In Their Own Words

How do you run an offsite that actually changes performance — not just conversations? In this episode, Travis Timmons and Kelly Allan share with Andrew Stotz what happened during the Fitness Matters off-site. They discuss how a Deming-inspired approach helped their team tackle a critical business aim, align around system improvement, and turn employee engagement into measurable competitive advantage. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Travis Timmons, who is the founder and owner of Fitness Matters, an Ohio based practice specializing in the integration of physical therapy and personalized wellness. For 13 years, he's built his business on Dr. Deming's teaching. His hope is simple. The more companies that bring joy to work through Deming's principles, the more likely his kids will one day work at one of those companies. And we also have a special guest, Kelly Allan, who is a long term practitioner of the teachings of Dr. Deming. And he's also been instrumental in bringing the teachings of Dr. Deming to Travis and Fitness Matters, and particularly to this offsite. So the topic for today is how a Deming style offsite can strengthen your company's competitive advantage. Travis, take it away. 0:01:01.4 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, thanks again for having us and super excited to share with Kelly and your audience how our offsite went a couple of weeks ago. The short answer, kind of the upfront, is it was amazing. We had fun, number one, which is always important, but engagement from the team was through the roof. For four and a half hours straight. We worked on the work together and had Kelly there to make sure we were appropriately following Dr. Deming's teachings. Had Kelly there to facilitate and a couple of fun things we did. One was the red bead experiment, which I'm sure we'll talk about as we go through the conversation here. The short answer is I know in the last podcast we talked about the preparation that Kelly worked with myself and our leadership team on in preparing for a Deming focused and led offsite. We did that and it was just amazing. What were your thoughts, Kelly? 0:02:06.4 Andrew Stotz: I'm curious, Kelly, as an outsider helping them, observing, what are your observations of how it went? 0:02:14.2 Kelly Allan: I think there was just incredible energy and interest in figuring out some of the challenges ahead for the company. People came in well prepared and it showed. The interactions in the breakout groups, interactions in the full groups. Often when you're in a full group of 60, 70 people, folks are often, especially new folks, and the company's been growing and adding new people, new folks are often somewhat hesitant to speak up. But the culture of the people in that room, the culture of the organization is bring it on, let's have a conversation, let's hear what people have to say. Let's share theories, let's get down and debate and wrestle with some of these things that are not easy. There's no low hanging fruit here. It's complex stuff in a complex and highly competitive industry. 0:03:28.9 Travis Timmons: Some of the feedback we received, I think I shared last time, Andrew. As Kelly said, we've hired several new team members and they've all shared with me just a breath of fresh air from where they came from before. The power of this offsite with it being focused on some of the core teachings of Dr. Deming allowed them to see how is this different? They know they like it, they know the culture is different. They know they can provide care the way they want to. They know they can have a voice, have an impact on the system. But they didn't really know why they just liked it. Having a Deming focused offsite to explain a little bit, you can't fully explain Dr. Deming in four and a half hours, but we covered quite a bit. Make the system visible, operational definitions. What are a couple other ones with the red bead, Kelly? We did some tampering. 0:04:28.8 Kelly Allan: Making sure that we're not being confused by visible numbers alone. That what's important is how we work on the system so that we're not doing special efforts all the time to get great results. It's built into how we do things. 0:04:43.8 Travis Timmons: To Kelly's point, part of why our team, for four and a half hours we had over 50 people all in, sharing thoughts without hesitation because one of the things we talk about in the very beginning of the meeting, one of Dr. Deming's core philosophies, if that's the right way to put it, Kelly, correct me if I'm off base here, but 96% of issues within an organization are system issues, not people issues. When you put that out there, we're here to talk about the system and improve it and make it visible. We're talking about problems with systems and processes, not people. Then the gloves are off and let's dive in and we're gonna say whateve

What do you do when a new data point drops—and all eyes turn to you? In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz explore the leadership discipline required when performance data changes. Instead of reacting to a single data point, they unpack how Deming thinking (understanding variation, avoiding tampering, and pausing to interpret patterns) can protect trust, stability, and improvement. A practical conversation for leaders who want wisdom—not speed—to guide their decisions. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is when the numbers change and everyone looks at you. John, take it away. 0:00:28.4 John Dues: Yeah, it's good to be back, Andrew. I think this is sort of an interesting topic. Many of us that have been in leadership roles have been in this position where the numbers change, whatever they may be. For me, they're dips in attendance, they're assessment results changing, something like that, a subgroup's results changes from the previous year. Sometimes the changes are small, sometimes they're big. But I'm thinking about times when they're just large enough to draw attention in a meeting. And it's not even really so much the size of the change that's important, it's what happens next. 0:01:12.9 John Dues: So you can kind of put yourself in one of these meetings where you're looking at data and maybe you didn't even expect it, but people kind of notice. Then someone asks what went wrong? And then the next thing that comes is someone suggests some type of fix or solution, and then this pressure starts to build. Especially if they're all sort of looking at you, the silence can feel irresponsible. And so what do we do? We react in some way. We call another... For explanations, maybe from others. We adjust a plan that's already in place. We launch a new initiative or tighten expectations on people, whatever it may be. None of it's out of malice. It's done out of care, most typically, or at least in the settings I've observed this sort of phenomenon. 0:02:13.1 Andrew Stotz: Don't just stand there, do something. 0:02:15.2 John Dues: Don't just stand there, do something. But the thing is, very often it just makes things worse. Right? 0:02:21.0 Andrew Stotz: Don't just do something. Stand there. 0:02:23.8 John Dues: Right, right. The opposite. But even if you know that, it's very, very difficult in the moment to... 0:02:32.5 Andrew Stotz: The pressures. 0:02:33.6 John Dues: Yeah. 0:02:34.9 Andrew Stotz: Well, I have a little... Little thing happened last night when a friend of mine came to see my mom and me, and we went out for there's a restaurant nearby, so we got the walker and got mom going. And her natural inclination was to help mom in getting up and that type of thing. And I was explaining to her the difference between what I call a caregiver and a caretaker. And I was saying that most people are caretakers where they're just taking care and they want to just help. And she's like, "It's irresistible. I mean, in my bones, I want to help." And I said, "It's very hard to see that sometimes the best help is to let her struggle and use her legs to get up, not to help her on that." And that was like a revelation for her last night, it just made me think about that. 0:03:33.8 John Dues: No, that's actually a perfect analogy because her health is sort of a high stakes environment. Just like schools are high stakes environments or many of the businesses that people run that listen to this podcast have high stakes. In our cases, it's students and families matter, outcomes matter. There's a lot of different stakeholders that are interested in what's going on in schools. And when those numbers do change, it can feel like neglect if you don't do anything. We're expected to notice. We're expected to... Good leaders are supposed to respond. They're supposed to act decisively, right? 0:04:12.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, because there's another aspect to it too. Let's just say that you have a boss that understands it and you're like, "Yeah, it's just noise. It's not signal." But how many times can you say that? Right? 0:04:27.8 John Dues: Yeah, that's right. 0:04:28.5 Andrew Stotz: That's another kind of pressure in that situation. 0:04:31.6 John Dues: Yeah, that's like the second-in-command type person, right? So they have their own pressure. And what you can see happening, this like visible action is sort of like evidence of competence because you can see it. And so the reaction becomes the default. So just like in this example you're giving with your mom, that action to help is very hard to resist. Even though by doing so, like you were saying, she doesn't get the physical exercise and actually makes things worse in the long t

How do you design a team off-site that actually improves your organization? In this episode, Travis Timmons breaks down the mechanics of a Deming-styled off-site team meeting—from starting months early and setting a clear aim to using pre-work, fishbone diagrams, and PDSAs to drive real change. If you want a real-world example of how Deming leaders create focus, collaboration, and joy in work, this conversation is a practical place to start. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussions with Travis Timmons, who is the founder and owner of Fitness Matters, an Ohio-based practice specializing in the integration of physical therapy and personalized wellness. For 13 years, he's built his business on Dr. Deming's teachings. His hope is simple; the more companies that bring joy to work through Deming's principles, the more likely his kids will one day work at one of those darn companies. Travis, how are you doing? 0:00:35.2 Travis Timmons: Hey, Andrew. Doing well, how are you? 0:00:37.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm really excited. We were just talking about the structure of today's discussion, and the topic for today is the mechanics of a Deming-styled offsite, which I... In today's session, we're going to be talking about the importance of starting early, setting an aim, figuring out and developing an agenda. Also homework, huh? 0:01:05.1 Travis Timmons: Right. 0:01:05.4 Andrew Stotz: Pre-work for attendees. I thought that's interesting as we were going through it. And then you talk about your activities, your outcomes and all of that. So why don't you get into it and walk us through the mechanics of a Deming-styled offsite. And by the way, one last thing. When we say Deming-styled, well, you're certainly getting a lot of support from a true Deming advocate, Kelly Allen, and your understanding of the teachings of Dr. Deming. And so you're doing your best to apply those things in this. Is it a perfect Deming offsite? Well, that's why we say Deming-styled offsite. Maybe the listener or the viewer would add in or subtract some things, but at least we've got the general structures. So why don't you take it away, Travis? 0:01:47.3 Travis Timmons: Yeah, no, happy to, Andrew. So yeah, we have our team offsite. It'll actually be 10 days from now. So from a big picture standpoint, one of the things I've learned is systems, process, organization, and none of that happens quickly. So every time we do an annual team offsite, it's about a three-month work-ahead process for myself and the leadership team. So we start a good three months before the meeting date just to start percolating on what do we need to talk about at this meeting? What's the aim? What do we want the outcome to be? And that doesn't happen with a week of preparation. So we've had to spend some time looking at our KPIs, where do we have an opportunity to have a positive impact on our system? So we have to study our current system, see where there might be opportunities for improvement, understand how do we want the team to engage with that. And for this year's offsite, our big aim... We have two aims for the offsite. One is to make the system visible. Everybody on the team. I've had some learnings through some newer leaders on our team that have been through the DemingNEXT and they've been on our team for a few years. 0:03:04.1 Travis Timmons: But they until going through the DemingNEXT, they didn't fully understand what system view meant. And that kind of hit me over the head like a ton of bricks. It's like, well, maybe that would be a good thing to spend part of our offsite making sure the entire team can visualize and see our organization as a system. And then the second aim from a mechanics, from a KPI standpoint, if you will, is we want to improve arrival rate for our visits. So basically, how many scheduled appointments show up is what we call arrival rate. To have a better impact on patient outcomes, joy in work for our team members, joy in the referral sources that send to us. So yeah, it was about a three-month process. 0:03:49.3 Andrew Stotz: And if I... Just curious, sometimes when I've done offsites or I've attended offsites, it's more general. Here you have a very specific thing, improve arrival rates. Why is it so specific and how do you come to that decision that this isn't going to be just an open discussion about things in our company? 0:04:14.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah. That's a great question. Some years they are a little more general. Like last year we spent quite a bit of time setting a new round of BHAGs, Big Hairy Audacious Goals. This year, looking at KPIs, looking at where the opportunities were to improve, where there were the most breakdowns and frustrations happening in our system that we were hearing consistently across our team. It's like, what's the one thing we can have an impact on that will, if we improve th

In this episode, Bill Scherkenbach, one of W. Edwards Deming's closest protégés, and host Andrew Stotz discuss why leadership decisions shape outcomes far more than frontline effort. Bill draws on decades of firsthand experience with Deming and with businesses across industries. Through vivid stories and practical insights, the conversation challenges leaders and learners alike to rethink responsibility, decision-making, and what it truly takes to build lasting quality. Bill's powerpoint is available here. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Scherkenbach, a dedicated protégé of Dr. Deming since 1972. Bill met with Dr. Deming more than a thousand times and later led statistical methods and process improvement at Ford and GM at Dr. Deming's recommendation. He authored the Deming Route to Quality and Productivity at Deming's behest and at 79, still champions his mentor's message: Learn, have fun, and make a difference. The discussion for today is, I think we're going to get an answer to this question. And the question is: Where is quality made? Bill, take it away. 0:00:44.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Where is quality made? I can hear the mellifluous doctor saying that. And the answer is: In the boardroom, not on the factory floor. And over and over again, he would say that it's the quality of the decisions that the management make that can far outweigh anything that happens on the shop floor. And when he would speak about that, he would first of all, because he was talking to the auto industry, he would talk about who's making carburetors anymore. "Nobody's making carburetors because it's all fuel injectors," he would say. And anyone who has been following this, another classic one is: Do you ever hear of a bank that failed? Do you think that failed because of mistakes in tellers' windows or calculations of interest? Heck no. But there are a whole bunch of other examples that are even more current, if you will. I mean, although this isn't that current, but Blockbuster had fantastic movies, a whole array of them, the highest quality resolutions, and they completely missed the transition to streaming. And Netflix and others took it completely away from them because of mistakes made in the boardroom. You got more recently Bed Bath & Beyond having a great product, a great inventory. 0:02:51.4 Bill Scherkenbach: But management took their eyes off of it and looked at, they were concerned about stock buybacks and completely lost the picture of what was happening. It was perfect. It was a great product, but it was a management decision. WeWork, another company supplying office places. It was great in COVID and in other areas, but through financial mismanagement, they also ended up going bust. And so there are, I mean, these are examples of failures, but as Dr. Deming also said, don't confuse success with success. If you think you're making good decisions, you got to ask yourself how much better could it have been if you tried something else. So, quality is made in the boardroom, not on the factory floor. 0:04:07.9 Andrew Stotz: I had an interesting encounter this week and I was teaching a class, and there was a guy that came up and talked to me about his company. His company was a Deming Prize from Japan winner. And that was maybe 20, 25 years ago. They won their first Deming Prize, and then subsidiaries within the company won it. So the actual overall company had won something like nine or 10 Deming Prizes over a couple decades. And the president became... 0:04:43.5 Bill Scherkenbach: What business are they in? 0:04:45.5 Andrew Stotz: Well, they're in... 0:04:47.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Of winning prizes? 0:04:48.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, they definitely, the CEO got the distinguished individual prize because he was so dedicated to the teachings of Dr. Deming. And he really, really expanded the business well, the business did well. A new CEO took over 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and took it in another direction. And right now the company is suffering losses and many other problems that they're facing. And I asked the guy without talking about Deming, I just asked him what was the difference between the prior CEO and the current one or the current regimes that have come in. And he said that the prior CEO, it was so clear what the direction was. Like, he set the direction and we all knew what we were doing. And I just thought now as you talk about, the quality is made at the boardroom, it just made me really think back to that conversation and that was what he noticed more than anything. Yeah well, we were really serious about keeping the factory clean or we used statistics or run charts, that was just what he said, I thought that was pretty interesting. 0:06:06.7 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. And that reminds me of another comment that Dr. Deming was vehement about, and t

What happens when an entire company learns to see its work as a system? In this episode, Travis Timmons reveals how his team uses Deming-inspired pre-work, collaboration, and the Red Bead Experiment to make their offsite energizing and impactful. It's a practical, engaging look at how clarity and shared purpose can transform improvement efforts and build a happy workplace. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Travis Timmons, who is the founder and owner of Fitness Matters, an Ohio-based practice specializing in the integration of physical therapy and personalized wellness. For 13 years he's built his business on Dr. Deming's teachings. His hope is simple. The more companies that bring joy to work through Deming's principles, the more likely his kids will one day work at one. The topic for today is bringing systems thinking to your next team off-site. Travis, take it away. 0:00:41.5 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, great to be with you again. And, yeah, looking forward to sharing a little bit about how we're preparing for our next annual team meeting. And focus for this meeting is going to be, well, a little back story, we had three of our newer leadership members attend some Deming learning, some Deming education. And the biggest comeback, the biggest aha moment they had was they now better understood what I meant by the system view and systems thinking, which got me thinking, boy, it would be great if more of our team fully understood what the system meant, how to visualize it, and then how that further dives into the Deming System of Profound Knowledge. So that's what we've been working on. Our offsite is January 30th, so about a month away. We're about six weeks into preparation for that, kind of going back and forth on what needs to be in there. And the biggest thing, the first exercise, they're going to have homework to do coming into the meeting. We're going to have them kind of diagram what they think the system is. What is the Fitness Matters system? And we're going to prime them a little bit. 0:01:51.7 Travis Timmons: We're going to be doing it via a fishbone chart is the method we've decided to do that with. So, yeah, very excited about that. And it's a great way to get the team working on the work together and making sure they have an appreciation, as Dr. Deming would say, an appreciation for the system. And if you don't know what the system means, it's hard to appreciate it. So, trying to make more team members understand that. 0:02:14.7 Andrew Stotz: And what you're describing, I think is like pre-work that you're asking them to do? 0:02:21.1 Travis Timmons: Yes, yeah. So we'll have we've been spending the last few weeks on making sure we get the right questions in there because we want them to come in prepared but not feel like it's overwhelming or not feel like it's too heavy, if you will. But we want them to do the work so that they can come in and we can dive deeper once we get into some of the teachings and making the visible system of what everything looks like for them. So, that's kind of what we're working on. 0:02:49.1 Andrew Stotz: Did you guide them on, "Here's a fishbone chart, here's how to use it," and then, "Here's the system"? Or do you want them to just understand the fishbone chart and how to use it, and then, "Okay, don't talk to anybody else, you come up with what your vision of the system is"? 0:03:05.0 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so we have a total of seven locations. So what we are going to put in the homework is a one-page definition on what a fishbone is, how to use it and maybe pre-fill in a few of the primary bones, if you will. 0:03:20.3 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:03:20.8 Travis Timmons: Just to give them a primer. But we do hope they work together around the lunch tables and the break rooms, and the local leadership will be there to kind of guide them. Because that's where a lot of the collaboration and culture starts to happen and continues to build. So yeah, there'll be some learning about what is a fishbone, how to use it, because several have probably not used one before. And then we'll prime it a little bit, but then we want them to work on it, kind of kind of work, struggle a little bit to see, like, "All right, what's been invisible to me that happens behind the scenes, and it just happens." And make sure that then we can kind of dive deeper into when we say somebody has a good visit at Fitness Matters, how does that happen? And it's everything from first contact to insurance, to in the clinics, to how they pay their bill. So, just making sure that somebody understands what piece of the puzzle they play and then how it all works together. So we don't have silos, is one of the things we try to avoid, having silos within the organization. 0:04:25.8 Andrew Stotz: So, just so that the listener and viewer can implement what they're lear

Travis Timmons shares with host Andrew Stotz how a decade of frustration running his physical therapy practice turned into joy once he discovered Deming's philosophy and embraced systems thinking. Through PDSA cycles, clearer processes, and genuine team involvement, he transformed Fitness Matters from chaotic growth to a scalable organization getting stellar outcomes. His story shows how small businesses can create stability, joy in work, and remarkable results by improving the system rather than pushing harder. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Travis Timmons. Travis, are you ready to tell us about your Deming journey? 0:00:19.7 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, thanks for having me. And yeah, very excited to share our journey and how impactful it's been on both our company, but also me personally and my family. So, super excited to kind of share where we started before Deming and where we're at today. So I'll just dive right in if that sounds like a good... 0:00:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think just for the audience here, I'll just mention that Travis is physical therapist, founder and president of Fitness Matters in Columbus, Ohio, going on his 27th year of business. And you know, you and I have had some discussions. You've had a lot of great things that you've written and we've gone through and I think it's really an exciting story, particularly for a small mid sized business owner who's just frustrated as hell that things aren't going the way that they want. And I think your frustration a long time ago was a driving force. So I'm excited for you to share your story. So yeah, take it away. 0:01:22.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, very excited. Yeah, 2000 is when we started, January 2000. So coming up on 27 years, as you mentioned, do physical therapy and wellness. And the first 10 years I was in business, pretty good at being a physical therapist. Started my own business and had no idea how to run a business. I knew a lot about physical therapy, but just kind of shooting from the hip in regard to business. Spent about a decade struggling, frustrated. We were growing, but growing slowly, growing chaotically. No process, it was just a, it was a heavy burden, to be honest with you. We were growing, but it was kind of Herculean effort on my part. 0:02:10.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm just curious how you were feeling at that time. Like there's gotta be a better way or this is the way business is and I just gotta muscle through this or how were you feeling at the time? 0:02:21.0 Travis Timmons: I was feeling frustrated and isolated. Didn't quite know where to turn. Yeah, I guess that's how, and just a burden. Didn't want to let the team down, I did not want the business to fail. I knew we had something different to offer. Just really had no idea how to scale that in a professional way. And along the journey was very fortunate to have a client who had a very successful business, took me under his wing. Ray Crook is his name. Started mentoring me and as luck would have it, he was familiar with Dr. Deming and a very long story short, after several meetings with him over time, some mentoring, I'd read the book along the way, the E-Myth Revisited and had some learnings from that book that really jumped out at me and came to the conclusion, both with reading that book and some feedback from Ray of basically, hey, it's time to grow up and turn this into a real business. If you're going to do this, let's do it right. And at that, around that time he introduced me to Kelly Allen with the Deming Institute. And you know, so we were 10 years into some chaos, had really no process, just would try stuff, see if it stuck or didn't. 0:03:43.5 Travis Timmons: If that didn't work, didn't really have any way to measure if stuff was working well. So really just a lot of chaos. And became introduced to Deming through Kelly Allen about 10 to 11 years into our journey and man, was that a breath of fresh air in terms of like having a direction to go in. After a few meetings with Kelly, him getting a better understanding of what was important to me, I think him just really understanding that I was serious about wanting to turn our organization into a large, professionally run and well run organization that would have a positive impact on people's lives, both team members and clients. I think he kind of, I think that we were so bad off he took pity on me to begin with, just to be honest with you, and he was like, man, this guy needs a lot of help. He could do some good in the world with what the services they have to offer. But if he doesn't figure out how to run a business professionally, they're never going to scale. 0:04:44.0 Andrew Stotz: And it's interesting that you reached out. I mean, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that situation and they really don't, either they don't reach out or t

How do we really know when improvement has happened inside a school or organization? In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz unpack a clear, three-part definition of improvement and show why evidence, method, and sustained results matter far more than year-to-year comparisons. Their discussion offers a practical lens for leaders who want to distinguish true progress from noise and build changes that last. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is, How To Define Improvement. John, take it away. 0:00:23.3 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, I think this is really interesting. Apologies on the front end. I'm a little bit under the weather, so I may sound a little raspy today. But you know, one of the things that's really interesting is there's lots of claims of improvement. In my world, there's lots of claims of school im- improvement. I would even go as far as to say that those claims are like a dime a dozen, something like that. And the reason I say that is not to be mean or anything, but you know, I think that a lot of these claims, they're not grounded any kind of reasonable evidence. And I think sort of even beyond that, that claims are often made without a logical definition of improvement. So I thought in this episode we could talk about a three-part definition that makes it really easy to tell when improvement has occurred and just as importantly, when it hasn't. 0:01:21.9 Andrew Stotz: Exciting. 0:01:23.2 John Dues: Yeah. When I talk about this, I always like to start with a challenge. So, you know, if I'm in a workshop, I'll say, you know, get out a piece of paper and a pen so the listeners could do this as well and think about, you know, the successful improvement efforts that you've led throughout your career. So in my world, maybe it's increase in state test scores or maybe you improved student enrollment in your school. Maybe you did a better job at retaining the teachers in your school. It could be any number of things. Maybe it's decreasing student office referrals or decreasing chronic absenteeism rates in your school or your school system, which are two things on everybody's mind coming out of the pandemic especially. And I tell people, just create a list of those instances. And I give them a few minutes usually. And typically, people come up with eight, nine, 10 or so instances of improvement, whether that's teacher in their own classroom or principal in their school, or a superintendent thinking about the whole system. Then I say to them, now what I want you to do is pause and think, what does it mean to improve? 0:02:46.7 John Dues: What do you mean by that? And that really brings us to this important question. What is improvement? You know, and this was... Full disclosure, when I started thinking about this, I stumbled across the definition in a book I'll show you here in a second. But when I stumbled across this, you know, there was some conviction. And I think that probably a lot of educational leaders or just, you know, leaders in general would say, actually, I never really thought about that. I don't have an answer for this seemingly simple question. And like I said, I didn't have an answer to that question when I really thought about it, when I stumbled across the definition, probably for the majority of my career, maybe the first 20 years or so, if I'm at year 25. So, yeah, the first two decades, I would not have had a clear answer for that simple question. Now, I turn to this seminal work in the field of improvement science called The Improvement Guide. I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with this. And I'll share my screen so people can see the book and kind of share an interesting story about the book. And, you know, when you're... Can you see my screen all right now? 0:04:06.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:04:08.1 John Dues: So you can see, if you're just listening, you can see the covers of two books. So on the left, a lot of people will recognize The Improvement Guide. But there's an arrow up there. It says, second edition. And a lot of people will recognize that book. Probably less people. Maybe some people that have been doing improvement work for maybe three decades will know this other book, the first edition of The Improvement Guide. It's this purple book on the right, if you're watching. But there's this interesting anecdote that I actually think I might have heard maybe on your podcast when some of the authors were on. And almost as soon as they wrote this first edition, this purple edition, they got this note from this professor in Brazil, and it said, I know you guys are really big into improvement, and you're really big on operational definitions, but you've

What if more quizzes created more joy—not stress? Lee Jenkins shows host Andrew Stotz how Deming-inspired practices like random-concept quizzes, student-led charts, and "all-time best" celebrations turn classrooms into true learning systems that build confidence, motivation, and real understanding. A simple shift in method—massive shift in joy. (View the powerpoint referenced in the podcast.) TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm talking with Lee Jenkins, who is a career educator in public schools, completing his full-time work as a school district superintendent. During that work, he was introduced to the teachings of Dr. Deming and has been applying those teachings to his life and work since. In his business, Crazy Simple Education, he helps people apply Dr. Deming's principles in their schools to bring joy back to learning, to help kids learn more. The topic for today is how educators have applied Dr. Deming's ideas to learning. Lee, take it away. 0:00:42.8 Lee Jenkins: Thank you so much, Andrew. It's amazing what Dr. Deming taught in five minutes. I've been able to teach that for over 20 years. It's just amazing. And then you see in the next slide, it was Lou Rhodes. And this is just a short little review of what we did on the first podcast. But he's the one that said, I think you're going to enjoy this. Little did he know how much I was going to enjoy that in 1990 when he said that. And then in 1992, heard Dr. Deming in person as the statistician. And he described in five minutes just a little touch of what was different about a classroom as opposed to all the other systems that he was teaching. And so over time, you're going to see how it's been implemented with great joy with so many people. He taught that education should have a learning system instead of an inspection system. And that's what we have, is an inspection system. The state departments of education inspect the schools and the teachers inspect the kids. We don't have a learning system. So if you think about that distinction, it's truly a learning system. And you're going to see that as we go through this today. 0:01:51.2 Andrew Stotz: Lee, I was just... After listening to you in the last episode and listening to some of our other great guests on the show, I talked to my students about this. And one of my students, after I went through it and talked about the random sampling as an example of questions to understand the level of knowledge that students as a group are getting, one of my students at this prestigious university I teach at in Thailand said, "So why are you grading us? " 0:02:26.1 Lee Jenkins: Yes. Yes. That's it. 0:02:27.4 Andrew Stotz: And I said... Lee, I need help. I gave my best answer and that is, "I decided that right now, the fight with the university to change the way it's done is not a fight I'm prepared to take. But what I'm going to do is try to deliver the best experience I can in the room." Now, that was a bit of a cop out, but that's part of... People who are listening and viewing this are also caught in a system, in a trap, an inspection system. So it's just great to hear you talk about this and it can help us think about how we can handle it. 0:03:09.9 Lee Jenkins: People say that education hasn't been improved for 50 years. Then think about it. We've had an inspection system for 50 years. Maybe that's the problem, right? So here's what Dr. Deming taught. Tell them what you want them to know first week of school. Here it is. You're going to give them a weekly quiz. The quiz is going to be the square root of the total number of concepts you want them to learn. So a teacher teaching a second language, 400 vocabulary words, they had 20 words a week at random out of the 400. It's simple, but it's crazy that you don't... People say, "How can you assess them on something you haven't taught yet? " You can, if you have a learning system. And then he said to build a scatter diagram and a class run chart. And let's look at those two just to review. The scatter diagram, and if you can't see this, it's just across the x-axis on the bottom. It says 1 to 14, which is for half a year. The y-axis goes from 0 to 10 because there are 10 questions every week in this classroom. And we have a dot by how many kids got 0 right, how many kids got 1 right, how many kids got 2 right. And if you look at over a semester, you can see all the dots moving from the lower left corner up to the upper right corner. So that's the scatter diagram. 0:04:29.7 Andrew Stotz: That's all the students in the class. That's not one individual student. 0:04:33.0 Lee Jenkins: That's not one student. It's the whole class because you're the manager of the learning of a classroom. He taught that. And then he said graph the total correct for the whole classroom. 0:04:46.6 Andrew Stotz: So you just did what he said. 0:04:49.8 Lee Jenkins: Yeah, add

Ever wondered what Dr. Deming really meant by "profound knowledge" — and how it can still transform your work today? In this conversation, Bill Scherkenbach shares with host Andrew Stotz lessons from Dr. W. Edwards Deming on profound knowledge, systems thinking, and why "knowledge without action is useless, and action without knowledge is dangerous." Tune in for wisdom, humor, and practical insights on learning, leadership, and finding joy in work. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Scherkenbach, a dedicated protege of Dr. Deming since 1972. Bill met with Dr. Deming more than a thousand times and later led statistical methods and process improvement at Ford and GM at Deming's recommendation. He authored the Deming Route to Quality and Productivity at Deming's behest, and at 79, still champions his mentor's message, learn, have fun, and make a difference. Bill, how are you doing? 0:00:36.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Doing great, Andrew. How about you? 0:00:38.6 Andrew Stotz: I'm good. It's been a while since we talked. I took a little holiday to Italy, which was. I was out for a bit, but I'm happy to be back in the saddle. 0:00:48.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Dove in Italia? 0:00:51.3 Andrew Stotz: Yes. 0:00:52.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Where in Italy? 0:00:53.6 Andrew Stotz: Well, I went to Milan for a trade show in the coffee industry, and then I went to Lake Como and relaxed and oh, what a paradise. 0:01:03.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Beautiful. Beautiful. Yep. 0:01:05.0 Andrew Stotz: And, of course, always great food. 0:01:09.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep, yep, yep. Well, you have a chance to use the PDSA on improving your mood there. 0:01:16.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it was just... The resort I stayed at was a tiny little place on the side of a hill, and the food at this tiny little place was fantastic. We just didn't want to leave. Every single meal was great. So I love that. Who doesn't love that? 0:01:34.4 Bill Scherkenbach: They didn't have a food cart in the background. 0:01:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. In fact, they didn't really open for lunch. 0:01:39.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Like what they do over here. 0:01:41.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, they didn't open for lunch. They only served sandwiches at 2pm so we had to hold out. But we still, the sandwich was so good. We just thought yeah, just wait. 0:01:51.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Early lunch. Yep. 0:01:53.3 Andrew Stotz: Well, you've got some interesting stuff to talk about today, and I'm gonna share the screen, and then I think we can kick it off from there. So let me see if I can get that up straight here. One second in. All right, so hopefully, you see a white screen that says profound knowledge. You see that, Bill? 0:02:16.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes, I do. 0:02:17.2 Andrew Stotz: All right, well, let's... Yeah, let's. Let's get into it. 0:02:23.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Oh, okay. I'll go from the bullets that I've got, and we'll hear from Dr. Deming and how he couched it in a little bit, in a few minutes, but he recognized that leaders would say they had the knowledge. Oh, yeah, we do SPC. We follow Deming's philosophy, we do that. But they really only knew the buzzwords. And to an extent, and I don't know how he came up with the word profound, but I do know in speaking with him that he intended it to be a degree of expertise that was beyond the buzzwords. Now, he said you didn't have to be an expert in it, but you had to know enough to be able to understand it and in fact, use it, as we'll talk about in a little bit. And knowledge obviously includes, as he said, an appreciation for a system and variation and knowledge and psychology. And as we'll hear in the audio, he also didn't really limited to that when he said there was there... His point, main point was that there are a whole bunch of interrelated subject matters that are very, very useful in managing your business or managing any organization. 0:04:17.1 Andrew Stotz: You know, I was thinking about that word profound. It's oftentimes wondering exactly what is meant by that. This is helpful to help us understand. It's, number one, about expertise. And I think the thing that I've always also felt is like, when you understand appreciation for a system, knowledge about variation, theory of knowledge and psychology, it, like things click, like it comes together, it's a whole. And that's the way I've thought about it. But that's interesting about the expertise aspect. 0:04:51.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. And that's something Don Peterson at Ford spoke about. He gave a very good talk to our leaders with Dr. Deming in attendance. And he said that a lot of you have said, "Oh, yeah, we already do this at Ford, " but you have to come to grips with a lot of you have been promoted for perhaps the wrong reason throughout your career, and you're gonna have to change. The change starts with us. So that was very

Are you looking for smarter, more sustainable improvements? In this episode, John Dues joins Andrew Stotz to challenge the way schools - and businesses - set goals. Instead of chasing stretch targets that often frustrate teachers and students alike, John shows how to use data and systems thinking to create real improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is how to set educational goals. Take it away, John. 0:00:25.6 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. So the thing that I see just over and over again is that goal setting in schools is just really ineffective. And not only that, but it's often counterproductive. So I thought it'd be good to talk about a different approach to how to set educational goals. I think most typically what I see, and this is probably not just true in schools, but in other places too, you get some result, and then you set a goal to increase by 10 or 15 or 20%. But I think that what often is missed is that without certain conditions in place, these stretch goals end up disconnected from reality. And so what I wanted to do in this session is to teach three conditions that I believe will lead to much more effective goal setting. 0:01:20.8 Andrew Stotz: It's interesting because goal setting seems really simple, like, just set a goal and go get it. 0:01:29.1 John Dues: Yeah. 0:01:29.5 Andrew Stotz: And yet when you're... You say that it's simple as an individual that I'm going to go walking every morning. That's my goal. It seems simple as an individual, but when it gets to a company level, it can get really complex, or a school level. And also there's this... What did you call it? Like aspirational... Or what was the word? Stretch, stretch goal. It's so common, particularly when business is not going great. Like, I want this from this team, and it's just so common to say, to lay down demands. I want 20% revenue growth. I want students passing this by 70% or whatever. And yet it just doesn't work that way. And so I'm looking forward to hearing from you about your three conditions. So let's go. 0:02:23.1 John Dues: Yeah, sounds good. So let's start by looking at why I don't think stretch goals are helpful. And since I'm working in schools, I like using data that people are familiar with. So I'll use this third grade reading state test score data. It's very common. It's really important. There's often some guarantee around third grade reading scores or there's often high stakes attached to third grade reading. So I'll use that. And so let's say in year one, and this is actually real data, 54.9% of third graders scored proficient or higher on that test. And then in the next year, they score 63.8% of the third graders scored proficient or higher. So in most places, leaders and teachers would celebrate because that represents an 8.9% increase in proficiency rates. And so then they do something like set a stretch goal of, well, next year we're going to grow by 20%. So you think, well, we grew by nearly 9%, so we can surely hit 20%. But then what often happens in a situation like this is that the next year's data comes out and actually goes down. 0:03:41.4 John Dues: And that's exactly what happened in year three of this data. Now, in this third year, only 61.2% of the students scored proficient or higher. And so then you think to yourself, well, what stretch goal would I set next? Would you change that 20% goal because of the decreased rates in the most recent year? So it actually is an interesting exercise. If you're listening to this, actually get a number in your head. You're the school leader, you're the superintendent, you're the principal or whatever, think about what goal then would you set for this group. So they grew by almost 9% and they went down by a couple percent. Between year one and two, they set the goal of 20%. Now what are you going to do? What's the goal? What are you going to say? 0:04:36.2 Andrew Stotz: And I'm thinking about the tampering concept that Dr. Deming talks about, constantly adjusting based upon where you're at. And it's interesting because in that case, you may say, you know, a disappointing year, but we've got to stick to our 20%. We got to stick to our strong, we can't give up. Remember that celebration we had? 0:05:01.0 John Dues: Yeah, this is a one year blip. We had increased by nearly 10. I know we can do it if we just double down. Let's keep that 20% goal in place. Yeah, that's definitely what a lot of people would do. So let me show you the results for those three years and then what happened for the next several years after that. So I'll share my screen for those that are watching so they can see this actual data in chart form. 0:0

What if learning could feel like a team sport instead of a pressure test? Lyle "Lee" Jenkins, PhD., a longtime educator, shares how a chance encounter led him to a Deming conference specifically for educators in 1992, which transformed his thinking. Deming emphasized defining learning outcomes, rejecting numerical goals, and avoiding ranking. Lee explains how Deming methods prevent "cram and forget", celebrate small wins, and rekindle students' natural love of learning. (Lee shared a powerpoint during the episode, which you can find on our website.) TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm talking with Lee Jenkins, who is a career educator in public school, ending his career as a school district superintendent. It was as a superintendent that he was introduced to the teachings of Dr. Deming, and he has been applying it to his life and work since then. In his business, Crazy Simple Education, he publishes books and schedules speaking engagements. Lee, how you doing? 0:00:38.4 Lee Jenkins: I am doing just great, Andrew. Yeah, this has been fun to put together. And just to highlight, I haven't done this before, just to highlight just simply what Deming taught. We've obviously, over the years added other things, but today we're just talking about what did he teach, just the pure form of it and our implementation of that. 0:01:01.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think you and I have already met once and gone through this. It's pretty interesting, you know, I think what I enjoyed about our discussion, truthfully, what I liked, was your energy and the energy about the teachings of Deming and how we can apply that. And so I'm looking forward to seeing you bring that to the audience. Now, for those that are listening, we're going to have... Lee's got a PowerPoint and a presentation he's going to share, but we'll walk you through it. It's not like it's full of very complicated things. So, Lee, why don't you take us through a little bit about what you've prepared here? 0:01:38.3 Lee Jenkins: Okay, I can do that, Andrew. I was like anybody else as a school superintendent. I went to a meeting of the Association of School Administrators. I can't even tell you what city or state it was in, but I was there. And while I was in the hallway between sessions, Lew Rhodes, who worked for AASA, he came up and he said, "Lee, I think you'll enjoy this next session." And that's why I've called this, One-Minute Invite That Changed My Life. So I went in and no idea, I just liked Lew. I trusted him. And it was David Langford's an administrator. And that's how I was introduced to Deming and spent a lot of time after that, reading everything I could get my hands on and absorbed it. And I knew that he was correct in how organizations are operating. And so that intrigued me a great deal. But it was the same information that he shared with all organizations. I just took them and applied them to education. But then two years later, in 1992, American Association of School Administrators, under... With Lew Rhodes' leadership, sponsored a Deming conference. So I went to Washington, DC in January that year to hear him speak. 0:03:20.2 Lee Jenkins: We were there four days. He was assisted and was a part of it for two days. And for two days it was him on stage, the red beads, you know, all the things that listeners know about with Dr. Deming. And I would say that the first part of it was the things you would normally expect to hear. Now, understand, the audience here was educators. And I know there were educators sprinkled in his audiences in his whole speaking career. I know that. I wasn't one of them, but I know that. This was one that was specifically for educators. And nobody's told me any other time when he spoke to educators as the audience. So, but just things he'd say that we've all heard. 0:04:13.7 Lee Jenkins: Best efforts are not enough, you have to have knowledge, you have to have theory. He said too, you can't delegate quality. And I had school superintendents doing that all the time. You ask them about, anything about teaching or learning, they say, oh, no, I'm not involved in teaching and learning. I have an assistant superintendent for instruction. In other words, they've delegated quality. Deming talked about wasting time and wasting money in all organizations, and certainly schools are good at that. I'm going to talk at the end of this, how I took it onto one other point which is similar to what he's talked about also. The losses of the current system. He said in one place that, for 50 years... Now, he said this in the '90s, but for 50 years, America has been asking for better education without a definition of what better education is. And... 0:05:10.5 Andrew Stotz: That reminds me of talking to Bill Scherkenbach, who showed a picture of him, Dr. Deming, in the old days at an event of national teachers, and he sai

Great leaders know there's no one-size-fits-all formula. In this episode, Bill Scherkenbach and Andrew Stotz discuss practical lessons on how to connect with people on physical, logical, and emotional levels to truly get things done. Discover why balancing "me" and "we" is the secret to lasting results—and why empathy might be your most powerful leadership tool. Tune in now and start rewriting your own leadership playbook. (You can view the slides from the podcast here.) TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Scherkenbach, a dedicated protégé of Dr. Deming since 1972. Bill met with Dr. Deming more than a thousand times and later led statistical methods and process improvements at Ford and GM at Deming's recommendation. He authored The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity at Deming's behest, and at 79, still champions his mentor's message, "learn, have fun, and make a difference." And the episode today is Getting Things Done. Bill, take it away. 0:00:41.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Okay, Andrew. We will get 'er done today. The reason I put that on there is that in many of his seminars, Deming said that, "I am not a businessman and not trying to be one." But you need to think about these things. And his approach really was to improving organizations was to put people who he thought were masters of his teachings into organizations, and they would be there full time to facilitate the transformation when he wasn't there, such as Ford and GM and a few other companies. There were a few of us who he trusted to be able to be there to get things done. And I'm reminded of the philosopher, the Asian, Chinese philosopher, Mencius, and I'll read it there. It says, "Don't suspect that the king lacks wisdom. Even in the cases of things that grow most easily in the world, they would never grow up if they were exposed to sunshine for one day and then to cold for 10 days. And it's seldom that I have an audience with the king. And when I leave others who exposed him to cold arrive, even if what I say to him is taking root, what good does it do?" 0:02:35.7 Bill Scherkenbach: And quite honestly, that's the lament of every consultant trying to get stuff done in today's world, in Western style management. And so one of the things in this slide, the framework for getting things done, for having fun learning and making a difference, is one of the two, I think, major contributions I do say that I've made to the profession of quality. And that is using this Venn diagram to be able to show that even though other people have used other terms for physical, logical, and emotional, that there usually have been holy wars being fought by people who say, "Well, emotional is better. That's how you get stuff done." And other people saying logic and other people saying physical. And in fact, I think in the last time we spoke, the three major gurus of quality were those ships sailing in the night. Dr. Deming was the epitome of logical thinking, whereas Phil Crosby was looking for the wine and cheese parties and the emotional sell part of it. And Joe Duran was looking at physical, how are you going to organize to get stuff done? Now, they all had their followers who were pretty much on those frequencies, and they reached people in other frequencies. I came up with this idea for the Venn diagram to show no hierarchy, I guess back in 1987, something like that. 0:04:49.3 Andrew Stotz: And for the listeners out there, we're looking at a diagram that shows one circle that says physical, that's interlocked with another one that says logical, and then there's a third, a Venn diagram, that third is emotional. And so those are the three pillars that Bill's talking about. All right, keep going, because you got stuff in the middle too, which is interesting. 0:05:16.1 Bill Scherkenbach: And the thing is that I based it primarily at the time in the mid-60s, there was a theory of brain structure called the triune brain. Now, and it was the limbic system, the neocortex, and the R-complex. And pretty much followed the logical, emotional, physical words that I'm using. Now, our understanding of the brain in the decades up through now, it's a little bit more complicated than that. But physical, logical, and emotional is in all of us. In our body, I mean, the latest looks at neural connections extend to your gut. And nerves are just about everywhere and connected, and that the way the brain works is still not even fully, not begun to be fully understood. Having said that, in order to get stuff done, this Venn diagram shows very, very simply that the intersection of physical and logical, I put as science. It's the logical explanation of physical phenomenon. And the intersection of logical and emotional is psychology, logic of the soul. And the intersection of emotional and physical is art. All art is is the emotional inte

What is your data trying to tell you? In this episode, John Dues talks to Andrew Stotz about why most leaders misread data, overreact to single results, and miss the real story. Discover how Deming thinking exposes when change is truly happening and how to use a process behavior chart to listen to the real story. Plus, find out why nine years of 'stable' results may still demand transformation. Tune in and rethink data-driven leadership! 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is understanding variation is the key to data analysis. John, take it away. 0:00:27.8 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah. So, we've just started the school year in Ohio, so I thought doing a session on goal setting would be a good place to kick off the year. And I was thinking a lot of leaders, school leaders and leaders in general, are setting goals around this time period. And I was really thinking about having this Deming lens. I was thinking, how did I set goals before I sort of started understanding this approach? And it's, you know, this is one of those things where if you really stop and think about it, goal setting is a lot harder than it seems at first glance. Things like, how do you set a reasonable goal? And then once you've gotten to that place, how do you know if things are improving? How do you know if things are getting worse? And I was thinking how powerful this understanding variation method is for folks that may be struggling with those questions. 0:01:32.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. In fact, that's a great question for the listener and the viewer. Like, how do you set goals? How did you set goals in the past? How have you improved that? And I was thinking when you were speaking, I didn't set goals. I gave proclamations. You know, 20% of I want to see this and that. And they were just stretch targets without any means or methods. So yeah, interesting. 0:01:55.2 John Dues: Yeah. How do you set the target? Was it arbitrary? Is it based on some standard that you heard somewhere? A lot of times you have no idea sort of what's behind that target or you've sort of associated it to something that's familiar. Like in my case, we often sort of set goals that sort of mimic the grade scale. So, you know, 80% is a common goal for something like test scores, you know. 0:02:23.7 Andrew Stotz: But they don't even call them goals anymore. They call them, let me remember, I think it's called KPIs. 0:02:30.0 John Dues: KPIs, targets, you know, lots of different things for sure. And I think what I've seen is that a lot of the reason that goal setting is so hard is because you, well, one, you misinterpret your data in the first place. And a lot of that misinterpretation, at least in the education sector, is because leaders don't have the knowledge. They don't know about natural variation. They're typically making comparisons between some current performance level, some previous value. But those two things, those two data points don't show you, don't convey the behavior of that data across time. So, what we do and what I did before I sort of discovered this method is you overreact to a single data point. Probably less frequently, you underreact to the data because you don't have this understanding of, you know, how much is the data moving up and down sort of naturally almost no matter what you're doing. Now, that's not always the case, but that's the case that I've found in a lot of situations. And so until you start to take that into account, those natural ups and downs, then you just misinterpret the data over and over again, usually by overreacting is what I've seen. 0:03:54.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:03:56.0 John Dues: So there's, you know, I think as a starting point, people in the Deming community will be familiar with, a lot of people. But others listening to this probably have never heard of this idea of dividing variation into, I've heard it described as like two flavors. There's the routine variation, what I call natural variation, things vary naturally no matter what you're doing. And then there's exceptional variation where things are so different that there is reason to pay attention to this. And what I found through studying this is, the key is knowing how to tell the difference between those two types of variation. And don't do that, lots of confusion, lots of wasted effort. And so that's really where the power of this methodology comes into play. And for anybody that's studied this, you sort of realize that you have to have a tool to make that differentiation. It's not arbitrary. And so that's where what I call the process behavior chart, some people call the control chart, where that comes into play because that tool allows us to tell

Discover how Andy Novins turns business challenges into big wins! Andy shares with host Andrew Stotz how he uses Deming strategies to outsmart competitors, watch for market shifts, and win loyal clients in one of the toughest industries around. TRANSCRIPT Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm here with featured guest Andy Novins. Andy, are you ready to join and share your Deming journey? Andy Novins: I sure am. Yep. Andrew Stotz: We've done a lot of prep for this, had some good conversations, and I'm looking forward to it. Let me introduce you to the audience. Andy first got introduced to the teachings of Dr. Deming more than 30 years ago and has been hooked ever since. He attended Dr. Deming's four-day seminar in August of 1993, only four months before the passing of Dr. Deming on December 20th of 1993 at the age of 93. Andy was a co-owner of a women's athletic apparel company, which was eventually purchased by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. For the past 23 years, he's been applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to his work in real estate, which traditionally has operated in what could be described as in opposition to the teachings of Dr. Deming. Andy, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing right now and maybe a little bit about how you got into what you're doing now, and then later we're going to talk a little bit about your experience with Dr. Deming and all that. But just let us know, where are you at? What are you doing? Andy Novins: Okay. Well, I am in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., and after my partners and I sold the company that Andrew just referred to, I had to decide what I was going to do. And I had about six months to do that because part of the contract required me to help the purchaser, which originally was Russell Corporation, a big athletic, they made all the Major League Baseball uniforms and everything. We had to transfer my company's systems to their systems, and that was one of the worst six months of my career, watching everything we had done, which was really all Deming-based, being sort of dismantled and worked into another Fortune 500 company at the time. It was, somewhat, actually it was a few years later that Berkshire Hathaway bought it, and it was because Russell was not doing very well. It was a rescue-type purchase by Berkshire Hathaway, which sort of had some satisfaction in mind that their systems weren't all that good. So that's where I got into Deming, and I've taken a lot of what I learned from the apparel company into real estate, which, as Andrew just mentioned, is very volume-centric, volume-focused, and focusing on processes as opposed to systems. Andrew Stotz: And in the real estate world, for those people that don't know, let's say real estate, what position are you in? For instance, my sister is a mortgage broker in Maine, and that's a different place within the whole sphere of it, but maybe you can explain exactly where you are in the value chain. Andy Novins: Okay. We focus on residential real estate. What we call in real estate farm, okay? I send out 5,000 newsletters a month that show to eight different areas, really, but they're all within, believe it or not, two miles of my house. And those news, I've been doing that for over 20 years. I've never made a cold call. I will never call anybody and say, are you thinking of selling or anything like that. Yet, using this process, which is all really Deming-based, I've done about 10 times the volume of any other realtor in the 5,000 homes that I service. It's the process... I don't want to use process. The system we used is based on Michael Porter, his concept of competitive advantage. And it's a system that's focused on a value chain, things that we do that other people can't do. For example, there are close to 300 sales a year in my 5,000 home market. I see every one of them. And when you see a house that's on the market, you know a lot more than anybody else does by looking at pictures. If you've ever been to an open house and after seeing it on the internet, it's a lot different than what you saw in the pictures. No other agent can do that because most agents in my area focus on Northern Virginia, which would be about 20,000 transactions a year, not 300. So they can't even try to compete with me in my area. So that's the whole concept of it is doing things. As Michael Porter would say, you have a value proposition. That's my expertise in my local area. Andrew Stotz: Porter talks about different strategies. One, he says, is the low-cost leader. Another is the differentiation. And the third one he talks about is focus and where you're focused on a niche in the market. And then I guess I always kind of think that really he's talking about two, because with focus, you're picking a niche, but then you're going to either be a low-cost leader or probably a differentiator in that

Step into a treasure trove of rare stories, photos, and audio clips as Bill Scherkenbach shares his decades with Dr. Deming. From boardrooms to sleigh rides, discover the moments, minds, and memories that shaped modern quality thinking, told by someone who lived it. A powerful blend of insight, humor, and history you won't want to miss. (You can see the slides from the podcast here.) TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Scherkenbach, a dedicated protégé of Dr. Deming since 1972. Bill met with Dr. Deming more than a thousand times and later led statistical methods and process improvement at Ford and GM at Deming's recommendation. He authored 'The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity' at Deming's behest and at 79 is still championing his mentor's message. Learn, have fun, and make a difference. Bill, take it away. 0:00:41.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, thank you. Thank you, Andrew. It's an honor to be asked back. Many places don't. 0:00:48.7 Andrew Stotz: I really enjoyed our first discussion, and particularly towards the end of it, it got a little personal and emotional, and I appreciate that you shared your journey. That was amazing. 0:01:00.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Thank you. Thank you. It is personal. 0:01:05.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:01:05.4 Bill Scherkenbach: But today, along that wavelength, I brought some pictures or photos and letters and audios of my association with Dr. Deming. So, if you might bring them up, we can start the commenting. 0:01:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Wonderful. Well, hopefully you see a screen now up. 0:01:34.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. Yep. 0:01:35.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay. And for the audience, just to let you know, for the listeners, we're going to show these and I'll try to explain a little bit about what we're talking about because you're not going to be able to see the pictures. But the first thing is the title is An Insider's View of Deming. Learn, have fun, make a difference. And we see a great picture on the left-hand side, and then I threw in a picture of a Lincoln Continental, which we're going to talk about later, which is kind of fun. But maybe you can take it from there, Bill. 0:02:07.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Well, we can talk a little bit later on on that, but this is a picture of me and my wife, Mary Ellen, with Dr. Deming having fun. We were at a restaurant in Northville called Elizabeth's, and it's something that he enjoyed to do just about every evening. 0:02:31.3 Andrew Stotz: Great. Well, what a kickoff. So let's go to the next one. And you guys all look great in that photo. 0:02:38.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. This is a letter that I received from Dr. Deming back in May of '85, auspicious because the letter dated 13 May, that's my birthday. But for those who cannot read it, should I read the letter for you? 0:03:05.2 Andrew Stotz: Either you or I can read it for you. You tell me. 0:03:08.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Okay. Well, yeah. Why don't you read it? 0:03:10.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So, the letter is addressed to a particular person. It says, this is written by Dr. Deming, this acknowledges your kind letter of the 29th April. He that depends solely on statistical process control will be out of a job in three years. The record is clear, the record is clean, no exceptions. A whole program of improvement of quality and productivity is necessary, and it requires that top management learn what their job is. No part of the program will by itself suffice. Your letter does not describe your program, hence comment is difficult. I am happy to learn that Bill Scherkenbach will work with you. His achievements are renowned. He is excelled by nobody. I am sure that you will follow his guidance, not only while he is there with you, but from that then on out. I send best wishes and remain yours sincerely, W. Edwards Deming. 0:04:19.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. I did spend a week with this organization, and as Deming said, and in many, many cases, the local management or local part of the organization get very enthusiastic, but the top management did not buy in. And so very little happened there, unfortunately. 0:04:53.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I missed that the top right-hand corner in handwritten, it says Portland, 20 May 1985. Dear Bill, I neglected to hand this to you in San Francisco, W. E. D. 0:05:08.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. We went to, we. Dr. Deming and I were in San Francisco to meet with Shoichiro Toyoda and his wife. It was a social call. Shoichiro was in town. I don't know where his brother Tatsuro was. Tatsuro headed up NUMI, but Shoichiro was head of it all and was in the US. And wanted to just have a dinner with Dr. Deming. I'm embarrassingly cloudy. We met in a hotel and I can't tell you which one, but it was a nice, relaxing dinner. The English was a bit stilted, but Soichiro wanted to have a dinner

What was it like to learn from Dr. Deming himself -- a decade before his name became legend in U.S. business circles? In this deeply personal episode, William Scherkenbach shares with host Andrew Stotz what it was like to sit in Deming's classroom in 1972, join him for late-night chats at the Cosmos Club, and help ignite transformational change at Ford and GM. Learn how Deming's teachings shaped a lifetime of purpose, and why Scherkenbach, now in his 80th year, is stepping back into the arena with lessons still burning bright. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm here with featured guest William Scherkenbach, and he is known as one of the men who has spent a huge amount of time with Dr. Deming, as he mentioned to me previously, starting from 1972, over a thousand meetings and many other activities that he's been involved in. So, Bill, welcome to the show. Why don't you give us a little background about you? 0:00:39.5 William Scherkenbach: Oh, okay. Good to be here, Andrew. Well, I'm going to start with, since it's about Deming, in '72, I was newly married in April, but had been accepted to NYU Graduate School of Business, and I don't know, I never found out who wrote the course syllabus, but whoever did wrote something that it sounded like a darn interesting course, sampling, manufacturing. I was a protocol officer at the United Nations at the time and was going to night school at the New York University Graduate School of Business. So, I said, this sounds like a good course, interesting course. Had no idea who Dr. Deming was, and I walked into the first class, and there was an old, I'm 26, so he was 72 in 1972, and he was one of the first, one of the only old person who didn't say, I used to be, and I don't want to stereotype all of my peers now that I'm 79, but hopefully I don't fall into the, well, I used to be and what happened. But he did tell, I mean, statistics can be a very technical subject, and the way he taught it, I had courses in some theory of sampling, which was one of his books. 0:02:52.2 William Scherkenbach: He had three, I said three courses. The other course that I took was based on his lectures in Japan in 1950, and in fact, two of them. The third course was an extension of that. So, he was, he would teach the statistics, but he was able to tell the history of the people behind all of the thoughts and the formulas and approaches, and I found that extremely, extremely interesting. And he handed out tons of papers and material, and it was just a very, very good experience. I know he had, and he had, in my opinion, a great sense of humor, but then statisticians, what's our status? Yeah, we're like accountants, in any event. . 0:04:12.2 Andrew Stotz: Why was he teaching? I mean, at 72, most men, you know, maybe women also, but most of us are like, it's the twilight of our years, and we now know he had 30 more years to go, but why was he teaching? And also, what's interesting is when I think about Deming, I think about his overall system of what he's teaching, whereas it's interesting to think about how he taught one relatively narrow subject. 0:04:43.7 William Scherkenbach: I'll get to that as to why I think he was teaching. But yeah, back then there were no 14 Points, no glimmer of Profound Knowledge. It was, not theoretical statistics, but applied statistics with a theory behind it. And he still was really expanding on Shewhart 's work with the difference between enumerative and analytic. He used his own. Now, why he was teaching, years later, probably 1987, so yeah, a bunch of years later, when I was at Ford and I had attended at the time, I attended a senior executive week-long get-together in order to get constancy of purpose or more continuity in the senior executive group. One of the people we brought in was Dr. Peter Kastenbaum. And I found as I attended his lecture in that week-long meeting, he was a student of CI Lewis. And CI Lewis, Deming learned about from Walter Shewhart and his work in the epistemology theory of knowledge. And in any event, Deming, when he was asked, and at the time it was still in the '30s, I think, when he was at the School of Agriculture, or the agriculture department, and bringing in Shewhart, he had tried to get CI Lewis to come talk. And CI said, I would love to, but I have a commitment to my students. And so I can't adjust my schedule. 0:07:33.9 William Scherkenbach: And the students, the people who wanted to learn were sacred. And I think that had a huge impact on Dr. Deming. I mean, he spoke about it a lot. And the way, you know, in a lot of the videos that Clare Crawford-Mason did, lovingly called the old curmudgeon. But for students, he had the greatest empathy and charity for, he just didn't suffer fools gladly. If you showed him that you weren't willing to learn, he took great joy in letting them know where they, where t

What if you could tackle a persistent problem without guesswork? In Part 10 of the Path to Improvement series, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss how John's team uses Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles to calm a chaotic process with precision. Discover how to shift from blame to solutions by leveraging data and Deming thinking. You'll also find out where the team stands on their path to reducing chronic absenteeism in their schools. Listen now! #EducationLeadership #ContinuousImprovement #SystemsThinking #DemingInEducation TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is mapping the process, part two. John, take it away. 0:00:23.5 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah, we've now been talking about our efforts to improve chronic absenteeism for several episodes. And we've talked about two Plan-Do-Study-Act or PDSA cycles focused on where we were working with specific students and their families regarding obstacles to getting to school. And then we shifted gears, and we started running this PDSA cycle three that we talked about last time. And just as a refresher for listeners, the objective of PDSA three is to create a process map, basically. And the goal for the process map is to standardize our attendance intervention system. And I think one of the things that comes to mind when you sort of work on process maps or on important processes is this quote from Dr. Deming. He said, If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing, which is pretty convicting when you really think about it. I think a lot of people initially will say, No, no, no, I know exactly what our process is. And then you say, Well, write it down, map it. And then it becomes much more apparent that most people most of the time have a very rough version in their head that they can't translate into an actual written process. 0:01:44.8 Andrew Stotz: And I'm curious why that is, because on the one hand, when I've done mapping a process, you end up with, Okay, but then there's this exception, and then there's this. And oh, yeah, but don't forget that. So there's like all these intricacies. That's one reason. And then there's another reason is why is that someone's tunnel vision on I know the process because I know the three parts of the process that I'm working with. Why do you think it's hard for people to understand the whole process? 0:02:11.9 John Dues: Well, I think that first reason is probably the biggest reason where there's when they actually start mapping it, there's all these things that they initially left out. And I think as soon as an organization gets to a certain number of employees and has a certain amount of complexity, or you have to add a person that's now going to do part of what you previously did because your role changed or something shifted, needs change, or whatever in the environment. And you have to bring them in. You realize pretty quickly that you can't rely on that stuff that lived in your head anymore. So I think it's a combination of all those things for why this becomes so important. And the other reason I mean, the reason you want to do this is so that there's a starting place, a standard place where people are working from so that whatever it is that the focus is that it can be improved. It's hard to do that when there's no set process to start with. 0:03:08.5 John Dues: Let me. I'll share my screen and just kind of as a refresher, take a look at some of that data that we've talked about so far on this chronic absenteeism front. So, you'll remember that we have this long range goal to improve chronic absenteeism. We've kind of talked about where we are now, where we want to be. So where we are now is in that sort of 40 to 50 % range in terms of chronic absenteeism. We want to be down in under 5%. We have eight years of data going back to the 16-17 school year. And the other thing we've talked about on the data front is that really we have this pre-pandemic world and this post-pandemic world when it comes to chronic absenteeism. For anybody that's watching, you can clearly see this on the process behavior chart or control chart that's on the screen where prior to COVID, we're sort of humming along around 25% chronic absenteeism, which is still high. But now, since COVID, we've since the pandemic, we've skyrocketed. So there's this clear, sort of, new reality, new system for schools like ours that... 0:04:23.7 Andrew Stotz: And can you, just for someone that may be just popping in and hearing this, can you just describe what is chronic absenteeism rate? 0:04:31.9 John Dues: Yes, chronic absenteeism is a standard federally defined level of absenteeism where kids are called chroni

How can we improve attendance when every school has a different process? In this episode, John Dues continues his exploration of Deming's philosophy in action, focusing on chronic absenteeism. As part of their third PDSA cycle, John's team shifts from individual interventions to process standardization—mapping how each of their four campuses handles attendance interventions. The surprising discovery? Each school follows a different process, revealing hidden variation and inefficiencies. By visualizing these systems, the team is not only grasping the current condition but also setting the stage for a reliable, scalable, and effective process. This methodical approach highlights how understanding systems and reducing variation are key to meaningful improvement. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Mapping the Process. John, take it away. 0:00:26.7 John Dues: Hey Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. For the folks that have been following along for the past several episodes we've been working towards defining this problem more narrowly in terms of this chronic absenteeism issue we've been talking about. And for the last few episodes we've been talking about how the team didn't have enough information to write that precise problem statement. And we took a look at gathering additional information by running a couple PDSA cycles in those first two cycles that we've discussed so far. We know we had zeroed in on a handful of students and ran PDSAs with them and their families about their obstacles getting to school. And then we left off talking about how we were going to shift gears in PDSA cycle three. And instead we were going to focus on standardizing our process. So creating a process map for how we intervene with kids with our attendance teams across the network. So that's what the team is currently working on. But just as a sort of quick reminder to folks, and especially if you're watching, we have this model that we've been working through, this four step improvement model where you set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and experiment to overcome obstacles. 0:01:48.1 John Dues: And then like we've talked about several times, we're doing this with the team and that includes people working in the system, people with the authority to change or work on the system, and then at least one person with significant knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge, like an SOPK coach. And we've been using this model that's on the screen to sort of symbolize or I guess visualize what those four steps look like. You're sort of marching up this mountain towards this challenge or direction. And we've also talked about this long range goal that we've had and we've taken a look at some data where we have our chronic absenteeism rate mapped out over the last eight years or so. We have this long range goal. So this is the direction of the challenge where we're trying to take our chronic absenteeism from above 50% down to 5%. We have the data going back to the 2016/17 school year. Then we also talked about how there's this, not surprisingly, there's this sort of pre-pandemic level of chronic absenteeism, which was again too high. It's not where we wanted it, but we have this major shift up where we've seen this significant jump in chronic absenteeism since the pandemic hit. 0:03:15.0 John Dues: So in those four years, 2020/21, 21/22, 22/23 and 23/24 we were up in the 51, 52, even up into the close to the 60% range in chronic absenteeism at the height of the pandemic. So for PDSA cycle three, really doing two things. So, and we're going to talk about this in the episode today. If you remember back way at the start of this series, we looked at something I called a system flowchart. So we'll kind of revisit that and then we're going to take a look at two process maps that were created by two of our school teams to sort of map their current process. And then we'll walk through, sort of we'll take that, we'll walk through what the plan is for this PDSA cycle three. So let's start by looking back at this system flowchart. I'll sort of reorient you to this. So we have up on the, and this is the current state. So up on the top we have the target system which is attendance. And then we have this aim that is sort of a three part aim. 0:04:42.7 John Dues: We want to define strong attendance for students and staff, make sure everybody's on the same page. We want to ensure that students, families and staff have a shared understanding of what it means to have strong attendance. And then we are working on improving and creating systems that identify and remove barriers to strong attenda

Why would any leader choose to take on a transformation that requires rethinking how they lead, how their organization functions, and how they learn? In this episode, we dive deeper with Cliff Norman and David Williams, co-authors of Quality as an Organizational Strategy, exploring Chapter 11: "Getting Started." They share powerful stories, practical steps, and the deep-rooted challenges leaders face when shifting from conventional methods to building true learning organizations grounded in Dr. Deming's philosophy. This conversation highlights why improvement cannot be delegated, why leadership transformation is essential, and how to begin the journey—with clarity, commitment, and courage. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today we are going to continue our conversation with Dave Williams and Cliff Norman about their book Quality as an Organizational Strategy. I found this book fascinating because I think it's addressing something where there's been a bit of a hole and that is how do we think about the strategy of our business? And so we already had our conversation in a prior episode about the overview of the book, but today we're going to be talking about specifically, now this is kind of funny because we're going to be talking about the back of the book and that is chapter 11, getting started. Dave, why don't you take it away? 0:00:53.3 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Andrew. Thanks for having us back on the Deming podcast. So, as you mentioned, part of the way that the book is laid out is that it describes kind of the foundations that are behind quality as an organizational strategy and begins sort of with an introduction that explains a good bit about how Dr. Deming had this provocation of a need for leaders to transform the way that they approach leading organizations. And part of that was to move not just from process based improvement projects, but to start to think about major systems in the organization and to pursue quality as the overall strategy and create a continuous improvement organization or learning organization. And so the book lays some of the foundation behind the science of improvement or behind profound knowledge that underpin the thinking, walks through quality as an organizational strategy, as a method of five interdependent activities. Then at the end it comes back full circle to say, well, this is great, now you've learned about these theories and methods. But a natural question for any leader would be, how do I get started? And one of the first things that we talk about in that section actually is about why leaders would want to do this transformation. 0:02:30.9 Dave Williams: And this actually came from a conversation that Lloyd and Cliff and I had in 2020 where we were talking about getting on this journey of building the book. And we all kind of recognized that this was really, really hard work. And we were curious or we, we didn't have a good answer of what was our theory about why somebody would deviate from the way in which they work today and embark on a transformational change of the way that they approach leadership, the way that they approach organizations. And actually I ended up going on a journey of interviewing a whole host of leaders who had been influenced by Deming, who had been involved in improvement in healthcare, folks like Dr. Berwick and Paul Batalden and Brent James. I interviewed some folks in the UK and other places, like John Seddon, and asked them, oh and I should Blaine Godfrey, who had been the lead of the Durand Institute, and I posed the question, what causes somebody to want to embark on this change? And many people actually had a hard time articulating it. But the answer that emerged, or actually Blaine Godfrey was the one that kind of framed it the best, I think, for us, was a number of things. 0:03:57.7 Dave Williams: Sometimes it's something like a book like this comes out and people read it and it's interesting and new. Sometimes it's an event happens, a patient safety event or a major accident or something of which causes people to have to change or do something different. Sometimes it's a discouragement with a desire that you know you could do better, but you don't have methods or know how to. So there were a host of things that we listed, and those are some of a sample of them that might invite somebody to say, the way that we're working today is not getting us to the level that we want to. And now we want to embark on something different. And we might look to something like quality as an organizational strategy as a method for us to transform the way that we're working and build on the shoulders of Deming's philosophy and the science of improvement and do it differently. 0:04:56.0 Andrew Stotz: And when I look at the book, you guys are bringing together a lot of different stuff. It's not just a Deming book. It's Deming is a part of

It's time for PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) Cycle 2 in John Dues' journey to reduce chronic absenteeism in his schools. His team is using PDSA to quickly test ideas and learn on a small scale. Find out what happened and how PDSA can be a powerful tool for learning. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of a new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is Powerful Learning with the PDSA Cycle, Part 2. John, take it away. 0:00:26.7 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, like you said, we, I think for the past three episodes or so, we've been working towards getting a better definition of our problem specific to this chronic absenteeism issue that we're working on this year. I don't know if you remember from last episode, but we have this team working and they've basically said we don't have enough information quite yet to write this precise problem statement. So we decided to gather information running the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. And last time we focused on the first cycle. This episode, we're gonna focus on a subsequent PDSA cycle, sort of along those same lines. For folks that are watching and perhaps just joining for the first time, I'll kind of share my screen and do a little bit of a review so that everybody can see or know what we're talking about, even if they're just listening for the first time. So we've talked about this improvement model. We're working through this four step improvement model. So set the direction or challenge is the first step. Grasp the current condition is the second step. Third step is establish your next target condition and then fourth, experiment to overcome obstacles. 0:01:44.3 John Dues: And we're doing all this with a team, people working in the system. People have the authority to work on the system and someone with the System of Profound Knowledge knowledge. right. And so, you know, we've talked about setting that challenge or direction. And as we're grasping the current condition, we've actually decided to skip to step four and experiment a little bit so we can get a deeper understanding of this problem that we've been working on. And you'll remember probably as well, did the screen change for you so you can see the chart now? 0:02:21.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. 0:02:22.9 John Dues: Yeah. Great. So I thought it'd be helpful to show this again too. So this is our process behavior chart of the chronic absenteeism rates dating back to the 2016/'17 school year. So we have eight years of data in regards to this problem. And you'll remember when we talked about set the direction or the challenge, we wanna basically cut this chronic absenteeism rate we're seeing coming out of the pandemic by a lot. So we're hovering around this 50% chronic absenteeism rate. We wanna cut it to 5%. So that means, you know, 50% or more of our kids, or right around 50% of our kids are missing 10% or more of the school year. 0:03:06.2 John Dues: And this is a trend that we're seeing all over the United States right now. And the other thing that we talked about is when we looked at this process behavior chart, that it's basically like there's a pre-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism, and then there's a post-pandemic system of chronic absenteeism. So, you know, before the pandemic, the rates were too high, but nowhere near to where they are now. So, you know, prior to the pandemic, we were sort of hovering around the, you know, 20 to 30% of kids chronically absent. And then, you know, coming out of the pandemic, it's been more like that, that 50% number that we've, that we've talked about. 0:03:49.4 Andrew Stotz: And so to reiterate for the listeners or the viewers, this is the chronic absentee rate at your school, as opposed to nationwide, which I remember last time you talked about, it's about 30% nationwide, and pre-pandemic, it was about 16%. 0:04:06.5 John Dues: Yeah. Right around there. So, yeah, so I'm talking about the four schools that make up our school system in Columbus, Ohio. 0:04:15.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:04:16.6 John Dues: And, you know, we have a pretty high percent of our kids are economically disadvantaged. And so the rates in schools that have that demographic tend to be more like ours, in that 40, 50% range. And then, but all schools coming out of the pandemic had much higher rates than what they had pre pandemic. No matter your affluence levels. It's just, just like a lot of things the schools with the most kids living in poverty get hit the hardest when you have these problems, basically. So, yeah, yeah. So what we were, we were studying this problem, and, you know, we have some idea of what's causing our challenges, but we've started running these PDSA cycles to dig into that a little bit more, and I'll, I'll, I'll stop sharing

How does "quality" apply in all areas of an organization? In this final episode of the Misunderstanding Quality series, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss lessons from the first twelve episodes, and the big ah-ha moments that happen when we stop limiting our thinking. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 13 and the title is Quality Management: Don't be limited. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.5 Bill Bellows: Hey, Andrew. So this is episode. What number did you say it was? 0:00:36.2 Andrew Stotz: 13. Lucky 13. 0:00:38.1 Bill Bellows: Lucky 13. So then for those who are concerned about the use of the number 13, this is episode 14. 0:00:51.0 Andrew Stotz: I thought you're gonna say episode 12A. 0:00:54.7 Bill Bellows: And for those who don't mind the number 13, this is episode 13. And as we talked earlier, if Dr. Deming was to title the episode it would be... It would not be "don't." It would be "do not", do not be limited. So at the start I wanted to go back to review the path we're on. We've been on episode one back in end of May, Quality, Back to the Start. All part of the Misunderstanding Quality series for The Deming Institute. Episode two, we got into the Eight Dimensions of Quality with David Garvin. One of those dimensions was acceptability. 0:01:49.8 Bill Bellows: Another was reliability. Another was I say dependability performance. Okay. And I think it's important in a series about misunderstanding quality to look at the work of David Garvin. Just realize I think it's fascinating to... You move out of the world of the American Society Quality and control charts and whatnot. And that's why I think Garvin's work paints a nice... Gives a nice perspective to not be limited. And then we got into in the third episode Acceptability and Desirability. Episode four, Pay Attention to Choices and the choice of differentiating acceptability which is I'll take anything which meets requirements, and desirability. 0:02:42.3 Bill Bellows: I want that little doggy in the window. Not any doggy in the window. And then we followed that with episode five, the Red Bead Experiment which for many is their first exposure to Dr. Deming's work. I know when I worked for the Deming Institute for a few years the Red Bead Experiment website was one of one of the most popular pages. I believe another one was the 14 Points for Management. And, personally, I've presented the Red Bead Experiment think just once, just once. And I'm going to be doing it at the 2025 at, let me back up, the Bryce Canyon Deming... The Bryce Canyon...Bryce Canyon Forum. I can't remember the name. It's a partnership between Southern Utah University and The Deming Institute, and we're doing it at Southern Utah University. And on one of those days, I'll be doing the Red Bead Experiment, which takes a lot of time and then studying to present it a few years ago I was getting all the videos that I could find of it, many of them on The Deming Institute web page and none of them have the entire data collection. 0:04:18.5 Bill Bellows: They kind of fast forward through six people putting the... drawing the beads each four times and when you're up on stage trying to do that, I had four people that's, you gotta do a lot of work to make it that exciting. But the reason I present it, I say I present it for a number of reasons. One is to do the classic "The red beads are not caused by the workers are taken separately. They're caused by the system which includes the workers. It's an understanding of variation and introduction to control charts" and all of that is as exposed by Dr. Deming is classic. 0:05:00.7 Bill Bellows: But, I'd like to take it one step further, which is to go back into that desirability thinking and look at the concept that we've talked about of going through the doorway and going past the achievement of zero defects, zero red beads, and realize that there's further opportunities for improvement when you start to look at variation in the white beads. And, that then takes into account how the beads are used. And that gets us into the realm of looking at quality as a system. Looking at quality with a systems view as opposed... That's good, that's good, that's good. With or without an appreciation on how the bead is used. So anyway, that was episode five. We explored that. Next we got into the differentiation of Category Thinking and Continuum Thinking. 0:05:55.5 Bill Bellows: And for those who haven't listened to it, maybe not in a while, the differentiation is category thinking. Putting things in categories such as red beads and white beads are the... It could be any categories, categories of fruit, categories of religion

Are your specification limits holding you back from improving your products and services? Should you throw out specifications? What does Stephen Hawking have to do with it? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss specifications and variation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is episode 12, and the title is Do Specification Limits Limit Improvement. Bill, take it away. 0:00:31.4 Bill Bellows: Hey, Andrew. How's it going? All right. 0:00:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Great. Great to have you back and great to see you. For those that are just listening, you can watch the video on DemingNEXT. But for those listening, Bill looks handsome, full of energy, ready to go, and it's my 8:30 in the morning in Bangkok, Thailand. So let's rock Bill. 0:00:56.3 Bill Bellows: So. I spoke recently to one of the folks I'd met on LinkedIn that have listened to our podcast and took the offer to reach out and we now talk regularly. And I just wanna say I've gotta, before we get to some, the story behind the title, I wanted to share, a heads up. And if anyone would like a copy of this article that I wanna, take some excerpts from, then just reach out to me on LinkedIn and ask for a copy of the article. The article's entitled 'A Brief History of Quality,' and there's three parts. So it's about 10 pages overall, and it was published in 2015 in the Lean Management Journal, which I don't believe still exists. I was writing articles at the end once a month for this journal, I think based out of the UK. 0:02:04.3 Bill Bellows: I think there was a manufacturing magazine that still exists and had this as a special topic and my interest was bringing Dr. Deming's ideas, to the Lean community, which is why it was a Lean Management Journal, so the article was entitled 'Brief History Equality.' And so I wanna get to those topics, but when I was reading the article, reminding myself of it, I thought, oh, I'll just share this story online with Andrew and our audience. And so here I'm just gonna read the opening paragraph. It says, "several years ago, I had the opportunity to attend an hour-long lecture by Stephen Hawking," right? So the article was written in 2015. So the presentation by Hawking would've been maybe 2012, 2013. And back to the article, it says, "he, Hawking, returns to Pasadena every summer for a one-month retreat, a ritual he started in the 1970s, several thousand attendees sitting in both a lecture hall and outdoors on a lawn area complete with a giant screen were treated to an evening of reflection of the legendary Cambridge physicist." 0:03:14.3 Bill Bellows: And I'll just pause. I have friends who work at JPL and they got me seats, and they got me an inside seat in the balcony, front row of the balcony, but they had big screens outside. I mean, it was like a rock concert for Stephen Hawking, right? 0:03:34.3 Andrew Stotz: That's amazing. 0:03:34.9 Bill Bellows: Oh, it was so cool. Oh, it was so cool. So anyway, "his focus was my brief history offering us a glimpse of his life through a twist on his treatise, A Brief History of Time. His introspective presentation revealed his genius, his humility, his search for black holes, his passion for life, not to mention his dry sense of humor. It ended with questions from three Caltech students, the last of which came from a postdoc student, an inquiry Hawking had likely tackled many times before." 0:04:06.6 Bill Bellows: So realize he's answering the questions through a voice activated thing. And it appeared that the questions were, his answers were prerecorded, but they're still coming through a device that is a synthesized voice. But I get the impression that he knew the questions were coming, so we in the audience were hearing the questions for the first time. But he had already answered the questions. So anyway, it ended with questions. There was an undergraduate student, a graduate student, then a postdoc, and I said, "the last of which came from a postdoc student, an inquiry Hawking had likely tackled many times before. And the student relayed the story of an unnamed physicist who once compared himself to both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein." So this unnamed physicist compared himself to Einstein and Newton each placed on a scale of 1 lowest to 10 highest. "With this context, Hawking was asked where he would rank himself." 0:05:22.0 Bill Bellows: So this physicist said, oh, you know, Andrew, I see myself as this. And so the guy relays the story, and he says to Hawking, so given this other physicist said this, where would you rank yourself? "Well, I do not recall the relative rankings posed in the query. I'll never forget Hawking's abrupt reply.

Can you use Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) during the information-gathering phase of an improvement project? Yes! Join John Dues and host Andrew Stotz as they discuss how John's team used PDSA to learn more about chronic absenteeism, their surprising findings, and what they'll do next. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is powerful learning with the PDSA cycle. John, take it away. 0:00:25.5 John Dues: Yeah, Andrew. It's good to be back. For the past two episodes or so, we've been working towards defining the problem of our chronic absenteeism issue, of course, we have a problem with chronic absenteeism, but we're trying to narrow that down and get a more specific problem statement. Last time we talked about how our improvement team, basically, had come to the conclusion after a few weeks of study that we didn't have enough information to write that specific, precise problem statement. So what we decided to do, and we started looking at this last time, was we started to gather additional information through a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. So that's what we'll focus on today, is this first PDSA cycle, and I think it's good to know that you can use PDSAs to run an experiment to test a new idea, but you can also run a PDSA to gather more information. Those are both very worthwhile uses of the PDSA cycle. So I go to share my screen just so I have that model up so that people who can see it, for those that are viewing. Can you see that now? 0:01:33.8 Andrew Stotz: Coming up. Okay, we can see it. 0:01:36.6 John Dues: All right, great. So you remember, we've been working through this four-step process for those who are hopping in for the first time or as a review for those that have been following along. So we have these four steps: set the challenge or direction, grasp the current condition, establish your next target condition, and then an experiment to overcome obstacles. And remember, we've been working through this team, that's a combination of people working in the system, people who have the authority to actually change the system, and then the System of Profound Knowledge coach. So I think that's a pretty powerful combination of people, and that's our team here working on this chronic absenteeism problem. You also remember that we have this long-range goal that this challenge that is to improve our chronic absenteeism from right around 50% to down closer to 5%, and I don't know if you remember this, but a number of episodes ago, I showed you the data we had over time, and we just had three years of data. Since that time I showed you that first run chart, I've actually gone back and added chronic absenteeism rates for our schools going all the way back to the 2016 - '17 year, and I think it's worth it to just take another quick look at those rates over time in a process behavior chart. 0:03:00.2 Andrew Stotz: Exciting. 0:03:01.5 John Dues: So, yeah. This is our chart. So we add more days so why not display it in this way. So what this chart is, is again a process behavior chart, we have school years going back to the 2016-'17 school year, and then through last school year. And we have the blue dots displaying the chronic absenteeism rate for each of those school years across our school system, and then the green is... The green line is that central line, it's the average of all years, the red lines are those natural process limits that sort of tell us where we can expect our data to fall given that this is a predictable system. So you can see right off the bat, something that's pretty obvious is that the first four years of data are below that central line, and then the last four years of data are above that central line. And of course, it's not too hard to sort of recognize that the pandemic happened towards the end of the 2019-'20 school year, and then sort of... We were all remote heading into that 2021 school year, and then for a number of years after we were in remote or hybrid, and so you can see very clearly that while there was chronic absenteeism in our system prior to the pandemic, after the pandemic, it exploded and it has not subsided. 0:04:28.7 John Dues: So in a typical year prior to the pandemic, we were somewhere around that 25, about a quarter of the kids give or take, depending on the year, of the kids were chronically absent, and then after the pandemic, we can see it sort of... Or at the begining of the pandemic, explodes up and then has settled around this, right about 50% average. 0:04:51.1 Andrew Stotz: And the fact that it's remained at this much higher level of, let's say 50-55% tells you that there's like... It has had somewhat of a permanent impact, whereas some people may think that the COV

In this episode of Misunderstanding Quality, host Andrew Stotz and Bill Bellows discuss what not to measure when it comes to quality. Bill offers some great examples to show how organizations get it wrong, and how to get it right. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, we're gonna have a lot of fun, who has spent 31 plus years now that it's 2025, helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities in the episode, today is episode 11, and the title is "To Improve Quality, Don't Measure Quality". Bill, take it away. 0:00:35.6 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And, so the title of episode 10, came from chapter 10... Chapter 1 of The New Economics, and I used a quote from Dr. Deming, which was, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" Which Dr. Deming says, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality? We can have a national referendum, yes or no?" Everyone says yes. Then he says... Then he say, "We could have a secret ballot." And... But I... At the beginning of the podcast, I had said, "Are you in favor of quality?" And it's... No, it's, "Are you in favor of the improvement of quality?" And so today I wanna, in episode 11, share it with our listeners and viewers, more of the profound insights from Genichi Taguchi. But I think, what I was just thinking is saying, "Are you in favor of quality?" And I've used that quote, which now I now realize it's a misquote. It's not, "Are you in favor of quality?" It's "Are you in favor of improvement of quality?" But in seminars, what I've done is used the quote, the misquote, I would say Dr. Deming would ask, "Are you in favor of quality?" And he would say, "We're gonna have a secret ballot. Is everyone in favor of ballot?" In quality, everyone says yes. So I would go through that. 0:02:16.3 Bill Bellows: And then I would go to the next question, and I would say to the audience, I'd say, "Okay. Dr. Deming made reference to secret ballot. So I wanna do a secret ballot. I want you to close your eyes, and I'm gonna ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, raise your hand. But I want you to close your eyes when you raise your hand, 'cause I don't want you to raise your hand 'cause everybody else does. Okay, so close your eyes." And I say, "Are you in favor of teamwork?" And all the hands go up. [laughter] And it's not so much "Are you in favor of improvement of teamwork?" But it's the idea that, acceptability saying this part is acceptable, as we've shared in prior episodes, is the essence of looking at that part, my task, my effort in isolation. And what that has to do with teamwork, I question. Now, with a few of us at Rocketdyne years ago used to talk about, we would say, you give out a term paper assignment, the term paper must be between 10 and 20 pages long. And what happens? They're close to 10 pages. Then I would share, we'd tell Allison, our daughter, I'd say when she was in high school, "Be home by between 8:00 and 10 o'clock," and she shows up around 10 o'clock. 0:03:51.6 Bill Bellows: And I would show a distribution over there. Then I would say, "What about a machinist? The machinist is given a hole to machine. And what does machinist do is machine the hole on the low side, and then a machinist is machining the outer diameter of a shaft or a tube. And what does machinist do? Machines to the high side." And so I would show those four distributions either on the low side or the high side, and say, "What do they all have in common?" And people would say, "Each of those people's looking out for themself. They're focusing on their work in isolation." Then I would say, "So what do you call that in a non-Deming company or in a... " In the first podcast there is a, called it a Red Pen Company or a ME organization, or a Last Straw companies... What do you call that behavior where people look at the requirements and say, "What's best for me?" What do you call that? What do you call, people scratch their head? We say... You ready? "Teamwork." [laughter] 0:05:00.6 Bill Bellows: And everybody laughs. And then I turn to somebody in class and I say, "So Andrew, are you a team player?" And Andrew says, "Yes." And I say, "Andrew, if you machine the holes to the low side, are you a team player?" And you might say, "I'm not sure." And I would say, "Say yes." And you'd say, "Okay. I say yes." And I say, "Okay, Andrew, who's on your team?" And you say, "Me." "So, oh, you are a team player, man." 0:05:24.2 Andrew Stotz: I'm a team player. Team Andrew always wins. 0:05:28.2 Bill Bellows: Yeah. And I would say, so I say, "In a non-Deming company, everyone's a team player. All right. But who's on the team?" So I would say to people, "You'd be a fool not to be on your own team. The only question is, who else is on your team?" All right. B

Join John Dues and Andrew Stotz as they go one step deeper into finding the precise problem you want to improve. Sometimes taking big actions means starting small. TRANSCRIPT Diving Deeper into Defining the Problem: Path for Improvement (Part 6) 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is more on defining the problem. John, take it away. 0:00:23.5 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, so it's been a minute, but two episodes ago we just kind of refreshed. We discussed how helpful it is to make sure we see the system in which we work whenever we're starting an improvement project. And then in this last episode, we took the sort of next step and we started working towards defining a specific problem. And like you said, we're going to dive deeper into that topic today. For those that have been following along, you'll remember that we've been walking through this four step improvement model. Step one, set the challenge or direction. Two is grasp the current condition. Three is establish your target condition, and four, experiment to overcome obstacles. And then again, we've said repeatedly, we're doing all of these steps with this team that has three parts. 0:01:18.1 John Dues: The people working in the system, again, for us, that's teachers and students a lot of the time, and then those that have the authority to work on the system, that might be a principal, that might be a teacher depending on the project, maybe it's the superintendent, if it's the whole system. And then this System of Profound Knowledge coach is that third part that's often missing, at least in school improvement. So we have this nice model and this nice graphic. And then what we've also been sort of layering on top of that is this improvement process. 0:01:48.9 John Dues: So in each of these steps in the model, we have a number of steps that we're taking to be able to sort of achieve that. One of the things though, that sort of like a key organizing question in step one in the model is we asked where do we want to be in the long run, right? And so we're thinking through this longer range goal, typically in the timeframe of something like six months to three years. And if we achieve this, it's really going to differentiate us from other schools in our case or maybe businesses or hospitals or whatever it may be. And we've also sort of said that this is a stretch goal and it's at the outset we don't know how to achieve it. It almost seems impossible. 0:02:31.8 John Dues: And so for us, the key thing we're working on at United Schools here in Columbus is that we've have this really high chronic absenteeism rate coming out of the pandemic, and we have a goal to get that down much lower. So right now, about 50% of our kids are chronically absent. And I think I've said this before, we're trying to get that down to closer to something like 5%. So it's a pretty, pretty weighty problem and a pretty, very ambitious goal, I would say. 0:03:04.3 Andrew Stotz: Yep. 0:03:06.7 John Dues: So last time, what we said was, at this stage in the process, we've stepped back, we looked at some tools that help us see the system, and now we're doing that same thing for defining the problem. And we talked about there's some really useful questions to ask at this stage. The first one that we talked about as a group is how is the project being funneled from a general to more specific problem? We start with this sort of broad problem about chronic absenteeism, and we're trying to narrow the specific problem that we're going to work on. And then once we have that narrower view, we'll get all the way down and answer the question, what is the precise problem statement? And that's kind of our focus for today. 0:03:57.8 John Dues: Now, we won't get to the precise problem statement today, but we're trying to figure out the things that we need to do to get there. So last episode, I reviewed a tool we use at this step in the process called a Problem Statement Readiness Check. So we wrote this problem focus area, and this is really important. I've repeated this like, we use these tools because it helps us organize the group's thoughts and put it into writing. And that's really, really powerful. So we wrote this problem focus area, this sort of broader sort of characterization of the problem as we see it. 0:04:34.4 John Dues: And then we just listed out, what have we learned so far? What insights have we gained? And then we also listed a number of questions that still needed to be answered. And then we basically, as a group, we have this improvement team that meets weekly on Friday mornings. Then we filtered all that learning through six questions. First question is, has our team inv

What if you could transform quality from a compliance exercise into a strategic advantage? In our latest podcast, Andrew Stotz sits down with Cliff Norman and David M. Williams, two of the authors of Quality as an Organizational Strategy. They share untold stories of Dr. Deming, hard-earned insights from decades of real-world application, and a framework for making quality the driving force behind lasting business success. - How can organizations move beyond quality improvement projects to make quality their core strategy? - How do the five key activities outlined in their book create a system for sustainable success? - Why has this work, developed over 30+ years, remained largely behind the scenes—until now? Don't miss this conversation that challenges conventional thinking and reveals how organizations can thrive, not just survive. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we have a fantastic opportunity to learn more about a recent book that's been published called "Quality as an Organizational Strategy". And I'd like to welcome Cliff Norman and Dave Williams on the show, two of the three authors. Welcome, guys. 0:00:27.1 Cliff Norman: Thank you. Glad to be here. 0:00:29.4 Dave Williams: Yeah, thanks for having us. 0:00:31.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while. I was on LinkedIn originally, and somebody posted it. I don't remember who, the book came out. And I immediately ordered it because I thought to myself, wait, wait, wait a minute. This plugs a gap. And I just wanna start off by going back to Dr. Deming's first Point, which was create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and to provide jobs. And all along, as anybody that learned the 14 Points, they knew that this was the concept of the strategy is to continue to improve the product and service in the eyes of the client and in your business. But there was a lot missing. And I felt like your book has started really to fill that gap. So maybe I'll ask Cliff, if you could just explain kind of where does this book come from and why are you bringing it out now? 0:01:34.5 Cliff Norman: That's a really good question, Andrew. The book was originally for the use of both our clients only. So it came into being, the ideas came out of the Deming four day seminar where Dr. Tom Nolan, Ron Moen and Lloyd Provost, Jerry Langley would be working with Dr. Deming. And then at the end of four days, the people who some of who are our clients would come up to us and said, he gave us the theory, but we don't have any methods. And so they took it very seriously and took Dr. Deming's idea of production viewed as a system. And from that, they developed the methods that we're going to discuss called the five activities. And all of our work with this was completely behind the wall of our clients. We didn't advertise. So the only people who became clients were people who would seek us out. So this has been behind the stage since about 1990. And the reason to bring it out now is to make it available beyond our client base. And Dave, I want you to go ahead and add to that because you're the ones that insisted that this get done. So add to that if you would. [laughter] 0:02:53.0 Dave Williams: Well, thanks, Cliff. Actually, I often joke at Cliff. So one thing to know, Cliff and Lloyd and I all had a home base of Austin, Texas. And I met them about 15 years ago when I was in my own journey of, I had been a chief quality officer of an ambulance system and was interested in much of the work that API, Associates of Process Improvement, had been doing with folks in the healthcare sector. And I reached out to Cliff and Lloyd because they were in Austin and they were kind enough, as they have been over many years, to welcome me to have coffee and talk about what I was trying to learn and where my interests were and to learn from their work. And over the last 15 years, I've had a great benefit of learning from the experience and methods that API has been using with organizations around the world, built on the shoulders of the theories from Dr. Deming. And one of those that was in the Improvement Guide, one of the foundational texts that we use a lot in improvement project work that API wrote was, if you go into the back, there is a chapter, and Cliff, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's chapter 13 in this current edition on creating value. 0:04:34.3 Dave Williams: In there, there was some description of kind of a structure or a system of activities that would be used to pursue qualities and organizational strategy. I later learned that this was built on a guide that was used that had been sort of semi self-published to be able to use with clients. And the more that I dove into it, the more that I really valued the way in which it had been framed, but also how, as you

Everyone is in favor of improving quality, but what does that mean? In this episode Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss stories of meeting requirements, missing the mark, and what Dr. Deming said about how to do better. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. And I guess now that we're into 2025, it's gonna be 32 years pretty soon. The episode for today is episode 10, are you in favor of quality? Bill, take it away. 0:00:33.5 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and Happy New Year. 0:00:35.1 Andrew Stotz: Happy New Year. 0:00:36.4 Bill Bellows: Happy New Year to our listeners. And yeah, so here we are episode 10 of Misunderstanding Quality. We got up to 22 episodes in our first series and then we'll have a follow-on series. One is I would like to thank those who took the invite to reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I've just started connecting with a few new people who are doing some interesting things involved in types of work that I'm not familiar with, it's just fascinating to listen to the types of issues they deal with. And they each come to me with an interest in Dr. Deming's work. So they're following the podcast series, this one, the others that you're doing, and they listen to all of them. And I'm not sure if they've contacted the others, but they've reached out to me. So I wanna once again say for those of you that are enjoying this conversation, my conversation with you, Andrew, then please reach out to me. 0:01:50.0 Bill Bellows: If you'd like to know more, that's one thing. The last episode was called Worse Than a Thief. And one thing I wanna mention, there's a bunch of meanings relative to being worse than a thief. One distinctly from Dr. Taguchi was... And I don't... He gave examples of manufacturers that made plastic sheeting for crops to protect the crops and his complaint was that they made it to the minimum side of the requirement. So there was a requirement on the thickness, so again, even if you have a 1mil thick here, we have in the States, there's you can buy plastic 1mil, which is 0.001 inch or something heavier. And so, and obviously, in the world of manufacturing, you're not gonna get exactly 0.001, it's gonna be a little low, a little high. So what Dr. Taguchi was referencing is companies in Japan that were making plastic sheeting that would be used for a number of things. But in particular, he talked about it, what if it's being used to protect crops? 0:03:19.8 Bill Bellows: And what if the manufacturers, to save money because they're buying the plastic by the pound, selling it by the yard, so they're gonna make it as thin as possible. And his concern was, so how much are you saving to make it as thin as possible? And what is the impact of being on the thin side when a crop is lost? And that was his reference to being worse than a thief, that you're saving a few pennies but costing the farmer the... Right? And so that could be... So that's a situation where there's a requirement, the requirement is met minimally. You and I reference that as leaving the bowling ball in the doorway, delivering to the absolute minimum, or I mean delivering to the minimum, the maximum of the requirement, whatever best suits me. So if I'm delivering to you a term paper and you as the professor say, "It must be between five and 10 pages," and I say, "Well, I'm gonna make it five pages." 0:04:23.9 Bill Bellows: If in another situation, [chuckle] an example, I guess is if when our daughter was in high school and we said, "Allison, make sure you're home between 10:00 and midnight," then she may move that to the high side of the tolerance and come home at 10:00 or 11:59. But in either case, what Taguchi is referencing is in the world of acceptability, the requirements have been met. But the worse than a thief aspect is, is what is the personal gain versus the impact to others in the system. So that could be picking up the nail in the parking lot or deciding not to do it. So I just wanna point out that I see that as a very broad statement, not just in terms of meeting requirements, but within your organization are you... To what degree are you focusing on your department at the detriment of the organization? That's another way of being worse than a thief. 0:05:28.7 Bill Bellows: It could be you're spending all of your budget just before the end of the year. 'Cause you know what happens, Andrew, if you don't spend all of your budget. 0:05:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Gonna get taken away. 0:05:38.9 Bill Bellows: So if you're 10 percent under, the next year you're gonna get 10% less. So I used to kid people is, so what will I spend... Again, so you learn the hard way, if you don't spend the entire budget then yo

In the final episode of the series, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss the difference between typical companies using traditional management and more successful Deming-style companies. If productivity and performance are so much better, why do companies stick with traditional management? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I continue my discussion and conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize winning author of The Lean CEO. And ladies and gentlemen, I just received my copy finally. Productivity Reimagined, it just arrived from Amazon. You can get it there. And that's the latest book that he's come out with. And this is exploring applying Lean and Deming Management Principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is moving forward with productivity. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:41.7 Jacob Stoller: Oh, thank you, Andrew. Great to be here once again. Yeah. Moving forward. That's really Chapter 13. Whether you consider that, hopefully you consider 13 lucky as I think they do in Italy. 0:00:57.4 AS: We do in Thailand. 0:01:00.4 JS: Oh, really? Wonderful. Okay. Perfect. Anyway, so I wrote in the book, I sort of defined where we're trying to go by describing two companies; a typical company, and then the company that we would aspire to for maximum productivity. So I'm gonna read those, just to illustrate. "Company A follows traditional top-down management practices. Leaders determine how the work is to be done, and give orders to their staff accordingly. Individuals, functional groups and departments are treated as independent entities under centralized control. Pay and promotion are determined by individual performance according to a set of predetermined criteria. Employees are ranked and encouraged to compete with each other." So that's company A, your typical company, which probably comprises what percentage would you say? 90%? 95%? 0:02:03.8 AS: 97.9% 0:02:04.4 JS: Okay. Okay. Let's look at where we'd like to go from there. "Company B is managed as an interactive system where people and functional teams depend on each other. Supervisors aren't expected to have all the answers, and they rely on frontline workers to share their workplace knowledge and take an active role in improving their work processes. All employees know they are part of a team culture pursuing common goals and solving problems together to move the company forward." Okay, so that's really, that's where we wanna be. And the reason you would want to go there is because if you take those two companies and they have similar resources, similar markets, perhaps operating in similar region, company B will outproduce company A 10 times out of 10. It's a more productive model, and it's proven to work. So why don't people do it? 0:03:16.3 JS: Well, there's some thinking that gets in the way, some sort of systemic kinds of barriers that are out there. So even people who aspire to making a company better, and I think there are a lot of people out there that think that, but they run into these barriers, and I'm just gonna review them again because we've gone through them in some detail. But the myth of segmented success, that's the really kind of the exact opposite of a company as a system. It's this idea that all the parts are interchangeable. You can take a department, you can give each department separate goals, and they'll all make their goals and it'll all add up. That's the myth, of course. So the myth of segmented success. We have really stemming out of that the myth of the bottom line. 0:04:11.9 JS: And because of that segmented structure, we believe that we can use finance as a proxy for all the quantitative, all the accomplishments of all these different segments. It all adds up. It's arithmetic. We figure, so why not? We just take, everyone makes their numbers, and then they all make their numbers and they all celebrate together. That's the myth, of course. The bottom line doesn't tell you what's really going on in the company. The top-down knowledge myth they run into, and that's this whole idea that managers are supposed to know all the answers, and their job is to tell people what to do. And it's not just people with MBAs. It's people with degrees in psychology and maybe working in HR. It's engineers, it's any person with professional training, figures that they have not only the privilege, but a duty to actually tell people what to do. And if I'm not telling people what to do, I'm probably not doing my job and somebody's going to be looking over my shoulder. So a big fear around that. 0:05:31.6 JS: Myth number four is the myth of sticks and carrots. And this is this idea of Homo Economicus, the idea that people act in their own financial interest and it's perfectly predictable. Performance is down? Well, let's just pay them more or maybe we need some threats here. Maybe we need to threaten them, or maybe we need to

Join Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz as they discuss what actions (or inactions) make us worse than thieves and how that relates to expiration dates, and acceptability vs desirability. Plus, stories about job swapping, Achieving Competitive Excellence, and birthdays. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is Episode 9, and it's entitled "Worse Than a Thief." Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.2 Bill Bellows: Welcome, Andrew. I haven't seen you in a while, and great to be back. 0:00:29.1 AS: It's been a while. 0:00:32.0 BB: Here we are. Episode 9 already. Gosh, [chuckle] time flies when we're having fun. First, let me say a shout out to people who are reaching out to me on LinkedIn. I spoke with another one of them this afternoon. It's always exciting to connect with them. And then I ideally connect in a regular basis and help them as best I can, and learn from them as best I can. 0:01:03.0 AS: Yep. 0:01:03.2 BB: So, for those who are thinking about it, they keep hearing you say, "Hey, you know how to reach Bill? Find him on LinkedIn." So, a reminder for those who are waiting for a nudge, here's a nudge. So, "Worse than a thief" is an expression that Dr. Taguchi used when he say, Andrew, "Don't be worse than a thief." And we'll get to that, but let me just give our audience some context on that. 0:01:37.8 AS: Yep. 0:01:39.0 BB: Dr. Taguchi would say... And actually, I don't know if Dr. Taguchi explained it. Someone explained it to me this way. He said a thief could be someone who steals your wallet, finds $20; which means they're up 20, you're down 20; which people refer to as "zero sum gain." Right? So, the thief's gain is my loss, zero sum. What could be worse than that? Well, "worse than a thief" would be a situation where what someone gains is nothing compared to what I lose. A simple example is, [chuckle] I'm not the only one who does this, but if I'm going to the supermarket and I get out of the car and I see a nail in the parking lot or a piece of glass in the parking lot on my way in. So, I'm not talking about walking all around the parking lot. I'm talking about if on my way into the store I see a nail, something that could puncture a foot, a tire, and I spend a few seconds to pick it up, throw it in the trash can right by the door, then my theory is the reason I do that, the reason others do that, is the belief that that little bit of time that I am spending doing that could potentially save someone far more than the few seconds it took me. 0:03:20.9 BB: Well, "worse than a thief" would be, I see that broken bottle, let's say a bunch of shards of glass. And having worked at my father's gas station, I've seen... A nail on a tire is one thing. Nail creates a puncture. A piece of glass in a tire creates a fracture. A piece of glass can destroy a tire 'cause you get a crack and it spreads, and that's hard to repair. A puncture with a nail, yeah, it's inconvenient, but that doesn't destroy the tire. So, I'm overly sensitive when I see pieces of glass in a parking lot, that that could ruin a tire. 0:04:04.8 AS: And ruin a day. 0:04:06.2 BB: Ruin a day, oh yeah. And so the idea is that for someone to not take the time, and the time they save cost you more than they saved, that's worse than a thief. 0:04:19.8 AS: Right. 0:04:20.0 BB: So, if I meet a set of requirements, leave the bowling ball in the doorway, deliver minimally, but in the world of acceptability, what do we call that, Andrew? It's good. 0:04:35.3 AS: It's good. 0:04:36.0 BB: Right? It's good. It's just within requirements, but good. 0:04:41.8 AS: It's not beyond looking good. 0:04:43.9 BB: And forget about beyond looking good; this is looking good. So, I leave the bowling ball in the doorway. I deliver to you the absolute minimum, which is still good. So, your response to that, Andrew, is, "Thank you, Bill." [chuckle] 0:05:00.0 AS: Yeah. 0:05:00.1 BB: And I'm not saying you know what I did, but let's say the situation where I am unaware of the loss function. I'm unaware that what I'm doing is make making your life worse. 0:05:12.2 AS: Right. 0:05:13.3 BB: But the idea is that my shortcut to deliver the D minus; D minus, minus, minus, minus, minus. 'Cause that's still not an F. What Taguchi is talking about is that the amount of resources I save, may be a fraction of what it cost you in terms of extra effort to use it. So, my savings of an hour, a minute, a second causing you far more than I saved, is worse than a thief. But in the world of acceptability, there is no such thing. In the world of acceptability, a little bit within requirements on the low side, a little bit within requirements on the high side, it's all the same. Again,

Before you start solving a problem, you need to know what, precisely, you're trying to solve. In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz talk about how to figure out the problem on which you will focus your team's efforts. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is, Define The Problem. John, take it away. 0:00:22.9 John Dues: Hey, Andrew. It's good to be back. Yeah. So, we've been going through this improvement model just as a refresher. Two episodes ago we looked at the three phases of performance measurement, research, accountability, and improvement. That was an important frame at the start of this process. And then in the last episode we discussed how we made sure in that first step of the model, we step back and see our system, see the full system in which we work. And I showed you some improvement tools that we use to visualize the improvement team or the group's thinking for each of a set of guiding questions. So, we looked at a system flow chart and that sort of said to us, within our system, kind of saw how things flow into the system, the things that we do, and then the outputs, and the questions there were, what's the largest system to improve on and what's the aim of that system? And then we took a look at an affinity diagram, and we used that just to answer the question, what are the opportunities for improvement within the target system? And then we used this tool called an interrelationship digraph, where we prioritize basically the various opportunities for improvement. And then it's been through this model that everybody can see these four steps that we're talking... 0:01:57.7 AS: Well, for the listeners, they may not be able to see, but for the viewers, yeah. 0:02:01.7 JD: For the listeners, they can't see it. But the model that we've been talking through, for sure, we've been working through this four-step improvement model, and we've spent most of our time on step one, which is set the challenge and direction. And we'll remain here at this point in the process today as well. And then later on in the series, we'll go on to the subsequent steps. So step two, grasp the current condition. Step three, establish your next target condition. Step four, experiment to overcome obstacles. And some of the first episodes in the series, we talked through just a high level overview of each of those things. And then we've also said that we wanna do all of these steps with a team that's made up of somebody that has Profound Knowledge, some number of people that have the authority to work or change or redesign the system, and in some number of people that are working in the system. 0:02:57.3 JD: So that's just kind of a refresher for those that have been following along. And again, in step one of this model, this is where we're at right now, we ask, where do we wanna be in the long run? And so we're really thinking about a longer range goal that will differentiate us from other organizations. So in our case, schools. And it seems nearly impossible at the outset. We've said that. And we've also talked about what's the right time period for this challenge or direction to be set for, in terms of out in the horizon? Then what I said was, somewhere in the neighborhood of six months to three years, sort of anything less than six months, it's just too fast to put the team together and really dive in and do the work that you need to do. Anything beyond three years, it just seems so far that, you now, things can kind of get away from you if you set the vision out that far. 0:03:48.8 JD: Not that it's impossible, but six months to three years seems to be a sweet spot in my perspective. And then I gave this example, we're working on this chronic absenteeism problem. Chronic absenteeism is when a student in a K-12 school is absent for more than 10% of the school year, and coming out of the pandemic, we've talked about a very high number of kids across the country in the United States are chronically absent. And in our particular system, like a lot of high poverty systems, those numbers are particularly stark. So over the last few years since the pandemic, the chronic absenteeism rate in our school system has been hovering right around 50%. 0:04:34.3 AS: It's just so incredible, every time I hear you say that, I just can't believe that. 0:04:38.3 JD: It is incredible, incredible. And we're trying to get that down, that number down to 5%. So it'd be a huge... 0:04:44.0 AS: Which is also an incredible stretch goal. 0:04:47.3 JD: Incredible stretch goal. Seems almost impossible. That's sort of how we've framed things in our school system. 0:04:54.4 AS: So let's stop there just for a second, because I think for the listeners

In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz dive further into acceptability versus desirability in the quality world. Is it enough that something is "good" - meets requirements - or do you need to focus on degrees of "good"? How can you tell the difference? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Episode, today is episode eight, Beyond Looking Good. Bill, take it away. 0:00:25.4 Bill Bellows: Hi, Andrew. How are you doing? 0:00:29.1 AS: Beyond looking good. So beyond my good looks, that's what you're saying. Okay. 0:00:33.6 BB: No, but it's funny, this beyond looking good and so I could say, Andrew, how you feeling? Oh, I'm feeling good. Right? I'm feeling good. So we have this, and that's part of why I think is funny is how are things? Things are good, things are good. 0:00:49.3 AS: Looking good. 0:00:51.0 BB: And that's what I find is, I mean, and it's not that people are necessarily honest, but when somebody says how was your day? Good. Or it could be the extreme other, and we won't use any foul language, but it's like, but I find it's just a very common, how are you feeling? Oh, I'm feeling good. Or I could say, great, which is better than good. So anyway, so I'm gonna pick up on, well first say that a heavy focus of this series, Misunderstanding Quality, is for you, quality professionals out there around the world that are excited by Deming's work, learning about Deming's work, trying to bring Dr. Deming's ideas to your organization in your quality function. 0:01:41.6 BB: Or it could be, you're elsewhere in the organization and you believe that...you're inspired to realize that there's something about how quality is managed in your organization, whether you're in design or manufacturing, which is inhibiting what you might want otherwise to do. And what I'm hoping is that the examples and concepts presented here can help you, one, absorb the ideas yourself, begin to absorb them, eventually explain them to people at work. At least once a month I'm contacted by someone listening to the podcast who says, hey, they wanna connect with me on LinkedIn, and then quite often I reach out to them and ideally end up in a conversation with them to find out more about what they're trying to do. 0:02:38.7 BB: But what I'm hoping is that this fundamental information, knowledge, wisdom is useful to you and personally learning, but then depending on what you wanna do with it, you have to engage others. And that's why I've been encouraging, and this is what I do with people I mentor, is you have to develop the ability to explain it to others. 'Cause you can't be the only one talking about these differences. You're gonna drive your coworkers nuts. You might get in a jam where somebody's confused by what you're trying to do, and you need help, or you need help in implementation, help in explaining. 0:03:17.6 BB: So I'm gonna go back to acceptability and desirability. And I was in the Finland, the Netherlands and the Sweden about a month ago with friends in each of those countries. And what came up was, again, this acceptability/desirability and that contrast. So acceptability again, as a reminder is, there's no need to know where we are within the requirements. It is absolutely good. All we know is that it meets requirements for whatever the requirements are. It is you're comfortable with good versus bad. I was talking with somebody, some clients today and we were talking about, pass versus fail. And I said, 'cause it's really a pass. Acceptability is a pass-fail system. And what does passing mean? 0:04:17.5 BB: Passing means not failing. It's like, years ago when I was a summer student working for this jet engine company in Connecticut and got together for beers one Friday night with a couple of the executives, and there were a couple of us summer interns there with these directors. Yeah. Senior directors. And one of the senior directors says to us, says, so what's the difference between business and crime? And we're like, this and this and this and this. And I don't know what our answers were, but we. And finally one of them said, no, no, no, no, no, no. He said, the basic difference is crime's illegal. 0:05:03.0 BB: So you end up with what is bad, what is bad is what's not good. And what is good, good is what's not bad. And so what is passing? Passing is not failing. And so when I was explaining to somebody today I was asking him, what's the letter grade? What letter grade? In fact, I asked a very senior NASA executive this question once. What letter grade do they expect for everything they buy that put into their missions? And he said, A plus. And I said, A plus is not the requirement. He said, what's the re

Before you jump into tools and solutions, you need to take a step back. In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the four questions you need to ask in order to make the system you want to work on visible, and decide on a direction. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I am continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is, what is the topic for today, John? 0:00:25.4 John Dues: See the System. 0:00:27.3 AS: All right. Well, why don't you take it away? 0:00:30.3 JD: All right. Great. Yeah, it's good to be back. Yeah, just as a quick refresher for people following along in the series, so two episodes ago we briefly talked about the importance of framing the challenge as an improvement goal. And then last episode, if you remember, we went deeper into those three sort of faces of performance measurement. There was research, there was accountability, and then there was improvement. And if you remember, you took the avocado quiz and you got 100% on that quiz. But the whole purpose of sort of taking that time to dive into those three different types of measurement or three different types of goals was this idea that problems arise when measures aren't used for their intended purpose. And what we talked about was, if you're gonna do a research goal, then, you know, the basic goal for research is to contribute to the knowledge base. 0:01:32.4 JD: And for accountability, the purpose of the goal is to determine the application of rewards and sanctions. And then for improvement, the goal is to learn our way to a system that produces a higher level of performance. And basically, at the end of that sort of episode, we established that the challenge or direction should be framed as an improvement goal, in my opinion, and not as an accountability goal, not as a research goal. And then we have this model that we've been working through which is up on the screen for those that are also watching the podcast, and it's this four-step improvement model. So we've outlined these steps. So step one is to set the direction or challenge. That's what's gonna be your improvement goal, not your accountability goal. 0:02:28.7 JD: Step two is to grasp the current condition or conditions on the ground where you are in your organization. Step three is to establish the next target condition. Step four is to experiment, overcome obstacles in the way of meeting that next target condition on the way to that ultimate goal or that direction or challenge that you've set for your organization. And then we've said multiple times that all of the steps are done with this team that's including those working in the system, those with the authority to work on the system, and then someone that has this System of Profound Knowledge lens. That's sort of a quick recap. And so what I thought we could do today is to sort of go back to, actually to step one. 0:03:16.8 JD: So we've gotten an overview of it, and talk about some other things to think about when you're on this particular step. And if you remember in step one of the model, what we're asking is, where do we want to be in the long run? Or what do we as a team or as an organization, what do we wanna accomplish? And we've talked about that this is this longer range goal, and it's a big goal. It may seem even impossible or nearly impossible at the outset, but if we achieve it, what we're saying is this thing, whatever it is, is really gonna differentiate us from other organizations, from other schools in our case, or you know, it could be differentiating you from other businesses or other hospitals or whatever the thing is that you're working in. 0:04:07.9 JD: We said this challenge or direction typically has this sort of long-term timeframe, six months to three years as sort of a rough guide. And then I talked about this example, one of our goals or challenges that we sort of set in our organization is we wanna significantly reduce student chronic absenteeism. If you remember, when we looked at this a couple episodes ago, that number rose significantly coming out of the pandemic. And so it's right around in the 50% range. So 50% of our students are chronically absent, which is a very high number. And we wanna take that all the way down to 5%. So right now as things currently stand, that seems like a very tough, nearly impossible challenge that we've set for the organization. 0:05:07.4 AS: I'm curious about how stretch of a challenge should someone be thinking about in this case? I mean, it's one of the hardest things when you start setting goals, is like, are we thinking about 10 years from now? Are we thinking about one year from now? Are we thinking about, come on guys, let's dream big, let's envision what we could be, or are we talking ab

John Dues and Andrew Stotz are diving deeper into the improvement model that John is building with his team. In this episode, learn the three ways to think about an improvement frame for your big challenge. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. And the topic for today is Frame the Challenge. John, take it away. 0:00:23.6 John Dues: Hey Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, we're gonna talk about Framing the Challenge today. We kicked off a new series a couple of episodes ago. I introduced this improvement model that we can use to set ambitious goals backed with this sound methodology. Make this disclaimer again, we're sort of building the plane while we are flying it. So this improvement model is new at United Schools where I work. And so again, we're actually letting listeners sort of see it as it's being built and first put to use. And so I think just starting out with a quick recap of the model is a good place to start. So what is this improvement model that we've been looking at? I'll pull up my screen so we can share a visual of the model for those that are watching. Right. Can you see that all right? 0:01:21.2 AS: Yep. 0:01:21.3 JD: Great. Give me one second. All right. So we have this improvement model. Basically the core idea of the model is it gives us the scientific way of thinking. And remember, we talked about we're working to close this gap between current conditions in our organizations and future aspirations. In order to close this gap, we're walking through the four steps on the model. So first, we set the challenge of direction. That's really where we focused our time last episode. The second step is to grasp the current condition. The third step is to establish the next target condition. And then the fourth step is to experiment to overcome obstacles. And that's where we spend most of our time in this four-step process. And then the other thing we've talked about is we do it with this team. The people working in the system, that's one part of the system, one part of the team. 0:02:19.8 JD: And we've talked about this in our case. This can be students, it can be teachers, whoever the frontline people are in your organization. Then there's those with the authority to work on the system, to make changes to the design or the architecture of the system. That could be a teacher in a classroom, or we've said the principal of a school, or maybe the superintendent of a system of schools. And then one of the innovations that we've made to this improvement model is that that third group or that third person on the team is someone that has Profound Knowledge, someone that's using Deming's principles to guide the work. So that's the basic model that we looked at in the first episode and... 0:03:11.8 AS: And I would just highlight... By the way, can you put it on slideshow? 0:03:15.3 JD: Sure. 0:03:15.4 AS: And I've been reading Mike Rother's book, rereading his book on Toyota Kata and stuff. And so this has really got me back to it. But what you're doing is applying this and helping us understand it as you're putting it into action at your school, right? 0:03:35.0 JD: Yeah, we've had an improvement model. And I think... Yeah, so like it says down in the right hand corner, that this model, it's based on Mike Rother's work, the Toyota Kata work. I think one thing that was missing from our model previously was like, how do you set this challenge or direction? How do you do that in an ambitious but reasonable way? And I think Mike Rother's sort of model speaks to this. So that's why I like his four-step model. I also like the four steps because it's pretty simple. It's not 15 steps. It's not 20 steps. It's four steps. Now there are some steps that you have to learn and stuff like that. There are different pieces to each of the steps, but I like that it's four steps. It's sort of easy to remember. It's memorable. And I think the innovation that we've done so far is who is the team that's working through this? And I think to frame it as the people working in the system, the people working on the system, and then someone with Profound Knowledge, I think that's an innovation, from what I've read about Mike Rother's work. 0:04:39.6 AS: Yep. 0:04:40.4 JD: Yeah. And so to continue the recap from last time, I think in the last episode, so we introduced the model two episodes ago. And then last episode, what we said we were gonna do is start walking through each of the steps, episode by episode, and do a deeper dive into each of the steps. And we did that with step one last time. So we did Set the Challenge last time. And just as a refresher, this is that longer range goal that would differentiate us from other schools in our case, if we ac

In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz explore the intersection of variation and quality through awareness of the "Paradigms of Variation." In a progression from acceptability to desirability, Bill created this 4-part model to offer economic insights for differentiating "Zero Defect" quality from "Loss Function" quality," with the aim of avoiding confusion between precision and accuracy when desirability is the choice. Learn how to decide which paradigm your quality management system fits into! TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is episode 7, The Paradigms of Variation. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.3 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome to our listeners, as well as viewers, if you have access to the viewing version. Yeah, so I went back and listened to Episode 6. I'm going out bike riding 2-3 hours a day, so I listened to the podcast, listened to other things, stop and write down. Let me go write that down. And, so, we're going to pick up today on some major themes. And, what I keep coming back to is, is I think the difference between acceptability and desirability is the difference between how most companies operate and how a company inspired by Dr. Deming would operate. 0:01:29.3 BB: And, I just think of, if there was no difference between the two, then... Well, lemme even back up. I mentioned last time we were talking about why my wife and I buy Toyotas. And, yes, we've had one terrible buy, which I continue to talk about. [laughter] And, it's fun because it's just a reminder that even a company like Toyota can deliver a really lousy product, which we were unfortunate to have purchased. And, we're not the only ones that, and they've rebounded and they've apologized, they've had issues. There's no doubt about that. They have issues, but they have notably been inspired by Dr. Deming. 0:02:30.6 BB: The one thing I brought up last time was relative on this thinking of acceptability, desirability, where acceptability is looking at things and saying it's a quality system of good and bad. It's acceptable, which is good and unacceptable is not good. And, that's how most organizations view quality. Again, the focus of this series is Misunderstanding Quality. Our previous series was broadly looking at implications for Dr. Deming's ideas. And, here our focus is quality. And, so what I'm trying to get across here is quality management, traditional quality management. 0:03:17.4 BB: In most organizations, in all organizations I've ever interacted with is acceptability basis, good parts and bad parts. It's a measurement system of it meets requirements, we ship it, if it meets requirements, we buy it. And, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think a system focused on acceptability can explain... To me, it does not explain the incredible reliability I have personally experienced in Toyota products. 0:03:46.9 BB: Now, I'm working with a graduate student and I wanna pursue that as a research topic in the spring, 'cause for all I know, the reliability of components in all cars has improved. I don't know if it's, I only by Toyota, 'cause so this woman I've met recently and I'm mentoring her and we're working on a research project. And, I thought recently, I'd like... And, I'm not sure how to do this, but I just know, I think I've mentioned I worked at my father's gas station back in the '70s and I remember replacing water pumps and alternators and all this stuff. This was before Japanese cars were everywhere. There were Japanese cars, but not like you see today. 0:04:33.3 BB: And, so I'm just used to all those components being routinely replaced. And, all I know is I don't routinely replace anything but the battery and the tires and change the oil. I think that's about it. Everything else is pretty good. But, I do think the differentiation between Toyota and most other companies is their appreciation of desirability and how to manage desirability. And, that's why I keep coming back to this as a theme for these sessions. And, what I think is a differentiation between a Deming view of quality and all other views of quality. What I tried to say last time is I just give you indications of a focus on acceptability. It's a quality system which looks at things that are good or things that are bad. It's, last time we talked about category thinking. It's black and white thinking. If the parts are good, then the mindset, if they're good, then they fit. 0:05:38.4 BB: Well, with a focus on continuum thinking, then you have the understanding that there's variation in good. And, that leads to variation in fit and variation in performance. And, that's a sense of things are relativel

Many companies strive to automate by using more technology and fewer humans. But does their productivity really improve? Does it keep them agile? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz share stories of companies that improve productivity because they focus on processes instead of tech alone. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I continue my conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize-winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores applying Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number five, the Myth of Tech Omnipotence. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:29.8 Jacob Stoller: Great, Andrew. Thanks. Great to be here again. Yeah. Tech omnipotence. Well, it's quite a myth. We sort of worship technology. We have for a long time, and we tend to think it can solve all our problems, and sometimes we get a little too optimistic about it. What I wanna talk about is in the context of companies adopting technology and go through some of the stories about that and how that relates to productivity. Really, the myth of tech omnipotence is kind of like a corollary to the the myth of segmented success. In other words, people have believed that you can take a chunk of a company. Now we'll take Dr. Deming's pyramid, and we take a chunk out of that and say, oh, well, that fits so and so in the org chart, let's automate that. 0:01:28.1 JS: And they don't consider what happens to the rest of the organization. It's just this idea that you can superimpose automation. So this has a long checkered history. And the way technology gets justified in organizations is generally what it's been, is reducing headcount. And I used to work in a tech firm, and we used to do this. We would do these studies, not really a study, but you do a questionnaire and you figure out if we adopt this, if we automate this workflow, let's just say, I don't know, it's accounts payable. So you automate accounts payable and you say, well, you got so many people involved, we think we could cut this by three people or something like that. So that becomes your business case. Now, they had categories in these little questionnaires where you would try to get other benefits from the technology, but they tended to be what they call soft benefits. 0:02:35.4 JS: And you know what that word means. Soft benefits means, well, okay, nice to have, but it's not going to get budget money or it's not gonna get approved. So anyway that's really been the kind of standard way of getting tech projects justified. And that goes through pretty much any industry. So what would happen is people adopt these technologies without looking at the whole system. And guess what? You put the software in, you start to implement it, and you run into problems. Doesn't quite work. Doesn't work the way it was supposed to. And so the tech people tended and still do tend to blame the company. They say, well, they had user problems. Users weren't really adjusting to it. These people are sort of way behind. We're a tech company. We've automated the same process for 50 different companies, we know what's good for them. We have to educate them, but they don't seem to want to be educated. So that was kind of the way it was. And I'll give you an extreme example. I did some freelance work for research firm, and one of the studies I worked on, I'm not making this up, it was called Aligning the Business with IT. So it was trying to get people to smarten up with their business and align it to what the smart people are doing with IT. So that's how extreme that kind of feeling was. 0:04:17.3 AS: As opposed to maybe aligning with the customer or something like that. 0:04:21.1 JS: Well, yeah, wouldn't that be crazy? Or how about aligning IT with the business? Finding out what the business wants. So anyway, that whole way of thinking has had, it's sort of filtered into manufacturing in the same way. And I found this out really researching Productivity Reimagined as I interviewed Ben Armstrong from MIT Industrial Performance Center. And what I learned from him is the whole history of automation and manufacturing in North America. And really, what he told me is that between 1990 and 2010, there were increases in productivity, but those were always from reducing headcount. They never found ways to actually grow the value of the business by using automation. So around 2010 or leading up to 2010, manufacturing started to change, and we started to transition into what they call a high-mix, low-volume type of markets. 0:05:33.3 JS: And I've talked to manufacturers that have said, 10 years ago, I only had to make two or three variations of this part, now I have to make 50 or 60. So you're getting shorter product cycles, larger mix. And the big buzzword now in manufacturing is agility. You've gotta be agile. So there was a study MIT,

Traditional management uses "carrots," like bonuses, and "sticks", like Performance Improvement Plans, to motivate employees. But are humans really built that way? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz dive into the myth surrounding that approach and talk about what actually motivates people at work. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Jacob Stoller, Shingo-Prize winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores applying Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number four, the myth of sticks and carrots. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:46.2 JS: Thank you, Andrew, and great to continue our conversation. Yeah, it is widely believed that people are motivated by threats and rewards. And to demonstrate that, all you have to do is go into an HR department and look at the job descriptions and the reward programs. And it's all assumes that people are motivated by externalities, right? And that goes back, actually, it's a very, very old way of looking at the world, that there's a term, it's a bit of Latin here, homo economicus. And it's the idea that humans are sort of goal seeking creatures. They seek what's better for them, and it's all material. They'll seek their material gain, and they will behave in very predictable ways, according to that. So you can set up external motivators, mainly money, and you can regulate the way people will behave. 0:01:38.2 JS: So that's the assumption that many businesses are built on. But science has proven that that's not the way human humans work. There've been a number... And starting really in the 1950s, a number of scientists have sort of poked serious holes in that thinking. One of them is Edward Deci, who talked about motivation and did a number of experiments to see that, to find out that people, you know, their motive for doing tasks really kind of transcends rewards. Often they'll do something, for the satisfaction of doing it, in spite of the rewards being greater. We have Frederick Herzberg who developed something called Hygiene Theory. And that's really that... He determined in an organization that money can't actually be a positive motivator. It can't motivate positive behavior, but lack of money can motivate negative behavior. 0:02:49.6 JS: So, you know, and a number of experiments to support that. And then we have, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, hard to pronounce, who talks about joy at work and really did experiments and kind of proved that joy at work isn't just some kind of fancy idea that somebody had. But it's actually a scientifically proven principle. Whereas when people have joy at work and they're fully engaged in their work, they do much higher quality work. So that's kind of the background really here. So what we want, when we manage, is we want people to be intrinsically motivated so that they do their best work. And Deming principles are very, very, I think representative of that. I think Dr. Deming understood that people are motivated when they feel a part of something, when they contribute, when they feel that their team members around them are supporting them. And so that's what we try to do. And Lean eorld tries to do that, and we try to do that with Deming principles. 0:04:06.8 AS: You know, when I start off my discussion on this with students and people that I teach in seminars and the like, I always ask them, you know, which, do you believe in, a carrot or a stick? Do you think more people are motivated by rewards or punishments? And it's a great... 0:04:18.1 Jacob Stoller: Oh, okay. 0:04:24.1 AS: Way to kick off a conversation. But, you know, obviously we're gonna get some people that say, I want people to be feeling, you know, positive rewards and feel positive. And then you have the other people that... What I invariably find is that people who are running large companies with lots of employees, it's sticks. Yes, because... 0:04:40.4 JS: Interesting. 0:04:41.8 AS: It's overwhelming. And then when I think about where it's easiest to do joy in work, and where it's easiest to get the intrinsic motivation is, you know, smaller companies where everybody's close and they're really working together. And that's a dilemma that I never really have had a great reconciling of, but I'm interested to learn more about it from the direction that you're coming. So continue on. But that's just something I have in my mind when heard you talk about it. 0:05:13.1 JS: It's tough to do with a big company, but I wanna tell you a big company story. And actually I'm gonna read, a page or two of the book just because it's, I don't want to, it's a complicated story and I wanna make sure you get all the... 0:05:32.5 AS: Well, you've it written so well. So might as well do that. 0:05:36.1 JS: Well, like, gosh, let's hope so. Let's hope so. But, anyway,

In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss the myth that managers need to know everything in order to manage. What happens when you ask non-managers for feedback? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Jacob Stoller, a Shingo-Prize-winning author of The Lean CEO and also Productivity Reimagined, which explores how to apply the Lean and Deming management style at the enterprise level. The topic for today is Myth Three: The Top-down Knowledge Myth. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:31.2 Jacob Stoller: Okay. Great to be here again, Andrew. And, yeah, the myth we're gonna talk about is this notion that managers can make their workers and their people more productive by telling them exactly what to do. And that's surprisingly prevalent in the workplace. But I wanna start out by just saying how this relates to the other myths that we were talking about, 'cause we started with this, what Dr. Deming calls the "pyramid," the org-structure type or... 0:01:08.9 AS: Organizational chart. 0:01:09.9 JS: Paradigm idea, yeah, the organizational structure that says that everything is a independent component, right? You got your different departments, they all work independently, we optimize each, and we optimize the whole, right? So, from that, it naturally follows. And we did Myth Number Two that we can follow financial logic, 'cause financial logic fits nicely into that structure. And of course, we saw last time that all the shortcomings and problems you get when you follow that kind of thinking. So, the third myth is we get to top-down knowledge. And again, that follows from the pyramid structure. If it were true that interdependent components weren't interdependent, that everything could act independently, it would certainly follow that you could have knowledge about those components taught in school and that it would all make sense. I think it's the interdependence that really shoots that whole thing down of top-down knowledge. So... Sorry. Yeah. 0:02:16.3 AS: Go ahead. 0:02:18.8 JS: I wanted to start with a bit of a story just to illustrate how prevalent this is. I was doing a workshop with a small excavation company, and we were looking at ways to make them more effective and serve more customers, grow more effectively, and stuff like that. I did an exercise with them, and we looked at where maybe the waste was taking place the most. And they were driving trucks around a lot. This was a rural area, so there was a lot of mileage that was perhaps being wasted. So, we did an exercise with tracking value and non-value mileage. If you're going to a customer, that's adding value. But if you take a detour to have lunch or something, well, that doesn't add value to the customer, right? 0:03:08.8 JS: So, we were exploring those things, and that exercise worked out really well. They made some big changes, and it actually really helped the company grow. They started posting little notes in the trucks talking about, "Remember, value versus non-value." They were tracking it. And it was really interesting. But the success was largely due to one participant. And I'm sure you've seen this, Andrew, in workshops where somebody really seems to get it. And he had all these ideas, a very, very thoughtful guy, and we were just writing down his suggestions. He had a lot to do with that. But after the workshop, I sat down with him when we were chatting, and he told me that he'd been in the construction business for 15 years, and nobody had ever asked him for his opinion about how work was done. Never. 0:04:04.7 AS: Incredible. 0:04:07.1 JS: I was just stunned by that. This guy was so good. [laughter] When you think about that, it's pretty typical. And I think it's really, people are, managers are taught that it's their job to tell people what to do. And often that puts them in a tough spot. Often they have to be in a role where maybe that they're not that comfortable, because maybe they know deep down inside that there's a lot of knowledge out there that they're not aware of. 0:04:41.3 AS: Yeah, it's interesting. It reminds me when I was a first time supervisor at Pepsi, and I worked in the Torrance factory in Los Angeles, in Torrance, California, and then I worked in the Buena Park factory. And at Buena Park, I was given control of the warehouse. In both cases, I was a warehouse supervisor. 0:05:02.9 JS: Right. 0:05:03.1 AS: And I remember I worked with the union workers who were all moving the product all day long. And I just constantly focused on improvement and that type of thing, and talking to them, and trying to figure out how can we do this better, faster, cheaper and with less injury and all of that. And when I left, it was two years, it was maybe a year and a half that I was at that facility. And one of the guys that had been there, he said... He came up to me, he said, "25

Is quality simply a matter of two categories: good and bad? But then how do you get to "better"? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss categories and continuum thinking. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. And today is episode six, Category Thinking and Continuum Thinking. Bill, take it away. 0:00:27.9 Bill Bellows: Welcome Andrew great to see you again. All right, so in podcast five, I went back and it was just posted by The Deming Institute. And I just wanna clarify again on the topic of acceptability and desirability. Where we're going tonight is looking at acceptability and desirability in a little bit more detail, a little bit differently, but those are still the prevailing themes. And again, I just wanna reinforce that none of this is to imply that desirability is better than acceptability. What's important is to be aware of when I'm using acceptability thinking. And when I'm using desirability thinking and use the one that makes the most sense in that situation. We were talking earlier about companies whose products we enjoy using and we're loyal to them. And I mentioned that my wife and I have developed a loyalty to Toyota products. 0:01:40.4 BB: Going back to 1989 was our first Toyota product. And I knew I wanted a pickup truck. 'Cause I was borrowing a pickup truck from a number of friends and I thought, I really like a pickup truck. There's a lot you can do with a pickup truck. So, I knew I wanted a pickup truck. And I knew from having worked in my father's gas station, I had reason to believe I wanted a Japanese pickup truck and not an American pickup truck. So, I then it was a question of is it a Mazda, Toyota. 0:02:11.1 AS: Nissan. 0:02:13.2 BB: Sorry Nissan. And I looked at all of them and yeah I just all I knew is I was gonna be one of those. And I think the major reason I went with... My wife and I went with a Toyota... I don't think the prices were that different. But it just had a, it was the styling was a little bit better. But I did not... That's why I bought it. 0:02:46.5 AS: The loyalty wasn't built yet. 0:02:49.0 BB: No I knew to stay away... I knew I had seen plenty of examples of... Well, I had traded in my first car that my father, my parents got me when I was in college was a 1975 Chevy Nova. Four door Chevy Nova. And the reason four doors is important is a... If it was a two door, the door would be longer. But it was a four door. By the time I gave that car to a friend, the engine was running beautifully but the body was falling apart. And, so, by the time I sold it to get the pickup truck, in order to get out of it, I'd have to throw my shoulder into the driver's door. Why? Because the door droop was so great that when you close the door, I mean the door drooped and this is not a four door, this is a two door. So, imagine if it was a two door the door would be even heavier. So, on a four door, the door drooped. And, so, when you closed it, you'd had to lift it and then close it in order to get out you had to... Oh, it's just my wife couldn't drive. It was just a nuisance. 0:04:17.6 AS: And, that in '75 was just about when the Japanese were really starting to go after the US car makers. And but I want to tell you just a quick one. I can't remember if I've told you, but I used to have a 1963 Lincoln Continental here in beautiful Bangkok. And I owned it for 10 years. And then eventually I sold it. But what a beautiful car. And people always ask me the same thing and they said, isn't it hard to take care of? And I said, you gotta remember back in those days, cars were simple. 0:04:49.1 BB: Yeah, yeah. So, the... So, with... So, the experience of 14 years or so, with the '75 Chevy Nova. And the door was like the straw that broke the camel's back. It just done with this, all right. So, we're gonna buy Japanese, bought a Toyota. That was the first one. And I think I've mentioned in the first podcast I mentioned that we had a 1998 Toyota Sienna, which is their first, it was their Toyota third attempt at a minivan. The first one I think was underpowered, the second one... And we knew we wanted a minivan. It was time, the kids were getting a little bit bigger. It was time for minivan. And just as we were ready to go buy it, they had a... I think a competitor came out with dual sliding doors. Dual sliding doors. And, so, instead of Toyota coming out with a one sliding door, they stepped back. I think Chrysler came out with two sliding doors. And they figured we can't come to market with one sliding door. They've got two sliding doors. So, then we waited another year and they finally came out and given all of our delight with the Toyota pickup truck, boom, that's

Is your financial bottom line the true story of your organization? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz take on the myth of the bottom line - maybe it doesn't tell you what you think it does. 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 Jacob Stoller, a Shingo prize winning author of "The Lean CEO" and also "Productivity Reimagined" which explores how to apply the Lean and Deming management style at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number two, the Myth of the Bottom Line. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:32.7 Jacob Stoller: Thank you, Andrew. Great to be back here with you. Yeah, the myth of the bottom line, it is widely believed that if you look at the financials, that tells you everything you need to know about the productivity in your organization. And it's almost when you think what we talked about last time, so that the pyramid, the idea that the whole equals the sum of the parts, I think the myth of the bottom line is really kind of flows naturally out of that. If you believe in this pyramid that Dr. Deming was so critical of, the myth of the bottom line seems to make sense. Just that dollars flow through, you save a dollar here, it's all going to add up. 0:01:23.8 JS: So the problem with that is that productivity as we've learned from Dr. Deming, is actually determined by lots of non-financial factors. And what the bottom line gives you is a kind of an oversimplified, I guess, aggregated view. So you take the total sales of a company and you divide it by the number of employees. You can call that productivity, but it's not really productivity, 'cause productivity, strictly speaking, comes from making increasing output with a set of inputs. So you go from time A to time B, are we making more while keeping all our fixed costs constant? So there are things that get in the way of measuring that and one of the big ones is something called price recovery. So if you look at profitability, it's really a combination of price recovery and productivity. But price recovery would be any change in cost, any kind of financial cost during or between the two periods that you're measuring. 0:02:45.7 JS: So if you've got say the cost of labor, cost of materials, facility costs, energy costs, all these things can change between two time periods. And at the same time, maybe your selling price changes. So it turns out that factoring all those things out is much more difficult than you would think. It doesn't come easily using ERP systems in those things. And one of the pioneers of Lean accounting [0:03:16.8] ____ explained to me how he, when he first realized this, how much work it was to actually just separate all these price recovery factors from the total that contributed to productivity. So it's not that easy to even get to productivity and really get an accurate figure on it. 0:03:39.1 AS: It's interesting. I'm a financial guy, so I look at the P&L all the time of so many companies. So I think I've got some fun stuff that we can talk about, but was there something more you were gonna wrap that up with? 0:03:51.9 JS: Well, yeah, I think what happens with that is you get a sort of a cultural divide, because executives, I'm told, typically see operations as a black box. They'll say, well, okay, someone worries about process and manufacturing process, or it could be in any field. It could be medical, it could be something else, but that's something that operations worries about, so we'll let them do that. So they're left, these executives, with only one language, and that's financial language to understand things. And that's basically the iron law there is you get what you pay for. So we wanna get better quality, okay, we invest in it, that costs money. We wanna get faster delivery times, well, we'll pay money for that. And we wanna lower cost, well, then we better get rid of some people. 0:04:51.7 JS: So these things are all looked at sort of transactionally from the outside, not inside this black box of process. But inside that black box, that's where all the magic happens. That's where the Deming chain reaction happens. The fact that when we invest in quality, costs are gonna go down, but you tell that to an accountant, they'll tell you you're nuts. So it's really, I think there's a big challenge there of getting people to understand that the laws of that really determine productivity are not purely financial. And people need to... I think a lot of people need to broaden their thinking to understand that. 0:05:43.0 AS: Maybe out having looked at the financial statements of thousands of companies and have valued thousands of companies in my life, let's look from a top down, first of all. So people organize, people give money, give capital to companies, because they expect to get some return from that capital. Some people care about what that company d

Is the whole simply a sum of its parts? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss what happens when you divide a company into pieces and manage them separately - and what to do instead. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number one, the myth of segmented success. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:30.4 Jacob Stoller: Great to be here with you, Andrew. And yeah, before I dive into that myth, I'd like to just start with a quote by Albert Einstein. "There is no failure in learning, but there can be in refusing to unlearn." Now that's something that's gonna occur over and over when we talk about the different myths. And the fact is, as many people have observed, unlearning can be a lot tougher than learning. So I think we always have to keep that in mind. So I want to tell a little story which kind of illustrates just how deep this unlearning can go. And this was told to me by Rich Sheridan, who has a company called Menlo Innovations, they're a software development company. And very interestingly, the theme of his work has been about joy in work. Sounds familiar? 0:01:28.3 AS: I love it. 0:01:28.5 JS: Well, he didn't really discover Dr. Deming until he had already written two of his books. So it just shows to me that there's some very underlying truths behind what Dr. Deming was teaching. But anyway, the story Rich tells is that he had his family in for a wedding. And they had a new office they'd moved into, so everyone wanted to see it. So he brought his granddaughter in, an eight-year-old. And he said, well, where do you sit, pop-pop? And he said, right here. Here's my desk. Here's my computer. And the granddaughter looked at his desk and was puzzled. You know, she said, well, where's your name? You got to have your name somewhere. And so, I mean, Sheridan was amazed. He says, I thought, wow, she already has it in her head that as CEO, I should have a corner office with a placard that showed how important I am. And you know, I felt a little embarrassed. She was somehow implying that I can't be much of a CEO if I didn't have a placard with my name on it. 0:02:35.5 JS: And she's only eight. So no, here's a CEO that's just really, really, you know, ahead of a lot of people. You know, he understands a lot of the Deming principles. And he sees just how deeply people hold these myths. She believed that there's this pyramid structure and there's got to be a CEO at the top and there have to be all these departments and people reporting to various people, et cetera, et cetera. So this really, this belief she had is really, it's sort of the pyramid that Dr. Deming described. And Dr. Deming actually wrote, he said, in The New Economics, you know, his last book, he wrote, this book is for people who are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management. And he talks about the pyramid. And I think that kind of encapsulates everything we're dealing with in terms of beliefs. And I'm just going to read it because he was so concise about saying it. "The pyramid only shows responsibilities for reporting who reports to whom. It shows the chain of command and accountability." 0:03:55.3 JS: "The pyramid does not describe the system of production. It does not tell anybody how his work fits into the work of other people in the company. If a pyramid conveys any message at all, it is that anybody should first and foremost, try to satisfy his boss and get a good rating. The customer is not in the pyramid. A pyramid as an organization chart, thus destroys the system, if ever one was intended." So I've never seen a more pointed description of the prevailing style of management. But think of this young girl at age eight, you know, I mean, and a lot of them, what happens is they go to school and they learn. And then maybe they eventually go to business school. And then sometime, maybe 30 years later or something, this person, this young woman is being told, we're not going to manage according to a pyramid anymore. 0:04:54.3 JS: We're gonna change the whole structure. We're gonna respect people and we're gonna respect their opinions. And we're not gonna assume that all these departments automatically fit together like building blocks. We're gonna work to define a system. All these things that Deming taught, you know, how do you think she's gonna react to that? You know, we're talking about things that this person has believed, not just from training in business school, but for years and years. So I think that kind of underlines the task we all have in terms of learning and unlearning. It's just an enormous thing we have to deal with, which is why I think it's important to look at t

What can Dr. Deming's famous Red Bead Experiment teach us about quality? What happens when you only focus on the bad, and ignore the good? In this episode Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss acceptability vs desirability in the context of the Red Beads and a few of the 14 Points for Management. 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussions with Bill Bellows who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is episode 5 of the Misunderstanding Quality series and the title is "The Red Bead Experiment." Bill take it away. 0:00:30.4 Bill: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome back. Welcome back to our listeners. One thing I want to say is, one is I listen to every podcast two or three times, listening for, is there a need for clarification, reminding myself, thinking, oh, I should have said this. Or sometimes I say, oh, make sure you make this point, and I do or I don't. And. so one is, nothing comes up from the last one that I thought I missed or mispronounced, but what I do want to clarify is, I'm viewing the target audience as quality professionals in your respective organization or people that want to become a quality professional that are learning, that are trying to apply these ideas in their organization, are fascinated with it. Could be quality professionals who are consultants looking for new awareness of the Deming perspective. So, that's... 0:01:35.8 Bill: And so, some of what I have in mind is, and the examples is, things you can try at home. In fact one thing I encourage... What I encourage my students to do, undergraduate and graduate students, even the clients I consult with, companies I consult with, is develop the ability to explain these ideas, any of them, to people outside of work. So, that could be a spouse, a brother, a sister, a mother, father, son, daughter. And, why outside of work? 'Cause I view that as a safe audience. You say, hey, I just listened to this podcast. Somebody at work may not be as safe. And why are we having this conversation? So, I would say, it could be a college classmate, but one is, try explaining these things to people outside of work and then when whoever that is looks at you and says, I have no idea what you're talking about, or this makes sense, then as you develop that confidence then you're refining your explanations. And that puts you in a better position to apply, to explain it at work. 0:02:54.9 Bill: And why is that important? I'd say there's a lot you can do on your own. I mentioned that a month or so ago, my wife and I were in New England, and I met my doctoral dissertation advisor, who's 86 years old and lives in the middle of nowhere. And one of the things is the wisdom he gave us way back when it was so profound. One of the things he said, we were poor starving college students making seven bucks an hour, working 20 hours during the semester as Research Assistants or 40 hours during the summer. And what a life. Living in... This is poor starving college students. And he would say to us... We'd get together now and then, there'd be a keg on campus and we'd be... Which it wasn't all that often, but anyway, he'd say to us, "These are the best years of your life." [laughter] And we'd look at him like... Now again, I mean, we were... I wouldn't say we were poor starving college students, but I mean, we made ends meet. Now our classmates had gone, undergraduate, gone off to work and they were making real money, and we just stayed in the slum housing and doing... Just living cheap. 0:04:20.3 Bill: Then he says, "These are the best years of your life." We're looking at him like what are you saying? And what he said was, you're working on your research projects either undergrad, masters or PhDs. He said, "You will never have the time you have now to focus on one thing and not be distracted." Now a few of the classmates were married. Most were not married, but he just said this is... I mean, what a dream situation. You're in the laboratory every day. That's all of your focus. Your tuition is covered, blah, blah, blah. But it was just like, yeah, okay. So, when our daughter was in graduate school I shared that with her and she laughed at me. I said, "Allison, these are the best years of your life." 0:05:14.4 AS: If only we listened. 0:05:15.5 Bill: Right. So, that's... And well, I wanted to bring up... But the other thing I want to bring up aside from that story is, he'd say to us, when you go to work, he said trust me. He said "there will be more than enough time to get your job done. You'll have a lot of... You will have time to..." And he said, 'cause he used to brag about he'd be given a task and he can get it done in a fraction of the time that was allocated. And why I mention that is that every job has latitude. And so, t

In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the first part of John's path for improvement model - setting the challenge. Using an example from United Schools Network, John explains their aspirations for cutting chronic absenteeism rates. 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. And the topic for today is "set the challenge." John, take it away. 0:00:24.6 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah. Last episode, we kicked off this new series. I introduced this improvement model that we can use to help us set ambitious goals backed with a sound methodology. I think I made this disclaimer last time. I'll make it again that this is sort of like showing listeners a peek behind the curtain because we're sort of talking about this as this model is being built and used for the first time in my network of schools here in Columbus in United Schools. So I think that caveat's important, and I think maybe starting with just a quick review of the model we looked at last time would be a good refresher for this episode for those that are reviewing and I'll talk through it for those that are only listening. I'll go ahead and share my screen quick. You see that all right? 0:01:17.1 AS: Yep. 0:01:18.4 JD: All right. Yeah, so this is the model we kind of stepped through kind of an overview last time. I think it's important to remember a few things. One, basically the core idea of the improvement model is it gives us the scientific way of thinking so that we can work in a way that makes sense to close the gap between our sort of current conditions in our organization and sort of our aspirations. So we frame those two things as the voice of the process, as current conditions, what's happening right now. And then the future aspirations, that's the voice of the customer. That's sort of what we or someone else wants those conditions to be. And what we're doing throughout this process is stepping through the four steps that you can see displayed in the model. So kind of just stepping through those quick. 0:02:06.5 JD: The first thing is that we set the challenge or the direction, and that's gonna be... We're gonna dive deeper into that step today. Then the second step over on the left hand side of the model, for those that are viewing, you work to grasp the current condition, so what's going on currently in your organization. And then the third step is we establish the next target condition. So think of that as like the intermediate goal that we're working towards sort of on a more proximate timeline. And then fourth, what we're doing is once we understand those things, then we're experimenting to overcome obstacles or impediments. And so all of those things we talked about, doing that with a team that includes someone or people working in the system, in our case students, a lot of the time, those with the authority to work on the system like the teacher in a classroom or the principal of the school building. And then that System of Profound Knowledge coach that has that awareness of the System of Profound Knowledge and sort of brings that lens to the improvement efforts. So that's sort of a quick rehash of the model that we went over in episode one. And then I'll stop. Well, you want me to leave that up or I can stop sharing? 0:03:29.9 AS: Either way. I don't mind. 0:03:31.0 JD: Okay. Well I'll stop sharing for now and then we can always pull it back up if we want to. Yeah. So with that sort of in mind, what I thought would be helpful is then do this deep dive into step one. And so kind of what we'll do through the next several episodes is focus on each of the steps. So we'll take this deeper dive into step one. Set the challenge or direction. So last time I mentioned that in step one of the model we asked this primary question, where do we want to be in the long run? And this is... Think about this as a overall challenge or direction that's set by organizational leadership typically. So senior leaders, the CEO, typically the board, they're gonna be the ones framing this challenge, setting the direction for the organization. 0:04:27.2 JD: And we can also think about it as a sort of a longer range goal that if we accomplish it, it will differentiate us in our case from other schools or if you're in the business community, it would differentiate you from competitors in some way. But even though it's something that we're striving toward currently we're setting this in a way that it's gonna stretch us and right now it almost seems impossible to accomplish this thing far out into the future. And this direction or challenge, I think it's fairly typical. Sort of set this on a six month to three year timeframe. So that kind of gives you a sense

Continuing their discussion from part 3 of this series, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz talk more about acceptability versus desirability. In this episode, the discussion focuses on how you might choose between the two. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is Episode 4 of the Misunderstanding Quality Series, and the title is Quality, Mind the Choices. Bill, take it away. 0:00:31.3 Bill Bellows: All right, Andrew, welcome. So podcast three, I think the title was Acceptability and Desirability. And one correction there, when I went back and looked at the transcript the concept of... At least the first person I heard tie together acceptability, desirability, at least in the Deming community, was a professor, Yoshida, Y-O-S-H-I-D-A. He was a PhD student of Dr. Deming, I believe at NYU but I mispronounced or misspelled his first name. I thought I've heard people refer to him as Kauro, perhaps spelled K-A-U-R-O, maybe that's his nickname, and maybe I just didn't remember properly but his proper first name is Kosaku, K-O-S-A-K-U and he at one point in time was in Greater Los Angeles at Cal State Dominguez Hills. And then I think sometime in the mid '90s, early '90s, last I heard he moved to Japan. 0:01:51.1 BB: I've never met him. I've watched videos of him, there's a classic presentation. I don't know if it's got, it might be online someplace of he did a guest lecture. There was a... Dr. Deming was speaking in Southern California and needed an emergency surgery, had a pacemaker put in, so this would've been '92 timeframe. And Professor Yoshida was called in to give a guest lecture. And that ended up being something that I think was sold eventually. The video, the lecture was sold by Claire Crawford Mason and so he is... I don't know how much of that is online, but anyways. 0:02:38.4 AS: Is Kauro, Kauro wasn't that the name of Kauro Ishikawa? 0:02:43.7 BB: That may be where I... Yes that was a Kauro. There's two Ishikawas. There's a father and the son and I... So I'm not sure if Kauro was the father or the son, but anyway correction there. In the first series we did, going back to '23, 2023, I mentioned the name Edgar Schein, but I don't believe I've mentioned his name in this series. So I wanted to throw that, introduce that in this series today and give some background on him for those who have not heard his name or not aware, did not listen to the first series and Edgar Schein, who passed away January of this year. He was an organizational theorist, organizational psychologist, spent the greater part of his career at MIT. And one of the concepts I really like about what he talked about is looking at an organization in terms of its artifacts. So if you walk around an organization, what do you see? What are the artifacts? That could be the colors, it could be the artwork on the wall, but the physical aspect of the organization Schein referred to as the artifacts. And what he also talked about is if you dig beneath the artifacts, they come from a set of beliefs, and then the beliefs come from a set of values. 0:04:23.9 BB: And again, the first series we did, I talked about Red Pen and Blue Pen Companies, and Me and We Organizations, and Last Straw and All Straw organizations. And those titles should make it easy for our listeners who are not aware to go back and find those. And what I talked about is, this imaginary trip report, if you visited a Deming organization, if we could think in terms of two simple organizations, a Deming organization, and a non-Deming organization in this very simple black and white model. And I had people think about the physical aspects of both, if they were to go visit both. What I then followed up on in our conversation is what you see physically comes from a set of beliefs. Now, they may not be articulated beliefs, what Schein would call espoused beliefs. And then you have what they really believe and I forget the term, I use this for that, but it comes from a set... But anyway, the physical comes from the beliefs, the beliefs come from the values. 0:05:39.0 BB: And part of the reason I bring that up for our listeners, and I'm thinking in terms of the people that have a responsibility in their respective organizations. They could be consultants, internal consultants, working in quality likely, given the focus of this series. First of all, you have to start where you are. But even added on, included in start where you are, is you have to start where your management is. So, if your management is tasking you with an improving scrap and rework, then that's what you better be talking about. Now, you don't have to be guiding your actions based on acceptability beca

In this new series, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss five major management and productivity myths and how Lean and Deming thinking solve them. This first episode offers an overview and Jacob shares his journey from traditional management to a better way. Jacob Stoller is the author of The Lean CEO: Leading the Way to World-Class Excellence and Productivity Reimagined: Shattering Performance Myths to Achieve Sustainable Growth. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'll be talking with Jacob Stoller, who is a journalist and Shingo prize-winning author of The Lean CEO, which provides a boardroom perspective of Lean initiatives. Now, he connected with Dr. Deming's criticism of command and control management and recently wrote Productivity Reimagined to explore the reasons why organizations fail to apply the Lean and Deming style of management at the enterprise level. Jacob, welcome to the show. 0:00:37.8 Jacob Stoller: Well, thank you, Andrew. It's great to be here. 0:00:40.5 AS: Yeah it was actually really fun to talk to you before we even turned on the recorder to kind of really help people understand where you come from and why you are here. So maybe you can just explain a little bit of your journey of how you got to this point in relation to Deming. 0:00:58.2 JS: Okay, well, interestingly, I started out in sales. I was a corporate sales rep selling services and software and all that kind of high-tech stuff. And I did that for quite a while. But what I liked best about corporate sales was the dialogue that I had with customers, being able to talk to people and ask questions and explore topics. So fortunately, I was able to turn that into a career. I left that profession about 2001 and became a writer, journalist, did research projects, gave talks, did some training, did all the things I wanted to do. And through that, I discovered Lean by accident. And that, I think, wasn't probably till about 2010. And I was writing for a magazine, and someone told me to write about this Lean thing. What is it? And I started to ask questions and talk to people and eventually discovered this wonderful way of running companies. I was totally impressed, not just with how efficient they were and all that, but how they treated people. I thought, this is, boy, I would have liked to have worked at some of these companies. 0:02:14.6 AS: And for someone who's never even heard, let's just imagine someone's never heard the word Lean. What does that mean anyway? And what did it mean when you first saw it and after you really became an expert in it? What does it mean to you now? 0:02:28.4 JS: Well, I thought it was going to be super high tech. That's what I first thought. As a matter of fact, when I went to Japan to actually see it firsthand, I was expecting just flashing screens and everything. And of course, it was a very different thing. It was a lot of people, very, very people-oriented environment, people talking to each other, lots of communication. So I thought, wow. And I started to learn that it was really all about people. And so that was a gradual transformation for me. But it was very rewarding to see the human side of this. So that led me, really led me to some writing. I started working with some lean organizations like the Kaizen Institute, and I started doing writing for them, writing newsletters. I also wrote, helped Misaki Yumi the late Misaki Yumi, a very well-known Lean promoter, write the new edition of his latest book. And I did all the case studies for that. And I also helped various other initiatives. But the main thing was that I decided to write my own book, and that was The Lean CEO. 0:03:57.2 JS: And what I was interested in at the time was I saw that people doing Lean were running into all this resistance, and I was interested in exploring that a little more. And I thought, well, the people that really understand that will be the CEOs because they'll been there. They've been in the boardroom discussions. So that's how The Lean CEO came to be. And in that process, I was asking questions about management and the various practices. Now, I was expecting that there would be a sort of a standard executive playbook for Lean. That was my hypothesis, I guess. And it would have been really nice, very, very easy to write the book and neat and tidy and all that, but it didn't work out that way. They were all different. They all had different ideas. And interestingly, a lot of the thinking that went into their work, actually, they had learned before they even discovered Lean. That had been stuff that they believed in. They learned about teamwork early on, so they were somehow predisposed towards the people side of Lean. So I was really fascinated by that. But my conclusion really was that there was no one way to implement Lean, that there were just many, many different variations on it. 0:05:2

In this new series, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss John's model for improvement. This episode includes an overview of the model and how John uses it for goal-setting and planning in his school. 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. The topic for today is building an improvement model. John, take it away. 0:00:24.8 John Dues: It's good to be back, Andrew. Yeah, so we sort of wrapped up this last series. We had a six-part series on organizational goal setting. And we, if you remember, we talked through those four conditions that are important for organizational goal setting, especially healthy goal setting, where before we set a goal, we understand sort of how capable our system is. We understand how our data is varying within our system. We are looking at our system and seeing if it's stable or unstable. And then, of course, we want to have a method for how we go about improving. And so you kind of have to have an understanding of those four conditions before you set a goal. 0:01:03.6 JD: And I thought sort of as an extension of that, or possibly a new series, we could kind of take a look at an improvement model that would help us sort of better set ambitious goals. Because when we did those four conditions, it kind of leaves you wondering, well, how ambitious should my goals be? Should I still do stretch goals, those types of things? And I think this improvement model that we're building here at United Schools sort of addresses that. And it's something we're building. 0:01:34.4 JD: And so I think the listeners kind of get like a little bit of behind the scenes on what it looks like now. I think we'll see a version of it. And perhaps through this dialogue, through the series, we'll even think about ways to improve it. 0:01:48.4 AS: Can I ask you a question about that? 0:01:49.6 JD: Sure. 0:01:50.0 AS: One of the things, I do a lot of lectures on corporate strategy and workshops, and the lingo gets so confusing, vision, mission, values, and all kinds of different ways that people refer to things. But when I talk to my clients and my students, I oftentimes just tell them a vision is a long-term goal. And it could be a five-year or a 10-year goal. And because it's long-term, it's a little bit more of a vision as opposed to, you can see it very clearly. Like my goal is to get an A in this particular class, this particular semester. Whereas what I try to say is, a vision is: I want to be in the top of that mountain. And I want us all to be at the top of that mountain in five years. And I kind of interchangeably call that a long-term goal and a vision. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on long-term versus short and medium as we go into this discussion. 0:02:53.8 JD: Yeah. I think as we get into the model, we'll actually see both of those things, sort of a long-term sort of goal, sort of a more intermediate thing, and then how you work back and forth between those two things. So I think that's a good segue. 0:03:08.4 AS: Let's get in it. 0:03:08.4 JD: Yeah. And so just maybe just a few other things about the model before we get right into it. So one thing to know I've come to appreciate is when when I say a model, I just mean something visually representative that helps us understand and communicate how we think things should be functioning in reality. So when I say improvement model, I'm actually like talking about a diagram on a piece of paper that you can put in front of everybody on your team. So everybody has an understanding for how you're approaching goal setting in this case. 0:03:38.1 AS: Would you call it an improvement visualization? Or what's the difference between what you mean by model and like something that I would call, let's say, a visualization? 0:03:49.5 JD: Yeah, I'd say it's a type of visualization when I say model. 0:03:52.8 AS: Okay. Excellent. 0:03:53.8 JD: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. And I think you'll see it when we get into the model that definitely there's credit due to Mike Rother and his concept of Improvement Kata because this model heavily borrows from the work that he's done, if you're familiar with that four-step Improvement Kata process. 0:04:15.1 AS: Yeah. Very. 0:04:19.7 JD: But anytime, whatever the thing is that you call like key performance metrics, key metrics, whatever you call that thing that we all set in our organizations, there's always this gap between what we want and what we're currently getting. And this model gives us the scientific way of thinking and working to close basically that gap. In this world, the gap between the voice of the process and the voice of the customer, how do we close that gap? So that's sort of what the model is addressing. So I'll share my sc

Is reaching A+ quality always the right answer? What happens when you consider factors that are part of the system, and not just the product in isolation? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss acceptability versus desirability in the quality realm. 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 Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today's episode, episode three, is Acceptability and Desirability. Bill, take it away. 0:00:28.1 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome back to our listeners. 0:00:30.7 AS: Oh, yeah. 0:00:31.4 BB: Hey, do you know how long we've been doing these podcasts? 0:00:36.6 AS: No. 0:00:40.8 BB: We started... Our very first podcast was Valentine's Day 2023. I was gonna say 2013. 2023, so roughly 17 months of podcast, Andrew. 0:00:53.4 AS: That was our first date, huh? 0:00:55.0 BB: Our first date was Valentine's Day 2023. 0:00:58.9 AS: All right. Don't tell your wife. [laughter] 0:01:03.1 BB: All right. And so along the way, I've shared reflections from my first exposures to Dr. Deming, as well as my first exposures to Genichi Taguchi. Talked about Edward de Bono, Tom Johnson, others, mentors, Bill Cooper, Phil Monroe, Gipsie Ranney was a great mentor. Last week, Andrew, while on vacation in New England with my wife, I visited for a day my 85-year-old graduate school advisor who I worked with for ten years, Bob Mayle, who lives in, I would say, the farthest reaches of Maine, a place called Roque Bluffs. Roque Bluffs. How's that for... That could be North Dakota. Roque Bluffs. He's in what they call Down East Maine. He's recently got a flip phone. He's very proud. He's got like a Motorola 1985 vintage flip phone. Anyway, he's cool, he's cool. He's... 0:02:15.9 AS: I'm just looking at that place on the map, and looks incredible. 0:02:19.0 BB: Oh, yeah. He's uh, until he got the phone, he was off the grid. We correspond by letters. He's no internet, no email. And he has electricity, lives in about an 800 square-foot, one-floor bungalow with his wife. This is the third time we've visited him. Every time we go up, we spend one day getting there, one day driving home from where my in-laws live in New York. And then one day with him, and the day ends with going to the nearby fisherman's place. He buys us fresh lobster and we take care of them. [chuckle] 0:03:01.3 AS: Yeah, my sister lives in Kennebunk, so when I go back to the US, I'm... 0:03:08.8 BB: Yeah, Kennebunk is maybe 4 hours away on that same coast. 0:03:15.3 AS: I'm just looking at the guide and map book for Roque Bluffs' State Park, and it says, "a beautiful setting with oceanfront beach, freshwater pond, and hiking trails." 0:03:25.9 BB: Yeah, he's got 10 acres... No, he's got, I think, 20, 25 acres of property. Sadly, he's slowly going blind. He has macular degeneration. But, boy, for a guy who's slowly going blind, he and I went for a walk around his property for a couple hours, and it's around and around... He's holding branches from hitting me, I'm holding branches from hitting him and there's... Let alone the terrain going up and down, you gotta step up and over around the rocks and the pine needles and all. And it was great. It was great. The week before, we were close to Lake George, which is a 32-mile lake in Upstate New York. And what was neat was we went on a three-hour tour, boat ride. And on that lake, there are 30 some islands of various sizes, many of them owned by the state, a number of them owned privately. Within the first hour, we're going by and he points to the island on the left and he says it was purchased in the late '30s by Irving Langmuir. Yeah, so he says, "Irving Langmuir," and I thought, I know that name from Dr. Deming. That name is referenced in The New Economics. 0:04:49.1 BB: In fact, at the opening of Chapter Five of The New Economics, the title is 'Leadership.' Every chapter begins with a quote, right? Chapter Five quote is, "You cannot plan to make a discovery," so says Irving Langmuir. So what is... The guy's describing this island purchased back in the late '30s by Langmuir for like $5,000. I think it's... I don't know if he still owns it, if it's owned by a nonprofit. It's not developed. It's privately held. I'm trying, I wrote to Langmuir's grandson who did a documentary about him. He was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from GE's R&D center in Schenectady, New York, which is a couple hours south of there. But I'm certain, and I was looking for it earlier, I know I heard of him, of Irving Langmuir through Dr. Deming. And I believe in his lectures, Deming talked about Langmuir's emphasis on having fun at work, having fun. And so I gotta go back and check on that, but I did some research after the day,

In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss David Garvin's 8 Dimensions of Quality and how they apply in the Deming world. Bill references this article by Garvin: https://hbr.org/1987/11/competing-on-the-eight-dimensions-of-quality 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 Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is the Misunderstanding Quality series, episode two, The Eight Dimensions of Quality. Bill, take it away. 0:00:30.4 Bill Bellows: Welcome back, Andrew. Great to see you again. All right, episode two, we're moving right along. So in episode one, which the title I proposed, waiting to see what comes out, the title I proposed was, Quality, Back to the Start. And that was inspired by some lyrics from Coldplay. Anyway, but this is a, it's going back to my start in quality and last time I mentioned discovering Taguchi's work long before I discovered Dr. Deming. In fact, Gipsie Ranney, who is the first president of the Deming Institute, the nonprofit formed by Dr. Deming and his family just before he passed away, and Gipsie became the first president and was on the board when I was on the board for many years. And I spoke with her nearly every day, either driving to work or driving home. And once, she calls me up and she says, "Bill," that was her Tennessee accent, "Bill." 0:01:50.5 BB: She says, "It says on The Deming Institute webpage that you infused Dr. Taguchi's work into Dr. Deming's work," something like that, that I... Something like I infused or introduced or I brought Taguchi's work into Deming's work, and I said, "Yes." I said, "Yeah, that sounds familiar." She says, "Isn't it the other way around?" That I brought Deming's work into Taguchi's work. And I said, "No, Gipsie," I said, "It depends on your starting point. And my starting point was Dr. Taguchi." But I thought it was so cool. She says, "Bill don't you have it? Don't you... " She is like, "Isn't it the other way around?" I said, "No, to me, it was all things Taguchi, then I discovered Dr. Deming." But I was thinking earlier before the podcast, and I walked around putting together how, what I wanna talk about tonight. And I thought, when I discovered Taguchi's work, I looked at everything in terms of an application of Dr. Taguchi's ideas. 0:03:29.7 AS: And one question about Taguchi for those people that don't know him and understand a little bit about him, was he... If I think about where Dr. Deming got at the end of his life, it was about a whole system, the System of Profound Knowledge and a comprehensive way of looking at things. Was Taguchi similar in that way or was he focused in on a couple different areas where he really made his contribution? 0:04:03.9 BB: Narrower than Dr. Deming's work. I mean, if we look at... And thank you for that... If we look at Dr. Deming's work in terms of the System of Profound Knowledge, the elements of systems psychology, variation, theory of knowledge, Taguchi's work is a lot about variation and a lot about systems. And not systems in the sense of Russ Ackoff systems thinking, but variation in the sense of where's the variation coming from looking upstream, what are the causes of that variation that create variation in that product, in that service? 0:04:50.9 BB: And then coupled with that is that, how is that variation impacting elsewhere in the system? So here I am receiving sources of variation. So what I deliver it to you has variation because of what's upstream of me and Taguchi's looking at that coupled with how is that variation impacting you? So those are the systems side, the variation side. Now, is there anything in Deming, in Taguchi's work about psychology and what happens when you're labelling workers and performance appraisals and, no, not at all. 0:05:37.6 AS: Okay, got it. 0:05:38.4 BB: Is there anything in there about theory of knowledge, how do we know that what we know is so? No, but there's a depth of work in variation which compliments very much so what Dr. Deming was doing. So anyway, so no. And so I discovered Taguchi's work, and I mentioned that in the first episode. I discovered his work, became fascinated with it, started looking at his ideas in terms of managing variation to achieve incredible... I mean, improved uniformity to the extent that it's worthwhile to achieve. So we were not striving for the ultimate uniformity, it's just the idea that we can manage the uniformity. And if we... And we'll look at this in more detail later, but for our audience now, if you think of a distribution of the variation in the performance of a product or a service, and you think in terms of... It doesn't have to be a bell-shaped distribution, but you have a distribution and it has an average and

Where did your "quality journey" start? In this first episode of a new series on quality, Bill Bellows shares his "origin story," the evolution of his thinking, and why the Deming philosophy is unique. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey in the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. This is a new series called Misunderstanding Quality, and the topic for today is Quality Management, what century are we in? Bill, take it away. 0:00:35.7 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. [chuckle] All right. 0:00:39.5 AS: Exciting. I'm excited to hear what you've got going on in your mind about this Misunderstanding Quality. 0:00:45.6 BB: Well, first let me say that whether you're new to quality or looking for ideas on quality and quality management, quality improvement, quality management, the aim I have in mind for this podcast series is to improve your ability to manage quality through deepening your appreciation of the Deming philosophy and how to apply it. But specifically, a focus on quality, time after time, which is where most people heard about Deming, was through Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position. For example, the title of his first book. And relative to the title, what came to mind is an anecdote shared with me by two mentors that both spent a good deal of time with Dr. Deming. The first, Gipsie Ranney, who was a professor of statistics at University of Tennessee when she met Dr. Deming, went on to become a senior statistical consultant to GM and the first president of the Deming Institute, when Dr. Deming and his family, shortly before he died, formed a nonprofit called The Deming Institute. Gipsie and I used to speak literally every day, driving to work, driving home, we... "What's up, what's up?" And we always... It was so cool. I wish I had the recordings. Anyway, she once shared that she once asked Dr. Deming, "What do they learn in your seminars? What do attendees learn in your seminars?" To which she said Dr. Deming said, "I know what I said, I don't know what they heard." [laughter] 0:02:26.0 BB: And along those lines, in the same timeframe, Bill Cooper who just turned 90, he and my wife share a birthday. Not the same year. Bill turned 90 last November and he was senior civilian at the US Navy's aircraft overhaul facility in San Diego, known as North Island. So as aircraft carriers are coming into San Diego, which is like the... I think they call it... It's like the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet. So as aircraft carriers are coming back, planes for which the repair work cannot be done on the carriers fly off to North Island. And Bill was in charge of, he said, some 5,000 civilians. And his peer on the military side, Phil Monroe was in charge of all the military people, and they got exposed to Dr. Deming's work in the early '80s, went off, left there, became Deming consultants. Anyway, Bill said he once asked Dr. Demings, says, "What percent of the attendees of your seminars walk away really understanding what you said?" And he said... Bill said Dr. Deming said, "A small percentage." [laughter] 0:03:44.0 BB: And so what I had in mind in this series is... One is, what makes it hard to understand what Dr. Deming is talking about? And so for the listeners, what I'm hoping we can help you understand, what might be some invisible challenges that you're having in your organizations trying to explain this to others. So maybe you think your understanding is pretty good, but like Dr. Deming, maybe people are having a hard time understanding what you're saying. And I know what it's like to be in a room, presenting to people. And I had that same experience. I had one Rocketdyne executive... Rocketdyne was sold a few times. Every time it got sold, our Deming transformation efforts got set back a few years. So when the latest management team came in six, seven years ago, I met with one of the very top people, was explaining... Trying to explain to him for the first time what we had accomplished with some, I thought, absolutely amazing work by managing variation as a system. And he said something like, "So are people rejecting what you're saying?" And I said, "No, that's not it." He says, "So they're accepting what you're saying?" I said, "Well... " he said, "What's the problem?" I said, "What they accepted is not what I said." [laughter] 0:05:19.5 BB: I said, we're not in disagreement, but what they think they heard is... And that's when I found that I've experienced that. So anyway, so I wanted to get some background. So my first exposure to quality circles, and this is like... So I was living in this parallel universe, a heat transfer engineer working on rocket engines, and Quality comes into the organization. And unbeknownst to m

In the final episode of the goal setting in classrooms series, John Dues and Andrew Stotz discuss the last three of the 10 Key Lessons for implementing Deming in schools. They finish up with the example of Jessica's 4th-grade science class. 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 six about goal setting through a Deming lens. John, take it away. 0:00:26.4 John Dues: Hey, Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, for the past handful of episodes or so, we've been talking about organizational goal setting. We covered these four conditions of healthy goal setting and then got into these 10 key lessons for data analysis. And then we've been looking at those 10 key lessons applied to an improvement project. And we've been talking about a project that was completed by Jessica Cutler and she did a Continual Improvement Fellowship with us here at our schools. And if you remember, Jessica was attempting to improve the joy in learning of her students in her fourth grade science class. So last time we looked at lessons five through seven. Today we're gonna look at those final three lessons, eight, nine and ten applied to her project. 0:01:15.7 AS: It's exciting. 0:01:17.1 JD: Yeah. So we'll jump in here. We'll kind of do a description, a refresher of each lesson. And we'll kind of talk about how it was applied to her specific project, and we'll look at some of her data to kind of bring that live for those of the folks that have video. Let's jump in with lesson number eight. So we've talked about this before, but lesson number eight was: more timely data is better for improvement purposes. So we've talked about this a lot. We've talked about something like state testing data. We've said, it can be useful, but it's not super useful for improvement purposes, because we don't get it until the year ends. And students in our case, have already gone on summer vacation by the time that data comes in. And you know that the analogous data probably happens in lots of different sectors where you get data that lags, to the point that it's not really that useful for improvement purposes. 0:02:15.8 JD: So when we're trying to improve something, more frequent data is helpful because then we can sort of see if an intervention that we're trying is having an effect, the intended effect. We can learn that more quickly if we have more frequent data. And so it's, there's not a hard and fast rule, I don't think for how frequently you should be gathering data. It just sort of needs to be in sync with the improvement context. I think that's the important thing. Whether it's daily or a couple times a day or weekly, or monthly, quarterly, whatever, it's gotta be in sync with whatever you're trying to improve. 0:02:50.5 AS: You made me think about a documentary I saw about, how they do brain surgery and how the patient can't be sedated because they're asking the patient questions about, do you feel this and they're testing whether they're getting... They're trying to, let's say, get rid of a piece of a cancerous growth, and they wanna make sure that they're not getting into an area that's gonna damage their brain. And so, the feedback mechanism that they're getting through their tools and the feedback from the patient, it's horrifying to think of the whole thing. 0:03:27.7 JD: Yeah. 0:03:28.3 AS: It's a perfect example of why more timely data is useful for improvement purposes 'cause imagine if you didn't have that information, you knock the patient out, you get the cancerous growth, but who knows what you get in addition to that. 0:03:43.7 JD: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that's certainly an extreme example, [laughter], but I think it's relevant. No matter what our context, that data allows us to understand what's going on, variation, trends, whether our system is stable, unstable, how we should go about improving. So it's not dissimilar from the doctors in that example. 0:04:06.8 AS: And it's indisputable I think, I would argue. But yet many people may not, they may be operating with data that's not timely. And so this is a reminder that we would pretty much always want that timely data. So that's lesson eight. Wow. 0:04:22.6 JD: Lesson eight. Yeah. And let's see how we can, I'll put a visualization on the screen so you can see what Jessica's data look like. All right. So now you can see. We've looked at these charts before. This is Jessica's process behavior chart for joy in science. So just to reorient, you have the joy percentage that students are feeling after a lesson on the x-axis, sorry, on the y-axis. On the x-axis, you have the school dates where they've collected this survey information from students in Jessica's class. 0:04:57.0