and then return the graded assignments to students within 24 hours. And as I stopped and read this particular principle, and I thought about how it applied to my time as a principal, I really learned that that was the wrong approach. And as you start to think about that and reflect on it, you start to think about why Deming said quotas are a fortress against improvement. And there's this...

0:03:31.5 AS: And before you go... Before you go on, I just wanna highlight how normal that sounds.

0:03:38.4 JD: Very normal. Yeah. Very normal.

0:03:39.8 AS: And anybody here, like the first thing I'm gonna do or the first thing I do when I take over as principal is I'm gonna require that there's a minimum amount of this, and it has to be da, da, da, da, da. And it just seems like it is the responsible thing to do as a manager.

0:03:56.4 JD: Yeah. And there was a noble premise behind the quota, and that was that students needed frequent feedback on their work in order to learn. That was the premise, right? So it was this work standard, it was well-intentioned, but like a lot of these things that Deming talks about and quotas are no different, is the actual effect was that teachers spent less time giving feedback and more time grading this high volume of work. So this is what happens when you have a quota, is the focus became meeting the quota, grading the two to three assignments per week, rather than giving that quality feedback to students. So in this case, this sort of numerical target for graded assignments, then superseded the quality of the feedback. And this is, this is what happens, I think, generally speaking, with quotas and practice.

0:04:56.3 JD: And so when you step back and you think about that particular quota, you say, well, what was the teacher's job? Was it grading two to three homework assignments per week or was it giving students quality feedback? And it really couldn't be both. It couldn't be both those things. So then I started thinking about, well, what would've been a better approach? You know, had I had the Deming lens when I was a principal, I think the thing that I would've done is start with, well, let's come up with a sort of a well articulated aim for why we give homework. And included in that process, or included was, developing a process so that students received timely and high quality feedback 'cause that's really what this was about. So I think that sort of brings to mind substituting leadership, that second part of the principle.

0:05:58.4 JD: And in this case, I think, you know what I should have done is replace those work standards or that quota with some type of a better understanding of the job of the teacher. So, you know, I think in doing that, then I also... Leads to higher quality work-life for teachers. I would say, in thinking about this homework example, time spent grading homework was probably the number one complaint that I got from teachers. And this better approach to the two, three, assignments per week quota would've been to work with teachers to design a better system. Like how could we design a system that would give them the time to deliver high quality feedback to students on a timely basis? That was really the aim. And that's really where I should have concentrated my time as a principal. But again, I didn't have that Deming lens 10 years ago when I was serving as a, as a principal in our network. And reading the Deming stuff, it was very quickly like, oh, aha. Like, here's how I should have been thinking about this. Rather than being so hyper-focused on: you gotta grade those two to three assignments every single week.

0:07:29.9 AS: I like the word substitute leadership, you know, and Dr. Deming said that a lot. And the best way that I've kind of tried to explain it, and it just happened recently, where a client of mine was talking about having what they would consider to be underperforming staff. And they were older. They'd been with the company for a long time, and like the mindset is not there. And so their idea was to use KPIs as a way of basically catching these people out and then eventually firing them from the company. I'm making it kinda crude, but that's kind of the way it came across.

0:08:09.7 AS: Yeah.

0:08:10.1 JD: And I was like, wait a minute, let's just get down to the meat of this. The fact is, is that you hired these people [laughter] and you led these people for 20 years, who's responsible for this? And then I said, look, don't substitute leadership... Don't substitute KPI for leadership 'cause people say, so if I don't have KPIs or I don't have this, how am I gonna manage the people who aren't performing? I'm like, you know the people who aren't performing, they're probably in the wrong job. They may be in the wrong company, they may be the wrong thing, I don't know, but you need to talk to them and work it out and figure out a solution, that's leadership. But hiding behind some sort of quota or target and thinking that that's gonna solve the problem, no, that's why we need leadership.

0:09:06.4 AS: Yeah. And knowing the staff that I was working with at the time, the group of teachers, I am sure I am 100% sure that we as a group could have come up with a way, a better way to do our feedback system than the way it was set up. I have, I have no doubt. If we said, look, this actually isn't really working that well for teachers the time it's taking just to grade the homework. The kids, the students are, do they really need homework every single night? And when they're getting these papers back in the morning, do they have any time to actually look at whatever feedback is provided? Sometimes it was pretty minimal. Sometimes there was, depending on the teacher and the assignment, sometimes there was some feedback there. But are we giving kids time to look at that and actually learn from that feedback in any way? And so, again, you know, well-intentioned as it was, the volume superseded the, you know, the quality of the feedback. So I can think of all types of ways that I would sort of redo that system in retrospect with a clear aim is where I would start, what's the aim of this? Whether it's homework or classwork or whatever it is.

0:10:23.9 AS: And with technology now too, it's just such, it's gotten a lot easier. Such as give the students a five question online quiz that tests the topic that you taught that day. Then accumulate the data and understand what was the hardest one or two questions. Then in the first 10 minutes of class or five minutes of class, say, okay, last night's assignment, the hardest question was number three. And now I'm gonna randomly select one person to tell me how did you answer number three? And then let's have a discussion on that. And then that way you're getting feedback. It's the same thing I did with Feedback Friday just 'cause you were talking about feedback. Where everybody wanted, they requested in my Valuation masterclass bootcamp, they requested more feedback and I designed Feedback Friday where I gave them the exact assignment, then a certain number of them will present their work, the ones who volunteer in this case, and then they present their work on Friday. And then I give feedback that everybody witnesses and can learn from.

0:11:44.8 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think there's so many different ways, like what you're describing to set up the practice, to set up the feedback system, to have students pair up or someone present their work or you know, there's all types of better ways that would would've saved a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of headache. There were many, many ways we could have redesigned that system.

0:12:06.4 AS: And why use the word arbitrary? You've said eliminate arbitrary numerical targets. We've talked about the numerical aspect of it, but why do you say arbitrary?

0:12:19.5 JD: Yeah. I wrote an article that actually called them arbitrary and capricious goals. So not just arbitrary, but also capricious, but yeah.

0:12:26.8 AS: What does capricious mean? How would you define it?

0:12:28.4 JD: Well, it's sort of the same as arbitrary. It's sort of like without any sort of grounding in logic or reality. [laughter] Flippant, sort of, I think I have that right. You can fact check me on that definition. But that's actually a perfect segue into that 'cause there's that second part of the principle that talks about also eliminating numerical goals for people and management. So not just teachers, but also school or network leaders. And we've talked a lot about, and across the series about various types of targets that exist in education. But I think it's still worth discussing a few points. Like what does arbitrary mean in this setting?

0:13:07.2 AS: And capricious means "given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior." [laughter]

0:13:12.5 JD: Yeah, and I think in that article I've used capricious because in education, you know that the targets are changing so often, especially associated with test scores or other sort of parts of state accountability systems. One year it's some type of label, another year it's letter grades that schools are rated on. Now in Ohio we're given star ratings. So they've gone away from A to F and now it's schools get rated based on a five star system. And so that's what I mean by capricious. It's just...

0:13:42.4 AS: So five is A?

0:13:44.5 JD: Five is good. Yeah, five is good. Five is an A, I suppose. If there's a difference between a star, a five star and an A, I don't know, [laughter], but that's the new thing here in the Buckeye state. Yeah, but so back to the management. I think, well one thing I think when you're talking about teams or departments or a school or the whole organization, I think they should have an aim. So I think that's really important. But by aim, I'm talking about some type of clear purpose statement, but that's not so specific in detail that it stifles initiatives, that's one part. And I think a clear aim statement sort of in that spirit is something very different from a numerical goal. So that's one part of it. I think another part, and I'm getting to the arbitrary part, is that so many times that internal goals either set for management or set by management of an organization are basically a burlesque,you know, if they don't include a method.

0:14:52.8 JD: And that's what I've seen so often where, we've sat down to create a scorecard or whatever, or we see these things imposed on us from some type of organization that holds us accountable like the state department is, we have these goals, like increased student attendance rates by 10% or increase math scores by 5%. And the thing is, is part of the arbitrary is that sort of natural variation in those attendance rates or in those test scores are viewed as a success if they're going in the direction of good, but fluctuations in the other direction sort of send everybody scurrying around looking for explanations. And we end up sort of writing fiction to explain away or to explain causality when there's not actually causality there. And I've been just as guilty. We're gonna improve test scores by 10% next year without some clear plan.

0:15:53.7 JD: But then what Deming would say is, if we can do it next year with no plan, why didn't we do it this year? [laughter] And why did we stop at 10%? Why not just make it 20%? That's again part of the arbitrary. Now there is a caveat and Deming I think makes this caveat Out of the Crisis that's important. And that's when... When we are setting numerical targets or talking about numerical targets that he categorized as, he called them, facts of life. Meaning, they're just sort of plain statements of fact with respect to survival. So a good example would be, for a school would be, unless student enrollment improves by 10% next year, the school will have to shut down. But that's not arbitrary, that's a fact of life.

0:16:43.3 JD: If we don't get the revenue associated with increase in enrollment, then we're gonna have to shut down. That's not an arbitrary target. That's something sort of something, you know, altogether different that we should pay attention to. But I think getting to this idea of arbitrary, I would probably characterize it this way, and this is probably the main point of principle 11 for leaders is that they have to understand system capability. And that's often what's sort of missing from the understanding when these arbitrary targets are set. So if the system is stable, you'll get what the system will deliver. If the system is unstable, then there's no way to predict capability. So I think it's fine for organizations and individuals to have goals, but the problem is so often just like what you zeroed in on is they're arbitrary.

0:17:50.8 JD: And that's been my experience during the vast majority of my career is, why is this target set at 80%? And then no one can really tell you why that was picked as the target. For whatever the thing is, I just picked 80%, sometimes it's 75%, sometimes it's 80%, sometimes it's 90%. But I think that type of goal setting is really inevitable when as a sector, we have really no understanding of the theory of systems, we have no understanding of the theory of variation. And so without that understanding, what we tend to do is blame individuals working within school systems instead of working to improve the system itself. And I think that's really the key for me and why I'm so zeroed in on the Deming philosophy 'cause it does offer this other way. And so thinking back to system capability and before we as leaders set goals, there's really four kind of things that I've tried to focus on. And one of them is: what is the capability of the system or process under study?

0:19:13.3 JD: And when I say what is the capability, the easiest way to think about this is, if I display my data, let's say it's third grade reading state test scores. By capability, what I mean is, if I've look at the last dozen years of those third grade test scores, there's gonna be an average. And that average of those twelve years is basically the capability of my system. So I'm not just looking at last year or even the last two years, I'm looking at a dozen or more data points preferably, to see how capable that particular system is. So that's sort of the first thing I'm gonna look at is, what's the capability of that particular system or process over time? The second thing I'm going to do is ask, what's the variation within that system? So we've talked about the process behavior chart a lot. I do think I'm sort of in the Donald Wheeler camp and thinking that that is the most important tool. And so it's very easy using a process behavior chart because I have the limits, the upper and lower limit.

0:20:29.8 JD: And however wide or narrow those limits are, that's gonna tell me the variation I can expect in that particular system over time. The tighter those limits are, the less variation, the higher the quality, or at least the higher the predictability of that system or process. The third thing I am gonna wanna know is, is that particular system or process stable over time? Do I see any signals in the patterns in the data that would say that this is a stable system and therefore it's predictable or is it unstable and therefore it's unpredictable? So that's the third thing I'm gonna ask. And then once I've answered those questions, the last thing I'm gonna say is, do I have a logical answer in thinking about whatever goal we're setting to the question by what method? And so I think if you don't have that sort of picture in your head, the goals that we set are sort of arbitrary and capricious. If we are setting a goal, we can answer those four questions, then the goal is probably reasonable, logical, and grounded in some type of understanding of our systems. That's what I think Deming meant when he talked about arbitrary targets or arbitrary goals.

0:21:58.1 AS: So let me review that for the listeners out there. Number one, what's the capability of the system? Number two, what's the variation of the system and understanding a process behavior chart? Is the system, number three, is the system stable over time? Is it predictable? And number four, do I have a logical answer to the question by what method? And what you get from that is that, clearly if you can answer those questions, you understand your system pretty well. And therefore it's less likely you're gonna come up with an arbitrary goal. You're gonna go to the, say, here's what I think we can do with a deeper understanding of the system. But if you have a bureaucrat from the state education department, as an example, say, I want 5% more. Why not 5% less? [laughter]

0:22:50.4 JD: Right. Based on what?

0:22:51.4 AS: But where? Where does that come from?

0:22:53.5 JD: Yeah. Yeah. I think another thing I mentioned Donald Wheeler, he said, goal setting is often an act of desperation. And I think I talked about earlier in this series of episodes, I've talked about third grade reading test scores in Ohio. The goal is 80%. The system right now is capable of about a 60% in terms of looking at the system of third grade reading test scores in the state of Ohio. So 80% is a hope and a dream. It's somewhere out in la-la land. You know, and and what's happening is schools are being held accountable for that number in a system that is not capable of meeting that target, far from it, as a state. So I'd wanna know, like who set that and on what basis was that goal set for third grade, for third grade reading in the state? And that sort of thing is happening over and over and over and over again. What's the latest thing that we're gonna focus on? I think chronic absenteeism is one of those things right now that everybody's talking about. Kids aren't coming to school like they did pre-pandemic without any understanding of the theory of systems and the theory of variation. And so people are just running around talking about it without any understanding of what that data looks like over time.

0:24:27.2 AS: Yeah. And I'm looking at Donald Wheeler's goal is often an act of desperation, part one. And some of his discussion on that is great, great stuff. I was thinking about, in my own case with my Valuation masterclass bootcamp, when I first started the bootcamp, now we're on bootcamp number 12, but the first ones, I just told the students, okay, pick any company and then you can write a report on that company. And the outcome of that was disaster. Like it was just so... And I realized I didn't have that much teaching involved in how to get them to where I wanted to get them. So I had to... First I had to start to improve my teaching knowing that I'm trying to narrow the outcome to be, you know, somewhat consistent. And then I realized I can't just let them do any one company by choice, I have to kinda give them a list 'cause there's a certain companies that just don't have much information.

0:25:23.3 AS: If they choose it, it's a bad company for them to work on. So then I would give them a list of a hundred companies and say, pick one out of this, and each person had a different company. So that started to improve it that I had more information. And so I'm iterating through this and then I realized, some people just state that it's harder for them to do this assignment. It takes six weeks to do it and it's just overwhelming for some people. And I thought, what if each team did the same company? And I assigned it. And so what I did is I set up teams and now I encourage the teams to work together. They each wrote their individual report on that company, but now they start sharing information. And now I'm narrowing down, and I'm getting my system more and more narrow and the outcome is getting more and more narrow.

0:26:07.1 AS: And then I have a deadline that by the end of the fifth week, you've got to submit your draft. If it's not up to the standard, I can't put you in a time slot. We're gonna have to figure out something else to do.

0:26:21.5 JD: Yeah.

0:26:22.0 AS: And so that prevented someone who's postponing until the last minute, we're giving them a deadline that's a week before to give them some time to wake up and fix, make sure they got the stuff fixed as much as they could.

0:26:35.6 JD: Yeah.

0:26:37.4 AS: And then recently, so we've been iterating through this and improving the system. And now the outcome is better and better and better of what they're doing and the way that they're presenting. The way that I'm able to... I can't teach about a hundred different companies, I can teach about a few and help them in that process. And then in this particular bootcamp, my idea for improvement was what if we... Instead of starting the first week by assigning them that company and the team gets all excited and they start working on that company, let's say the company's Tesla, as an example. Why don't I pick an industry? And in the first week, everybody in the bootcamp works on an industry report, which is just a one-page report. What are the key features? And now everybody's going out and getting industry analysis, third-party research, and that's helping them.

0:27:26.1 AS: And I had four groups that are later going to be assigned the actual company. So we looked at the automotive industry and then there'll be assigned companies like Ford or Tesla or Toyota or whatever. And so by the time we get to the second week, they've now got a really good picture of the industry. And all of a sudden it adds a lot. My hypothesis is it's gonna add a lot of context to their assumptions in the final report. The reason why I'm explaining that is the idea of a process, a system. And in this case, I have to say, I'm not like measuring it very, very specifically, I'm judging the outcome based upon my experience in the prior outcomes. But if somebody came along and they said, hey, why don't you improve this? Why don't you do this with the system and set an arbitrary goal? They would have no understanding of what we've been through, what we've learned, how we've iterated through it. And without that understanding, almost anything would be arbitrary. They're interesting ideas and I listen to what people say, but almost everything would be arbitrary in a system that you're not studying or that you are studying in detail.

0:28:33.9 JD: Yeah. I also think about our previous conversation about, I don't know how you evaluate the final project, but I think of the Deming admonition to abolish grades. And you can very clearly picture if you... How many cohorts have there been of the, that class?

0:28:53.8 AS: We've had 12.

0:28:55.1 JD: 12. So let's say you lined up the sort of reports, a representative sample from cohort one to cohort 12, and you looked at the quality of the reports from cohort one compared to the quality in cohort 12. It sounds like because of all these iterations you've done, the quality is much higher in cohort 12 than cohort one. But then the question would be, who do you assign that evaluation of that grade to? See what I'm saying? Like now you can start to see why Deming said that. Because the lack of quality or the lower quality in earlier cohorts is as much attributable to you and what you were doing as the instructor as it was to the students.

0:29:42.8 AS: It was almost 100%.

0:29:44.5 JD: Yeah, so you can see... [laughter]

0:29:45.0 AS: Because I was setting the whole system. And I think that's where you get the idea of substitute leadership.

0:29:54.3 JD: Yeah.

0:29:55.7 AS: Like it's you, for the listeners, for the viewers out there, it's you, it's your responsibility. The outcome is your responsibility. The outcome is an outcome that's happening because of the system that you're running and participating in and operating. And I could go back and look at my bootcamp number one students and go, they were terrible. [laughter] But the fact is, there's no difference between the raw material that came into the bootcamp in the first group versus the one that came in in the 12th group, but they're just so... The output's so much better, so you can't argue that it's the students, it's an improvement in the system. And let me just add one thing about grade. I really don't know how to grade them truthfully. So what I just say, first, you've got to hit that deadline of having a good quality draft. I said, it doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to show that you've put time in. Otherwise, I can't spend time in your presentation with you during the final presentations, which means you're not gonna graduate. You can come back and try it again, and we can do it in another way.

0:31:03.4 AS: We'll talk about that later. But then the second thing that I do is say, if you can submit on time and you can present on time and according to the guidelines that we give, which they can do, then you pass. So I guess it's kind of pass/fail. Now, what I do is I pick out what I think was the best one of that particular cohort. And I have never announced that, and I've thought about it in my team. My other team members have said, wait a minute, what about... All you talk about a Deming, and here you are highlighting this one person and all that. And I was like, yeah, that's a good point. So we haven't really done it, but what we did do is take that one and we use that in the next cohort to say, this is the high bar. That this is one of the best ones that was done in the last group and my goal is to have you exceed that.

0:32:03.6 JD: Yeah. Yeah. To me it sounds like sort of what you've been doing to improve that particular, that class, that system, follows the Deming philosophy to a T, really. Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:21.4 AS: And I think in the end, I think the key thing and maybe we'll wrap up on this is just the... I like the idea of the arbitrariness because what it tells you is that really to set, as you said, Dr. Deming didn't particularly, he's not against goals and he's not against plans and all that, but it is that arbitrary nature of somebody just coming into a system that they didn't really know much about and setting some arbitrary goal. And really that just disrupts the system. And so for the listeners and viewers out there, if you are setting some arbitrary goal without having a clear understanding of the system, then what's holding the system back could be you. And that to me is a big takeaway from this. Any last thing you would add?

0:33:08.3 JD: Yeah, and I was looking at that article that I wrote. I was in a series called Goal Setting is Often an Act of Desperation. And the definition I used for capricious came from a law dictionary 'cause that's where capricious most often shows up is in the legal world. And it's "a willful and unreasonable action without consideration or in disregard of facts or law." And so that's what I was feeling is that often what's happening is educators are given these targets that have no basis in reality and that can only cause consternation and we're seeing churn. And so, and the people that work in education, teachers leaving and those types of things, and I'm not saying it's all for this reason, but it certainly doesn't help when you're constantly being given goals that are not set in reality. So I think if we took those steps to do those four things when we're setting goals, what's the capability, what's the variation? Is there stability and do we have a method? I think we'd be far ahead of where we are now.

0:34:09.8 AS: Boom. John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, Win-Win, W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on amazon.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work.

Should we strive to better understand what happens "downstream" to our defect-free work? No matter the setting, if our work meets requirements and we pass it on, are we responsible for how well it integrates into a bigger system? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz expand on the interaction between variation and systems and why Dr. Deming regarded Genichi Taguchi's Quality Loss Function as "a better description of the world."

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, in episode 13, Integration Excellence, part two. Bill, take it away.

0:00:31.4 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. Always a pleasure to connect with you. Alright.

0:00:40.1 AS: Mine too.

0:00:40.1 BB: [laughter] In episode 12, I thought it was great. We shared perspectives on the human side of integration, what it means to be connected, to be synchronous, to feel included, to feel connected, to feel included or connected when something good happens where you're like, well, I was part of that, or to feel separated is when something bad happens. And, we somehow have the ability to not feel associated with that. I pass the puck to you and you hit the slapshot, it goes into the stands, off the goalkeeper. Y'know, girl gets hit in the head and you feel bad, but I go home and I can sleep. And so why is that? And so anyway, but I thought, and listening to it, and I thought it was a lot of fun to look at the human side of feeling connected or feeling separated. And what I wanted to get into tonight, and perhaps in another episode as well, is the physical side of connections.

0:01:46.5 BB: One thing I wanted, and I got a couple anecdotes. I had a woman in class at Rocketdyne years ago, and she said, "Bill, in our organization, we have compassion for one another." And I said, "Compassion is not enough." And, and so you, Andrew, could be in final assembly at this Ford plant, where you're banging things together with a rubber mallet 'cause they're not quite snap fit, and you're banging them together. I mean they all meet print perhaps, but where they are within the requirements is all over the place, and you're having to bring them together. That's called integration. And so when this woman said, in our organization we have compassion for one another, I said, well, that's like me saying, "Andrew, I feel really bad that you're, I can't believe, Andrew go home. You can bang that together tomorrow. You've been banging it together all day." And what I said to her is that "compassion is not enough."

0:02:54.7 BB: When I feel connected to what you're doing, when I begin to understand that the parts you're banging together meet requirements, but how they meet requirements is causing you the issue. Now, the compassion plus my sense of connection, now we're talking. But short of that, what I think is we have organizations where as she would say, we might feel bad for others. And it means I hear about your injuries and your ergonomic training because of all this, but I don't, until I feel associated with that, I just feel bad. But feeling bad is not enough. But I like that, that sentiment. But what I wanna look at tonight is a greater sense of Dr. Taguchi's so called Loss Function and look at more why we should feel more connected to what's happening downstream. So I wanted to throw that out. [chuckle] On the topic of variation, I just started a new cohort with Cal State Northridge University. And this is my, fifth year in the program doing an eight week class in, seminar in quality management. And the cohort model is, anywhere between two dozen and 30 some students that start, the ones I'm getting started a year ago.

0:04:23.5 BB: And they have class after class after class after class. Then a year into the program they get to meet for eight weeks so then onto other professors in the program. So I was showing them, first quarter, second quarter data points from an incident that happened at Rocketdyne years ago. And I was in a staff meeting and the vertical axis is number of accidents per employee. And the horizontal axis is quarter one, quarter two. So the quarter one data point is there, and I don't have the original data, the original data doesn't matter. But what I say to the students is, imagine we've got the first quarter data, what would you expect for the second quarter data? And what's funny is a number of them said, it should be lower. And I said, "Well, based on what?" And it's like, said "Well, we're gonna go off and study what went wrong and we're gonna improve the process."

0:05:20.6 BB: And I said, "Okay, that's all right." So then, I said, "I'll accept that, that's a possibility." Well, then I showed them the actual second data point was lower than the first, which in the meeting I was in, led to the question from one of the senior managers to one of the more, let's say the vice president of operations, "Hey, Andrew, why is safety improved?" To which the executive said, "Because we've let them know safety is important." And so I asked him, "So what do you hear in that?" And we went around and we went around and we went around. It's not the only time it has happened that what they're not hearing is the separation that "we" have let "them" this this. And so in part, I think with my Deming perspective finely tuned. I pick up on those things. And they're not picking on it picking up on it yet which is which is fine. And then but I kept asking, kept asking, kept asking. And then one person said, "Well maybe we need to look for a pattern." I said, "Oh brilliant. What if we've got this run chart of all this extra data?" So then I got them to buy into how easy it is to take two data points draw conclusion up and down. That's called variation. And so it was neat to... The first conversation with them on the topic of variation was really cool. And there's so much more to follow. Well then it, what I wanted to follow with this once upon a time our son when he was in third grade this is 20-some years ago invited me to come to his class.

0:07:07.6 BB: And I don't recall why other than he said, Can you come talk to the class? And I said, Okay fine. So my biggest concern was that the teacher wouldn't know I was coming but she knew I was coming so it was good. So I walk in talked with her briefly and I said I've got some things I'd like to do. She's like oh, I didn't wanna monopolize. But she said okay why don't you show your video? I said I got a video of rocket engines blah blah blah. And then I've got a little exercise I wanna do. Okay we'll do the video then we'll do some reading. So we're doing the reading. And so I'm helping her with the reading. And then what I noticed is now and then a word would come up and she'd write the word on the whiteboard and ask the students if they understood the word. So I clued in, I cued in on that. So when it got to me I wrote the word theory on the whiteboard. This is third graders Andrew, third graders. [chuckle] And I said do any of you know what a theory is? And a one of the girls Shelby whose name I'll never forget, she raises her hand and she says a theory is a prediction of the future. Third grade Andrew third grade! [chuckle] right? Now...

0:08:18.8 AS: And you know what they'd say now they'd say Ethereum is a type of cryptocurrency. [chuckle] Oh Ethereum. No no "theory" not "Ethereum." [laughter]

0:08:30.2 BB: You're right. You're right.

0:08:31.6 AS: Okay. That's a great answer.

0:08:33.9 BB: Well oh but what I tell my students is I didn't correct her. I didn't say well technically a theory is a prediction of the future with a chance of being wrong. But we'll just, I just, oh we'll just stop with that. So I invited her to the front of the room. So she comes to the front of the room and I brought with me this little plastic bag with half a dozen marbles in it. And the bag was also a holes from a three hole punch, little dots of paper. So I held the marble up and I said Shelby I'm going to drop the marble from this height predict where it will land. And what I tell students is she was able to predict where it would land without any data.

0:09:18.3 BB: So she predicts the first data point, the marble lands someplace else. I marked the spot with a marble. I then said okay Shelby I'm gonna drop it the second time. Where will it land? And I'll ask people in class so where do you think she predicted, exactly the same spot of the first drop [chuckle] Exactly right. That's what we do as adults. And so we went through this cycle again and again. And and finally after about 10 drops where these you know 10 different dots on the floor I said Shelby where's it gonna land? And she drew a circle, she said somewhere in here which is kind of like a control limit you know kind of thing.

0:09:55.9 BB: So the one thing I'll say is and I'm sure you've heard people say well you can't predict the future. No, as Dr. Deming would say [chuckle] you know he gave the example you might recall of how will I go home? I'm gonna take a bus. Will the bus... I'm gonna take the train. Will the train arrive? And so I'd ask adults in the class that says how many drove here today? All the hands go up. And I said so at the end of the day will you walk in the direction of where you left your car? Yes. What is your theory? It's still there. [chuckle] Is that a guarantee? No! [chuckle] So I throw that out as a predictions and her sense of variation and this sense of a third grader not acknowledging, I mean one understanding having some sense of a theory, not a lot of understanding of variation but I don't think that's unique to third graders.

0:10:51.8 BB: So that brings us to...there's variation. We can look at the variation in the Red Beads. Okay the Red Beads are caused by the system not the workers taken separately. Then we got into variation and things that are good. And when I introduced the students to last night in class is, I asked them "So how often do you go to meetings where you work to discuss things that are good and going well?" And I get the standard answer, "rarely." I said, "Well, why is that?" "Well 'cause we got, we're focusing on the bad." They said, "to make it good." "Well why do we focus on the bad to make it good? Why don't we focus on the good?" "Well the good is good." And we went around the room, went around the room online and and I said "what's the likelihood that we could prevent bad from happening by focusing on the good while it's good?" And it's like, "...interesting." And so where that leads us to is, is two aspects of looking at things that are good.

0:11:57.1 BB: One is the better we understand the variation of things that are good whether that's on a run chart or a control chart. My theory is we could prevent bad from happening by keeping track of the bad. Whether it's your pulse, your weight, [chuckle] how much gas is in your car. And so there's if we focus, if we pay attention to the good with some frequency you know every second, every hour, once a month, whatever it is, we could prevent an accumulation of damage to an appliance at home. Another aspect to focusing on things that are good is that it can improve integration which is boom, here we are. And that integration that I mentioned last time that understanding integration could be looking at candidates for a new hire and looking for who is the best fit because there's degrees of fit. Fit is not absolute. Last time we talked about reflections of an engineer who is worried that his hardware on the space shuttle main engine may have contributed to the disaster of the second... Of the Columbia space shuttle blowing up in reentry. Well let me share another story from a coworker at Rocketdyne.

0:13:19.8 BB: And this guy's father worked at Rocketdyne in the '60s. So in 1999, 30 years after the lunar landing, there's news teams, you know, from the local TV stations and television. It's 30 year anniversary of the Lunar Landing. And Rocketdyne was known for the Apollo engines that get the vehicle off the ground, as well as the engines that got the, Orbiter off the moon. So there's an article in the newspaper a couple days later, and this coworker is quoted and he says, "Boy, I would've loved... My father worked here back in the '60s, just to be a fly on the wall would be so cool. Oh my gosh, it'd be so cool." And the article ends with him saying how exciting it is to feel like you're part of something big. That's what we talked about last time.

0:14:09.8 BB: And I used to use that quote from him on a regular basis because it, the article was about something that happened at Rocketdyne. Then I would share that this is a quote from a coworker. And after quoting him for several years, it dawned on me, I've never met this guy, so I call him up one day and he answers and I say, "Hi, this Bill Bellows." And he laughs a little bit. And I said, "have we ever met?" And he says, "No, no, no," he said, "But you quote me in your class." And I said, "Well, I apologize for never calling you sooner." I said, "I do quote you." And I said, "Let me share with you the quote." I said, "you feel how exciting it is to feel like you're part of something big?" To which he says, "I wish I still felt that way." [chuckle] And I said, "can I quote you on that?" And so you can join an organization with this sense of being connected, but then depending on how the organization is running and you're blamed for the Red Beads, that you may lose that feeling.

0:15:15.6 BB: And on another anecdote, it's pretty cool. Our daughter, when she was in fourth grade, was in a class, they were studying water systems. And the class assignment was to look at a, they had an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper with a picture of a kitchen sink on it, like a 3D view of a sink with a pipe out and a pipe in. And the assignment was, we're about to study water systems. How does the water get to the sink, where's the water go?

0:15:47.2 BB: And so my wife and I were there for the open house and there were 20 of these on the wall colored with crayons showing all these different interpretations of water coming in, water going out. And I was fascinated by that. And eventually got copies of them and the teacher wasn't sure what I was doing with them. Well, I turned them into laminated posters. And so I gave one to our daughter one day. I said, take this to Mrs. Howe so she sees what we're doing. And so the following weekend I bumped into this woman at a soccer field, but she wasn't dressed like a teacher. She's dressed in a hoodie. And she says to me, "Allison shared with me the posters." And I'm looking at her thinking, "how do I know who you are?" She pulls the hood back. She says "I'm Allison's fourth grade..." Oh! I, her comment was when Allison shared with me how you're using those posters, handing them out, and people are inspired by them. And she says, "I cried." So that you get that emotion for free Andrew. [chuckle] Right. And that's all the integration stuff.

0:16:58.5 BB: Now let's talk about Dr. Taguchi and his Loss Function. So, um, the Taguchi Loss Function says Dr. Deming in Out of the Crisis is a better view of the world. The Taguchi Loss Function is a better view of the world. Dr. Taguchi says following...

0:17:15.3 AS: Wait a minute. I was confused on that. You're saying Deming is saying that Taguchi is better, or Taguchi is saying Deming's better?

0:17:22.3 BB: Dr. Deming in The New... In Out of the Crisis, Dr. Deming wrote "the Taguchi Loss Function is a better view of the world."

0:17:30.3 AS: Okay, got it.

0:17:34.5 BB: And that's what amongst the things that I read into Deming's work and I thought, boy, that's quite an endorsement. Dr. Taguchi is known for saying quality is the minimum of loss imparted to society, to the society by a product after shipping to the customer. So what does that mean? And we'll come back to that. Deming met Dr. Taguchi in the 1950s. There's a, at least once, there's photos I've seen in Deming's archives of the two of them on stage at a big statistical conference in India, and I know they met in September, 1960 at the Deming Prize ceremony where Dr. Taguchi was honored with what's known as the Deming Prize in Literature. There's Deming prizes for corporations, and there's also Deming prizes for individuals.

0:18:35.0 BB: And Taguchi won it 1960 for his work on the, on his, this quality-loss function concept. 1960. So then in 1983, Larry Sullivan, a Ford executive, was on a study mission to Japan, and he wrote an article about this for the American Society for Quality in 1983 the title of the article is "Variability Reduction: A New Approach to Quality," so if any of our listeners are ASQ members, well I'm sure you can find a copy of it. The Variability Reduction: A New Approach to Quality. Well, Andrew in 1983, Sullivan's article, 23 years after Taguchi's awarded this Deming Prize in literature, I'm convinced that's the first time Taguchi's Loss Function was heard about in the States. 23 years later. And in this article, Sullivan says, he says, "In March of 1982, I was part of a group from Ford that visited Japan, we studied quality systems out of variety of suppliers," this is ostensibly the first time the auto industry in the States is sending people to Japan.

0:19:52.8 BB: Right so 1980, summer of 1980 is the Deming documentary Why Japan? If Japan Can, Why Can't We? And so here Ford is in 1982, sending a team over. I know it was the late '80s, I believe, when Boeing sent executives over. So then in this article, he says, "The most important thing we learned, right, in this study mission, is that quality in these companies means something different than what it means in the US. That it's a totally different discipline." And so this is like the beginnings of people hearing about Dr. Deming in 1980. They're now hearing about Dr. Taguchi's work through Larry Sullivan. And it turns out Larry Sullivan and Dr. Taguchi became business partners and set up Dr Taguchi's consulting company in the States, which still exists. So they became fast friends and I've met the two of them many times.

0:20:53.6 BB: What Taguchi is saying is, is when it comes to things coming together, we talked about integration, whether that's combining, mixing, joining, weaving, this is the synchronicity. So in sports, we're talking about not, not where I am on the field, but where I am relative to the others, in music, and we're talking earlier about music and I've, I've played a musical instrument one time, Andrew with a group and I was with a, hockey band on a road trip when I was in college. And the cymbal player, they were missing, so they asked me to bang the cymbal, "you want me to do what?"

0:21:36.9 AS: When we signal you.

0:21:39.4 BB: So I'm boom! and what I didn't realize is I'm controlling the pace, like being in is like, okay, slow down, slow down. And I and a former student last year in the Cal State Northridge class who plays with one of the Beach Boys, and I went to watch her in the play and I was asking about these speakers, which are on stage, facing the players. And I said, so what are those about? She said, "Those help us stay synchronized." I said, "what do you mean?" She says, "the speakers next to me," she's the keyboard player. She said, "What I'm listening to in those speakers is the drumbeat. I need to make sure that I am playing synchronous with a drummer." And then what about the others? "Well, the others have their own speakers synchronized. They get to select who they wanna be synchronized to." And so I throw that out because we take for granted when we're listening to Coldplay, whoever these musicians are, we're not paying attention, at least I'm not paying attention to what if they're playing it... What if they're not as synchronous? How would that sound? 'Cause we're so used to it sounding pretty good.

0:23:00.1 BB: And, um, so there we go with synchronization and things fitting together, it's not just that the note was good, but is it played at the right rhythm and pace and, um, you know, with timing. So we talked about the Loss Function. We talked about last time about ripeness of fruit. Depending on what we're doing with the bananas, we wanna put it into a muffin mixed or eat, slice it up. Are we looking for something soft and hard? And I say that because what Dr. Taguchi is talking about is for a set of requirements, a min and a max, we're used to a sense of anything between the min and the max is okay, is "good."

0:23:45.2 BB: What Taguchi is saying is there's the possibility that there's an ideal place to be. And how do you know what that ideal place to be is? Well pay it, as you're delivering that piece of fruit to the next person, whatever it is, to the next person, deliver them something on the very low end of the requirement and see what they do with it. Then, it could be the next hour or the next time you give them something a little bit, a little bit further along that axis. How are they doing? How are they doing? How are they doing? And what you're looking to see is, how, how does, what is the effect of where you are within requirements on them? And this is how Toyota ends up with things being snap fit, because they're not just saying, "Throw everything to Andrew in final assembly." They all come together.

0:24:42.3 BB: My theory is they're doing what we do at home, at home I create the part, I cut the piece of wood. I'm, making the part, but I'm also using it. So I'm the one responsible for the part and integration, in a work setting that may not be the case. So what Taguchi is talking about is there could be a sweet spot in the requirement. And so towards that end, if we're talking about baseball in a strike zone, the World Series is teams are defined, not that I was gonna watch this year, the Dodgers, we're out of it. But in baseball, there's, for those understand baseball, there's a strike zone. If the ball somewhere in that rectangular ball zone is called a strike, outside is called a ball. And depending on who the batter is, it might not matter where the ball is in the strike zone, 'cause this player can't hit the ball anyway. But for another player, you may have to put that strike somewhere in particular to make it harder for them to hit. And that's what the loss function is about, is, is paying attention to how this is used and I wanna share a couple of stories that are, one that's kind of hard to believe. Well, I'd say one that's easy to believe. As you're driving down the highway, Andrew, in Los Angeles, right? You've lived out here.

0:26:07.2 AS: Oh, yeah.

0:26:07.4 BB: And no matter where you're driving down, right, do you stay to the left side of the lane, Andrew? Do you stay to the right side of the lane? Or do you kind of go down the middle of the lane, Andrew?

0:26:17.9 AS: I'm kind of middle of the lane guy.

0:26:20.5 BB: Yeah. And I think that people in the other lanes, you know, like that 'cause I know when I drift to the left, you're like, Hey, what are you doing? So being towards the middle is saying, I get the entire length of myself, but being down the middle is probably, what is that? It's minimum loss to myself and others. So I spoke at a, at a NASA conference ages ago and learned, this is uh '97, '98 timeframe, and I learned that the two greatest opportunities for destruction of the space shuttle are at launch, you can have a catastrophic failure, or at landing. And so at launch, it could be a problem with the engine, any of the engines or the solid rocket motors. Okay, so that I can understand. But I'm thinking, what's the issue with landing? Well, I say, well, the issue with landing at that time was the space shuttle's coming in at a couple hundred miles an hour.

0:27:24.9 BB: And when you're landing on a dry lake bed called Edwards Air Force Base, it's not a big deal. You got all that open space anywhere you want. You just get her down. But then in that timeframe, NASA converted. It was easier for them to have the shuttle land in Florida because they don't, they don't have to fly the shuttle across country. The shuttle is going to land there, launch there. So what they were talking about is, a lot of the pilots for the space shuttle are military pilots. They're used to landing in the center of the runway, Andrew, in the center of the runway. Why? 'cause they're landing on an aircraft carrier. And if I'm a little bit too far from the center, one way or the other, I either crash into the structure or I'm in the ditch and enter the water. So they've got these military pilots landing the space shuttle, wanting to be right down the center. And so they said what happened was if they land and they're a few feet to the left or to the right, going a couple hundred miles an hour, should they quickly steer the nose gear to be on the center?

0:28:32.5 BB: And he said, when you're going that fast, if you steer, you may cause the shuttle to just flip. When you're, once you touch down, don't steer to the center of the runway. Just go, go straight. No more steering. And they kept having this message and it kept being ignored and they kept having the message that kept being ignored so what was the solution, Andrew? You ready?

0:28:58.7 AS: Yes, here, tell me.

0:29:00.8 BB: They painted the center stripe to be wider. [laughter]

0:29:05.5 AS: I was thinking they were going to paint like 10 stripes so that there was no center one.

0:29:10.3 BB: So the center stripe is like three feet wide. You can't miss it. Well, and so I use that because what they're saying is when you land at the Kennedy Space Center, you could be off target left and right a lot, and it's not a big deal, we got a lot of space here.

0:29:29.4 AS: Yep.

0:29:29.6 BB: And what does that mean relative to loss of the vehicle, relative to bad things happening downstream? The loss function that Dr. Taguchi would describe as a parabola, and a parabola being a curve that has a minimum, and then the curve goes up faster and faster to the left, faster and faster to the right. That's if the parabola opens up, it could open down. But in this case, Taguchi draws the loss function as being opening upwards as like a bell and it gets steeper and steeper. But, what, but depending on your system, it could be very steep, which is you're landing on an aircraft carrier, or it could be very shallow.

0:30:13.6 BB: So when I ride on a bike trail in Santa Clarita where I live, I go down the middle of the bike trail. And to my right, depending on which direction I'm going is a split rail fence so I don't go into the Arroyo, which is this gully for all the water running off. And so there's... I go down there and the worst, I stay away from that split rail. When I ride in Long Beach where you went to college where our daughter lives, there is no split rail. So I stay not in the center when I ride in Long Beach. I ride to not the center of my lane, I steer closer to the to the center of the overall lane, which means I'm closer to the bikes going the other way. And that's and that's my understanding of: I go off that off that side is gonna be a bad day.

0:31:08.0 BB: And so that's what Taguchi is saying relative to the loss function. But I think a better way to think about loss, I think that may be kind of a weird concept. I think if we think about integration, and in making the integration easier or harder. So again, if we're talking about space shuttle landing, maybe the loss makes sense. But if we're talking about putting things together, we've talked about the snap-fit that Toyota pickup truck that Toyota was producing in the late 1960s. And what struck me when I first read that is, Holy cow, they've developed a system of hardware which goes together without mallets, and I immediately associated that with what I had heard that Dr. Taguchi was influencing, working with them, consulting with them back in the '50s. And I thought that kind of fits. And so why aren't things here in the States, why are they being banged together? Because over in the States, going back to Larry Sullivan's article, we've got an explanation of quality which is "part" focused. Everything meets requirements. And so what really amazed me is that Toyota in the late '60s, had things which were going together well.

0:32:25.9 BB: Ford in 1982/83 timeframe, they had been working with Dr. Deming for a couple years. They discovered that a transmission they had designed and were building was also being built by Mazda. And part because they owned one third of Mazda and they were outsourcing production. And these transmissions went into Ford cars. And what I've mentioned in a previous episode is that the Ford warranty people figured out that the Mazda transmission, which was designed by Ford, but built by Mazda, had one third fewer complaints than the Ford transmission designed by Ford, built by Ford. And in this study that Ford did, led by their executives, and then they sent out the documentation to their supply chain and it, and it talked about the need to... Their explanation was what Mazda was doing was what's known as "piece to piece consistency." And what they found is that the parts, instead of being all over the place in terms of dimensions and whatnot, that they were far more uniform, yet what you won't hear in that video, what they talk about is within Ford, we're all over the place we're consuming the greatest, a big portion of the tolerance. We've got scrap and rework. But these Mazda parts, boy they only consume a fraction of the tolerance compared to us. And that's the difference. And that's the difference.

0:34:02.6 BB: And so what I wanna close with is, having less variation is not the issue that gets us back to precision, but not accuracy. So my explanation is that Mazda was actually focusing on accuracy - being on target of the respective parts. And as a result, they got great functionality outta the transmission. But what Ford, at least, I'm willing to bet the path Ford was going, was saying, "oh look Andrew, their parts are more consistent than ours. Consistency is the name of the game." And that's precision, not accuracy. So what I wanted to do tonight is build upon what we did last time, bring it to this loss function as being a parabola. Depending on what happens downstream, you don't know how steep that parabola is, and not knowing how steep it is, we don't know how much effort we should spend on our end upfront providing those components to improve integration 'cause we don't know how bad the integration is.

0:35:17.6 AS: And that's a wrap. Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. If you want to keep in touch with Bill, you can just find him right there on LinkedIn. 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."

Slogans and exhortations don't work to motivate people. Targets usually encourage manipulation or cheating. John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss how these three strategies can hinder improvement, frustrate teachers and students, and even cause nationwide scandals.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz. I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 16, and we're continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. And today we're gonna be talking about principle 10 "eliminates slogans, exhortations, and targets." John, take it away.

0:00:37.1 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, we've been talking about these 14 principles for educational systems transformation for a number of episodes now. I think one, one important thing to point out, and I think we've mentioned this multiple times now, but really the aim in terms of what we're hoping the listeners get out of hearing about all these principles is really about how they all work together, as a system themselves. So, we started with create constancy of purpose. We've talked about a number of other things, like work continually on the system, adopt and institute leadership, drive out fear. Last time we talked about break down barriers. We're gonna talk about eliminating slogans and targets this time, which is principle 10. But really, as you start to listen to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and now 10, what should start to become clear is how all of these things work together.

0:01:34.5 JD: If you are operating as a leader, for example, within sort of the Deming philosophy, one of the things you are gonna do is eliminate these slogans. So all these principles shouldn't be studied in isolation. We study them together, see how they all work together. But let me just start by just reading principle 10 so you have the full picture. So principle 10 is "eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students that ask for perfect performance and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system, and thus lie beyond the power of teachers and students." So really what we're talking about is, what's wrong with slogans, exhortations and targets for educators and students, because these things are, pervasive, I think.

0:02:29.5 JD: We've seen them, we've seen the posters on the walls with the various slogans. And, of course targets are everywhere in our educational systems. In my mind the main problem is that they're directed at the wrong people. The basic premise is that teachers and students could sort of simply put in more effort, and in doing so, they could improve quality productivity, anything else that's desirable in our education systems. But the main thing is that, that doesn't take into account that most of the trouble we see within our schools are actually coming from the system. And I think we've talked about this quote is probably one of Deming's most well-known quotes, but he said, "Most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportion, something like this, 94% belong to the system, which is the responsibility of management, 6% is special." And that's more like, can be sort of tagged or pinned to individual students or individual educators working within the system. So I think that's a really important thing to revisit 'cause it sort of is at the heart of all of these, all of these principles.

0:03:47.7 AS: It's interesting, like, maybe you could give some examples of what type of, slogans or targets or exhortations that you've seen, in your career and what's going on in education these days.

0:04:06.5 JD: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna give an example here, kind of walk through an example in a second. But there, they're really everywhere, I mean, to varying degrees probably in different places. But, one, that one that sticks out in terms of, a target is when I first started my career in 2001, I was a teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. And No Child Left Behind had just come out. And, basically as they, as the leadership at the school sort of presented what was in this legislation, you know, they would always put up a just chart that basically said, a certain percentage of students are expected to be proficient across the country on state tests. And that, that percentage would increase over time starting in 2001 when the legislation was rolled out. And by the 2013, '14 school year, the way the tables were laid out is that 100% of students would be proficient in reading and math across the country in third through eighth grade. And of course, that didn't come to fruition. There's no chance that that ever would be the case. And it was also the case that there was really no methods attached to that target. So that's a really good example of a target that was sort of pulled out of the sky. And, basically, over the course of a dozen years, it was supposed to sort of, so somehow magically come to be.

0:05:38.2 AS: That's great. The idea of 100%. I mean, like what fool would say that, you would have 100% of anything. I mean, you just can't get anything to that point. But one question I have about that, I suspect that in those types of cases, it just gets swept under the rug and nobody's looking at that number the way that they looked at it back then, but maybe, maybe they do look at it. But my question would be that No Child Left Behind if we were able to objectively measure the improvement that was caused by that, or a devolution, like did, if it was, what was the starting point, for No Child Left Behind?

0:06:26.0 JD: Well, so, it, that would vary by district. If I remember right, I think the, the target early in the 20000s was something like in the 50 or 60%, something like that, right? And then it would...

0:06:40.3 AS: Right, so let's say 50 to 60%. And I wonder at the end of that period of 2013, if we could objectively compare and calculate that number, what would be your estimate of where it would be if it was 50 to 60 originally, where do you think it was at the end of 2013?

0:07:00.0 JD: 50% to 60%.

0:07:02.4 AS: So no improvement?

0:07:02.5 JD: No. I mean...

0:07:02.5 AS: Incredible.

0:07:04.2 JD: That could vary a little bit by time and place, but it's a little bit even hard to pin down because, the way that the test was constructed in 2001 in Georgia, for example, would be different than the way the test was constructed by 2013-14. So even, even the test itself had changed, the standards had changed, a number of things had changed over time. Also, for folks that know much, about what was going on in Atlanta by, by 2013-14, the superintendent, who would've been the superintendent from about 2001 until, I don't know, 2010 or something, she was actually charged under the RICO statute for sort of, yeah, I don't know if that was warranted or not. I think it was unprecedented, that's for sure. But there was a cheating scandal that was systematic from superintendent to principals down to even teachers. That was pretty pervasive because there was a lot of, in Atlanta at least, there was a lot of monetary incentives tied to the test score improvements. And so I know that it did result in a number of people being charged with various crimes, including the superintendent and number of principals.

0:08:18.3 AS: That's incredible.

0:08:20.6 JD: Incredible. Yeah. Yeah.

0:08:22.8 AS: Yeah. And there was a trial, there was a trial, I'm looking here on the internet. The trial began on September, in September of 2014 in Fulton County Superior Court.

0:08:32.3 JD: Yeah. Right around that time.

0:08:33.7 AS: Incredible.

0:08:33.8 JD: And so I was gone from Atlanta by that time. So I don't know all the details, but I have read a little bit about it, and I think, again, because there's these targets, that's certainly not an excuse for systematically cheating on these tests for sure. But, a byproduct of some of these testing regimens and some of the monetary incentive systems that were put in place was, cheating did happen in, in a number of places in the United States. Especially at the height of when the scrutiny was highest on these test results. So again, it's not, that shouldn't be the expectation even in a system where there's a lot of focus, certainly, but it was a byproduct. So you, you would wanna ask the question, why did that, why did that happen?

0:09:20.5 AS: Yeah.

0:09:21.9 JD: I mean, I think, yeah, go ahead.

0:09:25.2 AS: I was just gonna say that I also wanted to talk about, we were talking before we went on about the word "exhortation," which is kind of an, an old word, kind of a, and so I was looking it up on the dictionary. It says, "an address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something," and they use an example of "no amount of exhortation had any effect." And then I thought about, one of the questions I always ask students when I start my class, is "who's responsible?" And I want the listeners and the viewers to think about this answer to this question. Who's responsible for students being on time to class, the student or the teacher? And of course, the majority of students are gonna say the student. And if I ask the teachers, of course they're gonna say, student, it's personal responsibility. And most of the listeners and viewers would probably say the same. And then I want to explain a situation that I do every time I start my class. My class starts at 01:00 PM in this particular semester. And as soon as the door, as soon as 01:00 PM came, I just locked the door and I started teaching.

0:10:39.8 JD: And this is university setting?

0:10:40.7 AS: This is at university.

0:10:44.0 JD: Yeah.

0:10:44.6 AS: And when I did that, the university students, some of them had the, they were outside and kind of knocking on the door or no, wondering if they can come in. And I didn't let them in until after five or 10 minutes of teaching. And then I let, I went out and talked to them a little bit about, being on time and, please, be on time to my class or else I'm gonna lock the door and you're not gonna be able to come back in. And so I did that a couple times until all the students, I have 80 students in that class, and they all were in. And the next time that I, had my class, 100% of the students were on time. They were in there and ready to go. In fact, I had a funny case, John, I was, I was visiting a client of mine, which is north of the city of Bangkok. And I told my client, I gotta get outta here now because if I'm late to my class, my students are gonna lock me out.

0:11:32.7 JD: They're gonna lock you out. Yeah.

[laughter]

0:11:33.0 AS: But the point of the story is for the listeners and the viewers out there, if you said that the students are responsible for being on time, but I've just presented a case where the teacher changed something about the way that the, the class was done. That changed the outcome of the students. Can you still say that it is the students, and in fact, if you were to, to listen, if you went, we went to a, a high school or university and we sat down with all the teachers that would they be saying no amount of exhortation had any effect on the students being on time. These guys are just irresponsible.

0:12:17.4 JD: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting 'cause I think, David Langford, on one of the episodes he did, talked about the problem of kids being, or students being late to class. And in that particular scenario as a high school, and, when you ask the kids, why were you late? They said, "well, the teacher doesn't start until five or seven minutes into the period anyway, so why, why do I need to come on time?" So, there is some truth to thinking about who, who is creating the system, what is that system? What types of behaviors does that system encourage? That's certainly a good way to sort of analyze each, each situation.

0:12:53.7 AS: Yeah. I mean, it makes you think, and I think what David highlights too is like, what's the priority here? And, where do we want, is it so important that someone's gonna be there at exactly this moment or does it matter if it's five minutes before, five minutes after? And I think that there's, there's an interesting discussion on that.

0:13:13.1 JD: Yeah.

0:13:13.8 AS: And for the listeners and the viewers out there, you're gonna make up your own mind. But I think that the key thing is that what you're saying when you talk about 94% of, the output or the result of something is the result of the system. And that helps us to focus beyond just, putting the pressure on students or administrators or educators or employees.

0:13:36.1 JD: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, one of the tools that I've talked about repeatedly and I'm a very big fan of is, is the process behavior chart or what some people call a control chart. And the reason for that is because when you use that chart, you can then tell what problems are coming from the system itself, and that's the responsibility of management and what problems are coming from other causes and may take some other types of sort of approaches. I think just knowing that is a really important sort of upfront step when you're considering that 94%, 6% problem. You can actually tell what's coming from the system, and then there's one approach and what's coming from special, special causes. And then there's another approach to, to improvement. And I suspect that, you know, when you chart data in this way over time, the vast majority of systems are stable, but unsatisfactory.

0:14:38.5 JD: And I think that's probably where things like, targets, exhortations, these slogans when you have a stable but defective system, that's the point where, these exhortations, et cetera are particularly pernicious, you know? I think, goal setting seems like a good idea, but it's really useless in that type of situation. It's really often an active desperation actually, when you set a goal in a stable but defective system. So I was gonna sort of talk you through a, through an example of how this, perhaps, could show up.

0:15:23.6 AS: Yep.

0:15:26.2 JD: We... This is going back a couple years, but as the pandemic rolled out, and I think we've talked about this data before, but we were really closely charting and paying attention to: are kids engaged in remote learning? And again, this example's from the pandemic, but this can come from any data that that's important to you. And almost all of this data unfolds over time. But we were looking at, how, how engaged are kids in remote learning? And it was really important for us to first define engagement. And so for us, this question always comes up, what do you mean by engagement? For us, this meant, kids did a remote lesson with the teacher and then they had a practice set in math. So what percent of the kids completed that full practice set?

0:16:17.6 JD: And basically when we, when we charted this, what we see, we did this for, about five weeks. We charted the data. So we had about 24 days worth of data. This was eighth grade math. And the first day 62% of the kids were engaged the second day, 67, the third day, 75%, fourth day, 84%, and then down to 77%. And then the next day, 71%, the next day, 58%, the next day 74%. So you can kind of get the picture here that this data was sort of bouncing around. And when we took that out to 24 days, that first day was 67%, the 24 day was 68%. And then sort of, we looked at the average over those 24 days, it was about 67%, a high of, 84%, a low of 49%. But when you put this on a process behavior chart, what you see is it's a stable system.

0:17:17.3 JD: Meaning there are these ups and downs, some are above that 67% average, some are below it. When we look at sort of the natural process limits. So those are sort of the boundaries of the system based on the magnitude of the variability over time, it was sort of suggesting with this system, we could expect a low of 42% engagement, a high of 91% engagement, but mostly it's bouncing around this average. Now if imagine, that you're this eighth grade math teacher and the principal comes and says, this engagement data is not high enough, we're gonna create these posters across the school, we're gonna start this campaign. You can almost picture this in different places, right? And it says these posters say 100%...

0:18:06.3 AS: Graphic design.

0:18:07.0 JD: Yeah, that design, you have this poster and it says "100% engaged. We can achieve it if you believe it." Right? And you can almost imagine these posters going up in a school, and it's just this sort of proclamation. But when you look at the data, it's just a stable system. And what we can expect is this, these data points bouncing around the 67% average. School, the school leadership wants higher engagement rates. They want fewer days with the low rates. But the problem with a poster or a target or exportation is that you're, you're basically asking the teacher to do what they're unable to do. And we do this in all types of settings, all types of, work settings, not just, not just in education. If you look at this particular system, the upper limit's at 91%. So basically the...

0:19:10.0 JD: The system's not capable of achieving 100% remote learning engagement, and so basically the effect is then fear and mistrust towards leadership, and I think, you know, when you look at this remote learning engagement data, that's probably what happened to a lot of people, but if we go back to that No Child Left Behind example, the Federal Government, 'cause that's who is setting the proficiency targets, for No Child Left Behind, its federal legislation, teachers knew, principles knew that in many places, the system that was in place for education was not capable of hitting those targets, it just...

0:19:50.1 JD: It wasn't in the capability of the system, and then so if you are an individual operating within that system, you're trying to navigate that, you're gonna try to hit that target no matter what, and then in some places, they chose to do things that went as far as cheating, because they were trying to hit that target. Now, I'm not absolving those individual educators of responsibility, but it was that system that they were operating in that sort of caused that behavior to then happen. You know the worst case scenario is people did, the adults did cheat. And I'm sure there were other things that were happening in other places that didn't rise to the level of cheating, but I think we've talked about it before, there's really only three options in response to data that's not satisfactory. You can improve the system. That's the ideal. That's what we're talking about here. That's what we're going for here. You can sort of... What do you wanna call it? It's not as far as cheating, but you can sort of...

0:21:02.6 AS: Manipulate or...

0:21:04.4 JD: Manipulate the data in some way, or you can manipulate the system in some way, and that's I think what we were seeing. So the worst case scenario in Atlanta, they manipulated the data. But I think in many places, this idea of manipulating the system is less clear, but what happened in many places, and I think we've actually talked about this, that there was this over-emphasis on reading and math at the expense of other types of academics, and that's a manipulation of the system. That's not cheating necessarily, but it is sort of in my mind, sort of cheating kids out of a well-rounded education, and that was a product of so much emphasis on just reading and math test scores, and again, a lot of this was well-intentioned because people were...

0:21:53.5 AS: It's all well-intentioned. What are you talking about a lot of it?

0:21:56.9 JD: It's all well-intentioned but what actually happens as a result of putting these systems and these testing systems in place, and especially the sanctions or even the incentives on the positive side, the money. What actually happened...

[overlapping conversation]

0:22:10.6 AS: Holding back funding or providing additional funding, if you can hit these targets or that type of thing.

0:22:15.4 JD: Right, right, yep. And so you get all these unintended consequences that are produced as a result of the system, and we talk about these things as side effects, just like with drugs, there's these side-effects, but they're not really side effects, they're things that commonly happen, they're things that you would expect to happen as a result of doing these things, but we sort of put them in this... We've given this language as if they're these small things that happen over here, but really they're the sort of the typical unintended consequences that you could expect when you design a system in that way, whether the side effects of a drug or the side effects of cheating in a very strict, sort of, and regimented testing system, an accountability system in a school district.

0:23:03.6 AS: I couldn't help but laugh 'cause I thought about Robin Williams, and he had this skit he used to do when he was alive, and he talked about the drugs, drugs that people that the companies are marketing. And he said I was going through the side effects and I was like reading these horrific things that they had a list and he's like, I'd call that an effect.

0:23:21.4 JD: [chuckle] Right, right, yeah. Yeah.

0:23:24.0 AS: Let me ask you about this slogan, "We can achieve it if you believe it." Now, some students may respond to that, John, what do you say about the fact that... You know, because every time that you talk about getting rid of targets and getting rid of slogans and stuff, that people say, sometimes it works and it works for some people, and some people are driven that way, and when they hear that, they respond to it. What do you say to that?

0:23:57.5 JD: Well, I would say prove it, I wanna see if you're telling me that was actually successful, sometimes people will sort of dress up an anecdote. So, one, I'd wanna see the evidence that that did have the intended...

0:24:13.2 AS: Okay great answer and that's a lesson for everybody listening and viewing is always go back and say, prove it, 'cause I'm making an assertion.

0:24:21.3 JD: Yep. Yeah.

0:24:22.1 AS: And my assertion is that it helps certain people, actually, the burden of proof, of course, is on me as I make that assertion and you're asking me to prove that, which is a very, very logical and sensible thing to do. What else would you say?

0:24:38.0 JD: Well, well, I would say that, you know, Dr. Deming often talked about this idea, I think he got it from Taiichi Ohno, this idea of the loss function, which is basically like...

0:24:51.9 AS: Taguchi.

0:24:52.0 JD: Taguchi loss function, sorry.

0:24:54.4 AS: Yeah.

0:24:54.9 JD: And basically, think of an inverted parabola inverted U basically... And here is an optimum.

0:25:03.3 AS: Or think of a U. Think of a U.

0:25:03.4 JD: Now either side of it... An inverted U, yep, and the optimum is at the bottom of the U, but there's loss as soon as you start to move away from the U, but that loss comes on both sides. So, you know, the people that are anti-testing versus the people that wanna put strict sanctions and rewards in place, probably the answer is somewhere in between there, because we have to know how our students are doing, so we do need some data, so I would be probably a proponent of kids being given some type of standardized tests and can we sort of know the scores at the aggregate level, perhaps at the school level, by subject and grade level, but there's not sanctions and rewards tied to that in any way, it's just information. So that's one thing that'd be a big difference between, you know, between what we could be doing with this data and what's actually being done.

0:26:06.1 JD: So like taking the eighth grade math engagement data, for example. In terms of what would you do? I mean, I think if I was gonna put a poster up with sort of an explanation of how we're gonna approach the remote learning, maybe the first poster that I'd want staff to see is a list of what we're gonna be doing month by month to sort of deal with the reality of remote learning, maybe that first month, it's just making sure... The strategy is to make sure every kid has a device and access to reliable internet connectivity, right? That's very different than this proclamation, that 100% of kids is gonna be engaged, because as soon as I see that, as a teacher, I know that's not gonna happen. Especially if there's no other sort of methods tied to that. Maybe in month two, after I get all the kids devices and connectivity, that's reliable, we can do some training on, well, how do you even teach? What are the methods that a teacher can employ in a remote learning environment, and maybe all along, I am tracking the data, there's nothing wrong with tracking the data, but I'm putting it on that chart, I'm tracking it over time, and as we implement these various approaches to remote learning, I can see how that's impacting, but I'm doing that with students and teachers, and I'm not just plotting the data and then not giving a set of methods that sort of accompany the sort of march towards continual improvement.

0:27:47.2 JD: And the same thing, the same approach could be used with that test data from Atlanta, you know if the idea was, I'm gonna sort of start charting this data and seeing how we're doing over time, and I'm working with teachers and students to come up with ideas to how to improve this, to march closer to that 100% proficiency goal, I mean that's a noble goal, assuming that the test is well-constructed and that we want obviously more and more kids to be marching towards proficiency for sure, but we don't want all these other side games going on that come about when you sort of just simply have targets without methods, and I think that's the point. And if you take that approach, I think then teachers sort of understand that the leaders, the school leaders or the district leaders, they're taking some of that responsibility for a lack of engagement or low test scores or whatever it is, and they're trying to remove those obstacles systematically, that's a very different, different approach, 'cause I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't have goals. That's not what I'm suggesting. I set goals for myself all the time, I think they're actually helpful and necessary tools for individuals, but I think when you set numerical goals for other people without a set of methods to accomplish those goals, then you get the opposite effect of what was intended and you know, that's what I see happen over and over and over again in the education sector.

0:29:28.2 AS: And what I like to say is that two things about that, which is one is that if, if you're setting a goal, just don't tie compensation or other benefits to the goal or other punishment. Set the goal and then use it as a tool and track the information and discuss it. It's the same thing with compensation, once you start to tie compensation to specific goals, then you start to mess around with the incentive structure. And that's the first thing I also think the other thing I'd like to say is that if the object that you are measuring through your goal or target or whatever knows that it is being measured, look out. Now, I have a ruler right here, and if I measure the height of this glass, the glass doesn't know I'm measuring it, and so there's no change in anything in the glass, but when a human being knows that they're being measured, it causes a change. Just the knowing of that.

0:30:46.9 JD: Okay.

0:30:49.6 AS: So. Okay. So that helps us to understand about slogans, and what you're talking about is the idea of maybe replacing slogans with "How are we improving the system?" And, you know, I've started doing that in my Valuation Masterclass Boot Camp, where I was at the end of each session... At the end of each six week period, I have a survey that I give to students and I asked them for feedback, and how can we improve this? And then what I do is I take all those and I give them to my team and then we have a discussion and we kind of rank them, and then we go back on the final day and we say, by the way, these are the improvements we're making. And these are the improvements we did the last, this current time that you guys didn't realize, and then that way, the students also are kind of involved and interested in what we're doing, that we're asking for their feedback on how to improve the system, and we're telling them.

0:31:44.9 AS: I don't generally announce it beforehand, like put up something about, "Here's all the changes that we're making in this boot camp," 'cause I just want them to have a natural experience, I don't necessarily need them to be thinking like, "Okay, so this is new", and also some of the things that we're trying, we're testing and we're observing how they work and if they work, and so we may abandon that thing, so it may not make sense to just necessarily advertise it, but when we have some big things like this time, we got some excellent feedback in our last one, and now, I decided that when we do the boot camp, we're gonna have, let's say, 30 or 40 people, and we're gonna cover it one industry, we're gonna value companies in one industry, so we're gonna do the automotive industry, and then that allows everybody to work together in the first week, say, "Let's analyze this industry before I tell you which companies each of you are valuing." And so that's a new innovation that we're trying to do this time, and so there's a lot of work on our side to get that prepared.

0:32:46.7 JD: Yeah. And it sounds like there's methods, there's methods attached to the goal of improvement. That's the most important thing, I think.

0:32:58.1 AS: Yeah, I mean I feel like... One of the things I feel like, and I think maybe some of the listeners or viewers may feel like this, sometimes I don't measure it the way I maybe should. What I do is I get feedback from the customer, from the student in this case. And then I bring that feedback to my team and I ask my team to kind of rank what they think about those, and then we identify, let's say three of those recommendations that we think, Okay, this is good. Let's implement it. And then we test it. We don't have an exact measurement that say, "Okay, well, you wanna say, "Did that work at the end of a six-week period?" We just kind of know whether it worked or not, how much trouble it was, how much benefit we thought it got, and then we get some feedback at the end, and maybe the feedback from students at the end is part of the data. But I'm just curious, what are your thoughts about people who are doing things necessarily, they may be doing the right things, but they may not necessarily be measuring it in the way that they could or should, including myself. What are your thoughts on that?

0:34:08.7 JD: Yeah. I mean... Well, I mean, I think there's quantitative data and qualitative data, and it sounds like what you're doing is relying more on qualitative data, including this experience of the students. I mean, I think generally, probably some things lend themselves to more quantitative data, some things lend themselves to more qualitative data. I mean, I think the key here is to set up a system for improvement, identify what's most important to you in terms of... 'Cause you can't focus on everything at once, what are you gonna focus on? Get, you know, get other people involved. So it's not just coming from you, and it sounds like there's a team here working together, you're also doing it repeatedly over time. I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer on this. I think the most important thing is to, for me, I think about looking at this stuff, putting the data on a chart over time, again, that can be quantitative or qualitative data, determine what the sort of capability of the system is, get some baseline data. I think that's really, really important. And then understand, is what you're seeing sort of typical, is it bouncing around an average within some limits, or do you see special causes in your data? I think those are the most important things.

0:35:57.2 JD: And then the other thing, I think if we're talking about a school and if we really wanna make breakthrough improvements, then I do think at the end of the day, that continual improvement sort of approach has to involve students and teachers, I think it has to. And so I think there's different ways to go about doing that, but I think if you do those things, then you're well on your way to improved outcomes.

0:36:25.1 AS: I do have one question I ask them at the end, and that is, I give them a range of value, and I say, now that you've experienced the Valuation Masterclass Boot Camp, how, what would you say is the value that you received? And definitely in the beginning that kept going up because we kept improving and they could feel that value, and I didn't give them any guidance, the rating did never change, but it was moving up. Now it's kind of flattened off, and so I think we've, we've got a challenge if we wanna bring that to another level, but that's one of them. Well, John, without, without any exhortations to the listeners, I would love it if you could just wrap up the main takeaways that you want us to get from this discussion.

0:37:15.7 JD: Yeah, I think you know, maybe putting a fine point on those things, I think what I've come to appreciate is continual improvement is really the combination of plotting data over time and combining it with that Plan Do Study Act cycle, which we've talked about multiple times. So the first recommendation is whatever metrics are most important to you, plot them on a chart in time order, and then... It can be intimidating at first. But the calculations on the process behavior chart, to add in the upper and natural process limits or control limits is really, really valuable, because then you can start to understand the capability of the system And then you start to understand what would it really take, what would we really have to do to actually shift those limits and indicate a pattern of the data that actually indicates that we've brought about improvement. The other reason those limits are really important is because it does help you understand, do you just have this common cause system where there's lots of different cause and effect relationships, but there's not really a single one you can hone in on, and so then you know you're not trying to improve one component, but the entire system systematically. So I think for those reasons, it gets a little technical with the process behavior chart, or the control chart but they are...

0:38:46.7 JD: I think it's the most powerful tool that we have in the continual improvement tool box. So I would highly suggest at least a couple of people on, on your school district team have that sort of skill set, because then you don't waste your time on improvement efforts, and you can also tell when something you tried has actually resulted in improved outcomes for kids or for teachers or for schools.

0:39:13.1 AS: John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute and the listeners and viewers, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, "Win-Win: Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools" on amazon.com. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

What does it mean that people feel connected and included when something good happens yet dissociate when something bad happens? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss the human side of integration.

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'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, in today's episode, number 12, is Integration Excellence. Bill, take it away.

0:00:32.2 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. So before we talk about integration excellence, I wanted to throw out a couple thoughts. And listening to the podcast, I was reminded that when I share examples, there are times when I mention companies by name, and there's times I don't. And my hope is that people in those organizations don't feel offended. So what I found with students is, if I use the name, there's the risk of someone in the class having worked for that company who feels offended. If I don't use the name, then there's a sense that I'm making the stories up. [chuckle] So I just want to say I um... But there are... What I find is that most organizations are run with what Dr. Deming would refer to as a prevailing style of management, in which case examples such as replacing the cardstock paper with regular paper, and all organizations have those types of stuff. So I just want anyone to feel offended by that.

0:01:40.1 AS: Well, we can make an announcement.

0:01:43.3 BB: Go ahead.

0:01:45.3 AS: Remember those shows that we used to watch that says the names have been changed to protect... but here we're going to say the names have been changed to protect the guilty, [chuckle] not the innocent.

0:01:57.3 BB: Well, there are some stories, I can't share the names for a number of reasons, but they're all the same. Anyway, next thing I wanted to share is, again, on a recurring theme, we talked in the past about red pen companies and blue pen companies, or me and we, or last straw and all straw. And I was recently in... I was in the Netherlands last week doing a class live session for a group that I'm just starting to work with, and we did a physical simulation, a live experiential thing that built upon all the ideas we're talking about here. And I had the group do the trip report, looking at blue pen companies and red pen companies, or however you want to look at the contrast.

0:03:00.1 BB: And we talked about what are the hallway conversations in both organizations? And another was, what are the survival skills in both organizations? And the fairly straightforward survival skills in a last straw organizations are, be really good at shifting blame, be really good at hiding errors, hoarding information is power. And I look at, what are survival skills in a blue pen company or an all straw organization? That's sharing knowledge as power as opposed to hoarding it, it's sharing it. And so we got into those, all those, the usuals. And then I said to them, "Okay, so imagine we are, here we are in a last straw organization, I'm the president of the company and we're in a Friday afternoon staff meeting.

0:03:56.7 BB: And because it's a last straw organization, that means you work for me." I said, "If it was an all straw organization, you would work, and people always say with,": I said, exactly, it's with versus for, but it's a last straw organization. So you work for me. I walk in to the end of the week staff meeting. I apologize for running late. And then I turned to you and say, "I just got off the phone with a customer. I need to know who's responsible for last week's shipment." And then I turned to you, Andrew, and I say, "Andrew, was it you?" And you say, "No, it was Joe." [chuckle] And then I go to Joe and I say, "Joe, according to Andrew, it was you. And he says, "No, no, no, it was Sally."

0:04:44.6 BB: And then I'll go to Sally and actually I won't go to Sally. I'll then go to somebody next to Sally and I say, "It sounds like Sally was involved in this. Can anyone corroborate that?" Then someone else raised their hand and said, "Okay." 'Cause in the olden days, we went by one witness, but nowadays we need two witnesses. Okay, so we've got two witnesses. So, okay, Sally. So then I turned to Sally and I say, "I need you in the front of the room right now." And they're like, "Right now you want me to come?" "Yeah, I want you to come to the front of the room in front of the entire class."

0:05:18.0 BB: And I've had times people get really anxious. I've had times when people walk up on stage and they're like, "You want me to... " "Yeah, I want you up here right now." And they stand alongside me and I say, "So Sally, I understand you're responsible for last week's shipment." And she's like, "Uhhh, yes." And I say, "I just want to thank you. The customer has never seen such high quality before." [chuckle] And then there's this great sigh of relief. And I turn to the audience and I say, "Meet your new boss, same as your old boss." And then kid them that this is a point of time where Andrew says, "Oh, well, I provided the packing tape... "

0:06:00.6 AS: Yeah, I was involved.

0:06:00.7 BB: "That allowed that to happen." And then somebody else says, "And I licked the stamp and put it on... " So what you get is, in a last straw organization, what you have is failure is an orphan, as John F. Kennedy would say, and success has many fathers. So what I point out to them is survival skill in a last straw organization is now and then it might be good news. So when everybody else is playing duck and cover, that might be your opportunity to ask for a little bit more information and find out something good happened. Now you raise your hand, you get promoted because you're now the one who was responsible for this. And then the others then realize, "Well, wait a minute, I played too." And so what I find interesting is in organization is, we don't know if we were connected until we know it's good news or bad news.

0:06:55.2 BB: So what you get is situational association. And that leads me to a real story. I was mentoring a young engineer who worked in the Space Shuttle Management Program at Rocketdyne and I was, had been away, I was in England for about a week. And so I was just getting back to work. And on the day I landed in England, I landed at 9 o'clock in the morning. So it was middle of the night back in Texas. And so I walked in, my friend, Alan Wendlandt picked me up at the airport as usual. We went back to his home, walked in the front door and his wife's in tears because the Columbia shuttle had blown up on re-entry.

0:07:46.9 BB: And so back in the States, people are, yes, middle of the night. So I get back to work the following week. There's an engineer I met with regularly and he comes into my office and he tells me that, you know, what it was like. I said, "So... " I wasn't there. It was the first time I was at Rocketdyne when a disaster happened. Back in '86, I worked in Connecticut, wasn't on the program, wasn't at Rocketdyne. So it was interesting that, so I said, "What was it like?" And he said, "Everyone got a phone call. Everybody goes to their station and we follow this protocol." And I said, "So what was the protocol?" He said, "Every component, team, every component team in the space shuttle and men engine goes through their hardware, looking to see, could they have done something?"

0:08:39.5 BB: 'Cause he said, the early indications were it could have been a spark in the engine cavity, the rear, and that could have led to, led to, led to. I said, "So what'd you do?" He said, "Well, we each went through our planning." And he said, he in particular was thinking, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. We recently came up with a new version of one component. I hope we followed the new process." And he's panicking. He said he was feeling a lot of anxiety over this. Yeah, at first, until he goes in and he's thinking, "Oh my God, oh my God, did we follow the new process?" 'Cause if not, that could have been a contributor. So he found out that he did follow the new process. Which means what, Andrew?

0:09:29.7 AS: He feels relief.

0:09:31.9 BB: A huge sigh of relief, because he followed the process, he's no longer associated. And that's what I started thinking is, we go through life and there's times we feel connected and there's times we dissociate. And I asked a psychologist friend years ago, and I said, is that how we survive? We have the ability to feel connected sometimes and other times we dissociate. There was a hockey game in the National Hockey League in the early '90s where on a shot off the goalkeeper, the puck went into the stands and hit a teenage girl. She would, eventually into a coma, died a few days later. And so I have the headline and the headline says, "Player Distraught Over Death of Girl."

0:10:29.5 BB: And so I would show people that headline and say, "Which player is distraught over the death of the girl?" And people say, "Well, it's the guy who hit the slap shot…was the one feeling distraught." And I thought, why not the goalkeeper? Why doesn't the goalkeeper feel distraught? What about the person who passed the puck to the one who took the slap shot? How do they feel? And so this is this last straw mindset that, and I think psychologically we go through life and if we were that last straw, we feel all this weight. And if we're dissociated somehow, we don't feel it. Well, integration is about understanding how things come together.

0:11:14.7 BB: And in the world of integration, there is no separation. It's it's understanding that there's many contributions to the performance of a system. And I used to ask students, "If I gave you a 10 minutes to list all the people who contributed to who you are, would you miss some people?" "Yes." And then once you come up with a list, could you measure their contribution? And measuring it means that number, if you take all those numbers, like 10% from your mother, 10% from your father, X%, you add them all up to 100. There's no such thing. So in the world of integration that I wanna get into with Dr. Taguchi's work, it's about understanding that things are connected as in an all straw mindset. They are not separate. Okay?

0:12:10.2 BB: So then next I wanna get into, I've taken, I've been fortunate to take some training in the Lean manufacturing, Lean management, Lean thinking, whatever you call it. And it's not uncommon, there'll be simulations where there's a bunch of parts to put together a car, or you're building something out of Legos. And there's a model, you need so many rectangular Legos of this size, so many square ones and you... And, you know, we're creating a flow, putting all these things together. And I've been in situations, university classes where the students are doing that and they're doing that ahead of me presenting something to them. And I remember one time, they're putting, you know, these cars together, they had four wheels and a little motor and a windshield, and they're putting it all together, this assembly line.

0:13:02.6 BB: And I participated in that. And then when it came my turn, I held up a tire. And I said, what is this? And they said, "It's a tire." And what is this?" That's a tire." I said, "Are they the same?" And they're like, "Yeah, they're the same." I said, "Well, actually they're not." If you understand variation, and no two snowflakes are the same, then no two tires are the same. And so I say that because we get stuck in this model of: if the parts are good, which means they conform to a set of requirements, then the sense is because they're good, when we pass them onto the next station, then they all come together, just like that, with no effort.

0:13:48.9 BB: And I say, sometimes that's the case. There could be degrees of effort, but this model that says, because they're good, they fit. And then we treat good as it's good or it's bad, which is black and white. It fits or it doesn't. And then the model we have is because they are good, all the things that are good are equally good, and then they fit equally well. And that's just not the case. And an everyday example would be going to a supermarket and sorting through the fruit. And I would ask students or attendees of a seminar to say, if I told you all the fruit in the supermarket was bruised or otherwise physically damaged, would you sort through it? And there'd be people that say yes, and then people say, no, I don't sort.

0:14:35.8 BB: Well, I point out is the reason we sort through the fruit is because there are different ripenesses of the bananas or the oranges different levels of juiciness. And our needs depend upon either something very juicy or very ripe or something green or something that's gonna be ripe later. What is that? That is saying that we're looking at the integration as we're going to use those oranges and integrate them into our breakfast by making orange juice out of them or taking the banana and turn it into a smoothie. So the bananas and the oranges don't exist in isolation. We have a sense of how we're going to use them. And then we have a sense of how much variation do we want or more so within a set of requirements, we're looking for something in particular and we're looking for a particular parking spot. We're saying there's all these parking spots and we're looking for the one with the most shade because there's degrees of shade. When it comes to hiring...

0:15:39.5 AS: Bananas is a good example because if I'm just gonna buy the banana to eat it, it needs to be reasonably ripe. If I'm gonna buy it to put in a smoothie, it's less critical that it's ripe.

0:15:52.3 BB: That's right. Yes, exactly. And what we're saying is that your integration of that banana depends upon its use. Since you have in mind I'm making banana bread, what does that mean? I want one which is very soft, it doesn't really matter because I'm not eating it as I'm out cycling. Then when it comes to what I've also shared with students, you'll say, well, is there a place for meeting requirements? And that's all. I said, yeah, there's a place for meeting requirements and that's all we need. And then there's a place for going to the next step and saying, I want the juiciest one, I want the freshest one, I want a parking spot which is furthest away from the door, closest to the door. And the same thing happens with staffing.

0:16:37.3 BB: We hire, we're looking to fill a position in our organization, we post something on LinkedIn and we put down the requirements we want and we go from 20 people down to three people. We invite them in for an interview. And what are we looking for? We're looking for, on paper we're saying these people are relatively…on paper, they are the same. The reason we're inviting them in is we want to know what is the degree of fit of each of these people into our organization? And what we're saying is fit is not absolute on a scale from zero to infinity, where are these people on that scale? And our judgment is which one fits in best.

0:17:18.7 BB: I'd say the same thing goes in when you're dating, thinking about marriage or thinking about a long-term relationship even with a supplier, you're looking for degrees of fit. And that's where Dr. Taguchi's loss function comes in. What he's saying is, is all these things meet requirements but depending on how the requirements are met from the very minimum to the very maximum, chances are there's a place in there which has the best integration. And that could be it goes together the easiest. And then, and then in terms of integration excellence, what I want to speak to is shifting from the model that things are good, then they fit. And then when you turn the thing on, it works. That we think about an alternate model, which is there's degrees of good, which leads to degrees of fit, which leads to degrees of performance. And an advantage of that model is it allows for improvement. The model of good equals fit equals works. How do you improve once you get everything good? And that goes back to a far earlier conversation we had over the red beads and the white beads. And of all the beads are red or gone, we're stuck with the white beads.

0:18:39.0 BB: Can we continually improve? Yeah, when you begin to think about improving integration, what we've also spoken about, Andrew, is, you know, we ended a conversation, you said, "So what's the aha moment for people listening?" And I said, "Would you like your organization to be known for products or services that integrate incredibly well in terms of how they perform in the use, as used by a customer, whether their customers are using it exactly or next immediately, or it gets plugged into their system. And do you wanna have... " The reputation that I find... Well, the reason I buy Toyotas is they tend to last very long. And I associate that with their appreciation of Dr. Taguchi's work, which supposedly goes back to the '50s, that they are looking at the parts as a system, how they work together and looking, not just meeting requirements minimally or maximally, but trying to find out where in the requirements of the associated parts should you be for this entire system to come together easily on a scale from zero to infinity and perform incredibly reliably. Andrew, you're gonna say?

0:20:01.0 AS: There's a couple of things. The first one, when you talked about the act of separation that people go through when blame's being tossed around, as an example, let's say, but it's happening all the time. What I was just thinking about is that act of separation is in their mind only.

0:20:20.5 BB: Yes, absolutely.

0:20:21.6 AS: Just because, just because you declare separation doesn't mean that there's not integration of the system. You're just denying it, running away from it. And the other thing I was thinking about about Toyota, it's a very interesting situation with Toyota because the company's being totally beat up for not having electric vehicles to the level that the market wants them to have, the investors want. And when you go against the, the EV crowd, the people that want this for climate or whatever reason, you're gonna get beat up. And they really have been attacked. And to the point that their share price went down seriously low. But when you listen to the CEO of Toyota, he's trying to speak in a system thinking way.

0:21:13.2 AS: He's trying to develop hydrogen as a possible solution. He's got hybrids. Yes, he hasn't moved as fast on the EV, but he also sees other problems. And he sees the research and development that they're doing, which they've just recently announced that they've got some fast charging and long mileage EV vehicle. And so he's trying to manage this whole system. Whereas take a weak manager or a manager, maybe he just... The CEO came in for the last five years or so at Ford or at GM or wherever. And they're like, "Hey, the market says EV, let's go." And then without thinking about the whole system, they end up losing billions of dollars in EV. Whereas now I think that what I've seen with Toyota, and the reason why I'm talking about this is because I've been working with students in my valuation masterclass.

0:22:10.5 AS: They're valuing Toyota and some say it's a buy, some it's a sell, some are beating them up just like the crowd is on EVs, but others are seeing, some, that integration. But ultimately the job of a manager, I guess, is to figure out, I like the degrees of fit. That is such a great thing of how it's good enough. Like Taguchi's loss function was specifically can be a tool to look at one particular thing. But the idea of then bringing that all into the whole system is fascinating. And it's hard.

0:22:44.3 BB: Oh, yeah.

0:22:44.9 AS: The last thing I would say is it's hard. And I think most people, most managers spend their lives trying to break that because it's just too hard to manage. I would rather say, "Okay, you guys do this. You're responsible for this. You're accountable for this. And you guys do that. And I want accountability around here." It's just, it's easier. It's hard and complex what you're talking about.

0:23:12.2 BB: Well, and let's go back to this, this separation. And I don't, and a couple of things come to mind is, one is when the young engineer found out on the Space Shuttle Main Engine that his component was manufactured using the most current process, he was able to go home and sleep. So what I would propose is that we live in a society where when our task meets requirements, we don't, we can separate it. And that's what that, failure is an orphan. It wasn't...It wasn't…I didn't contribute to that. I passed the puck to you. You're the one, Andrew, who hit the slap shot. It wasn't... Yet, let's be honest that, where the, where the puck ended up that you hit did contribute. But that's what I find is, is that the newspaper article says, "Player Distraught," which player? You who hit the puck last.

0:24:39.9 BB: And then I thought, well, I wonder if we ran a study at what point would the goalkeeper, the goaltender feel responsible? Yeah, because it's just, it's off his or her stick. And that's what I find is that we have the ability to separate physically. So when I hand my part off to you, I'm separating physically, but then, when you're having trouble putting those parts together, my claim is that I didn't cause that. So I hand off to you because it's good you accept it. If it's not good, you give it back to me. But when I hand off to you physically, and there's nothing wrong with handing off physically, we have to hand off physically. But I find in a, in an all straw organization, I do not hand off mentally. So if you come back to me, "Bill, I'm having trouble getting these together." I'm thinking, but of course, of course.

0:25:37.9 BB: Right? I am contributing to that. So I don't have... This is... What I also find is, if you understand the psychology of an all straw organization, success has many fathers, but then failure has many orphans. And so you have to be able to go both ways. We're used to associating, all of us associating with success. But what I would want to, Andrew, going back to Toyota's, how do they deal with an organization where everyone feels responsible for the good times, and then but we also feel responsible in some way for the others. And this is the psychology piece of Dr. Deming's work, but notice how it's, there's a bit of variation in terms of how each of us feel contributed.

0:26:25.9 BB: We're talking about systems. And so there's a psychological piece of this. There's a physical piece of this. And what I admire, I think what we both admire about Dr. Deming's work is that he's tying all of this together in his System of Profound Knowledge, that in order to improve integration, integration is not just a physical thing, how these parts go together, but it also requires us to mentally be connected and, and, and feel each other's pain. And that we're not, instead of this, we've got a few hidden figures associated with putting man on the moon. You know what, Andrew? There's a lot of hidden figures that help helped put man on the moon and everything else that happens. But the other thing is I wanted to throw... Go ahead, Andrew, you want to say?

0:27:14.4 AS: I was just going to say that one of the interesting features living in Thailand, and I often wonder after 31 years in Thailand, if I went back to manage people in America, you know, how would I do it? I don't really know, 'cause Thais are so different. And one of the ways that they're different is if you're working in an office with a bunch of people and one person is going to have a late night, they're gonna have to work instead till 6:00, they're going to work till 7:00 or 7:30. The other people in the office, many of them, not all, but the ones that are closest to that person, they'll stay with that person.

0:27:53.2 AS: They won't leave until that person leaves, even though they don't have any work to do. They may ask them if they can help, but they may not. They just will be there. And I just thought that's so fascinating because in America, I remember, you could be like, "That's your problem, dude. You didn't plan or you didn't do this or you didn't think about that. So I'm out of here. Have fun, see you tomorrow." But here there's this connection in the workforce that's really important to Thai people. And I would say probably important to Asians in general, but Thais specifically is what I know best. And it's just, there is that connection that I think particularly for Americans, it's a lot easier to disconnect than it is maybe for the Thai worker.

0:28:40.3 BB: Well, what we're talking about in large part is, what does it mean to work together? And that second word "together" is not separate. This is not working independently. You and I opposite ends of the ditch, one plus one equals two, one plus one equals...you know, right? The opportunities we find appealing in Dr. Deming's work is that when we focus on relationships, not just I hand the part to you and you know you say, so you say, "It's good." And so I say, "Whew." So I separate physically... And I would do that with people in a classroom. I would hand the part to you, Andrew, and I say, "What if I deliver a part to you that doesn't meet requirements? What do you do?" And you say, "Hey, not on my watch." You didn't dot that I, you didn't cross that T. Hey, and you send it back to me. Then I cross the T, dot the I, and I give it to you. And what do you say? And I would physically give you something. And I say, "What do you say now, Andrew?"

0:29:44.8 BB: Actually, what I would say is, "What just happened?" So I would say to the audience, I just gave Andrew something, which is good. What just happened? I don't know what just happened. I said, I separated physically and mentally. So when you come back to me the next day and say, "I can't get this to fit quite right." I'll say, "Why are you calling me?" But I mean, so this integration is about together, working together, thinking together, learning together. And I think what Dr. Deming is offering us is insights that one plus one could be three, could be four, could be five, in terms of the positive synergy within the organizations. And really what it comes down to is, do we want to have no synergy? One plus one equals two. Do we want negative synergy? We're working at odds because how we're meeting requirements is pushing us against one another. And, and we're none the wiser for it.

0:30:47.1 BB: Or are we interested in what's called positive synergy in terms of getting performance out of the system, which you cannot explain by looking at the parts taken separately. So there's a lot of economics here when you begin to shift from looking at the parts in isolation, there's good/bad thinking. And again, there's a place for good and bad thinking. What we talked about last time is compliance excellence. But there's also an opportunity where depending on how we manage the components, we can end up with exceptional performance that they are, "Snap fit," that the transmission lasts much longer. And there's plenty of examples that when you manage the system that way, you get something out of it, which cannot be explained by looking at the parts taken separately.

0:31:39.3 AS: I wanna wrap up, but I also wanna just tell a quick story. In my ethics and finance class that I teach, which I was mentioning I'm teaching this afternoon, I have debates because part of ethics is independent and objective thinking. And I want to help students think independent and objectively. And so the first debate topic that I have, which will come up next week, the proposition is: individual performance-based compensation such as KPIs are the best way to get the most out of an organization. I'll have a group arguing for that proposition and a group arguing against that proposition. And I don't get involved in the... I raise the questions, you know, at the end of the debate, but I let them go and try to see what they come up with. But the point is, is that individual performance-based compensation is a great way to destroy integration.

0:32:48.5 BB: Yes. Yeah, exactly.

0:32:51.0 AS: So, all right, I'm gonna leave you with the last words on this. So let's have you sum up, we talked about integration excellence. Let's wrap up all the different stuff that you've talked about and say, how can we apply this in our lives?

0:33:09.1 BB: Well, one is I would say the recurring theme we've been focusing on from the very beginning is an understanding of systems variation, the psychology piece, that's the human spirit piece and the opportunities. And the last piece being that, this Theory of Knowledge from Dr. Deming, all we know is what we know and can we articulate our theories and a theory being a prediction of the future with a chance of being wrong. And I find that what Dr. Deming is offering is great insights on to how to, how to prepare your organization for an uncertain future. And I find that what a last straw organization does is get people to focus on themselves as you're just describing, avoiding blame, shifting blame to others when mistakes happen.

0:34:11.3 BB: And when you're living in that environment, now you're back to, you get into firefighting modes, you get into, is this a manufacturing problem or a design problem? And all that finger pointing associated with that. And I find is what you're really doing as an executive team in such an environment is you're praying that the future is like the present. And why do I say that? Because when you turn your people into concrete, when you turn your people inward as opposed to outward and they become all about avoiding blame, then boy, what's gonna keep your organization in business is if the future is like today.

0:34:58.0 BB: But if the future is not like today, then you're in a really bad situation because your people have become concrete, they have ossified. And the beauty of a Deming organization is that you've got people who have flexibility. So after the concrete is poured for the walls and after the tables and the equipment are put in place, yeah, you've got chairs on wheels, you can move some equipment around. But boy, if the most flexible part of your organization, your people, aren't flexible, then boy, you better hope the future is like the present. But if you're a betting man, as you and I would be, boy, I would not bet for the future to be like the present. I'm expecting there's gonna be changes going on either caused by people, caused by who knows what. And we want an organization where people are flexible and I'll just close on that thought.

0:35:55.2 AS: Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion and for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. 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 go get yours.

Listening to understand and learn is often harder than not-really-listening because you're thinking about what to say. Dr. Deming emphasized learning and was excited about ideas he heard from others every day. In this episode, David Langford and Andrew Stotz talk about why and how managers, including teachers, should listen to staff or students.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:03.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today, we continue going through Dr. Deming's 14 items that he discuss in New Economics about the role of a manager of people after transformation. In the third edition, that's page 86. In the second edition, that's page 125. And we're talking about point number 12 and that is "he listens and learns without passing judgment on him that he listens to." And we decided to title this one, Do You Listen to Speak or Listen to Learn? David, take it away.

0:00:56.8 David P. Langford: Yeah. Well, thanks. It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, I was just, I was just thinking that when I was at Deming's conferences and a couple of times sat with him either after the end of the day or even at lunchtime, etc. Or just watching him interact with other people, it was often pretty amazing that he'd be chatting with somebody and then he'd pull out these little notebooks and he's all of a sudden just writing down something that somebody told him or that somebody said or... And later in the day, a lot of times he'd pull out the notebook and say to somebody, "Look what I learned today." And I was always just so impressed with that. And I don't know how many four-day conferences I was at with him, at least half a dozen, and always the same, always swan with that little notebook, always writing stuff down.

0:02:02.9 DL: And so this point comes to mind about how special that made you feel that here you have the master of the third industrial revolution, writing down what, what you say, people that he doesn't really know that well or something, but just a point that somebody made and how important that was to him and to keep track of that. And a lot of times I think we've lost that skill. And I like the title of this session because a lot of times when people are having even casual conversations, they're not really listening to what the person is saying. They're thinking about what they're going to say next or how they're going to respond to a point that was made. And when I really started taking these points to heart and thinking about it, even as a classroom teacher, I began to realize that I really wasn't listening to my students. I was preparing to talk at them. [laughter] I remember...

0:03:16.0 AS: And they were preparing to be talked at.

0:03:18.6 DL: Yeah. They're ready to take notes, and you know, but they weren't ready to think and offer opinions and to go through that whole process of working through it. I'll never forget my friend Dr. Myron Tribus, he was a professor at Dartmouth, I think in the engineering school. And for some reason, his whole lecture that he was going to do one day was just either lost or something just before he was ready to walk out in his classroom of 200 kids, students that he was working with and everything. And he thought, "Oh my God, what am I going to do? I don't have my notes. I don't have all this stuff and everything else." Anyway, he just started asking them questions and put them into groups and had the groups discuss things and then come back and pose questions and debate each other and talk and work through. And he told me he'd never had so many students on the way out of classes. "Wow, that was the best class we've ever had." [laughter]

0:04:21.7 AS: Such a great, a great opportunity when you come unprepared, but you've got a group of people in front of you with all kinds of opportunities to pull out discussions.

0:04:37.3 DL: It's sort of like, are you prepared to be unprepared? [laughter] So there's a difference, there's incompetence where you just come in and you don't know what you're doing and, you know, you're lost, or you're prepared, this is a plan that you're going to come in and actually listen to people and present and go through things. I remember even in a high school class that I had, one of the most successful things we did is, I may have told you this story before, but anyway, the library would get all the newspapers and then after a day they're no good. And so coming into class, I would just get all the newspapers from the previous day. And the challenge for the students was to go quickly through the newspapers and pick out relevant events happening around the world and be prepared to discuss that in small groups and stuff. At first, I just thought of it as an activity. And it turned into be so profound that students really thought deeply about stuff.

0:05:43.1 DL: And then they would take Deming principles and apply that to that situation, whether you're talking about world wars, or you're talking about the economics or business or education or whatever it might be. And I remember even just a few years ago, a student of mine, 35 years ago, ran into me and said, "I still remember doing that. I still remember those discussions going through." And most of the time, I was just sitting and listening to them discuss about things. And maybe I'd ask a few questions now and then about things or try to get them to think differently about something. But it was, there were no right or wrong answers, it was just getting people to think.

0:06:30.9 AS: There's so many different things going on in my head as you're talking about this. The first thing is I was thinking... I was thinking about three things. The first is, in order to achieve what he's talking about, first, you have to stop talking. And the second thing is what I've learned over the years is, the best way to stop, the next thing you have to do is stop thinking, because my mind's racing to think about what am I going to say next. And the best way to stop thinking is to take notes of what the person is saying, from my experience. Yesterday, I went to visit a, a prospective client, and I asked him to tell me about his pain that he's feeling in his business and why he's asked me to come. And I have in my notebook here, I've got it all listed out. And then I went back and I read them back to him. And it was kind of funny because I said, "Unfortunately, I just don't think this is enough pain." [laughter] But I don't think I could have said that if I hadn't really understood what his pain was. And so, we had a further conversation going deeper.

0:07:42.5 AS: But then the third part that Dr. Deming is talking about is not passing judgment. Wait a minute. Come on. I'm all about judgment. I know what's right. I formed my beliefs over many years. And you can also say that Dr. Deming passed some pretty tough judgment, you know. So, I'm just curious, as I think about those three things, how do you put that all together in your mind?

0:08:09.2 DL: Well, I was just thinking about one of the conferences that we were at. He always had an education day after one of his conferences. And so, there'd be educators from all over the state would come to his one-day conference. And I'll never forget the room was filled with like 300 school administrators, principals, some teachers, et cetera. And then there was a time to ask Dr. Deming questions. And this fairly young man got up and described the high school that he was a principal of, and there were 52 different languages spoken, and the gang violence that he was dealing with, and all just really detailed and clear. And he had data, and he really understood what was going on. He says, "So Dr. Deming, I need your advice about what, where I should go from here, what I should do." And Dr. Deming is sitting up on this big stage. He's probably 89 years old at the time, and he's got his arms folded, and he looks down, and he looks up at the ceiling.

0:09:14.1 DL: The silence is just deafening with 300 people there. And started to think, well, maybe he didn't hear the question or realize he's supposed to [laughter] he's supposed to answer or something. And finally, the guy couldn't stand it anymore at the microphone. He says, "Well, Dr. Deming, do you have an answer to my question?" And Dr. Deming said, "It's not the answer that's important. It's the question. And you've got that right." [laughter] Next question. [laughter] And there was just this ripple in the audience, like, "What does that mean? Oh, my gosh." Yeah. So when you're able to actually ask the right questions, then you're probably on the right track of figuring out what to do yourself. It's the people that aren't listening and aren't thinking about what is the next question? Or what question should I be answering?

0:10:10.3 AS: And what do you think about when he says... Now, we have to understand that, we're talking about managing your people here. So it's not like he's talking about when you're going out and speaking in the public necessarily, but he's talking about how you're developing your people and interacting with your people. And he's saying, without passing judgment. And I guess the first thing he said, if the way you interact with the people that you manage is to pass judgment on them, you're probably going to lose trust right away. And we've already seen that trust was number 10. So I guess what he's trying to say is, you know, listen and accept what you hear. I don't know.

0:10:55.2 DL: Yeah, I think what I've often taught teachers a lot is to learn to be comfortable with silence, too. You think you're the leader of people so you have to fill all the silence all the time. And you may ask a question, and then you have to just wait. And I'll never forget when I was working with Alaska Native students in Alaska, high school students, read a study that said the average time it takes for an Anglo Saxon teacher to ask a question and then answer their own question is like three seconds. You know, not really listening at all. The average wait time, response time for Alaska Native students was something like 20 seconds. So, here you have all these teachers that have come in from the outside that are starting to work with Alaska Native kids. And they, I remember vividly teachers saying, "Well, these kids just don't respond. They just don't talk. They just don't." Well, give them time. [laughter] It's not in their culture just to respond instantly every time you ask a question or like a game show host or something like that of how many questions can we get through in one hour or something.

0:12:19.3 DL: And I just noticed for myself that I had to do little things like learn to put my hand on my watch, while I, as a cue just ask... I asked somebody a question just to wait until I got that response. And sure enough, when I would wait, I would get really good thought out well...good responses. I didn't wait and I get just cheap answers that people are trying to give you what they think you want to hear.

0:12:53.8 AS: I just thought about how being a podcast host has helped me a lot in listening because, I'm doing two things, one is I'm shutting up. And there's so many times that I feel like, you know I think my discussions with you are a little bit different from my discussions I do on my other podcasts where here I think there's a lot more... We're going back and forth on a lot of things, which I really enjoy. But still, it's just, it's a lesson in being quiet. And what you just said reminded me of something I always said to people that came to Thailand, either managers or teachers, and I said, "Just because Thai people don't respond to your question doesn't mean they don't have an opinion." And I think it's the same thing as what you're saying. And therefore, you've got to use different ways. So in the case of Thailand, one of the ways you do that is you have... And I just saw a presentation recently by a Thai person and they messed up themselves because what they did is they asked the audience, "Raise your hand and ask a question."

0:14:05.0 AS: Which they knew that that's not how Thai people respond. They're not so brave as to do that. But luckily, that person also had a little venue that they could type in a question. And instead of in, they could have saved time by just not even saying, "Shout out your question," they could have just said, "Go to the app, type in your question now." And then people would have really... Eventually they got it. But it was just interesting to see even a native person not really realizing the way people respond.

0:14:39.4 DL: I just know, even in my own family have five children. Well, my wife and I have five children. [laughter] But when they were really little, by the time we got to probably the third one, we had to sort of just hold back the older kids, because we found out that they were just filling in all the blanks for the little ones that couldn't answer or couldn't answer incomplete sentences, or they were actually just completing their thoughts for them and things and just had to explain to them, "Look, you just have to wait and let them formulate an answer and let them talk, let them speak." Because they didn't realize that they didn't have that problem when they were that age. [laughter] They just had parents that were just doting on them and there weren't any other children around. So.

0:15:31.6 AS: Let the process happen.

0:15:33.8 DL: Yeah, it worked out really well because then we'd have fantastic dinner conversations in which all five of them at different ages could enter in and talk about it and enjoy experiences.

0:15:48.3 AS: One other thing I recently did in one of my classes that maybe I would talk about because there's an aspect of listening to it. Originally, this is my ethics in finance class, and it's a 15 hour class. And I can teach for 15 hours on the ethics material, but after COVID happened, it's like, why not just put it all on video. And so what I'm teaching is exactly mirrored to what's in the videos. So now what I did is I told the students, "Look, you're responsible for going through this material. I'm going to carry you through a portion of it. But from day one, I'm telling you, it's all in the videos. And then there's practice questions and things like that." So now what I do is I did... Originally, what I did is I taught for half the three hour session I would teach and then I would have them do case studies. But I realized that I wasn't happy with what the case studies were bringing out and so I switched it to debates.

0:16:47.4 AS: And now I give them topics and they have teams that debate. And I still had the problem that the audience wasn't participating or asking really great questions, it's almost like, it's the other team. So I required all teams to submit one, let's say two arguments with some sort of link to some evidence and two arguments against linked to some evidence, and they all have to submit that by Monday. And then I release that to the whole group, so that the teams that were preparing for Wednesday can see even wider view before they get up on stage. But the key thing is that what's happened now is that I don't have to ask any questions at the end. So I'm just listening. And it's fantastic, because the audience now, they've got good questions. And I just feel like when you talk about listening for me to be able to spend the second half of the class, I don't say anything.

0:17:44.3 DL: Yeah, so it seems like such a simple point. But I think when you really think about it, there's just a lot of depth there and reasoning. And you also made me think about, because you were referring back to the one of the previous points to and trust and stuff, but all of Deming's work was always an interrelationship of parts to the whole. So whether you're talking about the 14 points in his New Eco... Or the Out of the Crisis book, or you're talking about these 14 items for managers or whatever it might be. I was always so impressed that he always saw these things as an interrelated parts to the whole. So it's not like, "Hey, if you just start listening and just do this, then everything is just going to be great." Well, that's a piece of the puzzle, that's not the whole puzzle.

0:18:31.0 AS: It's a progression. Well, is there anything that you would add in wrapping up about listen and learn without passing judgment on the person that you're listening to?

0:18:46.5 DL: I think, I think the last thing is that as a manager of people, whether it's a teacher in a classroom or whatever it might be, you have to actually formally make time to do that. And I know that's really hard to do, but you think of a normal like classroom teacher, like K through 12 classroom teacher, maybe you have 30 kids in a class, how are you going to set up a system so that you're actually getting some time to listen and learn from individual students? And that's really hard to do. It can be done if you think about, "Okay, well, I got 25 kids, if I set up a time to listen to five a day, by the end of the week, I've actually got some one-on-one time with everybody involved with that." Or we've talked about too, in moving to small groups or even whole group kinds of sessions. But the whole point is that you are listening, and think how proud it makes people that you are listening.

0:19:56.3 DL: That's why I told that story about Dr. Deming, because I always felt really proud that he was really listening to what I was trying to say or explain or ask a question about.

0:20:07.9 AS: Yeah, I can't help but add to that, that I do one-on-ones with every one of my students in the Valuation Masterclass Bootcamp. Now, it's a 70% pass rate. So, I don't do those until the end of the course, but people line up video meetings, and we do it virtually because it's kind of, it's easier. But what I have is I have a series of about eight questions that I ask them. And then what I do is I just get them on the line and I say, "Okay, let's look at your first question I asked you, and here's your answer." And I read it back, and then I say, "Tell me more about that." It's incredible.

0:20:47.2 DL: And you have to be real quiet and listen. [laughter]

0:20:51.1 AS: Just tell me more about that. That's all you have to do. And I think that's what your last wrap up there just reminded me. And I think for all the listeners and the viewers out there, you know, "tell me more about that." Well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. 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."

Most people agree: teamwork and collaboration generate greater results than isolation and silos. So why do we let barriers get in the way? In this episode, John Dues and host Andrew Stotz talk about barriers to collaboration and how to break them down.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. This is episode 15, and we are continuing our discussion about the shift from management myths to principles for the transformation of school systems. John, take it away.

0:00:34.9 John Dues: Good to be back, Andrew. So we're talking about these 14 Principles for educational system transformation, like you said, I think last episode we talked about Drive Out Fear, so this episode I thought we'd focus on that next Principle, which is Break Down Barriers. So Principle nine, break down barriers. The way I have this framed is "to break down barriers between departments and grade levels and develop strategies for increasing cooperation among groups and individuals, everyone must work as a team to foresee problems in the production and use of high quality learning experiences" in the case of schools. I was looking back through some notes, and I just happened to come across a quote from Out of the Crisis that I thought was a good quote to sort of start off with, in that book, Deming said "Teamwork is risky business. He that works to help other people may not have as much production to show for the annual rating as he would if he worked alone." And I think what this does for me is really illustrate how big a job breaking down barriers is, because everybody's gonna say, yes, I'm for working as a team. Everybody's gonna say I'm for cooperation.

0:01:58.9 JD: But when the rubber meets the road, you know what actually happens? And I think that quote is a good one, too, because it very clearly connects back to Drive Out Fear. Right. 'Cause what are you going to do once you break down the barriers? What's the behavior that you hope to see? And, you know, the behavior that you hope to see is only possible if you also drive out fear, which I think is, you know, showing that there's this connection between all of these Principles, there are these mutually supporting guiding principles.

0:02:36.3 AS: One thing that's just popping in my head is if you didn't incentivize people, let's think of young people, maybe. Would people naturally be, you know, helpful and doing teamwork? We know that, you know, the annual ratings and those types of things can incentivize being, you know, selfish and not, not working across the organization. But I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that?

0:03:06.8 JD: Yeah, I think... If, if, are you using incentives as a pejorative in this context?

0:03:13.9 AS: Yes.

0:03:16.6 JD: Yeah, I think you have to look at the system that you've set up and the behaviors that result, and then sort of step back and see that whole picture, what is it that... What's the behavior that you're causing by the system you've set up? So I think... That's the major point I think.

0:03:34.0 AS: I'm just thinking about like when someone's young and, you know, they're just living a normal life, they're out with their friends, they're playing in the woods, when I was young, you know, those types of things. Are they naturally helping each other and, you know, naturally want to help or are they naturally selfish?

0:03:53.0 JD: Well, yeah, I think that's a good question. I think that would probably depend a lot on the context. I think, you know, if you're generally talking about young kids, there's probably a sort of a natural inclination to cooperation that's sort of, I think maybe stomped out, extinguished, as you encounter the various systems that are in place in schools, in work settings, those types of things. So, I think, yeah, I mean, I think I would probably lean that way, that there's a natural inclination to cooperation that sort of, is depressed, you know, through the various work and school systems that we've set up. You know, that's a generalization, obviously, but I would probably concur with that. Yeah.

0:04:39.8 AS: You talked about departments and grade levels, and when I think about breaking down barriers, I always think about departments. But maybe you could explain breaking down barriers between grade levels too.

0:04:54.3 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think a grade level team in a school system can be very similar to a department in a business. I mean, obviously I'm working in a school system. And so, there are departments, there's, you know, operations folks, there's HR folks, there are the academic folks and so forth and so on. But there's also these grade level teams where, you know, oftentimes in a school, teachers work most closely with the four or five other teachers on their grade level team. That's a pretty common setup. And so, you know, just like you could sort of optimize the finance department at the expense of the operations department. Same thing, you could do that with the sixth-grade team versus the seventh-grade team versus the eighth-grade team in that same way in the school system. Yep. Yeah.

0:05:47.9 AS: And what's the hardest part about breaking down barriers in school environment? It's, at first, I think that, you know, everybody's overloaded. They're trying to get their stuff done. You know, like, I'm curious what you've experienced there.

0:06:05.0 JD: Well, you know, I mean, I think with any school, I see schools as sort of a complex system, lots of interdependent parts, I think especially so in schools that are located in, you know, high poverty areas, because in addition to the regular stuff of school, you're often sort of also coordinating any number of partners, providers, counselors, you know, healthcare providers even, that are coming from oftentimes outside your system, and, you know, there's all these programs and things that you're trying to coordinate on top of just normal school. So that's sort of an added challenge to coordination in my setting. I think in general, one of the big challenges is that whether you're in a high poverty or low poverty setting, there is a lot of coordination that happens in schools. But teachers are with kids all day. And so, when there is coordination that needs to happen amongst the adult teams, when do you do that? You know, there's only a few options where you can get everybody, you know, together that's, you know, before school, after school or perhaps, you know, you set aside days that are specifically for that where the kids aren't in the building. So I think that's a major challenge in a lot of...

0:07:22.2 AS: Which I would assume everybody would love a 6:00 AM meeting before school.

0:07:24.8 JD: Yeah. I mean, we try not to do too much of that anymore. But we used to do that, you know, not infrequently for certain things. And one of the things we actually did here at United Schools Network where I work, it's been almost a decade now. We reorganized our school day, so that kids used to come at 7:30 and now we have a lot of those sort of adult type meetings, grade level team meetings, building leadership team meetings. Those happen in that 7:30 to 8:30 hour now. So, we did sort of change our system, shortened our day a little bit in recognition of the fact that we need some time to coordinate all the work that's going on during the school day.

0:08:04.5 AS: What are the school hours now?

0:08:06.7 JD: For kids, 8:40 to 4:00 basically, and then adults come an hour earlier.

0:08:16.4 AS: Right. I don't know if you read that, the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, I think it is.

0:08:24.4 JD: No.

0:08:25.7 AS: It's an excellent book that I mean, I highly recommend it for everybody because it really shows the importance. I didn't really wanna read it because I felt like I don't need, I don't need to know why we sleep. I need to know how to sleep more. But once you literally understand why we sleep, you realize, okay, that's the impetus for starting to sleep more. But they had some research that they talked about how, you know, basically there's morning people and then there's evening people, you know, or let's say morning and not morning. And they talked about different schools and outcomes, and they talked about how the problem that schools could be facing is that by forcing non morning people to get into class at an early time they're hurting the performance of those people, those kids substantially, and they had research showing that. And I have always felt like everybody should be a morning person. Come on! That book changed my mind.

0:09:26.8 JD: Yeah, I've heard this argument made before and it went into our decision-making sort of praxis when we decided to change our day. We sort of have it backwards. We, you know, elementary kids often go to school around 8:30 or 9:00, and high school and middle school kids often go to school in a lot of places at 7:20, 7:30. And they're generally the kids that need to sort of more sleep. But, you know, thinking of systems, it's very hard to change because it's tied to transportation systems. It's tied to athletic systems and practices and stuff like that. And so, it's a very hard thing to sort of reshape those systems for all those reasons, for sure.

0:10:12.0 AS: I'm wondering if you could give advice to the listeners or viewers about, they're facing, let's say, somebody facing a lot of barriers in their school. And they don't really know where to start. Maybe you could give some ideas about ways to start and kind of your own experience and, you know, any guidance that you would give.

0:10:37.8 JD: Yeah. I mean, I think that one good starting point in the process is just to stop and think about the question, you know, what exactly is being produced by a school system. So, I think that's something to get clear on because I think a lot of people would instinctually say students, that's what's being produced. But I think if you stop and think about it, that's not quite right. Rather, I think what the aim of a school system is, is to produce high quality learning, not the students themselves. And knowledge and skills is what's being produced by a school system. And I think when you sort of look at your system in the same way that Deming would, you know, we don't have a graphic here, but for those that have seen it, you know, you sort of have, you know, inputs into your system and then you have all these processes that you sort of undertake, you know, while kids are with you. And then, you know, kids go out and are going to other places. In our case, they're going to high schools or, you know, for K-12 systems, they're going into the military or to higher education, to jobs, those types of things. And so, I think it's, you know, be very clear about what it is that you're producing. You're not producing the students themselves. You're producing these high-quality learning processes. Then how do you bring that to fruition?

0:12:07.9 JD: I mean, I think, in thinking through that aim and how to accomplish it, I think just like we were talking about the departments and the grade levels, school systems are organized functionally, and that's for efficiency, just like businesses, you know? But what we really need to think about is how to operate cross-functionally. So that would be one thing is how to set up cross-functional teams. And you know, this is for that simple reason that we've talked about repeatedly that we don't operate cross-functionally, and we just sort of operate in our silos. We make that silo as good as it can be. Oftentimes that can come at an expense to the system as a whole. So that's one thing I think of. You know, I think of...when you think about improving your system, I think one thing to think about off the top of your, sort of at the outset of any improvement effort is what's the boundary of the system that you're talking about. Are you just talking about your school system, which sort of the school system start and stop sort of at some arbitrary geographic boundaries.

0:13:35.4 JD: So, are you talking about improving the educational system in a city or in a single school building or a single school district? So, I was thinking of a couple of examples. You know, one sort of within a system and then would be between systems. But within a system, often there's a, you know, you have general education, students in general education, and then you have students that are spending some amount of their time in special education within that same school system. So, I think, you know, if you're talking about defining your system as that, that school system, you know, I think no matter what, it's you know, what's the aim of that system? Because we're required to have these special education services within our school systems, all of us. And, I think what often happens is actually two parallel systems get created. And, you know, there's specialized staff, there's a language that goes with special education. There's a whole list of compliance items and laws.

0:14:46.9 JD: And, you know, if you make one or the other really good, general education or special education, are you actually making the system as a whole worse? I don't know the answer to that question, but there's a whole lot of questions to answer. You know, do the special education students get the same curriculum? Do they get the same testing system? Are they operating under the same academic standards? I don't have the answers, you know, and that can vary by situation. All I'm saying is, wow we've created two separate education systems, and what happens when we try to improve one corner of the system like special education, does that actually make the whole system? Are we serving the kids well that are getting those services? I think there's a whole lot of questions happen... So I think just looking at that, how those systems talk to each other is another sort of step you can take.

0:15:41.4 AS: Yeah. And I guess the other thing, going back to what you've talked about before, about the aim of the system, and you've talked just briefly here about it right now, but the idea is that if you can, maybe one of the first steps besides setting up a cross-functional team is to say, why don't we talk about what's the aim? Because if we can get to that point of what's the aim of what we're doing, chances are that will be the first kind of guiding light as to why we should break out of our silos or break down the barriers.

0:16:17.6 JD: Yeah, what's the purpose? I mean, is the purpose of special education a temporary set of supports that then leads the child back into more and more general education services? Or is that not, not the purpose? I mean, I think clarifying that in your system is really important. Another example. You know, this would be more like, sort of thinking of a larger system, not just your school system, but in a lot of places we have a traditional public school system, like in a city, like a big urban system. And then we have a public charter school system, which is a lot of times not its own district, but a series of small networks or maybe even single, single buildings. And again, I step back and say, well, what's the aim? Is it to make the system of education better in that particular city, in my case, you know, in Columbus? Or are we just trying to optimize our little corner? Are we thinking about these different pockets? We've often you know, speaking from experience, we've often been an afterthought when it comes to transportation systems or funding or facilities. And a lot of times, I don't think it's nefarious. It's just like literally there is not a representative around the table when decisions are made. And these systems were set up not, you know, originally weren't taking public charter schools into account. So there literally is no one thinking about how the needs might be a bit different in that particular type of system.

0:18:02.8 JD: And then, of course, because there's limited resources, there can be a lot of sort of, you know, people at each other. And that, that was a revelation of sorts or a mindset shift of sorts for me not to think of, you know, other school systems as competition, but really in looking at the Deming approach, it's win-win. Like if we have any chance of creating, you know, a successful system of education, especially in areas where things aren't working so well, like in a lot of core, core cities. I mean, the only way that we're going to do that is through cooperation, working together, having a shared aim. Those types of things. So, I think breaking down those barriers, whether they're internal, your own system, in a lot of cases there's a lot of barriers in place. Or it's between systems. I think that's, you know, at least as important, maybe more important, I don't know. And so that's the best...

0:19:01.1 AS: Your mic was fading out there. So, what was the last thing you said?

0:19:05.4 JD: Yeah, I said, breaking down those barriers between the systems is just as important as breaking down the barriers within your own system. Probably more important in a lot of ways. And I think that's the, you know, part of the power that I see in the Deming philosophy is this framing of win-win. You know, I used to think of other school systems as competition. Now I think of, well, how can we work together to create this system of, you know, of education that works for kids? Yeah, those are a couple, you know, thoughts.

0:19:41.4 AS: I'll tell a story to wrap up and then ask you to do a final summary. But you just, just my mind went back to like, when I was younger and how I was in some special education classes or, you know, I was just in trouble. But my story, my story is that by the time I was 17, I was addicted to drugs and alcohol. And I went into a treatment center in Minnesota called Fairview Deaconess Hospital. And then four days after I got out, I started getting high again. And then I went to Baton Rouge General Hospital. My parents bought me a one-way ticket to, on a bus, on a Greyhound bus to go there from Cleveland. I left from Akron bus station, and, and somehow I got clean at that time. That was September 15th, 1982. And I've been clean since then. So 41 years now. And I went to a long term treatment center that was in Solon, Ohio at the time. It's moved now, but outside of Cleveland called New Directions and I was there for seven months. But, so I had a real challenge with addiction in high school and prior to high school.

0:20:50.7 AS: But why this is interesting about coming back to my special education was that back when I was in third grade or so, I just knew I was in a lot of trouble, and I was just not an easy kid to handle, like a lot of kids, I had a lot of energy. My mom came to live with me seven years ago and she brought, you know, we brought some of her personal effects and stuff. And she had a little, a notebook that she gave me that was the notebook she kept of all my medical journals of my whole life where she wrote down things. And what I found in that notebook a couple of years ago was that the doctors started giving me Ritalin at the age of seven. And I had forgotten completely about that. But I don't know whether it was three years, five years, whatever. But I was on Ritalin from a young age and it was, you know, because okay, I was, you know, not cooperating probably and all that. And so I needed special help or whatever. But I started wondering, I wonder what role that had in my later addiction. And then I look at my, my skills in education, which became much, much better as I went through university. And then I went on to do my Master's and I went on to do my PhD and I went on to teach and I realized that I'm actually, you know, reasonably smart and I am a good learner and a good teacher. But I look back at that time and, you know, it just I don't know, I just wanted to tell that story because I don't think I've ever, you know, put the pieces of that together, but...

0:22:19.3 JD: Yeah, that's interesting. There's a lot of directions you can take that, for first, you know, congratulations on 40 plus years of sobriety. I'm sure that wasn't easy. I think, one, you think could there have been more coordination between the schools and the treatment centers and, you know, other maybe your own primary care physician and stuff like that? And maybe that would have made it an easier road, I don't know, for you. And then you think of the school system and what are the expectations for a seven-year-old? How is that system set up? You know, how much time are you spending sitting and things like that. And, you know, I'm not a doctor, so I can't say. Did you need Ritalin? But I do know is it's you know, it seems like I mean, it's obviously a often prescribed drug for students with ADHD, but it's also a powerful psycho-stimulant, you know, that that can have major side effects. I did my senior thesis on Ritalin in undergrad, so I have a little bit of experience interviewing kids that are taking it and stuff like that. And it can have powerful effects for sure. So yeah, I mean, I think of a lot of things like that. How could you have been better served early on, maybe at seven or eight that wouldn't have led to?

0:23:46.8 AS: And what do you do with a kid that's tormenting everybody and the teachers and you know, like it's just such a hard thing. And I probably needed to run, you know, around for, you know, an hour and a half before I got into class, maybe exhaust me. I have no idea. But for those people out there that are facing addiction or, you know, have dealt with something like that or know about that, we have Deming's 14 points, but we also have a 12-step program that you can find online that can help.

0:24:13.0 JD: Yeah, Hard questions. Hard questions. For sure.

0:24:16.4 AS: Exactly.

0:24:16.6 JD: Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say to your point about you need to run, like I went to a K-8 school where teachers would send kids out by themselves and tell them to go run a lap around the school as a sort of a management tool.

0:24:30.8 AS: It's great one.

0:24:31.5 JD: You can't do that everywhere. But, you know, you certainly sometimes sit here and think, that would be better than Ritalin, I think.

0:24:37.7 AS: Well, how many times do the listeners or the viewers realize they just get up and take a walk and then new things come into their mind? So... All right, let's wrap this up. How would you... Let's just give your final points on breaking down barriers.

0:24:50.3 JD: Yeah, I think there's some concrete steps. I think we talked about some of them. So, you know, defining the boundaries of your system, you know, where are you working? Where are your efforts when it comes to breaking down barriers, where are you gonna focus? I think when you determine that focus, you know, building that shared vision and aim is a good first step to make sure everybody's grounded in that aim. You know, one we didn't really talk about, though, I think especially for an internal, you know, effort, I think building this internal customer concept, I think that's probably more common in the business world, but less common in schools.

0:25:57.3 JD: I say that often here is, you know, who are your internal customers? I say that to people on my team, you know, and sort of taking that mindset that you are in service to a certain group. And I often say if someone's coming to you and asking for this, this and this, it may mean that you didn't sort of communicate out ahead of whatever that thing is. So that's another sort of mindset thing I think you can take. And then we talked about these cross-functional teams to build understanding and reduce adversarial relationships, I think because when you're sort of siloed and you don't see or you don't often talk with another group that, you can start to assume things about that group. And one concrete thing I did across sort of the department that I manage, the departments, we literally have a weekly meeting on Thursday called See the System Meetings, and it's operations, HR, student enrollment, health and wellness, all are in one spot, and we're sort of saying, where do we need to problem solve? Where are things showing up that are, sort of need cross-functional attention? And those types of things. I think that's been fairly successful just to get those people in a room on a regular basis.

0:26:40.6 AS: That's a great one. And I think for everyone out there, you know, See the System is a great idea, or another idea is meaning to work on the system, not in the system. You know, those are some great ways to start the process of breaking down barriers. Well, John, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book Win-Win: Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on Amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:04:09.3 AS: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

0:09:44.4 BB: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

0:15:34.2 AS: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:19:23.7 AS: No.

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

0:20:41.3 AS: Yeah.

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

0:21:24.5 AS: Not sure.

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

0:21:26.7 AS: Not our problem.

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

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

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

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

0:24:27.3 AS: Yes.

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

0:24:35.3 AS: Yes.

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

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

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

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

0:27:05.3 AS: Yeah.

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

0:27:07.1 AS: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:37:19.6 AS: Yeah.

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

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

0:37:28.4 BB: Yes.

[laughter]

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

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

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

0:40:08.5 BB: Yes.

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

0:04:05.4 AS: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:14:00.2 JD: Yeah.

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

0:14:24.0 JD: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:24:35.2 JD: Yep.

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

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

0:26:01.8 JD: Yeah.

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

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

0:26:32.5 AS: Well, John, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for our listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find John's book, "Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools" on Amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

0:00:53.7 AS: Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:08:52.1 DL: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:12:19.8 AS: Yep. Yep. So, I'll wrap this up by challenging the listeners and the viewers out there to focus on that distribution of outcomes. Someday one of those outcomes may be perfect but most days or almost every day, it's not gonna be, it's gonna be a distribution. And so if you do not expect perfection, rather focus on the distribution of outcome, I think you're gonna be in great position. David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion. As always, it's fun. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to join, continue your journey and list...listeners can learn more about David at langfordlearning.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."